I think sudokus can be funny (or perhaps less trivially: that laughter can be an appropriate response to a sudoku). In fact, I think there's quite a lot to laugh at with sudokus in general, and I've encountered some particular puzzles which have a comedic content in a very similar way to how cryptic crosswords involve a groan-inducing element, if not out-and-out gags, but I'll save that for another occasion. Even more generally, I think laughter is an appropriate response to someone who goes out of their way to do something so seemingly pointless as to stand unnecessarily in a crowded airport café, laughing at a very disposable and unmomentous number-based logical puzzle.
In 'Absurdity, Incongruity and Laughter' (Philosophy, 84: 111-134, Jan 2009), Bob Plant argues that laughter is an appropriate response to a slightly different type of absurdity. Albert Camus (and some other existentialists) maintained that there is something absurd about life - that our lives are caught up in a rather ridiculous situation, in which we are committed to repeating the pathetic (because futile) attempt to find meaning and reason for our existence. Plant thinks that if this is the case, we should probably just laugh.
Plant augments Camus' arguments for the absurdity of existence with some ideas from Thomas Nagel, and the eventual view goes something like this. We humans are an interesting sort of animal, because we've got this conscious part of ourselves which is reflective, and which likes to ask questions like 'why am I here?' When we do this, we take a strange sort of perspective on ourselves: we try to treat ourselves a bit like any other object of inquiry that we're trying to learn about, just as if we were wondering about why there might be a weasel in the kitchen right now. And at the same time we also know that we're talking about ourselves, and knowing ourselves the way we do, we know we're not just like any other object of inquiry. The external, disinterested-observer's perspective tells us that our existence is just like the existence of lots of other things (milk, sap, squid ink) - it's kind of contingent, arbitrary, and in one sense rather unremarkable. But since we also take a very personal, subjectively-charged attitude to ourselves at the same time, we feel that there's something wrong (inadequate, insubstantial, and perhaps misguided) about these answers. So we're stuck in a situation where we ask questions which require us to regard ourselves impersonally, and are perpetually dissatified with the results of those inquiries. And, says Nagel, this is a part of human nature: it's constitutive of being a human being that we're continually conflicted like this, because the fact that we're conscious and self-concious allows us (and compels us) to try to take both attitudes towards ourselves and to try to resolve them. Our existence is absurd (in Camus' sense) because we're caught in a repetitive, futile cycle.
So what should our response to the absurdity of existence be? Plant explores a variety of options. We could try to break the spell that these Big Questions ('what is the meaning of life?') have on us, perhaps by engaging in a bit of philosophical therapy: the word 'meaning' doesn't mean what you think it means in this question, and so the question doesn't really make sense in the way you think it does, so you should stop asking it. Plant thinks this kind of response is a bit of a joke. Imagine it: someone's in turmoil over whether their existence is just pointless, a grand cosmic accident, and some philosopher is going to sooth their tortured soul with a lecture on the meaning of 'meaning'. (he gives a great example given by R. M. Hare, definitely worth reading).
Jean-Paul Sartre explictly discussed whether these existentialist conclusions should provoke us to such a despair - he thinks the answer is 'no', and so does Plant, but for different reasons. Sartre thinks despair is the wrong sort of reaction since we should instead be energised, optimistic and excited by the realisation that we are the makers of our own lives' meanings. Plant argues that despair is an inappropriate response since it presumes that life could have possibly been non-absurd. But once you endorse the picture that Nagel presents, it's clear that absurdity is a consitutive feature of our human nature. To despair is, in part, to wish that my life didn't have this absurdity running through it, and Plant maintains that this amounts to wishing that I wasn't a human, while at the same time somehow still being me.
Plant's positive thesis is that our response to existential absurdity should be laughter. There's a psychological component here: humans laugh in response to incongruity. It seems Kant thought as much; that when you expect one thing and get another, that's something to laugh about. So we expect our existence to be meaningful, momentous, interesting, and it turns our existence is explained in just the same way as any other kind of thing. It wouldn't be inappropriate to laugh at this incongruity. In fact, there's a second layer of humour here: it's in our nature to ask these questions and be perpetually frustrated at the kinds of answers that come back. So our existence has this continual cycle built in to it, as if we were Pooh and Piglet hunting for Woozles, our expectations consistently hopeful but entirely in vain.
An interesting consequence of this line of reasoning is as follows. If it's an appropriate response to laugh at the absurdity of our existence, then laughter is also an appropriate response to anyone who denies that our existence is absurd. We can laugh at anyone who thinks they've identified the meaning of life, or has dissolved these questions with philosophical arguments or scientific evidence, since they have a bunch of expectations and presuppositions which are incompatible with our actual human nature, which has absurdity built in. They think they've chased down an answer in the same way that Pooh and Piglet thought that they were chasing down a Woozle. What do you make of that?
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