A Little Humor, A Lot of Good

In psychoanalytic parlance, anger is often turned inward as a response to the proverbial "lost object." Of course, it is not without some measure of blame, whether it is the blaming of oneself or the blaming of an other for said loss. Anger, in this sense, is certainly destructive, but only insofar as it deteriorates the self (as Karl Abraham indicated, via depression). There are problems with such a simple characterization, to be sure.

Yet Sigmund Freud and others (i.e. Carl Jung) saw anger as much a part of hate as of love. There are problems with this characterization as well, even beyond its potential to be a mere perversion of Karl Kraus' quip ("Hate must make a man productive. Otherwise one might as well love."), but at least it points to the realm of action. That is, it speaks to anger as being reconciled with some form of human motivation--a point at which it is worthwhile to intervene.

Put simply: A little humor does a lot of good. As much could be gleaned from the recent hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, especially since it was illustrated sincerely by otherwise stoic Senator Specter. Indeed, Kagan's humor has helped moderate the extent to which she has been grilled, and could certainly (as Specter admitted) help to moderate the High Court.

Humor, after all, puts things in perspective. Anger knocks things out. It is easy to be angry right now. One need only consult the daily news and its headlines, from the disastrous Gulf oil spill to the ever-down-turning economy, to fuel one's depression, perhaps even one's hate. Yet a little bit of humor seems to quell anger just enough to consider a more productive and humane way of handling life's existentialities. So it is that I turn to the headlines of The Onion, and to a bit of perspective on what is nearly the birthday of our nation. In "U.S. May Have Been Abused During Formative Years," we are reminded of the abuses that hardened our forefathers.



Then again, we are admonished of the danger inherent in the abuses committed by them, as well as those that are perpetuated today--aggressive conflicts, wars that cannot be won, a will to vengeance. The "abuse" article, which was published in 2006, points, after all, to a more recent 2010 headline: "U.S. Flag Recalled After Causing 143 Million Deaths."



These articles certainly do a lot of good. The humor in them provides renewed perspective. It counters anger. It commends comedy. It censures tragedy. But it also speaks to humor's limitations.

That is, humor does not itself stop the oil leak. It does not end the war in Afghanistan. It does not recover the market. It also does not confine itself to moments of redemption. In an earlier post I commented on the humor of dominant discourse and its capacity to simultaneously discipline humor's regenerative spirit and reify the old way of doing things.

A little bit of humor can do a lot of good. It can help us laugh. Better yet, it can help us judge each other and our world more humanely and thus project outward less righteous and violent anger, more acceptance and good will. It can provide insight on the more humane elements of humanity. Then again, it can help us smile while we kill.

Photo Credits: The Onion.

(Perfection Is A) Moving Target

There was a time when Mother Nature was worshipped. There was a time when those supernatural and otherworldly forces that influenced our human ways of life were celebrated, venerated. In Greek culture, the earth was essentially deified as Gaia, or the Mother Titan, and considered to be as alive and even sentient as human beings. It has been some time, however, since we as a species have viewed Mother Nature as anything more than what Kevin de Luca has called a “storehouse of resources” for the advancement—and, alongside technology, the “perfection”—of humankind

There was also, in Greek culture, a god of the sun, Helios. Today, the annual summer solstice ignites celebration of the sun, from Stonehenge in Salisbury, England to the site of the grand Sphinx at Giza in Egypt to the Temple of the Sun at Machu Picchu in Peru and beyond. Today, many participated in such celebrations. The irony remains that, while many persist to worship the sun, many likewise profane it in the wake of increasing global warming. A further irony continues to rest in the wake of the BP oil spill, whereby Oceanus, the Greek world-ocean god, is daily being desecrated, devastated and defiled.

The tragic fact of the matter is that the oil spill is far too large, far too overwhelming and thus far too much a moving target to contain amidst whirling ocean currents and changing tides. As such, it is also far too great for many of us to even fathom, and this despite the multiple updates everyday about the millions of gallons gushing into Gulf waters. And yet the summer solstice and 62^nd day of the oil spill is a unique day on which to pause for reflection. I say this, not because previous days are inadequate for doing so, but because the summer solstice is so named because it occurs on the day on which the sun “stands still.” The Latin words sol (sun) and sistere (stand still) comprise the word “solstice,” indicating a time at which the sun pauses at the uppermost mark of its arc before continuing its declination.

So while the twice-a-year solstices are predictable and identifiable, the present oil spill and its potential solution are not. Yet, amidst the tragedy, the comedy that attempts to frame the spill continues to provide essential moments of pause, or “ways to get a little catharsis out of the maddening affair” as is written in this Huffington Post article. This video is but one of the myriad correctives that re-frame comically the disaster.

