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Camus, Nietzsche, and the Absurd:

Rebellion and Scorn versus Humor
and Laughter

Article in Philosophy and Literature · October 2015

DOI: 10.1353/phl.2015.0045

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Mordechai Gordon
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Mordechai Gordon

CAMUS, NIETZSCHE, AND THE ABSURD: REBELLION

AND SCORN VERSUS HUMOR AND LAUGHTER

Abstract. In this essay, I compare Albert Camus’s conception of rebellion

as a response to the absurd to Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion that humor
can become rebellious and assist us in the struggle against nihilism.
I show that Camus advocated rebellion as a response to nihilism and
vehemently opposed the tendency to become hopeless or cynical. Unlike
Camus, Nietzsche supported responding to nihilism with humor and
laughter rather than with defiance or scorn. I conclude by examining
the type of humor that is rebellious in nature, and show that it can assist
us in the struggle against nihilism.

T hroughout his relatively short life, Albert Camus struggled with

nihilism and the absurd nature of human existence. Indeed, many
of his writings deal with the problem of nihilism and with the issues of
suicide, murder, suffering, and mass death. Always serious in his writings
yet never resorting to cynicism or despair, Camus advocated rebellion
as a response to nihilism. The choice of rebellion as a response to the
absurdity of human existence makes sense when one realizes that his life
spanned the two world wars, the horrors of the concentration camps,
and the repression of innocent civilians all over the world, from South
America to Algeria. Perhaps Camus’s tumultuous background helps to
explain why his writings tend to be so solemn, and why his characters
do not laugh much and generally do not display a sense of humor. This
context may also account for the fact that he never really imagined, as
one of his mentors, Friedrich Nietzsche, did, that humor and laughter,
much like rebellion, could constitute a legitimate response to nihilism.

Philosophy and Literature, 2015, 39: 364–378. © 2016 The Johns Hopkins University Press.
 Mordechai Gordon 365

Inspired by Camus’s notion of rebellion as a response to the absurd,

this essay explores how humor can become rebellious and assist us in the
struggle against nihilism. However, I begin my analysis by demonstrating
that Camus was heavily influenced by Nietzsche’s conception of nihil-
ism. I then describe Camus’s struggle with and reaction to the absurd
nature of human existence by highlighting his portrayal of nihilism in a
number of works, including The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel, The Stanger,
and The Plague. I show how Camus advocated rebellion as a response to
nihilism and vehemently opposed the tendency to become hopeless or
cynical. Returning to Nietzsche, I then demonstrate that, unlike Camus,
he supported responding to nihilism with humor and laughter rather
than with defiance or scorn. In the final part of the essay, I examine the
type of humor that is rebellious in nature, and argue that it can assist
us in the struggle against nihilism.

I
The influence of Nietzsche on Camus’s thinking is a topic that has
received considerable attention among various scholars in the field. For
instance, in the opening of his article “Camus’s Fall—From Nietzsche,”
William Duvall writes that “for Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche was a
remarkable thinker, a man of lucidity and courage, a yes-sayer to free-
dom and creativity, the poet-philosopher par excellence. Camus’ texts
provide evidence of a deep attachment to Nietzsche and testify to the
fact that Nietzsche was one of his most significant mentors.”1 Duvall goes
on to note that the presence of Nietzsche in Camus’s thought is clear,
from the numerous citations in the Notebooks to the many references
to Nietzsche in works such as The Rebel, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The
Stranger. Other researchers, such as George Sefler and Matthew Lamb,2
have also emphasized the importance of recognizing the influence of
Nietzsche on Camus’s thought.
In addition, scholars of Nietzsche and Camus have noted that these
two thinkers were very intrigued by the phenomenon of nihilism—a
theme that is threaded throughout their writings. Nihilism, for Nietzsche,
is captured by the phrase “God is dead,” which appears in both Thus
Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science. For instance, in section 125 of The
Gay Science, Nietzsche writes: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we
have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all
murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet
owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood
366 Philosophy and Literature

off us?… Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we
ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”3
The phrase “God is dead” is clearly not meant by Nietzsche to be
interpreted literally; rather, this phrase suggests that the Western tradi-
tion’s reliance on religion as a moral compass and source of meaning is
no longer viable. As Ashley Woodward notes, “Nihilism is the apparent
meaningless of life, brought about in recent Western history by the bank-
ruptcy of the evaluative structures that previously gave life consistency
and direction. Nietzsche uses the phrase ‘the death of God’ to signal this
bankruptcy, because of the orienting role previously played by religious,
transcendent categories of evaluation.”4 Simply put, nihilism, according
to Nietzsche, is the sense of meaninglessness or absurdity that results
from the notion that the traditional Western concepts (e.g., God) and
rhetorical tools (e.g., reason) used to provide meaning and direction
to our lives are grossly inadequate.
In a number of his works, Camus appears to have appropriated
Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism. For example, in his Notebooks, he
writes:

