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Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy
Only a Joke Can Save Us presents an innovative and comprehensive theory of comedy. Using a wealth of examples from high and popular culture and with careful attention to the treatment of humor in philosophy, Todd McGowan locates the universal source of comedy in the interplay of the opposing concepts lack and excess.
After reviewing the treatment of comedy in the work of philosophers as varied as Aristotle, G. W. F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, and Alenka Zupancic, McGowan, working in a psychoanalytic framework, demonstrates that comedy results from the deployment of lack and excess, whether in contrast, juxtaposition, or interplay.
Illustrating the power and flexibility of this framework with analyses of films ranging from Buster Keaton and Marx Brothers classics to Dr. Strangelove and Groundhog Day, McGowan shows how humor can reveal gaps in being and gaps in social order. Scholarly yet lively and readable, Only a Joke Can Save Us is a groundbreaking examination of the enigmatic yet endlessly fascinating experience of humor and comedy.
After reviewing the treatment of comedy in the work of philosophers as varied as Aristotle, G. W. F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, and Alenka Zupancic, McGowan, working in a psychoanalytic framework, demonstrates that comedy results from the deployment of lack and excess, whether in contrast, juxtaposition, or interplay.
Illustrating the power and flexibility of this framework with analyses of films ranging from Buster Keaton and Marx Brothers classics to Dr. Strangelove and Groundhog Day, McGowan shows how humor can reveal gaps in being and gaps in social order. Scholarly yet lively and readable, Only a Joke Can Save Us is a groundbreaking examination of the enigmatic yet endlessly fascinating experience of humor and comedy.
226 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 15, 2017
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About the author
Todd McGowan
50 books223 followersTodd McGowan is Associate Professor of Film at the University of Vermont, US. He is the author of The Fictional Christopher Nolan (2012), Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (2011), The Impossible David Lynch (2007), The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (2007), and other books.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 26, 2025
In the introduction to his endlessly readable Only a Joke Can Save Us, Todd McGowan juxtaposes two cinematic moments of dismemberment as an example of "the sufficient condition for comedy," the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lamb. McGowan writes:
The difference between the Black Knight's loss of limbs and the loss of the character's face in Silence of the Lambs resides in the attitude that they produce in the subject watching them. If one simply saw the Black Knight being mercilessly slain by a superior adversary, this event would not be comic and would prompt the same response as Lecter's violence does...Even in the midst of a horrific dismemberment, the Black Knight never deviates from his belief in his own superiority or his devotion to continuing to fight. The more of his body the Black Knight loses, the surer he is of his eventual victory and the more he taunts his opponent with his own superiority. He thus embodies lack and excess simultaneously. It is this disparate connection that provides the key to grasping the comic. (13-14)
Lack and excess, which he later defines as critical components to subjectivity, produce the comedic but only when the two intersect or overlap. Furthermore, these moments of intersection sharply deviate from the essence of subjectivity as we ordinarily experience it. McGowan writes, "The subject exists as a subject only insofar as it remains incomplete and divided from itself. The subject desires as a result of its incompletion...At the same time, the subject is a being of excess" (15). But McGowan reminds his reader that daily existence bifurcates lack and excess. He writes, "Everyday existence separates lack from excess by isolating excess in specific times and places" (15). It is this separation that comedy disrupts, which suggests that moments of genuine comedy are transgressive and radical.
McGowan's analysis of comedy pivots from several basic psychoanalytic principles. Once we enter the symbolic matrix of language, lack occurs thus inaugurating subjectivity. As a way of coping with the incompleteness of language's mediating function, we seek excesses. McGowan offers an instructive example of how lack and excess function for the subject when he writes, "The enjoyment of excess enables the subject to forget about its status as lacking: when rapt in the excesses of religious ecstasy, I forget about my desire for a new BMW, and when swept up in the ecstasy of owning a BMW, I avoid thinking about the absence of any transcendent God in the world" (15). Subjectivity is an exercise in contradiction, which comedy thrusts back onto the subject. This matters, in part, because it shows the subject not only what it wants but how it wants.
