Humorlessness (Three Monologues and a Hairpiece)
2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/689657
ISSN1539-7858
Autores Tópico(s)Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeHumorlessness (Three Monologues and a Hairpiece)Lauren BerlantLauren Berlant Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe inaugural shot of American Hustle (dir. David O. Russell, 2013) streams an all-news-all-the-time radio broadcast announcing the onset of neoliberalism. Alliances painstakingly forged in the US postwar period are being abandoned, it reports. New York City is bankrupt and losing ground; a child’s been deserted by its mother; and police and fire unions threaten strikes against the city, which claims it’s too broke to pay decent wages for protecting property and keeping the law. As this is a film about risking property and breaking the law, we are set up to sense that we’re observing the end of many collective systems and dreams.It is 1979, and Atlantic City too seeks to stay afloat by becoming a gambling capital. American Hustle narrates the moment when a few people with power there scrambled to extend the city’s archaic promise to float all boats by selling off its resources to the highest bidder. Older practices of white crony capitalism and patronage, ritually cleansed by show trial exceptions decrying corruption, became what is now the ordinary of mass austerity and the privatization of publicly held wealth. As of 1979 the surface of postwar city life remained constant, until it didn’t.The radio’s aural tableau of the unraveling of the postwar alliance between the state and the aspirational working class fades to noise as the camera moves toward a pasty, big-bellied white man who is approaching, open-shirted, a large gilt mirror (Christian Bale, as Irving Rosenfeld) (fig. 1). In this mirror he assembles a massive and architecturally intricate combover coiffure. Uneven strands of pitch-black hair move in multiple directions, shooting out and bending across his balding pate. A Brillo-y toupee is glued toward the front with spirit gum, and the rest involves arranging and lacquering the remaining hair on it with aerosol spray, just so. All the while the white man’s face is pure gravitas, utterly serious and focused. He is at one with his ambition, honed in on his action. Behind him the room’s ornate curtains and furniture look like faded conceptions of what royalty would enjoy in its ordinary life, and the man wears a notably bulbous ring. The atmosphere, in other words, suggests a space where one tries on sovereignty for size.Figure 1. American Hustle (2013).View Large ImageDownload PowerPointIn the action of the combover the world lines up, and everything comes together. It is hard to believe that the project will work; the vast expanse of baldness needs to be filled in and naturalized. But none of that prospect distracts from the intensity of focus around the assembly of hair. The patting, the gluing, the spraying, the interminable forehead, and the man’s blank expressionlessness come off at first as comic because he does not appear to get the joke that his idealizing action is a useless fantasy. And, as we know, the person who doesn’t get the joke becomes a joke.But what makes this comedy?John Limon would suggest abjection.1 If so, the abjection that haunts this scene does not point to anyone’s radical dissolution, as the term abjection would suggest. It doesn’t even represent a wretched feeling or posture, necessarily.2 What abjects this combed-over subject is his refusal to adapt to anything but his own style of adapting to his own fantasy; what makes his appearance comic, when it is, is his insistence on form and, in particular, on inhabiting the form of comedy that, in his view, will allow his imperfect life to appear as a victory over existing.Motivating this maladjustment thus involves more than the vanity that Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson propose as a key motivating gotcha of the comedic.3 What makes this opening scene comedy is the appearance of a life-glitch plus the tableau of repair it offers that’s always teetering on reversal, exposure, and a collapse back into raveling and unraveling at once. This comedy involves not only the incessancy of the protagonist’s commitment to his abject striving but also a stark display of the way ambition opens up the ridiculousness of fantasy to a multiplicity of speculative causes and futures.What makes it humorless comedy in an exemplary way is both the person’s aspirational thingness and an aesthetics that plays out the searing incongruities of his desire to move toward and away from himself and the world. The painstaking display of reifying ambition and the proliferating microadjustments that preserve his attachment to life—the American hustle—provide a study in an ambivalent style that insists that it is not one.We are all combover subjects; let us put this image at the heart of humorlessness. In its conventional