Pleasure of Fools : Essays in the Ethics of Laughter [1 ed.] 9780773572850, 9780773528925

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THE P L E A S U R E OF FOOLS

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The Pleasure of Fools Essays in the Ethics of Laughter

Jure Gantar

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

McGill-Queen's University Press 2005 ISBN O-7735-2892-X Legal deposit second quarter 2005 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Gantar, Jure, 1964The pleasure of fools : essays in the ethics of laughter / Jure Gantar. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN O-7735-2892-X 1. Laughter in literature. 2. Laughter - Moral and ethical aspects. i. Title. BF575.L3G35 2005 8o9'.93353 C2005-900726-5 Typeset in Palatino 10/13 by Caractera inc., Quebec City

For Maya and Nika

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: A Critical Prejudice 3 1 Alternatives to Laughter 17 2 Typologies of Laughter

32

3 Nonsense

50

4 Ridicule 71 5 Laughter in Utopia 92 6 Self-Deprecating Laughter 112 7 The Comedian 130 Conclusion: Laughter and Insult 150 Notes 159 Bibliography 171 Index 185

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Acknowledgment*

I first wish to thank Smith and Kraus Publishers for their permission to quote two long segments of Charles Marowitz's elegant translation of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. Particular thanks go to John Zucchi, Joan McGilvray, and Joanne Pisano of McGill-Queen's University Press for their support at the various stages of transforming a manuscript into a book, and to Claire Gigantes for her careful reading and valuable editorial advice. In the academic year 2002-03, I had the privilege of teaching a Special Topics class in the ethics of laughter at Dalhousie University in Halifax. The students in this class - Kyle Cameron, April Cross, Tyler Foley, Kristin Langille, Matthew Lewington, Tracy Morden, Allison Patey, Emily Shute, Margaret Smith, and Rayna Smith-Camp - all made valuable contributions to the argument in this study. Their enthusiasm, curiosity, and openness of mind were instrumental in the shaping of many of my ideas. Finally, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my wife Sandra Siversky, who was not only my first audience but also my first critic. She read and reread every draft of the manuscript and helped me see the whole where there were only parts. Without her love, encouragement, patience, and advice, there would have been no Pleasure of Fools.

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THE PLEASURE OF FOOLS

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INTRODUCTION

A Critical Prejudice

In the central chapter of his 1988 book The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth uses Frangois Rabelais's famous sixteenth-century comic novel Gargantua and Pantagruel (1562) as a case study for his investigation of the role of ethics in literary criticism. Through a polemics with Mikhail Bakhtin and his perhaps most influential text, Rabelais and His World (1965), Booth sets out to prove that the French novel used by the Russian scholar as a paradigm for his definition of the carnival spirit is, because of its propensity for ridiculing women, ultimately an unethical work. Though Booth admits that both he and his wife once found the supposedly canonical novel very funny, his recently acquired understanding of the feminist perspective now leads him to believe that there was something wrong with the quality of their laughter. He summarizes the logic of his subsequent rejection of Gargantua and Pantagruel with the following three points: i. It is unjust to treat individual women as members of a class inherently inferior to men, as deficient simply because they are female. Corollary. - To talk of women unjustly is to act unjustly. Though the degree of an injustice may vary immensely from praising rape to varying kinds of verbal rape to "harmless" jokes about dumb broads, frigid cock-teasers, and insatiable farmer's daughters, the kind of injustice remains for our purposes the same.

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2. This work - Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel - does in fact treat women in this way. 3. This work commits an unjust act.1

In fact, Booth's unease with Gargantua and Pantagruel goes so far that on the next page of his book he hyperbolically compares the effect of Rabelais's attempts to induce laughter to the impact that a Penthouse story about a gang rape might have on its readers. While Booth never actually suggests that laughter by itself is an ethically questionable form of audience response, the implication of his argument is clearly that laughter - or at least "Rabelais's Masculine Laughter"2 - just like an erection, is difficult to control and not always polite. In order to be considered ethical, Booth argues, Rabelais's laughter should have been addressed to everyone and not just to the privileged sex. Just how significant an ethical problem laughter poses for Booth's critical methodology can be seen from the final chapter of his book where at least one of the remaining three case studies again revolves around the question what a contemporary reader should or should not find amusing. His reading of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) begins with a reference to the novelist's rejection of moralist criticism and continues with a number of compliments about Twain's use of American colloquial idiom. Booth then adjusts the focus of his interpretation and analyses the very end of the novel in which no amount of the author's humour can conceal the latent racism of the work's denouement. While he concedes that it might be possible to defend the book by "the attribution to Huck, not to Mark Twain, of all the ethical deficiencies,"3 Booth eventually concludes that it is the plot's ending, not the character's words, that violates the basic ethical principles and, therefore, makes Huckleberry Finn into a critical liability. Booth's is by no means an isolated opinion. For many years before critical theory rehabilitated the role of ethics in literary and cultural criticism, a number of scholars, philosophers,

Introduction

5

and writers observed that laughter as a common audience response may have "an ethical edge to it."4 Whereas in other fields of criticism, the return of interest in the socially engaged art, or, to use Emmanuel Levinas's terminology, the shift from the conscious to the sensible subject, may be attributed to a specific and universally traumatic historical experience such as the Holocaust - this, for example, is characteristic of both Levinas's and Theodor Adorno's method - the critical treatment of laughter never suffered from a lack of ethical, moral, or even moralistic perspectives. Insofar as in the past inquiries into the integrity of the characters' decisions or the social values of the work's "message" have been habitually viewed as puritanical and narrow-minded when it came to the criticism of "serious" artworks, the belief in the inherent ethical ambivalence of laughter as a conscious and intentional reaction to a work of art stubbornly persists: in the analyses of humour and comedy there is nary an attempt to disguise the demand for maintaining a certain moral standard. While in Aristotle's On the Parts of Animals laughter is still seen as a specifically human feature,5 early Christian thinkers have already speculated that laughter is a symptom of Satan's influence. After all, as St John Chrysostom points out in one of his homilies, the Son of God never laughed.6 Indeed, most biblical references to laughter are rather negative. In the Old Testament, for instance, it is said in Ecclesiastes that "laughter is mad" and that "sorrow is better than laughter."7 Similarly, St Paul in his letter to the Ephesians cautions his readers that "silly talk" should be avoided.8 As Jacques-Benigne Bossuet relates in his Maximes et reflexions sur la comedie (1694), laughter is also condemned by a number of other saints, among them St Ambrose, who is surprised that "Christians could look for subjects of laughter," and St Basil, who asserts even more radically that "it is not allowed to laugh at anything."9 The origins of the most drastic philosophical denunciation of laughter can, however, be found in the religious discourse of the Puritans. Ever since Aristotle in his Poetics associated

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the ludicrous with the ugly and the bad, writers such as the Dutch seventeenth-century philosopher Daniel Heinsius have had serious doubts about its ethical dimension. Thomas Granger, for example, argues that "if Adam had neuer fallen, there should neuer haue been laughter, nor weeping, but an heart possest with heauenly ioy, euen ioyful sobriety/'10 Though Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan (1651) describes laughter as a voluntary motion and thereby firmly places it in the rational sphere of human pleasures, his famous definition of laughter itself - as an individual's sudden joy in attaining imaginary power11 - was, during the Restoration, repeatedly used to disqualify laughter. Because Hobbes describes laughter as "a distortion of the countenance"12 and sees it as an integral part of one's drive to improve one's position in society and thus become superior to other human beings, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries laughter was widely seen as an essentially unjust expression. Thus, laughter was "associated with atheism, immorality and disorderliness"13 not only in Jeremy Collier's infamous Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) but, as David FarleyHills notes, in a number of other pamphlets such as Joseph Glanvill's A Whip for the Droll, Fiddler to the Atheist (1668), and Seasonable Reflections and Discourses to the Conviction and Cure of Scoffing and Infidelity of a Degenerate Age (1676), and Clement Ellis's Vanity of Scoffing (1674) and The Gentile Sinner (1660). Even Samuel Butler, the famous author of burlesques, tied laughter to malice and suggested that "men cannot laugh heartily without showing their teeth."14 Relatively few of the ensuing objections to laughter sustain this religious rhetoric, yet the argument often remains unchanged. Laughter is seen as an expression of one's superiority and consequently rejected as an unforgivable pleasure in other people's misery by authors as different as the nineteenth-century theologian Felicite Robert de Lamennais and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Italian Renaissance scholar Lodovico Castelvetro similarly suggests that we laugh "because we assume that we are superior to [the

Introduction

7

deceived], and superior in the very faculty which makes man akin to God and sets him far above all other creatures."15 Rene Descartes's definition of laughter reminds us of Castelvetro's and Hobbes's views: albeit not an outright condemnation, it can easily be seen how an understanding of laughter as driven "to the heart by some slight emotion of hatred (helped by the surprise of wonder)"16 could be used to dismiss the ethical validity of this human reaction. Just as frank in his reservations about laughter is Friedrich Schiller who associates it with permissible baseness and vulgarity. "Jests that would be insufferable in a man of education amuse us in the mouth of the people," he writes in his essay "Reflections on the Use of the Vulgar and Low Elements in Works of Art."17 For a critic who believes that art is, in its very core, a form of an "Aesthetical Education of Man,"18 any activity of human imagination that does not exhibit the influence of education is an idea that should be strongly discouraged. Comparable arguments are encountered not only in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debates on sentimental comedy but also in the more contemporary works that define laughter from methodological positions that might at first appear resistant to the traps of moralism, such as sociology, psychology, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. In Konrad Lorenz's book On Aggression (1966), laughter is described, for instance, as one of the ways of directing societal aggression and is in this sense related to "militant enthusiasm." Though Lorenz believes in "the great and beneficial force of humour" and declares that "humour is a powerful ally of rational morality," he also specifically warns that laughter "can turn into a very cruel weapon, causing injury if it strikes a defenceless human being undeservedly," and then adds that "it is criminal to laugh at a child."19 Arthur Koestler, as well, contends in The Act of Creation (1964) that while laughter may be an external symptom of one's creativity, the emotional climate that enables it is characterized by "a touch of aggressiveness" and defensiveness.20 By suggesting "that aggression and self-defence, rage

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and fear, hostility and apprehension, are as pairs of twins in their psychology and physiology,"21 he indeed tries to remove any moralistic undertones from his understanding of laughter, yet at the same time he speaks in connection with it of malice, condescension, and lack of sympathy. "In a word," Koestler summarizes, "laughter is aggression (or apprehension) robbed of its logical raison d'etre; the puffing away of emotion discarded by thought."22 Even more ambivalent is Henri Bergson's argument that first defines vice as a rigidity of a character's morality and then argues that people make us laugh "by reason of their unsociability rather than of their immorality."23 His point is additionally clouded by the contradicting assertions that, first, "there is no essential difference between the social ideal and the moral"; second, that laughter "cannot be absolutely just"; and finally, that in laughter "nature has utilised evil with a view to good."24 As a means of humiliation, laughter is powerful but undiscriminating: "Laughter punishes certain failings somewhat as disease punishes certain forms of excess, striking down some who are innocent and sparing some who are guilty, aiming at a general result and incapable of dealing separately with each individual case."25 No wonder then that laughter is seen as the result of "a momentary anaesthesia of the heart," and that the very last sentence of Bergson's essay advises his readers that the substance of laughter "is scanty, and [its] aftertaste bitter."26 The German phenomenologist Helmuth Plessner uses a more positive vocabulary, yet he too believes that to "laugh ... is in a sense to lose control" and, just like Bergson, denies the ability to laugh to "men with conscience and heart."27 It might well be true that laughter often arises as a by-product of one's existential joy, but even such laughter is, in Plessner's opinion, "pleasurable" rather than "cheerful"28 and is therefore not a truly ethical response. Bergson's indecision is echoed in many recent discussions of laughter, for instance in Susan Purdie's poststructuralist analysis of the subject. Whereas her critical take on laughter does not demand its eventual moral censorship, the notion

Introduction

9

that laughter always happens at the expense of a marginalized minority is a clear warning of the dangers of laughter's free, unchecked implementation. Her book Comedy: A Mastery of Discourse (1993) can never entirely escape an underlying feeling that there is something intrinsically wrong with laughter. In Purdie's postmodern perspective, joking is perceived as a means of empowering one segment of the population at the expense of the other and, simultaneously, as a strategy to "reinforce existing structures of exaltation or abjection/'29 While transgressing the Symbolic Law is, in principle, a welcome act, its abuses are problematic, as is best indicated by Purdie's observation that the mastery of discourse, which is an inevitable result of a successful transgression, is an essentially masculine position. Not unexpectedly, the situation is most obviously submerged in the perilous waters of moralism in the more specifically ideological methods, such as feminism or Marxism. In a review of her study by Lue Morgan Douthit, Purdie was thus criticized for not admonishing more severely traditional theories of comedy, humour, and laughter. Though Purdie on several occasions questions the ethical acceptability of laughter, her feminist reviewer appears to demand more: a new reading of the subject that will totally eliminate any trace of "the dominance of a western culture bias."30 It almost seems as if not much progress has been made on the question of the ethics of laughter in the past few centuries. Castelvetro's assertion that we "take pleasure in the ills of others" because our nature has been corrupted by "the sin of our first parents"31 is remarkably similar to Adorno's twentieth-century statement that laughter is logically deficient. Despite lamenting the demise of irony, Adorno nonetheless warns that he "who has laughter on his side has no need of proof."32 The belief in the axiological inadequacy of humour, comedy, and other vehicles of laughter has not diminished significantly since Castelvetro's time: as always, there are critics who believe that laughter must necessarily be subjected to moral scrutiny.

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Regardless of whether the justification for such a harsh treatment of laughter is found in the supposed association of laughter with evil, as in the Middle Ages, or in the absence of reason in laughable events, as is the case in neoclassical criticism, most critics agree that at least some laughter is socially irresponsible. In other words, there can be no doubt that laughter might be ethically problematic, either because it was originally intended to be offensive or because it was made offensive by the historical passage of time. From Booth's point of view, this means that no matter how funny and justified Rabelais's ridicule of the French sixteenth-century education system is and how well warranted the laughter he produces at the expense of religious excesses, his jokes about women, such as the prank Panurge inflicts on the Lady of Paris in Book Two of the novel, are not acceptable. By its very nature, laughter is always referential and only exists in a distinct relationship to its subject. Even those scholars who believe in the constructive, healing, or therapeutic power of laughter must sooner or later admit that exposure to laughter is often not desired by its target. It is probably fair to assume that, no matter how much Panurge laughed at the sight, the Lady of Paris did not enjoy "the sniffing and snuffing and pissing all over her."33 At the same time, it is possible to argue that some, or even all, laughter is only potentially offensive. That is to say, one could posit that laughter is not a necessarily unethical reaction to the reality surrounding us. If the phenomenon of laughter is by definition restricted to a self-enclosed communicational situation, as Sigmund Freud implies in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) with his division of the comic, jokes, and humour, then offensiveness may be seen as a by-product of laughter only in the case of some, but not all, mechanisms of laughter. Since, according to Freud, humour, as distinct from jokes and the comic, uses laughter only to protect one's Ego and not to involve any other party in the interaction, it could well mean that only laughter produced by the comic and jokes should be considered unethical.

Introduction

11

As long as it remains limited to the author of humour alone and, through articulation, does not transform into a joke, even the cruellest observation cannot insult. Rabelais can chuckle to himself as much as he wants about the weaknesses of women, but only once he expresses his thoughts about the sixteenth-century battle of the sexes in one of Doctor Rondibilis's instructions to Panurge does his laughter become ethically contentious. Only when the thought that "in making woman nature was more concerned with man's pleasure, and with the perpetuation of the human species, than with the perfection of an individual of the female sex"34 moves from the private to the public realm can one begin to question Rabelais's judgment. Booth successfully deflects the tip of this argument - and in the process prevents laughter from getting away on the basis of a technicality - by switching the debate to the historical ground. He counters the accusation that he is taking Gargantua and Pantagruel out of its context, and that he is judging "a classic by standards different from those of its time," by responding that "the historical defense scants [his] responsibility to [himself] and [his] living friends."35 That is to say, one cannot dismiss Booth's attack on Rabelais as methodologically inconsistent simply because it treats a sixteenth-century novelist as if he had been writing at the end of the second millennium. The reasoning outlined in the preceding paragraph might convince us that Rabelais's jokes should not be considered objectionable (for the audience that perceives them as such did not yet exist when Rabelais was writing or, at least, had not been invited to participate in his laughter). In Booth's view, however, a modern reader's laughter at the humour of Gargantua and Pantagruel must be assessed by today's standards. If the readers cannot afford to ignore the historical context of the author, can they truly afford to ignore the discursive and ethical context of their own era? This rhetorical question could lead one to assume that the most problematic aspect of laughter is its production. The belief that laughter can be useful and has its natural role in

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society does not contradict the supposition that the act of invoking laughter is ethically unpredictable. Laughter at the excesses of societal control may have been necessary in the Middle Ages, as Bakhtin recounts in his book on Rabelais, but this still should not prevent Booth from admonishing Rabelais for occasional abuses of his discursive privileges. In terms of how it is caused, even an infant's joyful laughter, perhaps the most innocent of all forms of this response, is not beyond reproach. Because such laughter tends to depend on a baby's implicit awareness of fear and danger - the game of peek-a-boo only begins to amuse once an infant has learnt to overcome its primordial fear - a concerned observer may well disapprove of the parents' attempts to tickle their baby into submission. Using the terminology of critical theory this point could be summarized in the following manner: as difficult as it is to blame someone for exploding in what Koestler calls a "spontaneous"36 response to the perception of the difference and recognition of the Other, it is quite easy to rebuke a person who deliberately works on creating an environment in which spontaneity is manipulated and the perception of difference exaggerated rather than abated. Generating alterity is very different from recognizing it. Just as every other form of production is ethically suspect because the very idea of production implies a dissociation of the producer from the consumer - from the point of view of critical theory, the relationship between the two is a hierarchical one, determined by its inherent power struggle - so the act of invoking laughter is unethical because it divides the world into jokers and comedians (those who control or even own laughter) and their passive audience; in other words, because it promotes, instead of debunks, yet another binary opposition. One could, alternatively, suggest that the only offensive thing about laughter is the way it is construed by the receiver. That is to say, what makes laughter offensive is not its makers but we who laugh. As the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire writes, "The comic and the capacity for laughter are situated in the laugher and by no means in the