Only a Joke Can Save Us marks something of a divergence for McGowan. His two previous books grappled with subjectivity within consumer capitalism and the psychological impulses, drive and desire. With Only a Joke Can Save Us, McGowan offers a smart and entertaining reading of comedy, but there are certain limitations. If, for example, one scoffs at the prospect of studying comedy from a perspective that synthesizes the psychoanalytical and Hegelianism, then McGowan's overarching argument will be difficult. McGowan, however, offers a myriad of thoughtful examples to support his claims, the best of which is perhaps the chapter on Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
Todd is a former professor of mine, so I am certainly a biased reader. Nevertheless, his ability to articulate, explain, and use dense psychoanalytical principles while also generating sound and argumentatively engaging ideas, makes his work worth the time and commitment.
***
2022 Reading
McGowan wrote Only a Joke Can Save Us five years ago. In those intervening years, McGowan has explored and developed the importance of lack to his overarching theoretical and political project. In retrospect, Only a Joke Can Save Us is more important than I understood initially. Only a Joke Can Save Us is an indispensable key to understanding McGowan's work during what I suspect is his most mature and impactful period.
When I read Only a Joke Can Save Us five years ago, I wrote the following: "Only a Joke Can Save Us marks something of a divergence for McGowan. His two previous books grappled with subjectivity within consumer capitalism and the psychological impulses, drive and desire." Clearly, this book is far from a "divergence." Instead, Only a Joke Can Save Us is a pivot point; this unassuming volume represents McGowan's move into a theoretical terrain that may define his academic career for generations to come.
***
2024 Reading
I am rereading this book as part of a project to familiarize myself with theoretical approaches to comedy. One of the things I noticed this time that I failed to mention in the past is McGowan's emphasis on surprise as a necessary part of the comedic edifice. The collision of lack and excess must take the subject by surprise. Because the unconscious is so vital to psychoanalysis, this makes sense. Part of what is so disruptive but liberating about the unconscious is, in short, its ability to surprise us. In this respect, at least as McGowan understands it, comedy is the subject reckoning with the unconscious.
The difference between the Black Knight's loss of limbs and the loss of the character's face in Silence of the Lambs resides in the attitude that they produce in the subject watching them. If one simply saw the Black Knight being mercilessly slain by a superior adversary, this event would not be comic and would prompt the same response as Lecter's violence does...Even in the midst of a horrific dismemberment, the Black Knight never deviates from his belief in his own superiority or his devotion to continuing to fight. The more of his body the Black Knight loses, the surer he is of his eventual victory and the more he taunts his opponent with his own superiority. He thus embodies lack and excess simultaneously. It is this disparate connection that provides the key to grasping the comic. (13-14)
Lack and excess, which he later defines as critical components to subjectivity, produce the comedic but only when the two intersect or overlap. Furthermore, these moments of intersection sharply deviate from the essence of subjectivity as we ordinarily experience it. McGowan writes, "The subject exists as a subject only insofar as it remains incomplete and divided from itself. The subject desires as a result of its incompletion...At the same time, the subject is a being of excess" (15). But McGowan reminds his reader that daily existence bifurcates lack and excess. He writes, "Everyday existence separates lack from excess by isolating excess in specific times and places" (15). It is this separation that comedy disrupts, which suggests that moments of genuine comedy are transgressive and radical.
McGowan's analysis of comedy pivots from several basic psychoanalytic principles. Once we enter the symbolic matrix of language, lack occurs thus inaugurating subjectivity. As a way of coping with the incompleteness of language's mediating function, we seek excesses. McGowan offers an instructive example of how lack and excess function for the subject when he writes, "The enjoyment of excess enables the subject to forget about its status as lacking: when rapt in the excesses of religious ecstasy, I forget about my desire for a new BMW, and when swept up in the ecstasy of owning a BMW, I avoid thinking about the absence of any transcendent God in the world" (15). Subjectivity is an exercise in contradiction, which comedy thrusts back onto the subject. This matters, in part, because it shows the subject not only what it wants but how it wants.
