Cases and Current Events/Comics in the News/Stand-Up Comedy

Bill Maher and Fran Lebowitz on Comedy That Cuts Deep

Posted on by nwilson

In an interview with Philip Galanes of the New York Times (7/15/2017), Bill Maher and Fran Lebowitz talk a bit about Maher’s recent controversy, and entertainers being treated as politicians and visa versa [and other things: see the end].

N-word controversy

Maher sticks to his guns, as I’ve argued previously, that he’s not a racist, just a comedian, and what he did was make “a mistake”:

BM I think most people understood that it was a comedian’s mistake, not a racist mistake.

PG Your first guest on the follow-up apology show, Michael Eric Dyson, was pretty softball with you. But Ice Cube was righteously indignant. He wanted to hold you to account.

BM Listen, I hope we had a teachable moment about race: trying to make something good from something bad. But maybe also about how to handle something like this: apologize sincerely if you’re wrong — and I was — and own it.

PG Mission accomplished, as President Bush said.

So, OK, perhaps he’s not a racist, and yes, it was a teachable moment, if one that was forced upon him. As I previously argued, I can’t speak to Maher’s sincerity of the apology, I can only speak to his execution, which seemed overly defensive; he keeps saying “Yes, but….” And in his next quote, he continues this defensiveness with another “but”:

BM But we don’t have to grovel, and we don’t have to admit things that aren’t true. When Ice Cube said something about my telling black jokes, I wasn’t going to be: “Oh, well, I made one mistake; I might as well admit mistakes I haven’t made.” I’ve never made black jokes. I’ve made jokes about racists. But my fan base knows that, so it never went anywhere.

In practice, I know that you write a joke from a particular perspective (jokes about racists), and you hope that is how it comes across, and just being called out in the current political climate doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done anything wrong.

However, to be dismissive about it displays a lack of sincerity.  If he had said, in the interview with Ice Cube, “Which jokes are you talking about?” and shown some interest, and if he could say now, “I went back after that interview and reexamined those jokes, and I’m pretty comfortable that they were jokes about racists and not ‘black jokes,'” it’d be different.

Asked about the difference between this incident and his 9/11, “Suicide bombers aren’t cowards,” comments, Maher said:

BM Part of the difference, as Fran says, is that I was on a network with sponsors. And when sponsors pull out, the network has no choice. But also, the 9/11 statement had meaning behind it. The recent thing was just a mistake. I should not have used that word, even reaching for a joke.

So he meant his previous statements; they were bona fide political statements.  His recent problem was attempting to joke, and a mistake – not bona fide, and he doesn’t stand behind it.

However, he’s falling back on a classic defense – one he stated in the moment – one that we should examine critically [and I have]: “I’m joking!”  When the statement comes out, it is what it is; it can be interpreted in a number of different ways.  Just because he doesn’t back it after it’s reception, we’re supposed to say, no harm, no foul?  It’s a premise Maher refutes in Catholicism: The idea that one can repent and all is forgiven. Perhaps I’m being too harsh, I’m a big fan of recoveries, and yes, “To err is human”; however, does the response to the audience reaction outweigh the original statement itself?  Can you ever “Take it back?” Unfortunately, no.  You can only hope to put it under erasure.

Entertainers and politicians

Lebowitz immediately picks up the point:

FL The worst thing about this is that there’s always outrage over people in show business, who have no actual power. They’re entertainers. We would prefer that they agree with us, and do the right thing. But moral outrage should be reserved for Congress or the Supreme Court. To me, the fact that people can’t tell the difference between these things is why we have Donald Trump as president. People want to be entertained 24 hours a day. And they’re seeking from entertainment what they should be seeking from other branches of life.

PG Have you ever had to do a public apology?

FL No. This is very specific to people who have mass audiences. Remember that whole period when Charlie Sheen was news. That’s not news, O.K.? You can watch Bill; you cannot watch Bill. But you can’t not have this Congress. That’s the misplaced moral outrage.

PG Better to save it for Paul Ryan?

FL I’m glad you brought him up. Every time I see the sentence “Paul Ryan is the conscience of the Republican Party,” I think: What is that? Is that like being the quarterback of the New York City Ballet? But yes, that is where your outrage should be.

