ridiculous

To be ridiculous is to be something highly incongruous or inferior, sometimes deliberately so to make people laugh or get their attention, and sometimes unintendedly so as to be considered laughable and earn or provoke ridicule and derision. It comes from the 1540s Latin "ridiculosus" meaning "laughable", from "ridiculus" meaning "that which excites laughter", and from "ridere" meaning "to laugh". "Ridiculous" is an adjective describing "the ridiculous".

~9 min read

Encyclopedic overview

14 sections

Contents

Humor
History: Incongruity, the superiority theory of humor, and deformity
Native American Ritual Clown
Parody and satire in social commentary
Deformity and incongruity in performance as social commentary, and lifestyle
Japanese Butoh dance
Theatre of the Ridiculous
Psychology: attention, memory, and attitudes
Advertising
Juxtaposition with the sublime {{anchor| Ridiculous and the sublime}}
Reduction to the ridiculous, or "reductio ad ridiculum"
Invective
See also
References

In common usage, "ridiculousness" is used as a synonym for absurdity or nonsense. From a historical and technical viewpoint, "absurdity" is associated with argumentation and reasoning, "nonsense" with semantics and meaning, while "ridiculous" is most associated with laughter, superiority, deformity, and incongruity. Reductio ad absurdum is a valid method of argument, while reductio ad ridiculum is invalid. Argument by invective declaration of ridiculous is invalid, while arguments involving declarations of nonsense may summarize a cogent semantic problem with lack or meaning or ambiguity.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “ridiculous” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.