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

Dustin Wood’s Truth

Posted on by nwilson

Danielle Jester interviewed budding comic Dustin Wood for siskiyoudaily.com (7/27/2017), he begins with a discussion of himself as a type of truth teller, at least, in what’s funny:

Q: Do you have favorite topics to write jokes about?

A: They always start with not just truth, but my truth. The best advice I received early on in my career was being told NOT to write what the audience finds funny but write what YOU find funny. After that it was like a dam crumbled in my head. I wrote about all the stuff in my life that was funny. The formula to comedy is often described as just being Tragedy + Time. Growing up with a rare disease has caused a lot of tough situations. But I can look at the absurdity that happens in a day to day basis of my life and convey that to a crowd.

Truth vs. Persona

This is an ongoing theme for me: the question of whether comics are ever “Real” or “Truthful” onstage or if they’re playing a role, embodying at least, in David Misch’s terms. a slippery persona? For critics like myself, it’s obvious, but as for a lot of comics – even when talking about other comics – they deny it. This is what’s going on in the above quote.

Yes, it’s personal to him, and we can also point out that yes, it’s selectively the stuff he can make funny.  However, a new point emerges that’s often overlooked: it should be the stuff that he finds funny – his particular sense of humor.  In my discussion of persona, I’ve pointed out that oftentimes we comics get enticed by the laughs into doing stuff we don’t like to be successful, and it’s good to see comics speaking out against that.

On comedy as self-defense

Q: Do you feel you use comedy as a form of communication? Are you trying to get a certain message out there or more just helping people to have fun?

A: Comedy was always used as a shield when I was a kid. I was an overweight, Catholic Irish kid covered in freckles and blue bumps from a rare disease. I was teased and bullied. I began to use comedy as a shield and a sword. I would make fun of myself before they could. It would soften the blow if it was coming from a comedic, self-deprecating place.

It’s a common story, we’re forced by society to display that we have a sense of humor, that we can take a joke, that we can laugh at ourselves [this segment is still coming], so we take the reins and tell the joke first, sanction their laughter and thereby (in theory) take control of their power to laugh at us.  We allow them to laugh with us, at us.  The question is, does it really work that way?

While we may steer the conversation in particular ways, into well-known jokes, thereby limiting the scope, and while those topics, being familiar, may be easier to cope with, is there a guarantee that the laughers’ deprecate us any less with their laugh?

On a personal note

I don’t usually tell jokes about my height (I’m 5’4”), but I tell a joke onstage, the setup for which is an insult I read on Facebook (admittedly not directed at me, but it could have been):

Someone recently tried to insult me.  They said, “The reason you’re so short is because your dad tried to pull out. The other half of you was left on the bedsheets.”

It gets a bigger laugh than most of my jokes—including my attempt to turn it back on itself. Further, it’s an ugly laugh, a laughing at, that grows as the audience comes to believe that it’s ok to laugh. And it is ok, because I told it, and I know where I’m going with it. But when they laugh harder at this than at my punchline, it displays their lack of sympathy. Maybe I need a stronger punchline.

It points to an enforcement of social boundaries.  In making fun of those at the margins, the joker is highlighting their marginal status, in choosing to laugh (even if it’s fake or a guffaw) we signal that we are in the group – but only barely, and it’s unlikely that by doing so that we will pass the test and be left alone in the future.

Moreover, we may be left uncertain if we even want to be a part of the group at all, though with work-groups, sport or activity groups and peer groups, we may not have a choice, it’s fit in or miss out.

Summary

As comics, we do have to negotiate our onstage personas with the audience; however, we don’t have to kowtow to their whims.  Comics choose what we tell, the way that we tell it, and what we want to make funny about it.  However, we also have to realize that the audience can take that up in a number of different and sometimes problematic ways.

I return to the point I made in my blurbs on Chris Crespo and Josh Blue:

[Once a comic has] acknowledged that he has to talk about his disability on-stage, [it] begs the question: Can you ever really be laughing with him, once you know that he’s only laughing to preempt the laughing at he expected from you? Does the fact that he’s allowing it- even writing the jokes – change the fact that it still might be, at base, ridicule?

Humor Theories/Stand Up Comedy/Theories About Funny

Chattoo, The Laughter Effect I. A. Introduction, Preview, Promise and Paradox

Posted on by nwilson

In May (2017), Caty Borum Chattoo, co-director of the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University and a comedy fan, released “The Laughter Effect: The [Serious] Role of Comedy in Social Change“, in which she summarizes the research and gives advice on how to use humor to further social issues.  She notes that comedy is promising, but that there are some hard, paradoxical problems as well.

The promise and paradox of comedy

The promise

Chattoo begins with the promise, citing Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’s success at getting action on New York City’s bail bond system. Basically, Oliver’s monologue culminating in a statement that “Increasingly, bail has become a way to lock up the poor, regardless of guilt,” had an immediate impact:

New York City officials changed the city’s bail protocol, immediately impacting 3,000 poor and low-level offenders in the short term, and thousands more in the long run.

That sounds great! Direct effects, comedy FTW!

