Theology, Comedy, Politics

Marcus Pound, Marcus Pound, Ashley John Moyse, Scott A. Kirkland, Marcus Pound, Ashley John Moyse, Scott A. Kirkland

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781506431628
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506458359
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What relevance has comedy for the global crises of late-modernity and the theological critique thereof? Coming out of the experience of war, a generation of modern theologians such as Donald MacKinnon, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and, more recently, Rowan Williams, in their accommodation to literature, choose tragedy as the paradigm for theological understanding and ethics. By contrast, this book develops recent philosophical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical studies of humor to develop a theology of comedy. By deconstructing secular accounts of comedy it advances the argument that comedy is not only participatory of the divine, but that it should inform our thinking about liturgical, sacramental, and ecclesial life if we are to respond to the postmodern age in which having fun is an ideological imperative of market forces.

4

Comedy and Politics

Ever since Jacques Derrida divided the opinion of the Cambridge scholars as to whether he should be allowed to go forward to receive an honorary degree on the grounds that his work consisted “in no small part of elaborate jokes and puns,”^[1] there has been a disquieting sense that postmodernity spelled the end of serious philosophical and political intent. Terry Eagleton says, “There is perhaps a degree of consensus that the typical postmodernist artifact is playful, self-ironizing, and even schizoid; and that it reacts to the austere autonomy of high modernism by impudently embracing the language of commerce and the commodity.”^[2]

Yet the place of comedy in our postmodern thought remains unclear, and the issues extend far beyond the parochialism of philosophy. (In the end Derrida was awarded the degree, largely on the basis of votes garnered outside the philosophy faculty.) On the one hand there are a number of theorists for whom our contemporary situation spells the death of comedy: this is the age of comicide in the sense that comic conventions descend into absurdist violence in ways that exceed any earlier historical understanding of the nature and purpose of comedy. Aristotle might have found comedy in ugliness, but he drew the line at comedy causing pain. On the other hand, there is a growing sense that there has never been a greater pressure within contemporary society to enjoy life and ensure that no stone remains untouched by the comic inflection. Sell-by dates on cartons of orange juice are replaced by the super-ego imperative to “enjoy before,” while riotous red inflated Santa Clauses vie among the gardens and rooftops of suburban houses imploring us to enjoy Christmas regardless.

In what follows I want to explore some of the currents of comic theory with regard to the postmodern condition. As I argue, comedy in postmodernity is linked to key cultural shifts within the economic sphere: the advance of capitalism, but capitalism itself might also pertain to the structure of joke. This serves as the basis for rethinking ecclesiology along the basis of jokes and comedy, not in the usual sense that we need to include some light humor within our exercise of church but that the church properly speaking has the structure of a joke, a counter-joke to capitalism.

Comicide

As the title of Erich Segal’s The Death of Comedy suggests, the story of comedy and its evolution from the classical period (associated with Aristophanes, Plautus, and Menander) through to Dr. Strangelove (1964) is best understood as a tragedy to the extent it ends badly. Segal writes from the perspective of the dramatic genre while drawing on the ambiguity of the etymology of comedy: kōmaōidē, “the night song,” or alternatively kōmos ōidē, “the revel song.” The Freudian overtones of the “night song” (i.e., dream) should not be missed here. Hence for Segal, “The essential human comedy is an odyssey from estrangement abroad to reunion at home. And the happiest of Happy Endings is . . . laughter in the house.”^[3]

Aristophanes is the real hero for Segal with Birds (414 BCE), proffering the “fullest expression of the comic dream.”^[4] If kōmos focuses on the joys of life in this world—with no regard for the next—as Segal suggests, then the preaching of contemptus mundi by the church in the Middle Ages is the first in a line of targeted attacks that have contributed to the overall decline of comedy. The main act in this comicide is given over to Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd: Didi and Gogo will indeed forever wait for their appointment because in the end, there is no ending: “There will be no revel, renewal, or rejuvenation . . . because comedy is dead.”^[5]

Beckett has replaced Aristophanes’s kōmos with “tragicomic stasis,”^[6] and like Doctor Strangelove, we can only hope to muster some vagary of laughter from the prospect of our total and utter destruction, be it nuclear or otherwise.^[7] Arguably the real problem, like George Steiner’s assessment of tragedy, is that Segal remains too wedded to the dramatic form while extending nonetheless the “death of comedy” as a metaphor for its evolution.

