1. It is to be generally agreed that the rediscovery of what is familiar, 'recognition,' is pleasurable;Freud;Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, comments that
2. Monica, his mother, is happy with an unreflective faith because she is a woman, weak in reason. She would be happier with authority. Aquinas maintained that the "highest beatitude" of human beings, which would have to include their greatest happiness (salvation could not be considered an unhappy event), was contemplation of God. See Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province;Augustine doubted that those who relied on authority alone, rather than exercise reason, could be happy, though they could be saved,1947
3. Whatever the case, the highest pleasure and human happiness not only follows reflection, contemplation, but also the escape from time and death in the return to Paradise. Reflection, because it escapes time, is pleasure. And only reflection can lead to laughter. The comedy of Chaplin, Keaton, and the Marx Brothers is "timeless" in more ways than one. It exists in the present only. It has neither past nor future. It begins anew with every comic "bit" or narrative operation. It saves nothing because it wants nothing. It has no desire. Without desire, it has no future, and because it has no future, it cannot lose. With nothing to lose, it always wins, if only momentarily. But it also requires the viewer to act by constructing two exclusions simultaneously, one from the film's image, its comedic narrative operation, and the other from experience. It requires theoria, contemplation, reflection, an activity pleasurable in itself, 69 and even more so because it allows the viewer to participate in her own salvation;A H Augustine ; Trans;Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, 2 vols,1948