Introduction

13

object of his laughter."37 Since no amount of trying to be funny can ensure laughter, the onus of ethical reservations concerning this audience response rests squarely on the person doing the deed, that is, on the reader or the spectator. Just as I have the ability to find amusing something that was not meant to be - Koestler's spontaneous laughter again - so I am responsible for what I laugh at. In a more exaggerated pose, it is even possible to conceive that no text is a priori laughable. All texts are in principle semantically neutral, and it is only their readers who can construe them as funny. Just think of two examples: first, of the nineteenth-century French play by Benjamin Antier, Amand Lacoste, and Alexis Chaponnier, entitled The Inn of the Adrets (1823), a melodrama so blatantly artificial that its leading actor, Frederick Lemaitre, decided to treat "the work as a farce, without substantially altering its dialogue";38 and second, of Joseph Kesselring's Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), which was originally entitled Bodies in Our Cellar and was apparently intended as a serious thriller but was openly laughed at - so goes the story - on the first few readings. In both cases, being read against the grain was hugely successful: Lemaitre commissioned the sequel to the parodied melodrama, and Arsenic and Old Lace became a classic Broadway hit. To return to Rabelais: Rondibilis's advice may well be sexist and Panurge's revenge infantile, but that still does not make them funny. What transforms an insult into a comic device is one's act of laughter. Laughter could then be described as an external display of our innate prejudices or, even more damningly, as a public projection of our desire to distance ourselves from the Other and suppress the difference. Though such a view carries with it attractive echoes of Roland Barthes's conception of "text" - we are the authors of the laughable text, not its writer - it cannot account for all instances of laughter. For every Inn of the Adrets and Arsenic and Old Lace where laughter was an emergency exit, there are many Italian Straw Hats (1851) and Matchmakers (i956)39 where laughter was carefully planned and realized

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with a solid degree of predictability. While it is certainly true that anything can be laughed at, it is just as hard to dispute that in many comic works a collusion of intention and response occurs regularly. And if this is the case, the responsibility for the unnethical aspect of laughter is at least shared by if not passed back to its producer. Suggesting that a producer of laughter cannot deliberately offend is just as narrow-minded as denying that a reader and a spectator are not capable of compromising an innocent text on their own. The crucial question defining a critical perspective on the ethics of laughter is, therefore, not whether or not there is offensive laughter but whether or not all laughter offends. It is probably clear to everyone that some laughter is not only lacking in sympathy but is, as the prime vehicle of discursive supremacy, often openly malicious and abusive and can be labelled as sexist, racist, classist, and so forth. What is less certain is whether or not there also exists laughter that is totally tolerant and constructive. If it is true that contemporary criticism is, at least in part, characterized by its departure from a Kantian insistence on aesthetic judgment as disinterested and on art as autonomous - the shift that Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung call "the moral turn of postmodernism,"40 then the main task of any relevant critical approach is to investigate the possibility of a perfectly ethical laughter and to see whether one can indeed find a theoretical instance when laughter as an audience reaction alienates no one. In the answer to this query is hidden the secret of the theoretical legitimacy of the ethical criticism of laughter. If this kind of approach to the problem appears a bit essentialist, it is most likely because it is essentialist. Levinas and his followers, as the main instigators of the moral turn of postmodernism, in their treatment of ethics usually talk about concepts such as Otherness, alterity, and responsibility and are not concerned with the questions of offensiveness and non-offensiveness, let alone with their perfection or totality. From the point of view of the criticism of laughter,

Introduction

15

however, the latter questions precede a meaningful debate on the former. It does not take a lot of theoretical imagination to conclude that from a postmodern perspective with its emphasis on the marginal, the heterological, and the decentred on the one hand, and its belief in social and political commitment on the other, a discussion about the universal acceptability of laughter is both an epistemological non-starter (how can anything be universal that depends so much on subjective criteria?) and a critical giveaway (everything that empowers the Other is ethical). This point, though, still does not prove why an essentialist definition of the production, not just of the reception, of laughter is unnecessary. The decision whether or not the mechanisms of laughter can have their own interest and still ensure that that interest will not encroach on any other interests is, considering the successful survival of at least some instances of laughter-inducing strategies through many centuries, an ahistorical one and thus better addressed on a structural rather than an incidental basis. Even if one were to continue arguing that to search for a perfectly ethical form of laughter is to look for universals in a world defined by a plurality of particulars, the implications of a refusal to acknowledge the validity of the search - responding to epistemological uncertainty by avoiding critical engagement; that is, by resorting to a form of discrimination against laughter - should be enough to persuade us to condone this methodological fallacy. In the course of this book, I will survey a variety of possibilities for a perfectly ethical laughter. The investigation will begin with an account of the alternatives to laughter and continue with an examination of the various typologies of laughter. Next, the roles of nonsense and ridicule in the formation of laughter will be explored, along with the position of laughter in various Utopias. A look at self-deprecating laughter and comedians as its main proponents will round off the main body of the text. In the conclusion, I will return to the relationship between ethics and the criticism of laughter. Most of the examples I use in

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my analysis are literary, the majority coming from plays as the only form of text where the presence of laughter can be determined empirically. There will be no additional definition of the terms laughter and ethics beyond the one implied in the introduction. I assume, first, that my understanding of the two words is broad enough to allow any reader unimpeded understanding of my argument; and second, that any potential ambiguities as to their denotation will be resolved as I proceed.

CHAPTER ONE

Alternatives to Laughter

Perhaps the most radical critical approach to the question whether or not ethical laughter is possible is the one that assumes that laughter can never be ethical. Interestingly enough, proponents of this opinion rarely argue that the production or construction of laughter is unethical; instead, they perceive as inappropriate the vulgar "sound ... produced by a deep inspiration followed by short, interrupted, spasmodic contractions of the chest, and especially of the diaphragm."1 Finding pleasure in comedy or jokes is perfectly acceptable, the argument goes, as long as that pleasure is not expressed in open laughter. Marking the liminal areas of representation, as humour could be defined with contemporary terminology, is, in this view, a legitimate and even desirable artistic task, but responding to such an accomplishment with laughter only signifies the lack of sophistication on the part of the audience. If this is true, the attribution of moral responsibility is irrelevant to further discussion of the ethics of laughter. It does not matter whether it is the authors trying to provoke laughter who are considered immoral or the spectators who laugh at them: what makes critics uneasy is the mere idea that the "short, interrupted, spasmodic contractions of the chest" can be perceived as a form of audience response. While the decision for one at the expense of the other may slightly alter the direction of critical reproaches, the fact that

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there is something intrinsically problematic with the physiological aspect of laughter is in itself enough to sustain the barrage of attacks. Critics who disapprove of laughter in this manner usually cannot eliminate or even ignore it, but that does not prevent them from trying to contain it. On the level of theory, such containment can be achieved with the help of several different critical strategies. First, critics may insist that laughter as an audience response is typical only of some literary genres and should not appear in others. Second, they can go a step further and argue that even in those genres where laughter is a common response it is not the preferred or necessary one. Finally, they may advocate the substitution of laughter with a smile as its more measured physiological alternative. Let us now take a closer look at each of these possibilities. The first person to engage in the critical slighting of laughter was none other than Aristotle. It was not so much that he had carelessly lost the second part of Poetics, nor that he had not bothered to discuss laughter in much detail in Rhetoric - where, after all, he says that "the objects of laughter are pleasant"2 - as that by limiting the representation of the ludicrous to comedy Aristotle implicitly helped to tie laughter to a specific genre and, consequently, made its criticism easier to control. Once laughter is tied to one genre alone, or more precisely, when it is constrained to function within yet another binary opposition, the reasons for its theoretical rejection become simpler and the objections against its ethical role less difficult to raise. Just how this happens can be seen very clearly in the historical perseverance of the arguments against the mixing of genres that define the discussions on the subject at least from Horace's Ars Poetica on. There, the Roman poet, who at first allows for the combination of both comic and serious elements in the satiric drama, eventually argues "that no god, no hero, who shall be brought upon the stage, and whom we have just beheld in royal gold and purple, shall

Alternatives to Laughter

19

shift with vulgar speech into dingy hovels, or, while shunning the ground, catch at clouds and emptiness."3 With a few minor exceptions such as Battista Guarini's defence of pastoral tragicomedy, Horace's reasoning is later adopted by most Renaissance and neoclassical critics who invariably insist on the purity of genres, a clear separation of tragedy and comedy, and the ensuing isolation of laughter. Of these the most typical, and at the same time theoretically the most coherent, is Nicholas Boileau-Despreaux's elaboration. In his opinion, any mixing of the pleasant and the sublime is counterproductive to the organic inner unity of a work. This essential duality even extends to the production of plays. "I'm tired to see an actor on the stage / That knows not whether he's to laugh or rage," he writes in canto 3 of his Art of Poetry (i674).4 Though Boileau, unlike many of his less-tolerant colleagues, manages to see some didactic merit in the abuse Aristophanes heaps on his contemporaries, the French critic and poet ultimately ends up advising his readers that "the comic wit, born with a smiling air, / Must tragic grief and pompous verse forbear."5 Even John Dryden, who in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) actually praises the merits of mingling "mirth and humour,"6 is quite categorical when it comes to the specific position of laughter itself. In his opinion, laughter is the domain of the comic poet and not of the tragic one. "That malicious pleasure in the Audience which is testified by laughter,"7 he suggests, can only be achieved adequately by the help of humour, a rhetorical device that belongs to comedy and, when appearing in tragedy, strikes us as discordant. It is not until the romantic rebellion against the practices of pseudo-Aristotelian rationalism, a rebellion inspired by an admiration for the generically impure Elizabethan drama and in particular for Shakespeare's plays, that the idea of limiting laughter to comedy is finally swept under the scholarly carpet. Even then, it is not entirely forgotten: Shelley still rejects the "modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy," unless "the comedy should be as in

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King Lear, universal, ideal, and sublime."8 As late as the twentieth century the separation of tragedy from comedy is championed by the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs, who thus indirectly abets the segregation of laughter from the more serious genres. While Lukacs believes that the mixing of genres may have some benefit when it comes to the philosophical weight of comedy, in tragicomedy the implied presence of laughter "disrupts the purity of style and keeps tragedy to the level of the banal and trivial, if indeed it is not distorted into grotesquery."9 Nowadays, the idea that laughter as an audience response should be restricted only to certain genres and banished from others has been largely outgrown. Also more or less extinct is the notion of a strict polarization of genres. Yet theoretical suspicions about the ethical value of laughter continue to linger somewhere in criticism's collective unconscious. The everyday critical diction, for instance, is a perfect example of how difficult it is to forget the deeply ingrained analytical biases. When someone remarks that a novel tackles a "serious" issue, this is usually meant as a compliment, whereas comments about the "funny" logic of a play's plot or the "laughable" motivation of its hero are routinely perceived as rebukes. Occasionally, this inherent linguistic inequality can lead to seemingly paradoxical results, as when the genre of comedy is defended with the argument that it "is no less serious as tragedy" or that it "is not something categorically separated from life's lamentations."10 One can again trace the origins of this shift in the critical reception of laughter back to antiquity. Ever since Horace noted that literature has the ability to arouse tears or laughter and Hellenistic scholars started to associate laughter with comedy, critics never stop seeing the ability to provoke laughter as one of the immanent weaknesses of comedy. The gist of their argument is that comedy is a perfectly acceptable genre, in many ways equal to tragedy, as long as it does not corrupt the audience by inducing negative, non-utilitarian responses such as laughter.

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Rarely is this affront more noticeable then when it is articulated by a great, and exceptionally funny, comic playwright such as Ben Jonson. In his collection of thoughts on drama and art in general entitled Timber: or, Discoveries; Made upon Men and Matter (1640), Jonson writes, "Nor, is the movement of laughter alwaies the end of Comedy, that is rather a fowling for the peoples delight, or their fooling. For, as Aristotle saies rightly, the moving of laughter is a fault in Comedie, a kind of turpitude, that depraves some part of a mans nature without a disease."11 Though his own plays do not manage to live up to this lofty standard and instead provoke in their audiences nothing more substantial than laughter, Jonson's position is unequivocal: "jests that are true and naturall, seldome raise laughter."12 Ideally, then, the scene in which Volpone is pretending to be dead so that he can observe Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino fight over his non-existent inheritance should not make us laugh; anyone who lowers himself to responding to the Venetian crook's antics with laughter is, in Jonson's opinion, doing the play's author a serious critical disservice. The contradiction between Jonson's theory and practice is as pronounced in this example as the division between theory and practice itself. Jonson may preach restraint when it comes to laughter, but the amount of humour he injects into his characters makes any attempt to reach his objective an exercise in masochism rather than an honest reception. The other famous author who regularly makes his audiences laugh but who, in theory at least, proclaims laughter to be peripheral to the other aims of comedy is George Bernard Shaw. In his review of the world premiere of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895),apl many believe to be the funniest in the English-written repertoire of the nineteenth century, Shaw, who himself can hardly be accused of lacking a sense of humour, dismisses his fellow Irishman's play as "a farcical comedy." Though he is honest enough to admit Wilde's play made him laugh and made him laugh often, he feels obliged to add that it

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also left him "with a sense of having wasted [his] evening."13 He went to the theatre "to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it, and that is why," Shaw continues, "though I laugh as much as anybody at a farcical comedy, I am out of spirits before the end of the second act, and out of temper before the end of the third, my miserable mechanical laughter intensifying at every outburst."14 Because of Shaw's sincerity in recounting his experience, his reservations may appear less significant than if they had been expressed from a more categorical standpoint, but they are still impossible to conceive of as anything other than an open rejection of laughter as a universally acceptable audience response. A similar stance can also be encountered in some philosophical accounts of laughter and its affiliation with comedy. Georg Wilhelm Hegel in his Aesthetics (1835), for instance, believes that there is no reason why one should assume that laughter is the necessary comic goal. "There is nothing in mere folly, stupidity, or nonsense, which in itself necessarily partakes of the comic, though we all of us are ready to laugh at it," he says and elaborates a bit later on: "Laughter is consequently little more than an expression of self-satisfied shrewdness; a sign that they have sufficient wit to recognize such a contrast and are aware of the fact."15 For Hegel, the success of comedy should definitely not be measured in the amount of laughter it generates but in the amount of selfknowledge it provides to its audiences. Comedy may generally tend towards laughter, but the highest form of a spectator's response to comedy is joy, he argues. This hypothesis is even less surprising when we recall that in Hegel's tightly structured hierarchy of emotions sympathy and several other possible reactions to comedy rank higher than laughter. The belief that laughter is not the necessary response to comedy survives well into the twentieth century. The American philosopher Susanne K. Langer, in spite of her admission that the "natural vein of comedy is humorous" and that "in a good play the laughs' are poetic elements,"16 still insists on a separation of laughter from comedy. With its concept of laughter arising "from a surge of vital feeling,"17

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Langer's Feeling and form (1953) offers one of the more inspired and original theories; yet she includes in her discussions on comic rhythm texts such as Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, and Jean Racine's and Pierre Corneille's heroic comedies, works that are undoubtedly masterpieces but hardly stand-up material. Likewise, Albert Bermel, whose book Farce: A History from Aristophanes to Woody Allen (1982) is perhaps the most complete account of the genre, contends that "laughter is not the motive behind farce, only its principal by-product"18 and thereby distances laughter not only from comedy but also from farce, a genre that has traditionally been safe from such an apprehension. Purdie's point that "a definition of 'comedy' which points only to its funniness must be so restrictive as to be virtually useless"19 is another comparable statement. While she firmly believes in the rejuvenating power of the saturnalian debunking of the Symbolic Law, her reservations nonetheless express an essential discomfort with the indiscriminate power of this festive response. Distaste for the connection between comedy and laughter is most pronounced, however, and consequently most influential, when comedy is at its strongest, during the Age of Reason. Because playwrights such as Colley Gibber and Sir Richard Steele felt that laughter as a reaction was inappropriate to the taste of the new tolerant rational and considerate man, they decided to counter the immorality of Restoration drama with an alternative of their own. Steele, in particular, was instrumental in discrediting laughter as a desired audience response. In many ways, it is Steele's aversion to laughter that made his career. As early as 1704, in the epilogue to his second play, The Lying Lover, Steele outlined his critical poetics in the following verses: Our too advent'rous Author soared tonight Above the little Praise, Mirth to excite, And chose with Pity to chastise Delight. For Laughter's a distorted Passion, born

24

The Pleasure of Fools Of sudden self Esteem, and sudden Scorn; Which, when 'tis o'er, the Men in Pleasure wise Both him that mov'd it, and themselves despise; While generous Pity of a painted Woe Make us ourselves both more approve, and know.20

In Steele's later views, articulated with particular eloquence in his 1711 attacks on Sir George Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676), performing laughter is described as a "pitiful" activity that suppresses "good natural Impulses" by choking them with "Vice and Luxury."21 Laughter is dangerous, Steele believes, because striving for it leads a susceptible playwright directly to immorality as expressed in the "lascivious Gesture of Body" and reliance in his dialogue on double entendre.22 One of Steele's main arguments against The Man of Mode is that Mrs Harriet "laughs at Obedience to an absent Mother." Rather than respecting her mother, "she Ridicules her Air in taking Leave"23 and eventually discloses her true colours by questioning the institution of marriage. Though Steele begrudgingly admits that laughter may occasionally originate in benevolence, his decisive step in the polemics with the raunchy Restoration comedy was to write The Conscious Lovers (1722). This play, with its two pairs of virtuous lovers, their sensible fathers, and their helpful and honest servants - of all the characters, only Cimberton, a coxcomb, is vaguely foolish - became the bestknown representative of a new genre, the sentimental comedy. In the preface to the play, Steele formulates the revised relationship between comedy and laughter in this manner: For any thing that has its Foundation in Happiness and Success, must be allow'd to be the Object of Comedy, and sure it must be an Improvement of it, to introduce a Joy too exquisite for Laughter, that can have no Spring but in Delight, which is the case of this young Lady. I must therefore contend, that the Tears which were shed on that Occasion flow'd from Reason and Good Sense, and that Men ought not to be laugh'd at for weeping, till we are

