Zupančič. The Odd One In: On Comedy click to download
In the contemporary ideological climate it has become imperative that we perceive all the terrible things that happen to us as ultimately something positive — say as a precious experience that will bear fruit in our future life. Negativity, lack, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, are perceived more and more as moral faults worse, as a corruption at the level of our very being or bare life.
There is a spectacular rise of what we might call a bio-morality (as well as morality of feelings and emotions), which promotes the following fundamental axiom: a person who feels good (and is happy) is a good person; a person who feels bad is a bad person.
It is this short circuit between the immediate feelings/sensations and the moral value that gives its specific color to the contemporary ideological rhetoric of happiness. This is very efficient, for who dares to raise her voice and say that as a matter of fact, she is not happy, and that she can’t manage to — or, worse, doesn’t even care to — transform all the disappointments of her life into a positive experience to be invested in the future?
There is an important difference between this and the classical entrepreneur formula according to which we are always broadly responsible for our failures and misfortunes. This classical formula still implies a certain interval between what we are and the symbolic value of our success. It implies that, at least in principle, we could have acted otherwise, but didn’t (and are hence responsible for our failures or lack of happiness).
The bio-morality mentioned above is replacing the classical notion of responsibility with the notion of a damaged, corrupt being: the unhappy and the unsuccessful are somehow corrupt already on the level of their bare life, and all their erroneous actions or nonactions follow from there with an inexorable necessity.
In other words, the problem is not simply that success and efficiency have become the supreme values of our late capitalist society (as we often hear from critics of this society) — there is nothing particularly new in this; social promotion of success (defined in different ways) has existed since time immemorial.
The problem is, rather, that success is becoming almost a biological notion, and thus the foundation of a genuine racism of successfulness. The poorest and the most miserable are no longer perceived as a socioeconomic class, but almost as a race of their own, as a special form of life. We are indeed witnessing a spectacular rise of racism or, more precisely, of “racization.”
This is to say that we are no longer simply dealing with racism in its traditional sense of hatred towards other races, but also and above all with a production of (new) races based on economic, political, and class differences and factors, as well as with the segregation based on these differences.
If traditional racism tended to socialize biological features—that is, directly translate them into cultural and symbolic points of a given social order — contemporary racism works in the opposite direction. It tends to “naturalize” the differences and features produced by the sociosymbolic order. This is also what can help us to understand the ideological rise of the theme of private life, as well as of lifestyles and habits.
To take a simple example: if a “successful artist” is invited as a guest on a TV show, the focus is practically never on her work, but instead on the way she lives, on her everyday habits, on what she enjoys, and so on. This is not simply a voyeuristic curiosity; it is a procedure that systematically presents us with two elements: “success” on the one side, and the life that corresponds to this success on the other — implying, of course, a strong and immediate equivalence between the two.
The objective surplus, the materialized work itself, is eliminated at the very outset. In other words, our ways of life, our habits, our feelings, our more or less idiosyncratic enjoyments — all these are no longer simply “private matters” exposed to scrutiny to satisfy our curiosity. They are one of the crucial cultural catalysts through which all kinds of socio-economic and ideological differences are being gradually transformed into “human differences,” differences at the very core of our being, which makes it possible for them to become the ground of a new racism. This is the process that aims at establishing an immediate connection between being (“bare life”) and a socioeconomic value.
We are thus witnessing a massive and forceful naturalization of economic, political, and other social differences, and this naturalization is itself a politico-ideological process par excellence. As I said above,“naturalization” involves above all the promotion of a belief in an immediate character of these differences — that is to say, in their being organically related to life as such, or to existing reality in general.
I could also put this in the following way: the contemporary discourse which likes to promote and glorify the gesture of distancing oneself from all Ideologies and Projects (as the Ideologies of others, and because they are necessarily totalitarian or utopian) strives to promote its own reality as completely nonideological. Our present socioeconomic reality is increasingly being presented as an immediate natural fact, or fact of nature, and thus a fact to which we can only try to adapt as successfully as possible.
If the imperative of happiness, positive thinking, and cheerfulness is one of the key means of expanding and solidifying this ideological hegemony, one cannot avoid the question of whether promoting comedy is not part of the same process. Is comedy not all about cheerfulness, satisfaction, and “positive feelings”? And is this not why Hollywood is producing huge amounts of “comedy,” neatly packaged to suit different audiences: romantic comedies, black comedies, teen comedies, family comedies, blue-collar comedies, white-collar comedies . . . ?
Well, this compulsive entertainment has in fact very little to do with comedy, just as comedy has very little to do with nature (or naturalization), immediacy, and feelings. True, comedy does not view men as an exception to nature, as the point that breaks the very laws of nature — this is more the perspective of tragedy. Yet comedy’s frequent reduction of man to (his) nature makes a further comic point about nature itself: nature is far from being as “natural” as we might think, but is itself driven by countless contradictions and discrepancies. As for the question of immediacy: comedy thrives on all kinds of short circuits that establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous orders.
