The Tyranny of Humour

Would be interested in hearing the opinions of any literary theory types who could link banter to Bakhtin's theories of the Carnivalesque

"Roll up, Roll up you skinny indie twots and come inside!!"

http://i.imgur.com/dYc0c.jpg

"banter" in the 18th century was something quite different and much closer to "the argot of criminals and dregs" so there's at least a history of them and us entwined into the word

agree with Lex that any social group that communicates exclusively thru banter wd get very boring very quickly

Is this thread about why we banned Dom?

you are so weirdly stuck on him

nowt to do with banter, or Dom, but just remembered that the chaplain at my 6th form college used to be very keen on humour - which he defined as " the affectionate communication of insight" . not sure where he got that from, but I do rather like it.

Banter isn't the most advanced form of humour, no, but there is a difference between friendly goading among two people who know each other well and full on bullying/chiding - it's all case-by-case innit? ILX has its own "zing" culture that ranges between genuine wit and outright nastiness, but it's pretty much impossible trying to deconstruct this. When a bit of verbl rough-n-tumble spills over into malice/tedium, that's really up to the parties involved to decide.

Amazing Fugazi moment that I can't remember if it was actually in the Instrument film or just at a show I attended:

Guy in audience: "Banter!"
Ian MacKaye: "Banter? What kind of banter would you like SIR? Am I bantering enough for you now?"

how does "banter" work in England? your version sounds so mean.

banter is the many against the one (the many aren't required to be present at the time)

it is the form exclusion takes

it is used to reinforce the boundaries of who is inside and who is outside

those that are outside are required to play along in order that everyone can pretend for a joke that they are inside

to refuse the rules of the game is to let the whole of society down

how does "banter" work in England? your version sounds so mean.

― beachville, Wednesday, March 7, 2012

It is how we consolidate hierarchies

and reinforce status quo

Banaka?

no she went of her own volition

I am having trouble with this again.

This is a personal example, so I'm afraid it might come across as "wah, oh woe is me" when it's actually me adding another piece to the puzzle of why I find it so difficult and overwhelming and unhappy-making.

Recognising and responding to humour is really really hard work for me, reading "tone" and responding in the correct "tone" is a constant battle. I've always used the metaphor of trying to follow the steps of a complicated 19th century dance without knowing the steps - and indeed, without even being able to hear the music.

Someone responded to a nuanced discussion with a rather pointed - and to my eyes - rude dismissal. I kind of sat looking at it for about five minutes, trying to work out, do they mean this? Is it as rude and mean as it looks? Are they being "funny"? Is this "banter"? After about five minutes, I decided it was "banter" and responded in (what I thought was) exactly the same tone - pointed and slightly mean, but with a hook I thought was funny.

Hey, look at me, I'm doing "banter."

They responded back with an absolute shit-storm, accused me of "lashing out" and told me to "chill out" (erm, I've been perhaps too calm in my evaluation of this whole thing?) and when I tried to say this was hypocritical, asking why responding in exactly the same manner was somehow "banter" for them and "lashing out" for me - they pitched an absolute fit, accusing me of "drama" when what I'm thinking is "whoa, where did this come from, can you dish it out, but you can't take it" ?

This is when I just want to give up and move to Mars, because I'm hurt and confused by their reaction (both times - first in them doing the banter, second in their having such a terrible reaction to *my* banter) and they're (I think?) acting like they're hurt and confused by my actions.

And I just feel like... why the *fuck* would you put someone through this kind of ordeal, and call it "humour."

Do I have no sense of humour? Am I just an aspie shut-in who should stop trying to interact with other people because I can neither read nor properly react to "tone"? Have I just been bullied into a kind of defensiveness that perpetually reads as aggressive even when I'm not?

Don't bother answering those questions, I'm not asking for advice. I'm just trying to state, very inarticulately, how hard it is for someone to deal with, and react to, what other people claim is "just banter." And why someone like me will avoid "banter" like the plague.

People who insist on forcing "banter" on you, and then getting angry at you about your reactions, basically: MASSIVE FUCKING DUD.

