What’s So Funny? - 麻省理工学院人工智能研究专业

What’s So Funny?
Laughter and Anger in
the Time of the Assassins*

YVONNE RAINER

During a recent rehearsal with my dance group, I asked one of the dancers
to read aloud an item from the “Shouts and Murmurs” page of The New Yorker,
which read as follows:

The President whammed his fist on the table. The Cabinet Room went
silent. “This isn’t some goddam B movie, gentlemen,” he said. “This is
real life.”

The scientist looked at the floor.

“We have the smartest minds in the world working on this,” the
President continued. “The top biologists and astronomers and geneti-
cists. And you’re telling me that the closest anyone can come to identi-
fying this . . . thing is . . .”

“I’m afraid so, 先生. 总统,” the scientist said. “What we’re dealing
with here is the Flying Penis from Venus.”

The Treasury Secretary giggled, and the chief of staff did his best to not
join in. But a look from the President silenced them.

“这 . . . 事物,” the President said. “This creature, this—”

“Flying Penis from Venus,” the scientist said.

The President burst out laughing, and the rest of the room joined him,
relieved to release their pent-up mirth.

“I suppose it is kind of funny,” the President said, “in that it’s so
improbable. But come on, guys—it’s already killed forty thousand peo-
普莱, so we really have to focus here.”1

First presented at the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum, 二月 4,
*
2016. Many thanks to Martha Gever for her insightful criticisms, Patricia Hoffbauer for her generous
responses, Deb LaBelle for her vital information, Su Friedrich for being a reliable sounding board, 和
Henry Kellerman for his unflagging interest.

Paul Simms, “Eight Short Science-Fiction Stories,” 纽约客, 九月 14, 2015, p. 50.

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OCTOBER

Not one of the dancers cracked a smile. When I then attempted to read the
same passage, I could not get through it without having to visibly suppress a laugh
each time I uttered the “improbable” designation. 明显地, what is salient here is
that one person’s funny bone is another’s yawn. Trying to account for my some-
what hysterical response to the joke, I found the following explanation in
维基百科:

Paradoxical laughter is an exaggerated expression of humor which is
unwarranted by external events. It may be uncontrollable laughter,
which may be recognized as inappropriate by the person involved. 这是
associated with altered mental states or mental illness, such as mania,
hypomania, or schizophrenia, and can have other causes. Paradoxical
laughter is indicative of an unstable mood, which can quickly change to
anger and back again, on minor external cues.

The last sentence neatly encapsulates my state of mind these days. Forgive me
if I am about to subject you to a similar “instability” via a series of somewhat arbitrary
equations that, in my daily consciousness, form a kind of ping-pong between anger
and laughter, outrage and hilarity, conflict and clarity, as revelations of rampant
injustice and flagrant disregard for the social good stream out from the orbits of
力量. Along the way I will deliver a few jokes plus pleasurable memories of absur-
dist art events from the past. Taking a cue from a recent review of Henry James’s
自传, I must add that in advance of this excursion I feel “comically small-
er” than the issues I am about to belabor, self-effacing as that may seem.2

Every morning I eat breakfast while ingesting New York Times articles about
the latest atrocities enacted by religious fanatics, sociopathic adolescents, and trig-
ger-happy cops, which are noteworthy—in most cases—for the desperate attempts
of journalists and politicians to account for such savagery. Dismay at reports and
photos of drowning immigrants trying to escape the ravages of civil war in the
Middle East and anger at the “collateral damage” of US drone strikes, the injus-
tices of our juridical/incarceration system, the rabid antics of the NRA, the brutali-
ty of the jihadists, 和, I should add, the unspeakable, debased pronouncements
的, of all people, the president of the United States (哪个, incidentally, is not the
first time I have found myself embarrassed to be a US citizen)—all of this, on one
day or another, permeates my favorite meal. Unlike a sizable percentage of the US
人口, I cannot share their paranoia. The chances of my spouse or myself, 或者
others close to me, becoming victims of xenophobia or deportation are practically
nil. The account by an acquaintance that a friend of a friend of hers had been
killed in one of the Paris attacks and news reports of blacks murdered by police
every four days in America have done little to alter my sense of security. Not any-
one I know. 毕竟, I am a US-born, 白色的, childless, middle-class adult living in
an American metropolis, am I not? Well out of harm’s way. 尽管如此, I—and

2.
while he knows that he is comically smaller than the things he is related to.”