appearance, humorlessness involves the encounter with a fundamental intractability in oneself or in others. In affective terms, it is typically associated with a bracing contraction of relation. Sovereignty is a fantasy of self-ratifying control over a situation or space—a stance that might or might not be sanctioned by norm or law. The sense of relational rigor mortis involved in sovereign-style humorlessness might take on any form representationally, but it is often associated with a tone drained of whatever passes for warmth or openness. This is why humorlessness is associated both with political correctness and with the privilege that reproduces inequality as a casual, natural order of things. Humorlessness wedges an encounter in order to control it, creating a buttress of immobility and impasse.But humorlessness as such is much trickier in its mode of expression than its ordinary American association with one-sided woodenness, flat affect, or severity would predict. Structured by his commitment to a certain mien, the aspirational sovereign can express his humorlessness in many ways: as affectlessness, passive aggression, seriousness, bitter mirth, or any kind of warm emotion, even a smile. What constitutes humorlessness is someone’s insistence that their version of a situation should rule the relational dynamic; but no particular way of being and sounding confirms its social presence.4In this essay my larger claim is that, whatever else structures it, the comic is motivated by the pressure of humorlessness, with its radical cramping of mobility at the heart of the encounter, whether the encounter is with oneself or with another person, object, or world. The “straight man” of comedy embodies this reduced capacity, but it would be wishful to think that humorlessness is always contained over there, in the other person’s intractability.5 Sometimes the straight man is more knowing and capacious than the comic partner, who is caught up and unstable in the machine of his compulsion. Sometimes the straight man is a dope or a fool. Who knows for sure? Humorless comedy depends on the uncertainty of the event’s solidity. If comedy always involves a revelation of the mechanicity of being, as Bergson suggests, humorless comedy threatens to expose the ordinariness of a desperately desired, feared, and failed sovereignty machine. But, more than that, humorless comedy is also a comedy of confusion about what and where sovereignty is, such that its location and the relation between its inflation and reduction are in crisis and unknowable.This condisjuncture is a scene where an ambition to be causal without interference meets a radical insecurity about being lonely. It is a scene where the subject experiences a disturbing ambivalence about being known, recognized, attended to, and mattering, an experience of self-incoherence that does not defeat the subject but forever demands microadjustments in the scene of encounter. Humorless comedy offers and threatens the fun of witnessing all that, mixing the pleasure of encountering the awkward, slapstick, incongruous experience of someone else’s pathos with the specter of a world-collapse that ropes the spectator into it, a spectator then constituted by the draw of aversion, empathy, identification, disidentification, seasickness, kindness, and a failed kind of numbness, the kind a person feels being jostled in a crowd that’s been willingly entered. In this way the comic encounter with the combover effect splits from the range of pity-rage affects and cathartic abreaction that might be induced by being pressured to bear someone else’s aggressive need; this kind of comedy promises a cushion for identification, the cushion of overdetermination.6These works pull back from being melodramas and tragedies because they conscript identification with the desire for comedy that structures the protagonist’s action. This might look like an ironic structure, in which the audience discovers before the agent in question does that the fantasy of self-completion is just that, nothing but a wish.7 Condescension is always in the air in these things—the sour comedy of the risible. Yet this comic structure is different from the Hobbesian emperor’s-new-clothes paradigm. The emperor’s audience can take sheer pleasure in the sovereign’s lack of knowledge that he is merely naked, an ordinary wizard.8 They are knowing, and he is not; they feel “eminency” in themselves and “infirmity” in him because he is not in on the joke that he is one.9 He does not know that he has already been humiliated definitively.In contrast, the combover subject, by revealing to the world some consciousness of the fragility of his power, pushes his spectators to have a morally encumbered relation to him, to see the failed effort in his unfinished success, and to sense the vulnerable and aggressive affect and urges that went into this labor, which is now exposed as failing to be up to code—his own code, which might or might not be theirs. When people