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Even Laughter? From Laughter in the Magic Theater to the Laughter Assembly Line

2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/689673

1539-7858

Anca Parvulescu,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeEven Laughter? From Laughter in the Magic Theater to the Laughter Assembly LineAnca ParvulescuAnca ParvulescuPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThere was a time when the literary and artistic avant-gardes defined themselves through their laughter. Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche and later Georges Bataille, they saw in laughter a space of freedom—from norms, from form, from the artist's ego. The artist aspired to laugh a true laugh; for it was clear that there were fake laughs, too. The path to laughter was tenuous, but its promise was rarely questioned. Laughter was the secret to a subjectivity capable of genuine art. And art, as with all avant-gardes, was to be indistinguishable from life. It needs to be emphasized that such laughter was not necessarily comedic. This is a story about laughter valued in itself, regardless of what mechanism produced it, whether that be comedy, jokes, humor, and so on. It was in the burst of laughter, often awkwardly and sometimes tragically produced, that promise lay.Yoshua Okón's Canned Laughter (2006) can be said to be nostalgically diagnosing the loss of this laughter.1 In the installation, contemporary laughter is produced in sweatshop conditions in Mexico, on an assembly line, and is carefully canned for long-term consumption by tame and unquestioning audiences. Gone is the spontaneity of laughter, its evental promise, its touch of the sacred. The revolutionary potential of laughter has given way to the seriality of the laugh track. In this essay, I read Okón's installation, drawing out what I take to be its project and its effects on the installation visitor. I also offer an analysis of a text the installation tacitly invokes: Hermann Hesse's novel Der Steppenwolf (1927), a modernist celebration of the promise of laughter, the presumed loss of which Okón deplores.2 Throughout, I trace the ramifications of a few questions: Is Okón's installation a symptom of our contemporaneity? Is nostalgia an appropriate affective relation to modernist laughter? What is the interplay between spontaneous and canned laughter? How are we to think of laughter after the laugh track?This, then, will be a meditation on laughter and only ancillarily on comedy. What I am proposing is a methodological reversal of the relation between laughter and comedy. We usually start with comedy and assume that it leads us to laughter; we subscribe to the presupposition that we laugh in the audience of a comedy or in the wake of a comedic situation. Sometimes we do, but often we do not. We sometimes laugh in response to tragedy (Bataille is fond of quoting the famous lines in Nietzsche: "To see tragic natures sink and to be able to laugh at them, despite the profound understanding, the emotion and the sympathy one feels—that is divine").3 Furthermore, recent studies have shown that most of the laughs we laugh are noncomedic in nature; we laugh by way of punctuating conversation, out of nervousness, embarrassment, awkwardness, and shock and, indeed, often gratuitously.4 In short, there is no stable connection between laughter and comedy. We might say, provisionally, that the relation between laughter and comedy is analogous to that between sexuality and gender in the queer theory of the 1990s; they are distinct categories, in need of distinct analytical frameworks of study. Like sexuality and gender (recall Eve Sedgwick's second axiom in Epistemology of the Closet), laughter and comedy sometimes intersect, but we cannot tell in advance how.5 This means that after we strategically posit their separateness and linger on their distinctness for a while, the challenge is to sometimes bring the two together, through careful reading, at the points where they most forcefully converge, in ways that cannot be anticipated.6 In this essay, I start from laughter, I dwell on laughter, and, at a few junctures, when laughter leads me to it, I touch on comedy. This reversal takes the conversation beyond the question of genre, beyond texts recognizable conventionally as comedies (neither Hesse's Steppenwolf nor Okón's Canned Laughter are comedies), asking us to ponder moments of comedy opened up by laughter rather than the other way around.Canned LaughterOkón's artwork has been exhibited, in various spaces, in three formats: a video installation; a single channel video; and a photograph.7 Canned Laughter came into being in the context of a program (Proyecto Juárez) within which artists were asked to create artworks based on their experience of the city of Ciudad Juárez.8 The city is located on the Mexican-US border and is known in the international media for smuggling, drugs, prostitution, and violence. It is also the site of a number of