Adam Gopnik, “Little Henry, Happy at Last,” 纽约客, 一月 18, 2016: “ . . . all the

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What’s So Funny?

of course I am not alone—am filled with anger that anxious and bigoted police
can so readily have recourse to their weapons and that mass killings can continue
to take place in different parts of the world, not only relatively close to home. 这是
a perplexing issue that, on a personal level, outrage at such acts can coexist, if only
sporadically, with outrageous hilarity.

Funny (Were It Not So Horrifying)

Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engi-
neer, 博士. John Trump, at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, 这
Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative
Republican, if I were a liberal, 如果, 喜欢, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, 他们会
say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when
you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I
always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a
fortune—you know I have to give my, 喜欢, credentials all the time, because we’re a lit-
tle disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers
me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is
强大的; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power, 然后
was thirty-five years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and
he was right (who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with
the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and
even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas
因为, 你知道, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right
now than the men, 所以, 你知道, it’s gonna take them about another hundred and
fifty years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators,
所以, 和他们, they just killed, they just killed us.3

Absurd in the Sense of Illogical

Artist Simon Leung conducted a seminar at the Whitney Independent Studies
Program some years ago. Centered on Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, his lecture
included a series of projections, one of which was of a penis protruding through a
“glory hole” in the wall of a public lavatory stall. At the end of his presentation, a male
student asked, “Was that your penis?” Without missing a beat, Simon replied, “Did it
look like my penis?” Choking on laughter, 哪个, much to my embarrassment, lasted
longer than that of anyone else, I almost had to leave the room.

Without delving deeper into what might at this point appear to be a fixation
with the male organ, I should emphasize, in case you haven’t already surmised it,
that my particular sense of humor veers toward the absurd, ridiculous, incongruous,

3.
2015.

Donald Trump, 七月 21, 2015, Sun City, South Carolina; published on Slate.com, 七月 31,

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OCTOBER

ludicrous, preposterous, and stupid, and sometimes obscene. The “Flying Penis
From Venus” joke incorporates all of these features, hence the extremity of my reac-
的. I still cannot utter the words aloud without experiencing some kind of internal
frisson. And the absurd illogic of Leung’s response to the student’s salacious ques-
的, compounded by the mockery of Duchamp’s iconic final joke, is what propelled
me into a convulsive fit of laughter. The following is another example of what can
send me over the edge, a cartoon:

A tom turkey lies with its head on a chopping block while a farmer, hold-
ing an ax, stands next to it. The caption, clearly representing the turkey’s
嗓音, reads: “Thanksgiving, shmanksgiving—we both know this is because
I slept with your wife.”4

On showing the above tidbit to my mate, I was nonplussed that her only
response was a small shake of the head. She found it barely amusing. This is not to
say that the woman with whom I live has no sense of humor. As I said before, 一
person’s funny bone, ETC.

In my aforementioned state of “instability,” I continue to peruse “Shouts and
Murmurs” and New Yorker cartoons and laugh with my friends. Conventional wis-
dom in the press tells us that life must go on. In the face of the evasion of impris-
onment by egregiously corrupt legislators and corporate heads, we continue to
attend theater and gallery openings, enjoy food and companionship and the affec-
tion of those with whom we live, while statistics measuring the increasing hard-
ships of the glaringly impoverished in the US are never far from our middle-class
mind-sets. 是的, our lives go on while fifty percent of the people incarcerated in US
prisons are innocent of the criminal charges brought against them. 是的, our lives
go on while the only public source of water in Flint, Michigan, a largely black com-
社区, was the lead-laden Flint River. That this body of water was for years a toxic
dumping ground for the auto industry is a fact well known to do-nothing, duplici-
tous officials.