Sounds like a pian. I guess the answer as with most things is just to be yourself, if you're not comfortable with banter, just answer with a straight reply. It's their problem if they find that annoying.

er *pain*

The word "banter" often reminds me of the phrase "bantha fodder" from Star Wars

I was at a dinner party the other night where none of the couples/singles knew any of the others, and the title of this thread popped into my head

There is a kind of arms race of clever-clever oneupmanship that can happen, and which is incredibly offputting if you're not part of the circle that understands it, or not on cocaine/drunk, and I think it's reaaallly exacerbated when people don't really know each other

It's especially bad when you have more than one (usually male) person in the room who is used to thinking of himself as the funny man.

I guess the moral of the story is: if you feel uncomfortable with something, don't do it.

But I have been reading post's posts above, and thinking about the way that banter is used for the construction of insider and outsider identities. And how that is such a double-edged sword.

I might have got the tone wrong, maybe they were using the banter to include me, maybe it was a "newbies GTFO" banter aimed at excluding me? I don't know. IDGI. I can't ever seem to read it.

My problem is not that I can't "read" humour because I'm too literal, but because my mind is sorting through so many different layers of meaning before I can reach the correct level of whether it's *humour* or not, which seems to happen even before I can get around to reacting to whether it's funny or not.. There are just too many options, is this banter constructing me on the inside? Or on the outside?

We got into trouble with this on the Radiohead thread last week, where... it's one thing when Melissa and I make "LOL fangirls" jokes back and forth at one another, because in the construction of identity, we are both assigning ourselves to the same class, we are Radiohead fangirls, we are laughing with each other, not at each other, when we pick on the denigrated class of "fangirl." We've taken the "outsider" category and made a joke over us both being insiders. But when Mark G or AG comes in and makes *exactly the same* "LOL fangirls" joke, it has such a different context, because they're not fangirls, so they may think that they are making the same jokes, but the context is so different in that they are not in the category, therefore they are pushing us back to the status of outsider again, with the same words. Which is not funny, it's unpleasant.

This is why I find humour so difficult, because it's so fucking complicated. It must be so much easier to understand humour when you don't have to deal with - or even think about - those insider/outsider categories.

(Then it just comes back around to the whole "OMG, you're being so ~disingenuous~ with your confusion, how can you not understand (which of the 500 different levels I meant to be funny on)!?!?")

We had dinner last night with friends of ours who are a MF couple. The dude is Scottish; bouncing jokes off of each other was an interesting experience just because both the idioms and the spoken cadence between my midwest US accent and his accent (btw I don't know Scottish accents well enough to place beyond "understandable" and "are we speaking the same language?"). There were multiple times where he made jokes that I hadn't realized were complete thoughts because his spoken inflection led me to think he was going to say something more and I'd have to go back and run back what he said in my head to realize he'd expressed a complete thought.

This was a lot of work for a conversation that was operating on the level of describing the giant maxipad they found on the sidewalk earlier that day and coming up with porn titles for Indiana Jones movies.

some people find tone and intent incredibly difficult to read even in face to face conversations. in print, the difficulties are exacerbated, with none of the physical clues of face to face - no tone of voice, no facial clues, no body language.

for all that emoticons can be cloying or twee or overused i think they survive because they're a useful attempt to put some of this paralanguage back into written communication. but of course, like any paralanguage, they're also open to difficulties of interpretation.

which isn't to say these difficulties are solely the fault or the problem of the interpreter - they're equally problematic if the person trying to communicate isn't saying what they "mean" to say.

Cross-cultural humour is bloody difficult, no matter what the context (doubly so if they're Weejans.) I guess take that conversation and replay it for 40 years, and that's basically part of my trouble with humour.

Like Tracer's description of a cleverness "arms race", it is another kind of status jostling to establish who is going to be "the funny one" in a newly assembled group.

some people find tone and intent incredibly difficult to read even in face to face conversations. in print, the difficulties are exacerbated, with none of the physical clues of face to face - no tone of voice, no facial clues, no body language.

OMG, yes, this, times 1000. It's why I hate talking on the phone so much. I suppose I love text because it strips away a lot of the distractions (I am so distracted all the time, by tone and affect) but it really doesn't help with the humour thing.

My wife (who is a private person, so..)..

... makes/d self-deprecating humour jokes, people laugh, and that's fine.

Some make the mistake of thinking aha and join in with the 'you are thick also because' and that's not fine.

There's only one way to avoid this: Don't put yourself down.

