In Defense of Laughter, pt. 2

Don’t panic! Laugh!

In the last entry, I talked about how Western culture associates laughter with pleasure, and hence with sin. So for centuries, the West has expressed some unease with laughter. But there is more to the picture than that.

From an artistic perspective, our culture’s suspicion towards laughter results in a similarly negative assessment of an entire genre, comedy. Notice how infrequently comedies win the “Best Picture” Oscar. Many people accept the idea that comedy is not the vehicle for expressing truths about the human condition; that’s the function of drama. But in reality, comedies can be expressive of deeper truths. By writing this, I don’t mean “comedy-but-with-a-message” movies, where the violins swell while Robin Williams tears up and intones platitudes. No, I mean that really funny comedies, like The Hangover, themselves express a deeper truth.

How is this possible?

To evoke laughter, comedy depends on the build-up of tension, which is released by a surprise. This explains why comedies cannot be rewatched with the same level of amusement—for the surprise to work, it needs to be, well, a surprise. If you know what’s going to happen, it’s not funny. For the same reason, a Cliff’s Notes version of a comedy isn’t the same as the comedy itself; a comedy just can’t be summarized. The point of a comedy, in short, is the moment-to-moment experience of it.

In this way, comedies reflect the way we experience life. We human beings think we can plan out our lives. But in the moment-to-moment experience, sometimes the unexpected happens. Comedies mirror those unexpected turns and twists of life.

Many of the world’s religions actually codify these vagaries of life. Nature religions personify aspects of existence with gods and goddesses. Storms, earthquakes, but also love and eroticism are forces that people need to cope with. Trickster gods are part of the pantheon. They personify life’s surprises that confound human beings and their plans. There is a wisdom here that monotheistic religions cannot express; a single, all-knowing, all-good and all-powerful deity simply would not place obstacles in front of people for sheer amusement. But there are times in life when it sure feels that way.

In ancient Greece, the trickster god was Pan, who amused himself by stymieing people as they went through their lives. Unable to comprehend the god’s humor, the people became increasingly frantic. The Greeks labeled that frenzy as “panic.”

So the deep truth of comedy is this: the next time that the unexpected causes you to revise your plans suddenly, don’t yell or cry or toss a houseplant out the window. Laugh. You’re in the midst of a panic. And you might just see that the joke is really on you.

In Defense of Laughter, pt. 1

Why is it that movie bad guys always laugh? “The world will be mine… hahaha!”

We can put the question another way: why is it that laughter has become synonymous with evil? As a culture we don’t usually cast sadness and tears as markers of malice. In Dante’s Inferno Satan, the source of all evil, weeps throughout eternity. In real life too tears probably cause more ills than laughter. As anyone with knowledge about domestic violence knows, abusers often tearfully express their remorse, thus sucking the victims back in. And that’s just one example among many. But you’ll rarely see tears as symbolic of evil these days. What is it, then, that causes our cultural suspiciousness of laughter?

Umberto Eco discusses the value of laughter in his novel The Name of the Rose (1980). Set in an Italian monastery in the 1340s, the novel depicts a series of murders that need to be solved by a visiting friar, William of Baskerville. In a key scene, William gets into a debate with Jorge, an elderly monk, about an esoteric topic—whether or not Christ laughed. More broadly, did God sanction laughter, they argue, or did He avoid it and, by extension, expect His followers to do so as well? On the surface, this sounds like the kind of trivial theological debate that echoed throughout medieval halls. But while Eco’s work is fictional, and hence factually inaccurate, it also expresses a deeper truth; it is informed by a keen observation about Western culture.

As Eco knows (he is a renowned scholar of the Middle Ages), there is a long-standing tradition of denigrating laughter in the West. In a nutshell, laughter is symbolic of pleasure, while tears are symbolic of pain. Pleasure and pain, objectively speaking, are merely the brain’s subjective interpretation of nerve impulses. But for millennia, Western Culture has not treated pain and pleasure equally.

Pain is symbolic of Goodness: the Crucifixion of Christ, and the blood of martyrs. Pleasure is evocative of the joys of physicality. Pleasure, therefore, indicates the life of luxury that people should reject if they want to be saintly. Pleasure is sin, in short, and our culture’s suspicion of laughter is part of the West’s broader suspicion of pleasure. These connotations of pleasure and pain are the subtext to Jorge’s debate with William of Baskerville. They also explain that staple of action movies, the laughing evildoer.

So the next time some super-villain laughs while taunting a cape-clad hero, remember that the gesture is merely an arbitrary cultural artifact. He could just as easily be weeping bitter tears as he plots the destruction of all creation!!!

Conspiracy Theories

When Archimedes discovered how to prove the purity of a gold object, the story goes, he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting “Eureka!” The anecdote illustrates the depth of emotion a person feels when resolving a problem. Some neuroscientists contend that the pleasure center of the brain is activated when it solves a tough problem.

