I offer a mixing-up of expectations on this celebration of laughter. Whereas and while the future may yet hold a documentation, an archive, and an accumulation of laughs, today will be a singular moment.
Allow me to set the scene for you by working atemporally.
It is the Saturday after a night of dancing in which you didnât return to your apartment until 3am, in which you check your step-count from the night before and see some near forty-thousand steps taken, in which your body feels remarkably light. It is two weeks before the Friday night of dancing, in which you are realizing the oncomingness of this festivity, and grow giddy in elation. It is the Friday, you take a shot before walking to the locale only to be harangued by a drunken man desperate for you to buy him a beer â he was nice, but a beer didnât seem like it would be of much help to someone who was already struggling to stand without a hand on your shoulder â you offer to buy him some food or a juice instead, and he asks if youâre his wife. It is the Friday and you are in the locale bouncing around for five hours continuously; you drink some five bottles of water through the set because the stage is so horrifically poorly ventilated that every body is drenched in a veneer of sweat. Four hours into the set, around 1:15 am, the stage has thinned tremendously leaving really the last few dozen individuals who enjoy themselves and have the vigor to carry on some bouncing and bobbing, when a young man tall-enough and mildly athletic looking, short-cropped brown hair and a white t-shirt with khakis, climbs onto the stage. He doesnât look particularly intoxicated, but he also doesnât look particularly interested in the music. He dances like a New Jerseyian from 2012, which is to say he dances with a fist in the air, not really moving his body, but certainly pumping that arm enthusiastically enough. And then it happens: you witness as he drops to the stage floor, not particularly smoothly by any means, and plants both palms onto the floor while stretching his legs out such that only his toes are touching the ground. You, dancing still, sweating, watch as this young man does two short push-ups, with honestly poor form, and stands back-up to start more moderately jumping around to the music once again. Nobody else seems to notice around you, or if they do theyâre not acknowledging the odd behavior on an elevated stage behind two DJs whoâve been playing high-BPM electronic dance music now for going on four-and-a-half-hours and with a crowd of maybe forty in front of them, eyes ahead, watching this stage and this young-man doing poor push-ups. Then, about two songs later but seemingly not correlated to any beat-drop or melodic moment, the young man repeats the ritual. He does about three push-ups this time, and then, upon standing up and bobbing to the music a few times, he slides off the stage and disappears into the dark rest of the locale. You laugh. It canât be heard over the music, but you know the look of laughter on your face would have been seen if not for the mask, lips wide and throat bulging as your exhaustion gulps air to expel again to ring out your joy under the tones of euphoria. Most every day since you have several moments of internal giddiness, laughing, over the event. So, you look to scholarship to help explain a man doing push-ups at 1am on the stage of a DJ set.
Before I continue and try this explication of such an eruption of feeling, such a soul-shaking, I must make clear the intention, and I do so with Nietzsche from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, âThis crown of the laughing one, this rose-wreath crown â I myself put on this crown, I myself pronounced my laughter holy. I found no other strong enough for it todayâ (239.) And thus an occasion for these posts, for all of this writing, on and toward laughter, to document it - that laughter is holy, that to laugh and to know laughter is a divine act. Not to be confused with a religious experience, and I mean this in earnestness, that your religious experiences can be as valid as you need them to be, but that there is a divinity aside from religious worship, or in tandem with it, that I think all life has access to should they give power to the profundity they experience on a momentary basis.
Or from Ben Jonsonâs Timber from 1640:
To this perfection of nature in our poet, we require exercise of those parts, and frequent if his wit will not arrive suddenly at the dignity of the ancients, let him not yet fall out with it, quarrel, or be over-hastily angry; offer to turn it away from study, in a humour; but come to it again upon better cogitation; try another time, with labour.
That it is the responsibility of a poet to write toward a type of humor, a wit, a comedy, a laugh. Or from Dillon Wentworthâs 1684 Essay on Translated Verse:
Each poet with a different talent writes,
One praises, one instructs, another bites;
Horace did neâer aspire to epic bays,
Nor lofty Maro stoop to lyric lays.
Examine how your humour is inclined,
And which the ruling passion of your mind;
Then seek a poet who your way does bend,
And choose an author as you choose a friend;
United by this sympathetic bond,
You grow familiar, intimate, and fond;
That humor is an intrinsic component of whatâs necessary both in forming lasting relationships, intimacy, and in knowing the real language of another. Something beyond communication, and beyond mere social attitude.
And in my exploration, stumbling onto the whole classification of scholarship known as laughter theory. Where they attempt to classify laughter in some four (or five, if youâre being contemptuous) categories â playful, superiority, relief, or the exposure to something outside of our perceptive expectations (with the fifth being the physiological response of laughter). And each field seems to have a legitimate case for its argument, although, it feels quite ridiculous to ever use laughter as a form of superiority even if you have seen the documentation of that snide laughter in all type of film and television since you were young, even listening to laughter in theatre and soundtracks as derisive. But then Paul Carus wrote in On The Philosophy of Laughing
Life is serious, and if we could see all the misery of life at once it would so oppress us that we would long to die. But because life is serious, and because we need a buoyant spirit to fight the struggle of life bravely, we need as a temporary relief from time to time a hearty laugh. The man who always laughs lacks seriousness, he is silly. Constant laughing betrays a fool. But a man who cannot laugh had better consult his physician. He is sick. He is devoid of that elasticity of spirit which is so necessary for carrying the burden of life with ease and in good grace. He will not live long and had better attend to his last will. Laughter is a medicine that will heal sour dispositions and a bad temper or alleviate the loss of fortune and the buffets of ill luck.
