The Tyranny of Humour

This is something I struggle with so much.

It's that kind of British kneejerk thing of snark or "comedy" as a way of saying "yes, look, I'm being self referential and reflective about this" when actually it's almost the opposite of being properly reflective and becomes reflexive rather than reflective.

I don't see the problem with taking things seriously. The problem is that "humour" as become a kind of shortcut for "self aware" and yes, I think that self awareness is hugely important to make great art, but it's like humour is the easiest, cheapest and lowest form of self awareness.

The problem is that "humour" as become a kind of shortcut for "self aware"

News to me

humor is, maybe, the most important way we connect with other people?

like maybe nothing will catapult you faster into the front of the group of people whom dayo esteems than by me discovering you laugh at the same things that I do, and more importantly, for the same reasons

― flagp∞st (dayo), Thursday, March 1, 2012 9:12 AM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is very much true for me. I just feel like people who have a similar sense of humor to me just sort of get me better than those who do not. Someone can be perfectly pleasant and engaging but if we don't laugh at the same things I sort of know we're never going to be great friends.

I don't see a problem with taking things seriously either but think you can value both seriousness and comedy highly. Also agree with the thing about the funniest people I know being quite serious.

if we don't laugh at the same things

Obviously I don't mean all the same things all the time but just in a general sort of way.

Well, a knee-jerk response I often have in my head is that people are frightened of seriousness 'now', and use a continual low-level humour, or non-directional irony in their writing and speech out of fear of assertion and subsequent contradiction, and therefore argument and thought. It's almost become an adjunct of 'niceness'.

Pretty otm. People seem to be terrified of sincerity anymore, and almost every cultural utterance seems tainted with an ironic smirk. But it's so often forced and unnatural and used as a distancing mechanism that I find it generally off-putting. As a society, we know how to follow the formula of a joke but we don't know how to replicate the soul of it.

This is kind of a formless idea, but it can be instructive to look at the television commercials that come out of a particular era in trying to get a sense of that era. '80s commercials seem so earnest about wanting to sell the good people a product, whereas today they're jokey and barely about what's being sold and, more often than not, fairly inhumane. To the extent that we accept that marketers have their finger on the pulse of society, it seems like a fair metric by which to measure how we interact as a society.

This is a big, big topic that I have lots of thoughts about. Let me get them properly in order.

"Humour" as a shorthand for "self aware" = "oh look, we are laughing at ourselves by laughing at our subject matter, we are aware that taking things seriously is kind of uncool, therefore we are using this kneejerk humour to distance ourselves from it, and show that we are in on the joke and also self aware."

This thread is clearly going to delineate along the usual lines of those for whom humour shows some kind of camaraderie and those for whom it's a slightly presumptuous assumption of intimacy. I'm not going to draw any cultural conclusions, but I tend towards the latter. But I'm also one of those po-faced fules who values sincerity.

People seem to be terrified of sincerity anymore, and almost every cultural utterance seems tainted with an ironic smirk

this seems a little overstated. there's plenty of sincerity to be found all around you. maybe not on the L train but

Struggling to think of many great works of literature that don't utilise humour in some way.

First thoughts are Greek tragedy (they're presented next door to satyr plays, iirc? but the things themselves are dead serious), Paradise Lost, the works of William Wordsworth. maybe even some shakespeare… there's not much fun in Coriolanus or Timon is there? (I may be forgetting the light relief scenes)

Very big generalised rough idea would that you need quite a serious belief system, and a belief in some ultimate high seriousness that can be found in art – I think that's there in Romanticism & its descendants through high modernism (in Europe, horrors of 1st half of the century have a part to play in earnest art too); it's not there so much now - we tend to be suspicious of things that claim high purpose and have no time for entertainment.

& then there's a secondary british argument about puritan or non-conformist tradition, maybe, that creates an art with less time for joking (is the Pilgrim's Progress funny? I remember it being really, really not).

I'm prone to liking stuff with jokes (or facing terrible universe with bitter stoic laughter etc), but unseriousness can be a real irritant – feel like Beckett is often pushed, nervously, as 'actually very funny', which is true, sure, but dodging some of the heart of it.

it's pretty hard to be sincere without being funny

guess it could almost be reduced, even for argument's sake, to two outlooks- 'the world is a serious place, in spite of it all' vs 'the world is a humorous place, in spite of it all'.