Now, that's one scenario. Others work differently.

i think text can be as flexible a means of conveying meaning as any, but any time you get into saying something you don't mean you are deliberately introducing a problem into your communication. sometimes that difficulty isn't intended to exclude. but i'm now wondering what rhetorical ends irony in its literary sense serves. and then obviously why/if irony has become such a widely-used strategy in public discourse.

people have talked about non-directional irony upthread, and how it protects the user from fully committing to an idea so as not to appear stupid if somebody argues against. but there's more to it i think. an absence of belief as well as a disguise? as if perma-irony becomes a way of avoiding communication yourself because there's some lack of social understanding inside the ironist?

so many of the things i laugh at are bound up in tone and also my knowledge of the person speaking - went for brunch on sun and spent most of my time cracking up but nothing anyone was saying would be recognisable as a "joke" per se.

which might be why my reaction to ubiquitous (and impersonal) "internet humour" and memes is a heavily disapproving kmt.

on the other hand, often i work with people who are supposed to have huge difficulty understanding tone or other kinds of paralanguage - i've got reservations about that idea but nevertheless - and none of them are "humourless".

But that ubiquitous and impersonal "internet humour" of memes is a way of easing humour discourse without a shared culture and history - or a way of creating a new one that anyone on the internet can participate in.

x-post

Interesting thought. I wonder if earlier (pre-Victorian) English writing attempted to convey the pragmatics/emotion with more discursive, idiomatic,symbolically coded language that was phased out during the 1800s w/ the efficiency and formalization of writing conventions & if emoticons and script markup are an attempt to reinsert the piece of communication that is largely unconcerned with "meaning"

I'm trying to get my head around what NV is saying about irony. And thinking, perhaps this is part of my problem with "Irony" as distancing technique. That I'm already sorting through 100 different possible meanings, when you introduce irony and "opposite-land talk" the person using it is literally (ha) doubling my job.

I dunno; I don't think I'm humourless. The world is often very, very funny. Of course it is. It's just that the things that people do to construct "humour" are so complicated and difficult for me to get my head around what they *mean*.

i think part of what i'm saying is that if you right a novel featuring ironic language there is a structure which clues the reader towards the irony - it's gettable. on a message board where although we're writing we're mostly imitating the style and rhythm of speech, the structures don't allow for making irony obvious - failure to grasp that a post is ironic is generally the poster's fault rather than the readers.

if you write a novel, even

In the sense that all communication is an arbitration for meaning, introducing the notion of dissembling/disingenuousness for "benign" purposes - e.g. sarcasm, irony - can (to me) be funny because it piles meaning on meaning on meaning and complicates the language in a way that values the playful over the actual.

It's not just about that poster's fault, it's about familiarity - with that person or group (and their familiarity with you.)

well yeah i'm not saying it wd be better if people never used irony. i am saying they have no right to get exasperated if somebody fails to recognise it.

(unless they've used a shitload of italics and ;-) winky symbols)

and also that there are places where we have a right to expect there to not be irony - on the labelling of overpriced soft drinks for example

I suppose that's my exasperation in this specific example - that I correctly realised, without any italics or winkies or indeed any visual cues - that someone was attempting humour - and yet they were not willing to allow me the same latitude.

(Sorry, I'll stop moaning and derailing, I'm just trying to sort through some disproportionate hurt here, and figure out why I was so upset by this thing.)

it's not a derail it's a scenic diversion

i would be upset if i felt like people were miscontruing what i said in a judgemental fashion too

I think whenever you try to be funny in a way that's not "you", it's not funny (and when that way includes being a little bit mean, then you've got a potentially combustible situation)

(As someone whose partner's first language isn't English I know whereof I speak here)

The thing is, it is a thing that's very, *very* me, but it's something I recognise as harmful and dangerous, and therefore I try to divert that kind of super-cutting humour into, e.g. song lyrics, because I recognise that humour can be a weapon, and how to use it, and how to *hurt* someone using it. That my caustic side is something I don't like - and I'm not afraid that it's out of character, I'm afraid that it's rather too much *in* character. That I have the potential to be very cruel, and much of my avoiding humour (and thus potentially coming across as humourless) is actually about avoiding cruelty, which I despise, because I have such a potential for it.

(Also, a person who thinks of themselves as caustic, might have been caught out, being out-causticked by the new person.)

Oh OK! Your post where you described the exchange made it sound like you were sort of blindly trying out this "banter" thing and hoping it "worked"

I also suspect your initial shock and hurt at the other person's message to you may have, shall we say, amped up the barb-itude of your rejoinder whether you were aware of it or not..