Don’t you believe that we are all responsible for the absence of values?
And if all of us who come from Nietzscheism, from nihilism, or from his-
torical realism said in public that we were wrong and that there are moral
values and that in the future we shall do the necessary to establish and
illustrate them, don’t you believe this would be the beginning of hope?5

This passage suggests that although Camus may have been dissatis-
fied with Nietzsche’s response to nihilism, he did not really question the
latter’s identification of this phenomenon with the absence of values.
Likewise, both Sisyphus’s futile attempt to push the rock (more on this
later) and the character of Meursault in The Stranger (who realizes that
the world is indifferent to his fate) illustrate that Camus bought into
Nietzsche’s view that the notion of nihilism characterizes the plight of
human beings in a world that has no purpose. It is a world in which
there are no transcendent values to guide us or give us meaning. In
short, Camus accepted Nietzsche’s assertion that nihilism refers to the
fact that human existence is characterized by a sense of meaninglessness
and that people often feel powerless to combat the absurd.
Although Camus appears to have adopted Nietzsche’s notion of
nihilism, he did not agree with Nietzsche on the best way to respond
to this phenomenon. For Nietzsche, the solution to the bankruptcy of
 Mordechai Gordon 367

Western concepts and ways of thinking in the face of an irrational and

often meaningless world lay in the hands of a few exceptional individu-
als (“overmen”) who were capable of creating new values. Nietzsche
suggests in the chapter “On the Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit” in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra that in order to overcome nihilism one had to go
through the entire process of transformation from a camel to a lion to a
child. In the first metamorphosis, the spirit becomes a camel, a beast of
burden that carries on its back all the weight of tradition:

What is difficult? asks the spirit that would bear much, and kneels down
like a camel wanting to be well loaded. What is most difficult, O heroes,
asks the spirit that would bear much, that I may take it upon myself to
exult in my strength? Is it not humbling oneself to wound one’s haughti-
ness? Letting one’s folly shine to mock one’s wisdom?6

During this stage, the spirit has to bear the norms and values, espe-
cially the most difficult ones, that have been handed down to us by our
ancestors, such as acting with humility and modesty. Only by subjecting
itself to the full weight of these norms and values can the spirit experi-
ence their oppressiveness. If the laws and truths of tradition are not
initially taken seriously, then they are not values in the full sense of the
term. This is because, for Nietzsche, values have no “objective” status
but rather are posited by human beings as valuable. It is people who give
a law such as “Thou shall not steal” value by adhering to it and taking
it seriously. Hence, the camel symbolizes the need to subject ourselves,
not only intellectually but also emotionally and spiritually, to the full
weight of our old norms and values.
Once the spirit has endured the burdens of tradition, it is ready for
the second metamorphosis: “Here the spirit becomes a lion who would
conquer his freedom and be master in his own desert. Here he seeks
out his last master: he wants to fight him and his last god; for ultimate
victory he wants to fight with the great dragon” (TSZ, p. 138). Nietzsche
transforms the camel into a lion not only because the lion is blessed
with courage but also because it is a beast of prey that devours other
animals. The lion has two important functions that correspond to these
two qualities. First, it must use its courage to conquer its freedom, to
liberate itself from its devotion to the sacred norms in order to assume
the right to create new values. Second, having freed itself from the
weight of tradition, the lion must destroy the values that have become
oppressive, even those that were previously cherished the most. It must
368 Philosophy and Literature