A friend who is of a Freudian bent maintains that laughter is relief from the
tyranny of anger. Maybe we should also be talking about relief from the tyranny of
irony, or the tyranny of email.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel has written that if, under the eye of eternity,
nothing matters, “then that doesn’t matter either, and we can approach our
absurd lives with irony instead of heroism and despair.”5 Nagel blurs the social and
emotional constraints of everyday life, their negotiations and suppressions, all of
which might be said to require the relief of laughter, to say nothing of thought-
provoking conversation, mutual admiration, and a good meal. Eternity has never
held any allure for me, and my self-image includes neither heroism nor despair.

Zachary Kanin, 纽约客, 十一月 30, 2015.

5.
Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd,” Mortal Questions (剑桥: Cambridge University Press,
1971), quoted by James Wood in “Is That All There Is? Secularism and Its Discontents,” 纽约客,
八月 15, 2011.

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What’s So Funny?

Yet sometimes I feel like a rat caught in a squirrel cage, doomed to repeat the
same obsessive gyrations from anger to laughter, laughter to anger. Anger and
laughter. Laughter and . . . STOP! STOP! Let me off this roller coaster!

Choreographer Patricia Hoffbauer, who also dances with me, responded to a

first draft of this paper:

Yvonne,

I like your essay even though I don’t think the jokes you use are all that
funny, which reinforces your point . . . 是的, different funny bones, 差异-
ferent age? Penis jokes are the least funny thing, 为我. But you really
think they are hilarious. What is that about? What would Freud say
about that?

Yet how else can you, 我们, discuss this fucked up world if not with
the help of humor? Humor as a weapon of caustic criticism . . . 为我
to make work that is relevant to our lives today, and not an exercise in
empty formalism or “deconstruction,” which too much dance tends to
是, we have to involve the world itself. And this world is so enraging in
its injustices, that only laughter can help us cope. Humor in this case is
not ha-ha funny; it’s about consciousness, it’s about communicating
something serious through light means.

So to me, your questions about “what’s so funny?” are pertinent
in the sense that they address our desperate state of paralysis. . . . [这
问题] explains that art making is an antidote to, and a way to revolt
反对, the deadly effects of anger in a state of not-doing. It’s not
funny; it’s fucking CRAZY! And rather than saying this whole thing
(生活) is impossible, you make work that prods a critical consciousness
to emerge. Call me what you will, but I believe art can change us and
make us better people. If I were not an artist I would probably be
depressed, an assassin, suicidal . . . who knows!

Funny in the Sense of Puzzling

An entry in my diary dated February 25, 2013:

I keep trying to reconcile images of my very alive brother from years
ago with that hole at the cemetery. It’s like when I was seven years old
in the ophthalmologist’s office, my crossed monocular eyes glued to a
machine that required that two American flags merge into one, a task
at which I failed abysmally. How could my brother fit into that little box
which was so neatly placed in the hole? Is the word “remains” supposed
to make it easier to understand? The mortuary attendant who told my
niece that he was “guarding your father” didn’t crack a smile, 当然.
My brother and his remains remain an absurd etymological puzzle.

