The Tyranny of Humour

From Trayce's DFW quote:

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval.

Paradox: the complete refusal of seriousness may emerge from the fear of being seen as ridiculous.

the complete refusal of humour can come from the same source

The complete refusal of either is rare, though

Humo(u)r is an unproductive emotion.

It produces laughter.

laughter is another tyrannical byproduct of human physiology that needs to be eliminated.

the thing makes a good point

what do funny things and painful things have in common? they both make it hard to speak. ever wonder about that?

also toffee

death to toffee

Did you hear about Agger, banaka? Not good.

From Trayce's DFW quote:

What? I have neither posted in this thread nor ever read any Foster Wallace.

In fact I was about to come in and express frustration that yet again, the conversation's moved on before I got a chance to comment on bits of it thanks to the stupid time difference :( most annoying thing about being an ILXor in this country.

jesus christ lady you woke us just to tell us THAT?

Haha :) Actually I wanted to commen on this from way back at the start:

English (in particular) notoriously obsessed/associated with mocking, belittling, cynical humour.

This is curious to me because, I would have agreed with it, but then I experienced the clash between UK and australian senses of humour. I had a bf from England at one point, and he was often very upset/offended by things people here said; he said we are all rude and sarcastic and aggressive, but it was the larrikin aussie humour* that he was getting cross at. Casual lighthearted dry humour, somewhat rude nicknames, that sort of thing. Australians can be relentlessly ...almost bullying, maybe? with thier humour at times.

*ugh kill me for using that phrase

Then again maybe he was just a humourless twat.

Sorry, Trayce. It was Tracer Hand's quote.

Heh yeah I suspected it might be. 'shappened before, all good.

wrt to that English type of humour, Trayce, just wanted to say I'm not at all certain about it! Feel it's a thing that is said, a lot, but wd want to look a lot more closely before saying that sort of humour wasn't a class thing.

Did want to put it forward as a counterweight to the idea that we... ah fuck this phone, I've gotta get up and write this now?

This whole thread turned v v weird for me, the initial idea was interesting but the extension into people using humor in their real lives as a net negative is just baffling. Note: I am pretty much happy and kinda O_O at how holy shit awesome the world (mostly) is 90% of the time so humor/levity seem kinda inextricable from my world view? Idk.

otm

So, continuing from above: ...counterweight to the idea that this is something new, or getting worse in some way.

wrt NV's Tyranny of Humour in 'public discourse', the first thing I thought of was punning headlines. They're not quite symbolic of the subject because they've become such a thing in themself, but they are representative of a continual, unfunny noise of non-seriousness. (Honorable exceptions like Foot Heads Arms Body/Book Lack in Ongar/Caley Thistle etc aside). This sort of thing has become pernicious beyond headlines, puns that aren't puns, non-directional irony or cynicism, whatever it is Brooker does where he says (thing) is like (absurd something else), we might as well (absurd action).

Where it's become more noticeably pernicious is in, say, politicians' speeches. Cameron and Osborne's funnies in their speeches have been extraordinarily ill-advised and have generated headlines as a consequence. But clearly they feel the need to do it.

Where public starts affecting private is in the concept of 'banter' I think. Top Gear blokey jokiness. That sort of humour (read 'general non-serious, gurning tone guess that must be FUNNY right?') seems to me very prevalent just generally as a thing you hear around the place. It seems to me horrible because it co-opts the listener into a moral view - the implicit message being, you're not laughing because you don't understand 'fun', rather than because you object to their capering imbecilities.

The worst of this is with colleagues you don't like and bosses. You can't not laugh/smile, unless you are a bastard of steel (I occasionally go as far as a thin smile, or just wait for the forced hilarity to die down and carry on with whatever was being talked about in a normal tone of voice). And so you are once again co-opted.

As for comedy, well generally the stuff that makes me laugh is stuff that occurs spontaneously in conversation/during the day/in my head. It is not related to the mechanics of performed humour generally. I guess I like the mechanics of how to create laughter when it comes off, but the number of things I find funny in performance comedy is so generally miniscule that I'm happy going with lex on this one and saying I hate comedy, especially stand-up.

There's just so much 'low-level funny' around that I find not at all funny, that yes, I do find there's a tyranny, both in the media and public discourse, but also in general talk around the place.

God, just rambling really, but Tyranny of Humour definitely strikes a chord, although yes, hard cultural differences wrt this as i think lex said upthread.

I thnk this whole thread's premise is quite thought provoking! For me anyway. The idea that humour really is in everything we enjoy is interesting bcz I immediately started racking my brains trying to think of anything i've enjoyed (movie, book etc) that was relentlessly humorless, or dark, or similar. I'm sure there have been such things. But of course, one comes away from such experiences feeling rather stained and exhausted or mentally violated or whatever ("Salo" might be a good example?). So does that mean it is not worth experiencing? Not saying anyone's suggested this, just thinking aloud.

FWIW I did not "enjoy" Salo one bit, in fact I never want to see it again and kind of wish I never had.

I really hate non-directional cynicism, you see it everywhere, it barely even registers as humour but it's become all pervasive, you see it in dreadfully written Metro intros, useless G2 recurring features like Pass Notes. The idea that everything is basically shit and scoffing at it should be the default mode of expression unless proven otherwise.