choose to protect from shared revelation the tableau of another person’s nonsovereignty they may cycle ambivalently among a cluster of affects, such as distancing, snickering, reluctant feelings of superiority, disgust at physical incongruity, rage at being taken affective hostage (and by a fool), the self-threatening, melting overcloseness of pity or identification, and the tragicomic burden of being forced to lie, whether out of aggression, defense, or care, reluctant or genuine. Usually all of this microadjustment diffuses across the surface of experience, and usually it does not achieve the status of event.This points to another key set of paradoxes in the scene of humorlessness. The self-amplifying personal style of mimetic sovereignty associated not just with the humorlessness of commitment but with the commitment to humorlessness requires a social concession to its claim on the conditions of relation. And like all affects the implications of its appearance are not just singular, defined within a given encounter, but also political, insofar as the privilege to be humorless, to withhold the cushion of generosity, wit, or mutually hashed-out terms of relation is unequally distributed across fields of power, inducing diverse effects and consequences—especially for those identified as bearing threatening or grotesque bodies (women, the sexual, the appetitive, the racialized, proletarians, all associated with “low” comedy, unsurprisingly).10 As scholars of the Hegelian slave-master dialectic have long argued, the aspirational master’s political location will greatly affect how he is protected from having to suffer the consequences of his sovereign occupation of others’ performance of being knowing. But in all cases the humorless sovereign is unsovereign because he depends on the world and others to expedite his sense of the achievement of his fantasy.In short, the combover is a medium that implies an affectively mixed mode. It redistributes to the scene of encounter the affective pressure of its organizing need, communicating the demand for a shared atmosphere that protects a protagonist from whatever anxiety, insecurity, and drives push him to assemble himself as a thing without holes. This redistribution of humorlessness is no doubt a potential feature of all encounters, insofar as every instance requires managing everyone’s aggression—their commitment to a way of appearing and their desire to move a situation in a way that is more bearable and cannot be achieved alone, by will.11 Additionally, as John Steiner has argued, every encounter with any object provides evidence of one’s lack of omnipotence in the world, such that one experiences one’s very receptivity as a threat because one needs the world.12 (The experience of this structure varies wildly, of course.) There is no getting outside of the situation of managing and testing what to do with one’s inevitable, technical openness. This is another way to phrase the concept of defenses.The point here is that the scene of unyielding self-commitment is humorless. It may or may not be funny ha-ha to the audience for the combover subject to be covering what can’t be covered; it may or may not be enjoyable for the audience to feel more knowing than the protagonist; the protagonist’s own self-encounter in the scene of organizing his fixities can take on any affect or many, since flooding with shame can be joined by aesthetic pleasure, satisfaction, fantasy and speculation about alternative outcomes, rage at the body or the world, and so on. But as long as the tortured situation of being asked to hold someone’s secret and be knowing about it without saying that one is induces more gestural adjustment and tact than drama, the modality is comic. The relation between comic and tortured life is bound up in the incessant pressure to defend the combover subject in the scene of survival so as to seem to more than survive it.For it is not just altruism and the fear of being exposed as cruel in an encounter between subject and subject that motivates keeping the secret of someone else’s failed aesthetic or personhood project. There is the need for reciprocity as well. No one wants to deserve to be revealed as too much of, or the wrong kind of, an event, and that recommends compliance with the injunction to help everyone feel okay in ordinary situations, which is to say, to assist with their not having to be seen facing the exposure of humiliation for being unevenly adequate to some norm or other or barred from ever deserving idealization. A fear of countershaming also encourages support for the open secret. In short, the desire to not be in the spotlight of an unavoidably diminishing grotesque amplification usually argues strongly for an immediate, but emotionally complex, concession to the form of good manners. The alternative is an open war of insults (which, indeed, happens in the opening scene of American Hustle, when the protagonist meets an enemy who messes up his hair).Even