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OCTOBER

So what’s funny now? Does one laugh to sidestep grief? Or do I laugh to circum-
vent my anger at the frustrating dancing around death that pervades our culture? 你
may well ask at this point, “Where is she going with all this?” Patience, my friends. 我
must first ask myself why, in the last few years, beyond my brother’s death in 2013, 有
my need to laugh become an ever more persistent imperative? 是的, our lives go on.
是的, I seek opportunities for laughter in the face of the atrocities and inequities. 在
同一时间, being the guileless person that I am, I must also ask, “How can this
是?” Why am I not out in the streets as I was during the Vietnam War and before the
invasion of Iraq, or marching with like-minded feminists, gagged and bound together
in chains in Washington, 直流, to protest anti-abortion threats to Roe v. Wade?6 和
aside from my impersonal annual contributions to Amnesty International, NYC
Rescue Mission, Planned Parenthood, the Innocence Project, and a slew of other
nonprofits, I must ask if we former demonstrators are so inured to the so-called War
on Terror, so accustomed to the culpable and reactive depredations of our govern-
ment in what is turning into multiple postmodern Thirty Years’ Wars, so hardened to
the sight of homeless people begging on New York streets and the A train, that we
have surrendered to helpless rage or despair? Why am I not shouting from my win-
dow, “I’M FED UP AND I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!”

Reluctant to deal with these questions right now (and well aware that the
above cri de coeur might regrettably be shared by tea-party and Donald Trump sup-
porters!), I shall continue tracking my instability problem by taking a hairpin turn
with two examples of early-twentieth-century jokes cited by Freud in Jokes and Their
Relation to the Unconscious.

先生. and Mrs. X live in fairly grand style. Some people think that the
husband has earned a lot and so has been able to lay by a bit; 其他的
again think that the wife has lain back a bit and so has been able to
earn a lot.7

A king was making a tour through his provinces and noticed a man in
the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person.
He beckoned to him and asked: “Was your mother at one time in service
in the Palace?” “No, your Highness,” was the reply, “but my father was.”8

In accounting for the ellipses and compression in the above two jokes as an

example of repression vis-à-vis their avoidance of outright “smut,” Freud writes,

The repressive activity of civilization brings it about that primary
possibilities of enjoyment, which have now, 然而, been repudiat-

No More Nice Girls, a mid-1980s group of eight to ten women, including Joan Braderman,
6.
Vanalyn Green, Y.R., and Ellen Willis, carrying a banner emblazoned with “NO FORCED LABOR.” I
must add that most of this essay was written prior to the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the subse-
quent Women’s Protest Marches in US cities.

7.
(Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1976), 卷. 6, p. 66.

Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 卷. 6 of the Pelican Freud Library

同上。, p. 107.

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What’s So Funny?

ed by the censorship in us, are lost to us. But to the human psyche
all renunciation is exceedingly difficult, and so we find that tenden-
tious jokes provide a means of undoing the renunciation and
retrieving what was lost. When we laugh at a refined obscene joke,
we are laughing at the same thing that makes a peasant laugh at a
coarse piece of smut. In both cases the pleasure springs from the
same source. 我们, 然而, could never bring ourselves to laugh at
the coarse smut; we should feel ashamed or it would seem to us dis-
gusting. We can only laugh when a joke has come to our help.9

Without meaning to desecrate the memory of the extraordinarily influential
thinker and writer, I have to laugh a little at Freud’s late-nineteenth-century class-
bound aperçu—I am sure that Freud would have characterized much of our con-
temporary humor as “smut”—while appreciating the role that omission—call it
repression if you will—plays in these jokes. My own sensibility, formed by my work-
ing-class antecedents, especially my old-world Italian father, seems to prefer the
earthiness of “peasant” smuttiness to the obliqueness of refined suggestion.
尽管如此, Freud’s extended analysis of the techniques and social role of
jokes—e.g., “their purpose of continuing pleasurable play and their effort to pro-
tect [这] from the criticism of reason” and “the pleasure . . . that is derived from
[他们的] simultaneous sense and nonsense”10—can shed light on the humor in
some twentieth-century art objects and performances.