Only a Joke Can Save Us marks something of a divergence for McGowan. His two previous books grappled with subjectivity within consumer capitalism and the psychological impulses, drive and desire. With Only a Joke Can Save Us, McGowan offers a smart and entertaining reading of comedy, but there are certain limitations. If, for example, one scoffs at the prospect of studying comedy from a perspective that synthesizes the psychoanalytical and Hegelianism, then McGowan's overarching argument will be difficult. McGowan, however, offers a myriad of thoughtful examples to support his claims, the best of which is perhaps the chapter on Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
Todd is a former professor of mine, so I am certainly a biased reader. Nevertheless, his ability to articulate, explain, and use dense psychoanalytical principles while also generating sound and argumentatively engaging ideas, makes his work worth the time and commitment.
***
2022 Reading
McGowan wrote Only a Joke Can Save Us five years ago. In those intervening years, McGowan has explored and developed the importance of lack to his overarching theoretical and political project. In retrospect, Only a Joke Can Save Us is more important than I understood initially. Only a Joke Can Save Us is an indispensable key to understanding McGowan's work during what I suspect is his most mature and impactful period.
When I read Only a Joke Can Save Us five years ago, I wrote the following: "Only a Joke Can Save Us marks something of a divergence for McGowan. His two previous books grappled with subjectivity within consumer capitalism and the psychological impulses, drive and desire." Clearly, this book is far from a "divergence." Instead, Only a Joke Can Save Us is a pivot point; this unassuming volume represents McGowan's move into a theoretical terrain that may define his academic career for generations to come.
***
2024 Reading
I am rereading this book as part of a project to familiarize myself with theoretical approaches to comedy. One of the things I noticed this time that I failed to mention in the past is McGowan's emphasis on surprise as a necessary part of the comedic edifice. The collision of lack and excess must take the subject by surprise. Because the unconscious is so vital to psychoanalysis, this makes sense. Part of what is so disruptive but liberating about the unconscious is, in short, its ability to surprise us. In this respect, at least as McGowan understands it, comedy is the subject reckoning with the unconscious.
March 31, 2025
While reading this, I was astonished by how much sense McGowans theory makes. McGowan characterizes comedy as the intersection between an excess and a lack. Using this as a departure, he further explores what the implications of this theory are in function of philosophy, ideology, tragedy and so on and so on. Even though I think this book has articulated, for me, the things I feel when reflecting about comedy - and in this way this book is a true gift - I still feel frustrated about how much sense this book makes. As a professor of me once told: "once you find the truth, throw it away and make sure no one finds it". I am still deeply doubting if I should throw this book away - or commit it to the flames, as Hume would say (even though this saying didn't age very well).
The thing that was, for me, the most interesting part, is the moment McGowan characterizes Hegelian philosophy as one of the most comic. Exactly, because Hegels philosophy is one which confronts excess and lack with each other (but, as in German Idealism, with finitude and transcendence). Not only in Hegelian philosophy, but this comical structure is also inherent to the dialectical method Hegel uses. What comedians and Hegelians have in common, is kind of a neurotic obsession with the number 3. While with Hegel, it might contain a positing of a concept, the negation of this concept and a more speculative way, namely the Aufhebung of the concept and it's negation. In comedy, this would be the set-up, the telling and the punch-line. Even though I believe that audiences will laugh more when a comedian performs his set, rather than reads Hegels Phenomenology of the Spirit - if we should convince one philosopher to make a comedyset (and, maybe, have some succes as comedian), it should be Hegel.
Even though some remarks: McGowan simply refuses to differentiate structurally between the different modes of comedy (the joke, irony, comedy as genre...). I do think this is a lack in itself. As Zupancic has pointed out, the big difference between a joke and a comedy (or: comical sequence), lies in the precise point where enjoyment is 'unexpected', but nonetheless produced. Focussing on the big lines of the comic genre (including all its different modes), does misses the different points where enjoyment is produced - and which is an equally important part of "anything funny".
