My research dwells at the intersections of philosophy, comedy, and politics. I am particularly interested in the liberatory and revolutionary potential of comedy. But, as I tell my students, the first task of a philosopher is to clarify their terms. So, before exploring comedy’s social and political dimensions, it was first necessary to begin with questions like: “What is comedy?” However, answering this question was more daunting than it first appeared. As Andrew Stott, author of Comedy: The New Critical Idiom, puts it, comedy “is a notoriously elusive quantity, one that evades scrutiny and has a tendency to bolt the moment critical attention is turned towards it.” As a result, many attempts to philosophize comedy have been foiled.
Therefore, in light of philosophy’s inability to adequately “think” about comedy, I want to propose a new “Copernican turn” of sorts. Instead of merely engaging with comedy as an object of inquiry, as another thing to be known, I propose that we turn our understanding of comedy inside-out by reframing it as a sort of subjectivity, or way of being-in-the-world. That is, rather than understanding comedy as having (or not) a strict form in the Platonic sense, I will instead begin my inquiry by regarding the comic as a mode or attunement to the world, a comic spirit. As Alenka Zupančič points out in her book The Odd One In: On Comedy, the connection between the comic mode of being in the world and spirit, at least in a generic sense of “mental capacity,” is frequently demonstrated in language, as evidenced in terms like, “wit in English; geistvoll or geistreich in German, as well as witzig and Wits, which have the common root with the English wit; French is especially eloquent in this regard—avoir de l’esprit, être spiritual, faire de l’esprit, mot d’esprit, or just simply spirit.” As she goes on to say, “we could say that the materialism of comedy is precisely the materialism of spirit.”
Accordingly, if we understand the comic as a spirit, this allows us to recognize its ability to permeate any setting, allowing it to take on many diverse embodiments and manifestations. Yet, in all of its diverse embodiments, we can also recognize a unifying comic rationality. As Henri Bergson says in Laughter: An Essay on the Comic, “The comic spirit has a logic of its own, even in its wildest eccentricities. It has a method in its madness.” Like its twin spirit, tragedy, the comic spirit can perhaps best be understood as a mode of experience which, like its mythical father Dionysus, experiences rebirths and reincarnations. Terry Eagleton is quite instructive in this area. Drawing on the works of William Empson and Christopher Norris, he characterizes the comic spirit as having “a down-to-earth quality of healthy skepticism,” which is reflected in “the routine practical wisdom of those who, more conversant with the material world than their superiors, are less likely to be bamboozled by florid flights of rhetoric.” Eagleton goes on to describe the comic spirit as a mode of viewing “the complex and sophisticated as embedded in the commonplace.” In this way, the “bathos” of comedy “ceases to be a mere comic trope and becomes instead a moral and political vision.” And yet, the bathetic skepticism of the comic spirit doesn’t manifest as cynicism. Instead, the spirit of the comic is a sort of earthly wisdom, guided by an attunement to the others and the world.
Shifting our approach to comedy in this way allows us to use phenomenology, the philosophical study of lived experience, as a methodology for investigating comic subjectivity. But what would a phenomenology of comedy look like? First, we may want to attempt a phenomenological reduction of comedy in order to identify its eidos, or essence, but not abstractly, conceptually, or theoretically, but rather, as it arises in our lived experience. Then, following Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, we may also want to look into the “background” of comedy to see what’s behind the curtain. In this case, we will want to look into the spatial and temporal background of comedy. In terms of the spatial background, what are the places and spaces in which comedy dwells? Where does comedy not only survive but thrive? And in terms of the temporal background of comedy, what are the politics and conditions of emergence for comedy? We might also want to explore a genealogy of comedy to learn more about its lineages, inheritances, and conditions of its emergence. Accordingly, these are the kinds of questions that I’m exploring in my current book project, A Phenomenology of Comedy.
But a “funny” thing happened during the process of working on A Phenomenology of Comedy. I began to realize that the comic spirit performs its own sort of phenomenology, what I would describe as comic phenomenology. Comic phenomenology is a narrative process that utilizes humor and jokes, but cannot simply be reduced to the use of humor and jokes. Because comedy isn’t about humor or jokes, it’s about what’s behind the humor and jokes. In one sense, we could say that comedy is not about the jokes; it’s about what comes after the jokes. Whereas jokes have a two-part structure, a set-up and a punchline, the narrative structure of comedy has three parts: beginning, middle, and end. And, as Matthew Bevis, author of Comedy: A Very Short Introduction, points out, comedy can best be recognized by its ending. In other words, the entire narrative process of comedy builds to its ending, often the classic happy or good ending. If nothing else, the ending of comedy serves as the resolution to the foregoing drama. So, in a literal, temporal sense, understanding comedy isn’t about the jokes; it’s about what comes after the jokes.
