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

Mike Birbiglia on Jokes

Posted on by nwilson

I’ve been a fan of Mike Birbiglia for a long time now, bought his merchandise, watched all his specials and both his movies (Sleepwalk with Me, 2012 and Don’t Think Twice, 2016). And while there are good and bad parts, his best bits – like his “Cracker please!” bit and the bit about positive stereotypes – are pure gold.

In his 2017 Netflix special, Thank God for Jokes, Mike Birbiglia tells a lot of jokes, but he also talks a lot about jokes. [Why am I discussing this? Check out Why Academics Should Listen to Comics.] So here’s a summary of his take on what jokes are.

Volatile and offensive

About a minute and forty seconds in, he says:

But jokes are something I think about all the time.  They’re a volatile type of speech. I mean, you just look at the news. The Charlie Hebdo incident two years ago where these ten satirists were killed for drawing a disrespectful cartoon of Mohamed who the killers believed to be the prophet of Allah, their lord and savior, which, by the way, he might be [Looks around nervously]…. The point is, is that these were comedy writers, like me, and they were murdered. And I was so shocked by this at the time, I remember talking to everybody about it, and my mother said to me, she said, “Well can’t these writers just write jokes that aren’t offensive?”

And I thought about it. And I said, “I’m not sure that’s possible, because all jokes are offensive to someone.” I’ll give you an example….

So jokes are volatile, which means unpredictable, and usually with bad connotations, perhaps because they are always offensive to someone.  His whole show can be read as a series of examples of this definition.

To be fair, it seems, when looking at his examples, that all jokes are only potentially offensive to someone. At the end of the show, he gives a laundry list of things he’s said, that when taken out of context, could be read as offensive.

A chunk that wasn’t on the list was a story about accommodating another airline passenger who has a nut allergy, where he says,

You know who doesn’t like this story are people with nut allergies. And you know who does like this story is everyone else. And, I feel genuinely conflicted about that, you know because there’s like almost a thousand people in this room together right now, and about 997 of us are like, “Ha ha! Nuts in the air!” And then three of us secretly are like, “That’s my life.” You know. And I don’t want to be that to you, but jokes have to be about something.

So here’s more the point of his statement: jokes have content and context, and the content can always be taken badly in a different context.

He also points out that you can be hit for the things you avoid. Part of the laundry list of things that supposedly might offend his audience were jokes he didn’t say: “Then he didn’t tell one joke about Muslims, because he loves ISIS!” [Nevermind that he did have a nonverbal joke about the Charlie Hebdo incident, which was, in a way, a joke about Muslims.]

Superiority and Relief

To put this in the larger conversation, we might say that jokes offend people when they feel they’re being ridiculed or corrected (in the sense of John C. Meyer’s model of the enforcement or differentiation functions), both of which are part and parcel to Superiority theory. While Birbiglia’s jokes aren’t aimed at anyone and they don’t seem mean-spirited in nature, they still might be read as a critique, particularly when he goes after an audience member for referring to a female cop.

However, the offensive can also refer to things that are taboo, things that we shouldn’t talk about and therefore we offend people when we do. This type of language is often attributed to Relief theory, it’s not an attack on their person, so much as an attack on their sensibilities.  This was the violation of which people accused Kathy Griffin.

Context matters

Birbiglia continues,

Which is why I’m cautious when I tell jokes on stage, because anything can be taken out of context, people’s careers are taken down instantly, and some people are killed. So I’m putting this is your hands. You can choose to leave here and quote me out of context, or you can choose not to, but I trust that you won’t.

While Birbiglia is primarily talking about Charlie Hebdo, we could apply this statement as much to Lenny Bruce, who went to trial for obscenity in San Francisco and New York, as to Kathy Griffin.

Historical note: By 1965, Bruce had been arrested nineteen times and convicted of obscenity once (later overturned).  Bruce’s legal battles and an inability to get gigs – even though he never paid any fines, never served any real jail time, and was, in the end, never convicted – eventually bankrupted him; he died before the final appeal was settled, though he was pardoned posthumously in 2003. It’s unclear if Griffin will suffer that much.

Birbiglia’s overarching point is that being a good neighbor means, in part, “listening to people and the context in which they intend their words.” Generally a good message for any type of communication.

Specific audiences are harder

Early on, Birbiglia says,

I’ve been a comedian for 15 years and what I’ve learned, is that you should never tell jokes to the people who the jokes are about.

He says that when performing for specific audiences, every relevant topic is potentially a mine field. He gives the example of a Christian college performance that didn’t go over well.

John C. Meyer might state that these audiences are too familiar with the incidents, and therefore too invested in the material to find the humor.

Crossing lines

After a joke about Janis the Muppet doing heroin, Birbiglia notes he “crossed a line.”

That’s what you always have to think about when you’re writing jokes, is sort of, “Where is the line?” And you don’t want to cross it, but you want to go near it. And, you know, it’s subjective, sort of, where the line is, and that’s where it becomes complicated.

Once again, Birbiglia seems to be referring in statements like this to Relief theory – approaching a line may be akin to approaching a taboo, which creates tension, which the joke can then relieve – unless it completely transgresses. Once the line is crossed, the tension boils over into action.

Opinions and inner thoughts

After telling his stories about dealing with late people, Birbiglia says,

But that’s just my side of the story…. That’s what I love about jokes, they’re just your side of the story. They’re your opinion, which isn’t to say they’re always just opinions, sometimes they’re an externalization of your inner thoughts, and often your inner thoughts are inappropriate.

Here we see some links to the idea of comics as truth-tellers; that we are ourselves on-stage, not some role or persona, as discussed by several comics in the documentary Dying Laughing. Their our bona fide opinions, our take on events, our inner (read as deep seated, and therefore more true) thoughts.

The mention of appropriateness seems another reference to Relief theory, as mentioned above.

Tragedy plus time

In an off-hand way, Birbiglia mentions that “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.”  This is a quote attributed by Goodreads and other sources to Mark Twain, who may have said “Humor is tragedy plus time.”

However, Quote Investigator attributes it to a 1957 Cosmopolitan interview with Steve Allen, and his full explanation is worth quoting:

When I explained to a friend recently that the subject matter of most comedy is tragic (drunkenness, overweight, financial problems, accidents, etc.) he said, “Do you mean to tell me that the dreadful events of the day are a fit subject for humorous comment? The answer is “No, but they will be pretty soon.”

Man jokes about the things that depress him, but he usually waits till a certain amount of time has passed. It must have been a tragedy when Judge Crater disappeared, but everybody jokes about it now. I guess you can make a mathematical formula out of it. Tragedy plus time equals comedy.

Mark A. Rayner, attributes a similar quote to Lenny Bruce, who supposedly said,

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.

Good stuff, but at it’s base, it seems like a rehash of Hobbes’ 1640 statement that laughter is “a sudden glory, arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly” (Chapter ix, § 13; Morreall, Humor). With distance from our own weakness, we can look back and laugh. That’s the tragedy plus time in a nutshell. It is this recognition of people’s ability to change and therefore laugh at our former ignorance or infirmity that really gives a boost to the applicability of Superiority theory.

I’m joking/Just kidding

A topic on my list of things to cover in this blog are statements of “just kidding” and “I’m joking.”  Birbiglia can get us started:

Like if you think about jokes…. you can’t tell jokes in life almost ever, like at work, or  school or the airport is a great example. I read a story where a guy sneezed on a plane, looks around and he goes, “I have ebola.”

