As I’ve noted, John C. Meyer draws a useful distinction between laughing with and laughing at – when we laugh with people, we draw them closer, when we laugh at people, we push them away. I’ve further complicated this with Joanne Gilbert’s model of victims and butts – we laugh with the victim, at the butt of the joke. These functions, however, create a potential for people to laugh strategically, especially in response to unequal power in their relationships. Basically, they can laugh with their superiors, or fake laugh – even when they feel personally attacked – or they can laugh with those who critique them, or guffaw – perhaps especially when they’re being attacked.
Fake Laughs
Horowitz notes,
[E]veryone laughs longest and hardest at the boss’s jokes. The ability to be a good sport and laugh at a joke, especially when it’s on you, is the mark of a good subordinate (5).
Other critics have found this to be true in race and gender relations (Apte, Gilbert). In this vein, many theorists differentiate between real laughter and “fake” or “nervous laughter” (Barreca; Gilbert; Horowitz; Limon; Merrill).
The latter terms designate laughter that is “usually done to placate someone in power or show that you get a joke (when, in fact, you might not enjoy or even understand it)” (Horowitz, 11). For Horowitz,
A fake laugh is like a fake orgasm—intended to smooth over a difficult social situation and not much fun for the laugher (11).
Power Problems
The problem is, when performed within a large group, not all of whom are faking it, fake laughter becomes virtually indistinguishable from real enjoyment, and thus is taken as such. While John Limon rules this form of laughter out of his absolute model – it is the mark of a “failed joke” – he notes that if we were laughing in the moment, we cannot claim fake laughter (or any alternative motive) after the fact – “individual recantations are invalid” (11). It’s Homer’s response to Marge’s laugh in The Simpsons Movie: “You smiled! I’m off the hook!”
The stipulation that one be a “good sport” isn’t limited to those without power. Thus subordinates aren’t the only ones who feign laughter; those in power guffaw.
Guffaws
Horowitz explains how the rule of laughter and decorum at events like “roasts” (or I would add, White House Correspondents Dinners) dictates that the target of the jokes and the rest of the audience must not rebel, and they must not interrupt; they must show themselves to be good sports to the extent that they laugh or remain silent. In short, they must “take it” (5). However, to the extent that audiences exercise a considerable amount of power, they may have more options in their laughter than simple agreement with the comic; in laughing at him, they can refocus the humor.
It is very much like when a person makes an earnest declarative statement – for instance, they say, “I’m the best!” – and somebody laughs. The laughter of the listener doesn’t allow the statement to mean what the speaker intends it to mean. In fact, by taking it differently than its intended meaning, laughter creates the possibility that the statement is ironical; the statement is now revealed to mean multiple things (it always had that possibility, the laugh just made it visible).
This is ridicule – or laughing at – in its strictest sense, which serves a socializing function: it says in essence “I don’t believe you, therefore you must be kidding.” It shifts the power over meaning from the speaker’s intention to the listener’s.
Similarly, Gilbert believes that groups who perceive themselves to be in-power, such as white, middle class, cisgendered, heterosexual males, are able to shift the meaning and laugh appreciatively at jokes at their expense, a condition she calls the “male guffaw.” She posits:
Perhaps by laughing a man is saying, “I’m a straight, white male—I am hegemony—hear me roar. No amount of joking, no matter how well done, is about to unseat me from my power position any time soon.” Perhaps the laughter is precisely because he is not threatened (163, emphasis in original).
While she speaks specifically of male guffaws, we can broaden the use of the term to apply to any group with claims to domination (156). Laughter thus becomes an act through which someone represents a superior position.
Power Potential
While many theorists feel that guffaws trivialize a challenge – that we expose our power over a situation precisely by laughing at it – this characterization is not quite accurate. Instead, imagine that through laughter, you transform yourself from butt to victim; that suddenly we are laughing with ourselves as targets, and laughing at the comic or critic, or even at the situation at large. While this seems easier to pull off when people believe we have that power, it is nevertheless a potential that all targets of laughter have – we decide what the joke means. Thus, guffawing is a particularly political form of uptake; it is a political act.
Political Possibilities?
Laughter as action
Laughter can thus be seen as an act of humor – not simply a response to humor – in that laughter performs the same function as the set up of a joke: it creates a space, a gap between the signifier (what was said) and the signified (what it means) [I’ll fill in this piece later].
Admittedly, this process is not easy – particularly in the case of people with little social power. After all, just because you laugh doesn’t mean the joke changes meaning for most people; to paraphrase the movie Mean Girls, I can’t, individually, make ‘fetch’ happen. If you have no power in the situation, the attempt to challenge the person mocking you does little to take them down a peg – it certainly is not likely not trivialize their power in the way that a more powerful person could. However, this it not to say that it can’t happen.
The ability that the laugher possesses to hijack the meaning of a joke – or any statement, for that matter – has important implications. Once again, Meyer begins to point us in a productive direction.
In his final position (differentiation), Meyer notes that humor that unites one group may differentiate that group from another, and for him the first group’s laughter is matched by the second group’s outrage (he notes that group members “would be expected to object if an ‘outsider’ told the same deprecatory jokes about their group,” [323] and remember, objections violate the contract of humor). Meyer implies that a significant part of the audience will not find the joke funny and the others will laugh at them – perhaps the first group is mad that the others are laughing at them.
But it would be a mistake to reduce Meyer’s statements to the enforcement of a humorous/serious divide, as such a blatant division of the audience along lines of humor/outrage is not the most desirable outcome for the political humorist.
Instead, what if those who were outraged fake laughed or even guffawed? The laugh would be read as a statement of agreement, which has political repercussions; yet at the same time, for the individual it is a statement of dissent that, contrary to Limon’s theory, cannot be ignored. It is not inaction, but rather may merely defer more direct action until a later time.
Summary
In fake laughs and guffaws we note the break down of a laughter/outrage binary. One can be furious and still perform as if the joke is funny, aligning oneself with the speaker (fake it). Conversely, we can laugh and yet differentiate ourselves from the speaker (ridicule or guffaw).
If humor has consequences and laughter guarantees neither that we found the joke funny nor that we agree with the meaning intended by the author (i.e. we didn’t “get it”), then perhaps we can see other possibilities for a redefinition of humor.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
References:
Barreca, Regina R. “Introduction.” Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy. Ed. R. Barreca. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988. 3-23.
Gilbert, Joanne. Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender and Cultural Critique. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 2004.
Horowitz, Susan. Queens of Comedy: Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Joan Rivers, and the New Generation of Funny Women. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Gordon and Breach, 1997.
Limon, John. Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Merrill, L. “Feminist Humor: Rebellious and Self-Affirming.” Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy. Ed. R. Barreca. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988.
Meyer, John C. “Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication.” Communication Theory 10.3 (2000): 310-331.
Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny? A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.