And yet, there is another sense in which comedy is about what’s behind, or under, the jokes. In this sense, comedy uses humor and jokes, but it does so in a way that reveals a form of truth. As Agnes Heller, author of Immortal Comedy, argues, “The truth of works of art in general can be associated with revelatory truth, and comic works are no exceptions. Their truth, if they are true at all, is revelatory.” This harkens back to the ancient Greek notion of truth (aletheia), which conceived of truth as revelation or disclosure. As such, comedy does not offer the types of logical arguments or rational justifications that traditionally ground truth claims. Instead, comedy arrives at truth via plot or narrative. As Dmitri Nikulin, author of Comedy Seriously, puts it, “The truth in comedy is not told plainly but demonstrated through the entire comic action by truth-telling and truth-enacting, by a seeming avoidance of telling the truth, which thereby tells it.” This reaffirms why comic truth can be described as revelatory. As Nikulin states, “It [comedy] often tells and shows the truth by withdrawing or suspending it.” Comedy, then, uses humor and jokes as a part of its revelatory truth process.
But again, even though the comic specializes in its use of humor and jokes, it’s not about the jokes; it’s about what’s behind the jokes. Accordingly, the punchline of comedy is that behind the humor and jokes, we find ourselves. In other words, comedy is able to use humor and jokes to reveal the “Other” within. Comedy’s unique way of illuminating human experience leads Simon Critchley, author of On Humour, to argue that comedy performs an “oblique phenomenology of ordinary life.” Critchley suggests, “The comedian sees the world under what some philosophers call an epochē, a certain bracketing or suspension of belief… The comedian behaves like a visitor from another planet, vainly trying to disappear into practices that we take for granted and failing calamitously in the process.” This understanding of comedy is reminiscent of what Edmund Husserl describes as the phenomenological standpoint, which he places in opposition to our natural, unreflective, everyday way of existing. Critchley writes, “Humour effects a breakage in the bond connecting the human being to its unreflective, everyday existence. In humour, as in anxiety, the world is made strange and unfamiliar to the touch.” As a sort of phenomenology of ordinary life, the comic spirit illuminates everyday experiences in ways that allow us to understand them anew.
What more, the very thing we think we know best, our “self,” is able to be opened up and seen differently by means of the comic spirit. Therefore, we could say that comedy not only performs its own sort of phenomenology, which works to reveal its own form of truth, but also that the truth which comedy reveals is subjective because the “thing” that it reveals is our very selves. Just as phenomenology, particularly as envisioned by Husserl, aspires to an objective truth of subjective experience, comic phenomenology follows suit with its desire to reveal the truth of ourselves, specifically the “Other” within—both individually and collectively.
An example of this occurs in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest when Jack inquires, “I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?” On its surface, this question appears ridiculous. Who doesn’t know who they are? And yet, as Bevis states, “From Menander to Wilde and beyond, this question [would you kindly inform me who I am?”] is the comic question. It implies that—in this universe at least—character is something social, something you frequently have to enquire after through repartee and exchange.” Understood this way, one’s identity is intersubjective, achieved with and through others. However, further complicating this matter is that identity is also intra-subjective; one can be beside oneself, coming face to face with versions of themselves with which they were previously unaware or perhaps in denial. This is why answering the comic question becomes the only true plot of comedy, let alone our being-in-the-world.
Paradoxically, however, answering the comic question [would you kindly inform me who I am?] is the one plot of comedy, and life, not because of its ridiculousness but rather because of its seriousness. It is an expression of the existential experience of “thrownness.” As Critchley explains, thrownness (Geworfenheit), a term coined by Martin Heidegger, “is the simple awareness that we always find ourselves somewhere, namely delivered over to a world with which we are fascinated, a world we share with others.” As Critchley points out, Jim Morrisson’s lyrics in “Riders on the Storm” express this sentiment quite well:
Into this house, we’re born
Into this world, we’re thrown
Like a dog without a bone
In other words, the term thrownness attempts to capture the human experience of trying to come to grips with finding oneself in a world, born into a specific family in a particular culture at a given moment of human history. Or as Morrisson puts it, “Into this house we’re born/Into this house we’re thrown.” However, the ‘already-having-found-oneself-there-ness’ of this experience points to a gap, or a lag, in the experience of ourselves; as Morrisson puts it, “Like a dog without a bone.” One’s being is thrown into the world, and they must go chasing after it in order to get a hold of it.
And yet, this experience of not having a hold of oneself never ceases. Not only is my identity something I can never completely possess, but it is also something I can never fully control because of its intersubjective and intra-subjective nature. Ultimately, the act of trying to achieve one’s identity is a never-ending saga for each individual. This is why the one plot of comedy, whether on-stage or in life, is always trying to get a hold of ourselves; the attempt to know and be who we are, which also entails being with those we love. However, in comedy, as in life, one’s identity is never permanently achieved but must be renewed constantly. Thus, we must constantly endeavor to be who we are in the eyes of others as well as ourselves. Which also means that the comedy of errors nevertheless ensues even as the work of comedy, the revelation of the Other within, is seemingly achieved.
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