The paradox

However, she also brings up the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “The Zombie Apocalypse” social media public health marketing campaign, which, while it built buzz and encouraged message sharing, also showed that people who had been exposed to the messages “were significantly less likely to take protective actions in the face of an impending disaster” (Fraustino & Ma). So yeah, increased exposure that backfires? Not good. Chattoo explains:

The two stories illustrate the promise and paradox of comedy in service of serious social challenges. On the one hand, it’s not revelatory to claim, based on compelling anecdotes alone, that comedy can cut through the clutter of today’s unrelenting supply of digital news and information. Comedy may even be able to help set the media agenda in a way that impacts policy, as illustrated in the bail story. On the other hand, to ascribe monolithic, one-size-fits-all characteristics onto comedy risks possible backfiring.

Preview

Chattoo creates a list of comedy formats that she argues work for social change:

  • Satire
  • Scripted entertainment storytelling
  • Marketing and advertising
  • Stand-up and sketch comedy

These formats, she asserts, exert five common forms of influence (to which she adds another factor: active audiences):

  1. Attracting attention,
  2. Persuading through emotion,
  3. Offering a way into complex social issues,
  4. Breaking down social barriers, and
  5. Encouraging sharing (multiplier effect).

In addition, Chattoo explains,

Perhaps most useful for social change efforts, contemporary comedy is uniquely able to set media agendas by creating shared cultural watercooler moments in an increasingly cluttered information age. Comedy doesn’t only preach to the choir—audiences actively seek out comedy as a vital form of entertainment and even as a source of information to understand the world. Comedy’s ability to reach unexpected audiences is crucial.

This report represents fairly recent, “breaking,” stuff (though most of what she’s citing is not), and so I want to delve deeper into her work over the next several days, starting with how she sets the scene, then to the five effects (plus active audiences), next moving on to satire, parts of storytelling and stand-up comedy, then her final advice.  On the way, I’ll probably break out her “Big Theories” and the authors she’s working from.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References

Fraustino, J. D., & Ma, L. (2015). CDC’s Use of Social Media and Humor in a Risk Campaign—“Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse.” Journal of Applied Communication, 222-241.

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

Joel McHale Wants to Make Trump Laugh

Posted on by nwilson

In an interview with  Joel McHale of foxnews.com (7/25/2017), Blanche Johnson talks about “making an audience laugh” in a different way:

BJ: Joel McHale… says he’d like to go back to Washington to make President Trump laugh.

JM: If he would show up I would do it. I would do it in a heartbeat. If they ask me to do it and he was coming… “f–k yeah.” I think it’s important for presidents –- especially American presidents, because they are literally the most powerful person on the planet — to show that they can take a joke…

BJ: He said every president has been able to handle a joke until now, and he thinks it’s important to show other countries our leader can laugh.

JM: …[In] a lot of other countries, reporters are put in jail for making derogatory comments or perceived jokes or something. In America, it’s the best country in the world, because reporters and comedians can say stuff.

JM: Comedians, especially, can say jokes, and the last few presidents have all been like, “Cool, thanks, now we’ll go back to defending democracy.”

Whereas Johnson uses the term “making [an audience] laugh,” she’s using the word “make” in a different sense than we’ve seen before.  Before, we’ve talked about how this phrasing reduces an audience to an object that is acted upon.

Here, McHale is talking about the value of having a sense of humor, to “take a joke,” and the pressure to not be “that guy” – the guy that can’t take it. In our culture, that pressure is immense. Thus, if McHale tells a joke in front of and about Trump, Trump has to take it. He must at minimum “guffaw,” or risk showing that he doesn’t have a sense of humor.

So this “making Trump [or anyone in power] laugh,” is not about acting on him in a mind controlling way, but employing social norms to provoke or coerce a laugh. [I’ll have more about the pressure to have a sense of humor coming soon – soo many articles to cover!]

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

Megan Garber on Comics as Public Intellectuals

Posted on by nwilson

This one’s an oldie, but I came across it in some research recently, and it needs to be in this discussion. Megan Garber, in an article for The Atlantic (5/28/2015), saw in Amy Schumer’s “Court of Public Opinion” sketch the marks of a trend: “[J]okes that tend to treat humor not just as an end in itself, but as a vehicle for making a point.”

Why has this happened? For Garber, “There was an unmet need” left by our traditional news media, so comedy stepped up to fill it.  However, Garber mentions a definition of comedy that could hamstring her entire thesis.

What comedy does

Garber asserts,

The point of comedy has always been, on some level, a kind of productive subversion…. [Comedy forms] are forms of creative destruction, at their height and in their depths…

This is a fairly common view of humor that I haven’t yet had the opportunity to address: that it is subversive and destructive, even if productively and creatively so.  That anything that is created in comedy is so because something else was destroyed or demolished by it.  That comedy (or perhaps meaningful comedy) only tears things down, it never builds things up.

I know, Garber’s own discussion seems to correct us on this point, but that’s the internal logic breaking down – it’s a performative contradiction of this definition.  Garber sees comedy and humor as a form of cultural criticism and a force for social change.

Critical cultural comedy

Garber notes that TV comedy, “the stuff that is firmly rooted in traditions of sketch and standup,” is talking on meaningful subjects:

Its jokes double as arguments. “Comedy with a message” may be vaguely ironic; it is also, increasingly, redundant.

