Notes for a Critique of Humor

     

1.  Humor is often very satisfied with itself. It is the weapon of the self-assured. One evident source of this kind of smugness currently is the self-certainty and self- satisfaction of the bourgeois. As the bearer of a universal empirical, utilitarian and mercantile culture the bourgeois is above all spiritualistic, sentimental nonsense. In short he is what Arnold and others labeled the philistine; hence his smirking satisfaction at any and all forms of disenchantment whether of religion, or love or art. A great deal of modern comedy, superficially supposed to be ‘subversive’, is in this vein and is, as such, a defense of the status quo. Even the absurdism of Monty Python (which I enjoy as much as the next person) is about how any and all claims to ‘seriousness’ are just stuff and nonsense. Absurdism is a very conservative form of comedy (all critique is neutralized as ‘serious’) and that is both its strength and its vitiating flaw: conservatism here devolves into a reflexive defense of off color racial humor because people are being ‘too serious’ and no one has ‘a sense of humor’ any more. This attitude shades easily into the flippancy of the aristocrat such that those two classes, technically at war, merge against common enemies.

2. Of course currently humor is being poisoned not only by the swagger and self-certainty of the bourgeois but by the resentment of those who have lost their swagger and are desperate to recapture it in the only form they know. This means they APE, to the point of parody, the self-satisfaction noted above.   

3. Is it an accident that from Aristophanes to Waugh reactionaries have been the funniest people? By the way, if it turns out that the radical stance is inherently less funny that would be a problem for the radical.

4. Humor is the impregnable fortress behind which a cultural or political agenda can mask itself. This is because humor is innocent and YOU, yes YOU, are being too stuffy and serious.

5. Humor though is not innocent. Yet, it is as essential to us as oxygen. This is the dilemma for the moralist.

6. Why do people take such umbrage when one fails to laugh at, say, a racist joke? This is because aggression is the latent content of this kind of humor. Of course no one wants to cop to aggressive feelings. But in fact it is more complicated than this. The purpose of the joke is to vent unconscious feelings. Sublimation is precisely its function. This process is disrupted if, rudely, one points to the mechanism of sublimation and makes it overt and thematic. You stick a wrench in the works. The aggression latent in the joke is vented precisely by the joke being ‘innocent’ and unconscious. Hence the defensive reaction of the aggrieved joke teller.

7. Yet humor is neither suppressible nor innocent. AND the joke teller actually has a valid complaint. When someone angrily and resentfully says “that was just a joke” they are partly correct for the joke has substituted for an overt act of violence. The teller has vented the appropriate gasses in the socially approved way!

8. Humor, like religion, can encode the most reactionary attitudes and dated cultural scripts. Like religion, it also claims the right never to be examined or questioned. By THIS privilege it masks and occludes other privileges which can’t be questioned because to do so would commit the sin of ‘humorlessness’. To be humorless is exactly equivalent to being blasphemous.

9. And again the joke teller is partly right for as Blake says (or rather one of his characters says) that the infant joy is ghastly if examined too closely. This is a serious challenge to the idea of critique.

10. We also see that ‘social critique’ indeed any critique also has its edge of aggression and latent violence. This is why we ‘destroy’ people when we win an argument on some social or cultural issue. Also, the critic does indeed struggle with humorlessness for the task of altering society is inherently serious and can always be mocked from the standpoint of absurdism and the puncturing of human hubris and pretension. In this way critique is like religion. It is constantly threated by irreverence and blasphemy as all serious things are.

11. And this is why, yes, humor is in fact conservative and only ever subversive on its face. Humor defends the status quo as the funniest people (like Pope or Swift) have always done. If society cannot do without humor it cannot do without a conservative element. Also note that ALL through the Trump era comedians defended the previous status quo.

12. The joke enacts a script of submission and dominance. Especially it enacts a hierarchy in the social sphere for the ‘other’ proves he has a ‘sense of humor’ by internalizing the jokes people tell about him. Richard Wagner had Jewish friends just for this purpose: they had to prove they were ‘funny’ by being the butt of his jokes. A butt (correct me if I’m wrong) is a wooden block used as a target for a lance. The butt internalizes the hierarchy by internalizing the joke that subordinates him to the teller. This hierarchy must never be threatened by the butt refusing to ‘get’ the joke.                  

  13. The circle of privilege within which the joke is funny must always remain implicit because any attempt to render it overt will expose its arbitrariness to view. The token Jew who gets to join the gentleman’s club must always respect his function as the man who legitimizes the rules that exclude the great majority of his fellows. He must always laugh at stereotypes of Jews or the spirit of the club is ruined. Above all he must NEVER show agency especially the agency to reject or accept the joke as funny. I understand this was the role of Sammy Davis Jr. in the rat pack.

14. But Wills! What, after all about the innocent functions of humor? One might admit, when all is said and done, jokes that are a pure form of aesthetic play. The pun would be the obvious example. A pun has no butt generally. It is laughter at a perceived incongruity in the arbitrary resemblance of two words. These might be classed as the angelic jokes that float above the animal or diabolic ones. In THAT case there would be laughter that descends into the body from the intellect as opposed to laughter that rises into the intellect from the passions of fear and aggression. Then there would be in the joke not only sublimated passion but incarnated reason with laughter as the sign of both one and the other. Laughter would then have a curious double function.  

 15. Laughter may not even be double though. It may express one of delight, scorn, bitterness, surprise or madness.

16. The basic function of laughter is to express a rational delight at incongruity or contradiction. Bodily humor then would reason’s delight at the contradiction between rationality and sensibility/corporeity. Laughter then gets co-opted or conscripted by other functions.

17. Laughter at farting or hiccupping (as in Aristophanes) alleviates embarrassment at animal functions by disarming it just as one knocks a sword out of an opponent’s hand. Of course we are already inching back towards our original hypothesis about humor for one neutralizes an opponent in war. At the same time we might say that one form of rational delight is the delight of malice- seeing the enemy discomfited or the proud beaten down. Scorn, which the old moralists took as the essence of humor would be the rational faculty aligned with a will to harm. In a sense scorn, as in the satirist, is rational malice that presumes a sphere of moral and social judgment. It is not ‘primitive’ aggression but involves comparison and judgment. Yet whatever the case here, scorn does indeed conscript the function of laughter and scorn is a mode of anger for which primary aggression is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Is laughter a function of reason conscripted by emotion or an emotional function conscripted by reason (with the pun on ‘conscription for warfare’ being intended)?

18. I mentioned ‘angelic ‘humor above but an angel is too unified with itself to laugh.

19. I also mentioned the pun as an example of ‘innocent’ humor though the pun is in fact a despised form of humor. The pun is not ‘edgy’ which means I suppose, that it does not walk a knife edge between taboo and transgression and also lacks the cutting edge of a knife blade. The more innocent the humor the less funny it is. Satire is the ultimate expression of humor and satire is ridicule matched with anger.

20. Freud suggests that one thing humor vents is fear or discomfort at an anticipated situation. Here we get another military metaphor for we ‘defuse’ such a situation (like a bomb).