Nonetheless very insightfull, and funny written book. McGowan is not afraid to crack a joke, which, actually, makes me take his enterprise more seriously.
To end, one of my favourite quotes of the book.
"Comedy is speculative because it forces us to confront the finitude and the transcendence of our subjectivity. In evey comic experience, the subject must navigate the variegations of subjectivity itself. In this way, comedy's project is not at all light or unserious.".
The thing that was, for me, the most interesting part, is the moment McGowan characterizes Hegelian philosophy as one of the most comic. Exactly, because Hegels philosophy is one which confronts excess and lack with each other (but, as in German Idealism, with finitude and transcendence). Not only in Hegelian philosophy, but this comical structure is also inherent to the dialectical method Hegel uses. What comedians and Hegelians have in common, is kind of a neurotic obsession with the number 3. While with Hegel, it might contain a positing of a concept, the negation of this concept and a more speculative way, namely the Aufhebung of the concept and it's negation. In comedy, this would be the set-up, the telling and the punch-line. Even though I believe that audiences will laugh more when a comedian performs his set, rather than reads Hegels Phenomenology of the Spirit - if we should convince one philosopher to make a comedyset (and, maybe, have some succes as comedian), it should be Hegel.
Even though some remarks: McGowan simply refuses to differentiate structurally between the different modes of comedy (the joke, irony, comedy as genre...). I do think this is a lack in itself. As Zupancic has pointed out, the big difference between a joke and a comedy (or: comical sequence), lies in the precise point where enjoyment is 'unexpected', but nonetheless produced. Focussing on the big lines of the comic genre (including all its different modes), does misses the different points where enjoyment is produced - and which is an equally important part of "anything funny".
Nonetheless very insightfull, and funny written book. McGowan is not afraid to crack a joke, which, actually, makes me take his enterprise more seriously.
To end, one of my favourite quotes of the book.
"Comedy is speculative because it forces us to confront the finitude and the transcendence of our subjectivity. In evey comic experience, the subject must navigate the variegations of subjectivity itself. In this way, comedy's project is not at all light or unserious.".
July 30, 2023
There was a time when I was convinced that the essence of comedy was contradiction. People will say that the lowest form of humour is sarcasm and the highest irony – and the thing both have in common is the saying of the opposite of what you mean. A few years ago (best not to check how long – which is one of the disadvantages of Goodreads I hadn’t anticipated when I started writing reviews, the horror or finding out just how long ago I read some books) I read Bergson’s Laughter: An essay on the meaning of the comic. In that he says that the comic is what takes away human free will (well, basically) and turns us into machines. I really liked this definition, but noticed over the years that to get it to fit most comic situations you had to stretch and twist it so much that it wasn’t clear if what you were left with was really fit for purpose any longer.
And then there are weird things about comedy that make theories about it hard work. One of the obvious things – something I’m sure you’ve experienced too – is that something that you nearly hurt yourself laughing at ten years ago is now utter shite. This is made much worse when you enthusiastically recommend it as something you want to watch with someone now and then wish an asteroid would take out the whole building, particularly the television, shortly after the damn thing starts. And this isn’t just a matter of ‘god, my adolescent hormones must have been going nuts when I watched this…’ but even stuff I’ve watched and enjoyed and laughed at a decade ago can be cringeworthy now. Any good theory of comedy is going to need to account for that – and I’m not sure, ‘the comic makes us mechanical’ really does.
This guy would seem to have quite a task ahead of him. I’m not sure if you have ever read any Hegel. He’s hard work. Eye bleeding hard work. I suspect no one in the history of the last couple of hundred years picked up Hegel for the laughs. But the author thinks Hegel’s philosophy forces humour upon Hegel in ways the philosophies of others makes humour impossible. To quote:
“The difference between philosophical comedy and philosophical seriousness becomes evident if we examine the contrast between one of the funniest philosophers in the history of philosophy and the least funny— that is, the contrast between Hegel and Martin Heidegger.” p.89
Heidegger isn’t the least funny philosopher because of his little problem with Nazism – the author even says there are some funny Nazis, not something I’ve ever witnessed myself. Rather, because his philosophy is fixated on the ‘being-thereness’ of our existence – essentially, an existence without transcendence. This is all well and good, but it is the exact opposite of what the author here says is the defining characteristic of the comic.
