Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

Publication Title

THE EXPLICATOR

Volume

74

Issue

3

First Page

1

Last Page

2

Abstract

Arriving in the San Francisco garage where the Pranksters are waiting for Ken Kesey in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Tom Wolfe engages in a discussion on metaphysics with “Hassler” (Ron Bivert). What follows is Bergsonian. Henri Bergson’s theory of Aristotlean comedy in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1901) states that “Society will…be suspicious of all inelasticity of character, of mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a slumbering activity as well as of an activity with separatist tendencies, that inclines to swerve from the common centre round which society gravitates: in short it is the sign of eccentricity” (19; italics in original).

DOI

10.1080/00144940.2016.1203748

Comments

First published in The Explicator 74 (3) 2016. Copyright Taylor & Francis. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2016.1203748.

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