Down Memory Lane: Funny in the Sense of Droll

In a solo performance called Prairie at Judson Church in 1963, Alex Hay, 和
two bed pillows attached by a rope that also wound around his waist to connect
the pillows to his body, climbed up to a horizontal aluminum-pipe beam about
eight feet above the ground that formed the top section of a trapezoidal play-
ground-like construction designed by sculptor Charles Ross. Struggling to
recline on the beam, Hay apparently was trying to sleep but of course was unsuc-
cessful thanks to his precarious perch. All the while, he responded to recorded
questions like “Is that comfortable?” and “That doesn’t look comfortable” with
“不, this isn’t comfortable” or “This is more comfortable” or “This isn’t comfort-
able at all,” etc. His statements were interrupted by occasional falls from the
beam that left him suspended in midair by the rope, to be followed by his clam-
bering back up to resume his insomniac labors. Prairie was a high point among
similar absurdist shenanigans at Judson Church.

10.

同上。, p. 145.

同上。, p. 181.

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OCTOBER

Funny in the Sense of Peculiar

Early Minimalist sculptures could elicit both delight and incredulity. 根据
Robert Morris, when Philip Johnson was confronted by Morris’s Slab at the Green
Gallery in 1962, he said he felt like “swatting” it. Its stoic, inexpressive, obdurate,
singular presence would belie the ensuing reams of theoretical and scholarly
分析. Pop art, 也, could evoke some of the same responses. Claes Oldenburg’s
happenings, with their messes of paint and debris, often suggesting the mon-
keyshines of the Keystone Kops, put in high relief the decorous painterly investiga-
tions of his contemporaries Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. But it was the total
absence of metaphor and cultural reference that at first made Minimalist sculp-
ture so intractably, and peculiarly, disruptive.

Responding to the issue of Minimalism, Patricia, my email pal, wrote the

following:

I never had any reaction to those minimalist sculptures. To me (a cul-
turally different person from the NYC artists in the ’60s) [Patricia was
born and raised in Brazil], most of those sculptures lacked a sense of
humor and therefore were an expression of a puritanical sensibility and
an ode to straight lines—similar to the “purity” of lines of the bodies in
Merce’s [Cunningham’s] 工作.

To which I replied:

You had to have been in your 20s at a time when the high-flown claims
of Abstract Expressionism were rampant and dominating. Remember, 我
lived with one of those guys. His A-E paintings were my introduction to
late modernism in the visual arts. So in the late ’50s when the irrever-
ence of Rauschenberg’s paint-besmirched and tire-encircled goat and
Morris’s subsequent Slab came along, it was like a breath of fresh air, A
clearing of the decks. You’ve probably heard me say that I nearly fell on
the floor in a fit of laughter when I first saw Rauschenberg’s paint-splat-
tered Bed at the Castelli Gallery in 1957. The audacity of what followed
produced whole new chapters in art history.

But these days I find it hard not to be cynical about the value of art, 和
I’m not talking about commercial value. Publicly, I try never to rational-
ize my work in terms of its social value or even speculate about its possi-
ble salutary effects on spectators. 反而, I prefer to focus on “aesthetic
strategies.” Nevertheless, I can sympathize with your statement that “art
making is an antidote to, and a way to revolt against, the deadly effects
of anger in a state of not-doing” and, despite some doubts, agree that
making art is one way to go, a way to live with what you describe as “our
desperate state of paralysis.”

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What’s So Funny?

Absurd in the Sense of Bizarre

Lucinda Childs’s canonical solo Carnation, presented at Judson Church in 1964, 是
another story. Having assembled a number of props from her domestic life—
kitchen sponges, hair curlers, a lettuce strainer—she proceeded with the utmost
composure to arrange the curlers, first in the interstices of the strainer, which she
had placed upside down on her head like a high-fashion hat with veil, then one by
one between the sponges stacked in her mouth. Looking like a cartoonish Daisy
Duck, she then dumped the whole assemblage, including the strainer, into a
garbage bag that enclosed one leg, hobbled over to a wallboard partition, and did
a handstand against it, which forced the paraphernalia to tumble out of the bag all
over the floor. Lowering herself to a headstand, she then removed her leg from
the bag, revealing a bed sheet, one corner of which was tied to a big toe. 仍然
upside down, she fumbled with the sheet until she found a free corner, which she
attached to her other big toe, then somersaulted backwards to lie flat on her back
while pulling the sheet up to her chin. By way of these circumambulations the oth-
erwise glamorous dancer moved from kitchen and bathroom to bedroom. 这
spectacle was not only astonishing and bizarre, but a powerful feminist statement
years ahead of the women’s-liberation movement.