inauthentic generosity, after all, gives the combover subject a chance to escape with his fantasy of life, which is why some spectators even consider themselves kind and considerate for performing fake inattention to the spectacle of someone else’s failed show of adequacy. The affective event of the combover will often be a significantly different thing, therefore, than the aesthetic enjoyment of suffering we call schadenfreude.13 They’re distinct when one cannot fully enjoy and support someone else’s failed defenses.Then there is the pressure on speech not to fail. Schadenfreude is often accompanied by explicit bodily pleasure, laughter, and taunting—often at the other’s loss of humor. But in the combover genre of this kind of encounter, pressure builds from neither telling the truth nor telling the joke about not telling it, which is why people will leak or spray affectively all over the place while they’re holding onto such a secret.14 We have all seen the public pleasure that takes place when what had been an awkward open secret becomes explicit and available for pitiless mirth (see Donald Trump’s hair). Usually, though, the mien of the spectators encountering the open zipper or the failed hairstyle of being is pretty solemn.These very oscillations within the humorless space can also be found in the classic archive of comedy theory and are on offer as the very conditions of the comic, according to the brace of writers from Cicero and Freud to Alenka Zupančič, Joseph Litvak, and Simon Critchley.15 However, virtually all comedy theorists are structuralists. To them, the comic encounter is defined by who is up and who is down; what’s repressed and expressed; known and disavowed; hidden and surprising; free and unfree; functioning and malfunctioning. The comedy door hits you on the way in and on the way out; it collapses distances; it laughs at impasses and other failures of movement; it forces displays of resilience (sometimes positively, as repair—sometimes against better judgment, as in satire). It merges cruelty and the genuine pleasure of being in unison with something—a person, people, or a world.16What makes this essay’s opening scenario a specific contribution to comedy theory generally is its location of comedy in the copresence of structuration and collapse, and its attention to the multiplier effect of comic disturbance. My interest is in flooding: the way a scene of disturbance lets into the room multiple logics of frame switching, temporal manipulation, status scale shifting, identification, and norm-agitating gestural events. If only the world were x and its other. If only causes led to effects. If only life produced flow, then blockage, then flow. The combover exemplifies the comedy of unbinding that happens in the face of rigidity but locates the comic in its proliferation of complications, threats, potentials, constraints, and consequences that are never definitively ordered.17American Hustle’s opening tableau, which figures an economic and social crisis in a balding man’s anxiety to be taken in as a successful arrangement of ill-fitting parts, thus represents an exemplary moment of comic humorlessness. You will note that the preceding description does not judge his or anyone’s affective overfocus on being a thing that would take down itself and the world rather than give up some ground within the encounter. As it involves the world, humorlessness points to individual pathology and the self-reproductive drive of power, norm, and law. But humorlessness is not all bad. It involves a commitment to principles, after all, to a world and to being reliable, which is to say, to some repetitions. It props up the arrangement of personhood we call identity or personality; it is central to any kind of fidelity or obedience in love, politics, and religion; and it can cathect us to habit. It is sneaky and often occupies a space of self-unknowing in people who understand themselves to be responsive, engaged, open, and kind.So, although having good humor is often considered a virtue and a relief, we would not always want the state of humorlessness to be replaced by whatever appears as the generosity of humor—such as being able to take a joke, or to shrug, to play with words, or to let something pass. The moral question is also an aesthetic question about the genre that communicates rigidified relationality and what proceeds from it. When we encounter the aesthetics of the intractable, how do we know how to distinguish satirical deflation from the melodrama of stuckness and the comedy of it? How do we, how can we, distinguish foolish righteousness from principled commitment? Context is everything. Perspectives vary. So much depends on the style of the subject’s or the artwork’s investment in humorlessness. So much depends on the resources spectators have to process certain styles of defense, their costs and their failures.Valerie Cherish, the protagonist of Lisa Kudrow’s The Comeback, calls this variant on the comic a “dramedy”: “You know, and that’s a um that’s a comedy without the laughs.”18 Elsewhere I have called this “um” a “situation tragedy,” where the very compulsion of a protagonist or a world to appear to be on an arc of a comic triumph over life reveals them to be a thin membrane away from suffering life as a complete disaster of ordinariness.19 Often this kind of humorless aesthetic finds its way into catalogues of satirical dark amplification, as in gallows humor or what André Breton names “black humor,” glossed elsewhere as “a superior revolt of the mind” that’s facing “a SENSE … of the theatrical (and joyless) pointlessness of everything.”20But humorless comedy, as I’ll lay out in the three monologues below (Colson Whitehead’s “The Comedian,” Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy [1982], and Kudrow’s The Comeback [2005, 2015]), is not just an orientation toward noise-cancelling amplification.21 It has specific aesthetic features that are worth attending to. Its exempla are not only about the work of humorlessness but also about the humorlessness of work, anatomizing specifically the intense physicality of exposure to even the most minor ambitions.22 Ambition is desire in the lifeworld of capitalism. This mode gives love a makeover, too.23 Crucially defining what’s comic about its “operational aesthetic” 24 is the conventional interrogative toggle between comedy and misery—between the inevitable “where does the comedy come from?” question that is posed to all comedians, and the “where does the misery come from?” question about personhood first posed by Wilhelm Reich to Freud and repurposed for feminism by Jacqueline Rose.25 Typically, the hope is that comedy repairs misery. In humorless comedy “where does the comedy come from?” and “where does the misery come from?” are the same question: a question about being humored, with no repair in sight.Monologue 1: “The Comedian”By its very title, Whitehead’s “The Comedian” narrates a person’s reduction of himself to a kind of thing: it’s in order to save his attachment to life. The narrator contributes to his character’s “thingification” by using free indirect discourse to get at him; he is an object to the reader and self-reflexively to himself. His only name in the story is “the comedian,” which obliterates the name of the father, the family, the genealogy, and even the generic casualness of a first name that could be anybody’s. Whitehead even refers to him only in the lower case. The celebrity profession he assumes tries to substitute for all that erasure, but the story plays with the both/and of misery/comedy in its examination of professional comedy’s promise to provide relief from the pressures of ordinariness. Whitehead’s strategy is to wield the dogged literalism one expects to find in proximity to humorless comedy. The story opens with the comedian on a talk show late in his career being asked “why he started telling jokes.” His response is that “he just wanted some attention.”As a child he’d felt unseen. He was a handsome baby (photographs confirm) but his impression was that no one cooed at him or went cross-eyed to make him smile. Common expressions of affection, such as loving glances, approving grins, and hearty that-a-boys, eluded him. His mother told him “Hush, now,” when he came to her with his needs or questions and he frowned and padded off quietly. He received a measly portion of affirmation from grandparents, elderly neighbors, and wizened aunts who never married, folks who were practically in the affirmation-of-children business.[“C”]He goes on to say that it was not just the family; the comedian was not even enough of an irritant to be bullied by the more alpha boys. He wanted surplus, more attention than he needed; he did not want to be a nonevent.So, spontaneously one day at a family affair, he experimented with comedy from below—fart jokes in particular, which become the origin of the revelation of his power. Farts are the essential confirmation that no one is a bodily sovereign and that decay suffuses the ordinary of life. The comedian’s first joke says as much: his cousin Roger’s farts smelled like the “dead rat” whose odor was suffusing the family room (“C”). This riffs on the opening pages of Native Son, perhaps, with its tragic slapstick chase of the rat around Bigger Thomas’s family flat;26 and perhaps on the stinky anality that opens Eddie Murphy’s Raw (dir. Robert Townsend, 1987), which locates Murphy’s comic genius in a childhood origin story of entertaining the family with monkey fart comedy. Whitehead’s story may imply African-American racial and working-class location. That any likely structural referents are basically tacit suggests an experiment on Whitehead’s part to see what happens when what goes without saying remains unsaid on behalf of hastening the reparative possibility. This principle of reticence becomes explicit later on in the story and is, of course, central to combover logic.Whitehead narrates a set of phases the comedian goes through next—stations of the comic, if you will. The story provides a brilliant condensation of the major comedy theories. At first, hemade unlikely connections between seemingly dissimilar objects and phenomena…. [Later] he experimented with metaphor and figurative language … A familiar situation disrupted by an unexpected and forbidden element produced laughter. The smell of the decomposing mouse was not one Roger fart, but a hundred. Exaggeration was key. Exaggeration was a kind of truth telling and it made people laugh…. Looking at it one way, it was a kind of commentary on the comedian’s lot—to translate between the world as it is and the world as people perceive it.