Comedy Isn't Funny

[comedyisntfunny]

Laughter itself is more often than not a vital abreaction to the disgust we feel for the monstrous mixing and promiscuity that confront us. But for all that we may gag on the absence of differentiation, it still fascinates us. We love to mix everything up, even if it simultaneously repels us. The reaction whereby the organism seeks to preserve it's symbolic integrity is a vital one, even if the price paid is life itself (as in the rejection of a transplanted heart). Why would bodies not resist the arbitrary swapping of organs and cells? Also: why do cells, in cancer, refuse to carry out their assigned functions?

Jean Baudrillard The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomenon

[comedyisntfunny]

According to Marx, repetition is comic when it falls short–that is, when instead of leading to metamorphosis and the production of something new, it forms a kind of involution, the opposite of an authentic creation. Comic travesty replaces tragic metamorphosis. However, it appears that for Marx this comic or grotesque repetition necessarily comes after the tragic, evolutive and creative repetition. (“all great events and historical personages occur, as it were, twice… the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”).

Gilles Deleuze Difference and Repetition

[comedyisntfunny]

During the strike in the Swedish film industry in 1951, I made a series of commercials for the soap Bris (Breeze). They rescued me from a severe financial setback. Even today when I look at them, I still feel a touch of my earlier enthusiasm. They do not reflect any lack of ambition or any laziness. They are unusual and were made in good spirits. One can even overlook the fact that they promoted a soap that practically tore the skin off your body. The comedies that I produced were made for the same reasons as the soap commercials. Their purpose was to make money. This doesn't embarrass me in the least. Most projects in the world of film come into being for that very reason.

Ingmar Bergman Images

[comedyisntfunny]

While many of the cinematic examples of the fascination with operationality have a comic element to them, it was in the plethora of mischief films produced over the years 1896 –1905 that cinematic comedy really got underway. It is in them that narrative, gag and mechanism became three distinctive means of ordering the temporal process in a way that was distinctively cinematic. [Tom] Gunning identifies these three components of the operational aesthetic in his analysis of L’Arroseur arrosé (1895), a film often cited as the first piece of cinematic comedy. A basic narrative structure is formed by the construction of the gag, a gag that is itself constructed on the basis of the deployment and redeployment of an apparatus. A man attempting to water his garden is prevented from doing so by a boy stepping on the hose. When the man examines the nozzle to see what is wrong with it, the boy steps off the hose so that water suddenly spurts in the man’s face. The man reprimands the boy and finally chases him out of frame with the hose. The narrative emerges from the apparatus mediating between the two characters and inscribing action with temporal development in the operation of the device. The gag, Gunning quite rightly suggests, emerges from the deployment of an apparatus which creates a detour of character action through an inanimate object, and of course from the man, initially oblivious to the boy’s intervention, being caught unawares.

Lisa Trahair The Narrative-Machine: Buster Keaton's Cinematic Comedy, Deleuze's Recursion Function and the Operational Aesthetic. 

[comedyisntfunny]

Laughter, whether conciliatory or terrible, always occurs when some fear passes. It indicates liberation either from physical danger or from the grip of logic. Conciliatory laughter is heard as the echo of an escape from power; the wrong kind overcomes fear by capitulating to the forces which are to be feared. It is the echo of power as something inescapable. Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practiced on happiness. Moments of happiness are without laughter; only operettas and films portray sex to the accompaniment of resounding laughter. But Baudelaire is as devoid of humor as Holderlin. In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is drawing it into its worthless totality. To laugh at something is always to deride it, and the life which, according to Bergson, in laughter breaks through the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric life, self-assertion prepared to parade its liberation from any scruple when the social occasion arises.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer The Dialectic of Enlightenment

[comedyisntfunny]

'Something absurd (something in which, therefore, the understanding can of itself find no delight) must be present in whatever is to raise a hearty convulsive laugh. Laughter is an affection arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing'.

Immanuel Kant The Critique Of Judgement

[comedyisntfunny]

The compulsion to operationalism gives rise to an operational paradox. It is not just that the order of the day is 'making something worth something': the fact is that it is better, if something is to be invested with value, for it to have no value to begin with; better to know nothing in order to have things known; better to produce nothing in order to have things produced; and better to have nothing to say if one seeks to communicate. All of which is part of the logic of things: as everyone knows, if you want to make people laugh, it is better not to be funny.

Jean Baudrillard The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomenon 

[comedyisntfunny]

The origin of the ludicrous is always the paradoxical, and thus unexpected, subsumption of an object under a concept that is in other respects heterogeneous to it. Accordingly, the phenomenon of laughter always signifies the sudden apprehension of an incongruity between such a concept and the real object thought through it, and hence between what is abstract and perceptive.

Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation