Beckett's Laughter Analysis

Beckett’s humor is closely linked with his categorization of humor and his aesthetics. For Beckett, there are three kinds of laugh namely, the ethical laugh, the intellectual laugh and the mirthless laugh. In his novel ‘Watt’, he writes: ‘The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout — Haw! – so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs – silence please — at that which is unhappy.’ (Watt, 40)
The ethical laugh constitutes Henri

Instead of taking a nihilistic stand, Beckett’s laughter offers resistance to it. Watt is a Chaplinisque character and a caricature of a rationalist who cannot accept anything outside his mind. Watt carries Cartesian skepticism to comic extremes in stretching all the limits of his powers of rational deductions. He is unable to conceive of any counterfactual possibilities that exist outside his rational methods. Watt becomes a prisoner of his search for absolute certainty and knowledge and he is constantly defeated by the ‘contingencies of the contingent world’ in the novel. Finally he finds his place in an asylum. Beckett gives many examples of possibilities throughout the text. For instance, Arsene recounts an estranging episode. While walking outdoors, “something slipped” and he experiences a “reversed metamorphosis”. The incident is compared to the transformation as told by Ovid, but instead of Apollo turning a woman to foliage, here Arsene says it is rather “the Laurel into Daphne”. This moment is taken up later: “Took a turn in the garden . . . . Made merry with the hardy laurel” (Watt, 36). The pun on the word ‘turn’ invokes various possible meanings: rotation as well as transformation; a performance; a “go” in a sequence; a short walk; a spell of confusion or distress; all finished off with a nod to the short sketches of two of Beckett’s favorite performers,

Yet the Cartesian method only makes him struggle with multiple contingencies as his world disintegrates. Instead of understanding his relationship with Mr. Knott he ends up in an asylum. Watt’s language becomes more and more evasive. This is because his logical paradigms are unable to handle the complexities that arise. Consequently both his logical paradigm and the linguistic structures break down towards the end. He uses words where logic and language do not unite and there are missing elements in his word sets. For instance, the use of word sets like ‘breast to breast’, ‘pubis to pubis’, ‘face to face’, ‘glued together’, ‘belly to belly’ etc. He gives maniacal descriptions of ordinary things like the cooking pot which he describes as ‘ It was a pot of which one could say pot, pot and be comforted’ (Watt,