The Tyranny of Humour

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.

We live in an informal age compared to upper class urban Victorians but that's tilting the playing field a little bit!

I don't know why, maybe it's just a natural egotism, but people always seem to think that previous generations were less funny, more serious-minded, less sophisticated, easier to fool, etc etc.

the intent of the artist is of limited importance, i think, and proximity is an important part of that murky equation

and yeah 100 years ago only the worst kind of political demagogue wanted to be your friend, friend of the people.

Trace this isn't less, more, better, worse...this is different. I'm saying that societies and cultures are different to one another. They may even repeat the same mannerisms, but i don't buy a timeless universality of experience.

Couple of case studies I guess. The first a 'yes' to the suggestion it's an expression of 'now'. Kafka I found incredibly gloomy (obv) when I first read him as a teenager. Now I find him quite amusing to read. The endless fruitless attempts to get things done in the face of the way things are (yes it's more than that), why, it's Larry David! (no.)

Celine: black as hell, and often extremely funny in what is essentially a presentation the bleak absurd? Black humour funny as a consequence of existentialism? see also Beckett.

So, death of god results in black humour? v possibly. See also the transition of the word absurd from the unique impossible to 'lol'.

Wd want to try and look at Rabelais/Cervantes/Swift maybe in this context, but people be staring at me not doing work.

Is it egotism? Premise of this thread seems to be that this might not, in itself, be A Good Thing.

so that's me saying 'yes' I guess.

sorry, xposting like blazes.

and it's not "previous generations", it's public discourse. the way media and public figures address their audience. the ways it's considered seemly for adults to relate to each other in public.

also xposting like mad. cos i'll have to work again shortly.

There is some kind of irony in a thread about humour being humorously delinated :/

deliniated. gah.

I'm cautiously yes on a cultural shift towards the tendency to see humour. I get the feeling 30s-70s maybe were a great deal more serious about their Kafka, Beckett, Dostoevsky etc.

death of god results in black humour

god = high seriousness
aftermath of death of god = black humour
god dead and forgotten = tim vine

xp

yeah i'm thinking this, from the perspective of criticism. altho it's obviously not the only measure of how writers are received.

aftermath of death of god = black humour

fits nicely into Breton's Anthology of Black Humour

on an unrelated note a work colleague - somebody i don't work that often with - just signed off an email to me with a "xx". i'm not perturbed but i am v much "this is ok now?"

You do see it.

i guess it's kind of pleasant, i think what throws me is the shifting signification of the "x" from "kiss"

well, yes, the first few times I saw it, I thought that as well. Take it it's from a woman tho? (I've only ever had an x at the end of an email from a woman, denuded of any close affection obv).

fuckin denuded gotta stop using that word. esp that close to 'affection'.

yeah exacly it's kinda like an air kiss but then you wdn't air kiss a colleague either?

gotta go actually work yay friday

xx is a bit much, but x i see a bit.

Going to think about humour and the bleak void we stare at/stares at us.

it's even closer to the word "woman" FYI

xx

Most of the "humour" in Private Eye is in the centre pages, the stuff towards the back about industry and banking is back at the anger and investigation. I think that stuff has as much sarcasm per item at the Street of Shame, but it just takes longer to cut through the pomposity and obstructive layers so the items are longer, whereas the SoS is all "An excellent review by Gerald Starborgling in the Telegraph of the new John Hardt novel, but surely the novel was written by a different Sally Johnson than the one who has been shacked up with him for 10 years?"

That said my reading order is straight to the satirical "From The Forums" in the humour, then SoS / the book reviews / everything else.

Also modern satire in pure black tar form = Chris Morris, particularly Brass Eye.

Yep. That qualifies more than anything else in the last couple of decades I think.

And the non-special part of it is 15 years ago, because I am old.

on an unrelated note a work colleague - somebody i don't work that often with - just signed off an email to me with a "xx". i'm not perturbed but i am v much "this is ok now?"

lulz this was the exact subject and angle of a hand-wringing daily mail column yesterday

FUCK CHRIS MORRIS

FUCK THE OFFICE