So when Schumer, in a set that aired on her show, comments with purposeful nonchalance that “we’ve all been a little bit raped,” she may be making viewers laugh. But she is, much more importantly, making us squirm. She’s daring us to consider the definition of “rape,” and also the definition of another word that can be awkward in comedy and democracy alike: “we.” She’s making a point about inclusion and exclusion, about the individuality of experience, about the often flawed way we think about ourselves as a collective. This is comedy at only the most superficial level; what it is, really, is cultural criticism.

She’s going out on a limb a bit with the “definition of ‘we’ stuff,” and she recites the “making viewers laugh” line that subtly de-powers audiences by making them objects, but I’ll tackle those points in a moment.

I can agree, Schumer is tackling the difficult issue of rape – she’s making a rape joke. And it’s one that “works” (if it does) because it plays about the edges of the issue; it plays with the definition, and that’s the province of cultural criticism.

Similar to the performative contradiction pointed out above, cultural criticism is, to some, only in the practice of tearing down some monolithic social and cultural structures.  However, critics who use this definition overlook (or redefine as “something else”) critical acts that celebrate a text, that produce new ways of looking at a thing, issue or idea, that expand the discussion, rather than curtailing it. Comedy and play does the latter, as Garber seems to stress.

Abbi Jacobson

Garber includes a decent list of comics in this vein: George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Keegan Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Abbi Jacobson, Ilana Glazer, Sarah Silverman, Patton Oswalt, Louis C.K., Nick Kroll, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Larry Wilmore. All of whom, she says, actively engage in some level of cultural critique, which is counter the traditional comic’s intention of just trying to get a laugh.

Intention

Garber points out that comedy has changed over time:

As comedy began to do a better job of reflecting the world, it began, as well, to take on the responsibilities associated with that reflection. It began to recognize the fact that the long debate about the things comedy owes to its audiences and itself—the old “hey, I’m just making a joke” line of logic—can be partially resolved in the idea that nothing, ultimately, is “just a joke.” Humor has moral purpose. Humor has intellectual heft. Humor can change the world.

We can pin on Schumer the intention of doing a cultural critique – that in addition to the traditional comic’s intent of trying to get a laugh, she also knew she was writing a joke about rape, she was perhaps trying to make us think about how widespread the issue is, how fuzzy the lines can be – she’s trying to change the world. Garber goes further in describing the comic’s intentions:

They’re exploring and wrestling with important ideas. They’re sharing their conclusions with the rest of us. They’re providing fodder for discussion, not just of the minutiae of everyday experience, but of the biggest questions of the day.… these are bits intended not just to help us escape from the realities of the world, but also, and more so, to help us understand them. Comedians are fashioning themselves not just as joke-tellers, but as truth-tellers—as intellectual and moral guides through the cultural debates of the moment.

As Mike Sacks, an editor at Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today’s Top Comedy Writers, told me: There’s a general feeling right now that “comedy can change people’s opinions.”

Both of these statements place emphasis on the comics: they explore, wrestle, share, provide, intend and fashion themselves, they speak truth (to power?) and through their comedy they try to “change people’s opinions.”

Garber sees in both happy and indignant news headlines alike evidence of the influence of comics, and I couldn’t agree more. My problem is that some, like Neil Postman, would argue that we’re just “amusing ourselves to death,” that discussions by and about comics – and worse, discussions about discussions by and about comics (like this blog) – are simply wastes of our collective time; that none of it matters in terms of real-world, political change.  While we can point to anecdotal evidence that people changed their views based on a bit or joke, there’s little hard research to support it.

So perhaps Schumer is trying to tell the truth, to change opinions but if you asked Schumer, I’d bet all I have that playing with the definition of “we” never entered her head. The “we” stuff, that’s on Garber. Which reveals a point she makes very clear: we [the monumental audience] allow it; we do the work.

Audience power

Earlier, I pointed out Garber’s use of “making the audience laugh,” as marking a performative contradiction.  This phrase, as I’ve discussed before, falls under the popular view of audiences as objects.  In direct contradiction to this, consider this quote:

[Comedy forms have] long allowed us to talk about things that taboos, or at the very least taste, might otherwise preclude…. [Comedians are] people who [use] laughter as a lubricant for cultural conversations—to help us to talk about the things that [need] to be talked about.

As in a previous quote where comics “provide fodder,” here comics “allow,” and “help us to talk about the things that [need] to be talked about,” not simply that they allow the comics to talk about what they want (though the space of humor does that too); it’s “we” who do the talking.  If we look back, in the previous quote, it was we who ask comics to give us more moral messages as fodder for our conversations. The audience isn’t a passive object; for Garber, we are active.

[Comics] most important function is to stimulate debates among the rest of us. They are adjuncts–… to the several institutions that have been self-consciously modeled as guardians of the national discourse. And we, for our part … [collectively] allow them to be.

I like this idea that comics are teachers, as I’m both and frequently see the overlap. I give my students and my audiences material, but it’s they who do the thinking, the work, the learning. And whereas my tenured position is granted by the University, my position as an adjunct comic is granted only by the audience.

Further, it’s we who do the watching, and that has fundamentally changed the way humor is delivered to us.

Changing the form

Garber notes that we watch so much comedy via the internet, that the form has evolved:

Comedy, like so much else in the culture, now exists largely of, by, and for the Internet.