I find it funny that so many philosophers, even breaching into as recently as in the last 20-30 years, find themselves writing in odd descriptions like, âMan must,â or âHe who gains access to the burden of philosophy,â god forbid a woman laugh, or think. Or even further from unimaginative capabilities, someone other than man or woman. Although, then, wouldnât that go into incongruous theory which is the explanation of laughter as a response to something outside of our perceptive expectations? And this type of laughter â to be clear â isnât a laugh of superiority but rather one of epiphany. It does give me some delight â that unexpected gender performances can create epiphany in others.
But then you have Hannah Ardent, Max Eastman, Roger Scruton, and Henri Bergson who all make similar but slightly nuanced arguments toward the affect of laughter. Arendt, in Life of the Mind, for instance pokes at laughter in reference to the ancient in Plato. She argues that laughter can be an immensely powerful tool for the oppressed,
Laughter rather than hostility is the natural reaction of the many to the philosopherâs preoccupation and the apparent uselessness of his concerns. This laughter is innocent and quite different from the ridicule frequently turned on an opponent in serious disputes, where it can indeed become a fearful weapon. But Plato, who argued in the laws for the striction prohibition of any writing that would ridicule any of the citizens, feared the ridicule in all laughter.
Eastman in The Enjoyment of Laughter (1936) thinks of laughter as an almost innate response to things that are traumatizing, âWe come into the world endowed with an instinctive tendency to laugh and have this feeling in response to pains presented playfully.â More firmly within the school of relief, Eastman doesnât expand the thought of laughter as an endowment into Arendtâs laughter as a weapon. And this distinction is necessary for if all tools became weaponry, well, isnât that what really got us into this whole mess of a world in the first place?
Scruton veers almost into the scholarly field of OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology). If youâre not privy to this terminology, I offer this intensely short synopsis with the asterisk that I am quite biased in that I donât particularly get the intellectual appeal of the field. Ontology is the study of being from a metaphysical sense, so object-oriented ontology is the study of objects as capable of being. From how I understand, this is useful as humanity approaches larger and larger-scale fuck-ups â for instance, we can explain how throwing massive amounts of chemicals into a river and pollute said river, but OOO can take that river as a representative object for, say, all the water on the earth and make an argument toward waterâs being. Does water think? Does water feel?
Anyway, sorry, I probably butchered the hell out of that description, and admittedly that was an exercise in vanity. As I confessed, Iâve never really gotten OOO. And the best way, in my experience, of beginning to know something is to repeatedly try to describe it in a way that makes sense to others.
Back to laughter â Roger Scruton in John Morreallâs 1987, The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, â the entire reason for this diverging, wrote, âIf people dislike being laughed at it is surely because laughter devalues its object in the subjectâs eyes.â I found the idea of putting laughter into the binary of object-subject relationship to be closer to Arendtâs vision for laughter as a tool for the oppressed; however, was profoundly interesting to me to think what in the laugh-er & laughed-at relationship is the object and what is the subject.
An Bergson wrote an ineffably evocative work for me as a person and as a thinker titled Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Iâll provide you two select passages from a work that Iâd immensely recommend skimming through on days when youâre just thinking through shit. The first:
A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it,âthe human caprice whose mould it has assumed. It is strange that so important a fact, and such a simple one too, has not attracted to a greater degree the attention of philosophers. Several have defined man as "an animal which laughs." They might equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to.
The animalistic-human distinction of laughter is an odd boundary, in my opinion, mostly because of the ways that animalism has been used in racial dehumanizations historically. Though I suspect this opinion largely would be revised in todayâs age as we have scientifically proven the capacity for animals, un-influenced by humanity, to laugh. Or perhaps influenced in some kind, who is to say what resonance affects the generational upbringing and knowledge of various animal-species? Regardless, I love the offering of a description of man as an animal which is laughed at. Then, Bergson continues in the same work, with:
We should see that vanity, though it is a natural product of social life, is an inconvenience to society, just as certain slight poisons, continually secreted by the human organism, would destroy it in the long run, if they were not neutralised by other secretions. Laughter is unceasingly doing work of this kind. In this respect, it might be said that the specific remedy for vanity is laughter, and that the one failing that is essentially laughable is vanity.
And here we have landed, full-circle, back to the core conceit of this essay and synopsis in laughter: the vanity of a young man doing shoddy push-ups on an elevated stage at 1am after hours of dancing to a DJ set.
I was certainly laughing due to the discrepancy in expectations - the epiphany that someone might do push-ups without bashfulness in such a scenario - the relief that someone was being such a goof in an environment actually breathed life into my fatigued muscles â and the absolute knowledge that this young man was exercising to show-off, out of vanity, and though he wasnât unattractive, he wasnât some miracle of muscle either, and that in this moment my laughter was the only remedy for his vanity.
And so, I end with this final lyric. This time from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, out of her work Aurora Leigh (book 1):
Whatâs this, Aurora Leigh,
You write so of the poets, and not laugh?
Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,
Exaggerators of the sun and moon,
And soothsayers in a tea-cup?
Whatâs this, Cody, you write of laughter and not laugh? Such is the invocation of joy.
If you wish for any links to the materials cited, please ask away and Iâm happy to send you materials for further reading!
If youâd like any more of me I offer:
A recent review Iâve done for Salamander Mag of Buffalo Girl by Jessica Q. Stark (magnificent work!)
The youtube profile of the DJs I saw for the origin of this essay, Book Club Radio.