“It was only a joke!” is an interesting statement that, reducto ad absurdum, is essentially a claim to non-existence. To a school bully it rests upon the premise that his physical and emotional abuse of other children is an innate right and upon this solipsistic foundation, his attacks that are partaken in humour, as part of the status quo, cease to exist. They function not as punishment regarding the recipient but as an act designed to gain acceptance via his assertion of dominance. Similarly with the pilot that this week joked about blowing up an airport only to find himself dragged away by the government and no doubt tortured into a full confession of his lifetime membership to Al-Qaida. The targets of the joke (“bad weather” and the social hysteria that links planes with terrorism) are socially constructed forms and, as such, don’t exist empirically but only as a concept. The process is essentially the same in both cases; the difference lying in the bully’s personal attack transgressing the harm principle whilst the pilot’s attack on concepts is a matter of the freedom of speech.
The function of jokes is an interesting one. Freud pointed to their wish-fulfilling potential, Bakhtin saw them as a politically liberating act, and Voltaire commented on their power to reveal latent truths within society. Indeed, the form of a joke is that of chaos-to-order, a momentary flux swiftly resolved; in this way a joke fulfils a wish for order within the narrative of personal/political ideology and thus resulting in the revelation of (subjective) truth. Stewart Lee once said that farting was the ultimate comedic act. Following this formula (wish/ideology/truth undergoing chaos-to-order) it can be seen that the Pope farting is simply a condensed version of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream down into its principle function.
Much like farts, jokes also provide a release for pent-up frustrations. This may explain why self-satisfied bourgeoisie all love Micheal Macintyre whose comedy consists of walking around a middle-class household, pointing to things and saying “isn’t this funny?” In fact, all comedy nowadays is in the prose format, indicating an ideological conviction to realism and the status quo. The purer “joke” form seems to benefit totalitarian conditions; famously many jokes were told in Nazi concentration camps, behind the iron curtain, and in the 1950’s (when the existence of genitalia was explicitly denied). The joke form has a liberating function that momentarily frees one from ideologically-imposed constraints by conducting a post-modern, or Socratic, re-evaluation of a metanarrative via its own implications in the form of irony.
Jokes therefore take place on a separate level than standard language, existing in the self-referential, symbolic dreamscape. One can then make like the quasi-Berkelean Baudrillard and create an all-purpose formula for the defence of jokes within our increasingly censored society:
Jokes = signifiers within phantasy. Action and language in joke form are therefore a pure form of which meaning is only attached through social convention (ideology). Censorship can be exercised only upon the definable as an extension of the harm principle and as jokes function upon implications they therefore must be exempt.
The real problem of jokes lies in where the laughter is directed: laughter as a symbol of agreement with the kernel of truth expressed by the joke form, the foundation of “political correctness”. Where is the joke’s target situated? This joke for example (http://www.lamebook.com/the-fresh-prince-of-bash-air ) is not targeting violence against women as inherently funny, on the contrary, it relies upon the fact that it’s inherently wrong, the target being bad taste in-itself through the contrast of opposites. It’s the region of Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Carr and The Aristocrats. The opposite of the Bernard Manning type, or to a lesser extent the aggressively middle-class Armstrong and Millers, as they target class and race not as entities-in-themselves but instead draw attention to the symbols of class and race, thus playing the class/race game of the hegemonic majority. The line between the two is perhaps most aptly drawn by the “Sachsgate” jokes of Jonathan Ross and Russel Brand that had “bad taste in-itself” as their target, yet by including a real person they crossed the signifier-signified barrier and resulted in appearing like the solipsistic bully I began this rant with. Much like Borat, the humour then had the properties of the uncanny; the joke exists within the realm of form whilst the subject it attacks simultaneously occurs in reality.
