Lewis, Paul. Comic Effects.

Lewis, Paul. Comic Effects. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989.

Lewis explicitly situates his critical method within the social-scientific field of ‘humour studies,’ in contrast to classical approaches. In his account modern humour research and criticism rejects any clear distinction between or adherence to these formulae, treating humour as a complex “whole made up of many parts, many variables, many potential topics of inquiry” (6), rather than as a unified abstract entity. Despite his espoused hostility towards systems, Lewis's account of humour is based in notions of incongruity, which he argues is not a sufficient condition, but instead needs to be the subject of emperical research in order to determine the other parameters.

For Lewis, Humour is an exercise of power, with the implication that it is correct, appropriate and ethical to find the posited incongruity amusing (13). He therefore offer sa negative assessment of the politics of contemporary humour in his declaration that while traditional comedy was anarchic and subversive, modern sitcoms function to perpetuate the status quo and are therefore conservative and sterile (65). For Lewis, humour can act as a means to evade reflection, implying value judgements in a “seductive” fashion (67), which recalls Marxist complaints about the function of culture more generally. In a manner that recalls both Freud’s tendentious joke and Bergson’s notion of “social nagging,” Lewis argues that humour can act as a means of socially sanctioned aggression, a struggle for supremacy, which does not liberate, but punishes (34-7). Beyond Bergson and Freud, though, Lewis rejects previous theories based upon unitary explanations and assumptions, which he suggests must be replaced by a critical social scientific method (2-4), and an evaluation of the assumptions that underpin any declaration as to what exactly counts as humour (14).

While beginning with a broad focus, the later sections of Lewis's book are a series of close readings of literary texts, in particular Gothic texts, combined with assertions as to the desirability of neuropsychological cognitive analysis. The literary is put forward as a central means by which to assess this cognitive functions.

Bakhtin, Mikail. Rabelais and his World.

Bakhtin, Mikail. Rabelais and his World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984.

For Bakhtin, the carnival, or the “carnivalesque,” was a comic state of being that functioned during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as a respite from official order and the everyday repression of the lower classes: a site of festivity and liberation wherein boundaries and hierarchies were inverted or overcome, rationalism and fear were revoked and seriousness was repealed, if only briefly (3-52). In the carnival there is no distinction between actors and spectators (7). The clowns are not actors playing a part, they inhabit the borderline between life and art (8).While it was not official, the festive aspect of life was tolerated, even legalised (9) because it could not be completely shut down. The carnival is liberation from the prevailing truth and established order and an entry into “truly human relations” (10).

Though not all interpretations of humour as subversion evoke the spirit of the carnival, insofar as the carnival represents the ability of (folk) humour to challenge authority and realise the contingent nature of existing structures of power, the notion of the carnival can serve as a useful metonym for the constellation of theoretical approaches that locate in humour an innate capacity for subversion.

Bhaktin argues that Carnival was so important in this earlier moment, because the official culture of the medieval was without laughter (73) therefore ‘vents’ needed to be created (75). Medieval laughter “was absolutely unofficial but nevertheless legalised” because the rite of the ‘fool’s cap’ was inviolable (89). For the brief time of the festival, life leaves it strictures (89) Carnival is freedom from class status and therefore fear (90). But humour was not just to escape repression, it being laughter in and of itself was crucial to liberate and enliven the people (94). However a love of laughter is not always resistance or opposition, laughter can respect what it parodies (95).