Pagan Comedians and Their Results
For me, the comedians (or comics) and audiences alike are not like Lyotard’s republicans, bona fide politicians or activists bound by litige, but like his pagans, unknown and questionable elements of whom we can never expect truth or even logical, rational thought. We can never definitively pin zir to any motive other than achieving humor. But just because we can’t expect these elements doesn’t mean political work doesn’t happen. Truth, logic and ulterior motives may still show up–if only in our interpretations.
Christine Harold borrows Friedrich Nietzsche’s model of the comedian. She suggests that unlike the ascetic, who seeks to expose truth, “comedians diagnose a specific situation, and try something to see what responses they can provoke” (194). Harold’s comedian jams or improvises, interprets and experiments with the forms of commercial mass-media, opening a space for the audience to act–to have agency–they are invited to participate and interpret mediated messages in divergent and often contradictory ways. This view sees humor as a productive political act on the part of the comedian in that it invites political action, which takes the form of audience uptake–their interpretations and reactions.
When a comic tells a story about a situation where their behavior is so outrageous that we cannot believe it happened let alone condone the behavior, but yet we also cannot dismiss that it quite possibly did happen, we are presented with a moment of possibility born of this irreconcilability.
If we abandon litige with its necessity of the closure of getting the intended joke, of an intentional telos (goal, point or end) that the audience and critic must uncover/decipher in order to “get it,” we find a much more complex model in which the humor lies not in the decision of “did ze mean it?” or “didn’t ze?” but in the possibility encapsulated by the questions “might ze have?” and “what if ze did?”
Our inability to decide on a single tenable position need not fall to relativism, but provides opportunity for audience agency in the form of meaning-making. We can decide the statement is meaningful and/or we can decide it’s meaningless. We can decide it’s political and/or that it’s funny
This presentation of pagan, ironic figures brings up another way of looking at irony and parody – as possibility that comes from irreconcilability and therefore requires supplementation [I’ll go into this later–if I haven’t already; still getting back into the swing of things]. Thus, in their purest forms, humorous irony and parody might best be called pagan tactics; they are différends, examples of the radically incommensurate. In this ironic economy, motive is not diminished, but rather motive becomes all that matters. But this motive is never taken at face value – determined; it must be inferred.
References:
Harold, Christine. “Pranking Rhetoric: ‘Culture Jamming’ as Media Activism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21.3 (2004): 189-211.
Lyotard, Jean François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1984/2002.
—. The Différend. Trans. George Van Den Abeele. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1988.
—. “Lessons in Paganism.” The Lyotard Reader. Ed. Andrew Benjamin. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989/1993. 122-154.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals, (1989).
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.
