Jokes, Puns, and Philosophy (Author Preprint)

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that a serious work of philosophy could be written composed of nothing but jokes. Taking Wittgenstein’s assertion seriously, we examine a range of philosophical accounts of verbal humor, specifically jokes and puns, dividing them according to whether they focus on the syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic elements of joking and punning acts. We then employ them to see if standard examples of philosophical discourse could thereby be seen as jokes themselves. Perhaps Wittgenstein was more correct than he realized and we are already writing philosophy in terms of jokes.