Everything is packaged (or eventually repackaged) to hit the internet consumer –  sketches, bits and rants are regularly created for or posted to YouTube. One more important quote from the middle, to serve as Garber’s conclusion:

[T]here are two broad things happening right now—comedy with moral messaging, and comedy with mass attention—and their combined effect is this: Comedians have taken on the role of public intellectuals.

Of course, that’s just one journalist’s opinion, though she does get taken up on this point by a policy mover and shaker, Caty Borum Chattoo, whose project is the reason why I’ve come back to this article.  [Look for that write up in the days ahead!]

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

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

Sigmund Freud’s Jokes part A. II. b. 6. The Techniques of Conceptual Jokes – Problems

Posted on by nwilson

This is the thirteenth of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes [Witz] and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the reactions to it. Still trying for clarity.

In this installment, I’m still addressing his second chapter, and his laundry list of joke techniques, which he is trying to narrow down to a few meta-types. We’ve moved on to the “Techniques of conceptual jokes,” which he says rely more on the situation for their humor. However, along the way, Freud has said some weird things that a lot of people call him on.

In particular, he makes a distinction between the comic and jokes [Witz], and begins to hint about jests [Scherz], he characterizes his jokework process as concerned only with the point of view of the joker, which he asserts can be known, he admits he still doesn’t know what a joke is, but “he knows it when he sees it,” he distinguishes his “opposites” from irony proper, and allusions and riddles from jokes. Let’s address each of these in turn.

The comic versus jokes and jests

Freud differentiates the “comic” from “jokes” a bit in the introduction, stating with Theodor Lipps that the comic is what is humorous or funny, but jokes are the result of an active joker. He notes that Kuno Fischer says jokes are a subset of the comic that “bring forward what is hidden.” However, Freud leaves off fully differentiating the comic from jokes.  And he again defers that in chapter II:

We must keep to our view that the technique of this last group of jokes that we have examined lies in nothing else than in bringing forward “faulty reasoning.” But we are obliged to admit that their examination has so far led us more into obscurity than understanding. (47)

This issue is important because it overlaps other problems in Freud’s theory, like the difference between a joker’s intention and the joke’s reception by the audience.

Freud hints through an example that jests [Scherz] and jokes [Witz] might apply to the same thing (56), but we should know there’s a distinction he’ll make there later.

Author versus audience intention

Freud considers and dismisses the question of an audience finding a displacement in a joke that may not have been intended. He announces that he is interested in “jokework” or “the psychical processes involved in the construction of the joke” (38).  He is not interested in the understanding or “taking in” of the joke – at least, not until later (38).

This is part and parcel to the difference between the comic (humorous, funny) and jokes: the comic can be found, jokes must be conceptualized and told.  Further, this omission of the audience, for myself and many others, is key and represents a mistake that gets carried on by a lot of early humor theorists – that it’s only the joke writer, or more specifically, how and why the critic thinks the joke was written, that matters, and he claims he can tell the difference:

If this distinction is not clear to us, we have an unfailing means of bringing it tangibly before our eyes in our attempts at reduction. (38)

I’m not convinced.

Characterizing jokes

Freud also includes a brief definition of “‘characterizing’ jokes“: a joke that “seeks by an example to illustrate a [person’s] characteristic[s]” (39).

What’s a joke?

Freud admits he isn’t really sure if the examples qualify as jokes.

It is the case, however, that in a number of instances we are in doubt whether the particular example ought to be called a joke or not…. In coming to our decision, we can base ourselves on nothing but a certain “feeling,” which we may interpret as meaning that the decision is made in our judgement in accordance with particular criteria that are not yet accessible to our knowledge” (43).

This kind of “I can’t define obscenity, but I know it when I see it” definition rarely flies.

Analogies

When he gets to analogies, Freud again is tripped up:

We have already admitted that in some of the examples we have examined we have not been able to banish a doubt as to whether they ought to be regarded as jokes at all; and in this uncertainty we have recognized that the foundations of our enquiry have been seriously shaken. But I am aware of this uncertainty in no other material more strongly or more frequently than in jokes of analogy. There is a feeling – and this is probably true of a large number of other people under the same conditions – which tells me “this is a joke, I can pronounce this to be a joke” even before the hidden essential nature of jokes has been discovered. This feeling leaves me in the lurch most often in the case of joking analogies. If to begin with I unhesitatingly pronounce an analogy to be a joke, a moment later I seem to notice that the enjoyment it gives me is of a quality different from what I am accustomed to derive from a joke. And the circumstance that joking analogies are very seldom able to provoke the explosive laugh which signalizes a good joke makes it impossible for me to resolve the doubt in my usual way – by limiting myself to the best and most effective examples of a species. (60)

Again, it’s a “feeling,” but in the case of analogies, it’s of a different “quality.” Further, the best jokes “provoke” an “explosive laugh.”  Here we see the first instance of Relief theory – that there’s a hydraulic pressure building that “explodes” when “provoked.”

Further, after working through several humorous analogies and finding them wanting, Freud says,

So far we have found that whenever an analogy strikes us as being in the nature of a joke it owes this impression to the admixture of one of the joke-techniques that are familiar to us. (64).