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come to a more clear Notion of what is to be imputed to the Hardness of the Head and the Softness of the Heart.24

Steele makes two crucial points in this passage. First, he clearly demotes laughter to a position below joy and delight, both emotional states without an audible signifier. Second, he specifically warns against laughter at weeping, the reaction that in the taste of the rapidly emerging middle class has become the preferred acknowledgment of sentiment. Giggling at someone's honest tears of sympathy clearly illuminates the danger of laughter: the responsibility for the Other is replaced with the Self-ish desire for difference. No wonder that the poet Leonard Welsted in his prologue to The Conscious Lovers cries, "No more let the lawless Farce uncensur'd go."25 I should mention here that Steele's perspective is not entirely original. Most of his ideas appear to be roughly modelled after Sir Philip Sidney's sixteenth-century treatise The Defence of Poesie (1595). In this work, comic effects are divided into delight (desired) and laughter (to be avoided). While "Delight hath a ioy in it either permanent or present," laughter "hath onely a scornfull tickling." Even more important is Sidney's observation that we can actually "delight without laughter" and "laugh without delight."26 In other words, the connection between laughter and delight is not motivated but arbitrary. Though both laughter and delight can be used to express similar feelings and often appear simultaneously, they represent the diametrically opposite sides of performing happiness. Laughter, on the one hand, is a physiological reflex that is not concerned with ethical responsibility and may frequently exhaust itself in a harmful and indiscriminate dismantling of everything, even of people and actions that are worthy of one's pity. Delight, on the other, is an inner psychological response that in many ways personifies moral substance. Thus, at the same time that sentimentalism, as "a view of human nature directly opposed to the Hobbeseanism of the

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Restoration/'27 prevails both in criticism and dramatic literature, comedy of manners and comedy of wit are replaced by the newly created bourgeois genres such as the sentimental or weeping comedy (or its French equivalent, the comedie larmoyante), where the smile is favoured over laughter as the default audience response. Although the eighteenth century is just as rich in "laughing" comedy as the seventeenth, by the 17205 laughter is at least temporarily relegated to the junkyard of critical history. It seems that all the desperate theoretical debates about the permissibility of laughter and the morality of wit as raised in the polemics of William Congreve, Sir John Vanbrugh, John Dennis, and George Farquhar with Collier and his followers resulted, not in the affirmation of laughter, but in its gradual replacement with tears, joy, and mirth. As a genre, sentimental comedy was designed to minimize the ethically questionable production of laughter, particularly in the form of wit, a fact that did not escape many contemporary critics. As soon as Gibber, Steele, and others started to discredit the role of laughter on a moral basis, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Dennis, Farquhar, and their supporters defended their territory. A vigorous exchange of pamphlets between 1698 and 1723 ended in a critical defeat for the protectors of laughter, who could never bring themselves to abandon the high ground of the utilitarian view of literature. In light of such an outcome, it should not come as a surprise that, for most of the eighteenth century, the smile is seen as the most popular of the non-vulgar alternatives to laughter. Voltaire, for example, in the preface to The Scottish Girl (1760), argues that "the honest man smiles with the smile of the soul which is preferable to the laughter of the mouth."28 On the subject of laughter, Lord Chesterfield takes a similar tone in a letter to his son: "I must particularly warn you against it: and I could heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh, while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners: it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy, at silly things; and they call it being merry. In

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27

my mind, there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter."29 Both in Voltaire's and in Lord Chesterfield's moral systems, the emphatic preference for the smile over laughter is perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the Enlightenment rebellion against the dictates of the body that exemplifies much of Restoration ethics. Although on the surface Restoration thought regularly pays lip service to Cartesian rationalism, its ethical criteria remain driven largely by the final extension of the Renaissance fascination with the human body. Let us not forget that Hobbes as the main philosopher of the era believes in a definite codependency of "human nature ... body politic, and ... law."30 Just as sentimental critics object to characters such as Horner from William Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675) or Dorimant from Etherege's The Man of Mode (and even Valmont from Choderlos de Laclos's novel Dangerous Liaisons (1782)) because of their willingness to let their corporeal desires govern their moral principles, so they perceive laughter as a symptom of the mind losing control over the body. Laughter is, in this view, an intrusion of physiology into ethics. While a smile may actually be conceived of as a sign that one has successfully repressed the instinctive convulsions of the diaphragm, audible laughter with its sensory vibration of the air represents the defeat of the rational at the expense of the material. Laughter is the sound of the body breaking the bonds of the mind; smile is the gesture of the mind reigning in the excesses of the body. The clash of ethics and body politics in the late seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth engenders a unique form of asymmetrical semiotics. Delight, mirth, and joy are perceived as autonomous signifieds that can participate in the process of signification even without any concrete signifiers. Conversely, laughter is regarded as an unstable signifier of pleasure that often says more about the failure of semiosis than about its referent. In some cases, as in Sidney's example, the implication is almost that laughter may have been dislocated so much that it stands for nothing; that it is an index of ethical void. Finally, the smile

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- which differs from laughter not only in the absence of an acoustic dimension but also in the ambiguity of the facial motion that demands interpretation and not just perception - is a true sign of happiness. Instead of being restricted to pointing out a semiotic lapse (this is exactly what laughter with its indication of the body's temporary triumph over the mind does), the smile of the Enlightenment transcends the simple binary relationship between the signifier and the signified and acquires properties of a social Gestus. Despite all these arguments, the suggestion that a smile is an ethical surrogate for the essentially unethical response of laughter eventually loses its steam and is today no longer considered a popular critical option. One reason for this is that laughter is almost impossible to suppress, both in theory and in practice. The first theoretical crack in its Restoration-age armour was administered in Sir Oliver Goldsmith's short but important "Essay on the Theatre; or, A Comparison between Sentimental and Laughing Comedy (1773)." Goldsmith insisted that "Comedy should excite laughter,"31 and that all attempts to tone it down and make it more compassionate were, notwithstanding the financial success of the eighteenth-century sentimental drama, doomed to fail, if for no other reason than that they were little more than a passing fad. In Goldsmith's opinion, the banishment of laughter from the stages of his time not only prevented spectators from properly enjoying the productions but also gave them a skewed picture of reality and did not prepare them adequately for life. Goldsmith's prediction was true: within a few decades of the publication of his essay, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Beaumarchais, and Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, as well as Goldsmith himself, had reintroduced laughter to European stages and did so, as Goldsmith himself urged, by whatever means they could. While this will to survive does not automatically prove that laughter is an ethically proper response that need not be questioned, it does imply that audiences miss laughter more than they need a smile. The longing for

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29

laughter could, of course, be attributed to the cultural or historical conditioning of the audience and not to its collective lack of joy, but the early emergence of laughter in children probably speaks in favour of the latter possibility. The second and even more important argument against the assumption that smiling can be seen as an ethical equivalent to laughter originates in the uncertain relationship between the two audience responses. That is to say, it is very difficult to decide whether or not smiling is qualitatively, and not just quantitatively, different from laughter. In fact, many scholars consider a smile to be merely a degree of laughter. Norman N. Holland, in his book Laughing: A Psychology of Humor (1982), writes that "laughter differs from smiling simply in that the smile does not interrupt breathing."32 Koestler similarly understands laughing and smiling as closely related phenomena that both work through "channels of least resistance."33 In other words: smiling and laughing could be described as two physiological aspects of the same psychological reaction. Inasmuch as this hypothesis, any more than the first, does not conclusively refute the notion of smiling as an ethical version of laughter, it does sow a seed of doubt about the categorical statements of the eighteenth-century critics. Even if the smile does not just differ from laughter in its intensity but also it in its substance and is literally a response to a different type of stimulus, or at least a response that indicates a different process in the receivers' minds, there are several signs that suggest that smiling, too, is not without its ethical caveats. Though the gesture of baring one's teeth is qualitatively different from a silent smile as an expression of joy and delight, it is still difficult to declare that no one will take exception to the subtle curving of the lips. How can one otherwise explain the phrase "condescending smile" that John Simon debates, or the notion of a "sardonic smile," which, in Donald Lateiner's opinion, characterizes Odysseus's attitude in Homer's epics?34 Just think how much time has been spent trying to determine why Mona Lisa's enigmatic smiling infuriates rather than

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placates us. These few examples by no means prove that a smile is as controversial a reaction as laughter, yet they do show that ethical concerns surrounding it are broader than the initial premise insinuated. Do the strategies for the critical containment of laughter succeed in their intentions? To a degree, the divide-andconquer logic of the theories outlined in the preceding pages is as efficient in its polemics with laughter as any other epistemological tool used in similar circumstances. Limiting laughter to comedy and farce and excluding it from, say, drama and tragedy appeals to all those critics who favour logical systems and believe in the essential orderliness of literary taxonomies. Conversely, understanding laughter as a possible but not an imperative response to the comic, wit, humour, irony, and other similar rhetorical devices appears particularly attractive to anyone who puts freedom above all other criteria in critical judgments. Finally, opting for the smile rather than laughter makes the foes of laughter seem far less intolerant and their arguments far more inclusive than when they call for the full suppression of laughter. In short, on the shelves of critical containment there is a strategy acceptable to every customer. No matter what the critics' individual preferences, they can always find an .argument that chips away at laughter's ethical credibility. By the same token, the dispersion of this subtle type of argument against laughter also makes its authors' theoretical defences more vulnerable. Dryden's point that laughter is the "business" of the comic poet can, for example, be used to counter Steele's reservations about its place on English stages, while the juxtaposition of Lukacs's and Langer's attitudes towards genres may lead a reader to notice the discrepancies in their positions. Since the three premises considered on their own function as discrete, stand-alone propositions and cannot draw on support from a network of related objections, their methodological momentum is easy to stifle and the gist of their rationale seldom probes

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deeply enough to cause laughter any long-lasting damage. Only when the same critic invokes more than one aspect of containment, as happens with Sidney or Jonson, does the argument against laughter become robust enough to endanger the status of its subject.

CHAPTER TWO

Typologies of Laughter

Just because we think that there is nothing wrong with laughter as a physiological reaction, we should not automatically assume that all laughter is by definition ethical. Many critics who believe in the existence of inoffensive laughter, yet cannot deny that laughter can insult as well, commonly resort to a division of laughter into several types, of which some are "good" and others "bad," some nonproblematic and others ethically contestable. One encounters in critical literature divisions between polite and rude, constructive and destructive, malicious and benevolent laughter, and so on. Baudelaire, for example, distinguishes between "significative" and "absolute" laughter; Marcel Pagnol between "positive" and "negative"; Etienne Sourieau between "crude" and "comic"; Ernest Dupreel between the "laughter of welcome" and the "laughter of exclusion"; and Herbert Blau between the uncontrollable laughter associated with the comedy of the absurd and the decisively inferior "pallid laughter of amnesia."1 Of all these different kinds of laughter the one that is most frequently associated with the unethical is satirical laughter. Jonathan Swift, who certainly knew the subject well, defines the source of satirical laughter in the following manner: "Satyr is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body's Face but their Own."2 In other words, satirical laughter is a response to a representation that

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ignores the Self at the expense of the Other. The belief that, unlike the Other, the Self is not necessarily subjected to representation invariably results in a disregard for any potential relationship with and brings about the total abdication of responsibility for the Other. Because satirical laughter originates in the notion of the essential ontological inequality of the Self and the Other, it must necessarily arouse contempt for its target. And since in this kind of laughter differences are materialized or personalized, there are few ambiguities that can interfere with the audience's reception. Everyone knows who or what is supposed to be funny, and if this laughter offends, laughers have no excuse for their reactions. If we provisionally assume that satirical laughter with its focus on the concrete is indeed the least ethical form of laughter, we can hypothesize that its polar opposite, laughter aimed towards the abstract, is its kindest counterpart. In contrast to satirical laughter, which as a rule "points to an extra-linguistic, real referent/'3 gentle, or innocent, laughter is non-specific. It deflects the edge of contempt away from an actual person or a particular issue and instead enunciates the difference on a general level. Though this kind of dichotomy may appear to be simplistic, a comparison between Aristophanes and Menander as the paradigmatic representatives of satirical and gentle laughter should enable us to determine whether the answer to the question about the ethics of laughter can be resolved by formulating a typology of this audience response. In his Essay on Comedy, the Victorian novelist and essayist George Meredith divides laughter on the basis of the amount of sympathy with which the laughingstock is treated. This in turn leads him to distinguish between three types of laughter: derisive, satirical, and thoughtful. Thoughtful laughter is "finely-tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity," while the "laughter of satire is a blow in the back or in the face."4 For Meredith, satirical laughter is more brutal than either ironical or humorous laughter because it generates

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the least sympathy for its victim. "Laughter is open to perversion, like other good things," he writes, "the scornful and the brutal sorts are not unknown to us; but the laughter directed by the Comic Spirit is a harmless wine, conducing to sobriejy in the degree that it enlivens."5 No surprise, then, that Meredith is sceptical about Aristophanes, Rabelais, Cervantes, and other satirical authors and instead prefers Menander and Moliere who, in his opinion, represent a better balance of feelings and ideas. "No one really loving Moliere is refined by that love to despise or be dense to Aristophanes, though it may be that the lover of Aristophanes will not have risen to the height of Moliere," Meredith writes and then continues: "Nothing in the world surpasses in stormy fun the scene in the Frogs, when Bacchus and Xanthias receive their thrashings from the hands of businesslike Aeacus ... Passages of Rabelais, one or two in Don Quixote, and the supper In the manner of the ancients' in Peregrine Pickle, are of a similar cataract of laughter. But it is not illuminating; it is not the laughter of the mind."6 It is hard to disagree with Meredith on this issue. The use of personal invective in Aristophanes' comedies is so prominent that to its victims his laughter must have felt truly malicious. It is impossible to imagine that some of Aristophanes' high-profile victims - Cleon, Euripides, and Socrates to name but a few - were not at least annoyed by his jokes. Consider a situation in which Demosthenes, one of the characters in Aristophanes' Knights, describes how Demos, his master, who of course stands for the People of Athens, "bought a slave, Paphlagon, a tanner."7 As soon as Demosthenes characterizes Paphlagon as a tanner, the Athenian audience immediately realized that Aristophanes was actually speaking about the politician and military leader of the day, Cleon, "whose family's wealth," Alan H. Sommerstein relates in his notes, "appears to have come from a tanning and shoemaking business."8 Not only does Aristophanes append to his description of tanner Paphlagon/Cleon the comment "a first-class rogue and slanderer" but he also continues Demosthenes' speech in the same vein: "He

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recognized the old man's nature, did this tanner of a Paphlagon, and he fell at master's feet and started fawning, flattering, toadying, gulling him with odd scraps of waste leather, saying this kind of thing: 'Have your bath, Demos, when you've first completed trying one case.' - Tut this in your mouth - slop this down - have your dessert - take three obols.'"9 In a matter of a few lines, Cleon is mocked for his working-class origins (he is a "tanner") and servility (he bootlicks and offers to bathe and feed the People); he is accused of lining his own pockets (he placates the mob with "scraps of waste leather") and of bribery (the reference to the three obols). Throughout the play, references to Cleon's corruption and political machinations never cease. Paphlagon is called names, accused of every conceivable impropriety, and ridiculed mercilessly for his bad looks (the insinuation that Paphlagon's mask has not been made to resemble Cleon because "the property-makers were too frightened for any of them to be prepared to make a portrait-mask of him"10). To top this abuse is the punishment that the Sausage-Seller suggests for Paphlagon at the end of the play: "Nothing very much; he shall simply ply my old trade. He shall sell sausages all by himself at the city gates, hashing up dogs' and asses' meat in them as he used to hash up the city's affairs; when he is drunk he shall exchange foul language with the prostitutes, and he shall drink used water from the public baths."11 Not a very appealing picture at all: the insults to Cleon's public and private affairs are of such a libellous nature that it is almost impossible to conceive that the Athenian demagogue could just sit in the theatre and calmly absorb the abuse. No matter how much poise Socrates demonstrated when he stood up in the Theatre of Dionysus and allowed the audience to compare him with his fictitious representation in the Clouds, it is difficult to accept that he found all the laughter that Aristophanes levelled at him fair and relevant. While Socrates may have been amused to hear how his theory of the origin of thunder had been transformed into

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the silly Big Fart hypothesis/2 other parts of the play surely must have tested his patience. Think, for instance, of the following exchange between one of Socrates' students and Strepsiades, which occurs right after a story is told about a "gecko shitting on Socrates": STUDENT Then last night there was dinner for us to eat. STREPSIADES I see, so what did he contrive to get you your groats? STUDENT He covered the table with a thin sprinkling of ash, bent a spit, then picked up a faggot ... from the wrestling-school and stole his cloak.13

Even if Socrates possessed the most forgiving sense of humour and did not mind the dirty double-entendre of the quoted passage, rendered very cleverly in this English translation, some of Aristophanes' jokes were bound to have offended many of Socrates' followers who subscribed blindly to his theories and would have been implicated in the Student's hint about what the Athenians perceived as the demeaning practice of passive homosexuality. Similarly, Euripides - who, incidentally, missed the premiere of Aristophanes' Frogs but was undoubtedly present at many earlier extravaganzas of iambic affronts that the comic playwrights heaped on him - must have grown tired of the repeated complaints about his overuse of ekkyklema and mechane, and about his fondness for costuming his actors in rags. He definitely could not have ignored degrading references to his mother in The Frogs as "that goddess of the vegetable-plot," suggestions that his tragedies were only popular among "clothes-snatchers and cutpurses and father-beaters and burglars," or accusations that he "defiled our art with sexual monstrosities."14 If satirical laughter as the Old Comedy practises was not offensive, how can we explain the fact that Cleon sued Aristophanes for slander (and lost)? Or, more radically still, if satirical laughter is not perceived as malevolent, why the need for the infamous decree of Morychides in 440-39 BC

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37

that banned the use of real names, and all other forms of personal humour, from Greek stages? This decree, which is often overlooked amongst the protestations about "freedom of expression" and functioning democracy in ancient Greece, is invoked throughout antiquity as the sign that a previously irresponsible Athens had matured. The attitude continues well past antiquity: both the Victorian Meredith and the otherwise tolerant Boileau see the introduction of the law against naming as a sensible solution: At last the public took in hand the cause, And cured this madness by the power of laws, Forbade, at any time or any place, To name the persons or describe the face.15