When I think of the tyranny of humour I also think of Alexis Petridis's Guardian album reviews, where he spends 2/3rd of the review laughing at his own jokes and the remaining third talking about the album. He used to restrict his stand-up routine to the first paragraph but it's expanded and expanded over the years.

it is broadly correct tho

I tried something out last night at a client-schmoozing event: the withdrawal of levity. Any participation I had in one to one discussion, or as part of some coalesced group, was deadly serious. This did not go well - people looked at me as if I had antlers. Perhaps this is because there is, in terms of face to face communication, a generally accepted (or tolerated) rule that you shall not bore your audience. Perhaps that has bled through to print and online media.

book etc ... that was relentlessly humorless, or dark, or similar
The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, by Janice Galloway. I don't recall that being funny, but I do recall feeling exhuasted afterwards...

Even Shakespearean tragedy uses humour as a release valve and/or commentary. Struggling to think of many great works of literature that don't utilise humour in some way.

The alternative is looking po-faced, and no one wants that when they're trying to make a serious point.

― Homosexual Satan Wasp (Matt DC), Thursday, March 1, 2012 2:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was thinking on reading the beginning of the thread that I'd come across a concept in a drama class that to make an interesting bad/evil character you had to establish a feeling of sympathy. If you didn't then the audience didn't really care what they did, they'd just be dismissive of the character. & one method of establishing this sense of sympathy was through humour. Could be the irony of the gap between the character's intentionality and reality or something else.
sorry started a thought but don't think I've got a proper conclusion.

it shd be pretty obvious that i'm as desperately crowd-pleasing and class clownish as any poster on board, so i'm certain that part of this train of thought is a dissatisfaction with myself. but i'm still unsure as to why - or if - humour is the great universalizer. i think the point woof made about unseriousness might be closer to how i'm thinking. this isn't humour vs humourlessness so much as need to please versus need to express, maybe.

but i'm still unsure as to why - or if - humour is the great universalizer

Fear of sex and death, probably.

If you can link it back to satire/mockery, it is the making small of things which are otherwise unpleasant or morbid maybe? Lilliputianisation... er.

I don't think humor is the great universalizer at all, I think it (litcrit pomo alert:) interpellates tribes. A joke hails you as a belonging to a certain group, an address you can accept (even if provisionally or strategically: the thin-lipped smile) or reject. It's when people's jokes interpellate you as a BOORISH ASSHOLE that it gets wearying.

i love the deployment of humour within a satirical context but i think it's telling that satire and humour have become conflated to the point where people assume that all satire must be humourous and that every "Cameron is a wanker" zing must be satire.

i have a whole side-notion in my head btw about neurodiverse people and the notion of an inability to process humour, but that is really far from where i was going here.

^otm, but then I don't think there's been any decent satire for years. No, scratch that, any satire at all? You might look in Private Eye I guess, but I think you'd look in vain for the most part (it's not really satirical?). Oh, Thick of It I suppose.

xpost.

also somebody raised upthread that there is also, for want of a better word, an emo culture which expresses itself in easily repeated psychological jargon and unexamined assumptions about the importance of being yourself, expressing yourself, and never being judged by anyone ever (except God, ymmv). but maybe that's too big to fit here either. i acknowledge that stuff functions as a counterweight to Red Nose Britain tho.

there's an issue for something like The Thick of It where the satirical comment is so close to the reality that it ceases to function as satire, cf. Kissinger and the Nobel Peace Prize etc

I was going to mention Private Eye in that it's a publication that's actually LESS humorous that you expect, once you get past the first few pages it's all investigative stuff and burning anger.

except the second half which is all remixes of the same jokes that Peter Cook was probably making in 1965 and i assume is the selling point to at least a good chunk of Eye readers?

and i assume Craig Brown is still doing his savant toff who read something about a celebrity in the Spectator once steez

actually the reason the Eye shdn't be counted as a satirical magazine now is because the satire is almost always the worst thing in there

ok so it turns out Craig Brown is Florence MacHine's uncle? huge lol

ok so it turns out Craig Brown is Florence MacHine's uncle? huge lol

!!!

there's an issue for something like The Thick of It where the satirical comment is so close to the reality

Definitely. Never really found The Office funny for that reason. It was just like an office. Which took me back to your original post (and woof's response) about whether humour is necessary.

I remember Wyndham Lewis wrote somewhere that all sorts of works are the better for being 'stiffened with satire' rather than being necessarily purely satirical (anyone who's read any of his purely satirical works will feel he has a point about limiting the amount of satire maybe).

I feel aesthetically that's right (and might operate only on a relatively unobtrusive level like externalising descriptions of people). Whether the same applies to humour I'm not so sure. I find black things funny. What woof said about Beckett upthread is relevant.

xpost lol.

i find black things v. funny. this is another point - often we bring the humour to what we're experiencing, it isn't necessarily present in the art work itself. i'll argue that Salo functions as black humour and i'm convinced that i'm right but it's obvious how you could miss it. the same wd go for a hell of a lot of cultural products. but is this eye for humour itself an expression of a sensibility that belongs to now?

No.

Cautious no.

like obviously some people have always seen humour in everything. but does the degree to which this is a thinkable response change thru time/geography? i'm almost convinced it does. po-faced Victorians like all cliches is obviously false and disprovable but societies do have a public face i think, a way that they like to think about themselves out loud and present themselves to themselves. we live in an informal age and i wd agree with the crustiest Telegraph curmudgeon on that point, tho our conclusions wd be different.

eg Ulysses now is funny in some of the same ways and in some very different ways than it was in 1922. or more accurately perhaps it was serious in different ways back then.