The Dialectic of Laughter
It’s easy to come across nihilistic humor in the modern age. When the majority of the planet is anti-capitalist in some form or another, it’s inevitable to encounter conceited laughter as this anti-capitalist soup curdles into the competing social movements of a revolutionary situation. It requires no reading or practice to lob jokes at capitalism, especially when the criteria for a joke can be as low as stating the possible demise of our civilization in an equally fatalistic and jovial tone. In effect, jokes in this current are an escapist form of entertainment aimed at coping with the real psychological strain of transient historical conditions. The joke can only appear as such because the absurdity of capitalism’s inner relations forces itself on those suffering from its lingering existence. When we turn the clock back, comedy returns into tragedy as the palpable necessity of capitalism’s dominion robs the situation of inner absurdity.
In the forward movement from tragic despair to comedic coping, humor would appear to be a sign of capitalism’s coming collapse, yet it also functions as an escape from the tension in that situation. This function arises due to the inherent sense of mastery identified by Hegel in comedy:
“The comic subjective personality has become the overlord of whatever appears in the real world. From that world the adequate objective presence of fundamental principle has disappeared. When what has no substance in itself has destroyed its show of existence by its own agency, the individual makes himself master of this dissolution too and remains undisturbed in himself and at ease.”1
While the irrationality of capitalist society produces a humor which tantalizes the subaltern classes with this sense of mastery, it remains ephemeral in the hands of comedy—at least in the ironic shell we have thus far dealt with. Laughter is an inherently dialectical movement, with tension building until an unexpected punchline dissolves the contradiction into a euphoric release. But this is not a dialectic in the positivist sense we deal with in class struggle, where the violent moment of revolution results in a higher synthesis. Instead, because the dialectic of laughter addresses the expectation by subversion, the premise is merely attacked and therefore too our subordination to it. Hegel noted this limitation explicitly, contrasting the syntheses he saw as ordained by God and crystallized in human art with the negative effect of comedy:
“Yet on this peak comedy leads at the same time to the dissolution of art altogether. All art aims at the identity, produced by the spirit, in which the eternal things, God, and absolute truth are revealed in real appearance and shape to our contemplation, to our hearts and minds. But if comedy presents this unity only as its self-destruction because the Absolute, which wants to realize itself, sees its self-actualization destroyed by interests that have now become explicitly free in the real world and are directed only on what is accidental and subjective, then the presence and agency of the Absolute no longer appears positively unified with the characters and aims of the real world but asserts itself only in the negative form of cancelling everything not correspondent with it, and subjective personality alone shows itself self-confident and self-assured at the same time in this dissolution.”2
While the power of laughter rests in this ability to recognize the end of necessity, it by no means follows that all humor results in this ideal effect of comedy. After all, how could this be the case when nihilistic humor functions as an escape from the ravages of capitalism, a modern opiate of the masses? Even the infamously irreverent Slavoj Žižek notes: “in contemporary societies … that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are, so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally”3. The negative dialectic of laughter offers a release on the social pressure valve even as it signals the mass recognition of capitalism’s irrationality. To understand how comedy really connects to the transition from anti-capitalist discontent to revolutionary upheaval, we must study how the spectrum of comedy progresses from empty absurdity to incisive critique.
Absurd humor takes a concept and extends it to the ends of its inner logic, exposing the limitations of the idea in isolation. Rather than depicting the capitalist as a complex of relations between different facets of their human existence, the capitalist becomes a capitalist ad infinitum. The ridiculousness of a being wholly concerned with the accumulation of capital finds its comedic totem in Scrooge McDuck’s money bath. Absurd humor is a necessary rebellion against an idea’s claim to unmediated existence, as noted by Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun:
“However, if an idea is simply infinite, then, in fact, it cannot possibly constitute an idea. Thus, the general character of humor is that, even while it is infinite, it contains the core of something. And when this center is not simply the center in its outward appearance but moves itself freely of its own accord and eventually suspends itself centrifugally, it constitutes the first type of humor—namely, the volatility of ideas (Ideenflüchtigkeit) and the extravagance of ideas (Ideenextravaganz).”4
This form of humor launches a necessary attack on ideas taken in themselves, showing the inner inapplicability of capitalism—or any other irrational existence—to society if applied in its pure essence. However, this form of humor fails to form an incisive critique of capitalism because it necessarily departs from reality to show that a given concept does not match it. Scrooge McDuck’s money bath shows the ridiculous implications of a life wholly oriented towards the fetish of accumulation, but it cannot critique capitalism because the average capitalist does not exist in line with this logical abstraction. The “satire” of fascism offered by series like Warhammer 40K ultimately follows this pattern, really functioning as an escape from reality via the absurdity of totalitarian stereotypes taken to their extremes. It satisfies us to see how the inner essence of capitalism or fascism does not match reality, but the contradictions of the thing in question go undetected and its nature therefore uninterrogated.