In fact, not all of Aristophanes' comedies depend for their laughter on personal satire. In several of his plays, the brunt of his scorn is intended for a concrete political issue rather than for a concrete politician. In Lysistrata, for example, the title character no longer stands for a specific woman but for all Greek pacifists. Likewise, in Plutus Aristophanes is making fun of the contemporary attitudes towards wealth in general and not of a particular rich Athenian. Does this make his approach more ethical, though? Based on the recent reception of such plays as the Ecclesiazusae and Lysistrata, the shift from ad hominem to ad rem does not absolve Aristophanes of his comic sins. Moreover, Lauren K. Taaffe in her book Aristophanes and Women (1993), sees his mockery of women's sexual drive as more devious than his character assassinations of well-known Athenians since it degrades a gender as a whole and not just an isolated but powerful individual who may have done something to deserve the abuse. "While cross-dressing itself may have a subversive aspect, challenging the fixity of gender identity and so the shape of society," she writes, "the restoration of proper dress and language relieves that tension." This means, she continues, that "as twentieth-century readers, we should interpret Ecclesiazusae as a play which represents

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a comic stereotype of woman in order to reaffirm the male power base of Athenian society."16 The pleasure he takes in the portrayal of sexually starved women, one of the staples of Aristophanes' final works, is, in this light, profoundly immoral, first, because it tackles from a dominant point of view an underprivileged community, and second, because it disguises itself in the supposedly gentler form of caring for the Other. The decrease of personal invective in the production of laughter does not make satire less offensive; on the contrary, it just makes laughter apply its unethical logic on a larger scale. The highly customized laughter that aims at an individualized Other offers the spectator a degree of immunity: since in personal satire the object of derision is clearly identified, at least in theory everyone else may feel safe from laughter. Once satirical laughter loses its personal touch, this sense of safety disappears as well. We can no longer comfort ourselves with the thought that laughter probably has nothing to do with us but have to watch a performance assuming that we could be implicated in any laugh. It is therefore possible to argue, as Purdie does, that the ethics of laughter depends not on the extent of its satirical content but on whether the target of laughter is a hegemonic majority or a disenfranchised minority. That is to say, on whether laughter is a vehicle of empowerment or of ideological subjugation. In this view, even attacks on Cleon's working-class roots should not be considered below the belt because his commodification of political decision making was clearly a means for institutionalizing power, whereas the three old women chasing young men in the Ecclesiazusae should be off comic limits because all they do is exercise their right to exert their sexual identities. According to this hypothesis, even satirical laughter can be ethical as long as its role is to subvert rather than to consolidate the dominant discourse. We should not forget that topical laughter that draws heavily on current events and aims at actual people is the least universal of all major types of laughter. It may well be

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the most immediate and the most combustible brand of theatrical turbulence, but its concrete manifestations are also the most transient. Though public abuse is perhaps the oldest attempt of its performance - according to Erich Segal, "insult and scurrilous abuse" can be seen as one of comedy's most important foundations17 - a few decades after its inception satirical laughter is usually in dire need of updating. Performing Aristophanes with full flying colours, that is, with all the mythological baggage and obscure historical references, is something that not even the most passionate classical philologists would wish on their lesseducated enemies. Instead, Aristophanes' survival on contemporary stages is largely due to some wonderfully creative adaptations by playwrights such as Peter Hacks and Pierre Tremblay. Aristophanes' condemnation of war, challenge to tyranny, and exposure of corruption are all timeless satirical subjects, but that is no guarantee that an audience, regardless of all the Greek master's skill, would not prefer to witness the abuse of their own warmongers, dictators, and influence peddlers rather than watch the lampooning of issues - as much as these resemble our own - that have been long forgotten. When Aristophanes is produced today, laughter is much more likely to originate in our unease with his sexual and scatological allusions than in any of his satirical slings. While the concept of innocent laughter is not defined as meticulously as that of its satirical counterpart, Meredith's suggestion that it differs from its less-considerate cousin in the degree of sympathy we experience with its subject is probably quite logical. In other words, my laughter is well intentioned when I feel with the laughingstock rather than apart from it. Because of this, as Goldsmith writes, in sentimental comedy "the Spectator is taught not only to pardon, but to applaud" the characters' "Faults and Foibles."18 Just like the notion of the smile, the idea of gentle laughter, or "benevolent"19 laughter, as John Milton called it in his Apology for Smectymnuus (1643), was articulated most precisely in

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response to the licentiousness and moral frivolity of the wit and satire of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century comedy, and in that sense represents another typical expression of the middle-class taste in literature. Yet the rationalist notion of gentle laughter can be very deceptive in its ethics: the emerging middle class was not only suspicious of laughter because they perceived it as offensive but also, as Swift sarcastically observes in his introduction to Polite Conversation (1738), because it was the matter of politeness to learn "how often, and how loud to laugh."20 The fact that in the eighteenth century the decision to laugh was controlled by a code of manners is an unmistakable indication that even polite laughter was often deemed morally suspicious. In Meredith's view, the ideal methodological model for examining the ethical differences between satirical and gentle laughter is a comparison between Aristophanes and Menander. Though Meredith more often pairs Aristophanes with Moliere than with Menander (whose plays he could not have read anyway since the first one was not rediscovered until 1905), the historical proximity between the two Greek playwrights makes it fairer and more natural to compare them to each other than to an author writing in a different language two thousand years later. How, then, does Menander go about achieving the ideal of thoughtful laughter? In two ways: first, by including rather than excluding the Other; and second, by bracketing rather than marginalizing the difference. Since Menander makes fun of general and abstract human foibles and is not interested in the concrete and specific flaws of an individual, his laughing community is not founded on repeated exercises in symbolic ostracism, as happens with so many of Aristophanes' comedies, but instead works on reintegrating the marginal. Menander changes the focus of Greek comedy so that the laughter it generates is no longer oriented towards an easily recognizable external scapegoat but originates in a careful introspection of the spectators themselves, who have to admit, before they can laugh, that they too are afflicted by the same weaknesses as the characters.

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In so doing/ Menander moves rapidly into the realm of the ethical. His laughter now no longer serves to assign blame and brand the unfamiliar but has become the evidence of our acceptance of individual responsibility. Sharing the characters' failings "by comic sympathy" is how Meredith sees the laughter "of the feelings and the idea/'21 This state is achieved much more easily if the performance of laughter shows restraint in its implementation of available rhetorical strategies. For Menander, pointing out or foregrounding a character's error in judgment is usually enough. He feels no great need to employ excessive comic force when subtle measures already accomplish his purpose. Charisius in The Arbitration, convinced that his wife Pamphila has been cheating on him, indeed hires the courtesan Habrotonon and moves in with her, but she specifically complains to his slave Onesimus that "he won't even let [her] sit next to him at the table,"22 let alone sleep with her. Charisius may behave irresponsibly, but only to a limit. Resorting to a total annihilation of the laughable subject's identity when mere exposure suffices is, in Menander's opinion, not only uneconomical but also unethical. And if such a conservative approach results in less laughter, one should not worry too much. After all, "to laugh at everything is to have no appreciation of the comic of comedy."23 These two essential principles of Menander's comedy can be seen in action in one of the first scenes in his bestpreserved play, The Grouch. Here, Cnemon's rant immediately identifies him as the crank from the title: Wasn't that fellow Perseus the lucky one! For two reasons. First, he had wings so he never had to meet anyone walking around on the grounds. Second, he had some sort of gadget to turn anyone who bothered him into stone. I wish I had it right now - I'd fill the place with statues. God almighty, life isn't worth living nowadays! Now people trespass on your property to come and jabber away at you. I don't even work that part of the property! I've given it up. Too many people passing by. And now they even chase me up into the hills. Oh, these crowds, these mobs!24

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Not a trace of topical reference in this scene. All the names of actual people are now gone, political jabs have been eliminated, and there is no running commentary on the state of Greek literature. In their place everyday life appears, in its full anonymity. What Greek audiences would most likely have found funny in this speech is Cnemon's extreme behaviour, which falls far from the ancient ideals of moderation as articulated, for instance, in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. When Cnemon wishes that he could turn people into stone, he is clearly overreacting to the feeble attempts of his neighbours to communicate with him. When he rants about the crowds following him into the wilderness, his complaints are again exaggerated, for there are only two other people present on the stage. By moving from Athens to a countryside cave in Phyle, Cnemon has literally retreated to the margins of his community. The sympathy with which Menander handles him and the benevolent laughter with which the audience responds to this careful treatment serve not to punish the unfairly bitter and occasionally abusive recluse but to gradually resocialize him. It is not until the final scenes of the play when Cnemon is mercilessly harassed by Geta and the hired cook Sicon, the very same people he used to chase away from his house, that this socialization may overstep its bounds and become ethically questionable; but he is already converted by then and reluctantly joins in their joy. In a paraphrase of Northrop Frye's point/5 the spectators' laughter can be seen as a signal to Cnemon, and to all audience members just like him, that despite everything he is one of them and that they are ready to readmit him into their community. To ensure that this process is complete and that no one will leave the theatre upset at being singled out, Menander regularly switches his focus in the latter stages of his plays away from the primary target of laughter and also prods those characters who previously acted as vehicles of comic exposure. In The Grouch, the young Sostratus, who was instrumental in making fun of Cnemon, must himself

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endure the humiliating experience of farm labour before he is allowed to marry Cnemon's daughter. To add insult to injury, he is taught - by his future father-in-law of all people - that "this is what shows the true man - whether, even though he is rich, he can submit to putting himself on a level with those who are poor/'26 Yet even the kind laughter of Menander is not immune to ethical criticism. For one, he rarely feels compelled to spare the slaves from laughter. Habrotonon and Onesimus are probably freed at the end of The Arbitration (though, unfortunately, in the lost fragment of the play), but they do not get the dispensation from laughter that Menander bestows on most of the masters. While the personal dignity of the old men and their sons is usually restored by act 5, the slaves remain trapped in their comic identities. From the point of view of the ethics of laughter, one might speculate that the laughter/slave (and later laughter/servant) dialectic, which determined comic dramaturgy for so many centuries, is a direct consequence of the socially negligible influence slaves and servants exert in their societies. As the class that literally personified disenfranchised Otherness, slaves and servants had no public voice and were of no concern in the production of laughter. Furthermore, there is very little about Cnemon's actions in The Grouch that one should feel confident to disapprove. He dislikes people and has a bad temper, and his attitude in the past forced his wife Myrrhine and stepson Gorgias to move out of their home, but very little of this kind of behaviour is evident in the play itself. In the passage above, for example, just about the pettiest thing Cnemon does is to attempt to protect one of the basic tenets of Western society, private property. He grumbles a lot and refuses to allow his daughter to marry a perfect stranger, and, it is revealed later in the play, he dresses in rags and prefers simple farmers to townspeople. Hardly enough to trigger laughter, one is tempted to say. A few moments after he has been rescued from the well into which he had accidentally fallen, Cnemon eloquently

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articulates his major character flaw: "I guess the one mistake I made was in thinking I was the one person who was completely self-sufficient, who'd never have need of anyone else. Well, now when I see how strange and sudden the end of a man's life can be, I realize how little I knew. A man has to have someone standing by who can look after him."27 Not only the fact that he learnt a lesson about the ultimate mystery of life (the appreciation of existence despite its lack of sense) but also the profoundly philosophical account of the causes of his past condition should make all ethical readers or spectators question the appropriateness of their response to Gnemon's earlier boorishness. Suddenly, a whole new range of possibilities arise for taking exception to the production of laughter in The Grouch: the right to find funny one's desire to be self-sufficient is not an automatic one; a defensive spectator could be offended by the implication that trespassing should be condoned; and the condemnation of Cnemon's lack of interest in appearances could be perceived as snobbery. Does this prove, though, that there is no such thing as innocent laughter and that Menander's more tactful approach is not a priori more ethical than Aristophanes' uninhibited jeering? A second look at the idea of gentle laughter inevitably ends up revealing that it, too, is afflicted by the same predicament that plagues satirical laughter: it is directed at a certain target. Of course, the butts of benevolent jokes may be far removed from their audience - Cnemon has literally moved away from his detractors, and twenty thousand Athenian theatre-goers watching the production of The Grouch have little in common with someone who believes that three is a crowd - and thoughtful humour certainly seldom dismantles its subject quite as radically as, say, satire. But this still does not ensure that an overly sensitive farmer might not be offended by what everyone else perceived as a charming observation of an irrational obsession. Segal suggests in his interpretation of The Grouch that "a loner, a misanthrope, and a melancholic, Knemon would today be labeled a depressive."28 How easy it is to object to poking fun at a

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person who should be on Prozac rather than on a healthy dose of public humiliation! If Cnemon is a sick man, no symptom of his personality disorder should strike a sympathetic spectator as abnormal enough to warrant a laugh. This is also true in a hypothetical case in which no one in the audience shares with the source of laughter any attributes of identity. The suggestion that only an insignificant minority - in our case, depressed ancient farmers from the outskirts of Athens - swears by a particular law does not in itself deny the assumption that all laughter, which as a matter of principle is based on trying to prove that any rule is intrinsically unnecessary, is a form of dictatorship of the laughing majority over the derided minority. An analogous logic can be applied to the second part of the previously outlined counterargument. Even if a character flaw is handled ever so gently, Meredith's "blow in the back" is a blow whether it is delivered with bare knuckles or boxing gloves. I am not going to argue that the more considerate production of laughter is actually more hurtful because it implies a degree of condescension and does not treat the object of laughter with the aggressive respect of the openly satirical. Such an argument would require more sophistry than is necessary to prove my point. Suffice it to say that the amount of pain is irrelevant once pain has been inflicted. In this case, it is precisely as with Sophocles' Antigone: the gesture matters more than the actual act. As soon as there is a fistful of dirt on the unburied body, the transgression has happened and the consequences are inevitable. One could thus conclude, just as for Aristophanes, that even gentle laughter is malicious, less painfully perhaps, but more broadly. The objects of such laughter might be insignificant or removed, but they do exist and may, because of their generality, often address a much larger cross-section of society. While Aristophanes' denunciation of Cleon may have been base and his grudge against Socrates petty, it is the specificity of his blows that enables the rest of the audience, Cleon's political supporters and Socrates's students among them, to ignore his questionable attacks. The laughter

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elicited by Menander's Cnemon and Charisius, on the other hand, precisely because of its generality (who among us has not occasionally felt depressed or jealous?), is just as likely to alienate a large number of spectators as it is to reach them. When Swift decided to write in his epitaph that "malice never was his Aim; / He lash'd the Vice but spar'd the Name,"29 he was not issuing a posthumous apology: rather, he reminded everyone how much further a non-specific satire can extend. All laughter is at someone's expense. That someone may be far away, long gone, or very unpopular, but that does not mean that he or she is not an individual with views, integrity, and an identity. And regardless of how much a person may deserve the reproach, one cannot deny that this individual may be hurt by it. Even laughter at the intolerant is ultimately a sign of our intolerance (of the intolerant). To use a well-known example from the not-so-distant past, Adolf Hitler was mortally offended by Charles Chaplin's 1940 film The Great Dictator, and if the Germans had won the war the film would most likely have been considered a classic of primitivism and defamation, and not a masterpiece of political parody. Though gentle laughter could be construed as belonging to what is popularly called laughing with as opposed to laughing at someone, laughing with is ultimately also laughing at - at the absent. And who can give even those among us who willingly subject ourselves to laughter the right to make a decision for all others who have not been consulted about being implicated in the process of laughing? In this respect, the notion of laughing with appears, if not unethical, contradictory and redundant. Purdie explains the distinction between laughing with and laughing at in the following manner: "What we laugh 'at' in the case of an apparently serious text which has failed to implicate us for some reason is very similar to what we are likely to laugh 'with' in joking texts; but while laughing 'at' the serious text implies laughing at its 'inept' authorial speaker, in response to joking we accept the invitation to identify with the 'author ego;' we

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construct a 'proper' language in which it speaks 'for' us, even though the text is marked as 'improperly' excessive."30 Or, to turn her perspective inside out: when we laugh "with" a joking text, we construe its "author ego" as an "inept speaker." When we laugh with, we laugh at the absence, or the lack, of a serious text. Laughing with only simulates inclusion: let us not forget that bracketing, too, is an ambiguous process. Inasmuch as bracketing encloses the marginal within the central, it also separates the two. By standing in between, brackets fulfil a dual function: they simultaneously include and exclude; integrate and contain; they denote the belonging (being-with) and the detachment (being-at). When Cnemon is reunited with his family and Charisius with his wife, their alterity is safely contained. They do not necessarily become part of the Same, but their Otherness no longer infringes on the identity of their communities, much like what happened, in Michel Foucault's description of the quarantine, to the people afflicted with plague whose disease was controlled through "a meticulous tactical partitioning."31 If I am with the Other, this means that we are at the same place. What is laughing with the Other if not laughing together at whomever or whatever is not there? Since laughing with only succeeds if the object of laughter acts as the subject of its production, the laughers as the recipients of this product are so restricted in their freedom to act that they can no longer be considered subjects. The situation is additionally complicated because the inherently paradoxical nature of satire as a literary genre may actually lead one to wonder if satirical laughter is indeed unethical. Its essential orientation towards the concrete Denis Diderot writes in The Paradox of Acting (1773) that "satire deals with a tartufe; comedy with the Tartufe. Satire attacks the vicious; comedy attacks a vice"32 - means that satire is frequently seen as socially the most committed of all literary forms, which in turn makes its preferred response a credible candidate for the discourse of ethical criticism.