maquiladoras, factories that operate in sweatshop conditions and avail themselves of the tax benefits of the border location. Okón, who lives in Los Angeles and Mexico City and exhibits his work globally, interviewed former maquiladora employees (he did not get access to actual, highly securitized maquiladoras) and asked them about their lives and work. He then rented a warehouse and hired the same workers he had interviewed to work in a fictional maquiladora named Bergson. In this space, Okón orchestrated and recorded a chorus of the workers' laughter and staged a fictional assembly line on which the workers produce cans of laughter for American sitcoms. In the installation, visitors walk between tables that serve as improvised replicas of this assembly line and handle some of the 160 red cans, labeled Canned Laughter, with subtitles like Hysterical Laughter, Evil Laughter, Manly Laughter, and so on. Headphones attached to some of the cans allow them to listen to the recordings of the laughing workers. Against the assumption that laughter is contagious, none of the visitors in the exhibit seem to be laughing. As Slavoj Žižek might put it, there is already laughter going on; there is no need for visitors to laugh.9In the video part of the installation, a camera is fixed on a chorus of laughers (fig. 1). The Mexican workers are lined up in three rows on choral risers and dutifully follow the cues of a German conductor. There are two recording microphones on each side of the chorus and a recording table to its left. The workers wear navy robes with the company logo written in stylized font on their chest (Bergson). As if worried about the hygiene of the production process, they wear hairnets. They laugh in unison, mechanically. Some are barely opening their mouths, some are yawning, some are visibly embarrassed, some make large, soundless mouth movements. Their facial expressions are often impassive, sometimes forced, sometimes pained. There is no laughing sparkle in these laughers' eyes. An abyss is opened between the sound of laughter and the facial expressions of the laughers. While, in itself, the sound might allow for some pleasure, or at least fascination, the facial expressions of the workers foreclose any such possibility. The effect on the viewer is of sadness mixed with a dose of horror. And, of course, revolt: Is this what laughter has become?One minute into the laughing choral, the German conductor announces, in Spanish, that the workers will now do Witch Laughter from his homeland in the Black Forrest. The ensuing unison laughter is as flat as the previous laughs.10 The laughers are out of sync with the sound, which seems to be superimposed on the images of laughter. The laughing faces are in fact out of synch not only with the sound of their own laughter but with the idea of laughter tout court. Okón's video frames a triangular clash between the visual, the aural, and the conceptual. We could not be further from the revolutionary potential of witch laughter that second-wave feminists tried to revive in the 1970s. Even the laughter of the early modern witch, which for a while functioned as a learning text for in-your-face, feminist laughter, seems to have been canned by a global capitalist laughter machine. Historically trusted to be one of the most authentic, place-specific sounds, Black Forrest laughter is now made in Mexico. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément's gloss on Jules Michelet's figure of the witch ("As she left she laughed, the most awful burst of laughter") acquires macabre resonances; unlike the witch's laughter, which sounded awful to some ears but registered as music in many feminist ears, the laughter of the contemporary laughing chorus imitating witch laughter is indeed awful.11 The pained faces of Mexican maquiladora workers testify to it.In another segment of the video, the workers are taking a break, holding hands and meditating. In case the viewer might be tempted to think that this is a union meeting, the counterpoint to the assembly line, Okón explains that the workers he interviewed told him about mandatory "spiritual breaks" in the maquiladoras; they are organized, in his words, for the workers to be "thankful for being exploited."12 It is as if, instead of nineteenth-century experiments that electrocuted the laughing muscles of the face in order to capture the elusive expressions of laughter, we have invented an even ghastlier, ever larger machinery that forces some people to laugh for their survival and then, perversely, asks them to express their gratitude for their chance at being exploited. The predicament repeats in nuce the familiar neoliberal refrain: it is better to work in sweatshop conditions than to not have a job at all. This means that all working conditions and all work are fair game.13 We know that in the flexible phase of capitalism we are asked routinely to commercialize the recesses of our affective life. We have sold our smiles long ago. But our laughter—even