The comic is something that involves a fundamental contradiction – but one that is more than the contradiction I mentioned at the start of this involving the ironic, but rather a more specific form of contradiction – that between lack and abundance. He illustrates this with a number of jokes throughout, and since reading this I’ve got to say that I’ve found myself deconstructing jokes I hear according to his scheme. If you don’t want comedy to be ruined for you – this might be a good time to stop reading this review.
The problem a theory of humour faces is that the theory is likely to either explain too much or to explain not nearly enough. You might get around this by saying that ‘humour isn’t one thing’ and so expecting one theory to cover all instances of humour is like hoping there will one day to a single cure for cancer. There is no such thing as ‘cancer’ and so it is just as likely that there will be a single cure for cancer as there will be a single cure for ‘being sick’ – other than dying.
That joke, by the way, is an example of the author’s theory. We are expecting a single cure for illness, but by saying the only single cure for illness is death confuses the ‘lack’ of being sick with the abundant ‘cure’ of being dead. Being dead does too much to ‘fix’ the problem. Basically, he argues that all humour is of that kind – where the transcendent and the finite are smashed together in a way that does not inspire pathos in a situation that we feel involved in, we laugh.
One of the problems of being a man my age is that so many other men my age tell me Monty Python jokes as if, like their taste in music, humour died in 1981 or whenever it was The Life of Brian was released. So, I’m going to use a line from a Python sketch to make the author’s point. There is a sketch where, during the Second World War, someone has discovered the ‘killer joke’. They decide that they will use it as a secret weapon against the Germans. To do this they need to translate the joke. But how do you translate a joke you can’t hear without dying? They give translators a single word to translate. Unfortunately, someone was given two words and they ended up hospitalised for weeks… (that’s the funny bit, by the way). Again, we have abundance and lack. Even if we were to believe there was a joke that could kill on being heard, the joke, like so many other things in life, is greater than the sum of its parts – and not reducible to its parts either.
Since humour is the smashing together of transcendence and finitude, there is a lot that needs to be answered here. One is, does this definition of comedy cover too much territory? And the answer is, even for the author, yes. The other place the transcendent and the finite come into direct conflict is in pathos. And this brings, for me, two of the most interesting observations of this book into play. One is that we can’t really laugh at those we find pathetic – empathy is not an emotion that has us losing control of our bladder, so to speak. The other observation I found fascinating was that, given a choice, we would rather be seen as a source of humour than of pity. There are limits to this, of course – that Gary Larson cartoon where doctors are standing around a hospital bed pointing and laughing at their patient with the tag line, “testing if laughter really is the best medicine” stands on this boundary. If bullying is not funny, it is probably because bullying crosses the line to pathos.
There is lots to like here. His discussion of the differences in the comic movies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton is probably worth the cost of the book. I also liked his explanation of why all real humour is Jewish humour – not because Jews are the only ones capable of telling jokes, but because the Jewish relationship to their god is one that makes humour inevitable. He also says it is interesting that Christianity can be quite so humourless – particularly since it worships a god at exactly the right point between transcendence and finitude. Christ is a god made human, but all of the things that might make him a source of humour are denied him in his humanity. He doesn’t urinate, vomit, have sex, a wife, a pratfall… his humanity has none of the things, therefore that make being human, well, human. And so, the great comic possibilities in the Christ story are missed.
The author extends this problem to Sartre and Camus. You might otherwise think that philosophers who start their philosophy by saying life is absurd would be nine-tenths of the way to being funny themselves. But their philosophy isn’t exactly a joke a minute. And in part this is because they don’t take the transcendent seriously, and so are stuck with finitude.