What all this analysis has shown is that the joke [Witz], or more specifically the jokework, though it might incorporate many techniques, is not a term used to describe the whole of a joking statement. There are specific components that are jokework, and others that might best be described as “humor adjacent,” strange, quirky, interesting or curious but not bringing a laugh on their own. Freud expresses his inability to parse out the differences a bit later

But, that being so, we are completely at a loss to see what it is that determines the joking characteristic of analogies, since that characteristic certainly does not reside in analogy as a form of expression of thought or in the operation of making a comparison. All we can do is to include analogy among the species of “indirect representation” used by the joke-technique and we must leave unresolved the problem which we have met with much more clearly in the case of analogies than in the methods of joking that we came across earlier. No doubt, moreover, there must be some special reason why the decision whether something is a joke or not offers greater difficulties in analogies than in other forms of expression. (65)

So Freud kicks that can down the road.  However, he does identify a lot of things that are not jokes.

Distinction between opposites and irony

Freud doesn’t limit either opposites or overstatement to jokes, but extends it to other forms of persuasion, like Mark Antony’s speech at the funeral of Caesar in Shakespeare’s Julias Caesar: “For Brutus is an honorable man…” Freud notes,

But we call this “irony” and no longer a joke. The only technique that characterizes irony is representation by the opposite. Moreover we read and hear of “ironical jokes.” So it can no longer be doubted that technique alone is insufficient to characterize the nature of jokes. Something further is needed which we have not yet discovered. But on the other hand it remains an uncontradicted fact that if we undo the technique of a joke it disappears. For the time being we may find difficulty in thinking how these two fixed points that we have arrived at in explaining jokes can be reconciled. (54)

Ok, so irony is a type of representation by the opposite, but it’s not joking – irony by itself is not jokework, or at least, not always – and Freud defers decision on this until a later time.

Distinction between allusions and jokes

Freud talks at length about various forms of allusion, but when when it comes down to it, allusion isn’t always a joke either.

Allusion is perhaps the commonest and most easily manageable method of joking…. But it precisely reminds us once more of the fact that had begun to puzzle us in our consideration of the technique of jokes. An allusion in itself does not constitute a joke; there are correctly constructed allusions which have no claim to such a character. Only allusions that possess that character can be described as jokes. So that the criterion of jokes, which we have pursued into their technique, eludes us there once again. (58-59)

Distinction between jokes and riddles

Freud does say something here about riddles: Basically, for a riddle to be a joke, it must possess unification:

The great majority of all such riddles [those that are not jokes] lack unification. That is to say, the clue by which one syllable is to be guessed is quite independent of those that point to the second or third, as well as of the indication which is to lead to the separate discovery of the whole. (49)

Summary

If we were to occupy ourselves by cataloging all the things that are not jokes – or not always jokes – we’d never finish.  Freud will eventually answer these questions.  Here he’s just building narrative tension; however, most of us don’t find those answers, when they do come, to be satisfactory.  And I haven’t even begun to discuss his examples; apparently, Freud thinks that it’s funny that all Jewish men are dirty and don’t bathe, and that many Jewish women are unattractive and unmarriable. Quite the recurring themes.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

Ramblings

101 Posts (Oops! 102!)

Posted on by nwilson

Today’s posts make over 100 that I’ve put up in my blog, The Critical Comic, and all in less that 2 months! It’s been frantic, frustrating, crazy! I feel pulled in a dozen directions. My saving grace is that very few are reading – I’ve had one comment and no subscribers, so….

Not my worry, I started this to work, and at this stage, I can say that I’ve done that. Hopefully, I can roll this momentum forward, get my book chapter done and roll into the semester, staying on top of this. Eventually, this may flesh out into an online textbook for a course (or a book deal), but for right now, I’m engaging new material and reevaluating my previous work on this project, and that’s more than I’ve done in the last… five years anyway.

Thanks to anyone still reading. Hang in there, I’m still working. If you have any requests or suggestions, don’t hesitate to comment.

Cheers!

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

Sigmund Freud’s Jokes part A. II. b. 5. The Techniques of Conceptual Jokes – Indirect Representation

Posted on by nwilson

This is the twelfth of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes [Witz] and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the reactions to it. Still trying for clarity.

In this installment, I’m still addressing his second chapter, and his laundry list of joke techniques, which he is trying to narrow down to a few meta-types. We’ve moved on to the “Techniques of conceptual jokes,” which he says rely more on the situation for their humor.

Techniques of conceptual jokes

Freud characterizes these conceptual jokes as “mak[ing] use of deviations from normal thinking,” (42) and ultimately arrives at five categories: displacement, absurdity, faulty reasoning, unification, and indirect representation. Now up is indirect representation, and its subsets, allusion, “synecdoche” and analogy.

Indirect Representation

Freud’s next category is of allusion, or reference to something not present.  He later says,

I have occasionally described allusion as indirect representation‘; and we may now observe that the various species of allusion, together with representation by the opposite and other techniques that have still to be mentioned, may be united into a single large group, for which indirect representation‘ would be the most comprehensive name. (59)

  • Connection or allusion

If representation by the opposite is one of the technical methods of jokes, we can expect that jokes may also make use of its contrary – representation by something similar or akin…. We shall describe the peculiarity of this technique far more appropriately if, instead of representation by something “akin,” we say by something “correlated” or “connected.” (54)

Freud relates this technique to that of allusion, but without the double meaning; in this technique, “its characteristic is replacement by something linked to it in a conceptual connection” (55-56). These are parallel to verbal techniques, particularly resemblance in sound, slight modifications, and omissions

    • Resemblance in sound

The connection used for the replacement may be merely a resemblance in sound, so that this sub-species becomes analogous to puns among verbal jokes. Here, however, it is not the resemblance in sound between two words, but between whole sentences, characteristic phrases, and so on.

