When Bad Things Happen to Other People by John Portmann Page B

naturally aims at laughter, and Aristotle believed that laughter masks aggression toward others.
    Hobbes’s reflections on comedy also turn importantly on aggression. In  Human Nature  (1650) and  Leviathan  (1651) he affirms that selfish motives propel comedy. Laughter, Hobbes says, is the result either of self-satisfaction or the “sudden glory” of the moment in which a person realizes his or her superiority over someone or something. For Hobbes, laughter at the weakness of others reveals a character flaw; it is unfitting for the strong to enjoy a sense of superiority over the weak.
    Nietzsche’s terse description in  The Gay Science  of laughter as “being schadenfroh , but with a good conscience” is indebted to Hobbes, but whereas Hobbes concerns himself specifically with laughter, Nietzsche is more interested in a general attitude toward the world, toward life, and toward oneself. Nietzsche’s aphorism places the roots of the comic in feelings of superiority, a link Freud explores at length in  Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious . Freud saw that jokes create problems and then remove them by the act of recognition. “The enjoyment of recognition,” Freud explains, “is joy in power, a joy in the overcoming of a difficulty...Recognition is pleasurable in itself, i.e., through relieving psychical expenditure—and the games founded on this pleasure make use of the damming up only in order to increase the amount of such pleasure.”15 The power of the joke is to succor us, to relieve temporarily the pressures of civilized life. This same sense of overcoming obstacles or resistance figures into Nietzsche’s understanding of why the satisfactions of making others suffer are so sweet. The ability to make others suffer represents for Nietzsche a uniquely gratifying manifestation of the will to power.
    Arguing that the comic is invariably somewhat infantile, Freud criticizes Henri Bergson’s influential theory of humor as defective because the underlying comparison involved in humor need not evoke childish pleasures and childish  play , but simply childish  nature . In the only passage in that work in which Freud refers to Schadenfreude by name, he simply shrugs his shoulders and concludes, “certain motives for pleasure in children seem to be lost to us adults...” ( JR,  p. 279).
    Laughter serves such good purpose that moralists hesitate to condemn mirth. Toward the end of the  Critique of Pure Reason  Kant praises laughter for helping us withstand the sheer difficulty of living. The same can be said of  Schadenfreude .
    4.        Malice
    Malice, or ill will, may either be general, directed toward all persons indiscriminately, or specific, focused on certain individuals or institutions. Because malicious persons are quite apt to revel in the suffering of others, it is difficult to dissociate Schadenfreude from the diabolical. Though malicious glee and Schadenfreude resemble one another in taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others, they are nonetheless distinct. Ill will is not a necessary condition for  Schadenfreude .
    Socrates and Aristotle both associated malice with  Schadenfreude . In the  Philebus  Socrates declares, “one will find the malicious man pleased at his neighbor’s ills” (48 b 7) and that “it is malice that makes us feel pleasure in our friends’ misfortunes” (50 a 1). In the  Nichomachean Ethics  (2.7) Aristotle ties pleasure in the misfortune of others to spite (he specifically decries  Schadenfreude ,  NE  2.6.18). Aristotle classifies envy with malice and shamelessness as feelings evil in themselves and for which there can be no golden mean ( NE  2.6.102 and Rhetoric 2.9–10.231–43). Here Aristotle neglects the reality that we sometimes approve of and even celebrate the suffering of another for reasons we take to be moral.
    Malice frequently causes people to lose a sense of proportion, causing them to hope for or actually to inflict