fight the great dragon that Nietzsche calls “Thou Shalt”—the values
and beliefs that have been with us for centuries and, because they are
embedded in our culture, stand in the way of renewal. Both courageous
and destructive, the lion is needed to confront and denounce these
deep-seeded values, and to remind us that values are merely posited
and can, therefore, be unposited and re-created.
However, even the lion cannot create new values—a task that only
the child can fulfill. As Nietzsche writes, “The child is innocence and
forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first move-
ment, a sacred ‘Yes.’ For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred
‘Yes’ is needed: the spirit now wills its own will, and he who has been
lost to the world now conquers his own world” (TSZ, p. 139). Unlike the
camel and the lion, the child is not burdened by tradition, since she is a
newcomer to this world and has not had the chance to experience and
internalize the dominant values in her society. The child easily forgets
what she learned just moments ago, and in that sense each moment is
a new beginning for her. Unlike the lion, the child is naïve; she is not
propelled by the need to create her own freedom and break with the
sacred values, since she has no “hallowed” values.
For a child, as Nietzsche points out, everything is a game in which
one makes up the rules as one goes along. This is the sacred “Yes” that
Nietzsche refers to in the quote above, an affirmation of the child’s own
will—not on the basis of past experience or a set of values but simply
because she has chosen it. Since the lion is still shaped by its history
and culture, this affirmation is something that even it cannot do as
it negates the old values and struggles to liberate itself from them. A
child can create something entirely new by virtue of the fact that she is
a newcomer in this world and has not yet been conditioned to follow
certain rules and norms. Thus, for Nietzsche, creating is a purely positive
act of choosing our values anew, one that goes beyond the negating of
the old that the lion must do.
Yet, while the child goes beyond the lion in creating something new
and the lion transcends the camel in breaking with the old, it is clear
that there is no easy way to become a creator. In Nietzsche’s view, one
cannot be a creator of new values (the child) without first bearing the
burden of tradition (the camel) and then negating the degenerate
norms (the lion). The reason is that breaking with the norms of the
past is meaningful for us only if we had previously valued them. That
is, destroying values, as the lion does, demands courage because these
values have a claim on us—because we are committed to them. Similarly,
 Mordechai Gordon 369

creating new values is truly innovative when we first go through the pro-
cess of resisting the weight of tradition and trying to liberate ourselves
from its influence. Otherwise, we are merely dressing the norms of the
past in new clothing.
Hence, Nietzsche believed that only those who have gone through
the three metamorphoses of enduring traditional norms, breaking with
them, and finally choosing new values can truly be said to be commit-
ted to them. Put simply, the process of becoming a creator establishes a
strong commitment to the new values and instills meaning in our lives.
Indeed, for Nietzsche, our values are always in danger of degenerating
into stagnant beliefs and dogmas that have no significance for us, and
therefore we should constantly be engaged in the act of revaluating
them. For him, this act of revaluating, of literally creating new things
that are valuable, is, ultimately, the way to overcome nihilism and give
meaning to our lives. In contrast, as I will show in the next section,
Camus firmly believed that the most appropriate and noble response
to nihilism must be based on rebellion and defiance.

II
Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus portrays the mortal Sisyphus, who is con-
demned by the Greek gods to perpetually roll a boulder to the top of
a mountain, upon which the rock rolls all the way back down the slope
of its own weight. Sisyphus is forced to repeat this process indefinitely,
which the gods view as the most futile and dreadful of all punishments.
Camus considers Sisyphus an absurd hero, and notes, “He is, as much
through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his
hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable
penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing noth-
ing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of the earth.”7
Camus insists that myths such as Sisyphus are metaphors, and are
designed to stimulate the imagination. In this case, the reader is encour-
aged to identify with the labor, sweat, and suffering of Sisyphus, all of
which seem to be exerted in vain. Yet, for Camus, this myth is also about
the plight of the ordinary worker in modern society, who toils every
day in oppressive conditions, repeating the same mundane tasks with
no apparent purpose. In his view, the predicament and desperation of
many workers is no less absurd than that of Sisyphus.
Still, what interests Camus most about Sisyphus is his response to
the cruel punishment, which is mainly noticeable when he descends
the mountain:
370 Philosophy and Literature

I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step towards
the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a
breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour
of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights
and gradually sinks towards the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his
fate. He is stronger than his rock. (TMS, p. 117)