I make no claim to medical knowledge, but as a scholar of the humanities I do understand the power of stories. Neuroscience is but one factor in explaining the persistence of a folkloric narrative genre in our culture: the conspiracy theory.

Of course, pleasure isn’t the first emotion that springs to mind when thinking of conspiracy theories. But conspiracy theories take disparate pieces of information—sometimes even fictional information—and put them in a satisfying framework. They offer an explanation for the true (if hidden) nature of reality. And for those who believe in them, they tickle the pleasure center by answering the riddle of the real way that things are. They also appeal to a second, related emotion: hubris. Reality simply must be more complicated than what it appears on the surface—and I have figured out what you lesser minds cannot see!

Although stories similar to conspiracy theories have existed for centuries, their modern form has its roots in a nineteenth-century book. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was purported to be the true document of the Jews’ plans for global domination. Their tools were the banks, governments, and the modern media, all of which they supposedly controlled. The book thus offered a simple explanation to the social changes caused by the capitalist system and industrialization. It took unrelated cultural phenomena and gave them a narrative—and more importantly someone to blame. In reality, The Protocols was a forgery composed by the Russian security services at a time when Eastern Europe was racked with pogroms.

Not all present-day conspiracies are anti-semitic. But they still share the characteristic of presenting historical events as controlled by small, powerful cabals. They present a definable group of individuals posing a threat to us and to our society. And this leads to yet another emotion they play upon: self-protection. For adherents of the theory, we must defend ourselves from them. Of course, the history of the twentieth century illustrates that it’s a very quick pass from defending ourselves to assaulting them.

After you’ve seen a few conspiracy theories, however, it becomes quite easy to spot new ones. There is a monotonous sameness to them, although their characters and plots may change. Reality is often too prosaic to inspire people from shouting “Eureka!” It also may not induce people to acts of violence.

Computer-Assisted Learning

A news story in the New York Times summarizes a recent study that challenges the accepted wisdom of the past two decades. It shows that computers in the home cause students’ grades to go down, not up. The belief had been that internet use—with all the information of the world just one Google-search away—would be an instructional boon. But proponents of the transformational power of computers forgot a couple of things.

First, they forgot history. As I man in my forties, I remember the audio-visual revolution of the 1970s. Yes, audio-visual technology was touted as innovative for educators, much like the more recent hype about computers. But I experienced “filmstrip days” as a child, not as an educator. I remember that sense of relief I felt whenever I walked into the classroom and saw the machinery—here was a day I wouldn’t be working (read: learning). Computer-assisted education isn’t really any different.

And this leads to the second major element that the proponents of computers forgot: the teacher. Tools are just that—tools. They are meant to enhance the education process. But in the rush to get the latest technology into the classroom, no one stopped to think how it would get integrated into a broader plan of education. Instead, in the case of “filmstrip days,” the program for a unit was stopped and an extraneous element—the technology—was thrust into the classroom. No one knew what to do with it, neither the students nor the teachers.

But in my opinion, the real problem with technology is human nature. As a professional teacher of Italian, I’m always fielding questions about which computer program is best for teaching a language. The truth is, none of them. Don’t get me wrong, the programmers can put together good explanations, and accompany them with well thought out activities. But in years as a language-instructor, I’ve never seen them work. Simply put, they fundamentally misunderstand what it means to educate.

“To teach” is a dative verb that requires an indirect object: a person teaches something to someone. This linguistic point underscores a deep truth about education. Students learn from teachers who motivate them. A fundamental component of the educational process is the human element: the interaction between one person with another. In the case of language learning, you learn a language to communicate with other human beings. It makes sense, then, that you’d learn a language from human beings, and not from a machine—after all, you’ll need to practice talking to people in that language from the start!

On Interpretation

Perhaps the most important aspect to the study of the humanities is how it teaches about reading. Not “how to read”—although literacy is essential to the humanities—but about the nature of reading.

There is a peculiar tendency in American culture to believe in literal interpretations. From churches to legal scholars, there are populations who promote themselves as literalists. Other people “interpret,” while they simply go by “what the text says.” The problem is that literal interpretations are virtually impossible. Here’s an example:


On April 20, 2010 the US Supreme Court struck down a federal law that prohibited the sale of films of animal cruelty. The 8-1 decision reaffirmed the freedom of expression enshrined in the Constitution’s First Amendment. Several Justices, most notably Antonin Scalia, are literalists; they parse the meaning of the Constitution to understand what it meant when its authors wrote it.

So let’s look at the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” We normally read it to mean the freedom of expression; but that’s not what it says. The two main forms of mass communication in the eighteenth century were verbal (“speech”) or the printed word (“the press”). No other technologies existed at the time.