For instance, Lichtenberg coined the saying: “New spas cure well,” which at once reminds us of the proverb: “New brooms sweep clean.” (56)

    • Slight modifications

The connection may also consist in similarity except for a “slight modification.” So that this technique, too, is parallel to a verbal technique. (56)

Example:

“Every fathom a queen,” a modification of Shakespeare‘s familiar “Every inch a king.” (56).

    • Omission

Finally, another kind of allusion consists in “omission,” which may be compared to condensation without the formation of a substitute. Actually, in every allusion something is omitted, viz. the train of thought leading to the allusion. It only depends on whether the more obvious thing is the gap in the wording of the allusion or the substitute which partly fills the gap. Thus a series of examples would lead us back from blatant omission to allusion proper. (57)

Here among the jokes is another Jewish, bath-house joke:

And now once again two Jews outside the bath-house:

One of them sighed: “Another year gone by already!” (58)

  • Synecdoche

Freud doesn’t name his next sub-species, so I’ll take the liberty. Synecdoche is “the part for the whole or the whole for the part.” This seems to be what Freud’s expressing when he says,

If we examine our material further, we seem to recognize a fresh sub-species of indirect representation…. This is representation by something small or very small – which performs the task of giving full expression to a whole characteristic by means of a tiny detail. This group can be brought under the classification of “allusion,” if we bear in mind that this smallness is related to what has to be represented, and can be seen to proceed from it. (59)

  • Analogy

Freud characterizes analogies as a sub-set of indirect representation, and though he questions if analogies are even jokes at all (and spends a lot of time working through examples), he eventually finds a few. Freud quotes Heinrich Heine for the following:

Her face resembled a palimpsest, on which, beneath the fresh black monastic manuscript of the text of a Church Father there lurk the half-obliterated lines of an ancient Greek love poem.

Freud finds this and a few other analogies to possess, in and of themselves, a joking quality.

Summary

So indirect representation is the final technique by which the joker makes use of deviations from normal thinking within the situation to achieve humor.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

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

Hari Kondabolu’s Dual Goal

Posted on by nwilson

Comic Hari Kondabolu has bachelor’s degree in Comparative Politics and master’s degree in Human Rights, so he probably knows a thing or two about theories of public action. However, in an article by Holly Vasic of the Daily Utah Chronical (7/19/2017), he expresses that his goals are two-fold:

The goal is always to make people laugh or be honest with my point of view.

I have reasons to like and dislike this phrasing.

Other goals

First off, I like that it expresses the idea, uncommon at the lower levels of small shows and open mics, that one can do something on stage other than telling jokes.  Of course, we can, but the dominant view is that we shouldn’t.

People came there to laugh, and getting to that is what we comics should be trying to do, that’s the traditional comic’s intent, which defines an absolute version of stand-up.

Objects

On the other hand, it expresses the popular idea that the comics “make” audiences laugh, like they are objects that are unable to prevent us from working on them. Some would say it doesn’t matter – this is just an expression; however, I’ve disputed it as frequently as it pops up, because:

  1. It’s really common – hopefully my readers can see how often it gets said
  2. It has implications for how we think humor works
  3. Which, in turn, has implications for what comics try to do
  4. Which ultimately shapes the comedy we see, what gets made

As I’ve said, I try to point out these assumptions to elevate the discourse, so we can make the choices conscious. We can choose to see the audience as active participants in the humor, as people with whom we must develop a relationship; in short, as lovers.

Either/or

The phrasing also suggests a dichotomy, like he’s only trying to do one or the other, and never both at the same time or anything else.  That bothers me.

This is the same view expressed in Nathan Mills’ review of Hasan Minhaj – that Minhaj doesn’t just tell jokes, but has a lot of stuff in-between:

Homecoming King is full of these lessons in between well-built and well-rehearsed jokes. Minhaj seamlessly transitions between the moments as if they’re two separate pieces of him.

That’s what worries me in the phrasing – this idea that the jokes and the other stuff are separate pieces.  Mills was referring to life lessons, whereas Kondabolu is referring to his point of view, but other comics don’t view either of those as separate from their humor.

Mo’Nique and Zainab Johnson have each expressed that they try to be honest and express their point of view in order to get the laughs. [This post is in the queue.] Tiffany Haddish has said that she uses her comedy to teach, while getting laughs [Also in the queue.] The point is, other comics try and succeed at doing both at the same time.

Summary

Yes, it’s one quick quote, tossed off by Kondabolu without thought, but sometimes those reveal more than carefully prepared dissertations; unexamined assumptions, things we’ve just absorbed from society, things that we mouth back at it when on the spot may tell us a lot about society, and, in turn, they shape society.

So yes, comics can do things other than tell jokes, but they can also do other things while telling jokes.  And sometimes, the audience will choose to laugh.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

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

Sigmund Freud’s Jokes part A. II. b. 4. The Techniques of Conceptual Jokes – Unification

Posted on by nwilson

This is the eleventh of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes [Witz] and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the reactions to it. Still trying for clarity.

