8 Emerson’s Sad Clown American Transcendentalism and the Dilemma of the Humourist John Michael Corrigan In Taking Laughter Seriously, John Morreall (1983) argues that ancient phi- losophy “would give us to believe that human rationality has to reject incon- gruity, that it is counter to our nature to enjoy it.” These traditional attacks can be grouped into three basic charges, Morreall writes: humour as 1) the enjoyment of something base, 2) the loss of one’s rational faculties, and 3) a type of scorn or mockery (99). Even whilst retaining a Platonic metaphysics, the American transcendentalists imagined humour in a different way than the ancients. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817– 1862), and James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) expressed a complex view that fundamentally affirmed the value of humour as a rational perception of incongruity. As Emerson (1884) contends in “The Comic” (1843), “com- edy is the intellect’s perception of discrepancy” (154), one that is necessary, indeed essential, for human survival since it is “a pledge of sanity” and elicits sympathy between people (155). Lowell (1920) similarly encourages humour, writing, “In human nature, the sense of the comic seems to be implanted to keep man sane, and preserve a healthy balance between body and soul” (42). This chapter examines these affirmations of humour and argues that the transcendentalists were moving away from crude assumptions about and lim- ited definitions of humour to see it as a foundational and necessary artistic activity. I begin by providing a critical context for Emerson’s use of humour and then move on to show how Emerson, Thoreau, and Lowell place humour into their respective metaphysics as an essential, yet initial, rung on the “ascending scale” of consciousness. Lastly, I discuss the consequences of this simultane- ous affirmation and confinement of humour to a lower form of intellection. I focus particularly on Emerson’s portrait of Carlini, the sad clown, and argue that it expresses a striking duality in the transcendentalist notion of humour, one that Emerson attempts to resolve in his later writing, aligning his mature philosophy more closely with the democratic poetics of Walt Whitman. Emersonian Humour and Metaphorical Incongruity Humour is seldom associated with New England transcendentalism, a major artery of Romantic thought and practice in the US. In some cases,