Lebowitz’s points seem to be:

  1. Entertainers have no power; legislators have power
  2. We shouldn’t seek agreement from people with no power, but those with power
  3. Our moral outrage is thus misplaced

However, I see another option: People are granting entertainers as much (if not more) power than they are granting legislators.  Understand, power doesn’t come from being an entertainer or being a politician, it comes from people.  You weren’t born a politician or entertainer, people make you one. People make entertainers by watching their shows, and they make politicians by voting.  Thus they can further give these people other types of power.  We could talk about this in terms of the differences between ideological power and legislative power.

Lebowitz is calling our politicians for their legislative power, which is the power to create and enforce laws, which have a real-world impact on people. However, she’s pointing out that celebrities have ideological power, which is the power to influence how people think, their ideas and goals.  The power to shape people’s worldview or ideology is far more powerful and subversive, but more slow and subtle, than legislative power. Ideological power helps decide who gets elected to public office – to whom we give legislative power. We base our votes for people (and our attendance to their shows) on the overlap between our (perceived) ideologies. And the more we realize this, the more we hold our celebrities accountable – as we should also be doing with our politicians.

“Comede-ing” versus stumping

Maher says one other thing that struck me as odd.  Galanes asks,

PG Both of you spend a lot of time on the road, doing speaking engagements and stand-up.

BM When you’re a comedian, there’s nothing greater than comede-ing, getting up on a stage and making people laugh. It’s also a great benefit for doing “Real Time” because I see the country. People talk about “flyover states.” I land in them. I do shows in them. I talk to people, and I think I have a greater understanding of America because of that.

This idea that, because he did a show there, he knows the country is strange.  After all, political candidates travel the country, do “shows” and talk to people.  Also, if audiences “vote” with laughs, then every show is potentially a town hall, or at least a focus group. But there are subtle differences.

Unless they’re huge (like Maher), comics are unlikely to have security guards and aides, so they are less likely to be surrounded by their “bubble.” Comics are also more approachable, and this seems more likely to yield honest interaction with people. So perhaps a comic sees more honestly than a politician.  And maybe Maher’s “greater understanding” is simply more than his understanding prior to touring.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

***Warning: Political rant ahead!!! Warning!!!***

The problems with these kids today…

They begin the interview with a question about racial and ethnic humor – which really becomes a discussion more about religion, identity politics, “busybodyism,” protecting lives versus protecting feelings, bashing millennials for trigger warnings and helicopter parents, and “quit complaining because it used to be so much worse”:

FL Or at Princeton, where they want to change the name of buildings. When I saw it on the news, the protest was full of black women. I thought: Girls go to Princeton now. When I was that age, girls couldn’t go to Princeton. Hardly any black people or Jews could go to Princeton, girls or boys. But they don’t know that, so they never think, “I’m pretty lucky to be here.”

Yes, we’ve progressed, but this is not the time to say, “Haven’t we come far enough?” Galanes is quick to point out the the playing field is far from level, and Lebowitz agrees, but Maher chimes in:

BM We need to find a middle ground on race. If you look at the polling of conservatives, Republicans and Fox News watchers, they think racism is over — which is insane. Denying racism is the new racism. And on the other hand, you have that liberal white guilt, #WhiteSoLame. They think they’re making things better by beating themselves on the back like that albino assassin in “The Da Vinci Code.”

First off, why’s he gotta pick on albinos?  No, but seriously, everyone he’s talking about in this equation is white (or passes for it). He’s also making a false dichotomy; yes, there are racism deniers and self-flagellators, but there are also those who think the situation is better than it is, and guilty allies, and everything in between.  Cries for “middle ground” and moderation skew toward indifference, and we still need activism and allies, even if only guilty ones.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

Ramblings

Quotable Quotes

Posted on by nwilson

In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud quotes Georg Christoph Lichtenberg as quipping,

It is a pity that one cannot see the learned entrails of authors so as to discover what they have eaten.

That may be the best description of the theory side of this blog.

Humor Theories/Stand-Up Comedy/Theories About Funny/Theories About Jokes

Sigmund Freud’s Jokes part A. II. a. 1. The Techniques of Verbal Jokes – Condensation

Posted on by nwilson

This is the fourth of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes [Witz] and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the reactions to it. I’m using this blog to make public my notes, both to help people to understand the theories as well as to help me clarify in my own mind what philosophers and theorists have said about comedy, humor, jokes, etc.

In this installment, I address his second chapter, where Freud asserts that the characteristic of jokes lies in their form of expression, and thus he gives us a laundry list of joke techniques, which he tries to narrow down to a few meta-types.  This chapter is not particularly interesting to me at present, but let’s get into it for the purposes of rigor. Freud notes that sometimes a joke relies on word usage, and sometimes it relies more on the situation, thus he arrives at two categories of joke techniques or jokework:

  1. Techniques of verbal jokes
  2. Techniques of conceptual jokes

I’ll deal with the former over the next several days, and address the latter in future posts.

