Abstract

In this paper, humor is analyzed as an ethical condition for the way of being and thinking of the existential becoming of the individual from the conception of Kierkegaard as the form of the cinematic philosophy of Woody Allen’s films. The existential becoming in Kierkegaard is not derived or reduced to the logic of a dialectic or of natural conditions, but depends essentially on the choice of oneself as the link between what has been and what is to come, which constitutes the ethical. This specific contradiction is humor, as the tension of the tragic and the comic in existence and in Kierkegaard’s subjective thinker, for which the tragic occurs when the infinite claims are not delimited in the specific contradiction of individual existence and the comic is given as a relativization of the same, in this way the becoming takes place when in the tragic there is a comic balance and in the comic the pathos of the tragic is denoted, giving rise to that condition of constant opening of new possibilities, that allows considering the choice of oneself, like wanting to believe that a bond of meaning is possible again despite the nonsense of the facts. Precisely the motivation of Woody Allen’s films philosophically has to do with this question in the form of a fundamental interrogation and it develops in general in his film work as the maturation of a humor where tragedy and comedy are reciprocally related, which allows to think subjectively-existentially as Kierkegaard has put it. In particular, the approach in Woody Allen’s film Melinda and Melinda from 2004 is analyzed.

Keywords: humor | tragedy | comic | Woody Allen | Kierkegaard | subjectivity