The Tyranny of Humour

I heard Weird Al say something that felt kinda true, of why he stayed a musician and never went into standup. Because if people didn't like his singing, they could still at least maybe enjoy the music behind it...whereas if you're not funny as a standup, that's it. That's all you've got, there's no real parachute.

xxpost Maybe so, but dismissing comedy outright in the extreme is... I dunno, fair enough - you get people who don't listen to music - but there's good comedy and terrible comedy and if anything's going to boil down to a matter of taste more than music, it's what makes us laugh. I just find it o_O that anyone can say they really dislike any and all examples of comedic entertainment.

Anyone can say anything; whether it turns out to actually be true is a completely separate matter.

stand-up has many unpleasantnesses that music doesn't have in the same way, as people are trying to explain

I have definitely listened to music that was just as unpleasant as stand-up comedy

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?

― FPocalypto! (Noodle Vague), Friday, 2 March 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In Salo's case (and its a v specific case) is it distance provoking the humour? I guess if it was released just after the war it might have too damn much to read any humour into it, more anger (and satire), but by '75 or so there was just enough, and then when you think about what was happening in some countries in Europe at the time (or what wasn't)...the thing is by then there was breathing space.

stand-up is needier: a performer almost always tries to ingratiate themself or else do some "confrontational" shtick, but either way they are desperate for an audience to respond. some music does that, and some performers, but music doesn't need to. it can just sit around being music all day not caring how you feel about it.

I don't know, there's something pretty sad about bands dutifully playing against the backdrop of a roomful of people talking and ignoring them, or a DJ who can't get people dancing, or whatever.

re: Salo and distance i'm not wholly sure, because it may depend on how familiar the viewer is with Sade? if you watched the movie with nothing but the notion that the 120 Days existed, or not even that, then perhaps there'd be less irony. altho i think that just an awareness of Fascist superman fantasies might be enough to tip you the wink that the director is laughing at the protagonists' inadequacies. but on the other hand Bunuel was using Sade as material for satire, maybe the subject too, before the war. so i think it isn't a distance from the horror that makes for bitter laughs but a subversion of Fascist mythology that wd have still been humorous in 1945, tho obviously far more dangerous to explore.

like in one sense Salo is an extended riff on Jesus = Blangis in L'Age d'Or except with fascism (more or less) substituted for christianity

Yeah I ws trying to think how much I did or didn't know about Sade or European dictatorships of the 60s and 70s. Do remember laughing at the daring of it.

It was a restrained kind of laughter tho'. I did see it at the cinema.

stand-up is needier: a performer almost always tries to ingratiate themself or else do some "confrontational" shtick, but either way they are desperate for an audience to respond. some music does that, and some performers, but music doesn't need to. it can just sit around being music all day not caring how you feel about it.

― Mo Money Mo Johnston (Noodle Vague), Friday, 2 March 2012 17:22 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know, there's something pretty sad about bands dutifully playing against the backdrop of a roomful of people talking and ignoring them, or a DJ who can't get people dancing, or whatever.

― Homosexual Satan Wasp (Matt DC), Friday, 2 March 2012 17:26 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is interesting. Whenever I'm DJing and no one seems to be dancing, I instantly feel like I've got to do something about it. Often I'll be in a room and enjoying the music without physically reacting, and I've gotta remind myself of this when playing out, instead of getting hacked off or defensive. As for comedy, are there examples of "ambient comedy"? Blue Jam I guess... Not quite the same thing. But then this applies to all forms of spoken word, from television shows to audiobooks - I get hacked off with TVs being on "in the background". This is why I treasure music as an artform so much - no matter what happens, you are a participant when music is playing. You can choose to ignore it, but you still have to listen to it unless you leave the room. With visual and spoken arts, you can tune out completely - turn the speech into hubbub, turn away from the picture. So technically, with music, you have to react in some way - and you're listening to the same thing as everyone else, regardless if you process it differently.

xp

seeing it in the cinema with a group of strangers would be very different i'm sure. there's also the fact that i came to it as a confirmed Pasolini lover very much aware of the film's status. that's all distancing i think.

xpost actually I generally despise the idea of "background music" unless I'm trying to go to sleep and just want something to drown out background noise. So there ya go.