Techniques of verbal jokes

Freud notes that there are three major categories for the techniques of verbal jokes:

  1. “Condensation [Verdichtung]” (28).
  2. “Multiple uses of the same material” (21, 28).
  3. “Double meaning” (28).

I’ll deal with the first of these, Condensation and it’s two sub-variations, today.

  1. “Condensation [Verdichtung]” (28).

Condensation is Freud’s attempt to incorporate the “peculiar brevity of wit” that he gets from Theodor Lipps and discusses in his introduction (b).  For Freud, condensation is a process of reducing by bring things together, “accompanied by the formation of a substitute” (10). Freud notes two types of substitutes.

    1. “With formation of [compound or] composite word,” (28).

These include creative words like “anecdotage,” “alcoholidays” (12) or my current favorite “carcolepsy”.

Such words make use of the classical rhetorical trope of allusion, they hint at a crossover of meaning of the two words to form something bigger.

    1. “With [alteration or] modification” (28)

This is a modification of the form of expression – the slighter the modification, the better the joke.

Freud’s example is a Minister of Agriculture, formerly a farmer, when he resigned, another said of him that “Like Cincinnatus [a Roman], he has gone back to his place before the plow,” when the common expression is “behind the plow,” in front of the plow is the ox (16).

A face made for radio.

Another old favorite is Fred Allen’s quip that he didn’t do movies because, “I have a face that was made for radio.” Voices are for radio, faces are for film and television.

Freud links this condensation process to one he described in his The Interpretation of Dreams.

Summary

So these are the first techniques of verbal jokes, and Freud takes a ridiculous amount of time describing examples, connecting them to the theories from the introduction and making arguments. These categorizations of jokes doesn’t do much for my work, but they are interesting to think about when writing jokes.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

Cases and Current Events/Comics Talking Shop/Stand-Up Comedy

Dawn Picken on Comedy and Laughter

Posted on by nwilson

Dawn Picken of the New Zealand Herald (7/21/2017), expresses a few common and scientific interpretations of comedy and laughter, but she also expresses a better view.

What’s funny?

Picken notes:

Conventional wisdom and even scientific research suggest something is funny because it’s true.

Not exactly.  More specifically, research (and David Misch, who I’ve talked about before) shows that sometimes it’s funny because we believe it might be true – it’s believable, tenable, truth-adjacent, truths. Sometimes, we hope it’s not true – we hope they’re unreliable narrators telling us outlandish stories, like when Bobcat Goldthwaite talks about swinging his date’s cat around by the tail and inquiring about more pets.

The point is, when we recognize something in the joke that resonates with something we believe – or want to – or like, we often are amused, whether or not we laugh.

Why laughter?

Picken has more “conventional wisdom” thoughts on the causes of laughter.

Laughter is more than frivolous fun – it’s a survival skill. So say social scientists. Or anyone who has weathered a life crisis, like Louis C.K.

Laughing, even in death’s face, is what we do when we’ve run out tears, courage or stamina.

These quotes draw primarily on Tension Release/Relief theory (and other, more nuanced theories I have yet to address). This is the idea that when we are truly in a crisis, we build up so much psychological and emotional tension and pressure, that it must be released or bad things will happen. Most theorists argue it doesn’t work this way, but the popular view persists.

The quotes also point to theories of guffaws and fake laughs, where we perform a good-humored personality in front of our bosses and critics to survive and fit in, which is the first part of the next quote:

Laughter promotes attraction, social bonding and learning. It can dilate the narrowest of views, softening our armour while palpating our brains’ frontal lobes.

One of the  common views of laughter is that we all laugh for the same reason, so if you’re laughing and I’m laughing, you instantly seem similar to me, and loads of social scientists have shown that similarity increases attraction. Further, part of John C. Meyer’s theory of humor was that it acts as a unifying force, bringing people into communities and clarifying our beliefs and values.  In this sense, it also promotes learning – through choosing to laugh and noticing others doing the same, we learn about our community.

Active audiences

I like that the focus is on the laughter as active, rather than the comic as active.  The general view is that it’s the comic that dilates narrow views, softens armour, palpates frontal lobes. Picken seems to note that the audience does it themselves.