When I'm writing something it comes naturally to me to insert maybe a little bit of humour. But often I read back something after it's published and just think "what was I doing?!". Humour is an effective tool but a dark art. One shouldn't wield it unless one knows what they're doing.

irony is pretty much our primary tool as a feeling species and eventually when all of us who grew up in the 1990s are finally dead people will remember that the word doesn't mean "making fun of stuff" but refers to an attunement to the failure of expectations that is at root deeply humble, and that since probability and not physics is on some level the mother of the sciences lacking or failing to develop this sense is like never understanding that objects move when you push them, i.e., you won't ever have any idea what's going on

Learning to be funny is a hard path for the uncool adolescent to take, but it bears rich fruit.

So by the time you get to college if you have figured out how to make people laugh turning it off is going to seem dangerous.

IMO.

Also had a prof who apparently didn't understand sarcasm, pretty weird to not be able to reliably use that register with someone. He just gets concerned when people are sarcastic at him.

Humour as a shorthand for self-awareness usually smacks of insecurity and defensiveness to me. That said, when you see things (especially in the corporate world) that are really po-faced and serious or just idiotic and unaware how ridiculous they are it can be pretty fucking funny.

Point is humor is just a decent way of building up a wall around yourself and your feelings. It's also a good way of taking that wall back down. Regarding yourself with complete seriousness is as broken as being a joke-telling ironic reactive cipher.

Well, a knee-jerk response I often have in my head is that people are frightened of seriousness 'now', and use a continual low-level humour, or non-directional irony in their writing and speech out of fear of assertion and subsequent contradiction, and therefore argument and thought. It's almost become an adjunct of 'niceness'.

yeah, this rings true for me, too. a sense of humor is obviously very important, and i agree that there's humor of some sort or another in almost all great film & literature, but "intelligent" internet culture does seem to have cultivated a kind of hostility to sincerity. more often than not, this seems defensive, the avoidance of risk by keeping it light.

personally, i strongly disagree that earnestness and sincerity are close to the bottom on the list of qualities i value in others. quite the opposite, tbh. i like people who are willing to honestly speak their minds and engage directly with ideas. people who can and will do this, who are smart, open-minded and humble about it, are quite rare, i find. absent humor, that sort of earnest exposition can become quite dull, but humor without something substantial to say quickly becomes horribly grating.

I often tone down the humour in my music writing but feel like there's a definite need retain an element. Anything likely to be read by an audience of people who are passionate about the subject can be as serious as you like, anything that's going to attract a large number of people who don't really care and are just reading to pass the time, and possibly learn something, has a lot more pressure to be 'engaging'. The most direct way of doing that is through a light tone with a bit of humour.

I try to do the same thing when i'm writing in my day job - anything that can make someone smile is probably going to have a much better chance of sticking in the memory. A lot of marketing copy-writers seem to be really bad at it though.

i've linked to this before, but this is one of my favorite essays about anything, ever:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4352/4352-h/4352-h.htm

Try, for a moment, to become interested in everything that is being said and done; act, in imagination, with those who act, and feel with those who feel; in a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. Now step aside, look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama will turn into a comedy. It is enough for us to stop our ears to the sound of music, in a room where dancing is going on, for the dancers at once to appear ridiculous. How many human actions would stand a similar test? Should we not see many of them suddenly pass from grave to gay, on isolating them from the accompanying music of sentiment? To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple.

...

This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with other intelligences. And here is the third fact to which attention should be drawn. You would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself isolated from others. Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. It may, perchance, have happened to you, when seated in a railway carriage or at table d'hote, to hear travellers relating to one another stories which must have been comic to them, for they laughed heartily. Had you been one of their company, you would have laughed like them; but, as you were not, you had no desire whatever to do so. A man who was once asked why he did not weep at a sermon, when everybody else was shedding tears, replied: "I don't belong to the parish!" What that man thought of tears would be still more true of laughter. However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary. How often has it been said that the fuller the theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience! On the other hand, how often has the remark been made that many comic effects are incapable of translation from one language to another, because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social group! It is through not understanding the importance of this double fact that the comic has been looked upon as a mere curiosity in which the mind finds amusement, and laughter itself as a strange, isolated phenomenon, without any bearing on the rest of human activity. Hence those definitions which tend to make the comic into an abstract relation between ideas: "an intellectual contrast," "a palpable absurdity," etc.,—definitions which, even were they really suitable to every form of the comic, would not in the least explain why the comic makes us laugh. How, indeed, should it come about that this particular logical relation, as soon as it is perceived, contracts, expands and shakes our limbs, whilst all other relations leave the body unaffected? It is not from this point of view that we shall approach the problem. To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one.

