Labour Pains

[faustus]

"Henri Bergson was a French philosopher who was born 1859-1941." (Student essay)

But marking essays this PM has led to Thoughts. I need to think about my next conference paper - on the comedy of embarrassment.


Early Thoughts on the Comedy of Embarrassment:

That striking embarrassment when David Brent tells a racist joke or Larry David quibbles about a tip. I can't believe they actually said that... Why be embarrassed.

Various quotations from Bergson (Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudsley Brereton and Fred Roth. London: Macmillan and Co, Limited., 1911):

Humour exists in the realm of the human.

Laughter requires "a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple" (5)

"The comic will come into being, it appears, whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one of their number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into play nothing but their intelligence." (8)

So comedy is the suspension of caring for the other - the end of empathy.

Yet laughter has a corrective function - but why would you correct them if you don't care about them? (A sentiment with real relevance as I'm marking essays...) Surely it's not just to insist on superiority.

The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine. (29)

So we laugh at David Brent, Larry Sanders, Rick Spleen, Larry David, Basil Fawlty because we don't care or empathise for their plight.

No, that doesn't feel right. There is a sense that we do want them to suffer - there's a Schadenfreude, a sadistic gaze Memo: If this isn't in Laura Mulvey it's in Steve Neale "Masculinity as Spectacle". We demand violence.

So why do we feel embarrassed and cringe at it? Is our superiority brought down by their inferiority? The always already castrated make us fear castration - if we want the Freudian 101 route.

I've been here before. Bergson's model of laughter offers an Martin Buber style I-It relationship because the other is object.

Whoever says Thou does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in relation.
. . . Those who experience do not participate in the world. For the experience is “in them” and not between them and the world.
The world does not participate in experience. It allows itself to be experienced, but it is not concerned for it contributes nothing, and nothing happens to it . . . The world as experience belongs to the basic word I-It.
The basic word I-Thou establishes the world of relation

(Buber I and Thou 1970: 55-6).

The I-It relation requires you to treat the other as object; the I-Thou relationship is reciprocal: you are Thou to the Thou.

“When man lets It have its way, the relentlessly growing It-world grows over him like weeds, his own I loses its actuality” (Buber 1970: 95-6)

Somewhere in here we have Levinas again:

One has to respond to one’s right to be, not by referring to some abstract and anonymous law, or judicial entity, but because of one’s fear for the Other. My being-in-the-world or my “place in the sun”, my being at home, have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved, or driven out into a third world; are these not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing?

I care for the other at expense to myself: I substitute for the other, feel their pain.

Or am I embarrassed because I know this and I still want the other to suffer?

To be continued....

Comments

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

Interesting questions. Are your examples of embarrassing things actually funny? Or are they merely embarrassing things that have been labelled as 'Comedy' by people who don't find them embarrassing, or who think that others won't?

On the whole, if I find something embarrassing I don't find it funny, but I may well be on my own there.

It's a long time since I read any Bergson, but I remember thinking that his definition of comedy seemed very restrictive.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

There's the rub. I think a lot of these fall along gender lines - with generally males finding them laugh out loud and females saying they're silly. This from a small sample. It rather depends how funny is defined, of course. The fact of laughing at it doesn't make it comedy - see reactions to roller coasters, say. Bergson doesn't explain why puppetry funny in muppets but scary in (say) The Exorcist.

Largely the examples are labelled as sitcoms.

I confess to being more taken by Lacan's definition ("[Comedy] is a question of the relationship between action and desire, and of the former’s fundamental failure to catch up with the latter." Jacques Lacan, 1992. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The Seminars of Jacques Lacan VII. London: Routledge - although it would include a lot of non-comic narratives). The contradictions in Bergson's theory attract me to it as it feels like it will help me unpack my problem: do we care for that idiot/monster or not?

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I have to ask: if a definition of comedy also includes tragedy, is it any use at all as a definition of comedy?

What I remember of Bergson (this is based on very fuzzy recollections of Le Rire) suggests that he thinks that we do see something inhuman ('rigid' is the word that springs to mind) in the thing we're laughing at. So you're right that it's a suspension of empathy in this case, although it may be temporary. I'm not sure that this would apply in all cases, though - I'm sure I've felt amusement and sympathy simultaneously: say, when someone's relating an anecdote about something uncomfortable but doing it with comic delivery. Black humour, or at least rueful amusement.

I think that the corrective function of humour suggesting that one cares about the butt of the joke is a red herring, though. I can certainly wish to correct people who irritate or horrify me without caring about them specifically: I care about my own comfort, or society, or their 'victims'. I think gentle humour can be used to encourage or discourage particular behaviours, but it depends both on the form of humour and on the intended audience, and I don't think that it's a necessary component of comedy.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I have to ask: if a definition of comedy also includes tragedy, is it any use at all as a definition of comedy?

It's what we have to do with Aristotle - character flaw, reversal of fortune, catharsis can be seen as relating to laughter. The ending tends to be wedding rather than funeral, of course. And Lacan's throwaway 200 words comes on the heels of talking about Antigone. The Banana Boat sequence in Beetlejuice and the factory scenes in Modern Times are clearly comic because of the rigidity and the inhuman in the human - but various scenes in horror films and, say, Metropolis cause fear or sympathy (or nervous laughter). [The grotesque hovers around this point of undecideability.]

Rigid is the word. Not sure what the French is.

I think we do care for the slapstick comedians, or Victor Meldrew or... But I'm not wanting to throw the bathwater (Bergson) out whilst I'm thinking aloud.

Correction does sound all too serious. I need to reread those sections as I don't have any specific quotes - and I guess I need to look for Koestler's Outlook and Insight for his demolition job. An afternoon at UoK beckons.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

Character flaws would probably fit right in with Bergson's 'rigidity' (I can't remember what the term is in French, either). So what is the difference? It's got to be something to do with the extent to which we see ourselves in the character, although that on its own sounds ridiculously simplistic. Some of it's to do with situation, but that raises a whole new set of questions about what constitutes a ridiculous situation as opposed to a merely unlikely one.

The more I care for a slapstick character (or at least, the more I believe they can be hurt and/or shamed), the less funny I find them, in general, although there is a third state of irritation in which I neither laugh nor give a damn. More than two minutes of Frank Spencer, for example.

How are you allowing for delivery? That is, comic timing, expressions, etc., not the sort that seems to have taken Mme. Bergson so long.