our laughter? The affective resonances of this question are of intense, indignant surprise; the installation visitor is left with a sense of too muchness, of things pushed too far.Laugh tracks for American sitcoms were for a long time produced by a machine called the Laff Box. In the words of its inventor, Charley Douglas, the Laff Box was "an organlike mechanism with six keys that when played with the left hand, can provide small chuckles, medium chuckles, small laughs, medium laughs, medium heavy laughs, and rollin'-in-the-aisles boffs."14 Laugh tracks produced by the Laff Box (there were about one hundred variations) were introduced in the 1950s and were thought to induce a sense of immediacy at a time when television shows were increasingly filmed rather than live productions. In fact, even when television shows were live productions, producers believed that audiences could not be depended on to laugh at the appropriate time. Laugh tracks were superimposed on the unreliable laughter of live audiences. The presumably original moment of recording a laughing chorus has always been an illusion. One could think of Okón's chorus as providing the recording for a fictional Laff Box, in which case it is appropriate that the Mexican workers are in fact not producing the sound of laughter. The sound comes from the recording table, which has already typologized laughter into giggles, chuckles, and boffs of different intensities. The can of laughter does not imprison any "real" laughter; canned laughter is always already recorded laughter.Laughter's association with a can has always had negative connotations. The intertextuality with Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) cannot be missed. Warhol's paintings of Campbell's soup cans dramatized the seriality of consumer choices (there were thirty-two identical soup cans differentiated by one word on the label). Okón likewise produces quasi-identical laughter cans differentiated by one word and by the shape of the laughing mouth on the label. Canned laughter is serial laughter. Unlike canned Campbell's soup, however, to which one might prefer authentic soup (today we would say organic) but that nonetheless has its uses (Warhol is said to have been fond of the predictability of eating soup out of a can), canned laughter is strongly oxymoronic. In their tacit invocation of modernist conceptions of laughter as the epitome of spontaneous singularity, Okón's serial laughter cans register a contradiction in terms.During their exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962, Warhol's cans were displayed on shelves imitating store shelves, like products in a grocery aisle, in a gesture towards performance that Okón's installation pushes to another level. Warhol's soup cans were paintings (portraits of cans), but in 1964 the Factory also produced oversized Campbell's soup boxes, which were displayed in a gallery, with visitors walking between them. Visitors—their bodies and affective performance—were inducted into the world of the installation. Okón further develops this strategy, having the visitors in his installation space stand by the tables that function as replicas of the assembly line and thus temporarily occupy the position of the workers in the video. They experience, among other things, the alienating effects of the spatial distribution of bodies along the assembly line and the troubling resonances of the focus on hygiene. In other cases, visitors walking through the installation listen to the recordings attached to some of the cans, uncomfortably standing in for the American sitcom viewer hailed as the consumer of canned laughter. The result is a mixture of fascination, guilt, and repulsion. Even laughter?Okón interpellates the visitors in the installation at the same time as spectators (they contemplate the space), performers (they interact with the space and with each other), and coproducers (the artwork is simply not complete without their presence). In an interview, Okón talks about his work as a "hybrid between video installation and performance." He explicitly claims allegiance with the historic avant-gardes: "bringing art and life together, which is not a new idea."15 Beyond Warhol and the installation art movement, what tradition is Okón's installation invoking? What exactly did laughter use to be? And when did it become this hateful, canned thing? Did it become this hateful, canned thing? And are all canned things to be thought of as hateful?Modernist GelotoscopyOkón's installation weaves together multiple layers of intertextuality. Alongside Warhol, Okón is in dialogue with Piero Manzoni's "Artist's Shit" (1961), which consists of ninety tin cans filled with the artist's feces. Aside from the can connection, however, the installation works with the assumption that the visitor is somewhat familiar with a Western tradition of writing on laughter. This is an old tradition, going back to Aristotle and passing through a thick early modern moment (Laurent