This is interesting. Whenever I'm DJing and no one seems to be dancing, I instantly feel like I've got to do something about it. Often I'll be in a room and enjoying the music without physically reacting, and I've gotta remind myself of this when playing out, instead of getting hacked off or defensive.

Yeah. You always have to remember that the problem solves itself once everyone's had another drink or three. (Which is true of comedy too, except by the time the crowd is truly warmed up all the opening acts have long since slunk off stage)

reading an article about unamuno and there's a quote that made me think of this thread, which i will now badly translate:
ya sé que a nadie se tuesta, ya no se hacen autos de fe, pero se hace algo peor: combatir las ideas con la burla

"i know that they don't burn anyone, they no longer do autos de fe, but they do something worse: combat ideas with mockery."

he did write that over 100 years ago mind you.

I generally despise the idea of "background music" unless I'm trying to go to sleep and just want something to drown out background noise. So there ya go.

― Alexandre Dumbass (dog latin)

Feel the opposite about this - I don't make a differentiation between foreground and background music, its like listening or not-listening, they often merge

Or walking round a city, looking and not-looking, often the best parts are when non-looking then suddenly realizing, rather than explicitly looking

zoning in, zoning out

yes exactly. the original point of ambient music too, not to be ignored but to reward shifting attention.

"i know that they don't burn anyone, they no longer do autos de fe, but they do something worse: combat ideas with mockery."

I guess the trad UK hostility to pretentiousness, love for 'common sense' maps to this. Can't think or write at the moment (have to shout at Melvyn Bragg on the TV), but I'll try to make a thinking-to-myself post tomorrow if brain is clear, something about Shaftesbury and ridicule maybe.

Dublin blather is the stuff I find funniest in Ulysses.

Having mentioned W Lewis upthread, should have remembered this sooner:

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/jpegs/1143209920265639.jpg

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/jpegs/1143210017640638.jpg

Magnificent.

what charming fascists, those Vorticists

That's probably a whole other thread!

im not sure i understand this thread but i guess i am part of the problem here

I think part of the problem is that NV was "begging the question" a bit.

Banter is not humour; banter is what people have when they lack a sense of humour. Banter is a catch-all word for idiocy that warns the rest of us that Here Be Lads. Banter is Soccer AM. It is Andy Gray. It is middle-aged men on Top Gear pretending that they are edgy outsiders by mocking society's weakest, then going home to Chipping Norton where they live two doors down from the Prime Minister. It is an English stag do in Dublin or Amsterdam with matching T-shirts. It is cruelty unleavened by wit but which is excused because it is a bit like wit, if you look at it from a certain angle. It what is left when humour has died, and just the rotting, stinking carcass remains, bearing a resemblance to the living being but lacking all that made it good. Banter is the Dunning-Kruger effect writ large. If you like banter, you are an idiot.

I have just written a tirade complaining about the price of stadium gig tickets, and now I'm agreeing with an Op/Ed column in the freaking TORYGRAPH.

Today is the day that i finally achieved Old Man Waving Can At Clouds status and there is nothing I can do about it.

Cane.

Though, being me, waving a copy of Ege Bamyasi at the clouds would be just as likely.

Didn't Eva Wiseman write (more or less) the same thing in the Observer a few weeks ago?

the banter backlash has been under way for a while i think, but there are...class dimensions that need to be unpicked.

but banter is only part of what NV was talking about.

Oh, I could say something about the class dimensions of the Bullingdon Banterers and the sheer depths of their sexism once you scratch the surface of their paternalism, but I won't go there.

the banter backlash has been under way for a while i think, but there are...class dimensions that need to be unpicked.

