Zizek, Slavoj. “The Christian-Hegelian Comedy.” The Artist’s Joke. Ed. Jennifer Higgie. London: Whitechapel, 2007. 216-220.

More than any other writer on humour/joking, Zizek parses an understanding of comedy and joking (in the case of this essay) within the terrain of Continental philosophy and critical theory. In this essay, he describes the character of what he calls the Hegelian joke, further offering an analysis of Christianity as based on a comic structure. This annotation will focus on the former, though the latter is also interesting, and typically mind-boggling, in Zizekian fashion. Zizek describes a tripartite joke structure that fits within the typical Hegelian dialectic. Thus, the "Hegelian" joke for Zizek is that which the butt's subjective position is undermined, in which he/she finds him/herself part of the group he/she is ridiculing (216). The negation of this joke, or its antithesis, is a joke in which the punchline involves the exclusion or othering of the subject outside of the group. Finally, the third term Zizek describes is the joke correlative of "infinite judgement," or tautological "supreme contradiction" (216—all of these terms are explained with great jokes in the text, which I won't quote here).

 

Going on to further parse the comic in Hegelian terms, Zizek describes the difference between a tragic and comic hero in terms of the actor's distance from the role: where the tragic hero is representative of a universal character and is separated from him/herself, the comic character "is never fully identified with his role; he always retains the ability to observe himself from outside: 'making fun of himself'" (217). That is: this self-reflexivity is built into the character him/herself. Linking this analysis with Hegel's notions of comedy, Zizek notes that "what happens in comedy is that the Universal appears directly" (218).

 

Seeming to offer a direct rebuttal to analyses such as that offered by Paul Lewis of killing jokes as our response to a fallen world, Zizek writes,

Comedy does not rely on the undermining of our dignity with reminders of the ridiculous contingencies of our terrestrial existence. On the contrary, comedy is the full assertion of universality, the immediate coincidence of universality with the character's/actor's singularity. Or to put it another way, what effectively happens when all universal features of dignity are mocked and subverted? The negative force that undermines them is that of the individual, of the hero with his attitude of disrespect towards all elevated universal values, and this negativity itself is the only true remaining universal force. (218)

This quote also offers a counterpoint to the view that negation through comedy (perhaps also cynicism) need only lead to a universalized negativity. Instead, Zizek positions individuality and/or subjective experience and the ability to harness negativity through comedy as a counterforce to a kind of blasé nihilism. Perhaps nihilism only becomes such when we treat it as hopeless—we reify it in naming and lamenting it as such.

 

Zizek goes on to write "the comic effect proper occurs when, after the act of unveiling, one confronts the ridicule and nullity of the unveiled content—in contrast to encountering behind the veil the terrifying Thing too traumatic for our gaze. Which is why the ultimate comical effect occurs when, after removing the mask , we confront exactly the same face as that of the mask" (219). This quote links Zizek's discussion of comedy here with his analysis of ideology in Sublime Object of Ideology, where he describes our relationship to ideology in very similar terms.

Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In: On Comedy.

Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

A pupil of Zizek, Zupančič offers a philosophically dense and complex interpretation of humour as transcendant incongruity taken up in the context of contemporary examples such as Borat and George Bush Jr jokes.

For Zupančič, Comedy is not a simplistic liberation: irony and laughter can function well in conditions of true ideology wherein the subject feels profoundly free – freedom and humour constitute an important aspect of the contemporary dominant ideology (4). The subversion of humour is not to be found in its intellectual resistance, indeed currently all that is negative must be seen as positive, happiness is a virtue (6). Contemporary ideology biologises difference in a form of inverse racism (6). The current ideology celebrates the absence of ideology which is replaced with happiness and comedy (7).

In dense Hegelian and Lacanian language, Zupančič argues that “true comedy” constitutes a split between the actual and abstract realisation of an Universal ideal thereby revealing the gaps in the implied finitude of the social order (30-52).Taking up the Freudian notion of the tendentious, Zupančič argues that comedy allows us to realise, and thereby laugh at, the paradoxical functioning of our symbolic and contingent universe (142-7). This is carnival on a transcendent, rather than social level.

