Comedy and critical thought: Laughter as resistance

Abstract

Is humor critique? Many have long assumed it to be-including heads of state and government censors. A group of people sniggering together often seems threatening, signifying a kind of antisocial collectivity, a point of view not commonly available, a subverting of the normative stitching of politics. This suggestive conflation also underlies the power of the medieval jester, the coyote trickster, the Greek cynic, the literary satirist, and-in our own time-the late-night television comedian, all of whom possess a tremendous power: the ability to say the unsayable, to confront hypocrisy, to kick the pricks. But any clear-eyed rendition of humor must also take into account its profoundly reactive qualities. Those sniggers also serve to keep others in their place. The subjects of jokes are more often minorities than governments. The cutting edge of wit can exile and humiliate. Teenagers mobilize humor against the misfit, the nerd, the overweight, the already-outcast. This would seem an odd fit for critique: cruelty against the weak does not comport with the uncovering of the truth from the exigencies and productions of capitalist cultural consumerism. Comedy also operates under a second set of procedures which misfit critical thinking. Critique requires distance from its subject, whereas humor operates through immersion. Humor operates contextually and immanently. Explaining a joke kills the joke. And a third problematic: critique depends on a profound positivism, or at least a presumption of discoverable verities. Discovery (the procedures of seeing how things operate) and actuality (the structural truth of oppression in any given situation) underpin critical thought. What is behind the curtain is real; the curtain itself must be abolished. Comedic tropes, in contrast, revel in the play between reality, intentionality, and meaning: irony, sarcasm, exaggeration, slapstick. Critique operates structurally and narratively, while humor surprises and undercuts. This volume of thirteen essays, originating in a conference ranging across lines of political science, rhetoric, history, philosophy, and media, addresses this vital Ó