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Laughter as Immanent Life-Affirmation: Reconsidering the educational value of laughter through a Bakhtinian lens

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00131857.2012.721733

1469-5812

Joris Vlieghe,

Humor Studies and Applications

AbstractIn this article I try to conceive a new approach towards laughter in the context of formal schooling. I focus on laughter in so far as it is a bodily response during which we are entirely delivered to uncontrollable, spasmodic reactions. To see the educational relevance of this particular kind of laughter, as well as to understand why laughter is often dealt with in a very negative way in pedagogical contexts, this phenomenon should be carefully distinguished from humor or amusement. I build my argument for a smaller part on the basis of conceptual analysis, and to a greater extent on Bakhtin’s work on the transition from Medieval folk culture to Modern civilized culture, in which he claims that a reduction from laughing as a strongly physical experience to mere forms of amusement or humor actually implies that laughter no longer possesses its inherent equalizing and communizing potential. In a sense, laughter forms a threat to any organization of social existence according to similarities and differences in identity and position, and this explains why we usually try to suppress it, or why we try to render it functional in view of the continuation of a societal regime or pedagogical order. More positively formulated, laughter may be said to have an intrinsic educational meaning, because it allows a significant transformation of individual and collective existence.Keywords: communal laughtercarnivalesque laughterBakhtinPlessnercorporeal experienceequality Notes1. This term refers to the most basic power structure that organizes the meeting of the elderly and the younger generation. This order is threatened not only by devious forms of laughter that directly attack hierarchy and authority, but also by laughter as such (Baas, Citation2003, p. 100).2. For a discussion about the non-necessary interrelation between laughter and pleasure, illustrated with many counter-examples, see Pfeifer (Citation1994).3. This is typically the case in philosophical explanations of laughter that mainly concentrate on the things we laugh about, such as the superiority theory, which states that when we laugh, we consciously or unconsciously mock and denigrate others in order to prove our own superior position, or the famous theory defended by Henri Bergson, who explains that we laugh with human behavior that becomes inert and machine like (e.g. when we stick too much to habits or make a slip of the tongue) (Bergson, Citation1981).4. A main part of Bakhtin’s study precisely tries to show that the existing Rabelais scholarship is on the wrong track, because it fails to read his work as a direct affirmation of physical life and tends to interpret this oeuvre through a contemporary lens: ‘Current literature concerning this subject presents merely gross modernizations. The present day analysis of laughter explains it either as purely negative satire (and Rabelais is described as a pure satirist), or else as gay, fanciful, recreational drollery’ (Bakhtin, Citation1984, p. 12).5. The ‘classic’ theories on laughter I discussed in footnote 3 do exactly the same: the model case of laughter they advance always concerns deriding something that is inappropriate or reprehensible in view of a desired form of behavior which, at the very moment a joke is told, is affirmed to be the right way of how to live our lives.6. It should be admitted, however, that Langman, next to the obvious dangers related to these practices (that they may surreptitiously subject us to consumerist exploitation), also stresses the ‘utopian’ qualities of ‘carnivalesque’ lifestyles—in the same way that Giorgio Agamben argues that (some) pornographic imagery has the force to suspend all social hierarchy: it debases, but because of its obviously exaggerated character, it may also embody an otherwise almost impossibly imaginable ‘idea of communism’ (Agamben, Citation1995).7. This does not of course preclude that we actually can laugh together with people who are close and very similar to us. The whole point is that this closeness or similarity do not constitute necessary conditions for the communizing effect laughter may generate. To be clear, I am not denying that we use it to laugh with friends and significant others, that this kind of laughter may strengthen and deepen our friendships, and that anonymous laughter occurs less frequently.8. Dentith draws here from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s analysis of the Carnival at Romans (Citation1979), which he considers to be an archetypical form of the carnivalesque. Looking at the popular-festive culture of the Late Middle Ages through a contemporary lens, the carnivalesque is reduced here, once more, to a form of satire that symbolizes the antagonism between the poor and the rich.