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Not only is satire rhetorically very convincing but it is also the most didactic of all strategies of laughter. Francis H. Buckley's recent vindication of laughter emphatically asserts that in principle all "laughter has tendency. It takes sides," and that satirical laughter's main function is "to correct our morals."33 As satire is interested solely in social aberrations and does not, or ought not to, attack values that deserve to be championed, it is often considered to be the only ethical form of producing laughter. Patrice Pavis in his Dictionary of the Theatre (1996) suggests that the scope of satire "is fundamentally serious, as it sets up a coherent system of counter-values in opposition to the values criticized"34 and sees satire as a moral reformer. Satirical comedies, such as Moliere's Tartuffe (1664), Alain Rene Lesage's Turcaret (1708), Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector (1836), Gerhart Hauptmann's The Beaver-coat (1893), or Vladimir Mayakovsky's The Bedbug (1928), are therefore among the most commonly analyzed plays of the comic canon. Since their investigation of society's darker side is perceived as much more significant than the harmless exposure of the congenital limitations of theatrical conventions on which, for instance, farce relies, critics can even forgive an audience's decision to respond to satire with laughter. This observation, however, brings forth yet another critical contradiction: the type of comic genre that is, in some scholars' opinion, the most ethical generates the cruellest and least-moral response. The English romantic critic William Hazlitt, in his Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), not only justifies the supremacy of tragedy over comedy but also establishes an elaborate categorization of the comic. Its lowest form, in his opinion, is the "merely laughable," which relies predominantly on the "accidental contradiction between our expectations and the event." This is followed by the ludicrous, where surprise is augmented by "some deformity or inconvenience ... contrary to what is customary or desirable," and finally, "the highest degree of the laughable," the ridiculous, "the province of satire," "which is contrary not only to custom but to sense and reason."35

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The similarities between this classification and Meredith's are obvious, as is the implied moral judgment of laughter. If it is possible to reconcile theoretically the disapproval of laughter as an audience response and the promotion of satire as a genre, the phrase "satirical laughter" must be one of the most convoluted critical concepts known. It is, at the same time, aesthetically sound and morally objectionable; structurally complex and critically biased; thoroughly deserved and entirely inappropriate. Since great satirists such Juvenal, Rabelais, Swift, and others laugh at everyone and in their assaults on everything sacred spare nothing, their approach is, despite "working on a storage of bile,"36 in many ways more democratic and less discriminating than what produces gentler forms of laughter. Degradation is evenly spread, and there is no need for a justification of exceptions. Whether this makes a response to their works more moral is another question altogether. First, the satirists' own identity will always colour the critical reception of their works. As hard as they may try to escape the ideological discourse that constructed them, satirists cannot remain politically neutral: their very attempt at neutrality is an ideological stance of its own. Second, society itself is not egalitarian. Not everyone in a society starts from the same position, and if satirical laughter cuts everyone down by the same increment, the inherent inequalities in a society will just be further perpetuated. Only one thing is sure at this point in our discussion: neither satirical laughter nor its equally confusing relative, gentle, or innocent, laughter, are the elusive objective in our search for ethical laughter.

CHAPTER THREE

Nonsense

It is still too early to abandon all hope of finding ethical laughter. If all laughter is indeed a result of our recognition of the contingency of difference, we must at least consider what happens when the most rudimentary of all differences, the Saussurean linguistic difference, becomes a subject of laughter. Since within a particular linguistic environment (for all the English, or French, or ancient Greek speakers, and so on) the code as the foundation of discourse is in principle shared, in laughter that targets a linguistic difference the danger of enunciating the Other should, at least in theory, be minimized. Exploring the limitations of linguistic representation is, in this view, inherently less contentious than the testing and stretching of the boundaries of our political, sexual, or literary identities. Inasmuch as the debunking of the immanent imperfections of verbal discourse may, in its strategies, parallel satirical laughter at the exposure of an integral contradiction within a political system (in Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae, for example, the hypothetical dangers of the Athenians' constitutional right to stack the assembly are examined), there is nothing that guarantees that both approaches will have the same impact on their recipients. The pseudo-Aristotelian Tractatus Coislinianus, in fact, already distinguishes between laughter arising "from actions" and laughter "from speech," which incorporates

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most elements of what we today call verbal humour.1 While a polemic with political beliefs, philosophical teachings, or literary preferences will inevitably upset all those who subscribe to the satirized issues, the idea of parodying the semantic limitations of a particular language does not have quite the same edge and could easily not be at all problematic. A pun that demonstrates, if I can paraphrase Ferdinand de Saussure,2 the unfortunate arbitrariness of linguistic difference can hardly be compared in its effect to laughter at the expense of gender or racial differences. In practice, these matters are, of course, not quite so simple. First, we cannot ignore the fact that speakers differ in their command of a language. Native speakers are usually more comfortable than those who learned a particular language in school. Just think of all those instances when a character in a play or a novel is mocked for consistently mispronouncing certain words: from the barbarian god Triballus in Aristophanes' Birds to Tristan Tzara in Tom Stoppard's Travesties (1974), linguistic inability or alternative ability has been regularly subjected to laughter. Even within the same language, discursive competence varies: speakers of the central idiom are usually in a superior position to speakers of regional dialects, and better-educated speakers hold a distinct advantage over their less-schooled counterparts. There are few more obvious examples of how power can be gained from "proper" speaking than Shaw's Pygmalion (1913), in which Eliza Doolittle literally makes the transition from being the Other to becoming her-Self by learning how to dominate the discourse of upper-class English. Whenever language is used as an instrument of ideological subjugation, one cannot consider it beyond ethical reproach. Homonyms, synonyms, paronyms, and other techniques that Tractatus Coislinianus lists as staples of verbal humour can undoubtedly be used to promote unethical ideas. A simple pun, when employed in an actual communicational exchange, may abuse: not just the language itself but the other speaker as well. As Aristotle points out in The Nicomachean Ethics, "mockery is a species of revilement."3 While

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wit, when applied in moderation, is considered a virtue in Aristotle's ethical system, the line between buffoonery and wit is precariously thin. "It is a mark of a tactful man to say and listen to such things which befit a good and free man," Aristotle writes. "A buffoon, on the other hand, is a slave to humour, sparing neither himself nor others if he can make people laugh, and using such language which a cultivated man will never use and some of which he will not even listen to."4 When the instability of meaning is marked with the intention of discrediting a particular speaker, one can hardly speak about a disinterested action. Let us not forget that, according to Purdie, it is the mastery of discourse that wins comic agons. The audience invariably sides with the characters who dominate the dialogue and laughs at those who fail in their attempts to exert control over conversation. If there is a concrete message in a comedy, it is usually delivered by the most articulate figure who has his or her way with words. From this perspective, all verbal strategies for producing laughter that aim to achieve discursive subordination are not merely rhetorical devices but tools of social integration as well. And any disclosure of the inadequacies of a language that is performed in a dialogue is, as Purdie argues, necessarily a means for revealing the discursive incompetency of the other speaker. Obviously, not all forms of laughter at language are ethical. Only those instances of verbal humour where fun is made of language itself and not of its speakers, that is, only laughter delivered outside of what linguistics calls pragmatic concerns, seem likely to have any ethical potential. All other usages of language to amuse deal not just with utterances but also with their enunciation and are thus ultimately suspect. Think, for instance, of sarcasm, which colloquial tradition considers the lowest form of wit. Not until a sentence is quoted, that is, foregrounded with quotation marks, assigned to a virtual speaker, and ascribed a particular performative quality can we detect in it a departure

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from what Victor Raskin calls "bona-fide"5communication and take an exception to its semantic implications. In our case, this means that the best chance for a nonoffensive verbal laughter is laughter of pure syntax and semantics, which paradoxically manifests itself best when an utterance is devoid of any sense - that is, in the humour of nonsense. Oscar Wilde, Edward Lear, and Lewis Carroll, as the pioneers of this genre, writing in an era when euphemisms, cliches, and invented etymologies rule not only in nonsense literature but also in everyday language, represent an almost ideal testing ground for this hypothesis: Wilde's aphorisms because they have been regularly described as "full of colour yet harmless"; Lear's limericks because they defy all non-linguistic analyses; and Carroll's wordplay because he "was so offended by the slightest impropriety in language" that he "even considered editing an edition of Shakespeare for girls in which he would bowdlerize Bowdler by omitting lines that Bowdler considered inoffensive."6 It is somewhat unusual to begin a discussion on the ethics of verbal laughter with an author whose writing career and life were ruined by repeated public accusations of immorality. Even before his disastrous trial and subsequent imprisonment, Wilde had been regularly berated for his casual attitude towards social values and admonished for trivializing morality. Before we assume that this automatically disqualifies Wilde's laughter from an ethical consideration, we should take into account two counterarguments. First, morality and ethics are related but not equivalent, and even those critics who complained about the lack of moral perspective in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) would have had a hard time denying the essential ethical dimension of, say, Wilde's fairy tales or his essay on The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891). Second, it was primarily Wilde's lifestyle and not his jokes that offended Victorian sensibilities. As much as Wilde's behaviour was seen as outrageous, contemporary audiences loved his plays and rarely found his

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laughter controversial. If we recall Shaw's review, Wilde's humour was seen as harmless and insubstantial rather than aggressive and dangerous. During his career as a writer, Wilde composed hundreds of maxims, epigrams, and aphorisms and integrated them into virtually all genres of his writing, from comedies and novels to political and philosophical essays. Most of these snippets of wit exploit the common cliches and platitudes of the time, and foreground their semantic exhaustion with persistent repetitions, paradoxical inversions, or fortuitous substitutions. The aphorism "The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast," for instance, is a parody of Shakespeare's endlessly abused verse from As You Like It, while his suggestion that "No man" is "rich enough to buy back [his] past" is a spoof of the common saying "No one is rich enough to buy cheaply."7 Despite its charm and linguistic ingenuity, the politics of Wilde's aphorisms is clearly not ethically flawless. We can object to their amorality ("Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike"); their stereotypical depiction of the sexes ("Women give to men the very gold of their lives ... but they invariably want it back in such very small change"); and their ethnic stereotyping (Sir Thomas's suggestion in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) that "when good Americans die they go to Paris" is accompanied by Lord Henry's comment that when bad Americans die, "they go to America").8 Because of this, many critics claim that Wilde's wit actually "satirizes Victorianism" and that it is characterized by "a really deep vein of satirical philosophy."9 In addition to these openly antagonistic witticisms, there is another series of Wilde's aphorisms that cannot be considered ethical. If it is true that all laughter at language that occurs in a pragmatically specific situation is morally ambiguous, then any epigram that can be attributed to a rhetorically distinct and coherent speaker has its identifiable target. In other words, all those instances of wit that are either spoken by a character in a play, novel, or story, or are

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used to promote a particular line of argument in Wilde's essays and criticism should automatically be excluded from further analysis. Wilde's quip that "ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone"10 may initially appear to be perfectly innocuous. Moreover, with its economy and elegance it not only expresses a broadly acceptable truism, or a profound observation on life and education, but literally epitomizes Polonius's suggestion that "brevity is the soul of wit."11 Yet our view could easily change if we take into account the pragmatic context in which this aphorism has been uttered. The line is spoken by Lady Bracknell in act i of The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) as a part of her inquiry into Jack Worthing's suitability for marriage with her daughter Gwendolen. Here is the relevant passage of the text: LADY BRACKNELL

JACK

.

LADY BRACKNELL

I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing. Which do you know? (after some hesitation) I know nothing, Lady Bracknell. I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.12

Wilde wrote many of his most famous aphorisms before the plays in which they appear, often tested them at the parties that he attended, and occasionally even fashioned his characters around the lines/3 but that still does not prevent the person who does not share the author's views on the state of English education (no matter how relevant they

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may be) from finding Lady Bracknell's comment cynical and callous. From the point of view of ethical criticism, one cannot ignore the pragmatic function of the aphorism in this chunk of dialogue: Lady Bracknell uses it to bully Jack and prove her rhetorical authority over him. A similar logic can be applied to all those maxims that Wilde employs in his criticism and essays, except that there the author constitutes himself as the speaker with superior discursive competency and treats his readers as the impressionable and hapless listeners who will be swayed by the power of his language to accept his arguments. Wilde's flamboyant but ostensibly harmless oxymoron that "the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing" acquires an edge as soon as one realizes that it is an integral part of his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism.14 For an opponent of Utopian socialism, the idea that the fundamental values of a capitalist society are trivial is at least questionable, if not misguided. Sensitive readers may be offended by the aphorism's tacit insinuation - even though the sentence is not addressed specifically at them and even though its wit depends on the semantic tension between the adverb "everything" and its qualifier beginning with "except" - rather than by Wilde's direct attack on a journalist or a newspaper owner. Our best chance of finding ethical laughter in Wilde's work rests, therefore, with stand-alone aphorisms, that is manifestations of discourse that function merely as text and not through their speaker or author. In order to reduce the possibility of pragmatic and contextual interferences that occur when a witty sentence is an integral part of a narrative, I selected a handful of loosely connected examples that have been published in two short collections of aphorisms. The first one, A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the OverEducated (1894), originally appeared in Saturday Review, while the second one, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894), was intended for the same periodical but was then eventually published in the only issue of the

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student magazine Chameleon. Beyond some thematic similarities, there is no discernible structure in either collection, and while several of the aphorisms were later recycled in Wilde's other works, we can safely assume that the danger of pragmatic contamination is minimal. The first example - "It is very sad nowadays that there is so little useless information" - follows a model that Wilde frequently utilizes in his maxims: to borrow Koestler's terminology, Wilde bisociates the noun "information," which is usually defined as an item of substantial news, and the adjective "useless," which denotes exactly the opposite from substance.15 Because of Wilde's clever encoding, it takes a couple of seconds before we can grasp the implication of the sentence, namely, that life would have been much happier if reality were dissociated from it. A similar technique, though used to articulate the diametrically opposite attitude towards the world, can also be found in an aphorism from Phrases and Philosophies. "Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance,"16 exclaims Wilde, lamenting the lack of excitement in life and hinting in a curiously ontological manner that there is, at a certain level, no difference between something and nothing. Both of these aphorisms provoke laughter because they manage to expose the fundamental inability of English idiomatic phraseology to deal with matters of logic. Wilde shows us how language cannot keep up with the speed or multiple dimensions of our thought and how any discussion about linguistic sense is doomed to convey more with its failure than with its success in capturing meaning. Though lapidary in their scope, his observations about information and importance are masterpieces of discursive ingenuity and creativity, and demonstrate beautifully the nature of wit as a rhetorical strategy that deliberately encrypts sense. As Gotthold Ephraim Lessing says in the Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767-69), "Genius loves simplicity, and wit complication."17 Does this mean, though, that Wilde's stand-alone aphorisms only impress and never insult? Those among them that do

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not flaunt Wilde's amorality, that avoid articulating his dislike of middle-class taste, and that do not resort to sweeping generalizations about the relationship between men and women certainly appear to resist ethical objections. When Wilde shows off his linguistic brilliance by combining the cliche "a waste of time and money" and the proverb "Time is money" into the caustic "Time is waste of money"18 and in the process forces us to reconsider both how significant the influence of syntax on meaning is, and how unimaginative and trite our value system, his effort could hardly be considered offensive. Instead, his aphorism could be seen as a sign of the tremendous verbal skills that are transforming Wilde's wit into the true poetry of laughter and as such elevate it to the stage that, in conventional understanding, was reserved for Beauty and considered off limits to the vulgarity of grinning and giggling. If Wilde can make us laugh simply by exploring the lack of sense in everyday discourse, and by causing the sudden reappearance of meaning, then it is probably difficult to question the ethical neutrality of laughter at words. His epigram "One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one's hearers"19 is a play on two words that both have to do with the activity of one's ears, yet do not always share all of their semantic connotations (Wilde is actually making a point about talking, not about hearing or listening): can this linguistic exercise really offend anyone? Or to put it another way: does Wilde's systematic disassembling of the semantics and syntax of everyday English jeopardize anything but the identity of language itself? When Wilde retouches well-known cliches and exploits the acoustic similarities of certain words we surely laugh at the rigidity of language and not at its referents. If anything, instances of polysemy and semantic ambiguity are seen as new layers of signification and as yet another proof of the wonderful complexity of language as our chief means of communication, and not as acts of discursive abuse. We are forgetting, however, the Foucauldian idea that when a text exerts its authority over discourse (the ability

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to make someone laugh at language broadcasts such an authority), it remains an expression of power over the reader as much as if that authority were exerted by a speaker or an author. While power in itself is not always negative - Purdie argues that "subjective empowerment is involved in all joking, and that is not an intrinsically bad thing"20 - its practical implementation inevitably results in a hierarchy of oppressive relationships and, in particular, in the hegemonic relationship of an authoritative text to its readers. Possessing wit, a term that in the English language shares its etymology with the word wisdom, is the text's method of controlling the reader. If, through wit, the text construes itself as wise, this by implication means that its readers, if not unwise, are at least not quite as wise. Laughing at Wilde's aphorisms is, in this light, laughing at everyone who cannot quite keep up with their eloquence and command of language. This means that even his standalone aphorisms can annoy. They may no longer irritate all those readers who disapprove of Wilde's sexual preferences or his aestheticist views of art, but they will anger the ones who feel threatened by his discursive power. A laugh at Wilde's epigram on hearing and listening will frustrate everyone who could not decode its semantic noise quickly enough, while one's smile at his maxim on time and money will exclude all those who initially assumed Wilde's version of the idiomatic phrase was incorrect and did not realize that the violation was deliberate. Once I recognize a text as intentionally funny, everyone else who has not done this yet has been demoted a step down the discursive chain. Simply put, when I do not get a joke and others do, I lose power: instead of the Author (of laughter) I become the Other. .

In Wilde's aphorisms sense as a semantic and philosophical category is displaced or dislocated; in Lear's limericks sense is entirely eliminated. Whereas laughter at Wilde's aphorisms is conditional on our understanding of his wit, there can be no understanding of Lear's nonsensical poetry, only the realization that interpretation no longer leads to sense.