Perhaps this is why Bruno put so many people off as well. Where Borat stood as a “devils-advocate” representing the consciously acted form of the joke that knows itself in a post-modern sense (an ironic signifier), Bruno fluctuated between this (the ‘illegal immigrant’s as furniture’ scene for example) and a shameless caricature of a gay stereotype. The comedy in Bruno thus steps back an extra level where Bruno’s character is not the agent-provocateur that we implicitly trust but a double-agent that, through his own grotesqueness, seems to end up attacking homosexuals himself without the justifying target of the societal Other to exempt him. The trick here then, the genius double-agent-reversal, relies upon Borat for its meaning. Baron-Cohen attacks racism in Borat by revealing the ridiculous inaccuracies of racist thought; the jokes attack the Other by pronouncing them wrong and rewards the viewer for laughing with correct intent. In Bruno, the narrative of Borat is closely mirrored, however, Bruno is not a homophobe but a homosexual so it would appear that we are to laugh at the homophobes that attack him. The problem lies in how often Bruno is seen to be in the wrong, so are we still to laugh at his attackers for being homophobic? No, the point is that being a homosexual does not make you Bruno and the target is not homophobia but the confusion of gay rights with a fear of criticising gay people (“political correctness gone mad” as idiots put it). The true point of gay rights is not that people like Bruno, it’s that people dislike Bruno, but for his superficial personality and not because of his sexuality. For this reason Bruno is a far more complex film than Borat and one that confronts the prejudices within real, intelligent and sympathetic people rather than the one-dimensional characters presented, albeit hilariously, in Borat.
It’s this sort of complex meta-humour that is probably why so many people nowadays seem to lack a sense of humour. A sense of humour is a willingness to hear other opinions and then reassess your own. The best jokes, like farts, cut through the dogmatic ideologies of intelligence with undeniable physicality. Think of the renaissance, when the likes of Rabelais and Cervantes laughed their way out of centuries of religion oppression. Problem is though; one must be willing to have things questioned, and let’s face it, not many of us do. We tend to find ourselves attacking the comedians themselves. Which is probably why very few people will recognise this jazz-comedy sketch at the end of this episode of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle as perhaps one of the funniest comedy sketches of all time - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDwQ66XBrH8&feature=related
Anyway, enough of this. The entire thing’s been written in a state of intense flu-delirium so I apologise if it rambles or makes very little sense. These blogs are nothing but reducto ad absurdum nonsense anyway I’m sure it’s no big loss. Next week: Was Jesus a commie? I’ll be answering ‘yes’ in the hope of shocking some Americans from the 1960s! What a rebel I am…
The function of jokes is an interesting one. Freud pointed to their wish-fulfilling potential, Bakhtin saw them as a politically liberating act, and Voltaire commented on their power to reveal latent truths within society. Indeed, the form of a joke is that of chaos-to-order, a momentary flux swiftly resolved; in this way a joke fulfils a wish for order within the narrative of personal/political ideology and thus resulting in the revelation of (subjective) truth. Stewart Lee once said that farting was the ultimate comedic act. Following this formula (wish/ideology/truth undergoing chaos-to-order) it can be seen that the Pope farting is simply a condensed version of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream down into its principle function.
Much like farts, jokes also provide a release for pent-up frustrations. This may explain why self-satisfied bourgeoisie all love Micheal Macintyre whose comedy consists of walking around a middle-class household, pointing to things and saying “isn’t this funny?” In fact, all comedy nowadays is in the prose format, indicating an ideological conviction to realism and the status quo. The purer “joke” form seems to benefit totalitarian conditions; famously many jokes were told in Nazi concentration camps, behind the iron curtain, and in the 1950’s (when the existence of genitalia was explicitly denied). The joke form has a liberating function that momentarily frees one from ideologically-imposed constraints by conducting a post-modern, or Socratic, re-evaluation of a metanarrative via its own implications in the form of irony.
Jokes therefore take place on a separate level than standard language, existing in the self-referential, symbolic dreamscape. One can then make like the quasi-Berkelean Baudrillard and create an all-purpose formula for the defence of jokes within our increasingly censored society:
Jokes = signifiers within phantasy. Action and language in joke form are therefore a pure form of which meaning is only attached through social convention (ideology). Censorship can be exercised only upon the definable as an extension of the harm principle and as jokes function upon implications they therefore must be exempt.