[“C”]He practices in front of the mirror. “His bits eventually become routines” (“C”). He learns to imitate others, to steal their jokes while annexing a little supplement of his singularity to hide his unoriginality. On top of this he becomes a character comic, a person in the form of a cartoon, which is to say at once feral, inhuman, injured, and immortal, the combination of a fool and a god. His character called Danny the Dentist spends his bits conversing with patients while fisting their mouths, contrasting his sadistic eloquence to their grunting good manners. His character called the Limo Driver doesn’t know he has bad boundaries while in inappropriate conversation with his captive passengers.In other words, in both personae the comedian’s combover medium is at first the conversation in which his persona takes both sides. Inconvenient talkback can never happen in his art; a person can’t heckle themselves. This stand-up strategy allows an internal monologue in the form of dialogue to give the audience the feel of participating in his observations without actually being able to impact them. His comedy thus involves both imitating nonrelationality in his personas’ actions and miming genuine relationality through insider knowledge shared with his audience. Avoiding and strangling any openness or intimacy as such, he casts stand-up comedy as a game of domination and negation from which the audience is asked to take pleasure. The narrator observes that this mode of comic hostage taking produced a mildly successful career.But then one day the comedian’s body rebels against the machinery of its own compensations. He is in the middle of performing Danny the Dentist interacting with a German tourist. Then:No one else seemed to notice it, and he thought for a minute that it was another one of his mysterious physical or mental symptoms, but quickly understood that it was more than that. He stopped speaking (his mouth had continued the routine, such was his professionalism) and looked into the audience. They were a hive of faces before him, still and attentive, arranged like hexagonal tile in a bathroom. The comedian said the words that popped into his head: “If I had known what little came from talking to other people, I never would have learned how to speak.” The microphone dispatched these words into the sound system and into the void of the auditorium. And then they laughed. They laughed for a nice comfortable while. The comedian resumed his act (poor Danny, poor German tourist), but he knew something had changed.[“C”]No one notices the comedian’s bodily nonsovereignty and the autonomy of his voice; no one notices that his unconscious is playing karaoke with him, as it will. But the comedian survives the shame of his public dissociation and takes on as method the dignity of the kind of simplicity it offers. The comedian becomes eventually “unadorned by the traditional flourishes of comedy…. The tools of the trade [such as]—the crooked eyebrows, head wagging, and shrugs…. fell away” (“C”). His gestures, the props that urge on laughter, fall away passively; he becomes a thing without his combover character to shield his tenderness from the world.27As a result of its forfeiture, he has room to take the audience into what he calls “his confidence” (“C”). To take beings into your confidence is to release yourself from the humorless isolation of your internal monologue. It collapses the intimate into intimating in a way that subtends the loneliness of carrying a secret that the world might not be able to bear—at least as long as one’s interlocutors continue enjoying holding the secret of one’s particular truths. For being trusted to bear the secret that was combed over makes the interlocutors feel powerful and special along with being, in some cases, less free from the knowledge. His audience eats it up.The secret of the secret the comedian tells his public in confidence builds from two observations: “people are disappointing” and “everything is terrible” (“C”). All the sex and pleasures, he tells them, are mere noise to keep away these truths. There is a third principle, too, which he keeps to himself and metabolizes privately over many years. It turns out that there was nothing special about him
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