Film, in other words, is not literally covered by the First Amendment, only oral and written language. Yet the literalists on the court interpreted the First Amendment as covering film. So am I suggesting the US Congress apply bans to all other forms of communication? Not at all. I’m suggesting we challenge the fiction that anyone can read texts literally.

Meaning is not inherent to texts. It takes a human mind to derive meaning from scratch-marks on a page. But that human mind does not exist in a vacuum. It has its own history, including personal and social experiences, other works it has read, and idiosyncratic forms of reasoning; and it brings all these to bear when approaching a text. Interpretation is central to the humanities. The power of the humanities is understanding the nature of interpretation. The beauty of the humanities is seeing the range of reasonable interpretations of the same text.

Just the Facts?

In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the narrator Ishmael spends an entire chapter explaining why he believes that whales are really fish. There is just one problem: whales are mammals, of course.

In this blog, I have written a lot about “the Truth” or “truths”—how the humanities express some of the deeper realities of life. But what about the inaccuracies, when works of art are just mistaken? What do we make of texts when they get the facts wrong?

This isn’t a minor question. Literature has a long memory because we still read classics composed hundreds—sometimes thousands—of years ago. Almost any historical piece of fiction will get something wrong. Any cosmology written before the seventeenth century will be geocentric, even though the solar system is heliocentric. There are numerous anachronisms in Shakespeare’s tragedies. In his Julius Caesar for example clocks struck time, when in fact the mechanical clock was invented in the fourteenth century.

The first response to these errors is: so what? We don’t read Shakespeare to learn about the history of technology, but to gain his insights. We don’t read Moby Dick to learn about whales, but about Ahab’s very human obsession. We can usually compartmentalize the authors’ insights away from their flawed understanding of the world. The only one who can be upset about Ishmael’s mistake is, well, a whale.

But the situation is actually very complicated. Factual errors are one thing, but what about flawed perceptions of other human beings? There’s reason to interpret Richard Wagner’s deformed and corrupt character Alberich as a Jewish stereotype (although this isn’t entirely clear—but Wagner really was a renowned anti-semite). With this in mind how should we approach his Ring Cycle? We can’t simply discount it, because it’s a musical masterpiece. Its impact on European music cannot be measured. But we can’t pretend that he didn’t hold and express offensive opinions. Nor can we take refuge behind that old staple, “he reflected the beliefs at the time.” Many people in the nineteenth century did not share his beliefs, and some challenged Wagner’s anti-semitic writings. Cultures are never monolithic, after all. What now?

It comes down to insightful readers. Writers don’t simply dictate to passive readers; readers aren’t mere sponges, absorbing indiscriminately everything the author thought. Readers engage with and interpret literature. It is the on-going interaction between works of literature and their readers over the years that makes them great. The acknowledgement of objectionable opinions doesn’t change the writers, who are usually dead, but it destroys two-dimensional images of them. And that can be a positive development. Calling people “great authors” glosses over the fact that they were human beings who blew it sometimes.

Isn't It Ironic?

Among the allegations about childhood sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Europe earlier this month, Father Raniero Cantalamessa caused further scandal. He likened the media’s interest in the story to anti-semitism. The outrage was intense, particularly among Jewish groups: how could anyone compare the experience of Holocaust victims to the publication of credible accusations?

Father Cantalamessa fell into a common trap regarding language use. A staple among apologists for the Church is the idea that anti-Catholicism is the last religious prejudice tolerated by the mainstream culture. Prejudices against all other religions are considered politically incorrect; but denigration of Catholicism is still countenanced. Hence, anti-Catholicism has become the anti-semitism of our age, they argue. Father Cantalamessa mangled the argument, however.

But the problem was greater than simply one person’s clumsiness. Languages develop within groups of people, and insiders become used to the group’s expressions, arguments, and stories. The group members become so habituated to their own language that they can succinctly allude to it, sometimes with a mere word. The problem, as Father Cantalamessa discovered, is when they do so with outsiders, who do not share a similar background.

One theory of the novel is that it is a genre that represents the society’s many languages. The author brings together the speech of different groups, and puts them in dialogue with each other. The author can do this by having characters that are insiders. Their statements naturally reflect the group’s opinions and thus contain the group’s language. But the author can also do so by imbedding the statements in the prose, by “citing without quotation marks.” If you listen to passages, you can tell that the narrator is making indirect reference to someone else’s words.

When done right, the novel’s collision of languages yields fruitful results. With all due respect to Alanis Morisette, irony is not “rain on your wedding day.” Irony is the literary technique of making a statement that conveys the opposite meaning. Irony, in other words, is the technique of taking insiders’ language and revealing its artifice: its presuppositions, its biases, and omissions. And irony highlights the flaws in their argumentation.

Despite the fact that many editorial writers try to be ironic, irony is actually a difficult technique. But Father Cantalamessa perfected it, probably on accident.