Here’s why that’s not a good joke: they landed the plane. They landed the plane, and they’re met by the guys in hazmat suits, and his defense was “I’m joking!” Which is always this catchall defense when people say dumb things. Like, you can’t tell jokes at work, because at some point in history, some idiot showed up at work and was like, “Nice tits, Betsy!” And Betsy’s like, “What?!” And that guy’s like, “I’m joking!” And the boss is like, “Uuuuuuh, no more jokes!”  Jokes have been ruined by people who aren’t good at telling jokes. A joke should never end with, “I’m joking!” or “Git’r done!”

He later includes Fozzie Bear’s catchphrase, “Waka Waka,” in this mix. The message seems to be that if you have to defend it by labeling it a joke – which catchphrases can also do – then it either wasn’t, at base, a joke, or it really wasn’t funny. As I’ve pointed out, that seemed to be Bill Maher’s biggest problem with his N-word incident.

“I’m joking” and “just kidding” are often abused ways of “taking back” a statement, but nothing that is said or done can truly be taken back. It’s at most placed under erasure, which Jacques Derrida talks so much about [REALLY looking forward to revisiting that author *sarcasm*]. In a nutshell, all you do is strike-through; in Birbiglia’s example, the coworker has (now) said (back then) “Nice tits, Betsy!” It’s still there, he just added a line about not meaning it, or meaning something different by it (if it were ironical).  The original statement can still be read underneath.

The comic process

Birbiglia has a bit about a visit to his urologist, and how he’s not funny on-the-spot. He then says,

I feel like we’re led to believe this false cliche from romantic comedies that we’re all just whipping off jokes all the time. Like, we meet a girl in a coffee shop and we’re like, “What’s in your latte, cum?” And she’ll be like, “You’re hilarious! We should be married in ninety minutes!” But in real life, that guy gets arrested, or runs for president.

On the conversation with his urologist, Birbiglia notes, “I’ll take this conversation home and work on it, and that will be the bit.”

A lot of comics make statements like these, which for me are nice. Some comics are obviously hilarious in real life, for instance, Robin Williams, anyone from Whose Line Is It Anyway?, etc. Other comics have our moments, but most of our work is done in rewriting and editing.  Birbiglia places himself in this category.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

Do you agree with Birbiglia’s perspectives?  Did you see something different in his statements (even the ones I didn’t quote)?

References:

Hobbes, Thomas. The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic: Part I, Human Nature, Part II, De Corpore Politico; with Three lives.  Ed. J.C.A. Gaskin.  New York: Oxford University, 1994.

Morreal, John.  “Verbal Humor Without Switching Scripts and Without Non-Bona Fide Communication.”  International Journal of Humor Research 17 (2004): 393-400.

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

Why Academics Should Listen to Comics

Posted on by nwilson

Comics are critics

One of the premises of my work is that comics are social and cultural critics. Comics frequently operate in a critical mode, and they home in on a lot of social and cultural problems.  The difference, though, between comics and bona fide critics is that comics most often try to push their critiques to the funniest possible outcome, rather than the most social conscious outcome – but not always; some try to do both.

Comics study jokes

In any case, one thing comics – especially successful comics – are intensely interested in is the joke work: how to write them, tell them, what they are and why people laugh.  Moreover, their opinions about jokes might be just as good as the opinions of the social scientists and cultural critics that formally study them – a lot of the time, they’ve put in about an equal amount of time.

Academic bases

More formally [Warning: Academic jargon alert! Skip this paragraph if you want to stay sane!], at a certain level, it’s all just discourse, articulating different loci in an archive to reflect and deflect the discourse formation that is stand-up comedy. Whereas critics retroactively take apart jokes and determine their structure and content, comics use their tools to create that structure and content, and then they go further: they test it out on real-world audiences and collect data in real time.

Now, these tests are sporadic, haphazard, slap-dash affairs, highly susceptible to the whims of individual audiences and the subjective reflection of the comic – not a systematic and formal study of the performance of the joke.  Oftentimes, what they really have going for them is persistence. However, the end result of this process can be a successful live show.

Jumbled positions

Often times, the theories that come from comics are a hodgepodge of different critical theories that have been circulating for decades, if not centuries.  What I like to point out is when the theories of the comics overlap with the theories of the critics, and where they differ.

Successful application

And who’s to say the comic’s bizarre mix isn’t the “correct” one? After all, it got them to the stage they currently occupy, which is more than the armchair academic critic can say. True, for every successful comic, there are a host of others trying out the same premises, similar personas, etc.

These comics could fail for a number of reasons: the audience one night didn’t like the joke, so they dropped it; they failed to execute it properly on a series of nights and thought the problem was the joke, and dropped it; they didn’t try to rewrite the joke in a different way; the joke was wrong for their persona or that set; etc., etc., etc.

There are so many ways a good joke could fail! That’s why I find humor so interesting!

References:

Biesecker, Barbara.  “Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric.”  Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 350-64.

Foucault, Michel.  The Archaeology of Knowledge.  New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

—.  “Space of Invention: Dissension, Freedom, and Thought in Foucault.”  Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002): 328-344.

Humor Theories/Stand-Up Comedy/Theories About Jokes

Victor Raskin’s Script Theory

Posted on by nwilson

Presuppositions, “common sense,” and scripts

In proposing Script Theory, a major model seen to support Incongruity theory, Linguist Victor Raskin notes that

[M]any jokes are based on the knowledge of a presupposition shared by the speaker and the hearer(s) (327).

Our understanding of the sentence … [its meaning], depends among others, on the two sources, the lexicon (language) and our knowledge of certain things about the world we live in. (329).

Thus the premise is that the speaker and listeners have presupposed, shared understanding. He compares our knowledge of the “lexicon” to a dictionary, and “our knowledge of certain things” to an encyclopedia, but we store both the meanings of words and “cognitive structures” in our minds.  Raskin labels the cognitive structures “common sense,” and later “scripts.”

“The scripts are … the “common sense” cognitive structures stored in the mind of the native speaker” (325)

The scripts are designed to describe certain standard routines, processes, [later, he includes “standard procedures, basic situations, (329)], etc., the way the native speaker views them and thus to provide semantic theory with a restricted and prestructured outlook into the extra-linguistic world. (325)

Overlap

As such, verbal humor

is the result of a partial overlap of two (or more) different and in a sense opposite scripts which are all compatible (fully or partially) with the text carrying this element (325).

Or later:

[M]uch of verbal humor depends on a partial or complete overlap of two or more scripts all of which are compatible with the joke carrying text (332).

The scripts must each make sense when applied to the text of the joke. Through examples he notes that the script shifts due to certain word use.  For instance, in the example,

The Junior String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.

The word “played” is an indicator we can shift from the primary script, played music, to a secondary script, played sports against.  While the set-up possessed the necessary indicators (i.e. it was “compatible” with both scripts), the punch line brings it home to the audience.

He admits the jokes and scripts are simple, but he’s merely trying to illustrate a point.  In practice, both are much more complex, and the more complex the script, “quite often, the better is the joke” (334).

He further notes that the overlap can not be between just any two scripts, “The two overlapping scripts should be opposite in a certain sense” (333).

In his later work, Raskin proposes a set of possible categories:

  • Actual/non-actual
  • Normal/abnormal
  • Possible/impossible
  • Good/bad
  • Life/death
  • Obscene/non-obscene
  • Money/no money
  • High stature/low stature (1985, 113-114)

Such lists, he argues, are limited and culturally based, and there must be a cultural connection between the two scripts:

[O]ne cannot simply juxtapose two incongruous things and call it a joke, but rather one must find a clever way of making them make pseudo-sense together (Triezenberg, 537).