How we frame our view of the oil spill is certainly important. Indeed, as Kenneth Burke notes, a tragic frame of approaching this catastrophe would envisage it as an unfortunate sacrifice made in the pursuit of human perfection, a hurdle to overcome on the path to progress. A comic frame, however, enables us to make it fathomable and even tolerable until it can be changed. It recognizes while censuring human error, but always implicates humans in such events and their correction. The comic frame finds a way to laugh and live on; the tragic frame cannot stop crying and so joins Louisiana in the only path it sees left: prayer.

So it is that we should continue to put the pressure on BP to plug the leak and clean up the mess they have made. We should also keep Obama on the chopping block so long as this disaster continues. To be sure, we can look at the following political cartoon and laugh. But to look at this image through a comic frame in order to better understand why a disaster such as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was allowed to happen, we may wish to consider our own, individual habits and actions—we may wish, in the interest of understanding the risks we are willing to take in order to preserve our ways of life, to move the target.

Photo Credits: Michael Ramirez

Prophetic Riddles

Poor mortals who good fortune do desire,

Receive the bounties of the earth or deracinate before they grow?

World knows neither good nor evil, yet knows it dire

When for their own delight poor mortals have no limit to how far they’ll go.

The first line of this (my) riddle is borrowed from François Rabelais’ La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel (The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel)—which is the epitomic exemplar of the carnivalesque, as laid out by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World.

Why the riddle? A few reasons. First, it is obvious that our world is presently wrought with a number of “riddles” that need to be solved, from environmental (BP oil spill) to man-made (BP oil spill….as well as heightened conflict in Gaza, a stand-off between the two Koreas, an anachronistic law within these our twenty-first century United States, among others). Second, it harks back to Bakhtin’s understanding of the “prophetic riddle,” in which “historic events are represented with the help of” games, prophecies, parodies, festivals, etc. presented in a carnivalesque aspect. That is, “[i]nstead of being gloomy and terrifying, the world’s mystery and the future…appear as something gay and carefree.” More on this in a moment, but third, it speaks to a recent article in issue 46-21 of The Onion. The article is entitled, "White House Jester Beheaded For Making Fun Of Soaring National Debt," and in its own carnivalesque way speaks directly to the limits of denuding the ideologies of our time. (Note it's own riddle contained within: "A pocket-hold that grew so large, / A giant couldn't eat it. / A cache of gold that never was, / but nonetheless depleted").

Dating back centuries, and certainly to the time of Rabelais as well as the English Royal Courts (15^th/16^th centuries), the jester has played an important role in what Bakhtin calls “popular-festive” occasions. On such occasions (and on order of the monarch), the jester was given license to play the fool: to mock, satirize, jibe and deride the politics and political figures of the time. Far from being idle amusement however, the jester’s performances were often laced with subtle critiques of those in power. Moreover, they were anything but merely playful, but rather loaded with high seriousness despite their low presentation. As Bakhtin notes, such a “comic performance” is “gay and free play, but it is also full of deep meaning. Its hero and author is time itself, which uncrowns, covers with ridicule, kills the old world (the authority and truth), and at the same time gives birth to the new. In this game, there is a laughing chorus. The protagonist is the representative of a world which is aging, yet pregnant and generating. He is beaten and mocked, but the blows are gay, melodious, and festive.”

Simply put, the jester is meant to abuse and even be abused himself, but he is not meant to be killed. What this article points to is the glaring fact that, even today, those in power tend to dictate the parameters of even the most festive of occasions. If one is not convinced, one need only consider the difference between Stephen Colbert’s roast on George W. Bush at the Annual White House Correspondent’s dinner in 2006 and Obama’s roast of himself and his administration at the 2010 dinner (Jay Leno's performance is, I am sorry to say, a poor example of carnivalesque jest). In the former, Colbert's "punishment" of the Bush administration and its press corps was "transformed into festive laughter"; in the latter, Obama "killed" with laughter (for sure), but reminded us all that his and the government's power to literally kill is more serious than the carnival play could ever hope to be. Said Obama:

“Jonas Brothers are here, they're out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys, don't get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming. You think I'm joking? I’m serious.”

What was killed in Obama’s speech was the power of the carnivalesque (which is unfortunated because much of it was actually really funny); what was reborn was the power of the United States government, and it is certainly reason to give us pause as to that which we find funny and why. After all, the comic “blows” should be “broadened, symbolic, ambivalent.” They should “at once kill and regenerate,” not by putting bookends on a narrow spectrum of the norm but by “put[ting] an end to the old life and [a] start [to] the new.”