There were times when I felt that perhaps this theory of the comic needed to try a bit hard. He talks of the comedy of the abundance of language becoming funny when it is confined in the finite of a particular usage, for example. But even here I think he has a point. His clearest example is the abundance that is the phallic symbol. You start to wonder if there is any word in any language that doesn’t have men thinking about their dicks. What is particularly interesting here is that this abundance doesn’t extend to female genitals. And he makes the point that even though referring to penises and vaginas isn’t something you can do other than carefully in polite conversation – it is infinitely more acceptable to refer to penises than to vaginas. And the most offensive word for penis is less offensive than the least offensive word for vagina. To kick him in the prick seems less offensive than to kick her in the box, and the c-word does not have an equal penis version.
I liked this book a lot. It’s done a lot to have fucked up jokes for me, admittedly, but like the author, I think there is something deeply philosophical about humour – and so, that this forces me to think of why I laugh at certain things is worth even that.
Oh, and the reason why things might not be as funny now as they were then has probably as much to do with the distance between the ‘us’ of now and then. We have changed and that distance is now too far for us to feel properly involved in the humour and so the jokes fall flat. A joke about Julius Caesar, even a good one, is hard to laugh at in the way a joke about Trump is – the distance in time makes a very good joke like, in the end Caesar was just sick of all the backstabbing, perhaps less funny than what is objectively a less clever joke than, there’s a term for a president like Donald Trump, but probably not a second one.
And then there are weird things about comedy that make theories about it hard work. One of the obvious things – something I’m sure you’ve experienced too – is that something that you nearly hurt yourself laughing at ten years ago is now utter shite. This is made much worse when you enthusiastically recommend it as something you want to watch with someone now and then wish an asteroid would take out the whole building, particularly the television, shortly after the damn thing starts. And this isn’t just a matter of ‘god, my adolescent hormones must have been going nuts when I watched this…’ but even stuff I’ve watched and enjoyed and laughed at a decade ago can be cringeworthy now. Any good theory of comedy is going to need to account for that – and I’m not sure, ‘the comic makes us mechanical’ really does.
This guy would seem to have quite a task ahead of him. I’m not sure if you have ever read any Hegel. He’s hard work. Eye bleeding hard work. I suspect no one in the history of the last couple of hundred years picked up Hegel for the laughs. But the author thinks Hegel’s philosophy forces humour upon Hegel in ways the philosophies of others makes humour impossible. To quote:
“The difference between philosophical comedy and philosophical seriousness becomes evident if we examine the contrast between one of the funniest philosophers in the history of philosophy and the least funny— that is, the contrast between Hegel and Martin Heidegger.” p.89
Heidegger isn’t the least funny philosopher because of his little problem with Nazism – the author even says there are some funny Nazis, not something I’ve ever witnessed myself. Rather, because his philosophy is fixated on the ‘being-thereness’ of our existence – essentially, an existence without transcendence. This is all well and good, but it is the exact opposite of what the author here says is the defining characteristic of the comic.
The comic is something that involves a fundamental contradiction – but one that is more than the contradiction I mentioned at the start of this involving the ironic, but rather a more specific form of contradiction – that between lack and abundance. He illustrates this with a number of jokes throughout, and since reading this I’ve got to say that I’ve found myself deconstructing jokes I hear according to his scheme. If you don’t want comedy to be ruined for you – this might be a good time to stop reading this review.
The problem a theory of humour faces is that the theory is likely to either explain too much or to explain not nearly enough. You might get around this by saying that ‘humour isn’t one thing’ and so expecting one theory to cover all instances of humour is like hoping there will one day to a single cure for cancer. There is no such thing as ‘cancer’ and so it is just as likely that there will be a single cure for cancer as there will be a single cure for ‘being sick’ – other than dying.
That joke, by the way, is an example of the author’s theory. We are expecting a single cure for illness, but by saying the only single cure for illness is death confuses the ‘lack’ of being sick with the abundant ‘cure’ of being dead. Being dead does too much to ‘fix’ the problem. Basically, he argues that all humour is of that kind – where the transcendent and the finite are smashed together in a way that does not inspire pathos in a situation that we feel involved in, we laugh.