To be fair, when he says opposite, they don’t have to be diametrically opposed, merely incompatible, operating in different realms or registers. Playing music is a physical act, but the goal is harmony, playing sports is also a physical act, but the goal is often healthy competition.

Underlying Assumptions: Getting it

My problem with Script Theory is that it assumes certain elements of intentionality, which I’ve discussed before as the assumption that the comic’s only goal is to create humor.  Here, the assumption is that the comic wants to create humor in specific ways, and that there are a finite number of them.  Therefore, it’s the audience’s job to “get the joke.”

“Getting” the scripts

So to take Raskin’s “Brahms” joke:

The Junior String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.

When we get the statement: “The Junior String Quartet played Brahms,” we have to supply the script that “All string quartets play music.” We also apply a script that “Brahms created music that can be played.” However, we also are supposed to get competing scripts that “People make up string quartets,” and “People can play both music and sports,” and “Brahms was also a person, who can also play sports.”  This is the application of a simple model of verbal irony, where there is tension between two possible intended meanings, one obvious, one implied.  The punch line shifts the meaning from one to the other, and the implied meaning is given priority – it is, for the purposes of the joke, the right one.

Supplemental scripts

One of my major points (that I continue to emphasize in this blog), is that this process can be more complex than a simple “fill-in-the-blank” that follows author intent.  Audiences can be active, they can supplement a text and create humor.

Ross Perot

For instance,  John C. Meyer, when giving examples for his Four Functions of Humor, talks about when failed 1992 independent presidential candidate Ross Perot, who was caricatured in political cartoons as having huge ears, quipped in a debate, “If there are some good plans out there, I’m all ears.”  Meyer argued that audience members familiar with the cartoons and Perot, could laugh with him at those caricatures, thus identifying with him.  However, Meyer also mentions that Perot denied knowing or noticing that what he said was funny.

So in this case, the primary script, that “‘I’m all ears’ means ‘I’m ready to listen'” was the only intended script.  The text was also compatible with a known secondary script, “Ross Perot has big ears,” but this script wasn’t intended, only inferred. The audience therefore, I argue, didn’t need to laugh with Perot at the caricature, they could laugh at Perot himself as embodying the caricature, and all the harder for him not seeing why that was funny.

Gabriel Iglesias

In a more recent and popular example, Gabriel Iglesias, in his 2007 special Hot and Fluffy, tells a joke where he was drunk at a bar on St. Patrick’s day, and he starts to do an accent (it’s more Scottish than Irish, but whatever), and fools other patrons, who ask him questions.

People go, “Are you here by yourself.” I go, “No, I’m not here by myself. Donkey!”

Now, if you’re not laughing, you need to get out more often, because that’s a funny joke. That’s hysterical, ask a ten-year-old, they’ll tell you [in a child’s voice] “That’s funny!”

Then he talks about the joke,

I did that joke one night in Memphis, Tennessee, and some guy thought he knew why it was funny, and he was waaay off, but he confronted me outside, all drunk

[In a drunk, nasally voice with a southern twang] “Hey you! Fluffy.”

I’m like, “What?”

“‘mere.” [A callback to a previous joke]

“No, you ‘mere.”

And he walks over and he’s like, “I have to tell you, your show was hysterical. I damn near wet myself when you said ‘Donkey!’ My friend, Roy, didn’t laugh, so I had to explain it to him. And he thinks I’m wrong, but I know I’m right.  Could you set the record straight?”

“Sure, what’d you tell your friend?”

“Ok, look here. I told him the reason why it was funnier than hell that you said ‘Donkey!’ was ’cause you’re Mexican. And you people ride ‘Donkeys!'”

What this situation reveals, is that even though Iglesias has a script in mind (for those not in the loop, it was a reference to the film Shrek) and it’s clearly indicated (e.g. he’s a large man, doing a poor Scottish accent, etc.) the audience member found a competing script that worked for him, applied it and thus found it funny. This script, however, wasn’t “shared by the speaker” or even necessarily, the other hearers.

Iglesias doesn’t correct the guy, and he has his reasons, but perhaps additionally there’s this: the guy laughed – hard!  He enjoyed the show. He was a fan.

And most importantly, who’s to say he was “wrong” about why it was funny to him? Yes, it’s mildly racist in that it’s an inaccurate and not widely held stereotype (i.e. it wasn’t “common sense”), but not funny?

The guy thought he was laughing with Iglesias, at the stereotype, just as Meyer thought people were laughing with Perot about the caricature. So he’s at least “that much” right.

Summary

Raskin’s Script Theory argues that jokes, especially complex jokes, create gaps that can be filled by competing scripts.  And Raskin knows there can be multiple scripts (more than two) that can get it done.

What these two examples show is that the speaker doesn’t control the script.  They can set it up as well as possible, but the audience still has to do the leg work, and as with the enthymeme, which the audience can make persuasive or not, the script they supply can make the joke funny or not.

Further, we might never be able to pin down which part – if any – of those scripts the author intended the audience “got.” Their laughter gives us no clue, as it seems uniform, and thus comics and critics assume everybody “got” the same thing.  But they might not have.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Aristotle, The Rhetoric

Meyer, John C.  “Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication.”  Communication Theory 10.3 (2000): 310-331.

Raskin, Victor. “Semantic Mechanisms of Humor.” Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1979), pp. 325-335.

Raskin, Victor. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Boston: D. Reidel (1985).

Triezenberg, Katrina E. “Humor in Literature.” In Primer of Humor Research, ed. Victor Raskin. New York: Mouton de Gruyte (2008).

Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny?  A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.

Wilson, Nathan. “Divisive Comedy: A Critical Examination of Audience Power.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 8 (2), 2011: 276-29

Theories About Audiences/Theories About Comics/Theories About Laughter

Comic Intent II: Getting it

Posted on by nwilson

My problem with a number of different theories is that they assume certain elements of intentionality, which I’ve discussed before as assuming the comic’s only goal is to create humor.  Here, the assumption is that the comic wants to create humor in specific ways, and that there are a finite number of them.  It’s the audience’s job to “get the joke.”  This form of intentionality often has (at least) four sub-assumptions:

  1. That the comic wrote the joke a particular way, so
  2. The audience has to “get it” in exactly that way to laugh; thus,
  3. When they laugh, they are always laughing in the way the comic wanted, and
  4. We know what that intention was/is.

These are the assumptions of bona fide persuasion. Victor Raskin mentions the idea of bona fide communication early in his discussion of Script Theory, and says he rejects it, but the traces are still there.  These assumptions are based on the Classical Greek persuasive model of the syllogism and its equivalent, the enthymeme, and the concept of verbal irony [I’ll have more to say on this soon].

Syllogisms & Enthymemes

Aristotle proposed a way of breaking down an argument into three component parts:

  1. Major premise – Usually known, overarching truths, or we might say, “common sense” or scripts
  2. Minor premise – Particular truths about the situation or object discussed
  3. Conclusion – The logical result of the two premises

So the classical example (of a categorical, one type of syllogism) is:

  1. All men are mortal
  2. Socrates is a man
  3. Thus Socrates is mortal

If we accept that all men are mortal, and that Socrates is a man, then we must conclude that he is mortal.

The enthymeme can either be a syllogism where one or more premise is not necessarily true, but only probable (e.g. All men are mortal, and Socrates is probably a man, therefore…), or it can be a truncated syllogism, where one piece is missing (e.g. Socrates is a man and therefore mortal [–because we know, “All men are…”]).

Truncated enthymemes are thought to be more persuasive because the audience must do the leg work; they supply the missing piece, making the argument work for them (or fail to), and thus, in a sense, they convince themselves.