In this installment, I’m still addressing his second chapter, and his laundry list of joke techniques, which he is trying to narrow down to a few meta-types. We’ve moved on to the “Techniques of conceptual jokes,” which he says rely more on the situation for their humor.

Techniques of conceptual jokes

Freud characterizes these conceptual jokes as “mak[ing] use of deviations from normal thinking,” (42) and ultimately arrives at five categories: displacement, absurdity, faulty reasoning, unification, and indirect representation. Now up is unification, which has four sub-sets: ready repartees, “ands,” representation by the opposite and overstatement.

Unification

Unification is Freud’s fourth category of conceptual jokes.  He says, “Their technique, in particular, reminds us of what we already know” (47). He describes these jokes as “refined rather than strong,” and that they “work by methods that are unobtrusive,” so he gives us multiple examples (47).

January is the month in which we offer our dear friends wishes, and the rest are the months in which they are not fulfilled.

Human life falls into two halves. In the first half we wish the second one would come; and in the second we wish the first one were back.

Experience consists in experiencing what we do not wish to experience. (47)

The last two are borrowed from Fischer.  While he notes some overlap with “multiple use of the same material,” Freud finds something more in these jokes:

I should like in particular to stress the fact that here new and unexpected unities are set up, relations of ideas to one another, definitions made mutually or by reference to a common third element. I should like to name this process “unification.” (47)

While this process “is clearly analogous to condensation by compression into the same words,” the examples, particularly the first one, “are characterized by a (once again, modified) relation to a third element” (48).

Freud then launches into a series of sub-sets.

  • Ready repartees

Freud notes,

[R]epartee consists in the defence going to meet the aggression, in “turning the tables on someone” or “paying someone back in his own coin” – that is, in establishing an unexpected unity between attack and counter-attack. (49-50)

Some of Freud’s examples are clever:

The French poet J. B. Rousseau wrote an Ode to Posterity. Voltaire was not of opinion that the poem merited survival, and jokingly remarked: “This poem will not reach its destination.” (Fischer, 1889; 49)

Duke Charles of Württemberg happened on one of his rides to come upon a dyer who was engaged on his job. Pointing to the grey horse he was riding, the Duke called out: “Can you dye him blue?”

“Yes, of course, your Highness,” came the answer, “if he can stand boiling.” (50)

I never said that!

I always like the old joke, falsely attributed to Winston Churchill, where an offended woman says to her offender,

“If you were my husband, sir, I’d give you a dose of poison!”

The man looked at her. “If I were your husband,” said he, “I’d take it!”

These are thought to be an return attack, a rejoinder that comes uniquely out of the situation, unifying what was said or done with something unexpected.

  • “and”

Unification has another, quite specially interesting technical instrument at its disposal: stringing things together with the conjunction “and.” If things are strung together in this way it implies that they are connected: we cannot help understanding it so. (50)

Freud’s example:

For instance, when Heine, speaking of the city of Göttingen in the Harzreise, remarks: “Speaking generally, the inhabitants of Göttingen are divided into students, professors, philistines and donkeys,” we take this grouping in precisely the sense which Heine emphasizes in an addition to the sentence: “and these four classes are anything but sharply divided.”

Freud argues that in this example (and in other cases) the “and” causes us to make connections and assumptions we might otherwise miss.

  • Representation by the opposite

The replacement of the really appropriate “no” by a “yes” constitutes a new technical method of joking. (51)

Freud uses the example of the Duke’s horse, which he wants dyed blue, and also this one:

Frederick the Great heard of a preacher in Silesia who had the reputation of being in contact with spirits. He sent for the man and received him with the question “You can conjure up spirits?”

The reply was: “At your Majesty‘s command. But they don‘t come.”‘

Freud notes

In order to carry out the replacement, it was necessary to add a “but” to the “yes”; so that “yes” and “but” are equivalent in sense to “no” (51).

The example with the Duke’s horse adds an “if,” with similar effect. Freud comes to call this “representation by the opposite” (51-52).

  • Overstatement

In these the “yes” which would be in place in the reduction is replaced by a “no,” which, however, on account of its content, has the force of an intensified “yes,” and vice versa. A denial is a substitute for an overstated confirmation. (52)

Freud’s examples are:

Two Jews were discussing baths. “I have a bath every year,” said one of them, “whether I need one or not.”

A Jew noticed the remains of some food in another one‘s beard. “I can tell you what you had to eat yesterday.”

“Well, tell me.”

“Lentils, then.”

“Wrong: the day before yesterday!” (53)

This is the idea of protesting too much, or revealing things that one shouldn’t.  While Freud constantly points out that his classifications overlap, he misses making a distinction between this and his “automatic” faulty reasoning, above.

As these examples show, representation by the opposite is an instrument of joke-technique that is used frequently and works powerfully. (54)

Summary

So displacement is the first of several techniques by which the joker makes use of deviations from normal thinking within the situation to achieve humor.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

 

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

Tiffany Haddish Stepped in It Again.

