The examples that I have taken in the preceding pages do not exactly deal with phobias. The fear of death is not exactly a phobia. But Woody's therapy, the joke that belittles the unknown, works the same with phobias. There are various examples: in Hannah's Sisters, with Woody's hypochondria, or in Mysterious Murder in Manhattan, with Woody's claustrophobia. Woody, then Larry Lipton, is stuck with Carol Lipton (Diane Keaton) in an elevator that is blocked underground. This last situation makes a perfect counterpart to Pascal's plank. It represents a kind of test, similar to Pascal's challenge to the philosopher.

Larry, Woody as Larry, is stuck in the elevator. He presses various buttons. Nothing happens. The doors will not open. The light goes off. Larry has forgotten his Xanax. He tries breathing deeply (as William James would suggest). Larry panics but Woody is funny. We laugh when we see him. The character on the screen is scared. But the character that is telling us the story, Woody, makes a joke of the situation. The character on the screen is ridiculous so that what scares him cannot be really scary. Woody's therapy is not in the pill, nor in the deep breathing. It consists in the ability to make fun of the dreaded situation. The question is, the challenge is: can we do it?

Once, in Burgundy, I visited a coal mine. Standing outside the house where the minors used to change their cloths, the guide explained that the mine was a thousand meters deep. She explained how the elevator worked. In the early days of the mine, it was just a bucket tied to a cord. There were a certain numbers of stages, for they could not make a cord long enough. It took an hour or so to go down. A thousand meters below the surface of the earth. As Pascal invited a philosopher on the board above the abyss, we could ask a comedian to try and go down in the bucket. Would he be able to make a joke, make fun of the situation, or would his “imagination,” to use Pascal's word, the dark unfathomable side of his imagination, prevail? It is possible that phobia escapes the clear rationality of philosophers, but can it be coaxed by the obscure wit of the comedian?

Woody could be the counterpart to Descartes, putting all his hopes in the power of an instance in us, no longer the transparent Reason, which always knows itself, but an opaque Wit, which does not know how, or why, it works. However, in the end, neither seems to work on the right level. If the security that Reason offers against phobia seems to be too much of a bravado, Wit, since it is opaque, offers no guarantee that it will work.