Political Potential

The problem, as I’ve argued elsewhere, is that if we allow that audience’s convince themselves, then they have a lot of the power in the exchange. They have the freedom to “get” things the author didn’t intend – in short, to supplement the text – and to “not get,” miss, or overlook things the author did.

Especially when jokes are complex – we could use big words like polysemic (having multiple possible meanings) and polyvalent (having multiple possible ways of evaluating them) – we might never be able to pin down which part–if any–of those the author intended the audience “got.” Their laughter gives us no clue, as it seems uniform, and thus comics and critics assume everybody “got” the same thing.  But they might not have; see my discussion of Victor Raskin’s Script Theory for just two examples.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Aristotle, The Rhetoric

Ceccarelli, Leah.  “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism.”  Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 395-415.

Fiske, John.  Television Culture.  New York: Routledge, 1987.

Raskin, Victor. “Semantic Mechanisms of Humor.” Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1979): 325-335.

Raskin, Victor. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Boston: D. Reidel, 1985.

Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny?  A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.

Wilson, Nathan. “Divisive Comedy: A Critical Examination of Audience Power.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 8 (2), 2011: 276-29

Theories About Audiences/Theories About Laughter

Conscious Laughter: Fake Laughs and Guffaws

Posted on by nwilson

As I’ve noted, John C. Meyer draws a useful distinction between laughing with and laughing at – when we laugh with people, we draw them closer, when we laugh at people, we push them away.  I’ve further complicated this with Joanne Gilbert’s model of victims and butts – we laugh with the victim, at the butt of the joke. These functions, however, create a potential for people to laugh strategically, especially in response to unequal power in their relationships. Basically, they can laugh with their superiors, or fake laugh – even when they feel personally attacked – or they can laugh with those who critique them, or guffaw – perhaps especially when they’re being attacked.

Fake Laughs

Horowitz notes,

[E]veryone laughs longest and hardest at the boss’s jokes.  The ability to be a good sport and laugh at a joke, especially when it’s on you, is the mark of a good subordinate (5).

Other critics have found this to be true in race and gender relations (Apte, Gilbert).  In this vein, many theorists differentiate between real laughter and “fake” or “nervous laughter” (Barreca; Gilbert; Horowitz; Limon; Merrill).

The latter terms designate laughter that is “usually done to placate someone in power or show that you get a joke (when, in fact, you might not enjoy or even understand it)” (Horowitz, 11).  For Horowitz,

A fake laugh is like a fake orgasm—intended to smooth over a difficult social situation and not much fun for the laugher (11).

Power Problems

The problem is, when performed within a large group, not all of whom are faking it, fake laughter becomes virtually indistinguishable from real enjoyment, and thus is taken as such. While John Limon rules this form of laughter out of his absolute model – it is the mark of a “failed joke” – he notes that if we were laughing in the moment, we cannot claim fake laughter (or any alternative motive) after the fact – “individual recantations are invalid” (11). It’s Homer’s response to Marge’s laugh in The Simpsons Movie: “You smiled! I’m off the hook!”

The stipulation that one be a “good sport” isn’t limited to those without power.  Thus subordinates aren’t the only ones who feign laughter; those in power guffaw.

Guffaws

Horowitz explains how the rule of laughter and decorum at events like “roasts” (or I would add, White House Correspondents Dinners) dictates that the target of the jokes and the rest of the audience must not rebel, and they must not interrupt; they must show themselves to be good sports to the extent that they laugh or remain silent.  In short, they must “take it” (5).  However, to the extent that audiences exercise a considerable amount of power, they may have more options in their laughter than simple agreement with the comic; in laughing at him, they can refocus the humor.

It is very much like when a person makes an earnest declarative statement – for instance, they say, “I’m the best!” – and somebody laughs.  The laughter of the listener doesn’t allow the statement to mean what the speaker intends it to mean.  In fact, by taking it differently than its intended meaning, laughter creates the possibility that the statement is ironical; the statement is now revealed to mean multiple things (it always had that possibility, the laugh just made it visible).

This is ridicule – or laughing at – in its strictest sense, which serves a socializing function: it says in essence “I don’t believe you, therefore you must be kidding.”  It shifts the power over meaning from the speaker’s intention to the listener’s.

Similarly, Gilbert believes that groups who perceive themselves to be in-power, such as white, middle class, cisgendered, heterosexual males, are able to shift the meaning and laugh appreciatively at jokes at their expense, a condition she calls the “male guffaw.”  She posits:

Perhaps by laughing a man is saying, “I’m a straight, white male—I am hegemony—hear me roar.  No amount of joking, no matter how well done, is about to unseat me from my power position any time soon.”  Perhaps the laughter is precisely because he is not threatened (163, emphasis in original).

While she speaks specifically of male guffaws, we can broaden the use of the term to apply to any group with claims to domination (156).  Laughter thus becomes an act through which someone represents a superior position.

Power Potential

While many theorists feel that guffaws trivialize a challenge – that we expose our power over a situation precisely by laughing at it – this characterization is not quite accurate.  Instead, imagine that through laughter, you transform yourself from butt to victim; that suddenly we are laughing with ourselves as targets, and laughing at the comic or critic, or even at the situation at large. While this seems easier to pull off when people believe we have that power, it is nevertheless a potential that all targets of laughter have – we decide what the joke means.  Thus, guffawing is a particularly political form of uptake; it is a political act.

Political Possibilities?

Laughter as action

Laughter can thus be seen as an act of humor – not simply a response to humor – in that laughter performs the same function as the set up of a joke: it creates a space, a gap between the signifier (what was said) and the signified (what it means) [I’ll fill in this piece later].

Admittedly, this process is not easy – particularly in the case of people with little social power.  After all, just because you laugh doesn’t mean the joke changes meaning for most people; to paraphrase the movie Mean Girls, I can’t, individually, make ‘fetch’ happen. If you have no power in the situation, the attempt to challenge the person mocking you does little to take them down a peg – it certainly is not likely not trivialize their power in the way that a more powerful person could.  However, this it not to say that it can’t happen.

The ability that the laugher possesses to hijack the meaning of a joke – or any statement, for that matter – has important implications.  Once again, Meyer begins to point us in a productive direction.

In his final position (differentiation), Meyer notes that humor that unites one group may differentiate that group from another, and for him the first group’s laughter is matched by the second group’s outrage (he notes that group members “would be expected to object if an ‘outsider’ told the same deprecatory jokes about their group,” [323] and remember, objections violate the contract of humor).  Meyer implies that a significant part of the audience will not find the joke funny and the others will laugh at them – perhaps the first group is mad that the others are laughing at them.

But it would be a mistake to reduce Meyer’s statements to the enforcement of a humorous/serious divide, as such a blatant division of the audience along lines of humor/outrage is not the most desirable outcome for the political humorist.

Instead, what if those who were outraged fake laughed or even guffawed? The laugh would be read as a statement of agreement, which has political repercussions; yet at the same time, for the individual it is a statement of dissent that, contrary to Limon’s theory, cannot be ignored. It is not inaction, but rather may merely defer more direct action until a later time.

Summary

In fake laughs and guffaws we note the break down of a laughter/outrage binary.  One can be furious and still perform as if the joke is funny, aligning oneself with the speaker (fake it).  Conversely, we can laugh and yet differentiate ourselves from the speaker (ridicule or guffaw).

If humor has consequences and laughter guarantees neither that we found the joke funny nor that we agree with the meaning intended by the author (i.e. we didn’t “get it”), then perhaps we can see other possibilities for a redefinition of humor.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Barreca, Regina R.  “Introduction.”  Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy.  Ed. R. Barreca.  New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988. 3-23.

