What makes us laugh and why? Is comedy transformative, reparative, or rather restorative? What kinds of mechanisms are at play when it comes to comedy? And what is at stake in comic performances? This book aims at investigating the object of comedyâits core and invariancesâas well as its objectivesâthat is, its goals, targets, and (side) effects.
It seems evident, almost too evident, to claim that comedy objectifies; that is to say, that it produces objects. When we consider an individual or group as being the butt of a joke, we are thinking about them as objects, reduced to a single trait that is associated with them. Accordingly, âthe object of comedyâ is understood as the target against which the complicity between the joke teller and the joke listener, or the cast and the audience of a play, is oriented. The tendency to objectify, in this specific sense, is a tendency which comedy shares with humor in general and which we could call, by way of a synecdoche, the tool of the caricature. When such a device is used by the dominant party against an underdog, for instance against sexual or ethnic minorities, we see it as foul play, no different from bullying. When the weapon of humor is used by the oppressed against their oppressor, instead, it is perceived as a legitimate means in the political arena.
In his Epistle to Augustus, the satirical poet Alexander Pope wrote that satire âheals with morals what it hurts with wit.â Like classical satireâfrom Horatius to Swift and from Juvenal to Voltaireâcomedy may operate as a moral whipâcastigat ridendo moresâaiming at criticizing both human vices and social injustices. In such cases, comedy employs humor as an ideological instrument to guide us morally to the path of the righteous.
Yet, comicality cannot be easily reduced to humor or to satire. In the classical Freudian interpretation, humor is understood as a subversive psychic device: as Freud argues, âhumor is not resigned; it is rebelliousâ (Freud 2001, 163). Regarded as a social practice, comedy, on the contrary, reveals a much deeper ambivalence. Umberto Eco points out that, at first sight, comedy seems to be intrinsically liberating, since it allows us to break rules (Eco 1998). Indeed, comedy allows the uncanny to appear while allowing us to speak about the unspeakable, to laugh at misfortune, to turn reality upside-down. This is why, to a certain extent, in Ecoâs account comedy may be considered as exerting a transformative function on the existing reality. But precisely insofar as it only involves a temporary transgression, the comical relies on and strongly reaffirms the same rules it is supposed to break. In this respect, instead of representing a way of rebelling against norms and subverting the social order, comedy may operate as a normative tool that can be used to impose codified roles and social behaviors, discriminate, dominate, and eventually oppress.
Comedy, in fact, can be extremely conciliatory, and laughterâas Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer remarkâcan be extremely âwrongâ when it becomes a sign of surrender to the coercion of the status quo (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002). What the carnivalesque theory of comedyâhistorically perhaps most vocally argued for by Mikhail Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World 1984), and more recently to some extent by Simon Critchley (On Humor 2002)âdoes not take into account is the fact that laughter is not in itself opposed to the dominant discourse. Quite to the contrary, laughter and comedy can just as well serve as ideological weapons for reinforcing the existing order of things.
This book, however, does not concern itself with the question of the legitimacy of comedy as a political, ideological, or moral device, nor does it ask to what extent humor can be acceptable or improper. It rather addresses the question of what exactly it is in the nature of comedy that makes it appropriate for ideology in the first place. The book primarily engages with the very structure of comedy, the structure that, entre autres, allows it to be recognized by politics as a formidable instrument for exercising power. What is it that makes comedy so useful and powerful on the ideological battlefield? What does comedy have in common with power?
One could argue that comedy is power, and that the power of comedy lies precisely in its ability to produce objects, in its ability to subsume the multitude of the particular details and to round it up in a single marker, to produce the totality with one single stroke. This may be the reason why Hegel revered comedy and even considered it, as the only philosopher in the entire European tradition, as above tragedy and as a quintessentially dialectic form.
In her seminal book The Odd One In, Alenka ZupanÄiÄ proposes the formula that comedy âputs the universal at workâ and thus consists in the becoming concrete of the universal, or in the concrete work of the universal (ZupanÄiÄ 2008, 11â22). Placing the understanding and analysis of comedy back on the agenda for contemporary critical theory, ZupanÄiÄ separates what she calls âconservative comedyâ from âsubversive comedy.â While the predominant discussion about comedy praises its capacity to âhealââthat is, its power of delivering us from everyday routines and from the seriousness of real concerns and real obstaclesâZupanÄiÄ argues for a comedy that does not offer merely comic relief from the tragedy of the real world, but rather presents us with a demand for our (more) active role in it. What she calls conservative comedy is the type of comedy that defines itself in binary opposition with the seriousness of official language and habits. Historical examples for this kind of comedy abound in the culture of carnivals, where the official rules are suspended within a clearly defined temporal and spatial framework.