i don't know how anyone can survive in this world without recognizing the inherent ridiculousness of human existence

personally, i strongly disagree that earnestness and sincerity are close to the bottom on the list of qualities i value in others

Did anyone actually say that this is true for them?

This thread is clearly going to delineate along the usual lines of those for whom humour shows some kind of camaraderie and those for whom it's a slightly presumptuous assumption of intimacy. I'm not going to draw any cultural conclusions, but I tend towards the latter. But I'm also one of those po-faced fules who values sincerity.

This is nonsense though. Sincerity vs humour is a false dichotomy. The idea that ideas of humour split along those lines is another one. You yourself clearly don't view it as a presumptions assumption of intimacy because you use humour around people you don't particularly know all the time, onboard at least. It's only the case if you're talking about a particularly pointed and/or mean humour, cf "banter" culture in the UK (destroy destroy destroy).

sincerity is not the opposite of humor
xpost

otm - it's very strange to me that several people seem to think that it is

Agree... with the false dichotomy bit (xxp)

In terms of humor born of fear, it seems that there are basically two types (aside from the aforementioned 'ineptly going through the motions of a joke' humor) that have become widely: distancing humor as defense mechanism/tension release valve (present in and undercutting every horror movie made these days) and humor that directly addresses sources of blight and sadness (a la The Soup). I'm not a fan of the former.

I think there may be some confusion (possibly on my part) as to whether we're addressing humor ITTA on a cultural level or on a personal level. I hold humor in very high esteem on a personal level (a compatible sense of humor is probably the number one determinant of how compatible I'm likely to be with another person), but I also hold the appropriate demarcation of humor in very high esteem. Culturally, that demarcation seems to be a highly-permeable membrane (and almost unselectively so, at times) anymore because of that fear born of not knowing how to communicate with one another anymore as antiquated social bonds crumble. Instead of directly addressing the problem of Bowling Alone, we crack wise about how we're bowling alone to stave off some heavy existential terror.

Humour is an effective tool but a dark art. One shouldn't wield it unless one knows what they're doing.

This times 10000000 (culturally speaking).

And using humour to amuse yourself primarily?

i think if anything as we've bowled more frequently alone we've gotten less funny, unless you count quoting high-grossing comedies at each other as being funny. a lot of the stuff people are (rightly) complaining about in this thread isn't funny; it's just noise. plenty of people with no sense of humor constantly make jokes.

calling someone who only amuses himself funny is like calling someone who well i'm sure you can finish this

distancing humor as defense mechanism/tension release valve (present in and undercutting every horror movie made these days) and humor that directly addresses sources of blight and sadness (a la The Soup). I'm not a fan of the former.

you might not be a fan of humor as a defense mechanism, but it provides a serious, helpful psychological benefit to many people who are in real need of a defense mechanism. some situations can't be directly dealt with, so "staving off existential terror" is the only possibility.

Thinking about humour at a presumption of familiarity - this is only the case for me when there are power dynamics involved. I don't want my new boss making certain kinds of jokes around me, especially if they're even relatively mild ones at my expense, or that of someone else in the team. But humour in other directions breaks down boundaries, it's a lot harder to get to the level of familiarity without it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyL8sKJJUHU

calling someone who only amuses himself funny is like calling someone who well i'm sure you can finish this

― the "intenterface" (difficult listening hour), Thursday, March 1, 2012 7:27 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol this was supposed to read "calling someone funny who only amuses himself is like calling someone sexy who well i'm sure you can finish this", obviously i am not the authority on jokes that i thought

calling someone who only amuses himself funny is like calling someone who well i'm sure you can finish this

Don't think anyone said that, but being funny without amusing yourself sounds interesting

it really is worth reading the whole thing, but in bergson's conclusion he says:

Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy or kindness.