Yet again, the immediacy that comedy thus puts forward is not that of a smooth, imperceptible passing of one into another, but that of a material cut between them. If we think of the simplest examples of this procedure (like the one frequent in the Marx Brothers’ comedies when, say, A says “Give me a break!” and B pulls a brake out of his pocket), is it not that its fundamental lesson is always this: the only genuine immediate link between these two things is the very cut between them?
And as for the question of comedy’s nonaffinity with our subjective feelings and emotions — this point has been systematically made in literature on comedy, and is splendidly epitomized by Horace Walpole’s remark: “This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.” Yet this divorce of comedy and feelings is not simply comedy’s way of keeping a distance from feelings, but above all its way of introducing a distance (or nonimmediacy) into the feelings themselves.
This is especially interesting in the case of happiness: comedies have very ingenious ways of showing us that happiness can indeed be largely independent of how we feel….In other words: there has been some philosophical discussion lately about the difference between what people think they feel and what they really feel. One of the fundamental axioms of what is now officially called “happiness studies” is that there is no difference between the two. In this respect, comedy definitely aligns itself with the opposite camp, which insists that it often happens that we don’t know how we really feel, and that emotions (far from constituting a direct insight into the Real of the subject) can lie and be as deceptive as anything else. 6-8
Comedy is materialistic because it gives voice and body to the impasses and contradictions of this materiality itself. This is the true incarnation involved in comedy.
Comedy is materialistic because it sees the turning of materiality into pure spirit and of pure spirit into something material as one and the same movement, driven by a difficulty inherent to materiality itself. 47
Alenka does not like this theory of comedy
Comedy is a genre that strongly emphasizes our essential humanity, its joys and limitations. It invites—or even forces—us to recognize and accept
the fact that we are finite beings. It teaches us that we are only human,
with all our faults, imperfections, and weaknesses, and it helps us to deal affirmatively and joyfully with the burden of human finitude.
And this is why
The prizing of comedy as a porte-parole of human finitude (and of everything that is supposed to be related to it: acceptance of our weaknesses, limitations, and imperfections; reconciliation with the absence of the transcendent and acknowledgment of the equation “a human is [only] human,” “life is [only] life”) is conceptually highly problematic.
Is not the very existence of comedy and of the comical telling us most clearly that a man is never just a man, and that his finitude is very much corroded by a passion which is precisely not cut to the measure of man and of his finitude? Most comedies set up a configuration in which one or several characters depart violently from the moderate, balanced rationality and normality of their surroundings, and of other people in it.
“man,” a human being, interests comedy at the very point where the human coincides with the inhuman; where theinhuman “falls” into the human (into man), where the infinite falls into the finite, where the Essence falls into appearance and the Necessary into the contingent.
the true materialistic axiom, promoted by comedy, is, rather, “a man is not a man.” This is what the above-mentioned metaphysics of finitude fails to see when it encloses itself within a heart-stirring humanism of accepting human weaknesses and flaws. 50
A man comes home from work earlier than usual, and finds his wife in bed. She is visibly upset by his arrival, and claims to be in bed because she has a terrible headache. While he is expressing his concern for her, a phone starts to ring.
An example
The man reaches for his phone and answers, but the ringing continues. He is perplexed, and keeps looking at the phone in his hand; then the door of the bedroom closet opens and another man, wearing only his socks, comes out. He apologizes for the inconvenience and heads for the heap of clothes lying in the corner of the room, in search of the phone, which continues to ring. He finds it, answers it, and gets very seriously engaged in conversation. Meanwhile he is gesticulating to the (staring) husband and wife, to express his regret at intruding on them with his phone conversation. As if to minimize this impolite intrusion, he moves back towards the closet, climbs in, closes the door behind him, and calmly continues his conversation inside. . . . 57
What makes this irresistibly comical? Precisely the impossible sustained encounter between two excluding realities. Comedy stages this encounter in its very impossibility.
In “ordinary reality” this kind of intrusion of the other side would cause an immediate reaction and adjustment of both sides, enabling the linear continuation of the story.
The lover would be embarrassed, the husband humiliated, the wife embarrassed and perhaps scared; there would be a confrontation—that is to say, some kind of acknowledgment of what happened, and of its necessary consequences.
In our comic example, however, it is precisely this acknowledgment that is suspended, enabling the two mutually exclusive realities to continue to exist alongside each other, and, moreover, to be articulated within one and the same scene.
The actual link between them, the way the two realities meet and are articulated together (the lover politely apologizing to the couple for the disturbance caused by his phone, and considerately retreating back to his closet so that he does not disturb them with his talking) is, of course, highly illogical and “fantastic,” yet it works. In other words, it is not only that this comic procedure presents us with two mutually exclusive realities as visible in one and the same “shot,” it also has to find and offer us a form of their articulation which, in all its “absurdity,” somehow works.