The real problem of jokes lies in where the laughter is directed: laughter as a symbol of agreement with the kernel of truth expressed by the joke form, the foundation of “political correctness”. Where is the joke’s target situated? This joke for example (http://www.lamebook.com/the-fresh-prince-of-bash-air ) is not targeting violence against women as inherently funny, on the contrary, it relies upon the fact that it’s inherently wrong, the target being bad taste in-itself through the contrast of opposites. It’s the region of Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Carr and The Aristocrats. The opposite of the Bernard Manning type, or to a lesser extent the aggressively middle-class Armstrong and Millers, as they target class and race not as entities-in-themselves but instead draw attention to the symbols of class and race, thus playing the class/race game of the hegemonic majority. The line between the two is perhaps most aptly drawn by the “Sachsgate” jokes of Jonathan Ross and Russel Brand that had “bad taste in-itself” as their target, yet by including a real person they crossed the signifier-signified barrier and resulted in appearing like the solipsistic bully I began this rant with. Much like Borat, the humour then had the properties of the uncanny; the joke exists within the realm of form whilst the subject it attacks simultaneously occurs in reality.
Perhaps this is why Bruno put so many people off as well. Where Borat stood as a “devils-advocate” representing the consciously acted form of the joke that knows itself in a post-modern sense (an ironic signifier), Bruno fluctuated between this (the ‘illegal immigrant’s as furniture’ scene for example) and a shameless caricature of a gay stereotype. The comedy in Bruno thus steps back an extra level where Bruno’s character is not the agent-provocateur that we implicitly trust but a double-agent that, through his own grotesqueness, seems to end up attacking homosexuals himself without the justifying target of the societal Other to exempt him. The trick here then, the genius double-agent-reversal, relies upon Borat for its meaning. Baron-Cohen attacks racism in Borat by revealing the ridiculous inaccuracies of racist thought; the jokes attack the Other by pronouncing them wrong and rewards the viewer for laughing with correct intent. In Bruno, the narrative of Borat is closely mirrored, however, Bruno is not a homophobe but a homosexual so it would appear that we are to laugh at the homophobes that attack him. The problem lies in how often Bruno is seen to be in the wrong, so are we still to laugh at his attackers for being homophobic? No, the point is that being a homosexual does not make you Bruno and the target is not homophobia but the confusion of gay rights with a fear of criticising gay people (“political correctness gone mad” as idiots put it). The true point of gay rights is not that people like Bruno, it’s that people dislike Bruno, but for his superficial personality and not because of his sexuality. For this reason Bruno is a far more complex film than Borat and one that confronts the prejudices within real, intelligent and sympathetic people rather than the one-dimensional characters presented, albeit hilariously, in Borat.
It’s this sort of complex meta-humour that is probably why so many people nowadays seem to lack a sense of humour. A sense of humour is a willingness to hear other opinions and then reassess your own. The best jokes, like farts, cut through the dogmatic ideologies of intelligence with undeniable physicality. Think of the renaissance, when the likes of Rabelais and Cervantes laughed their way out of centuries of religion oppression. Problem is though; one must be willing to have things questioned, and let’s face it, not many of us do. We tend to find ourselves attacking the comedians themselves. Which is probably why very few people will recognise this jazz-comedy sketch at the end of this episode of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle as perhaps one of the funniest comedy sketches of all time - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDwQ66XBrH8&feature=related
Anyway, enough of this. The entire thing’s been written in a state of intense flu-delirium so I apologise if it rambles or makes very little sense. These blogs are nothing but reducto ad absurdum nonsense anyway I’m sure it’s no big loss. Next week: Was Jesus a commie? I’ll be answering ‘yes’ in the hope of shocking some Americans from the 1960s! What a rebel I am…
RSS Feed