Comic enjoyment today certainly seems to tread an increasingly thin line between laughter and lawsuit. It is a point substantiated by the comedian Daniel Tosh who tweeted an apology for including a rape joke in his set in 2012: “There are awful things in the world, but you can still make jokes about them.”^[8] This is a far cry from the concerns of the nineteenth-century philosophers working in the field of aesthetics, like Hegel, for whom comedy should participate in the supreme task of art: to present a certain idealized image of a free subject.

As Mark Roche argues in his imperious study of Hegel, “If tragedy and comedy are more than just literary structures, a focus on their contemporary fate should bring insight not only into tragedy and comedy but also into today’s world.”^[9] According to Roche, and in contrast to Segal, ours is an age of comedy having passed from an age of tragedy. Yet, like Segal, this is not a happy or reconciliatory state of affairs. The contemporary age gives witness to an ever-increasing corrosion of the public good accompanied by the cultural elevation of individualism, which renders tragedy impossible. If, as Hegel argued, tragedy was an admixture of will and fate played out between the law of the family and the law of the state, then the conditions of postmodernity preclude such a dialectic. Today, individuals reflect not on the social as such but merely “on their private psyches.”^[10] The postmodern subject remains stuck in a life of self-absorption, unable to transcend the tyranny of one’s own intimacy. In a world where “public life is reduced to a merely formal obligation,” self-knowledge is treated simply as an end in itself as opposed to the betterment of others.^[11] In this sense, the loss of tragedy is allied to the loss of self-sacrifice for others, and the classical admiration that once existed for (potentially tragic) heroes gives way to a comic preoccupation with celebrities where people are known precisely on the basis of their “well-knownness” rather than any heroic deed. What matters today is success measured by wealth or tweets rather than an ethically driven performance.^[12]

If for Roche the outlook for tragedy is not good, neither is it for comedy: “Americans are very fickle about their heroes, and fickleness conduces to comedy, not tragedy.”^[13] However, “A literary danger of the modern comedy of negation is that the comic heroes’ transgressions are so severe as to surpass the limits of the comic: pain and suffering are indeed evident; even murder [or rape] is not beyond the bounds of the modern comedy of negation.”^[14]

What Roche finds in Hegel’s work, by contrast, is a moment of comedy that seems to be lost in much of modern comedy, “a lightness of spirit”^[15] in which, like Aristotle, the comic hero suffers no real pain.

Approaching the issue from the perspective of religious studies, Russell Heddendorf’s more recent study From Faith to Fun argues that the cultural significance of comedy and humor in postmodernity has negatively influenced the culture in ways that have contributed to the loss of traditional meaning within orthodox religions.^[16] For Heddendorf the culprit is the postmodern discrediting of rationalism that has led to an increased sense of paradox within culture but also the increased fragmentation and secularization of culture. Under these conditions, fun is understood principally as an “escape from chaffing expectations.”^[17] His argument is supported more generally by what he discerns as the cultural shift “from restrictive to permissive thinking.”^[18] Under such conditions, comedy can only degenerate into a purely transgressive act of fun, a secular form of humor that now dominates the cultural landscape. If, as Berger believed, comedy is transcendent in the sense that it allows us to imagine a different state of affairs, then Heddendorf’s point is that the secula...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dispatches
• Series Editors
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• The Three Elisions of Comedy
• The Metaphysics of Comedy
• Comedy and Trinity
• Comedy and Politics
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Subject Index