Funny in the Sense of Odd

In a recent workshop geared primarily toward visual artists, I divided the fif-
teen participants into four groups. I had previously asked each of them to bring in
a photo, 文本, and object. One participant introduced a photo of a dog. Searching
for some way to extrapolate bodily action from the photo, I asked him if the dog
seemed happy, 如果是这样, what did that suggest in terms of movement? He started
to move his upper body and hips in a silly manner. I immediately assigned his two
confederates the task of watching him intently. What at first appeared inane or
puerile in isolation now achieved a kind of gravitas through the concentrated
attention of his companions, who had become performer-witnesses. That they
were female and he the object of their scrutiny is yet another issue. By turning the
tables on the “male gaze” and its more familiar imperatives, their “female gaze”
enhanced the oddity of the situation.

Although laughter as “relief from the tyranny of anger” offers a modicum of
truth, I am still not completely convinced that this explains, in my case at least,
how in these dire times, when I am not directly affected by the political/economic
machinations and social upheavals that are responsible for the misery of others, 我
am lured implacably to such relief. A hedonistic explanation might be that since I
am at a remove geographically, economically, and physically from such misery, 我
feel free to seek out sources of fun. Contrarily, perhaps I have simply been describ-
ing a moral repugnance that can be accessed and illustrated more potently by a
scene in a recent dance of mine called Assisted Living: Good Sports 2. Ruefully, 我
have to admit that this scene may suggest that performance, with its simultaneous

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OCTOBER

juxtapositions, is a more effective medium than the ramblings with which I have
been taxing you.

Assisted Living: Good Sports 2 is a performance for five dancers, one reader, 和
two prop movers. It was first presented at the Montpelier Dance Festival in 2011, 和
performed by Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, Emmanuèlle Phuon,
Keith Sabado, Yvonne Rainer, Will Orzo, and George Sanchez.

Toward the end, while four of the five dancers lie on the floor seemingly out of
control with laughter, each with her/his head on another’s heaving abdomen, 和
Patricia, on the other side of the space, executes in slow motion a series of positions
derived from sports photos, I deliver a monologue: “Steve Jobs and a Chinese worker
from a factory that makes iPhones go into a bar . . . Has anyone heard this joke? . . .
The factory worker has half his face blown off . . . Does that sound familiar? . . . 所以
they go into this bar and . . . You know, I’m not very good with jokes. 哦, Lord, 我
see it coming . . . they go into this bar and the bartender says, ‘What’ll it be, folks? .
. . but I can’t remember the punch line, so can anyone help me out here? . . . 这
factory worker with half his face blown off and Steve Jobs?”

最后, I lead each dancer, 一次一个, to a preassigned spot where each
has been given a line of text to recite. When it is Keith’s turn, he struggles, 仍然
laughing, to make the transition to an agonized utterance, “My younger brother is
full of shrapnel wounds and dying in front of me.” Inevitably, in every perfor-
曼斯, my eyes tear up as I observe this transition.