In choosing to laugh, they open their minds, let down their guards, and begin to think. She seems to acknowledge that laughing is not a passive, unconscious reaction to an overwhelming funny joke force, but an active, thinking response.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

Humor Theories/Stand-Up Comedy/Theories About Funny

Jerry A. Flieger on Freud’s Introduction

Posted on by nwilson

In The Purloined Punch Line, Jerry Aline Flieger picks apart Freud’s arguments, looking for consistency. She finds some problematic assumptions right from the start.

In his introduction, Freud finds nine criteria and characteristics of jokes that “[Seem] to us at first sight so very much to the point and so easily confirmed by instances” that we can easily accept them (6). One of these is “The characteristic of playful judgement.”

Playful judgment

Freud, working from Kuno Fischer’s work, notes that jokes are judgments that produce “comic contrasts,” but unlike bona fide, “useful” discourse, jokes and the judgments they produce are playful in nature, like the aesthetic. Flieger draws our attention to this passage:

The aesthetic attitude towards an object is characterized by the condition that we do not ask anything of the object, especially no satisfaction of our serious needs, but content ourselves with the enjoyment of contemplating it. The aesthetic attitude is playful in contrast to work. (4)

Flieger notes that Freud is saying that jokes are “divorced from serious needs” (59); that we don’t expect them to satisfy any biological function, but only psychological “enjoyment.”

Tendentious jokes

The problem is that Freud devotes a massive amount of space toward a distinction between tendentious jokes, which fulfill “a hostile purpose”, and innocent jokes, which are “a purely aesthetic – ‘aim in itself'” (58). Tendentious jokes have a serious purpose: they express “a hostile urge directed against a victim” (58).  She quotes Freud here:

By making our enemy small, inferior, despicable, or comic, we achieve in a roundabout way the enjoyment of overcoming him. (103)

Flieger clearly takes this type of psychological “enjoyment” is, for Freud, the expression of a deeper, serious biological need.

There are other passages Flieger points to later that corroborate with this evidence, and I’ll get to them in due time.  However, I need to put up a brief note about deconstruction.

Deconstruction

When critics find inconsistencies, we generally use them to question the author’s thesis by a process some call deconstruction (others don’t name it, but they generally hit the steps in some fashion). The term has a lot of uses, but my understanding and usage of the term is based on Derridean (from Jacques Derrida) Deconstruction, as explained by Barbara Biesecker, Ph.D [Though if she ever reads this (she won’t), she’ll probably tell me I’m wrong, as I am about so much of Derrida].

Derridean Deconstruction is a four step process, initiated by the critic, but grounded in the text. Though the critic points out the problem, the problem is with the text itself; the text essentially deconstructs itself through internal inconsistencies.  What the critic does is:

  1. Locate a key binary opposition in the text. For Freud, they are things like unconscious versus conscious (although there’s also preconscious) and tendentious versus innocent jokes.
  2. Determine the hierarchy in the author’s theory. Freud views innocent jokes as frivolous and purely aesthetic, so only tendentious jokes, which have a hostile purpose, matter. The hierarchy is: tendentious/innocent.
  3. Find an example in the text where the hierarchy is inverted. In the above case, Freud says all jokes are aesthetic; although they produce judgment, they can fulfill no purpose, satisfy no need save enjoyment. Essentially: tendentious = innocent.
  4. Carry this inversion through to the rest of the text. What happens when we apply the broken or inverted hierarchy to other examples? If the hierarchy breaks down in this case, can we use the case as a key to show the flaws in all the other cases? What happens to the overarching argument?

People get mad at the critics [Though, to be fair, Derrida’s writing style casts him as an asshole], but the problem is with the text and theory itself: in the immortal words of rapper and actor Ice-T, “You played yourself.”

Flieger will essentially take apart Freud’s theory of tendentious jokes and see what remains in the rubble; strap in, it’s going to be fun to watch [If you’re into such things]!

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

Cases and Current Events/Comics Talking Shop/Stand-Up Comedy

Is Tiffany Haddish Serious?

Posted on by nwilson

Tre’vell Anderson of the Los Angeles Times is doing double duty with his interviews: two articles in the same day feature his interview with Tiffany Haddish (7/20/2017). I’ll use the more fleshed out interview here, to call attention both to the traditional comic intention, and to Haddish’s alternative intention.

Comic Intent

In a story about her comedy camp experience, Haddish remembers being heckled by Richard Pryor.