Gilbert, Joanne.  Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender and Cultural Critique. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 2004.

Horowitz, Susan.  Queens of Comedy: Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Joan Rivers, and the New Generation of Funny Women.  Amsterdam, Netherlands: Gordon and Breach, 1997.

Limon, John.  Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Merrill, L. “Feminist Humor: Rebellious and Self-Affirming.” Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy. Ed. R. Barreca.  New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988.

Meyer, John C.  “Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication.”  Communication Theory 10.3 (2000): 310-331.

Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny?  A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.

Wilson, Nathan. “Divisive Comedy: A Critical Examination of Audience Power.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 8 (2), 2011: 276-291. 

Theories About Audiences/Theories About Laughter

Laughing With Victims At Butts

Posted on by nwilson

Apologies for reposting, but in trying to organize the site I think it will be more useful to break the theory out from the cases. This enables me to just link to the theory in future cases, without making people read the previous case. – N

The “with/at” question

There’s a problem with laughter that I call the “with/at” question. Are we laughing with someone? Or are we laughing at someone? Or both? And who/what is the object of each?  I’ve already written about how John C. Meyer characterizes the function of laughing with vs. laughing at: when we laugh with people, we draw them closer, when we laugh at people, we push them away.

Victims & Butts

Joanne Gilbert offers a distinction between the victim of the humor, the person or group who receives negative treatment within the narrative of the joke, and the butt of the humor, the person or group who is at fault and therefore worthy of ridicule.

We should note that this distinction comes from a model of superiority.  In a frame of tension release, we could imagine a distinction among stressors and triggers; what is creating the tension and what triggers that release.  We would always laugh at stressors in light of the release, but even this relationship can be complicated when one delves deeper.

This would seem to solve the “with/at” problem: we always laugh with the victim, at the perceived butt (to the extent that these are different).  This distinction is crucial because, as Samuel Janus states, “The ability to make a person laugh with [a minority group], not at them, is a vital one” (as cited in Horowitz, 7).  However, this distinction makes things more complicated as we now have to navigate new potential sources of humor.

Because humor could be found in many different parts of the joke or performance, it is difficult to pin it all down.  Further, laughter, particularly when expressed by a group, does not necessarily reveal any of the particularities. For an example, see my discussion of the difference between Silverman and Maher.

Gilbert notes there is no guarantee that even members of preexisting groups – groups that would seem to share the same backgrounds, values, etc. – will laugh for the same reasons.  Despite the common interpretations of laughter, Laughter is not a uniform sign that the author’s intent was received.  Further, though laughing is a performance, this performance does not have to be unconscious and therefore trivializing; it can be feigned.  While there are many reasons for feigning laughter, I will discuss begin with two:  fake laughter and guffaws.

References:

Gilbert, Joanne.  Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender and Cultural Critique. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 2004.

Horowitz, Susan.  Queens of Comedy: Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Joan Rivers, and the New Generation of Funny Women.  Amsterdam, Netherlands: Gordon and Breach, 1997.

Meyer, John C.  “Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication.”  Communication Theory 10.3 (2000): 310-331.

Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny?  A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.

Wilson, Nathan. “Divisive Comedy: A Critical Examination of Audience Power.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 8 (2), 2011: 276-291. 

 

Theories About Audiences/Theories About Comics/Theories About Laughter

John C. Meyer’s Four Functions of Humor

Posted on by nwilson

John C. Meyer was interested in how people use humor – what their purpose is. Meyer’s first conception is that people can use humor to unite us or to divide us. Meyer is thus one of several critics who note a crucial distinction between laughing with and laughing at – when we laugh with people, we draw them closer, when we laugh at people, we push them away.

Humorous Modes

In looking at the traditional humorous modes, Meyer finds that each can be used in specific situations:

Relief humor for relaxing tensions during communication in disconcerting situations or relating to a controversial issue, incongruity humor for presenting new perspectives and viewpoints, and superiority humor for criticizing opposition or unifying a group (316)

However, each mode falls down when attempting to stretch to encompass all humorous instances.

Besides, he argues, wherever humor comes from, it depends on at least two other situational variables.  First, it is dependent on its acceptability, given the audience and the context. Second it must surprise the audience, neither being too familiar nor too foreign.

Four functions

From this (and Martineau’s sociological model), Meyer finds four functions of humor, differentiating the major types (unifying/dividing) based on how sympathetic the audience member is to the target of the joke (its acceptability), and how familiar she is with the topic (its ability to surprise).

Identification

“If there are some good plans out there, I’m all ears.”

On the side of unification, he finds that humor can enact identification.  When the audience strongly agrees with the target and is familiar with the issue, they can feel a sense of commonality and shared meaning. His example of this is when failed 1992 independent candidate Ross Perot, who was caricatured in political cartoons as having huge ears, quipped in a debate, “If there are some good plans out there, I’m all ears.”  Audience members familiar with the cartoons and Perot, Meyer argues, could laugh with him at those caricatures.  Notably, Perot denied knowing or noticing that what he said was funny (and Meyer mentions this).

Clarification

An audience who has slightly less agreement and familiarity will find that the humor clarifies the issue, social norm or the speaker’s position on it, “without a sense of correction or censure of anyone involved” (319). A number of examples are offered here:

Ronald Reagan, who was regularly criticized for his age in his second run for president, in a 1984 debate with Walter Mondale expressed that he had no desire to make age an issue in the campaign because of the “youth and inexperience” of his opponent.

Then there are “church bulletin bloopers”:

The Low Self-Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7:00.  Please use the back door.

The Rev. Merriwether spoke briefly, much to the delight of the audience.

During the absence of our Pastor, we enjoyed the rare privilege of hearing a good sermon when J.F. Stubbs preached last Sunday.

The choir needs eight new robes “due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.” (320).

Meyer finds that in reacting to such messages – in laughing with the others in our group – we clarify social norms without correcting specific people, thus they help to unite groups.

Enforcement

An audience that disagrees slightly with the target or is less familiar with the issue will enact the enforcement of a social norm. Meyer refers to this as a delicate process that maintains some degree of identification.

Here he points to several examples of children’s questions, including:

A girl wrote she would like to ask god, “Are you invisible or is that just a trick?”

A boy wrote, “Why is Sunday school on Sunday? I thought it was supposed to be our day of rest.”

Another boy asked, “I went to this wedding and they kissed right in church. Is that okay?”

Another girl asked, “Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don’t You just keep the ones You have now?” (320-321)

Meyer finds that in laughing at such statements, we are laughing at the children, who will soon be corrected – and our laughter serves as a form of correction that brings them back into the group.

Differentiation

Finally, the audience with a large amount of disagreement with the target, who are very familiar with the issue will differentiate themselves from that target.  We laugh at them. When we unite in our laughing at, we identify with each other and stress the differences between us and those we oppose.  His example here is Bob Dole’s failed 1996 run for president, wherein he said:

For the government cannot direct the people, the people must direct the government. This is not the outlook of my opponent [Clinton], and he is my opponent, not my enemy. Though he has tried to be a good Republican, there are certain distinctions between the two great parties that will be debated, and must be debated in the next 82 days. (Dole, 1996, p. 679 as cited in Meyer, 322).

In pointing out that Clinton was trying to be a “good Republican,” Meyer sees Dole highlighting the differences between the true Republicans and Clinton, and our laughter (if any) reflects our agreement with that critique.

Problems

However, Meyer falls prey to several problematic assumptions: the intentions of the speaker matter more than the power of the audience, laughter is separate from critique, and laughter is unifying.