Posted on by nwilson

The issue

In an interview with Los Angeles Times reporter, Tre’Vell Anderson (7/20/2017), she said Bill Cosby was one of the comedians who inspired her, and added that she wouldn’t mind collaborating with him on a project:

I still want to work with Bill Cosby; I don’t care, I’ll drink the juice. I’ll drink the juice. I’ll take a nap. I don’t give a damn. [Laughs.] But seriously, I would love for him to play my grandfather in something.

Michael Harriot of theroot.com (7/28/2017) tracks the outrage,

As soon as the article was published, headlines sprang up all over the internet condemning Haddish’s remarks as insensitive to Cosby’s accusers and all survivors of sexual abuse and rape.

Just kidding

In an AP interview (7/27/2017), she clarified that her comments were an attempt at a joke. She explained that she had done over 20 interviews that day and probably reached a little too far trying to conjure up something funny for the interviewer.

In every interview you have to be humorous because you’re a comedian. So I was trying to be humorous, and maybe it was not the best joke, but it was a joke. I’ll work with whomever. I’m not afraid of nobody. Nobody can do anything to me that I don’t allow.

This is a matter we’ve discussed before, the “just kidding” response. Don’t get me wrong: I think Haddish’s statement was a joke, made in the moment. And I think further that she expresses a sentiment that is right: at this stage of her career, she should work with anyone who can give her a leg up, even if it’s Cosby – though she should watch out for herself.

However, Haddish’s point is that she has to be funny in interviews because she’s a comic. Several comics would dispute this, arguing that when they’re not onstage, they shouldn’t have this obligation – this expectation.  Haddish’s situation is different, I would argue, than comics who make politically incorrect or ill advised jokes onstage.

Doing it onstage

Harriot makes some important points here:

In 2011, Morgan was castigated for going on an “anti-gay tirade” during a Nashville, Tenn., comedy show. That’s right. He wasn’t trying to make a joke to a newspaper. He was onstage talking to people who paid to hear him go onstage to make jokes. Earlier this year, Dave Chappelle faced the same backlash when he released a pair of specials that had parts many felt were transphobic and blind to rape culture.

I am not one of those people who rail against the culture of political correctness; nor am I one of those people who believe that “art” is sacrosanct and cannot be criticized. However, I do think it is at least disingenuous and at most stupid to criticize comedians for making jokes when we know it’s a joke.

It may seem like a fine line to parse, but I separate them from city officials who email Barack Obama memes to each other or cops caught making racist jokes because we pay them to calculate our water bill and patrol the streets. They can make their friends laugh on their own time.

Cosby’s alleged crimes are horrendous. Haddish is a product of abuse and dysfunction, and perhaps her ability to make fun of it and situations like the one she escaped is one of the pillars on which her I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude stands. She explained that it was a joke. That’s enough.

Harriot is right that comics should get some leeway onstage.  However, he would seem to extend the same “joking” excuse to all of a comic’s activities; an understanding he does not bestow on your average Joe.

This begs the questions, “When she’s not onstage, do we know it was a joke? How? Should we just take her at her word?” While Haddish is not one of those “social” or “political” comics, who have an overt message and will bring it up onstage and moreso in interviews, neither does she get to escape the idea that when offstage, she might be a real person. While we can agree that while “on the job,” our public officials and servants don’t get to make racist jokes, do comics get the same leeway in interviews as they do onstage?

 

 

Harriot’s concessions

Harriot makes some concessions to the culture of sensitivity:

I can understand when people say they don’t like that brand of comedy (I still don’t understand how Andrew Dice Clay was ever a thing). I can even understand why some people get offended when someone they don’t know says something that has no effect on their lives whatsoever. Even though I wasn’t outraged when Emilia Clarke equated Hollywood sexism with racism, I thought it was a stupid thing to say with a straight face.

Yes, as will become apparent (if it isn’t already), there are forms of humor and comics I downright detest – some of these comics will for that reason never appear on this blog – Dice isn’t one of them.  And yes, we should help people by becoming outraged on their behalf – particularly when some of them are outraged – that’s called “being an ally.”

False dichotomies

Harriot is also right to point out some of the points of comedy, but he takes it too far:

Much of comedy is using absurdity and hyperbole to make fun of reality. There are some who prefer to chuckle, but I don’t want to live in a world where sidesplitting jokes are replaced by innocuous puns and clever witticisms. I like the “I might get you pregnant” Morgan. I prefer the Chappelle who dissects white people, crackheads and racism. You can’t get that by making someone dance on the knife’s edge of public sentiment.

You can’t fall in love with her for blithely beginning a story with “What had happened was … ” on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and turn around and get upset with her when she doesn’t carefully choose her words for a newspaper interview. You can’t ask her to tread gently around sensitive toes and give banana-grapefruit blowjobs in a movie. Milquetoast doesn’t coexist with bold fearlessness.

They don’t go dagetha.

This is a false dichotomy: either we allow everything, or we are reduced to puns and witticisms.  I agree that, as with all free speech, comedians should be free to say whatever they want.  They are not, however, free from the consequences of their speech.  These consequences will usually be mixed – some will understand their intent, even if they miss their mark, but some will be outraged, and perhaps they should be. That’s what affects a comic’s career.  In the internet age, comics will find their crowds, their niches, however, if they want to become huge, they have to appeal to the mainstream, and that means not saying things that hugely offend.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?