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Because of this, pragmatic concerns and issues of authority and power have little to no impact on the ethics of our response. Nonsense abolishes all hierarchies of discourse and tolerates no hegemony. It disempowers everyone. It is no longer marred by semantic noise; nonsense is communication taken over by noise. In the highly moralistic Victorian era, when tactless laughter was frowned upon even more so than under the Puritans or during the Enlightenment, nonsense humour was probably the safest option available. In many ways, Lear's approach is a natural extension of the attitude towards morality that compelled the prudish Victorians to drape the legs of tables and omit the word toilet from dictionaries. At a time when the genteel euphemism "white meat" was invented to avoid the phrases chicken or turkey breast, nonsense became the ethical path of choice to laughter. Nonsense is not, of course, an exclusively Victorian phenomenon. The English word itself was first used in the seventeenth century, while individual elements of nonsense such as imaginary languages and silly refrains can be encountered periodically in literature from antiquity on. Interestingly enough, both Bergson and Freud saw a connection between nonsense and dreams. Bergson thus believed that an "inversion of common sense" as one of the main methods of laughter "is of the same nature as that of dreams," while Freud argued that nonsense just as commonly appears in "the formation of dreams" as it does in conceptual jokes.21 In his opinion, a nonsensical joke that "makes use of deviations from normal thinking" makes us laugh by criticizing stupidity.22 Since very few of us would admit to stupidity, or openly object to making fun of it, Freud's interpretation of nonsense as a representation of stupidity could well be a strong argument in favour of the ethics of laughter at nonsense. Most of Lear's limericks - as the best-known though by no means only form of nonsense he wrote - are rather harmless. In 1861 Lear published a collection of 112 limericks entitled The Book of Nonsense that more or less singlehandedly

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established his reputation as a writer and ensured the limerick's status as a genre of poetry. All of the short poems in the collection share the same basic structure: they are five lines long; the first, second, and third lines usually have eight or nine syllables, and the third and fourth lines five or six; the metre is usually but not always anapaestic; the rhyming scheme is invariably aabba; the first line starts with "There was a so-and-so" and then defines the person; and often a portion of this line is repeated again at the end of the poem. Here is the first limerick from the collection: There was an Old Man with a beard, Who said, "It is just as I feared! Two Owls and a Hen, Four Larks and a Wren, Have all built their nests in my beard!"23

Is it possible to imagine something less controversial and yet more amusing? As cosy as a Victorian Christmas idyll, Lear's poem depicts a hard-to-conceive picture and does so with a creative use of rhyme. Not much more alarming is the fifth limerick from the collection where the focus is again one of Lear's true loves, birds, except that here the source of fun is a woman and not a man: There was a Young Lady whose bonnet, Came untied when the birds sat upon it; But she said: "I don't care! All the birds in the air Are welcome to sit on my bonnet!"24

In many respects, this limerick is more innocuous than the one quoted earlier: the Young Lady in question not only accepts the infringement on her identity (she is, after all identified by having a bonnet) but fully endorses it, thereby deflating any impending ethical reservations. One can only applaud her tolerance for the Other and acceptance of difference.

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In The Act of Creation, Koestler explains the laughter at limericks as rooted in our response to the perception of "the bisociation of exalted form with trivial content." He continues: "The rolling dactyls of the first line of the limerick, carrying, instead of Hector and Achilles, a young lady from Stockton as their passenger, make her already appear ridiculous, regardless of the calamities which are sure to befall her. In this atmosphere of malicious expectation whatever witticism the text has to offer will have a much enhanced effect."25 It is the limerick's metric and rhyming format that is the necessary condition of laughter. A limerick may make no sense, but it has a very precise prosodic structure; the restrictiveness of this structure is what becomes the prime field of laughter's explorations. Knowing about Lear's difficult childhood, his psychological problems and phobias, love of birds, and extensive travelling experience may enable us to remove some of the semantic fog that permeates his limericks and possibly detect in them traces of meaning, but we do not need this kind of biographical information in order to laugh at his poetry. As long as we are implicitly aware of the limerick's structure, we can revel in the latent tension between the name and the rhyme and laugh at the unexpected and illogical combinations of words. But their structure is not only what makes Lear's limericks funny: it is also what, from a critical point of view, makes them an ethical liability. T.S. Eliot, in his Music of Poetry (1942), contends that Lear's "non-sense is not vacuity of sense: it is a parody of sense, and that is the sense of it."26 Elizabeth Sewell similarly argues that nonsense is "not merely the denial of sense, a random reversal of ordinary experience and an escape into a haphazard infinity, but ... a carefully limited world, controlled and directed by reason, a construction subject to its own laws."27 Because it has its own laws, nonsense is not beyond imposing them on its readers and in the process restricting their interpretive power. Lear's limericks ultimately exercise their discursive authority just as much as Wilde's aphorisms or Aristophanes' personal satire. In their natural reflex to maintain their

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structure, limericks too exhibit the principal fallacy of an unethical strategy of laughter: their relationship to reality remains intentional. Or, as Koestler says much more elegantly, "Even with rhymed gibberish the illusion of meaning is essential."28 And where there is meaning, there are unwanted connotations. In the concrete example of Lear's limericks, the unethical consequences of the imposition of structure are most clearly seen in the use of appropriation as an interpretive strategy that both contains the identity and debunks its difference. Think, for instance, of so many of the first (and last) lines of limericks and of their geographical and phonological characteristics. Limericks are written about Old and Young Men, Women, and Persons from places such as Abruzzi, Aosta, Apulia, Bohemia, Cadiz, Chili, Coblenz, Corfu, Crete, Ischia, Jamaica, Kamschatka, Madras, Majorca, Moldavia, Nepal, Parma, Rhodes, Smyrna, Sparta, Tartary, and Vesuvius. Though these more or less exotic, yet .real, locations sound like stops on Lear's itinerary around the world,29 they have another attribute in common: they are all very foreign - foreign as in far away and foreign as in sounding strange; foreign to insular Victorians and to the English language. Even if we overlook some of the limericks that are, from today's perspective, most blatantly xenophobic - the infamous Limerick 78 on the "Old Man of Jamaica" immediately springs to mind - one cannot shake the impression that these particular names were chosen specifically to emphasize the difference between us and them. A whole chapter in Thomas Byrom's book on Lear's limericks is dedicated specifically to this issue. Not only do they live in funny-sounding places but they also behave very differently from us. Some of them, for example, subsist on strange diets: the "twenty sons" of the "Old Man of Apulia" eat "nothing but buns"; the "twenty-five sons and one daughter" of the "Old Person of Sparta" prefer "snails"; the "Old Person of Ischia" calms himself down by eating "thousands

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of figs"; while the "Old Person of Troy" drinks "warm brandy and soy/' but only "with a spoon, / By the light of the moon."30 Others have peculiar clothing or sleeping habits ("the Young person of Crete" is "dressed in a sack, / Spickle-speckled with black" and the "Old Man of Moldavia" sleeps "on a table") or exhibit a propensity for idiosyncratic forms of violence (the "Young Person of Smyrna" asks her Grandmother to burn her Cat) while the "Old Person of Tartary / ... divided his jugular artery."31 One could, naturally, counter this argument by suggesting that the choice of these particular geographical places was dictated by their rhyming difficulty and not by a desire to pass judgment on their inhabitants. Just try to find a rhyme for "Kamschatka" (Lear goes for "a remarkably fat cur").32 After all, while the majority of limericks do talk about weird foreigners, quite a few are dedicated to bizarre Britons and some to generic people who are not identified by their geographical origin but by their peculiar appearance, habits, or props. Still, both of these subcategories seem to favour locations and occupations that pose a distinct rhyming challenge: Anerley, Cheadle, Chertsey, Dorking, Melrose, and Whitehaven are all very British but no easier to pin down metrically than Smyrna or Vesuvius. Likewise, the Old Men "with a poker," "with an owl," and "at a easement"33 take some effort before they can be anchored with a rhyme within the majority discourse. Yet in a curious manner this explanation is even more demeaning. I mentioned earlier the tension between a name as the symbol of one's identity and the rhyme as the mark of the difference: when in Lear's limericks the name of a foreign place or a strange person has been appropriated by the discourse of the rhyme - that is, when an actual physical locality or a concrete personal attribute is reduced to a string of English phonemes - the difference of the foreign and the marginal has been trivialized and subjugated by the dominant discourse. Limerick 56 is a good example of how this process functions:

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There was an Old Man of Vesuvius, Who studied the works of Vitruvius; When the flames burnt his book, To drinking he took, That morbid Old Man of Vesuvius.34

First of all, Vesuvius is a very real and historically important Italian volcano that would probably have been familiar to most educated Englishmen of the era. During his travels, Lear may well have met an old man from Vesuvius. Second, there cannot be too many words that rhyme with the name Vesuvius. As soon as Lear demonstrates to his readers that he can find a rhyme on Vesuvius, he immediately extracts from the real mountain in Italy its signified and foregrounds the word in its primary role as a phonic signifier. The Old Man no longer lives near a mountain, let alone in a volcano, which would give him a particular aura, but he resides in a word that rhymes quite unexpectedly and quite creatively. By being made into a vehicle of rhyme, the Old Man of Vesuvius has been dispossessed of the most important element of his identity: his geographical difference. He has become a footnote in Lear's exhibition of discursive skill; he is now just another anomaly from the English language that can be added to all the other strange things Victorian explorers used to bring back home from the uncivilized world. Once the Old Man of Vesuvius rhymes, the readers are no longer interested in him but in the author of his secondary identity, in the creator of the rhyme. The cruel fate that befalls the Old Man of Vesuvius in the next two lines of the limerick is, in this context, just a logical consequence of his unfamiliarity to the readers: what else can we expect from someone from Vesuvius than that his book will burn and that he will end up a drunkard? A similar interpretation could be applied to the other two previously quoted limericks. Here too Lear's superior use of prosody results in the discursive appropriation of the Old Man's and the Young Lady's difference. After being

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subjected to the limerick, the Old Man who was all beard and the Young Lady who was all bonnet are now both all, and only, words. Even without looking at the grotesque drawings with which Lear accompanied every limerick in The Book of Nonsense (1861), one can see why the laughter invoked by his poetry is always tainted. Saussure writes in his Course in General Linguistics (1916) that "in language, as in any semiological system, whatever distinguishes one sign from the others constitutes it."35 Some people differ from us because they live in exotic or unfamiliar places with hard-to-pronounce names, others because they carry around strange instruments (one of the Old Men has "a gong" and another a "flute") or because they have long noses, legs, beards, and chin.36 They are themselves because they are different. By versifying the cultural difference, Lear's limericks colonize the Other: the rhyme removes the sense (identity) from the Other and replaces it instead with a phonic surrogate. An outsider himself, Lear may have sympathized with the bizarre and the marginal, but by placing the Other in the centre of his nonsense poetry he accomplishes exactly the opposite: he appropriates rather than promotes it; he affirms rather than denies the typically Victorian colonialist view of the world; he subscribes to the discourse of hegemony rather than subverts it. Lear may have dedicated his book to "the great-grandchildren, grand-nephews, and grand-nieces of Edward, 13th Earl of Derby," but he "originally made and composed [them] for their parents,"37 very Victorian parents one might add. Had Lear written a limerick about the Old Man of Palestine, Edward W. Said38 would not have been amused. Just how easy it is to find even total nonsense offensive is best seen in the critical reception of Carroll's "Jabberwocky." This poem, whose first stanza entitled "Stanza of AngloSaxon Poetry" originally appeared in his manuscript Mischmasch, is particularly interesting because its lack of

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sense occurs exclusively on the level of meaning. As JeanJacques Lecercle observes in his book Philosophy of Nonsense (1994), there are no interpretive problems with the text on the phonetic, morphological, or syntactic levels. Only when we attempt to analyse the semantic level, he continues, do "we draw a blank."39 Here is the complete text of "Jabberwocky" as it appears in chapter i of Through the Looking-Glass (1871): Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!" He took his vorpal sword in hand: Long time the manxome foe he soughtSo rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood awhile in thought. And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! One two! One two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. "And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" He chortled in his joy.

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Most first-time readers, not unlike Alice herself, find these verses at the same time vaguely familiar and mildly confusing. After Humpty Dumpty explains the strange words' meaning later in the book and once Carroll, in his preface to The Hunting of the Snark (1876), confirms Humpty Dumpty's theory,41 any doubts one might have had about the laughter the poem generates ought to have been dispelled. While "Jabberwocky" has its pragmatically defined speaker (a book in which Alice finds the poem), she is "puzzled"42 rather than upset with her discursive status. If anything, Alice sees the "pretty"43 sounding verses as intriguing and returns to them with wonderment and curiosity. Because so much of the poem's vocabulary is invented, there can be no containment of actual identities and foregrounding of their differences. And it appears that if there is implied mockery in "Jabberwocky" (of Anglo-Saxon epics), it works in reverse. That is, it makes fun of something that was and not something that is or can be and is thus unaffected by Booth's arguments about the historically and culturally conditioned readings of classical works. Yet "Jabberwocky" too can alienate. It can alienate critics. Together with "Humpty-Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau," which according to Carroll "seems ... the right explanation for all,"44 "Jabberwocky" serves not only to amuse its readers but to aggravate its interpreters. Anne Clark, for example, in The Real Alice (1982), notes that the "poem indicates Dodgson's [Carroll's] complete ignorance of the Anglo-Saxon language and poetic tradition: he knew nothing of its basic vocabulary, its inflexions and word order; and he was apparently unfamiliar with the spring rhythm which Anglo-Saxon poets employed. His poem was rhymed, a convention unknown in Old English."45

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Though Clark is in general sympathetic to Carroll and laughs at his verbal gymnastics, the amount of attention she spends on the issue of Carroll's poor Anglo-Saxon is symptomatic of how "Jabberwocky" was received by many critics. Their inability to determine, for example, whether the poem should be classified as a parody or as a burlesque46 frustrates them to the point where they often forget to laugh. This was especially true of the reception of Carroll's work in his own time. While he had his share of supporters, many of his early reviewers perceived Carroll's experiments with nonsense as "inspired by a wild desire to reduce to idiotcy [sic] as many readers, and more especially reviewers, as possible."47 No wonder, then, that Carroll's contemporary Robert Scott felt the need to provide an ironic commentary on the poem, which shows more convincingly than any academic argument that the true target of the laughter invoked by "Jabberwocky" was scholars and that the seven stanzas are poking fun at the useless efforts of scholarship to grasp the essence of nonsense. Scott writes in a letter to Dodgson: "Are we to suppose, after all, that the Saga of Jabberwocky is one of the universal heirlooms which the Aryan race at its dispersion carried with it from the great cradle of the family? You really must consult Max Miiller about this. It begins to be probable that the origo originalissima may be discovered in Sanscrit, and that we shall by and by have a labrivokaveda. The hero will turn out to be the Sun-God in one of the Avatars; and the Tumtum tree the great Ash ygdmsil of the Scandinavian mythology."48 In another of his books on nonsense, The Violence of Language (1990), Lecercle quotes one of several completely incomprehensible letters that Lear wrote to his friend Evelyn Baring (this particular one is from 1862): Thripsy pillivinx, Inky tinky pobblebockle abblesquabs? - Flosky! Beebul trimple flosky! - Okul scratchabibblebongibo, viddle squibble tog-a-to

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ferrymoyassity amsky flamsky ramsky damsky crocklefether squiggs, Flinkywisty pomm, Slushypipp49

There can be no question whatsoever that this text is entirely nonsensical. Its words are not pretend Anglo-Saxon, there are no names of exotic locations from one of Lear's travels included in the letter, the text does not carry a message concealed by a cryptic code, and it does not mock a specific individual or a group of people. Can the letter still offend? Lecercle comes up with an interesting theory. "If I forget denotation and look for connotation, in other words if I go from semantics to pragmatics, the text as a whole acquires meaning." He continues: We all have to write official letters, full of the expression of highflown but empty feeling, of conventional phrases and cliches. We congratulate a colleagues on his promotion, we thank a distant acquaintance for a lovely dinner party. Hollowness, sometimes even hypocrisy, are the order of the day. Would not a semantically empty text, keeping only the pragmatic skeleton of a conventional letter, aptly embody the artificiality of such letters? Lear's meaning, if my hypothesis is correct, is satirical.50

If Lecercle is indeed correct, we can conclude that any nonsense that makes someone laugh will potentially offend someone else (in his case, the writers of banal letters). While incomprehensible nonsense may exist, there is no such thing as funny nonsense that is not at the same time satirical and thus derogatory. By extension, there is also no such thing as "Clean Wit, inoffensive Humour."51 All laughter at words is malicious to someone. Even if it is language that is distorted and not people, there will always be readers and listeners who will perceive such an abuse as an attack on their own discursive identities. And they will not consider this affront ethical.