Camus’s point is that Sisyphus is most conscious of the cruel and absurd
nature of his punishment during his descent of the mountain to retrieve
the rock. When he is rolling the boulder up the mountain, Sisyphus is
so immersed in the tremendous amount of effort and discipline that it
takes to move the rock that he thinks very little about his misfortune.
However, during his descent, Sisyphus is free to contemplate and even
react to his tragic fate. Moreover, he is not only conscious but also
rebellious and scornful. As Camus writes: “Sisyphus, proletarian of the
gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched
condition; it is what he thinks of during his descent” (TMS, p. 117).
Although Camus believed that Sisyphus’s descent of the mountain is
sometimes accompanied by grief and at other times by joy, the rebel-
lious attitude is always present. The sorrow is there especially in the
beginning, when Sisyphus becomes aware of the magnitude and futility
of the task that lies before him; the joy comes afterward, from realizing
that, despite his cruel punishment, he can choose how to respond to
his own destiny. Camus insists that Sisyphus, as a tragic hero, should
be revered for his rebelliousness and for not giving in to cynicism and
despair in the face of his awful predicament. Indeed, Camus argues that
we should regard Sisyphus as a model of how to approach and respond
to the modern form of nihilism described above:

The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. If
there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny or at least there is but
one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he
knows himself to be the master of his days. (TMS, p. 119)

Thus, although Sisyphus’s fate is inevitable (being forced to repeat the

same task over and over again for eternity), he is still the master of his
own destiny in that he is able to decide how to react to it. His rebel-
liousness is manifest in his choosing to view his destiny as despicable,
and in responding to his fate not with submissiveness but rather with
defiance and scorn.
 Mordechai Gordon 371

Aside from The Myth of Sisyphus, rebellion as a response to the absurd

nature of human existence is echoed in many of Camus’s writings. In
The Plague, for instance, Dr. Rieux, Tarrou, and Cottard are committed
to the fight against the plague that has invaded their town. Summing
up why he decided to chronicle the terrible impact of the plague on
the citizens of Oran, Dr. Rieux notes that he didn’t want to be “one of
those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those
plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and
outrage done them might endure.”8
In the chapter in The Rebel titled “Beyond Nihilism,” Camus makes
it abundantly clear that his preferred response to nihilism is one of
rebellion. He writes, “It is those who know how to rebel, at the appro-
priate moment, against history who really advance its interests.”9 This
passage, as well as many others in the book, demonstrates that Camus
advocated rebellion as the noblest response to nihilism. However, the
rebellion that he favored had to be dedicated to achieving some wor-
thy goal (like freedom) and could not rest on indiscriminate violence.
Indeed, earlier in The Rebel, Camus describes rebellion as the struggle
against servitude, falsehood, and terror, and insists that every struggle
has to operate within certain justifiable limits. As he puts it, “The rebel
demands undoubtedly a certain degree of freedom for himself; but in
no case, if he is consistent, does he demand to destroy the existence
and the freedom of others” (TR, p. 251).
Moreover, for Camus, the rebellion against the absurdity of human
existence should never be combined with cynicism or despair. Despite
his tragic fate, Sisyphus does not exhibit any cynicism or despair, and,
indeed, one would be hard pressed to find these attitudes expressed in
any of Camus’s heroes. In The Plague, for example, neither Dr. Rieux
nor his friend Tarrou, who experiences the terrible consequences of
the bubonic plague, displays these reactions. In fact, the two remain
hopeful and committed to saving as many lives as possible throughout
the entire ordeal, even when Tarrou himself falls victim to the disease.
In The Stranger, Monsieur Meursault, who commits a senseless murder
of an Arab man and is condemned to death, still claims that he is happy
after he is placed in solitary confinement. At the end of the novel, when
Meursault finally confronts his absurd fate, he states that acknowledging
“the benign indifference of the universe” to his impending death “made
me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.”10
372 Philosophy and Literature