Then he said that people don’t come to comedy shows because they want to hear about your problems or politics or religion or what’s going on in the world. They come to comedy shows to have fun. So when you’re on stage, you need to be having fun. I took that philosophy with me and I do that in everything that I do.

The idea that people come to comedy shows exclusively to have fun is pretty typical and traditional. A lot of comics who label themselves “entertainment” comics or other variations, use that as an excuse not to talk about “issues” on stage (whether their own, or social issues).

However, what Pryor is saying – or at least, how Haddish took it – is that, rather than avoiding your problems or politics or religion, the trick is for the comic to have fun with these topics.

Haddish’s Intent

Haddish has a message in her comedy; she is trying to teach.  Asked about industry pressures, she diverts to this:

The only thing I think of when I’m doing my job of being funny or working on these shows is, “How can I deliver my message in a way that will stick with people?” Every teacher that I’ve ever had, that I still remember their name, made me laugh. I feel like comedy is the best instrument to teach.

My special is coming out in August and to me it is a calling card, but also a learning tool. To me, when I do what I do, I’m just wondering, what am I teaching right now? What is the message right now? And how can it inspire?

People since before Socrates knew that humor made things memorable, that it helps teach. However, few comics take that approach – few even try – because they’re more focused on getting the laughs than making a statement.  Haddish, however, says that’s what she does.

Summary

Laughs are what the audiences are there for, and bigger audiences create more money for the clubs, which gets comics more gigs, higher pay, etc. So it’s no surprise their focus is there.  It’s tricky and dangerous to do both, so I applaud those that do. It’ll be interesting to watch her special in August, and see how she goes about it.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

Humor Theories/Stand-Up Comedy/Theories About Funny

Sigmund Freud’s Jokes part A. I. b. – Introduction

Posted on by nwilson

This is the second of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the reactions to it. I’m using this blog to make public my notes, both to help people to understand the theories as well as to help me clarify in my own mind what philosophers and theorists have said about comedy, humor, jokes, etc.

In this installment, I go into the second set of criteria and characteristics of jokes from from Jean Paul Richter, Theodor Vischer, Kuno Fischer, and Theodor Lipps, that “[Seem] to us at first sight so very much to the point and so easily confirmed by instances” that we can easily accept them (6):

  • The coupling of dissimilar things
    • Contrasting ideas
    • Sense in nonsense
    • The succession of bewilderment and enlightenment/illumination
  • The peculiar brevity of wit

While Freud worries that there’s no unified theory that relates all the criteria and characteristics to one another, I’m trying to clarify these characteristics to get a better handle on his theory.

The coupling of dissimilar things

Freud notes that a classic definition of joking is “the ability to find similarity between dissimilar things – that is, hidden similarities” (4).  While the German, Witz, is translated in Freud as “joke” (and maybe also jest, jape, crack, gag, rib), it also means wit, wittiness, and witticism, which usually are defined as the possession of reasoning, mental soundness, astuteness, superior intellect, and “the ability to relate seemingly disparate things so as to illuminate or amuse” (Merriam-Webster.com).

Of course, as Freud and Lipps point out, this isn’t a quality of the joke, but of the joker; jokers make the connections.  Usually this process can be called comparison, the opposite of contrast, but contrast is part of it too.

Contrast is finding differences in things thought to be similar, and Fischer “stresses the fact that in a large number of joking judgments differences rather than similarities are found” (4). Here is the other side of wit, representing the “reasoning, soundness and astuteness”; it is the exercise of sound judgment.

This is perhaps why Freud uses (or is translated as using) “coupling” [Note: some translations, like Bartleby.com’s use “union”]  It’s not just the linking of dissimilar things, but also finding dissimilarities in things that are already linked. They are connected or paired, either prior to or because of the comedian’s work. Either way, this is the “revealing of something hidden or concealed,” that Freud and Fischer stress is true of caricatures and jokes.

Freud then goes into three “more or less interrelated ideas” (4). These seem to be logically subsets of coupling of the dissimilar, which is what the order Freud put them in suggests, so I’ve represented them as such.

Contrasting ideas

Freud quotes Emil Kraeplin, who defines a joke as,

[T]he arbitrary connecting or linking, usually by means of a verbal association, of two ideas which in some way contrast with each other (4).

So here we again see a restatement of wit in the form of contrast or judgment – Fischer’s finding of differences.  They are linked (or coupled) by the joker to create a contrast effect. One popular contrast is between sense and nonsense.