One of the problems of being a man my age is that so many other men my age tell me Monty Python jokes as if, like their taste in music, humour died in 1981 or whenever it was The Life of Brian was released. So, I’m going to use a line from a Python sketch to make the author’s point. There is a sketch where, during the Second World War, someone has discovered the ‘killer joke’. They decide that they will use it as a secret weapon against the Germans. To do this they need to translate the joke. But how do you translate a joke you can’t hear without dying? They give translators a single word to translate. Unfortunately, someone was given two words and they ended up hospitalised for weeks… (that’s the funny bit, by the way). Again, we have abundance and lack. Even if we were to believe there was a joke that could kill on being heard, the joke, like so many other things in life, is greater than the sum of its parts – and not reducible to its parts either.
Since humour is the smashing together of transcendence and finitude, there is a lot that needs to be answered here. One is, does this definition of comedy cover too much territory? And the answer is, even for the author, yes. The other place the transcendent and the finite come into direct conflict is in pathos. And this brings, for me, two of the most interesting observations of this book into play. One is that we can’t really laugh at those we find pathetic – empathy is not an emotion that has us losing control of our bladder, so to speak. The other observation I found fascinating was that, given a choice, we would rather be seen as a source of humour than of pity. There are limits to this, of course – that Gary Larson cartoon where doctors are standing around a hospital bed pointing and laughing at their patient with the tag line, “testing if laughter really is the best medicine” stands on this boundary. If bullying is not funny, it is probably because bullying crosses the line to pathos.
There is lots to like here. His discussion of the differences in the comic movies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton is probably worth the cost of the book. I also liked his explanation of why all real humour is Jewish humour – not because Jews are the only ones capable of telling jokes, but because the Jewish relationship to their god is one that makes humour inevitable. He also says it is interesting that Christianity can be quite so humourless – particularly since it worships a god at exactly the right point between transcendence and finitude. Christ is a god made human, but all of the things that might make him a source of humour are denied him in his humanity. He doesn’t urinate, vomit, have sex, a wife, a pratfall… his humanity has none of the things, therefore that make being human, well, human. And so, the great comic possibilities in the Christ story are missed.
The author extends this problem to Sartre and Camus. You might otherwise think that philosophers who start their philosophy by saying life is absurd would be nine-tenths of the way to being funny themselves. But their philosophy isn’t exactly a joke a minute. And in part this is because they don’t take the transcendent seriously, and so are stuck with finitude.
There were times when I felt that perhaps this theory of the comic needed to try a bit hard. He talks of the comedy of the abundance of language becoming funny when it is confined in the finite of a particular usage, for example. But even here I think he has a point. His clearest example is the abundance that is the phallic symbol. You start to wonder if there is any word in any language that doesn’t have men thinking about their dicks. What is particularly interesting here is that this abundance doesn’t extend to female genitals. And he makes the point that even though referring to penises and vaginas isn’t something you can do other than carefully in polite conversation – it is infinitely more acceptable to refer to penises than to vaginas. And the most offensive word for penis is less offensive than the least offensive word for vagina. To kick him in the prick seems less offensive than to kick her in the box, and the c-word does not have an equal penis version.
I liked this book a lot. It’s done a lot to have fucked up jokes for me, admittedly, but like the author, I think there is something deeply philosophical about humour – and so, that this forces me to think of why I laugh at certain things is worth even that.
Oh, and the reason why things might not be as funny now as they were then has probably as much to do with the distance between the ‘us’ of now and then. We have changed and that distance is now too far for us to feel properly involved in the humour and so the jokes fall flat. A joke about Julius Caesar, even a good one, is hard to laugh at in the way a joke about Trump is – the distance in time makes a very good joke like, in the end Caesar was just sick of all the backstabbing, perhaps less funny than what is objectively a less clever joke than, there’s a term for a president like Donald Trump, but probably not a second one.
June 4, 2023
Only a Joke Can Save Us is not funny, but it is profound. In other words, what is lacks in comedy it makes up for with excessive philosophical value.
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