C H A P T E R FOUR

Ridicule

In the early seventeen hundreds, another aspect of the debate on the ethics of laughter was introduced: the question of ridicule. Though ridicule was a common rhetorical strategy, already described in detail in Cicero's On Oratory and Ora tors and in Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory, it did not play a prominent role in critical discussions until its morality was questioned. Etymologically, the word ridicule derives from the Latin verb ridere (to laugh) and is usually defined as the deliberate exposure of an issue or a person to laughter. In other words, to ridicule is to make something deserve, or be worthy of, laughter. Based on this provisional description, one might presume that the need to ridicule is closely related to what is commonly called a sense of humour. Both ridicule and a sense of humour originate in one's ability to detect difference, and in both cases laughter is the preferred response to the discovery. The two, however, diverge in at least one fundamental respect: while a person with a sense of humour can only perceive the difference, a person with a talent for ridicule is also capable of articulating it. A sense of humour enables us to notice the Other, whereas a gift for ridicule also enables us to perform its alterity to everyone else. Many students in the past found the format of a typical foreignlanguage textbook absurd, but it was not until Eugene lonesco's The Bald Soprano (1950) that the private chuckles

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at the inanity of husband and wife introducing themselves to each other became a source of public laughter. Similarly, there were many critics of the corruption in the Catholic church in the sixteenth century, but only a few who could express their disapproval of contemporary clerical practices in a way that made their audiences laugh. If Martin Luther had had as good a sense of humour as Erasmus of Rotterdam and as keen a knack for ridicule as Niccolo Machiavelli, the Reformation would have started with a joke instead of the Ninety-five Theses. Ridicule is not, of course, without inherent ethical dangers: it is by its very nature an arbitrary activity and thus entirely indiscriminate in its pursuit of laughter. There is nothing in its disposition that can prevent an author from subjecting to laughter phenomena that may not deserve such a fate. The eighteenth-century English critic Joseph Addison thus suggests that "Humour differs from the True, as a monkey does from a man ... He is wonderfully unlucky, insomuch that he will bite the hand that feeds him, and endeavour to ridicule both friends and foes indifferently."1 A person capable of ridicule not only marks the difference but may also construct it, that is to say, may produce Otherness where it does not occur naturally. Authors with a pronounced propensity for ridicule never let a fact interfere with their representation. Alexander Pope, for instance, in the early editions of his Dunciad (1728), made Lewis Theobald a king of Dulness [sic] simply because of his critique of Pope's edition of Shakespeare, though Theobald's comments were relevant rather than dull, whereas Pope himself was a victim of anonymous and untrue lampoons suggesting that he was publically beaten by his enemies.2 In light of Charles Darwin's discoveries a good hundred years later, Addison's comment may well contain more layers of meaning than he intended (just remember all the nineteenth-century caricatures of Darwin as evolving from a monkey). There is little doubt, however, that ridicule is difficult to rein in. Determined satirists can mock a noble cause or a decent person with the same efficiency they

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employ in the derision of corrupt or worthless subjects. No wonder, then, that many scholars see ridicule primarily as an operation that makes fun of the serious, the dignified, and the sensible and never consider it to be potentially ethical. Collier openly warns his readers of the dangers of the arbitrariness of laughter and claims that to "laugh without reason is the Pleasure of Fools, and against it, of something worse," while Booth, his critical heir, explains that laughter at a mixed metaphor "has an ethical edge to it: a ridiculous metaphor implies a ridiculous author, one who ought to know better."3 The adjective "ridiculous" is inevitably used as a pejorative: what is worthy of laughter is in principle unworthy and definitely undesirable. A reduction to laughter is in this view a reduction to nothing, or, in Hegel's terminology, a realization that a phenomenon is "void of substance."4 If what we laugh at is nothing, and if anything can become nothing, then nothing is safe. Works of ridicule where nothing is sacred, where the most sublime concepts can become a target of laughter, are regularly accused of moral relativism if not even of ethical nihilism. Because of this, even most contemporary defences of laughter such as Buckley's The Morality of Laughter (2003) are primarily concerned with trying to prove that there is such a thing as "comic virtue"5 and that laughter affirms rather than denies the moral norms necessary for a successful functioning of society. The eighteenth-century polemics on ridicule is, therefore, centred around one crucial question: is the blow ridicule strikes a priori a low one and as such inappropriate for use by ethical speakers? Considering the amount of lively literary dialogue that took place during that time between various authors and their parodists, the most typical instance being the flurry of responses to Richardson's epistolary novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1739), the answer to this question is not as simple as it may seem. Arguments in favour of ridicule range from contentions that ridicule is actually a useful rhetorical tool because it cannot affect certain phenomena to more cautious pieces of advice that focus

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on creating lists of subjects to be excluded from the arbitrary reach of laughter. For our purposes, any successful defence of ridicule opens a new lifeline to the possibility of ethical laughter, which makes this issue particularly interesting. The main philosophical advocate of ridicule in the eighteenth century was Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury, whose 1709 essay Sensus Communis formulates the basic tenets of the notion of ridicule as a test of truth. He claims that while ridicule can indeed be applied indiscriminately and arbitrarily, it can only hurt what is false and not what is true and thus remains both an acceptable part of a gentleman's discourse and a valid device for a religious or parliamentary debate. Epistemologically, ridicule as a vehicle is parallel to reason and helps us reach similar objectives to the ones achieved by rational introspection. While common sense enables one to laugh at all that is foolish and absurd, Shaftesbury writes, "one may defy the World to turn real Bravery or Generosity into Ridicule." Further, "A Man must be soundly ridiculous ... who, with all the Wit in the World, wou'd go about to ridicule Wisdom, or laugh at Honesty, or Good Manners."6 Truth is impervious to the distortions imposed on it by ridicule. Regardless of how much one twists it, truth will never make us laugh: "For he who laughs, and is himself ridiculous, bears a double share of Ridicule."7 That is to say, laughing unjustly should be avoided because it makes the laughers more ridiculous than the object of their laughter. Shaftesbury's points are echoed in Anthony Collins's 1729 Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing. The author sees no problem with exposing people to laughter, "for Decency and Propriety will stand the Test of Ridicule, and triumph over all the false Pretences to Wit; and Indecency and Impropriety will sink under the Trial of Ridicule, as being capable of being baffled by Reason, and justly ridicul'd."8 A broad implementation of this kind of a logic in the Enlightenment transformed ridicule, to borrow Pope's words, into a "sacred Weapon! left for Truth's defence."9

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According to Thomas B. Gilmore, Jr, the idea that truth is beyond ridicule was accepted as the basic premise of the argument by virtually everyone involved in the debate, including so major a foe of ridicule as the Scottish bishop John Brown, whose Essays of the Characteristics (1764) were otherwise a radical rejection of Shaftesbury's treatise. "There is a great difference between seeking how to raise a Laugh from every thing; and seeking, in every thing, what justly may be laugh'd at," argues Shaftesbury, "For nothing is ridiculous, but what is deform'd: Nor is any thing proof against Raillery, but what is handsom and just."10 In general, rationalist ethics firmly believes that there are personality traits and phenomena that not only resist laughter but can never be made funny. While lies and falsehood on the one side and deformity and vice on the other are easy pickings for ridicule, truth, beauty, and virtue are impossible to construe as the Other. Since truth, beauty, and virtue are expressions of what critical theory usually calls culturally dominant ideologies, they by definition always delineate the identity and not the difference. There is nothing marginal and unstable about values: instead, they define the topography of the centre and of the mainstream. According to this logic, a person who is honest and good and whose appearance conforms to the visual discourse of the majority cannot be ridiculed. An eighteenth-century literary figure who best exemplifies these ideals and should thus be able to resist laughter is Richardson's Pamela Andrews. Here is a list of her virtues as spelt out in detail at the very end of the first part of the novel: Her obliging behaviour to her equals, before her exaltation; her kindness to them afterwards; her forgiving spirit, and her generosity; Her meekness, in every circumstance where her virtue was not concerned; Her charitable allowances for others, as in the case of Miss Godfrey, for faults she would not have forgiven in herself;

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Her kindness and prudence to the offspring of that melancholy adventure; Her maiden and bridal purity, which extended as well to her thoughts as to her words and actions; Her signal affiance in God; Her thankful spirit; Her grateful heart; Her diffusive charity to the poor, which made her blessed by them whenever she appeared abroad; The cheerful ease and freedom of her deportment; Her parental, conjugal, and maternal duty; Her social virtues; Are all so many signal instances of the excellency of her mind, which may make her character worthy of the imitation of her sex."

Pamela comes from an impoverished family, yet through her natural grace, some limited access to education (her father used to work as a teacher), and three years of training as a waiting-maid at the Bedfordshire manor, she manages to acquire manners befitting an upper-class young woman, without ever compromising her personal integrity. Pamela not only passionately protects what she perceives as the main feminine virtue, chastity, but also refuses to jeopardize truth. Though on several occasions a lie would have helped her avoid her seducer and, later on, escape her captivity, Pamela cannot bring herself to stoop so low. As her future husband Mr B observes in one of their passionate exchanges: "I know you won't tell a downright jib for the world: but for equivocation^, no Jesuit ever went beyond you."12 Pamela the novel is not just about virtue rewarded but about virtue personified. The heroine is totally devoted to her family, her friends, and her God, to the degree that she never puts herself in the first plane and thus literally stands for Levinas's notions of "being-for-the-other"13 and for the total absence of egology as the foundation of contemporary ethical theory. Her repeated expressions of obedience and duty to her parents and suspension of her own will at the expense of that of her master - once Mr B stops threatening her virginity, she immediately forgives him - make Pamela

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thoroughly un-Self-ish. In her unwillingness to surrender to temptation, Pamela's virtue is saintly. Often a character so utterly flawless will lose the readers' interest. Yet her eloquent paean to honesty and humility gives Pamela a strange narrative power and endeared her to several generations of readers in the Europe of her time. On top of that, the fifteen-year-old virgin is stunningly beautiful: her pretty face and her slender figure force both her tormentor, Mr B, and everyone else with whom she comes into contact, to forget about class distinctions and other social restrictions. Especially once her beauty is framed in the code of the fashionable clothes of the time the lists of petticoats, stays, and stockings that she inherited from her late mistress or that she is given after her wedding are comprehensive - Pamela is irresistible. If she does have a weakness, it is vanity: Pamela is certainly susceptible to flattery as her detailed accounts of the compliments she receives testify, but she is also aware of her imperfection and openly admits to it. When she is first introduced to Sir Simon Darnford and his family and when they all praise her beauty, she carefully notes this in her diary but also begs her parents to "forgive the little vain slut" for being so immodest.14 In Pamela's world of naivety, innocence, and kindness, there is no space for laughter. She cries a lot in the novel, as do other sympathetic characters, but laughter is reserved for people of "unreasonable passion,"15 such as Lady Davers, her sister-in-law, before she recognizes Pamela's charm, and in particular for Mrs Jewkes, Pamela's cruel guardian and lesbian predator and Mr B'S would-be pimp. She is the on who "ridicules" Pamela "and laughs at [her] notions of honesty."16 The loudest laughter in the book is heard after this woman of lascivious innuendo has read the letter in which Parson Williams, carrying Pamela's secret letters, describes how he was beaten and robbed by two brigands. Here is Pamela's description of Mrs Jewkes's reaction: The wicked brute fell a laughing, when she had read this letter, till her fat sides shook. Said she, I can but think how the poor parson looked, after parting with his pretty mistress in such high

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spirits, when he found himself at the bottom of the dam! And what a figure he must cut in his tattered band and cassock, and without a hat and a wig, when he got home. I warrant, added she, he was in a sweet pickle! - I said, I thought it was very barbarous to laugh at such a misfortune; but she replied, As he was safe, she laughed; otherwise she would have been sorry: and she was glad to see me so concerned from him - It looked promising, she said.17

Is not this passage a virtual dramatization of Collier's admonition of Restoration comedies for laughing at the clergy? There is little in terms of Pamela's and Richardson's ethics that can be disputed, even from a contemporary point of view. From a feminist perspective, Pamela is clearly the victim of a male-dominated world. Mr B'S rape attempts, fo instance, are in Laura Fasick's opinion characteristic of the patriarchal desire to devalue female authority. To "accept a version of the body that strips it of moral meaning," she writes, "apparently entails an acceptance of a version of moral presence that upholds patriarchal norms."18 Robert Folkenflik similarly suggests that Mr B'S intrusions into Pamela's space and correspondence are intended to deny "her right to selfhood" and that the novel "ends with Pamela empowered as a mouthpiece for a reinscribed male authority."19 Pamela is a victim of class stratification, gender oppression, and economic inequality. In this light, her protection of virginity ought to be seen as a desperate struggle to maintain the freedom and control of her body rather than as an unnatural repression of her sexual desires. Pamela's ethos is the ethos of her choices: to disagree with this statement could easily be interpreted as condoning both an institutional violation and the violation of her body. That Pamela's ethical stance is, at least in theory, difficult to question is a given. Not only is any form of rape considered utterly unlaughable but Pamela's high moral principles, or, as the critics of her era called them, her virtues themselves, appear to be practically unassailable. While one can safely laugh at the wimpy parson in an embarrassing situation, a

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joke at the expense of the beautiful and persecuted Pamela is bound to backfire. Yet Pamela has been repeatedly and mercilessly ridiculed. Both Pamela the character and Pamela the novel have been subjected not only to patronizing smiles and mild rebukes but to unadulterated explosions of laughter. As early as 1741, merely a year after the hugely successful publication of the first part of Richardson's novel, the earliest parodies of the virtuous heroine and her ordeal appeared. In Richardson's own time, Pamela inspired a couple of dozen imitations, adaptations, sequels, and parodies. These range from the anonymous pamphlet Pamela Censured (1741) - in which the author objects to Richardson's method of teaching virtue through descriptions of situations that serve "only to inflame the Mind"20 and proceeds to quote meticulously and without any omissions every single one of the supposedly lewd passages - to Henry Fielding's comic novel The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr Abraham Adams (1742), which focuses on the life and parallel experiences of Pamela's equally virtuous adopted brother Joseph. From our point of view, even more interesting than the much longer Joseph Andrews is Fielding's earlier take on Pamela, entitled An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1741). This short parody is conceived as a series of letters by the real Mrs Andrews and in turn reveals Richardson's story of Pamela to be a clever fabrication by Shamela, ordered by her husband and written on her behalf by her lover, the manly and debauched Parson Williams. Just about everything in Shamela, from the phony dedication to the final list of the work's moral lessons, is an outrageous mockery of Richardson's original. Pamela is the name Shamela takes on once she has been hired by the family of her future inlaws. Her parents are not impoverished farmers but a petty criminal and a prostitute. She is by no means a naive and innocent girl but a cunning and experienced woman. Mr B'S full name is Mr Booby, he does not have a sister, and he is not a dangerous peeping Tom but a hapless victim of Shamela's deception. Parson Williams is Shamela's lover

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before her arrival in Bedfordshire, during her "kidnapping/' and after she is married. While Pamela, in Mr B'S words, "write[s] a very pretty hand, and spell[s] tolerably too,"21 Shamela is an atrocious writer and horrible speller. The list of parallels could continue for a while. The genius of Fielding's ridicule lies in the closeness of his parody to its original. Practically every single episode of Shamela is based on an event from Pamela, and it is easy to see how Shamela's experiences could, from a different vantage point, be interpreted in the manner conveyed in Richardson's novel. Consider, for instance, the two versions of Mr e's/Mr Booby's first serious sexual assault. In Pamela's account, the events happened in the following manner: I pulled off my stays, and my stockings, and all my clothes to an under-petticoat; and then hearing a rustling again in the closet, I said, Heaven protect us! but before I say my prayers, I must look into this closet. And so was going to it slip-shod, when, O dreadful! out rushed my master in a rich silk and silver morning gown. I screamed, and ran to the bed, and Mrs Jervis screamed too; and he said, I'll do you no harm, if you forbear this noise; but otherwise take what follows. Instantly, he came to the bed (for I had crept into it, to Mrs Jervis, with my coat on, and my shoes); and taking me in his arms, said, Mrs Jervis, rise, and just step up stairs to keep the maids from coming down at this noise: I'll do no harm to this rebel. Oh, for Heaven's sake! for pity's sake! Mrs Jervis, said I, if I am not betrayed, don't leave me; and, I beseech you, raise all the house. No, said Mrs Jervis, I will not stir, my dear lamb; I will not leave you. I wonder at you, sir, said she; and kindly threw herself upon my coat, clasping me round the waist: You shall not hurt this innocent, said she: for I will lose my life in her defence. Are there not, said she, enough wicked ones in the world, for your base purpose, but you must attempt such a lamb as this? He was desperately angry, and threatened to throw her out of the window; and to turn her out of the house the next morning. You need not, sir, said she; for I will not stay in it. God defend my poor Pamela till to-morrow, and we will both go together. - Says

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she, let me but expostulate a word or two with you, Pamela. Pray, Pamela, said Mrs Jervis, don't hear a word, except he leaves the bed, and goes to the other end of the room. Ay, out of the room, said I; expostulate to-morrow, if you must expostulate! I found his hand in my bosom; and when my fright let me know it, I was ready to die; and I sighed and screamed, and fainted away. And still he had his arms about my neck; and Mrs Jervis was about my feet, and upon my coat. And all in a cold dewy sweat was I. Pamela! Pamela! said Mrs Jervis, as she tells me since, O-h, and gave another shriek, my poor Pamela is dead for certain!22

And here is how the same situation is described in Shamela's letter to her mother: Mrs Jervis and I are just in bed, and the Door unlocked; if my Master should come - Odsbobs! I hear him just coming in at the Door. You see I write in the present Tense, as Parson Williams says. Well, he is in Bed between us, we both shamming a Sleep, he steals his Hand into my Bosom, which I, as if in my sleep, press closer to me with mine, and then pretend to awake. - I no sooner see him, but I scream out to Mrs Jervis, she feigns likewise but just to come to herself; we both begin, she to becall, and I to bescratch very liberally. After having made a pretty free Use of my Fingers, without any great Regard for the Parts I attack'd, I counterfeit a Swoon. Mrs Jervis then cries out, O, Sir, what have you done, you have murthered poor Pamela: she is gone, she is gone. O what a Difficulty it is to keep one's Countenance, when a violent Laugh desires to burst forth.23

One can see from this comparison that Fielding found funny three aspects of Richardson's narrative: the contrivance of the literary convention, the awkwardness of the situation itself, and, in particular, Pamela's behaviour. The sheer amount of letter and diary writing Pamela manages to accomplish during her spare time is astonishing, as is the precision with which she remembers all the details of her tribulations. Shamela's memories are much more lapidary,

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and when her writing transgresses the letter-composing form and starts to veer in the direction of the literary (as in her sudden switch to "the present Tense"), Fielding clearly marks this for laughter. Throughout his spoof, Fielding exposes the artificiality of restrictions that the decision to relate Pamela's story in the form of a real correspondence received by an editor imposes on the author of the novel. He points out how easy it would be to fake such an exchange of letters, how one-sided a first-person account can be, and how self-serving the imaginary editor's notes are. No less amusing, in Fielding's reading, is the image of a bed with three adults in it who keep throwing themselves at each other and yet never run out of space. One somehow cannot shake the impression that Shamela's account of how a hand could be found in her bosom appears more likely than Pamela's astonished observation. This is not to suggest that Pamela is lying but rather that there is more subtext to her story than she, or even Richardson, will ever admit. In a strange way, it is almost as if Fielding were paying the author of Pamela a backhanded compliment: if we accept Shamela's version of the incident, we implicitly acknowledge that Richardson's insight into an adolescent woman's psyche and her awakening sexuality could well go far beyond what the moralistic framework of the novel seems to allow. Fielding simply cannot accept that someone who conveniently prays at her bedside "all undressed," with her "underclothes in [her] hand"24 and voluntarily agrees to stay with Mr B for months after he first started to ogle and grope her is not aware of what she is doing. He prefers to believe that Pamela's actions are deliberate and even planned, and that her words are simply a smokescreen designed for the public protection of her reputation. A woman like this, not only Fielding but even the anonymous prude who wrote Pamela Censured suggests, cannot be "artless and innocent" but is bound to have "as much Knowledge of the Arts of the Town, as if she had been born and bred in Covent Garden, all her Life Time."25 The author of