Sense in nonsense

Freud says of finding sense in nonsense (or visa versa),

What at one moment has seemed to us to have a meaning, we now see is completely meaningless.  That is what, in this case, constitutes the comic process… A remark seems to us to be a joke, if we attribute a significance to it that has psychological necessity and, as soon as we have done so, deny it again. (5)

This plays out various understandings:

  1. We attach sense to a remark and know that logically it cannot have any.

  2. We discover truth in it, which nevertheless, according to the laws of experience and our general habits of thought, we cannot find in it.

  3. We grant it logical or practical consequences in excess of its true content, only to deny these consequences as son as we have clearly recognized the nature of the remark. (5)

Or, in short form, first:

  1. We attach sense
  2. We discover truth
  3. We grant consequences

Then: we become conscious of or get the impression that the things we’ve attached or discovered or granted are, in fact, “relative nothingness” (5).

Another place where this plays out that Freud doesn’t note is the figure of the wise fool, both in the fool who is wise and in the supposedly wise who act foolish. As this version would have it, in the former case (wise fool), we attach sense, discover truth or grant consequences to their statements and actions; we think they are “speaking truth to power.”  Then we remember that they are, after all, fools, so there is nothing to guarantee that it actually made sense, was in fact true, or that they can produce consequences. We must now treat their statements and actions as suspect.

In the latter case (the wise who acts the fool), we likewise attach sense, discover truth or grant consequences to their statements and actions, but then recognize that they are not speaking in earnest, and thus again, there is nothing to guarantee that it actually made sense, was in fact true, or that they can produce consequences

This shift from meaningful to meaningless is said, Freud notes, to be the basis of the comic, and he wonders if it also contributes to defining jokes.

The succession of bewilderment and enlightenment/illumination

Freud notes that Immanuel Kant has previously said that the comic is “remarkable,” in that it can “deceive us only for a moment” (5). Gerard Heymans gives the example of a bit of wordplay, in which a poor character boasts that a Baron “had treated him quite as his equal – quite famillionairely” (5). Freud and Heymans argue that at first the word seems “wrongly constructed,” “unintelligible, incomprehensible and puzzling.  It accordingly bewilders,” but then we “get it,” we understand the word and are enlightened, the hidden or concealed is once again revealed (5).

More recent “gurus” of stand-up, like Jerry Corley who founded Comedy Clinic, unknowingly (or at least “unacknowledgingly”) reference this when they say things like “the number one element that triggers human laughter is SURPRISE.” When surprised, people are initially bewildered or confused. However, we should note with Freud and company that the surprise can only last for a moment, they must then be enlightened or reach clarity, or they won’t “get it.” As I noted in describing Incongruity and expectancy violation theory, Kenneth Burke has noted that you have to surprise them with something they should have seen coming.

Lipps argues that the enlightenment or illumination has two stages:

  1. We understand the meaning of the word
  2. “[W]e realize that this meaningless word has bewildered us and has then shown us its true meaning…. [T]hat a word… has been responsible for the whole thing.” (5).

The second illumination, which is also the “resolution of the problem into nothing” – sense in nonsense – is the only thing (for Lipps) that produces the comic effect (5). However, Freud and Lipps are quick to point out that it isn’t the word that did the work, but the person who wrote the joke.

The peculiar brevity of wit

Finally, Freud returns to a view expressed first by Shakespeare, but echoed by Jean Paul Richter that “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Lipps notes,

A joke says what it has to say, not always in few words, but in too few words – that is, in words that are insufficient by strict logic or by common modes of thought and speech.  It may even actually say what it has to say by not saying it. (6)

Any course or book on comedy will tell you that word economy is key.  You have to find a way to get to the punchline as quickly and smoothly as possible (unless you’re off on a tangent, but that tangent must also be quick, or you’ve lost the main joke). Words should be chosen for maximum impact.

All of these are “truisms” about comedy for Freud, needing no extensive proof to support their acceptance.

Freud’s project

The problem for Freud, as previously noted, is there’s no unified theory that relates all the criteria and characteristics to one another.

We are entirely without insight into the connection that presumably exists between the separate determinants…. We need to be told, further, whether a joke must satisfy all these determinants in order to be a proper joke, or need only satisfy some, and if so, which can be replaced by others and which are indispensable. We should also wish to have a grouping and classification of jokes on the basis of the characteristics considered essential (6-7).

