Overview

In The Virtue of Wit: Humor, Social Connection, and Flourishing, Clair Morrissey argues that wit is a form of social ingenuity, an aptitude for building and maintaining human connection. Her novel account of wit understands it as the capacity for joining people in feeling through playful, amusing creativity with words and behaviors. In animating and enlivening our everyday shared social landscape, exercising wit is partially constitutive of living a good human life. Through analysis of the history of philosophical treatments of wit and related concepts, contemporary empirical and theoretical research on humor, and examples drawn from across the narrative arts and standup comedy, Morrissey argues that wit should be considered a proper moral virtue. Her analysis illuminates how virtue ethicists can embrace a non-ideal ethical framework that centers the joy and flourishing of marginalized or oppressed people. The exercise of wit can play an important role in asserting and celebrating one’s humanity in everyday resistance to oppression.

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9781666929669

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Reviews

""In this insightful analysis of the nature, role, and value of wit, Morrissey shows that wit isn't just valuable because it is fun, but more significantly because of the ways in which being witty facilitates connection and community between people, therein creating and maintaining an ""us"". Working from the perspective of non-ideal theory, and informed by feminist analyses of human agency, Morrissey makes a compelling case that developing wit is an essential part of how non-ideal agents can flourish, even and especially in contexts of oppression. This book makes an important contribution to the philosophical literature on humor and wit, as well as to non-ideal theory itself."" --Lorraine Besser, Middlebury College ""One of the many virtues of Clair Morrissey's The Virtue of Wit is that it exhibits the very aptitude it describes. Situating itself at the sometimes-precarious intersection of ethics and aesthetics, her investigation delves into matters ranging from the ways in which wit can foster human solidarity to the ways in which it embodies a facility for playing with language and ideas, from the moral weight it can bring to bear on situations to the ways it colors and enlivens our encounters with the world. That Morrissey's exploration is, in itself, playful and engaging offers a kind of bonus demonstration of the value of wit and the happy enchantment it can conduce."" -- --Eva M. Dadlez, Professor, Department of Humanities and Philosophy, University of Central Oklahoma

Author Information

Clair Morrissey is professor of philosophy at Occidental College.

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