The second form of humor moves further towards critique by taking the thing in question and centering its contradiction with reality in reality, rather than centering the impossibility of its pure extension. I move from absurdist humor to ironic, jesting humor. The concept remains within the bounds of its real, mediated existence, but my reception to it becomes inverted to express its real contradiction with rationality. When I sarcastically say, “I love working for a minimum wage,” I’m taking the inherent anxiety of my condition and subverting it to match my understanding that this condition is itself unjust and irrational. I identify the negative aspect of the situation, and as Tosaka notes, I don’t escape into the realm of the absurd:
“In this case, people do not intentionally escape from reality; in other words, they are not creating a special world of optimistic escapism. Instead, they have the courage to examine the world as it actually is. But reality is not being analyzed in the least; rather, it is being swallowed in its actual condition.”5
As we’ve seen with Hegel, the ideal form of comedy communicates a victorious rejection of the thing in question’s continued necessity, but with ironic humor, this stage of comedy merely voices a protest against this necessity. The irrationality of the situation is expressed and internalized, but the reasons for its irrationality go uninvestigated. Honest reality cowers just below the surface of ironic humor, and the jokester gets to diffuse the clash between their helplessness and an irrational situation into a statement of bitter recognition.
For humor to gain the final step needed to express real mastery, it must prove the self-destruction of the thing in question. From absurdity to ironic humor, we now proceed to satire in the ideal goal of the term. The thing in question is extended according to its inner logic, but in a manner which matches its mediated reality and therefore contains its real motion into irrationality rather than an absurd caricature. In Tosaka’s words: “from within the affirmative, a thing must come to contain the negative. This is what constitutes criticality”6. In this vein, a critical masterpiece such as Capital follows the journey from the value-form’s germ into the depths of colonial devastation. Consider too how Hegel ends his examination of phrenology in his Phenomenology of Spirit:
“When, therefore, a man is told ‘You (your inner being) are this kind of person because your skull-bone is constituted in such and such a way,’ this means nothing else than, ‘I regard a bone as your reality’. To reply to such a judgement with a box on the ear … at first takes away from the soft parts their importance and position, and proves only that these are no true in-itself, are not the reality of Spirit; the retort here would, strictly speaking, have to go the length of beating in the skull of anyone making such a judgement, in order to demonstrate in a manner just as palpable as his wisdom, that for a man, a bone is nothing in itself, much less his true reality.”7
Hegel does not merely abstract a phrenologist to the absurdity of their beliefs—portraying a person who brings a set of calipers to every social gathering. Nor does he jest that his animosity towards them must be due to the shape of his skull, resting content on the statement’s ridiculousness. Instead, Hegel takes the kernel of logic which guides phrenology and applies it to its adherents. An absurdity and sardonic wit accompany his conclusions, but they nonetheless take the nature of the thing in question and bring it to a vicious, logical conclusion. The irrationality of attributing a person’s nature to their skull structure means that even phrenologists themselves can receive a personal demonstration on the illogic of their ‘science’. Hegel’s humor enters the realm of critique by applying the contradiction uncovered by his scientific investigation. Just as his proverbial owl of Minerva flies at dusk, so too can humor reach the ideal function of comedy only after the thing in question loses its historical mandate and becomes understood.
Instead of being a lazy escape, comedy can and should be a scalpel in the toolbox of Marxist critique. Serious argumentation will always be a more reliable bedrock when we haven’t yet reached that point of understanding where effective satire becomes possible, but abandoning the use of comedy thanks to its modern, nihilistic uses would be tantamount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Laughter is, contrary to outer appearance, an eminently logical form of emotion: “One hears that most animals can show anger but only primates can laugh”8. Laughter’s juggling of expectations and subversion reflects its higher nature as a dialectic emotion. It must be exercised both to temper our dialectical reasoning and to mark the real sublation of each reactionary institution.
Bibliography
Hegel, G.W.F. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vol. 2. Translated by T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. (p. 1202)
Ibid. (p. 1236)
Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2008. (p. 24)
Tosaka Jun. “Laughter, Comedy, and Humor.” In Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader, 50-8. Translated by Christopher Ahn. Ithaca: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2013. (p. 56)
Ibid. (p. 57)
Ibid. (p. 52)
Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. (§ 339)
Tosaka Jun. “Laughter, Comedy, and Humor.” In Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader, 50-8. Translated by Christopher Ahn. Ithaca: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2013. (p. 51)