III
In an earlier part of this essay I suggested that for Nietzsche the
answer to the problem of nihilism lay in the hands of a few exceptional
individuals who were capable of creating new values. However, creating
new values is only part of what Nietzsche suggests we need to do in order
to combat the phenomenon of nihilism. The other part of his response
to the problem of nihilism is based on adopting an attitude of humor
and laughter. Indeed, Nietzsche’s writings contain a great deal of irony
and sarcastic humor. For example, in The Will to Power, he remarks that
“perhaps I know best why man alone laughs: he alone suffers so deeply
that he had to invent laughter. The unhappiest and most melancholy
animal is, as fitting, the most cheerful.”11
Although we can’t know for sure that other animals do not laugh
like us, it is a pretty safe bet to say that humans are the only beings
who are aware of themselves laughing, much like they are the only ones
who know that they suffer. Another way of making Nietzsche’s point is
to say that we are the only beings who have a sense of humor and are
conscious of having this capacity. Our sense of humor enables us to
laugh not only at other people, absurd situations, and the incongruous
incidents that we witness but also at ourselves. Humor allows us to view
the world from a perspective that is amusing and comical rather than
serious, defiant, or sad.
Moreover, in the chapter “On the Higher Man” in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, Nietzsche mocks those who believe that laughter is our great-
est sin and emphasized the value of a laughing spirit to combat the dead
weight of our culture and tradition. Summarizing this value, he writes:

What gives asses wings, what milks lionesses—praised be this good intrac-
table spirit that comes like a cyclone to all today and to all the mob. What
is averse to thistle-heads and casuists’ heads and to all the wilted leaves
and weeds—praised be this wild, good, free storm spirit that dances
on swamps and on melancholy as on meadows. What hates the mob’s
blether-cocks and all the bungled gloomy brood—praised be this spirit
of all free spirits, the laughing gale that blows dust into the eyes of all
the black-sighted, sore-blighted. (TSZ, p. 407)

For Nietzsche, the way to become liberated from the melancholy teach-
ings and the gloomy morality of various religions is not through defiance
but by relying on a spirit of jest and lightheartedness. Throughout this
chapter, he repeats that failure is good, and calls on the higher human
 Mordechai Gordon 373

beings to “learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh!” By learning

to laugh at ourselves and accept failure as an integral part of the human
condition, we also begin to question the “Spirit of Gravity”—those
worn-out morals that have been handed down to us by our ancestors,
which we typically take for granted. Nietzsche recognized better than
most philosophers that part of what makes our lives so burdensome
and gloomy is our uncritical attachment to various conventions that
we inherited from our parents, culture, or religion. Taking ourselves
less seriously can help us relate to these conventions less rigidly and
perhaps even open ourselves to the possibility of creating new values.
In his essay “The Absurd,” Thomas Nagel echoes Nietzsche’s notion
that the absurdity inherent in human existence should be cause for
humor, not agony or scorn. Nagel first acknowledges that there are
many absurd situations that people encounter daily where there is a
discrepancy between their pretensions or aspirations and reality. In
those cases, he maintains, people generally try to modify the situation
by changing their aspirations, by attempting to align their reality with
those aspirations, or by removing themselves entirely from the situation.
Nagel insists that absurdity, in the sense that many aspects of our lives are
incongruous and do not make sense, is a rather common occurrence.
He provides the following examples to illustrate this notion: “Someone
gives a complicated speech in support of a motion that has already
passed; a notorious criminal is made president of a major philanthropic
foundation; you declare your love over the telephone to a recorded
announcement; as you are being knighted, your pants fall down.”12
However, Nagel points out that a philosophical sense of absurdity arises
from the view that pretension and reality inevitably clash for everybody. He
defines this universal notion of absurdity as “the collision between the
seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of
regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to
doubt” (TA, p. 718). The problem is that neither the seriousness with
which we approach our lives nor the arbitrariness of our beliefs and
conventions ever really changes, even when we notice that they clash. A
philosophical (general) sense of absurdity comes from the recognition
that there is a fundamental contradiction between our serious approach
to life and the notion that our existence is often both unpredictable
and senseless.
Most people feel that life is absurd at some point in their lives, and
some people even have a strong and continual sense of absurdity. Nagel
claims that this sense of absurdity is a particularly human quality, since
374 Philosophy and Literature