Developing Hegelâs concept of comedy, a proper comic procedure, argues ZupanÄiÄ, aims at grasping the symbolic, universal function itself as something concrete; and, we might add, as a kind of object. Jacques Lacan famously stated that âa madman who believes he is a king is no madder than a king that believes he is a king.â Paraphrasing Lacan, ZupanÄiÄ claims that what is truly comical is not a madman who believes he is a kingâwhich is the formula of conservative comedyâbut precisely the king that believes he is a king. Her point is that real comedy does not merely result from the difference between the symbolic function of the king (or the judge, the bishop, etc.) and the flawed human being carrying out that function. In other words, comedy does not inhabit the gap between a pure ideal and its necessarily failed realization, but rather the gap or the failure within the pure ideal itself. If comedy relies on incongruity, such a discrepancy does not originate when the ideal encounters reality; it is rather an intrinsic character of the ideal itself.
Another of ZupanÄiÄâs striking examples is the baron who keeps falling in the mud: what is truly comic in this routine is not the baronâs all-too-human failure at performing the dignified symbolic function, but rather his rising up again and again, his indestructible belief that he truly is the baron. âThis âbaronnessâ is the real comic object, produced by comedy as the quintessence of the universal itself,â she writes (ZupanÄiÄ 2008, 32). ZupanÄiÄ also draws on the concept of the object small a from Lacanian psychoanalysis, where the term designates a certain surplus involved in the pursuit of a subjectâs goal: the immediate object of the pursuitâa lover, for instanceâis to be strictly separated from the object that emerges in the detours of the pursuit and concerns the enjoyment brought about by the ritual of seduction itself. In fact, what Lacan calls the âobjectâ is an inadvertent by-product of the subjectâs purposeful pursuit of his or her goal. Object small a clearly has a characteristic germane to comedy. This allows ZupanÄiÄ to locate the object of comedy not outside of the subject, but also not exactly within the subject itself. In a dense formula, she declares that the comic object is âa surplus of a given subject or situation which is the very embodiment of its fundamental antagonismâ (ZupanÄiÄ 2008, 101). We can unpack this phrase by recalling ZupanÄiÄâs own example of the baron who keeps falling in the mud: the comic object as the surplus of the subjectâthe indestructible âbaronnessâ of the baronâis the embodiment of the subjectâs fundamental antagonismâof the baronâs inextinguishable belief that he is the baron. In ZupanÄiÄâs account, by placing the object of comedy in the excess of subjectivity, as the by-product of the subjectâs own activity, the pleasure of comedy is not explained as a pleasure that arises at the expense of an external target; paradoxically, comedy reveals that a certain kind of pleasure is to be gained at the subjectâs own expense.
Through its excesses and lacks, comedy once again brings us back to Hegel. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel takes on the task of explaining the historical necessity of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, and writes:
The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water. (Hegel 1977, 360)
Even though he is evoking cabbage heads, Hegel is clearly discussing the guillotine and its terrifying efficiency in delivering instantaneous death. Hegel seems to understands this terrible device as a metaphor for, or, better, as the very image that encapsulates, the French Revolution as such. The guillotine and what it immediately stands forâthe abrupt death and the absolute terrorâis not understood as a necessary evil that accompanied the historical project of emancipation, as a kind of an unfortunate side effect of bringing about the idea of universal freedom, but precisely as its âsole work and deed.â In a short formula, we could say that the guillotine is the concrete work of the idea of universal freedom. If the image of monarchy is the image of Louis XIV in his majestic pose, identifying his own body with the body politic of the monarchy, then the image of universal freedom is the image of the guillotine, negating âthe empty point of the absolutely free self.â What seems to be so interesting about the image of the guillotine is that it strikes us with an almost palpable sense that something is missing, that something essential is absent from the pictureâsomething like the head. In fact, the guillotine is nothing but this absence of the head made palpable, this void made visible. And it is precisely the idea of the embodiment of the absence (of the head) that allows us to apprehend this imageâas strange as it may appear at first glanceâas structurally equivalent to the idea of the comic object as discussed above. It is not the head (of the king) itself that is the proper comic object, but rather the palpable absence of the headâthe absence, the void, the nothingness that has itself become a thing. In his brilliant new study Liquidation World, Alexi Kukuljevic formulates this peculiar comic procedure from the perspective of the comic subject: âTo make comedy requires standing in the place of oneâs own absenceâ (2017, 6). To come back to the powerful image that Hegel gives us with his understanding of the French Revolution: is the guillotine not precisely the king himself, standing in the place of his own absence?
A publicity shot that was circulated to promote Buster Keatonâs silent film The General (1926) shows Keaton sticking his head into the mouth of a cannon (take a look at the cover of this book). In the large armed conflicts of the early stages of modernized warfareâThe General takes place during the American Civil Warâregular conscripts were often reduced to âcannon fodder.â There is nothing heroic about the lot of a conscript: he marches onto the battlefield; he dies; the end. Keatonâs publicity shot seems to take the idea of cannon fodder quite literally: Why even bother with marching to the battlefield, when you can just directly feed the cannon?
The current of comedy in this visual gag runs deeper, though. There is something strange about this publicity shot, showing us Keaton minus the head, given that the face is an actorâs most recognizable feature and his or her single most essential instrument, the very mask they...