Shall we be told that the motive, at all events, may be a good one, that we often punish because we love, and that laughter, by checking the outer manifestations of certain failings, thus causes the person laughed at to correct these failings and thereby improve himself inwardly?

Much might be said on this point. As a general rule, and speaking roughly, laughter doubtless exercises a useful function. Indeed, the whole of our analysis points to this fact. But it does not therefore follow that laughter always hits the mark or is invariably inspired by sentiments of kindness or even of justice.

To be certain of always hitting the mark, it would have to proceed from an act of reflection. Now, laughter is simply the result of a mechanism set up in us by nature or, what is almost the same thing, by our long acquaintance with social life. It goes off spontaneously and returns tit for tat. It has no time to look where it hits. Laughter punishes certain failings somewhat as disease punishes certain forms of excess, striking down some who are innocent and sparing some who are guilty, aiming at a general result and incapable of dealing separately with each individual case. And so it is with everything that comes to pass by natural means instead of happening by conscious reflection. An average of justice may show itself in the total result, though the details, taken separately, often point to anything but justice.

Hah, this is sort of what I was getting at in the other thread

well that's a big question i think. humour seems to have a self-protective function as much as a reaching out function, and of course there's whole sections of humour designed to hurt or belittle. but now more than ever i feel like "being funny" is in some way at the heart of social discourse.

Well yeah, what you protect and what you belittle are part of your social "signature" - laughter is just a measure function over it. The quickest I've ever made a friend was by watching a multi-person comedy show with someone and seeing what they laughed at and what they didn't.

I'm actually quite funny IRL in the right settings, but rarely bother to try on ILX. and then when I'm writing reviews etc I find myself making humorous bits, but I doubt they're really funny, especially once they go out to public. Problem is once you've stared at, proofed and redrafted, what was once an amusing idea tends to have lost any impact whatsoever, so it's impossible to know whether someone reading for the first time would find it light-hearted and fun or stilted and embarrassing.

So take out the jokes then? Well it's not that simple - often humour can work as a structural device - it's easier to "show" rather than "tell" with humour. It can be a useful way of making a point or moving commentary along without resorting to bland matter-of-factness.

xpost to n/a

Yeah, but again we're in that hazy territory where I don't know exacly whether we're discussing humor as a tool of interpersonal communication here or humor as it's used on a broader cultural level. On an interpersonal level, pressure release humor is highly valuable in the moment.

There is "I can joke about this because it's not important to me", and "I can joke about this because it is important to me" and in my experience most people really really can tell the difference very quickly.

Earnestness/sincerity are perfectly fine in many ways, but as personality traits aren't they v close to the bottom of the list of 'positives' you'd ideally be looking for in ppl you've to spend time with?

Absolutely not and under no circumstances - the best people have things that they very definitely have no sense of humour about (in public at least)

Don't think anyone said that, but being funny without amusing yourself sounds interesting

― Charles Kennedy Jumped Up, He Called 'Oh No'. (Tom D.), Thursday, March 1, 2012 7:31 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh yeah i wasn't accusing anyone here of saying that, just talking about humor as retreat/insulation vs. humor as engagement/understanding; they are technically similar but not really the same thing or of the same value at all.

some people are funny without amusing themselves! they're good at letting you see inside a mind that is sufficiently different from yours to be unexpected and exciting for you but has never really been so for them. altruists of humor!

and some people you're just laughing at, obv

Also there's a difference between sincerity and self-importance.

See also: "Can't you take a joke?" as a tool of absolute cunts.

I don't know exacly whether we're discussing humor as a tool of interpersonal communication here or humor as it's used on a broader cultural level.

I don't think there's a difference TBH!

Like, the entire function of humor is bound up with connecting the individual to the broader culture. (It's similar to gossip in this respect)

the problem i have with most humour i encounter is how LAZY it is, it's entirely dependent on clichés and archetypes and reducing things to easy, recognisable targets when you can't be bothered to engage - and often it's just space filler, an attempt at the most basic type of "bonding" that's more about the joker trying to score half a brownie point with his or her perceived peers than about the subject of the "joke"

i guess, insofar as i like any humour, it's the really dry, incisive type borne of an insider's actual knowledge - the kind of witty comparison or turn of phrase that makes me think the person making it knows their shit, rather than drawing on received wisdom for an easy laugh. marina hyde excels at this!