Joubert, Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes,), but Okón's installation specifically claims familiarity with its modernist configuration. Modernist laughter can be said to start with Nietzsche's laughing Zarathustra, pass through Charles Baudelaire's meditations on caricature, and culminate in Bataille's thoughts on laughing sovereignty. Okón, somewhat unjustly, condenses this diverse genealogy in the name Bergson, a reference to the philosopher's well-known 1900 essay on laughter.16 Rather than help explain the workings of laughter, in 2006 Bergson becomes the ironic name of the laughter factory.Hesse's Der Steppenwolf will be my point of entry into the modernist genealogy Okón's installation tacitly takes as a reference point. The novel was written in 1926 by a German writer in exile in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland and in dialogue (often tense) with other avant-garde and modernist artists. To briefly set the scene: The novel's protagonist, Harry Haller, understands his alienation in the modern world through the figure of the divided self; he has a "dual and divided nature" (S, p. 43). He is both wolf and man.17 Like other modernist heroes, he claims kinship with artists: "Many artists are of this kind. These persons all have two souls, two beings within them" (S, p. 44). Over the course of the novel, he slowly learns that his idea of a dual and divided nature is a convenient fiction, nothing but a pose. With the help of two other characters, Hermine, a wise prostitute, and Pablo, a handsome Mexican saxophonist, both ambiguous characters in terms of gender and sexuality, Harry proceeds to take apart the illusion of a "dual and divided nature." The Steppenwolf slowly learns to enjoy the pleasures of dancing, eating, and sex. The path leads to the magic theater, an externalization of Harry's fantasies.18There is only one solution to Harry's crisis: learning to laugh. Glossing the language of learning and training, drawn from the tradition of the bildungsroman, Theodore Ziolkowski avers that the novel could well have been titled Harry Haller's Apprenticeship.19 Against assumptions that laughter lurks at the background of consciousness, ready to erupt at any time, Hesse's novel proposes that laughing takes learning; the spontaneity of laughter is to be achieved through a project, through a certain discipline. Unlike other apprentices, who undertake their Bildung in their adolescence or early twenties, Harry is fifty (and thinks of himself as close to his death), the novel extending the temporality of one's formation as a laugher over one's lifetime. If the modern civilizing process has been, among other things, an apprenticeship in the restraint of laughter (as Norbert Elias's essay in this issue argues), the Steppenwolf is challenged to learn precisely that which his Protestant formation has marginalized.To begin with, in order for Harry to learn to laugh he needs to differentiate between different kinds of laughs, to distinguish tonalities in laughter. The novel could be said to be a virtual tour de force of varieties of modernist laughter. The education of its protagonist involves his capacity to develop himself in relation to these different laughs. In the following, I draw out the novel's taxonomic work of typing laughter. This typing is a form of canning avant la lettre. Contemporary canning follows its own patterns (which Okón's installation foregrounds), but it is important to remind ourselves that laughter has long been canned into various labels. Gelotoscopy, a branch of physiognomy, is the pseudo-science of divination by laughter. Both physiognomy and gelotoscopy had their heyday in the nineteenth century, but their rudiments survived well into modernism.20 We continue to see their traces in our contemporaneity.21 It is particularly important to acknowledge that the canning of laughter into types occurred in modernism, the very tradition thought to have given us the spontaneous, singular laughter that we often oppose to the canned, unison variety.In keeping with its title emphasis, one of the first laughs the reader encounters in Hesse's novel is animal laughter, lupine or steppenwolfish laughter. At the beginning of the novel, laughter is the property of the wolf, not of man, as a tradition of writing on laughter from Aristotle to Bergson (famously excluding Darwin) has maintained.22 Hesse of Steppenwolf, like Thomas Mann, with whom he had a long correspondence, insists that some animals, like the wolf (for Mann, his dog) can laugh: "For example, if Harry, as a man, had a beautiful thought, felt a fine and noble emotion, or performed a so-called good act, then the wolf bared his teeth at him and laughed and showed him with bitter scorn how laughable this whole pantomime was in the eyes of the beast" (S, p. 42). The wolf bares his teeth, the aggressive gesture par excellence, but instead of biting, laughs. "He who laughs cannot bite," suggests Elias.23 Within the "dual and divided