Don't think so, you see it among posh boys as much as working class lads. It's a particularly male thing though.

Tend to see it as 'posh lads' tbh.

surely Barney Ronay did this backlash (not that fascinatingly but he did it)

come to think of it I think Harry Pearson weighed in also

though 'weighed' is not the word for light comic floater HP

"BANTA" has become a Thing amongst footballers and football fans in recent times. Not many posh lads there.

actually HP strikes me as another case of humour not being tyrannical -- his Guardian column is pure humour, not really serious at all, just play, and has often been the best thing in the sport section

yeah banter is def a homosocial thing throughout all classes, thinking about it

I would argue that Matt is right, there aren't class distinctions that need to be unpicked - there are *intellectual* dimensions that need to be unpicked. The intellectual people (though mostly men) of all classes are capable of true wit, the less intellectual are not and so need to fill the chasm where the wit should be with their banter.

The only reason why it seems to be posh lads is because the posh lads are more visible as they have the more visible jobs - you read their words in magazines and hear them on TV. Obviously if you are a painter and decorator and the only place your banter is heard is down your local on a Saturday night people aren't going to be so aware of it.

I should add here (before someone shouts at me) that what I meant wasn't that women aren't capable of wit, it's that women's humour whoever they are is less cruel, so the differences between the humour of intellectual women and non-intellectual women are not so obvious.

Um. I don't know that it's that women's humour is less *cruel* - you've never heard two women giving ~female cleb X~ a once-over? But it seems somehow less competitive, and less based on sexually humiliating the person one is being humourous *with*? Actually, I don't even know that that's true, either. It's just a different power dynamic.

I have wondered why, for a long time, why, when women do sexually loaded "banter" about men, it tends to be a lot funnier and less "offensive" to me than men doing the same thing. If this is just my inherent prejudice, or if there is something in the power dynamic that renders it subversive rather than just grotesque.

But this is another topic. I hate this reductive "men drive like this, women drive like that" stereotypes, they wind me up so much.

Hm, by posh lads, I meant young upper class men taking on the darts/footy/zoo manner, for what psychological or social reason is a different matter.

That thing about intellectual 'wit' and lower class 'banter' I'm not sure is the case either. Certainly there is enough wit, wryness, sardonic and deprecating understatement in all classes, in fact put in those terms it's often seen to be located in working class undermining of authority and upper class attitudes.

Banter seems to be more of conversational froth, tending nowhere and to nothing. At its best banter is light-hearted back-and-forth between friends, usually based on certain cliches about each other's behaviour and known areas of mild difference. It can grease the wheels of conversation, true, although I tend to find it tedious. Humour is often a component, but doesn't need to be, because the main thing is the light-heartedness.

At its worst it's become a noisy badge of 'lads together', the 'just a bit of fun' crowd (and little else, and 'just a bit' is about right).

I have never experienced any humour, with a man, based on him trying to sexually humiliate me.

That would be strange.

Fizzles, the distinction being made was surely clever wit vs dumb banter, in all classes

and in light of WCC's post, the 'lads together' thing shd be extended to it being a defensive/aggressive badge of belonging no matter what the group. Humour or wit isn't limited to that group. xpost

Sorry, you're correct, pinefox. But I probably wouldn't have used the term 'intellectual' I think.

Argh, that was clumsily constructed. Being funny with? Being funny *at*? Like, the objects of "banter", it is definitely about the humiliation of the object. But I suppose the point is bonding with a man in a homosocial way, over the humiliation of the Other, where the Other usually = "women" or other targets of that kind of oneupmanship.

I think people, together, sometimes like laughing at other people, who are not there, or whom maybe they don't like that much

In my own particular experience, that does not have any gendered dimension, eg there is no particular tendency to laugh at women more than men, or to laugh at either on any sexual basis - this sounds likely to be vulgar and not so nice.