Zupančič suggests that humour acts to question the sanctity of what Hegel dubs the symbolic Universal by revealing how it emerges out of the concrete Particular (27-9) or, in other words, how seemingly eternal unquestionable aspects of existence are really products of the transient everyday. This occurs because humour reveals how the Universal arises out of concrete forms, a process that creates a short-circuit between the lofty nature of the Universal and the “obscene other side” that emerges from its materialist consequences (32), the two aspects stitched together in a comic contradiction. Humour, in Zupančič’s conception, can therefore accommodate the existence of two mutually exclusive frames of reference that are compelled to co-exist, which leads to a perceptual break-down of the symbolic order and allows us to draw nearer to the Lacanian kernel of the Real (142). In this scheme, comic characters are funny because they embody a single universal notion, be it piety or cleanliness, for example, to the detriment of their particular existence as an embodied subject – they put the universal desire of their self before their actual existence which creates comic consequences wherein the Universal, which is revealed to only exist in the Particular, comes into conflict with it (Zupančič 49-51). The comic character is thus not subversive because they challenge the dominant ideology or what Zupančič refers to as the Universal, but because they reveal how that ideology emerges out of the material and how it must therefore always exist within a particularity even as it feigns an essential nature.

Freud, S. The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious.

Freud, S. The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. Joyce Crick. New York, NY: Penguin, 2005.

The pleasure of a joke, Freud suggests can arise either from its “joke-technique,” an economy of phrase which produces mild amusement (“Jokes,” 85-91) or from its “tendentious” qualities, by which a joke circumvents socially-conditioned repression and allows one to take pleasure from normally inaccessible sources, such as sexuality, hostile mockery or cynicism (“Jokes,” 92-111). Tendentious humour achieves this breaking of social taboos by ‘bribing’ the listener with the pleasure of jest and joking, so that they might permit the expression of what is customarily repressed and suppressed which affords even greater pleasure. The humour of tendentious jokes, because it arises more from the statement they convey than the form they take, forces us to distinguish between the substance of the joke and the joking form, or “joke-work” which, in the case of tendentious humour, merely operates as a Trojan Horse, allowing the impermissible idea to be given expression.

While the tendentious elements might suggest the potential for the joke to act as a vehicle of political criticism, this is undercut by Freud’s account of the fundamental pleasure of the “joke-work,” which is explained as a source of play, wherein the pleasure arises out of “savings in psychical expenditure” itself caused by the recognition of the familiar and the repetition of the similar (“Jokes,” 119-24). Thus any critical political potential of tendentious humour stands in contrast with the conservative function of this joke-work, which, as in Bergson’s model, involves a return to that which is already known, here presented as a source of pleasure. Thus while Freud does not state his model in ideological or political terms – rather he understands the social motivation of the constructing and sharing of joke as a means to release psychic energy (“Jokes,” 135-43) – a certain conservative political aesthetic may be conceived within.

Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic.

Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005.

Bergson presents humour as an intellectual, rather than emotional or sensual, matter: noting that humour requires an absence of feeling, “a momentary anaesthesia of the heart” (2-3). Bergson suggests that to find humour in a fellow human’s situation it is necessary to regard them without sympathy, and pay no heed to the pain or suffering that may be inflected on them in the course of the humour. He attributes to humour a minor social function: that of gentle reprimand where laughter as a corrective “social nagging” (66) in response to inflexible, ignorant or eccentric behaviour (8-10, 89-98). In Bergson’s account, then, humour begins to carry out a basic social function, yet this is not the political aesthetic proper, because this disciplining function arises at the level of social interaction, rather than any aesthetic aspect of a text. Furthermore, humour here operates not to defamiliarise, but to ensure that unfamiliar or unexpected behaviour is curbed. This is a political function (if not an aesthetic one), but a conservative one.

