Can a bear have a sense of humour?

a. A bear vs the Bear

We shall discuss not one bear out of many but the Bear, being the ideal bear that our
minds can perceive, a bear from which all bearhood is obtained; for it does not seem useful
to discuss the characteristics of an individual bear out of a demography of bears. I note in
passing that some have argued that there is no such ideal Thing, being as it is that sensedata from the material world alone does not (and cannot) allow us to posit the existence of
ideals; nor, indeed, does Plato make any strong claims of our intellectual ability to grasp
such a world of ideals. For these philosophers, what makes a thing a thing is merely what
we are accustomed to mean when we call it a thing. Leaving that aside, I will refer to the
bear as a shorthand description for the bear which lacks no things bearly.
b. Does the bear have intellect?
Biologically speaking, it should come as no surprise to us that the bear has a brain which is
capable of neural activity. Indeed, when we think, briefly speaking, our brains are engaged in
such activity sufficient for us to have a certain complexity of thought. Coupling this with what
Descartes refers to as our apperception, we are aware not merely of incoming sense-data
simpliciter, but also of a self that receives this sense-data. Now, there may be good
grounds for doubting whether the bear has quite this type of self-consciousness, and
therefore whether the bear can critically recognise a complex state of affairs, i.e., when he is
not merely prompted by what we might fairly call his animal instincts. Some, such as
Nagel, have put forward strong arguments that as we have no grasp of the psychology of
any other animal apart from our own, i.e. what it is like to be that other animal,
correspondingly, we have no idea at all what, objectively speaking, that animals
consciousness would be. There is, however, some evidence to suggest that certain animal
species are capable of solving complex problems and displaying complex emotions,
suggesting some tendencies towards the intellectual. Putting aside our doubts for now, we
pass on to the next question, which goes slightly more to the heart of the present query.
c. Is the bears intellect (and sense of humour) intelligible to us?
The chief difficulty with a discussion centred around the concept of humour in the present
context is that humour is, for all our usual intents and purposes, a mental state distinct to
homo sapiens sapiens. As I will argue later, even accepting that the bear might possess a
mental state in which he recognises a state of affairs as humourous (and even this much
may be doubted), it is quite unlikely that such a mental state is in any sense one which is
intelligible to us. Indeed, as previously discussed, we harbour reasonable doubts as to
whether the bear is sufficiently capable of complex thought, or indeed, self-consciousness. I
note in passing that self-consciousness might fairly be regarded not only as a premise for an
individuals ability to recognise complex states of affairs, but also, as an aside, perhaps the
significant element in certain types of self-deprecating humour. Nonetheless, we should
begin by first discussing principal states of affairs which we might find humourous (or,
interchangeably, as comedic), and then whether the bear might have both the nous and then
also the emotional capacity to recognise comedy.

Briefly, Gaiman (the author) pithily describes a joke as any passage containing as necessary
(but for obvious reasons, not sufficient) elements a truth and an exaggeration. More
generally, psycho-sociologically speaking, theories of humour have converged around
incongruity, namely, that we find funny situations which appear strange. Perhaps
immodestly, we think that we can explain humourous situations by their coherence with
these theories. Thus, according to Morreall, we laugh when we feel superior, when we feel
relief, or when we feel pleasantly amused by the incongruous. For example, we would
probably laugh if a giant pumpkin appeared in our bathtub (but not if it were a cougar).
While there is some evidence that certain species of animals display their feelings of
amusement by laughter, or perhaps proto-laughter, it is not clear whether these animal
species would, on experiencing superiority, relief or incongruity, engage in a display of
amusement in line with these theories. The difficulty here is not with the theories
themselves, but with their application: we run again into the core issue which Nagel treats,
viz, that concepts of superiority, relief and incongruity are complex and sociologically
informed, so that these concepts almost certainly mean different things between species
inter se. As Wittgenstein put it, if a lion could speak, we could not understand him. Accepting
therefore that even if the bear might be capable of complex thought and self-awareness,
and even if the bear could conceivably display amusement in language or as behavior
intelligible solely to his own kind, there is however no shared mode between the bear
species and our species by which we can comprehend such a display. Accordingly, we
cannot even begin to apply our own intuition to determine the presence of humour in the
bears understanding. As an example, the bear might point to something with a claw and say
to another bear, in his own way, thats beary funny, and they might share a giggle.
However, for us this is not even bad humour, this is strictly unintelligible. Put the other way
around, there is no syntactical sentence, much less any joke, which we could put in words to
the bear, even if the bear spoke the language, by which the bear could understand our
meaning (much less our humour), no matter how eloquent we might be.
Thus, even if the bear could have a sense of humour, it would be a bears sense alone,
and more significantly, there would be nothing humanly intelligible (or humourous) about it.

Das Leben ist werth gelebt zu werden, sagt die Kunst, die schnste Verfhrerin; das Leben is
werth, erkannt zu werden, sagt die Wissenschaft - Nietzsche.
Life is worth living, says art, the most beautiful seductress; life is worth knowing, says science.