nature" framework in which the Steppenwolf functions, lupine laughter can only be directed at the human game, the pantomime modern humans go through daily. Wolf laughter has overtones of ideology critique; it poignantly and scornfully (aggressively, one could say, in line with recent commentators on ideology critique) shows the pantomime to be a pantomime.When, in the last part of the novel, Pablo, a jazz saxophonist and a hallucinogens-smoking pleasure-seeker, enters the frame, he is described through "his jolly eyes that really were animal's eyes except that animals' eyes are always serious, while his always laughed, and this laughter turned them into human eyes" (S, p. 173). Pablo's laughing eyes help Hesse reposition laughter, initially the property of the idealized animal, on the threshold between the animal and the human. Laughter in fact becomes the test of the human animal, offering something like a Turing test to the skeptic.24 In the economy of the novel, Pablo is racialized as Mexican; clearly a fiction, Mexico is, spatially, from the perspective of European modernism, somewhere else, somewhere other than European modernity. There, the assumption is, people might not have forgotten how to laugh (and, yes, modernists are already extremely worried that they might have forgotten how to laugh). It is also necessary that Pablo laugh with his eyes. In the nineteenth century, Duchenne de Boulogne's experiments showed that, since the choreography of human expression can be deceptive, "real" laughter becomes legible as both the eyes and the mouth laugh.25Another form of laughter in relation to which the Steppenwolf learns to position himself is feminine laughter, laughed by Hermine, a prostitute. Having listened to Harry's narrative of a "dual and divided nature," she replies: "I've understood your story very well, Harry. It's a funny story. You make me laugh" (S, p. 91). Hermine proceeds to actually laugh at Harry on a number of occasions, as she simultaneously offers to help: "You need me to teach you to dance and to laugh and to live" (S, p. 110). She subsequently sends him Maria, another "lost woman," who duly teaches him the pleasures of the body. Not surprisingly, Maria's beauty "laughingly offered itself" (S, p. 157). Hermine is an androgynous figure, who reminds Harry of a childhood friend, Hermann. Within the rather macho gender dynamics of the novel (the wolf is a hyperbolical masculine figure), it is Harry's feminine self, the self he develops through his identification with Hermine, that starts laughing and aims to teach his multiple over-serious selves the secrets of laughter. As in other avant-garde and modernist texts (think Bataille), this privileged feminine character has an ambivalent status. She is a necessary mediator (on one occasion the novel refers to her as a door).26 Hermine is there to help with Harry's apprenticeship by reminding him of the feminine laughter within himself. But Hermine herself, although intimately knowledgeable in laughing matters, cannot be the heroine of an apprenticeship similar to Harry's.27Another subspecies of laughter, this time located on the threshold between the human and the divine, is epiphanic laughter. In addition to its other functions, laughter in Steppenwolf is a method trusted to lead to an illumination. Harry discovers the benefits of laughter through reading: "As I thought again of that newspaper article and its jumble of words, a refreshing laughter rose in me, and suddenly the forgotten melody of those notes of the piano came back to me again. It soared aloft like a soap bubble, reflecting the whole world in miniature on its rainbow surface, and then softly burst" (S, p. 35). Recalling the experience of reading a "jumble of words," Harry starts laughing and, in the midst of his soaring burst, remembers an aesthetic experience. The memory of this experience condenses a miniature picture of the world, of "the order of things," as Michel Foucault might say (Foucault's own revelation of how les mots et les choses align famously came through his own laughter at a "jumble of words").28 The brief and sudden burst of laughter, primarily a temporal burst, has long-term "refreshing" effects.Epiphanic laughter in its turn leads to divine laughter. Midway into the novel, Harry has a dream about his literary idol, from whose Werther he learned a great deal about the bohemian disdain for respectability, orderliness, punctuality, and the cultivation of suffering. In Harry's dream, "Goethe's face was rosy and youthful, and he laughed…. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time" (S, p. 97). Buoyant and youthful Goethe is the Steppenwolf's example of an immortal—a god-like artist. The gods of Hesse's cosmology are his adored artists; heaven is a laughter-filled bohemia. The time-space we call eternity resonates with laughter. "Laughter I have pronounced holy," Nietzsche writes.29 Unlike Jesus in the Christian tradition, who famously never laughed, the gods of art do. The signature gesture of the immortals is in fact their laughter. In this modernist framework, seriousness, in turn, is a sure sign of an unimaginative disposition.30 Seriousness, the longue durée of humorlessness, Lauren Berlant proposes in this issue, signals a certain intractability, a rigid commitment to one's subjective profile, in this case the pose of the double. While Harry Haller misunderstands his loyalty to this pose as a form of sovereignty, Goethe of his dream proposes that sovereignty can only be found in divine laughter.Having met Goethe in a dream, Harry encounters his other idol in a hallucinogens-induced episode in the magic theater: "Mozart laughed aloud when he saw my long face. He laughed so hard that he turned a somersault in the air and played trills with his heels" (S, p. 207). The description of Mozart's laughter reads like early modern depictions of laughter in which it would not have been uncommon for one's whole body to engage in the act of laughing.31 This is a moment of slapstick cracking a very serious novel that could not be further from the generic conventions of comedy. Harry's search for laughter leads him to the immortal gods, who, instead of confirming his seriousness, point to it as the problem at hand. The way to draw this problem out is to act light themselves. If trills announce that we might be on the terrain of high classical music, Mozart is playing trills with his heels (schlug Triller mit den Beinen). High (classical music) and low (idiosyncrasies of the body) collapse in Mozart's somersault. Slapstick, one of the "lowest" modes of comedy, turns out to be underwriting the gestural choreography of the gods. Importantly, when faced with Mozart's somersault, Harry finds it peculiar; he certainly does not respond to it with laughter. It is, presumably, the other gods who get the comedy.32 Since they, however, are always laughing, it is impossible to tell which of their laughs are a response to Mozart's trills.By the end of the magic theater episode, Harry has a final illumination: "For the first time I understood Goethe's laughter, the laughter of the immortals. It was a laughter without an object. It was simply light and lucidity" (S, p. 154). It is crucial to emphasize that, Mozart's somersault notwithstanding, the immortals' laughter does not have an object. This is Hesse's way out of the conundrum Sigmund Freud identified—we laugh at something or somebody and therefore laughter works by exclusion.33 It takes three to laugh, Freud famously explained; I always laugh with someone and at someone, the object or butt of the joke. The butt of the joke is, by definition, excluded from the community of laughers. In contradistinction, the laughter of the immortals in Hesse's cosmology has no object—it a laughing with rather than a laughing at. Theoretically, given the appropriate apprenticeship (which, as we have seen, is no small thing), divine laughter creates a nonexclusionary community of laughers. Much as it seems to desire this kind of laughter, however, Hesse's novel does not fully support its promise. At the end of the novel, when the gods punish Harry for his jealousy, they laugh at him, effectively laughing him out of the magic theater. Like the laughter of other gods or godlike figures, this remains an exclusionary, corrective laugh.34Finally, by way of learning not to take himself seriously, Harry needs to learn to laugh at himself. Nietzsche's Zarathustra has sent the provocation of self-laughter: "Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh!"35 Most importantly, Harry needs to laugh at his "dual and divided nature." When Pablo shows him his reflection in a mirror, Harry indeed laughs. "'Well laughed [Gut gelacht]" (S, p. 178) is Pablo's congratulatory acknowledgement of the wondrous event. Self-laughter gives form to the shattering of the illusion of duality. Harry laughs his illusion away, exploding it (bursting it, one might say) into a multitude of selves. He is sent back into the world to continue his apprenticeship. He failed, having mistaken a symbolic reality (Hermine's reflection) for prosaic reality and having allowed a bourgeois affect (jealousy) to jeopardize his training. He cannot enter the world of the immortals, but, in an uncertain future perfect beyond the novel ("one day"), he will have been allowed to try again.Steppenwolf is thus the story of Harry's negotiation of his relation to a number of laughs: he slowly gives up his desire for animal laughter; he passes through a moment of identification with Pablo's laughter; he instrumentalizes feminine laughter; he attunes himself to the laughter of the immortals; and finally he turns laughter against himself. Laughter's promise is that the laughing subject undertakes a training in a particular kind of receptivity. And yet the spontaneity of laughter can only be achieved through a long-term project, what I have been calling an apprenticeship. And it can only be achieved in the magic theater, on stage, through artifice. In her