Ontological Laughter: Comedy As Experimental Possibility Space By Timothy Morton

Throughout history philosophers and scholars have widely debated the theory of comedy and laughter, the types of laughter and the reasons why we laugh. In his essay “Ontological Laughter: Comedy as Experimental Possibility Space” Timothy Morton, discusses his views on laughter and states that “comedy is the genre closes to the ontological structure of how things are” (332). Morton begins by proposing that “a thing is exactly what it is, yet never exactly as it appears” (Morton 322-323), therefore, “since things are never quite as they appear, things are always pretending”. He uses ecology and ontology to prove that “comedy is a possibility space in which all kinds of beings coexist” (324). In contrast to Morton’s theory, in his book, Beyond