Speaker intention

In characterizing the relationships between audience and target, he assumes that speaker and audience are one, that the speaker’s goals are clear and in sync with that of the audience – that the audience can and will “get it.”  This is particularly clear in identification and differentiation, where Meyer relies on examples of bona fide political speakers, such as Ross Perot and Ronald Reagan, who wish to persuade us, not the unreliable and discordant narrators represented by stand-up comics.  This is again the assumption of intentionality, and it is easily dismissed.

How do we know that the audience who laughed was laughing with Perot at his caricatures?  Couldn’t they have just been laughing at him?  Wouldn’t some audiences have laughed harder thinking that he said it un-self-reflexively (and even more, upon finding they were correct)? [I have a more developed critique of this through Script Theory.]

In the case of Dole, can’t we laugh at Dole for thinking Clinton is a “good Republican,” for being fooled (enforcement)? Can we laugh with the community and Dole at himself, clarifying the way we did with Reagan? That Reagan example is just weird.

Audience power

Why is it necessary that we get the speaker’s point? Meyer’s treatment of clarification and enforcement starts to get at this – the audience decides to laugh with, or laugh at.

We don’t have to laugh with the congregation at the bloopers, we could laugh at the congregation, or at those with low self-esteem, or the Rev. Merriwether, our usual pastor or the older members of the choir.  Rather than censuring the children, we could laugh at the congregation that created rules that so baffle these children – for “From the mouths of babes…”

For stand-up comics, clarification becomes especially problematic; it takes a large amount of inference to believe that we know what the speaker “really means.” Comics are feel free to inject their own versions of social norms or reinterpret those in existence, thereby perhaps doing little to enforce such norms. Nevertheless, they leave the audience free to interpret in multiple ways.

Laughter is not critique

Further, Meyer’s functions of humor reinforce a laughing/critique dichotomy.  While he differentiates between laughing with and laughing at, he’s only talking about laughing, thus implying that when the audience rejects the speaker’s message (when they heckle or boo), they have not received humor (though it may be too much to say they haven’t been subject to persuasion or rhetoric).  Thus we still might note that for Meyer, expressions of critique rupture a humorous space.

Uniform laughter

Because laughter is assumed to be a sign that we’ve accepted the speaker’s message – that we “get it” – Meyer also does not break us away from the common notion that laughter is uniform.  The four parts of Meyer’s model designate that humor works and the text is funny because it possesses some agreed upon meaning that we all share with each other, that it clarifies an unknown incident or condition via relation to one that is known by way of an (often hyperbolic) analogy, that it informs and thereby enforces social norms or that it possesses an agreed upon message through which we reject the target. However, individual audience members may read a joke in different ways.

The good news

However, Meyer does complicate the common interpretations of laughter. What Meyer introduces is a notion that laughter is not unconscious but thoughtful, and therefore not trivial but consequential.  Further, while Meyer replicates several problems, he does provide us with a perspective that humor serves a purpose.

Meyer also breaks out of humorous modes argument, offering ways that his purposes can be explained via (or work within) multiple modes (317):

Humor theory Humor Function
Relief Identification
Incongruity Clarification
Differentiation
Superiority Identification
Enforcement
Differentiation

There are still many reasons to question these relationships, even when both the humor and purpose work, but we’ll move on.

He further implies that physical and temporal presence is not necessary, as identification and differentiation have no time limit.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Meyer, John C.  “Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication.”  Communication Theory 10.3 (2000): 310-331.

Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny?  A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.

Theories About Audiences/Theories About Laughter

Common Interpretations of Laughter

Posted on by nwilson

I have previously discussed John Limon’s theory of absolute stand-up. This theory states that the audience “[makes the comic’s] jokes into jokes, or refuse[s] to, by a reaction that is more final, less appealable, than a judgment” (26-7) Thus, we might infer that laughter is the ultimate judgment, and it is the only judgment that should matter.

However, Limon calls it a “reaction.” And the way that he talks about it, displays that humor’s constitution is marked by an involuntary physical reaction; therefore laughter is an anti-judgment, a refusal to judge. This view relies on a few common underlying premises – mostly remnants of Freudian psychoanalysis – that have profound entailments for judgments of humor.

In Limon’s view, humor must be defined by a uniform and visceral display of pleasure, an eruption of the unconscious; thus this judgment is reactive, uncontrolled and therefore trivializing.  As such, one must be physically present for any such reaction to matter. Here, I’ll take a moment to examine each of these premises.  To begin, the notion of uniformity of laughter depends on the idea that all laughter is based on the same interpretation.

Uniform/Particular

One of the early proponents of a superiority theory of humor and one of the first to write a treatise on laughing, Henri Bergson believed there was a sort of complicity among laughers – that all people laugh for the same reason.  It is in this sense that many researchers note the power of humor to polarize people (see for instance, Boskin; Gilbert; Schutz).

Collective laughter is often interpreted as a sign that people have formed a cohesive group and agree with one another (Coser; Gilbert; Merrill; Mitchell; Nietz).  For instance, Borns notes that in the face of a joke we might not normally find funny, like a “dick joke,” “we find ourselves laughing in recognition, then we notice others laughing, and we feel a sense of group recognition” (16). This felt sense, while it might be mistaken, nevertheless constitutes a group whose sense of self can have very real consequences – they may then decide to act as one.

Limon takes up this view by default.  He reasons that because laughter is ephemeral, expiring in the moment, it cannot be examined after the fact.  Such appraisals are untrustworthy (therefore “Individual recantations are invalid”), whereas the uniformity of visible and audible reactions is undeniable, and the effects accrue regardless.  While hostile audiences pinpoint their critiques – boo’ing at the moment or stating the particularities of their problems (heckling) – laughter gives no clues as to why or how it was funny, simply that it was.  But this sense of uniformity at its base relies on a notion that laughter is visceral, physically affecting the emotions, and therefore unconscious.

Unconscious/Conscious

Limon’s theory of laughter returns us to Freud’s idea that humor attempts to subvert thought and therefore judgment.  This belief stems from Freud’s distinction between the conscious and unconscious.  For Freud, judgment occurs in the conscious.  Conscious thought enforces taboos.  It is only when we react without thought – when the unconscious is victorious over the conscious – that laughter is possible.  This view of laughter as an involuntary response or an eruption of the unconscious has become commonsensical, and is held by everyday people, academics and critics alike (see for instance Bergson; Boskin; Coser; Merrill; Mitchell; Nietz; Schutz). We can see it when comics talk about belly laughs, or “making the audience laugh.” In the hierarchy of humor, these laughs are thought to be the best.

Comics and critics who take this view further argue for a loss of bodily control; mere amusement is insufficient.  Laughter and gasping (e.g. in surprise) are therefore thought to be genuine, visceral responses enacted in the accepted register of humor – that is to say, the physical expression of unconscious emotions.  Any other response thus displays the imposition of thought, which then constitutes the content as “not humor.”

By this logic, any audience member who is moved to thought – to judgment – is no longer audience to a humorous act, but to something else.  So from this frame, anyone who boos, heckles, critiques or protests – especially after the fact – is cut out of humorous audiences – “To criticize a joke is to miss it” (Limon, 12).  In each case, by taking up the act, thoughtfully engaging it and responding in a manner other than laughter, such audiences constitute it as consequential, and therefore not humorous.

Trivial/Consequential

Laughs, as the expected response to humor, are treated by many people as universal signs that the joke has not achieved any political end (whether or not this is true).  Limon states, paraphrasing Freud, that “there is ‘no process that resembles “judging”’ in [laughter’s] vicinity” (12). Because the pleasure of humor is derived from an eruption of the unconscious, it is incapable of being subsumed within the realm of judgment, thought and therefore incapable of having any meaningful effect.