i do not know how to be funny, let alone in a "light" way, and this has been the subject of wrangles with several editors in my time (I DO NOT DO JOKES), but insofar as i can be humorous in writing, it's only ever when i don't really care about my subject or don't particularly care about being accurate, which says a lot. if i love something i can't joke about it!

also no professional comic i have ever encountered has made me laugh, or indeed made me do anything except purse my lips in really intense disapproval to disguise my RAGE at their temerity

It's quite illuminating to see the people whose first thought about humour is as a barbed weapon with someone at the butt of it.

i didn't realize there was a humor epidemic in the UK?

am i the only person not feeling the "tyranny of humor" around me?

It wasn't what I initially meant, but the thread definitely went there

I think it was originally more about the urge to be ingratiating at all costs, above everything. If you look at old photos, from a certain time back - 100 years ago sure, more recently maybe - people would rarely smile, like it was undignified, or at least like it wasn't socially expected

As somebody who talks to people for a living I get real tired of my own shtick quite often. I don't want to make general moral principles out of my own self-irritation tho

Maybe this wasn't about a world of David Brents (ok it definitely was about that really) but about the social fear of seriousness

It's definitely related. I think I'm more sympathetic than I used to be to people flailing around in the world of observational/recognition empty phatic or lubricating bantz - it's awkward and dull but it's an attempt to find conversational consensus or make a connection in a fucked UK where everything is broken and everything is a fight.

And fuck knows I don't somehow stand above it

i always took the difference to be between nv's original (imo v interesting) thrust of "obligation towards humour as a default transmitting/receptive mode is tiresome" and the thread's somewhat immediate turn towards "someone was mean to me once and therefore nothing can be funny" which is a different question - still possibly interesting but only if we agree that being funny can take any shape at all and does not have vectors only an impact on the individual's gut laughter response

There's a specific kind of banter which is better thought of as bookishness and that might be tiring sometimes but generally you don't come across it unless you opt in so it's hardly oppressive in the big scheme of things - if i don't wanna be around that then i don't have to go to the pub

Mocking people's opinions isn't really tyranny of humour either, it's a natural consequence of publicly expressing opinions, dumb or otherwise, and we're all fair game for that

Blokishness, not bookishness ffs

My social circles and their humour:

- Writing group I'm still in the WhatsApp of despite never attending. Absolutely fucking desperate normie nonsense of exactly the sort Daniel is on about
- Football forum. Skews far older than my other circles. Often quite funny but also often quite uh yeah...risqué! Mean! Morally indecent! But also, yeah, often quite funny. My cricket club is similar but nicer, mostly I suspect as we're all meeting face to face.
- Discord server for a certain art-rock group. Pretty good humour to be found here, but that's as much due to the nature of the band as the youth of the participants. Other servers I'm in are far more deadly-serious (and what humour there is tends to be entirely shitpost-oriented).
- People we bump into around Camberwell. Fucking atrocious craic

Conclusions? People are probably getting less funny, or less willing to take a risk for humour's sake. But those who do and get it right are absolutely to be treasured, because good humour can still seem effortless and joyful without anyone even close to being ostracised. Also, upper middle class Londoners are collectively about as unfunny as it gets

If you look at old photos, from a certain time back - 100 years ago sure, more recently maybe - people would rarely smile, like it was undignified, or at least like it wasn't socially expected

In terms of portraits, people had to sit still for long periods when being photographed which is one of the main reasons they didn't smile.

I always find it funny when people have their stupid opinions mocked and then start whining “I have a right to my opinion!” Like calm down nobody said you didn’t, we said it was stupid!

Xp That's a good point and at least partly explains it. I love old works football team photos from the 50s tho where they've all got "serious business" faces

I'm sure somebody wrote a book about how the growing respectability of smiling was linked to the French Revolution - plus let's not forget Saint-Just's pithy "Happiness is a new idea in Europe".

xpp yeah also of course you have a right to an opinion it's physically impossible to stop somebody thinking something but that's not the same as a right to annoy people at will

that thing upper middle class Londoners do when they disparage etc

and look what happened to Saint-Just!

I thought the revive might be about Ethel Cain's rant.

Still baffles me the amount of time people put towards memes and reaction gifs. There's no way that's rewarding.