Re: MARXIST HUMOR: UNITY OF THEORY & PRACTICE

["Bryan A. Alexander" <bnalexan@xxxxxxxxx>]

"...a somewhat different light is shed on this odd prejudice by the
realization that laughter here is conceived as essentially Homeric - that
is, a ferocious vaunting, with bared teeth, over the victim, as
exemplified, for example, by Wyndham Lewis's Tryos; while we should also
read into the record Adorno's frequent exception - from such denunciations
of sheer malicious 'fun' - of the genuinely zany, such as the Marx
brothers..."
        Fred "The Man" Jameson, LATE MARXISM, 145



Bryan Alexander
Department of English
University of Michigan
**********************

On Tue, 6 Jun 1995, Santiago Colas wrote:

> Hilarious!  My response to the pop quiz:
> 1."Blew up once" is obviously the central kernel of the punch-line and,
> as such, it houses, again obviously, two meanings, one totally banal and
> unfunny and the other pretty tragic (if you care about Christa McAuliffe
> or someone who did).  Yet juxtaposed, fused as it were in this single
> phrase, the thing is funny.  So the humor, if you ask me, resides
> somewhere in the liminal (sorry about that word) space between the two
> "literal" meanings.  I seem to remember from a comedy class I took in
> college some essay by Bergson on humor where he emphasized a certain
> juxtaposition of the cosmic and the banal as the source of humor (anyone
> else remember?) and I remember we played it out by reading Woody Allen's
> Getting Even and Without Feathers.  Something along these lines is at
> work in Ralph's joke.
>
> 2.However, there's another edge (maybe it comes from Adorno or somewhere
> in the Frankfurt school, if I remember vaguely correctly) where the laugh
> is like a cannibalistic, aggressive gesture, right?  so it wouldn't be so
> mucha bout the pleasure you take in laughing, unless (as I've said
> before) the pleasure resides precisely in the act of agression which
> laughing involves.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Santiago Colas                                        e-mail: scolas@xxxxxxxxx
> Asst. Professor                                       phone:  (313) 763-4352
> Latin American and Comparative Literature     fax:    (313) 764-8163
> University of Michigan
> Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1275
> USA
>
> On Mon, 5 Jun 1995, Ralph Dumain wrote:
>
> > Santiago isn't funny, but he's thinking.  What, pleasure be
> > recognized by the Vanguard Party?  No use value here, comrades.
> >
> > As a Deborinite menshevizing idealist, I'm far more interested in
> > the dykealicktickle materialist approach than the hysterectical
> > part.  I don't know what historicizing pleasure means (get the
> > Hook ready), but I do know that we love to laugh at disaster.
> > What makes one joke merely cute and another one riproaring?  Could
> > it be the profundity of the simultaneous absurdity and truth
> > encapsulated within it?
> >
> > Remember all those jokes that followed the Challenger explosion in
> > 1986?  Most of them centered around the star of that show, Christa
> > McAuliffe, the teacher who went along for the ride into Space.
> > Well, my fellow humorologists and I collected them all.  Without a
> > doubt, there is one joke that stands out above the rest.  It may
> > not Further the Struggle, but here it is:
> >
> > Q: Why was Crista McAuliffe such a good teacher?
> >
> > A: She only blew up once in front of the class.
> >
> > After you are done laughing, please explain why this is so funny.
> > This is a pop quiz, so get out those keyboards and pixels and get
> > to it.
> >
> >
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> >
>
>
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>


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