At the centre of Bergson's theory of humour is an opposition to mechanical forms of being - of speech, of movement, of thought - which humour helps to correct: “the attitudes, gestures, movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine” (15). Bodily movements, like gestures, cannot shift and alter as living thoughts do, which is why they are comic, and why imitations are funny – because they treat the body as a machine (16). Things that are similar make us laugh because they are like mass-produced goods which are inherently mechanical (17). We cannot see the rigidity in things we are familiar with though, such as in fashion clothes. There is a distinction between comic de jure and comic de facto (19), we don’t laugh at familiar things because “the continuity of custom having deadened within them the comic quality” (19).

Incongruity does not produce laughter; it just puts us in a situation where we can recognise the rigidity of an aspect (19). There are also things that we see as artificial but that are not, which we experience as funny (20). This is not logical but rather reflects the dreaming of society (20). We laugh at the natural that is mechanically tampered with or that is understood as if it were (21). The ceremonial always contains something of the comic, and becomes comical once they lose the seriousness with which convention endows them (22). We also display our rigidity when we act in a typical way at a time when we should not (23). Materiality when we expect to find vitality is funny (24) as are situations where our attention is called to the bodily over the moral, reminding us of the physical (25). It is comical when the letter (rigid) overcomes the spirit (26) – taking metaphors literally etc. The crystallisation of the mind and the inelasticity of the body go together (28). We laugh when a person gives us the impression of being a thing (28).

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Mered. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Publishing, 2007.

In Kant’s account, humour, or laughter as he has it, is conceived as a form of pleasure that is entertaining and lively, but that is without consequence or intention (208). For Kant, humour is a gratifying and enjoyable bodily sensation produced by an “oscillation” of the mind, “inner motion” and body, but with little wider philosophical importance (208-10).

Kant argues that humour, because it is an aesthetic characteristic, is without intention or effect beyond aesthetic pleasure. Thus humour, or laughter as he would have it, does not arise out of social relations but rather, “is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.”

QUOTES:

“Something absurd (something in which, therefore, the understanding can of itself find no delight) must be present in whatever is to raise a healthy convulsive laugh. Laughter is an affect arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing. This very reduction, at which certainly understanding cannot rejoice, is still indirectly a source of very lively enjoyment for a moment. Its cause must consequently lie in the influence of the representation upon the body, and the reciprocal effect of this upon the mind. This, moreover, cannot depend upon the representation being objectively an object of gratification, (for how can we derive gratification from a disappointment?) but must rest solely upon the fact that that reduction is a mere play of representations, and, as such, produces an equilibrium of the vital forces of the body.” (209)

“It is noteworthy that in all such cases the joke must have something in it capable of momentarily deceiving us. Hence, when the semblance vanishes into nothing, the mind looks back in order to try it over again, and thus by a rapidly succeeding tension and relaxation it is thrown to and fro and put into oscillation. Since the snapping of what was, as it were, tightening up the string takes place suddenly (not by a gradual loosening), the oscillation must bring about a mental movement and a sympathetic internal movement of the body.” (210)

Eco, Umberto. "The Comic and the Rule."

Eco, Umberto. "The Comic and the Rule." Faith in Fakes. Trans. William Weaver. London: Vintage, 1998.

Eco distinguishes between humour and the comic, both of which arise out of the violation of cultural and social rules. Humour is understood as a positive force, wherein a social or textual rule is explicitly established and then broken (“Comic” 276-8), such that the values therein embedded are revealed (“Carnival” 7-8). In contrast, the comic is a rhetorical device in which a social rule or intertextual frame is broken without that frame ever being made explicit (“Comic” 272). Hence, in order for the comic to be appreciated as such, the rule must be presupposed to the extent that it is regarded as inviolable; comedy is only perceptible to those who have internalised the rule to point where it is regarded as inviolable (“Comic” 275). Thus what appears as a moment of liberation is argued to actually institute a reinforcement of the existing order: in the modern media, “laughing is allowed precisely because before and after the laughing, weeping is inevitable” (“Comic” 275). Moreover, even as the carnivalesque humour of the mass media reveals that the rules may be broken, it circumscribes the conditions for doing so, only in specific arenas and in particular ways (Eco, “Carnival” 6). The distinction between the comic and humour can therefore be framed that carnivalesque comedy breaks the rule and, in doing so, reinscribes it; where as humour acts to defamiliarise the rule and therefore make it known.

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).