Freud moves pretty fast, so to clarify, I will break each chapter into parts, and address each part in a separate post, broken up by posts by some of Freud’s critics. I’m currently working through The Purloined Punch Line, by Jerry Aline Flieger, so I’ll start there.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

Humor Theories/Stand-Up Comedy/Theories About Funny

Sigmund Freud’s Jokes part A. I. a. – Introduction

Posted on by nwilson

This is the first of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the reactions to it. I’m using this blog to make public my notes, both to help people to understand the theories as well as to help me clarify in my own mind what philosophers and theorists have said about comedy, humor, jokes, etc.

In this installment, Freud introduces the project and goes into several theories about jokes and the comic that have come before; namely, from Jean Paul Richter, Theodor Vischer, Kuno Fischer, and Theodor Lipps. [Maybe someday I’ll get hardcore and attempt to work through these guys in German.]

Freud finds nine criteria and characteristics of jokes that “[Seem] to us at first sight so very much to the point and so easily confirmed by instances” that we can easily accept them (6). In the order in which he discusses them (and I will follow his lead), they are:

  1. Activity
  2. The bringing forward of what is hidden
  3. Relation to the content of our thoughts
  4. The characteristic of playful judgement
  5. The coupling of dissimilar things
    1. Contrasting ideas
    2. Sense in nonsense
    3. The succession of bewilderment and enlightenment
  6. The peculiar brevity of wit

The problem, for Freud, is there’s no unified theory that relates all the criteria and characteristics to one another.

We are entirely without insight into the connection that presumably exists between the separate determinants…. We need to be told, further, whether a joke must satisfy all these determinants in order to be a proper joke, or need only satisfy some, and if so, which can be replaced by others and which are indispensable. We should also wish to have a grouping and classification of jokes on the basis of the characteristics considered essential (6-7).

Freud moves pretty fast, so to clarify, I will deal with the first four of the above criteria and characteristics here, and the rest in a subsequent post to keep things manageable.

Activity

Theodor Lipps says that jokes are “entirely subjective” instances of the comic (or humor; what’s funny). Through a joke, the comic (or humor) “is attached to action of ours as such, to which we invariably stand in the relation of subject and never of object, not even of voluntary object” (80, as cited in Jokes, 3). We make jokes – we’re the jokers – and in these jokes we produce the comic; thus, we are active, striving to create humor.

A joke is “[A]ny conscious and successful evocation of what is comic, whether the comic of observation or of situation” (78, as cited in Jokes, 3). The competing ideas that it’s “subjective,” that we find it funny ourselves and thus try to make the joke, but that it must also be “successful” creates quite a bit of a problem, that Freud will later try to correct. Also, Freud will challenge the idea that this action is entirely “conscious.”

The bringing forward of what is hidden: Physical caricature

Kuno Fischer begins with the idea of the caricature, which is a subset of the comic that characterizes and reveals the physical world:

Many caricatures of Reagan depicted him as old.

If it is concealed, it must be uncovered in the light of the comic way of looking at things; if it is noticed only a little or scarcely at all, it must be brought forward and made obvious, so that it lies clear and open to the light of day… In this way caricature comes about. (as cited in Jokes, 3)

Caricature brings the concealed into the open, and yet characterizes it as comic by highlighting and “making obvious,” which usually involve hyperbolic representation.  But this is again done with physical things: a politician’s age, or actions, etc.  There’s another level beyond the physical: the world of thoughts.

Relation to the content of our thoughts

Fischer posits, in contrast, that what makes jokes a subset of the comic is their relation, not to an active subject/joker, but “to [the comic’s] object, which he considers is the concealed ugliness of the world of thoughts” (3).

World of thoughts and ideas

Fischer notes,

Our whole spiritual world, the intellectual kingdom of our thoughts and ideas, does not unfold itself before the gaze of external observation, it cannot be directly imagined pictorially and visibly; and yet it too contains its inhibitions, its weaknesses and its deformities – a wealth of ridiculous and comic contrasts (as cited in Jokes, 3)

To unpack this, the “world of thoughts and ideas” as differentiated from the physical world that we can observe is fairly straightforward; to avoid going all Marxist with ideology here, I’ll go to Kenneth Burke and his “Definition of Man [sic]” as “Inventors of the negative.” The world of thoughts and ideas is the world of the conceptual, and Burke might say of zero and “not.” We can’t see nothing – there’s nothing there to see – but we can conceptualize absence, and refer to things that are not physically present. But that’s still imagining “pictorially and visibly.” We picture something and note its absence.

