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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Theory Redux
- Sprache: Englisch
Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge.
Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, and so too is our social life. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore. But what if we really can’t take jokes anymore?
This book argues that the spirit of comedy is the first step in the building of society, but that it has been lost in the era of divisive identity politics. Comedy flares up debates about censorship and cancellation, keeping us divided from one other. This goes against the true universalist spirit of comedy, which is becoming a thing of the past and must be recovered.
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Seitenzahl: 134
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction: The Tension of Comedy
A Reactionary and a Liberal walk into a bar …
The Ideology of Laughing Freely
Didactic or Retroactive Laughter
The Form of Jokes
Despicable Jokes and the Ideology of Exception
Anxiety and Laughter
Sneezing Corpses
Satire and Satiation from Brexit to Trump ’24
Memes and Group Psychology
Keks and LOLs: Playground Humour
Milk Pouring and Trolling: Perverse, Psychotic, Neurotic
Activist or Fetishist
Dancing Laughter and Clowns from St Vitus to TikTok
Conclusion: Jokes, Masters and Orgasms
Bibliography
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction: The Tension of Comedy
Begin Reading
Conclusion: Jokes, Masters and Orgasms
Bibliography
End User License Agreement
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Theory Redux series
Series editor: Laurent de Sutter
Published Titles
Mark Alizart, Cryptocommunism
Armen Avanessian, Future Metaphysics
Franco Berardi, The Second Coming
Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld
Alfie Bown, Post-Comedy
Laurent de Sutter, Narcocapitalism
Diedrich Diederichsen, Aesthetics of Pop Music
Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things
Boris Groys, Becoming an Artwork
Graham Harman, Immaterialism
Helen Hester, Xenofeminism
Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love
Lorenzo Marsili, Planetary Politics
Fabian Muniesa, Paranoid Finance
Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction
Eloy Fernández Porta, Nomography
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism
Gerald Raunig, Making Multiplicity
Helen Rollins, Psychocinema
Avital Ronell, America
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
Grafton Tanner, Foreverism
Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics
Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal
Post-Comedy
Alfie Bown
polity
Copyright © Alfie Bown 2024
The right of Alfie Bown to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6340-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024937222
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Introduction: The Tension of Comedy
At the most infamous of Oscars ceremonies, Will Smith and Chris Rock, two men famous for their harsh and cutting comedy, had a spat on a stage that is itself renowned for its ‘roasting’ humour. Despite this context, it provoked personal and social anxiety among those on stage and those off it. Today, comedy is fraught with tension like never before. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore, but what if we really can’t take jokes anymore?
Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief – as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture – from the marketplaces of the medieval period to the playgrounds of the twentieth century – from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge. To laugh together was, quite materially, the first step in the formation of society. Perhaps then, if we can’t take a joke anymore, we also won’t be able to build a society.
This book argues that laughter, as a shared communal experience of connection between people across divides and personal subjectivities becomes eroded by a particularist and identarian dynamic of contemporary capitalism. Joking together – and with and at each other – was once a key part of public life, which allowed a ‘commons’ to exist and universal solidarity to emerge, but now – with the privatization and commodification of every space – no such public exists, and no such laughter takes place. The kind of comedy that dominates in its place is not universalist ribbing but self-congratulatory and smug satire and critique. We are, in this sense, living in a post-comedy world.
Comedy has become a pressure point for contemporary culture. It flares up debates about censorship, cancellation, progressivism and even fascism (fascism and comedy of course have a long history). While commentators – and comedians themselves – are invariably tempted onto one side of this culture war, by being so they preclude the possibility of comedy working against the identity categories of contemporary capitalism and of the universal fraternal solidarity that marks true comedy. It is this missing universalist spirit of comedy that is at risk of becoming a thing of the past. If true comedy is defined by anything, it is by its ability to confront us with a deeply psychoanalytic realization – that we are all lacking subjects with failure at our core. True comedy, in this sense, is antithetical to the values of contemporary capitalism – and is under threat.
It wouldn’t be difficult to claim the contrary: that comedy is everywhere and has never been more central to social life than it is now. From viral memes to endless laughing emojis to the increase in comedians made possible by the replacement of traditional comedy venues with social media spaces and the rise in short-form content embodied by TikTok, comedy conditions the rhythms of everyday life like never before. Yet, these proliferating forms of fragmented humour are productive of a private or privatized laughter that is symptomatic of the replacement of public space with a private social world of individuals as commodities in competition with each other. At the same time, the comedians at the top of the box office are more oppositional than ever. The fraternal comedy of solidary has been replaced by the enemy-making humour of identity. Instead of showing the lack at the core of subjectivity, comedy has become capitalist in that it disavows this universal lack and creates an illusion that some of us are complete and authentic subjects who are in the right, while others are lacking and nefarious subjects who are in the wrong.
Though it does not do justice to his thesis, Henri Bergson wrote that laughter can often issue from the subject whose feathers are thoroughly unruffled. In other words, laughter serves to secure the already established position of those doing the laughing. It seems now that this kind of laughter is the only kind that remains. But we can go further. By appearing as an instinctive response to things (we ‘can’t help’ laughing), laughter seems to perceive a kernel of truth in the content of the joke or observation, thus validating the ideological position of the comedy. Laughter in this sense has a particularly ‘retroactive’ power to re-establish and entrench ideological positions. After laughing, the object of laughter acquires a special status, an appearance of truth, which seems to have pre-existed the joke.