Limon believes that laughter displays an unwillingness to take the content seriously and/or to take action – at least, for the time being.  On the other hand, outrage would seem to display that the joke is not trivial, but consequential and such determination must come not from reaction (as an unconscious, physical act) but from judgment. Outrage comes from audience members’ thought, which distances the reaction from the unconscious and therefore the joke from the trivial, and this distance is what comics need to bridge in order to “make people laugh.”  However, comics must also overcome physical and temporal distance.

Presence/Distance

The requirement of an unconscious, visceral, physical reaction limits the correct use of term “audience” to those physically present.  Many theorists of stand-up implicitly reference the traditional live audience that witnesses and responds to the stand-up act (see for instance Borns; Gilbert; Limon; Stebbins).  As Borns states, stand-up comedy is not just “live, but living – an organic, growing, developing monologue that is as reactive as it is active,” and this could only occur in front of a live audience, or a series thereof (16).

Yet, by the above logic, when the act becomes mediated via radio, television, and especially when captured in writing or on records, tapes (audio or video) or digital technology (CDs, DVDs, or MPEGs), the act loses this living quality and presumably much of the audience’s power to shape it. Audiences making use of mass media are thus implicitly designated secondary (and therefore perhaps trivial) to (and therefore parasitic on) the immediately present audience.

A series of immediately present audiences have shaped the comic’s routine, the live-audience being televised confirms the humor and serves as mediator of our reaction, thus although we don’t get the experience in the same form, format or context as the live audience, we still are encouraged to laugh by that audience. This is the whole reason for the laugh track.

This requirement of presence further justifies the separation of critics as well as their audiences from humorous audiences.  If we accept that once we are outside the “living” moment of stand-up, once the text has been watched (whether via mass media or not), it is no longer adaptive, malleable, living; then in this static form the text can be examined in greater detail, as is the case with many critics and protesters.

In this form, audience members – including bona fide political critics (those who present themselves as advocates, not comics) – are free to reframe the comic’s material as consequential political discourse.  The comic’s entire routine may be rendered down to a specific bit or series of jokes, critical commentary can be added in order to clarify the issue – to determine the “true” meaning – and this new statement is then (re)presented to a new audience with different expectations.  My own projects are thus cast as highly suspect.

Political Problems

Yet such an easy delineation of who is and is not an audience for humor relegates stand-up to a trivial role.  To begin to distinguish between audiences puts us on a slippery slope.  Where do we stop drawing distinctions? In making such distinctions, we rob stand-up of any claim to political action, and also define political statements as necessarily non-humorous.

Implicit, then, in Limon’s laughter/outrage dichotomy is a set of criteria that systematically define whether a text is humorous or serious and he is not alone.  Other scholars also make this distinction, and I’ll get to them in due time.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Corrections? Additions?

References:

Bergson, Henri.  Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic.  New York: Macmillan, 1911.

Coser, R.L.  “Laughter Among Colleagues: A Study of the Social Functions of Humor Among the Staff of a Mental Hospital.”  Psychiatry 23 (1960): 81-95.

Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. 1905. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963.

Gilbert, Joanne.  Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender and Cultural Critique. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 2004.

Limon, John.  Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Merrill, L. “Feminist Humor: Rebellious and Self-Affirming.” Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy. Ed. R. Barreca.  New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988.

Mitchell, C.  “Hostility and Aggression Toward Males in Female Joke Telling.”  Frontiers 3 (1978): 18-27.

Nietz, M.  “Humor, Hierarchy, and the Changing Status of Women.”  Psychiatry 43 (1980): 211-23.

Schultz, Charles E. Political Humor: From Aristophanes to Sam Ervin.  Rutherford: Associated University Presses, 1977.

Stebbins, Robert A.  The Laugh-Makers: Stand-Up Comedy as Art, Business and Life-Style. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990.

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

Jay Leno on Anti-Political Funny Stuff

Posted on by nwilson

Tim O’Shei interviewed Jay Leno for The Buffalo News (6/23/2017) about his philosophy on stand-up, and in Leno’s responses I see a few popular notions of stand-up that I (and others) write about.

Anti-political: Hitting both sides

O’Shei asks Leno, “You seem to balance the political material in your act and talking about Republicans and Democrats equally. Is that instinctive, or something you learned to do over time?”

To which, Leno answered,

I always found when I was on the road, I would do a (Donald) Trump joke and I would do a Hillary (Clinton) joke, and go back and forth, and everybody started laughing as they realized, “Oh, you’re just not picking on one side.

This statement could also have been said by Bill Burr about his 2017 Netflix special, Walk Your Way Out, or a number other comics.

When asked to clarify on Trump, Leno says,

I was lucky. I came up at a time when (George) Bush was dumb and (Bill) Clinton was horny. These were just sort of normal human failings you could have some fun with.

Russell Peterson has called this process of “having fun,” with “normal human failings,” “Leno-izing,” and notes that the process is distinctly “anti-political.” For Peterson, “it is not satire,” actual, meaningful political critique done in a humorous way, “but pseudo-satire.”  Such “nightly assaults on political leaders are characterized not by critical engagement with politics, but by a kind of lazy nihilism.”  As opposed to treating politicians like enemy targets, they treat politicians as “mere targets of opportunity.”  He says, “Their attitude is: we make fun of whoever shows up, we hit both sides evenly, and we don’t mean any of it.”

When Leno (or any other late-night host) makes jokes about Bush being dumb and follows with jokes about Clinton being horny, Peterson says the “conviction” such jokes “[turn] upon is not that politics and politicians don’t matter, but that they are irredeemably and indistinguishably insufferable.” It is a reductio ad absurdum, a reduction of their humanity to a caricature, a humor (in Northrop Frye’s sense of a ruling passion that hamstrings a character’s actions). Peterson traces this literary method back Aristophanes.

What this expresses – albeit passively – for Peterson is all politicians are bad, and that therefore “the political process itself – and, by implication, representative democracy, which depends on that process – is an irredeemable sham.”  Peterson further links this belief to low voter turnout.  In this sense, such comics are undermining our very democracy.

While Leno seems to believe that comics can make a difference when expressing a political view, he doesn’t seem to see it as their job.  Their job is not to be wise fools who “speak truth to power,” but to be funny.

True/untrue vs. funny/unfunny

In his last question, O’Shei asks, “I was talking to a rising stand-up comic who told me, ‘Comedians are the only people left who can tell the truth.’ Do you agree with that?”

Leno answered,

The answer lies somewhere in the middle. One thing you don’t want to do is get too self-important as a comedian, when you think you’re the only one telling the truth…. The truth is most comics just want a really good laugh. That’s what you’re going for, and if there happens to be some truth in it, well that’s really nice, too. But most comics will lie their teeth off if it gets them a good laugh.

Again, this seems to express that comics can speak truth, but they’re not trying to – or they shouldn’t be.

In answer to a previous question about being political, Leno similarly said,

As a performer, your goal is to be funny first, and people will figure out your politics….Just do your act and let them come to that discovery on their own. When you make an announcement like that, right away you lose half the crowd….  I think comics are truth-tellers to a certain extent, but you need to be a comedian first. The idea is to really be funny.

Leno notes of the Kathy Griffin incident (which I’ve addressed previously),

The Kathy Griffin incident, perfect example of that, when she held up the bloody Trump head. If it had been funny, people would have gone, “That was awful. But I’ve got to tell you, it was really funny.” If it’s not funny, you’re just standing there naked onstage.