only human beings have the capacity to step back, critically evaluate
their actions, and appreciate the incongruity of a situation. The life
of a mouse, he writes, is not absurd, as the mouse “lacks the capacities
of self-consciousness and self-transcendence that would enable him to
see that he is only a mouse” (TA, p. 725). Since only human beings, of
all the animals on earth, have the capacity for self-consciousness and
self-transcendence, only their lives can properly be considered absurd.
As Nagel eloquently writes, “Absurdity is one of the most human things
about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting charac-
teristics. Like skepticism in epistemology, it is possible only because we
possess a certain kind of insight—the capacity to transcend ourselves
in thought” (TA, p. 727).
People’s responses to the little incongruities they encounter daily
or the general sense that human existence is absurd can vary widely.
Some people may become depressed by the realization that their lives
are meaningless and fall into despair. Others might become defiant and
choose to resist the sense that their lives seem incongruous and absurd.
Some may elect to extricate themselves from the absurd situation or
to change their behavior or attitudes, thereby making their lives less
meaningless. Still others may opt to laugh at the situation or themselves
and accept the absurdity as an integral part of their lives.
To the extent that we accept Nagel’s assertion that a sense of absurdity
is one of the most human things about us, then humor and laughter
may be the most beneficial responses of all the alternatives mentioned.
That is, if absurdity is an integral part of human existence, it follows
that despair, defiance, or avoidance of the situation does not make
much sense. Much more plausible and healthy, it seems to me, is to
approach the absurdities and little misfortunes of our lives with humor
and laughter. As Ted Cohen suggests, “When we laugh at a true absurdity,
we simultaneously confess that we cannot make sense of it and that we
accept it. Thus this laughter is an expression of our humanity, our finite
capacity, our ability to live with what we cannot understand or subdue.”13

IV
In his essay “Humour,” Sigmund Freud writes that “humour is not
resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies the triumph not only of the ego,
but also of the pleasure principle, which is strong enough to assert itself
here in the face of the adverse real circumstances.”14 An example of the
rebellious nature of humor cited by Freud is the prisoner who is being
 Mordechai Gordon 375

led to his execution on a Monday morning and remarks, “Well, this is

a good beginning to the week.” Freud goes on to explain that humor
has a rebellious and liberating quality to it since it refuses to give in to
the forces of reality even in the face of overwhelming odds.
Another example of this rebellious and liberating aspect of the comic
is the humor created during the Holocaust—by comedians, scholars,
prisoners, and others—to criticize Hitler and the Nazi regime. As John
Morreall notes, “During the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, humor-
ists were among the first to call attention to what was going wrong.”15
For instance, Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator calls the viewer’s
attention to Hitler’s insanity and ruthlessness.
Morreall suggests that because of humor’s subversive nature, the Nazis,
and especially Hitler, were quite afraid of it. In fact, telling a joke could
be considered a crime against the state and its leaders. Morreall writes
that, under German law, “circulating and listening to anti-Nazi jokes
were acts of treason. Several people were even put on trial for naming
dogs and horses ‘Adolf.’ Between 1933 and 1945, 5,000 death sentences
were handed down by the ‘People’s Court’ for treason, a large number
of them for anti-Nazi humor” (CR, p. 120). Despite the danger posed to
people living under the Nazi regime who dared to create humor against
the state, Morreall shows that jokes and other comedic acts and images
were still present even in the concentration camps. The prisoners in the
camps used humor to mock the German guards and protest against the
absurd and dehumanizing conditions of their existence.
In his book Rebellious Laughter: People’s Humor in American Culture,
historian Joseph Boskin explores how humor was used in the United
States during the second half of the twentieth century to respond to the
major social, political, cultural, and technological events of the time.
Boskin’s main argument is that “joking is a finely tuned form of people’s
language, honed in large part on the overall role that humor has played
throughout the course of American history. I claim considerable cultural
power for humor as a social fulcrum in this culture, one that acts as
a divisive as well as a coalescing agent.”16 Boskin’s point is that joking
and humor in general are forms of discourse that not only reflect the
changes that were taking place in American society in the second half
of the twentieth century but also challenge and even rebel against those
values and communal identities that are seen as problematic.
Boskin indicates that in the second half of the twentieth century
there was a surge of new comedy shows and sitcoms on television, from
I Love Lucy to M*A*S*H to The Bill Cosby Show to Seinfeld. All of these
376 Philosophy and Literature

