Humor in The Logic of Sense by Deleuze

It is inevitable that some articles here appear not in chronological order (Stuart Tave, Lesley Stephen, and this one, Gilles Deleuze). It so happens that some modern thinkers covered in some of my courses likewise deal with humor directly or indirectly. I can't bear to let them slip by. Today, in our class of Literary Theory, we came across the “Second Series of Paradoxes—Of Surface Effects” in The Logic of Sense by Gilles Deleuze. With Lewis Carroll in mind, Deleuze likens humor to the Deleuzean Surface:

[I]t is the task of language both to establish limits and to go beyond them. Therefore language includes terms which do not cease to displace their extension and which make possible a reversal of the connection in a given series (thus too much and not enough, few and many). The event is coextensive with becoming, and becoming is itself coextensive with language; the paradox is thus essentially a “sorites,” that is a series of interrogative propositions which, following becoming, proceed through successive additions and retrenchments. Everything happens at the boundary between things and propositions. Chrysippus taught: “If you say something, it passes through your lips; so, if you say “chariot,” a chariot passes through your lips.” Here is a use of paradox the only equivalents of which are to be found in Zen Buddhism on one hand and in English or American nonsense on the other. In one case, that which is (end of Page 8) most profound is the immediate, in the other, the immediate is found in language. Paradox appears as a dismissal of depth, a display of events at the surface, and a deployment of language along this limit. Humor is the art of the surface, which is opposed to the old irony, the art of depths and heights. The Sophists and Cynics had already made humor a philosophical weapon against Socratic irony; but with the Stoics, humor found its dialectics, its dialectical principle or its natural place and its pure philosophical concept.
Lewis Carroll carries out this operation, inaugurated by the  Stoics,...

—The Logic of Sense*(8-9)

*Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense (1968). Trans. Mark Lester. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.