This speaks to another thought I addressed recently: that comics become “truly” themselves onstage.  Leno seems to think comics will be whatever will make the audience laugh.  [For the record, I agree with this, but think the best of us temper this with some kind of goal – what can I say that the audience will agree with and laugh? Or at least, some boundaries – what am I not willing to say that would make this audience laugh?]

Leslie Jones expressed something similar in her interview with Sylvia Obell of BuzzFeed:

I’m so tired of comedians trying to teach people. Your job is not to teach people; it is to make them laugh. And if we can laugh about the pain, then we can get taught somewhere else. There’s no laughter in this world right now, at least not no pure laughter. And anytime any comedian steps up with the bullshit, they are making people hate us. Step up with some funny shit, don’t step up with that political controversial shit. … Bring some goddamn laughter or stop calling yourself a comic.

These last quotes confirm what Peterson has said about comics like Leno (and those trying to do the same), that they do not seek to “speak truth to power.”  But instead, they are, “almost by definition, consensus-seekers. They don’t succeed by saying things with which the audience disagrees…. Challenging people’s beliefs… makes them defensive, angry, and uncomfortable, and people don’t laugh when they’re uncomfortable.”

New models, new possibilities

However, this is just one, outdated model of stand-up.  Even Leno notes,

With Netflix and comedy specials, comedians find their audience and play to that. If you have a particular point of view – Republican or Democrat – you just go to that audience and play to that crowd. But that doesn’t help you grow as a performer.

The shift is toward niche marketing, finding your audience, and it can be lucrative.  This is the basis of Rory Scovel’s Lenny Bruce opening: to weed out those who aren’t likely to be his type of audience. So comics who want to speak to a particular political sensibility can do that.

This, however, begs the question: If they’re only writing for people who already believe, are they having a meaningful political impact? While reinforcing a responsible political belief might be good political work, it might not be as meaningful as convincing the unconvinced.  It would seem like comics in the age of Netflix are free to abandon that goal.

I should point out that neither Peterson nor Leno (nor Jones) seem to say that comics can’t speak the truth to – and change the mind of – a general audience, just that they probably shouldn’t and therefore usually don’t. Some can and undoubtedly do, though it’s really hard to point out when and where it actually happened. So many other things are going on – so many messages being exchanged simultaneously – can we ever really say it was “just one thing” that made the difference?

Leslie Jones has said, “Comedians’ job is to point out what’s going on in society and make it funny.”  Embedded here is the possibility of finding common ground with a general audience that doesn’t reduce politicians and issues to caricatures – though this is really difficult. But then, we all have to have goals.

In the words of Mark Twain,

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever. And by forever, I mean thirty years.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Peterson, Russell.  Strange Bedfellows: The Politics of Late-Night Television.  Doctorial Dissertation.  The University of Iowa, 2005.

Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny?  A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.

Humor Theories/Stand-Up Comedy/Theories About Laughter

John Limon on Laughter: Is It Crucial?

Posted on by nwilson

I’ve talked a bit about how John Limon defines a genre of “absolute stand-up,” as marked, in part, by authorial intent.  Yet he also distinguishes his absolute form from serious, extrinsic forms by noting how the audience responds.

Limon’s rules for absolute stand-up are as follows:

  1. “If you think something is funny, it is.”
    1. “Individual reservations are irrelevant.” People who don’t agree with the general audience response are wrong.
    2. “Individual recantations are invalid.” Once you’ve laughed, you can’t take it back.
    3. “You cannot be retroactively disabused by a critic. To criticize a joke is to miss it.”
  2. “A joke is funny if and only if you laugh at it.” Without laughter, even if the audience nods or smiles, the joke becomes a “failed joke.”
  3. “Your laughter is the single end of stand-up.” (pp. 11-13)

So only item three deals with the intentions of the comic.  The bulk of the theory places responsibility on the audience. Limon argues that unlike “serious art,” stand-up does not need to appeal to any outside judge for a decision that endures.

Serious Art

For Limon, serious art is what we might call “high culture” art, which requires professional critics.  In performance art, like ballet or opera, where the art is expressed in the moment, the decision falls to the professional critics who witnessed the event.   When the art form is more enduring, such as a novel, the decision is deferred: “posterity will judge,” thus these high forms have claims to seriousness (13).  Of course, many have critiqued such a high/low distinction as elitist in nature, thus this distinction is fairly quickly dispensed with. Further, now that we have video, more and more critics can weigh in on performance art, after the fact.

Stand-up

On the other hand, he argues that laughter by individual audiences is the sole indicator of humor – any given act of laughing in the moment retroactively defines humor as such for that moment.  The requirement of laughter thus indicates that it is incorrect to define a joke or bit as funny or not, but instead we must place it in a time and a place; we must state “it was/was not funny when…”  Funny changes from a stable traitor quality of a routine, bit or joke to a state the audience is in after hearing or reading it, and it is the achievement of this state that is the comic’s goal.

Without laughter, even if the audience nods or smiles, the joke becomes a “failed joke” (12). As Limon puts it, “the audience cannot err, it cannot feign, it cannot be misled” (13).  Laughter is a very limiting criteria, but Limon argues it is involuntary and less ambiguous than smiles or other indicators. When I talk about the difference between Silverman and Bill Maher’s racist incidents, this is a primary indicator: people laughed – and continued to laugh – with and at Silverman, few, if any laughed with or at Maher.

Audiences individually may be idiots, but together they’re a genius

Limon also arrives theoretically at what Betsy Borns arrived at inductively: that a large number of comics downplay the individuality of members of the audience in favor of the reaction of the group.  As just one example, Lenny Bruce reportedly once said, “Audiences individually may be idiots, but together they’re a genius”; taken together, they’ll tell you what is or is not funny (Borns, 27). Comics don’t have to please everyone all the time; they simply have to please enough of the people (and not completely alienate anyone) to elicit tacit approval from those who are not actually laughing – these people shouldn’t be incensed enough to disrupt the show, but they don’t have to love it.

Boos and hecklers

However, more hostile reactions from a few members of the audience can negate this tacit approval. Borns notes in the case of the individual audience member who is not at all happy, “one can always yell, ‘Hey, what the hell are you talking about?’ and, most likely, you’ll get an answer” (25). And, as I’ve noted in Dying Laughing, where they tell sixteen stories about hecklers and boos, audience dissent is certainly recognized as a possibility.  But when such interruptions occur, the audience as a group also may go farther; Borns notes the audience may mutiny and take back control, as Royale Watkins describes in the movie.

Thus, Limon notes that a stand-up act can be measured as separate from the absolute form (and therefore consequential) by registering “the irruptions of alien impulses.”  This can perhaps be easily seen when the audience’s tacit approval fails – the most extreme case being audience outrage (13-14).  Negative audiences (protesters, critics, hecklers, boo’ers and walk-outs) do more than indicate that the text was not humorous; they mark the rupture of the humorous event.  Thus, like the criterion of expectation inherent in incongruity theory, Limon’s laughter criterion creates a false dichotomy between humor and serious persuasive discourse.

This presents another danger of the heckler or booer.  To a certain extent, criticisms after the fact and from people who weren’t there are informed by the criticism of those who were – if people in the immediate audience responded negatively, the critic has more to go on.  On the other hand, by Limon’s logic, if the immediate audience finds it amusing, the comic has no need to defend it once it’s filmed or digitized.  Therefore, when the act is interrupted before it can be laughed at, the comedian has truly failed.  Once the act is disrupted, the uptake of the original humor is no longer possible – any response by the comic is not guaranteed reception as humorous, and thus the comedian needs to be wary.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Borns, Betsy. Comic Lives: Inside the World of Stand-Up Comedy.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

Limon, John.  Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny?  A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.