shows, in one way or another, called various American practices and

values into question. One successful comedy show that is still running
today—Saturday Night Live—has since its inception featured a particular
kind of irreverent and rebellious humor. Contemporary political satires
like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, as well as stand-
up comedians such as Lewis Black, Wanda Sykes, and Chris Rock, have
continued this tradition of using comedy and humor to challenge many
of our outmoded values and unexamined assumptions.
The significance of rebellious humor lies in its ability to get people to
question embedded beliefs, ridiculous practices, and false assumptions. It
does so by putting a mirror in front of our faces so that we see ourselves
as others do, from a different perspective—a perspective that is often
very unflattering. Rebellious humor resembles the lion in Nietzsche’s
metaphor, in that it can liberate us from the weight of tradition so that
we can, hopefully, create new values.
To be sure, being exposed to rebellious humor does not necessarily
lead people to liberate themselves from outmoded traditions, let alone
create new ones. As Nietzsche’s metaphor illustrates, becoming a cre-
ator of new values is a very difficult undertaking, one that first requires
bearing the weight of tradition, then negating the past, and finally,
adopting the attitude of a child. However, my claim here is simply that
rebellious humor can help facilitate the process of getting people to
critically examine their most cherished beliefs and practices.
My reading of Nietzsche suggests that he recognized not only that
humor and laughter are healthy responses to nihilism and the absurdity
that characterizes human existence but also that they can constitute a
form of rebellion against nihilism. For instance, in the prologue to Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes:

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do

you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beast
rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock
or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman:
a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way
from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes,
and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.
Whoever is the wisest among you is also a mere conflict and cross
between plant and ghost. But do I bid you become ghosts or plants?
(TSZ, pp. 124–25)
 Mordechai Gordon 377

In this passage, Nietzsche seems to be simultaneously mocking humans

and challenging them to transcend their current existence and seek
a higher mode of being in the world. That is, he uses humor to both
chastise humanity and inspire people to reexamine their current values,
so that they can move beyond their present condition. Consider also
the following aphorism in The Will to Power, in which Nietzsche employs
irony and wit to get his readers to think critically: “The philosophical
nihilist is convinced that all that happens is meaningless and in vain; and
that there ought not to be anything meaningless and in vain” (TWP, p.
23). Thus, Nietzsche’s literary style in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as well as
in many of his later works shows that he recognized and tried to take
advantage of humor’s rebellious and liberating function.

V
In conclusion, I am not certain that Camus, unlike Nietzsche, was
ever fully aware of the fact that humor and laughter can have a rebel-
lious impact. Based on his personal history and the writings featured
here, there is no doubt that Camus struggled with the phenomenon of
nihilism, and that he considered the absurdity of human existence the
most significant philosophical problem of his time. What we also know
is that Camus never backed away from nihilism, and that he believed
that rebellion was the most appropriate response to this problem. For
him, rebellion was embodied in Sisyphus’s defiance of his cruel and
senseless punishment, in Dr. Rieux’s struggle to save as many people
as possible from succumbing to the plague, and in his own resistance
to the Nazi regime. Following some of Nietzsche’s insights, my analysis
in this essay indicates that humor can also constitute a form of rebel-
lion against nihilism, one that can liberate people from many of their
unexamined beliefs and practices that have ceased to make sense.

School of Education, Quinnipiac University

1.  William Duvall, “Camus’s Fall—From Nietzsche,” Historical Reflections 21, no. 3 (Fall
1995): 538.
2.  George S. Sefler, “The Existential vs. the Absurd: The Aesthetics of Nietzsche
and Camus,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 32, no. 3 (Spring 1974): 415–21;
 378 Philosophy and Literature

Matthew Lamb, “The Rebirth of Tragedy: Camus and Nietzsche,” Philosophy Today 55,
no. 1 (2011): 96–108.
3.  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random
House, 1974), p. 181.
4.  Ashley Woodward, “Camus and Nihilism,” Sophia 50, no. 4 (December 2011): 544.
5.  Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1942–1951, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Marlowe &
Co., 1965), pp. 145–46.
6.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 138; hereafter abbreviated TSZ.
7.  Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 116; here-
after abbreviated TMS.
8.  Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1975),
p. 308.
9.  Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1954), p.
269; hereafter abbreviated TR.
10.  Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1946),
p. 154.
11.  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale
(New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 56; hereafter abbreviated TWP.
12.  Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd,” The Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 20 (October 21,
1971): 718; hereafter abbreviated TA.
13.  Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999), p. 41.
14.  Sigmund Freud, “Humour,” in Collected Papers, vol. 5, ed. James Strachey (New York:
Basic Books, 1966), p. 217.
15.  John Morreall, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009), p. 119; hereafter abbreviated CR.
16.  Joseph Boskin, Rebellious Laughter: People’s Humor in American Culture (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1997), p. 2.

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