We can also conceptualize things that have no physical presence (or absence), like wealth, prosperity, peace in the Middle East, freedom and ‘Merica!  Concepts like these cannot be pinned down to individual objects or things, and yet the concepts carry psychological force; they shape our actions, tell us what to like and how to think, and they don’t always work as a cohesive whole – they’re a mess of contradictions.  When we call attention to these contradictions and contrasts, we’ve made a judgement, which can take the form of a joke.

A joke is a judgement which produces a comic contrast; [comic contrast] has already played a silent part in caricature, but only in judgment does it attain its peculiar form and the free sphere of its unfolding (3).

So a joke is a judgment that displays or produces a comic contrast, which could run to ridicule and superiority theory, but to be comic it must be done playfully.

The characteristic of playful judgement

Fischer makes an analogy to the aesthetic, to beauty and form, which Freud describes as:

[A]esthetic freedom lies in the playful contemplation of things. Elsewhere the aesthetic attitude towards an object is characterized by the condition that we do not ask anything of the object, especially no satisfaction of our serious needs, but content ourselves with the enjoyment of contemplating it. The aesthetic attitude is playful in contrast to work. (4)

Thus playful judging is similarly “a sort of judging released from its usual rules and regulations” (4). Freud quotes Jean Paul Richter: “Freedom produces jokes and jokes produce freedom” (4).

We can see how this idea plays out in the notions of play spaces, and particularly in the simple carnivalesque, where the norms and rules of polite society are temporarily suspended and people are “free.” Freud similarly will incorporate an idea of how this “freedom” will come about.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

 

Cases and Current Events/Comics in the News/Stand-Up Comedy

Rosie O’Donnell: There’s No There, There

Posted on by nwilson

Rosie O’Donnell’s in the news for a Tweet in which she promotes an online game, “Push Trump Off A Cliff Again.”  At first glance, it seems right up my alley: Yes, she’s a stand-up comedian. Yes, her public speech is creating a bit of a stir.  Yes, there’s a parody in there that’s amusing.

However, she neither conceptualized nor made the game.  She also didn’t name the game. Promoting a game that already exists is perhaps cringe-worthy, but hey, this post does it too, so…

Further, she wasn’t joking. Her Tweet wasn’t a joke – it was a bona fide statement that she enjoyed a game, that it amused her. Perhaps she hoped the game would amuse others, but that’s not the same as making a joke.

Nevertheless, her Tweet has provoked outrage, providing more evidence that the actions of all celebrities – even comics – must be policed because comics are dangerous, they have ideological power, the power to change ideas [a concept I’ll address very soon].

Cases and Current Events/Comics Talking Shop/Stand-Up Comedy

Mike Birbiglia on Getting Personal

Posted on by nwilson

Mike Birbiglia spoke to Bill Brownstein of the Montreal Gazette (7/14/2017) about getting personal.

Getting personal is crucial in comedy. I feel that we’re living in this sort of Instagram culture, where people are going: ‘Look at the life I’m pretending to live.’ And then people go: ‘Ew, I’d like to have that life you’re pretending to live.’

I do that myself on occasion. I go on Instagram and ask myself why I’m here and they’re there. But the truth is that it’s mostly fabricated and falsely framed and de-contextualized to give a sense of excitement and thrill. What I’ve tried to do with my shows is to bring them to a place where people don’t say: ‘I’d like to have that life.’ Instead they’d say: ‘That’s what my life is like, too, and it gives me some sense of perspective.’ One that is hopefully humourous and, sometimes, touching.

Brownstein says of Birbiglia:

[H]e merely wants to connect with audiences in search of someone who can articulate their similar experiences. Which explains why he still sees himself as “a travelling salesman of comedy.”

Birbiglia’s take seems to be that he’s not pretending to be something he’s not; he’s trying to speak from his real, lived experiences, his truths.

However, just as people on Instagram are taking selections of their experiences to highlight, we know that Birbiglia is as well.  His experiences, while perhaps less “mostly fabricated” (a claim not all comics can make) are no less “falsely framed and de-contextualized to give a sense of excitement and thrill,” because what is a laugh if not a form of excitement, an expression of a thrill?

His stated goal is to be less of an idol and more of a peer, to connect and “give a sense of perspective”; he wants people to relate. Further, this relating is not limited to laughing, but also deeper sentiment. In this, he diverts from traditional comic intentions.

What is inherent in his language, he’s “trying to bring them” and hopes for the best (humor, sentiment). He’s a salesman, but he seems to realize that it’s not on him; he can’t make them buy. The audience ultimately buys or does not; they are active but perhaps only at the level of voting.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?