ABSTRACT
Whilst retaining a Platonic metaphysics, the American transcendentalists imagined humour in a much different way than the ancients. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and James Russell Lowell expressed a complex view that fundamentally affirmed the value of humour as a rational perception of incongruity. This chapter examines these affirmations of humour and argues that the transcendentalists were moving away from crude assumptions about and limited definitions of humour to see it as a foundational and necessary artistic activity. I provide a critical context for how Emerson, Thoreau, and Lowell place humour into their respective metaphysics as an essential, yet initial rung on the “ascending scale” of consciousness. I conclude with Emerson’s portrait of Carlini, the sad clown, and show that it expresses a striking duality in the transcendentalist notion of humour that Emerson attempts to resolve in his later writing, aligning his mature philosophy more closely with the democratic poetics of Walt Whitman.