Didactic humour has become the rule rather than the exception, and it characterizes both sides of the debate about comedy and ‘woke’ culture into which discussions of humour have been forced. James Acaster’s viral jokes at the expense of Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle’s perceived transphobia in fact operate in much the same way as the geriatric outspoken free speech activist John Cleese imagines the remake of Fawlty Towers to function. While one supports ideas of woke liberal culture and the other claims to rail against it with its anti-wokeness, both operate didactically to affirm the unruffled politics of the laughing subject.
The ‘woke’/’anti-woke’ discourses around comedy, or those that centre the discussion around free speech and censorship, end up obscuring the really important point about comedy today: its transformation in contemporary capitalization. Both sides of the culture war around comedy (the free speech brigade and the cancel culture no platformers) end up contributing to the mystification of what is really changing in our relationship to laughter and comedy (and by proxy to our relationships with each other) as new forms of digital capitalism restructure the public spaces that are defined by humour. To see what is happening with comedy, we need to be neither woke nor anti-woke, but anti-capitalist.
In short, this book shows that comedy confronts us with the lack at the heart of subjectivity. Revealing this lack operates in a universalist way: it connects us to each other, whether we are male, female, enby, black, white, intersectional, populist, Left or Right. The reason that comedy reveals lack is because it produces identities in relation to it and helps us deal with the anxiety of it. Laughter (hence its link with anxiety) helps us create and establish ideologies. Today, it is helping us to entrench divisive capitalist ideology. However, because laughter is tarrying with and dealing with ideology coming into being, it nevertheless cannot help but remind us of this lack from which we all – universally – originate. Jokes, then, create ideology – and identity – but they also remind us of contingency. In this sense, they won’t be assimilated into the contemporary capitalism of identity politics. While there are many – comedians included – taking us into a didactic post-comedy world of opposition, comedy itself fights back in the service of universalist solidarity.
A Reactionary and a Liberal walk into a bar …
Acaster and Gervais are an introductory case in point of what is happening with comedy today. They vied with each other for the most streamed comedian on Netflix in 2022, while each took a strong position on either side of the culture war. Gervais represented free-speech advocates and brought transgender people into the content of his sets to embody the enemy of contemporary liberal culture, while Acaster appointed himself the defender of marginalized groups by characterizing Gervais as the apparently fascist enemy. Both achieved unprecedented commercial success (with Gervais selling the most tickets ever for a single gig in 2023) because both of these positions are well rewarded by the contemporary market.
But the success of these comedians (bolstered by the digital platform of Netflix) suggests not that comedy is alive and well, but that identity politics (as well as those who market themselves as for and against it) are a symptom of contemporary capitalism that suits its market. While both sides of the debate frame themselves as the dissident progressive non-normative force (as comedy has always tended to do), this didactic identitarian comedy both serves and is symptomatic of contemporary capitalism. While comedy has perhaps always been prey to the market, now political and cultural positions are commodified and the ‘correct’ positions are sold to us as products we’re compelled to buy with our laughter. By this logic the test of a good joke is not whether people laugh at it but whether they agree with it.
Jesse David Fox, in his Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture, used the term ‘post-comedy’ to refer to jokes or comedy in which the comedian doesn’t aim to provoke laughter in the audience and notes that such post-comedies can be more like TED talks than stand-up.
Two Donald Trump jokes – one from the Left and one from the Right – both viral in the last two years, show this didactic humour in full swing. In the first, a brave man sees a child about to be devoured by a lion after straying into the enclosure at the zoo. The man, who wears a MAGA hat, jumps in and throws the child to safety before punching the lion in the face. Afterwards he is interviewed by a nearby journalist and is excited to read about his heroism in the newspaper the next day, only to wake up to the headline: ‘Right-wing fascist extremist punches African immigrant and steals his lunch.’ In the second joke, Trump chats about foreign policy to his aide. ‘The more immigrants we let in the better’, he says. Seeing his gaff, the aide corrects him, ‘the fewer’. Trump replies: ‘I told you not to call me that yet.’
The jokes take opposing positions: one critiquing the tendency of liberal media to escalate every act by a Republican to a fear of rising fascism and the other criticizing the Republican tendency to sneak further towards fascism. In both cases, the didactic and moralistic joke secures the position of the subject laughing from the ‘correct’ position against the impure or corrupt other. Like Acaster and Gervais, they are two sides of the same coin.
Contrary to this, a laughter of solidarity might work, not to entrench us in our ideological positions but to universalize us and reveal our shared subjectivity. Though Freud is the theorist of comedy most known for ideas of laughter as a release of social repression, it is the Russian Marxist Mikhail Bakhtin who developed these ideas into a universalist ‘laughter of all the people’ (Bakhtin 1984, 12). Contrary to the laughter of superiority, this laughter can function as a kind of carnivalesque confrontation with one’s own inadequacies and failures. In this laughter, kings become peasants and Left becomes Right. While the market competition of capitalism wants to stress our differences, this laughter shows our connectedness.
Though it often emerges without form and in spontaneity, a third joke might give us a sense of how this universalist humour could emerge. Jacques Derrida is rumoured to have enjoyed a joke that has been retold by various philosophers since and used to make a range of points. In the joke, a rabbi, a businessman and a cleaner are performing their lack of worth in the eyes of God. The businessman and the rabbi take it in turns to stand up and declare that they are unworthy. When it is the turn of the cleaner, he also stands up and declares himself worthless. Then, the businessman turns to the rabbi and says ‘Who is that guy who dares to claim that he is nothing too!’