Laughter in Another Time

Not confident that I have reconciled or even mitigated the instability of my
hilarity/outrage, laughter/anger mood swings and unable to answer with any certain-
ty the question “What is to be done?” with “Make more art,” I turn to Mikhail
Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, with its complex and expansive take on laughter in
the early sixteenth century, a radically different perspective from that of subsequent
periods, including our own. Rabelais’s folk culture, which integrated and celebrated
the “lower” bodily states of birth, digestion, defecation, and death, dodged not only
the moralism and judgments characteristic of later eras but also the bitterness of
satire. Bakhtin affirms over and over the productive value of laughter as

a universal philosophical principle that heals and regenerates . . . 为了
the Middle Ages and Renaissance the characteristic trait of laughter was
precisely the recognition of its positive, regenerating, creative meaning
. . . [和] because folk humor existed and developed outside the offi-
cial sphere of high ideology and literature and precisely because of its
unofficial existence, it was marked by exceptional radicalism, freedom,
and ruthlessness.11

11.
PP. 70, 71.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (布卢明顿: Indiana University Press, 1984),

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What’s So Funny?

Reading Bakhtin has eased whatever snobbish ambivalence I may still be laboring
under with regard to my father’s “peasant” sense of humor.12 My mother, 谁有
working-class aspirations to “the finer things,” loudly protested whenever, 为了
例子, he unpacked his barbershop joke, 哪个, during my childhood, was fair-
ly frequent:

A man is getting his hair cut in a barbershop. After a few minutes the
barber goes to a corner of the shop and spits on the floor.

“Why’d you do that?” asks the man.

The barber replies, “哦, I’m leaving this dump soon.”

After a few more minutes of cutting the man’s hair, the barber goes to
another corner and urinates.

The customer is somewhat indignant. “Why did you do that?”

The barber replies, “I’m leaving this dump in an hour.”

When the barber has completed the haircut, the customer goes to a
corner and takes a shit.

The barber is outraged. “What made you do that?”

The man replies, “I’m leaving this dump right now!”

Bakhtin again:

The images of feces and urine [in Rabelais] are ambivalent, as are all
the images of the material bodily lower stratum; they debase, destroy,
regenerate, and renew simultaneously. They are blessing and humiliat-
ing at the same time. Death and death throes, 劳动, and childbirth are
intimately interwoven. 另一方面, these images are closely
linked to laughter. When death and birth are shown in their comic
aspect, scatological images in various forms nearly always accompany
the gay monsters created by laughter in order to replace the terror that
has been defeated.13

Winding down, I can’t help wondering to what extent laughter inhabits the
lives of the Syrian refugees. Certainly it has been an important experience for the
impoverished and oppressed in my own time and country. The great African-
American comedians with their corrosive wit and empathy—Richard Pryor, Eddie
墨菲, Whoopie Goldberg, Dick Gregory, Larry Wilmore, to name a few—come

12.
become a stonemason’s apprentice.

My father was born in 1891 in a tiny village near Turin and left school at age eleven to

13.

Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 151.

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OCTOBER

to mind. In any case, much invigorated by Bakhtin’s ruminations on Rabelaisian
ribaldry and relieved, at least temporarily, of the need to scream out my window, 我
offer another quote:

Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning; it is one of the essential
forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole, concerning history
和 [人类]; it is a peculiar point of view relative to the world; 这
world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when
seen from the serious standpoint. 所以, laughter is just as admissi-
ble in great [艺术], posing universal problems, as seriousness. 肯定
essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter.14

I shall leave it to Patricia, my email pal, to have the last word on whatever ves-

tiges remain of my instability impasse:

I think the laughing hysteria of Good Sports 2 juxtaposed to Keith’s story
about his brother dying from shrapnel is an odd moment, not funny. 它
makes the audience suddenly realize that none of it is really “all that
funny.” . . . So I think what you create in that moment is shock, 也许
surprise, embarrassment for the viewers . . . as in, “Should I really be
laughing at any of this?” The spectators are challenged to find a viewing
perspective that enables them to experience the complexity of the
scene at that moment. They are invited to grasp the explosive distur-
bance produced by the radical and ancient juxtaposition of laughter
and tears.

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14.

同上。, p. 66.
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