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Shamela does not object to Pamela's sentiment so much as to her lack of awareness. He is not really bothered by her pomposity and does not condemn her inertia: what Fielding finds truly laughable is Richardson's conviction that Pamela's behaviour is not rationally motivated. Does the fact that Fielding manages to laugh at the virtuous Pamela mean that nothing is safe from ridicule? Or, to rephrase the question: how is it that Pamela's integrity and respect for truth have not protected her from widespread mockery? One possible answer to these questions lies in the origins of the eighteenth-century debate on the ethics of ridicule. We should not forget that the discussion of ridicule was only a minor issue in the long-lasting religious polemic between English deists and theists. While the deists thought ridicule was an excellent instrument for an examination of the limitations of the theist dogma, the latter perceived it as a questionable rhetorical strategy that was rooted in unreasonable and thus fundamentally unethical principles. In Collins's opinion, for instance, the inability of ridicule to affect the truth is precisely what can enable a deist to debunk some of the theists' "most extravagant, whimsical, absurd" beliefs,26 such as the ones about the plausibility of prophecies, factuality of miracles, divinity of revelation, or non-symbolic nature of transubstantiation. For a deist such as Collins, the reliance on religious narratives, which is typical of the theist view of faith, is a symptom of philosophical constriction. Only what reason can affirm through empirical evidence should be considered truthful while everything else is potentially a figment of one's fancy and thus subject to the abuse of ridicule. In this perspective, as the etymology of the word orthodoxy as the correct or conventional opinion implies, any orthodox belief that relies on a dogmatic axiom rather than on a pragmatic verification is an explicit symptom of the rigidity of the respective system that does not allow for deviations or inventions. Conversely, heterodoxy as the discourse of Other is by definition open to the different and cannot be caught lagging behind new scientific

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discoveries that disprove the traditional positions. In the environment of religious and other public debates where the disassembling of the (politically?) correct is frequently seen as heretical, the function of ridicule could, therefore, easily be seen as that of the promoter of dissent, of the defender of the plurality of opinions. A logical extension of this argument is that even virtue and truth can be ridiculed, though only when they are constricted by a dogmatic interpretation of ethics. As Bergson notes, "A flexible vice may not be so easy to ridicule as a rigid virtue/'27 Just as the high Anglican orthodoxy, with its saints, legends, and prophecies, is limited, in Collins's mind, by the rigidity of its doctrine and can be ridiculed even when the basic postulates of its faith are true, so can Pamela's uncompromising adherence to virtue and truth, which shows no commonsense pliability to the demands of a concrete situation, become an easy subject of laughter. As Douglas Brooks writes in his introduction to Joseph Andrews, Richardson's readers "could not, apparently, see that what Pamela explicitly proclaimed, through its subtitle Virtue Rewarded and the marriage of its heroine to a wealthy squire, was the reduction of the abstract ideal, Virtue (the sum of a man's corporeal and intellectual excellences), to the purely self-regarding, prudential, retention of virginity."28 True virtue is not about stubborn insistence on the status quo but about one's ability to act ethically here and now. Collins's preference for allegorical over literal interpretations of the Bible is, in this light, a perfect example of the hermeneutic nature of ridicule. What makes a representation of God such an easy target of laughter is the recognition of the inadequacy of our abilities to conceive of divinity. Reading a text literally instead of interpreting it inevitably results in the disclosure of the liminality of representation and in its ensuing susceptibility to derision. Thinking of God as an old man with a beard will invariably bring about the question of his shaving habits. In Pamela's case, Fielding successfully ridicules virtue not because honesty or chastity are in any way questionable but because their expressions

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in Richardson's novel are unnatural. By offering an alternative reading of Richardson's signifiers of virtue, Fielding simply reminds his readers of the essential polysemy of a text or any other vehicle of representation. Pamela's fainting fits are just as likely to be the carefully planned act of a calculating gold digger as they are an indication of an innocent girl's primordial fear of sexual intercourse. Her fascination with pretty clothing may indeed be a reflection of her youthful vanity yet it could just as easily be decoded as a premeditated ploy to seduce the gullible but affluent Mr Booby. To deny, in a paraphrase of Judith Butler's statement on gender, that Pamela's "identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results"29 is to expose oneself totally to the deconstructive operation of ridicule. As soon as Richardson fails to consider this factor, his heroine becomes vulnerable to laughter. Pamela is not who she says, or who Richardson thinks, she is: she is what the readers determine her to be. In a text, signifiers lead to the signified and not the other way around; any attempt to ignore this semiotic principle will invariably end up as fodder for laughter. Unfortunately, even this argument does not account for all instances of ridicule. While we may agree with Fielding that Pamela's version of the nightly events is relatively difficult to accept without any reservations and that her swooning is suspicious, there are many other examples of parody in Shamela where Richardson and Pamela may not deserve the laughter. Think, for example, of Pamela's unsuccessful attempt to escape her captivity and her contemplation of suicide in the pond on Mr B'S property. This episode, in which Pamela feels horribly guilty and never assumes an air of immaculate virtue, appears sincere and even moving rather than sentimental and melodramatic. Yet her vivid description of utter physical and psychological exhaustion - "and there lay poor I; so weak, so low, so dejected, and withal so stiff with my bruises, that I could not stir, nor help

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myself to get upon my feet" - is trivialized in Fielding's burlesque into Shamela's prosaic sentence "and then I went and hid myself in the Coal-hole, where I lay all Night."30 In order to make us laugh, ridicule does not have to prove that its subject's interpretation is indeed literal or its actions dogmatic; all it has to do is convince us that they are different from our own. Ridicule may test the truth, but its role is fulfilled long before its examination has concluded. While Bergson remarks that a "flexible vice may not be so easy to ridicule as a rigid virtue," he also perceptively notes that if we "step aside [and] look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama will turn into a comedy."31 Ridicule is all about angles: from an appropriate standpoint even the most beautiful young woman such as Pamela will become as distorted as Mrs Jewkes. As Gilmore points out, in the eighteenth century "the evidence that ridicule can err or be abused was overwhelming."32 In its voracious appetite for laughter, ridicule cannot restrict itself only to justified targets but habitually tackles the blameless ones as well. The most commonly used polemical illustration of this point in Shaftesbury's time was the implied conflict between Socrates as the personification of truth and wisdom, and Aristophanes as the representative of the arbitrariness and ethical irresponsibility of ridicule. In the rationalist mind of an Enlightened scholar, Socrates stood for reason itself: his maieutic method and interest in the common good were absolutely without reproach. When in the play Clouds Aristophanes reduced Socrates' creation of philosophy and invention of logic to the economically driven sophism, his strategy of ridicule was seen not only as a clever exposure of the grey area between the literal and the metaphoric reading of Socrates' philosophy, and as the foregrounding of its inherently contradictory parts, but as an outright vulgarization of truth and violation of reason. "From the i66os onwards," Raymond A. Anselment writes in reference to Aristophanes' ridicule of Socrates, "this infamous illustration of laughter's harm reflects a corresponding realization that reason is vulnerable

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to various forms of attack."33 The defence of ridicule was "as a 'sense' or 'faculty' independent of reason" seemed by extension "also to be denying the supreme authority of reason in the search of truth."34 From an ethical perspective, the depiction of Socrates and his philosophy as fraudulent is a lie and something that should never have happened. A righteous man such as Socrates should have been above mockery especially when the laughter it produced relied for its effect primarily on slander. But this did not happen: Socrates was ridiculed often and, based on the fact that references to him appear in several other Greek comic fragments (in Ameipsias and Eupolis, for instance35), ridiculed successfully. This led rationalist ethicists to take a step further. In an effort to discredit Aristophanes entirely, they combined in one figure the fictitious Socrates of Old Comedy with the only slightly more historical Socrates of Plato's Symposium and Apology and, in a curious exercise in casuistry, blamed Aristophanes' ridicule for the philosopher's trial. William Warburton, for example, wonders why Socrates with his unparalleled wisdom was "unable to save his life from the false ridicule of Aristophanes."36 Whereas today this kind of accusation seems a bit exaggerated, three centuries ago writers of pamphlets were actually debating whether or not ridicule rather than hemlock was the true cause of Socrates' death. These kinds of conclusions forced many critics in the past to adjust the logic of their arguments somewhat and, instead of insisting that ridicule could not affect certain values such as truth and virtue, strongly recommended that it should not target them. In theory, the safest approach to ridicule is, once again, to argue in favour of its selectiveness. Since nothing can escape derision, it is wiser not to condemn all ridicule outright but to condone it as long as it is justified. Even virtuous characters can legitimately be mocked, this train of thought implies, as long as laughter is directed at, say, their lack of sense, and not at their honesty and integrity. To use a more concrete example, even Pamela

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is not too good to be ridiculed, but only if her naivety and not her efforts to protect her virginity are singled out. The preferred critical view of ridicule is thus that it should function almost as a measure of ethical hygiene that efficiently purges the unwanted: in Greek antiquity, laughter should ideally censure only the undemocratic; in the Middle Ages, sin and vice; and in neoclassicism, the irrational and the imprudent. At the same time, critics provide their readers with lists of issues that should, in the interest of the ethics of laughter, remain outside ridicule's hunting ground. Since Aristotle in The Nichomachean Ethics already asserts that "legislators prohibit certain kinds of revilement, and perhaps they should have prohibited certain kinds of mockery also,"37 critics have rarely hesitated before they offered their own suggestions of what should not be lampooned. Ethical critics of the distant past and of today, for instance, emphatically agree in that laughter should never be aimed at manifest Otherness. Just as Sidney writes that it is inappropriate "to jeast at straungers, because they speake not English so well as we do," so Purdie writes about "patriarchy's appropriation of joking" whose intention is to degrade women, foreigners, and homosexuals as typically inept speakers.38 Laughter should also never be used against the oppressed: perhaps not coincidentally, Pamela on several occasions calls herself "Your greatly oppressed unhappy servant."39 Since the oppressed have no power, they are in a position of permanent disenfranchisement and as such should never be marked as Others. They already are the Other, and any foregrounding merely reinforces the unnecessary epistemological tautology. In his analysis of the Puritan attitude to religious ridicule, Anselment observes that there was a "considerable tradition supporting [an] exclusion of all jests designed to laugh at miserable or unfortunate people" at the time because "this 'uncivil' and 'inhumane' behaviour runs counter to Christian compassion; it also makes light of God's providence."40 Richard Baxter's 1673 Christian Dictionary, for example, forbade laughter at reason, conscience, God, and damnation,

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while Addison, who believed that "laughter was the effect of original sin/' advised his readers a few years later that, in the interest of morality, "the violations of the marriagebed" should not be a subject of ridicule.41 Perhaps the most interesting and inclusive explanation of when ridicule is ethically acceptable, however, belongs to Dryden. In his preface to An Evening's Love (1671) he suggests that only those vices are truly laughable "as may be forgiven, not such as must of necessity be punish'd."42 Since a comic poet employs laughter to cure follies and to teach us how "to amend what is ridiculous in our manners," only that which can be changed should be ridiculed. The audience is "mov'd to laugh by the representation of deformity,"43 Dryden writes, and not by the deformity itself. If a vice can be corrected, an affectation removed, or an error fixed, laughter is a suitable reaction; if they cannot, society should either employ a more drastic measure to contain them or even respond to them with sympathy. If one cannot be held responsible for one's failings and imperfections, one should also not be subjected on their behalf to laughter. Making fun of distortions that can be eliminated is infinitely more ethical than laughing at permanent deformities that cannot be rectified. The discovery that the potential offensiveness of laughter depends on the reversibility or irreversibility of difference may well be the crucial point in our discussion on the ethics of ridicule. Let me illustrate this point using Fielding's description of Mrs Slipslop in Joseph Andrews: "She was not at this time remarkably handsome; being very short, and rather too corpulent in Body, and somewhat Red, with the Addition of Pimples in the Face. Her Nose was likewise rather too large, and her Eyes too little; nor did she resemble a Cow so much in her Breath, as in two brown Globes which she carried before her; one of her Legs was also a little shorter than the other, which occasioned her to limp as she walked."44 Being able to determine that this sarcastic sketch is ethically more contentious than Fielding's ridicule of Mrs Slipslop's malapropisms simply because her appearance is not the result of

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her pretentiousness nor her limp the result of her drunkenness is already a major step in our search for ethical laughter and has far-reaching methodological consequences. It can lead us, for instance, to the idea of the maturing of comic perception. In a manner similar to the way children are taught that it is impolite to giggle at a person who limps, adult audiences eventually learn which physical disabilities and personality disorders they can enjoy without feeling guilty. Just how difficult it is to decide why it is acceptable to laugh at Camille Chandebise's heavy speech impediment in Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear (because his false palate, when he has it in his mouth, can reverse his congenital defect) is demonstrated by the sheer number of critics who refuse to commit themselves when it comes to assessing laughter. Moliere, in his Critique of the School for 'Wives (1663), captures this axiological hesitancy beautifully in Dorante's description of a marquis who refuses to laugh at the funniest joke in a comedy for fear of being wrong.45 If nothing else, the idea that ridicule might be ethically acceptable as long as it concentrates on corrigible rigidity implies that all laughter at the irreversible is offensive. In this context, laughter is considered cruel not only when it is triggered by obvious examples of incurable handicaps Lavinia in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus cannot speak because her tongue has been cut out and, surely, deserves our pity and not our chuckles - but also when it is induced by more subtle instances of permanent Otherness such as a serious mental illness or atypical physical appearance. In such a view, Don Quixote should not be laughed at since his delusions of grandeur take an extreme and untreatable form, likewise Gargantua, who suffers from gigantism. It requires an exceptional degree of compassion for one's fellow human beings to refuse to laugh at Moliere's Harpagon and Alceste because of their "goodness and simplicity," which is exactly what the French social philosopher and reformer JeanJacques Rousseau does in his condemnation of drama.46 Laughter at human stupidity, as a possibly irreversible affliction, is particularly difficult to give up. Few spectators

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are willing to suppress a response to Bottom's or Dottore's antics just because the characters in question so obviously lack intelligence. Instead, all kinds of excuses are found, of which the claim that their supposed joie de vivre protects them from the damage inflicted by laughter is probably the most common. Does all this guarantee, though, that laughter at the reversible is automatically fair? Even if we ignore the option that on a certain level representation itself might be seen as reversible (one can rewind the film or keep returning to the same page in a book), it is hard to deny that while reversibility could well be a necessary condition of ethical laughter, it is not the only one. The hypothesis that an irreversible deformation or flaw can never provoke ethical laughter is credible, but the suggestion that a reversible deformation or flaw may not always succeed in doing so either seems just as likely. A person with a speech impediment will have a much harder time finding Camille's disability funny than someone who can speak normally, whether the young man has a false palate or not. A drunkard will sober up the next morning, but his staggering could still be perceived as tactless by a person with a family history of alcoholism. The argument that ridicule of the irreversible is clearly unethical is very convincing: but just because the positive proof of unethical laughter has been found, one still cannot claim that the evidence of ethical laughter has been discovered as well.

C H A P T E R FIVE

Laughter in Utopia

"If Men are forbid to speak their Minds seriously on certain Subjects/' Shaftesbury notes in Sensus Communis, "they will do it ironically."1 To express his contention in a more modern idiom, one of the greatest strengths of laughter is its potential subversiveness. Since laughter regularly probes the boundaries of representation, it is often seen as an ideal instrument of ideological sabotage. Because of its natural attraction for slippages, semiotic gaps, interpretive blanks, and other forms of structural weakness, laughter can indeed be employed very efficiently to undermine hierarchies and institutions, especially when an underprivileged or oppressed subject resorts to it. As a means of self-affirmation, laughter clearly performs, if not necessarily an aesthetic, then an essential utilitarian function. The belief that laughter can be used as a strategy for discursive liberation is a common philosophical and critical notion. It is encountered in a variety of sources, from Horace, Baudelaire, and Friedrich Nietzsche to traditional Asian thought,2 but it is perhaps most pronounced in Russia - that is, in an environment where oppression in various forms was more or less continuous during the last two hundred years. Thus, at a time when in the rest of Europe laughter was invariably discussed in openly moralistic terms, Gogol, in his defence of The Government Inspector, wrote about the "laughter that soars from man's bright nature,

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from the depths that contain its eternally surging spring," and further on argues that "laughter is luminous/' that it can "bring reconciliation to [man's] soul/' and that "only a profoundly magnanimous soul can burst into goodnatured, bright laughter."3 His defence of the emancipating power of laughter was later successfully adopted by another famous Russian, Bakhtin. The main premise of Bakhtin's study Rabelais and His World is that in the Middle Ages laughter, or more specifically carnival laughter, served primarily to subvert the chief institutions of the era, in particular the Catholic church. By debunking Christian rituals and other repetitive patterns of behaviour that were implemented to reaffirm medieval structures of power, carnival results in a "temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order" and contributes to "the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions."4 Festive laughter "is never used by violence and authority"; rather it is a regenerating and empowering experience for the society as a whole that follows directly from the defeat "of all that oppresses and restricts."5 By inverting the rules and defying the conventions, laughter as an expression of the carnival spirit enables the society to rid itself of fear as the most "extreme expression of narrow-minded and stupid seriousness."6 The notion of laughter as a method of liberation, albeit no longer of the public but the private variety, also appears in structuralist treatments of the subject - Michael Issacharoff argues that comedy "constitutes the category of discourse that is 'liberated'" of its referents7 - and, more importantly, in several treatments of laughter from a psychoanalytical standpoint. Freud, for example, implies in his essay on humour that laughter should be understood as ethically acceptable regardless of its undesirable side-effects simply because it frees our ego from the pressures of superego. He speaks of jokes, humour, and the comic as safety valves that help us deal with problems that would otherwise remain under the surface. The release of tension with laughter is, literally, a manifestation of the victory of our subconscious

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over the moral bonds imposed on it by society and tradition. "Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious," Freud writes. "It signifies not only the triumph of the ego but also of the pleasure principle, which is able here to assert itself against the unkindness of the real circumstance."8 Were it not for humour, the French psychoanalyst Charles Mauron argues in a similar fashion, our anxiety and anger would remain pent up and would eventually explode in a far less controllable manner than that represented by an outburst of laughter. The subversive dimension of laughter is a frequent focus of feminist interpretations of the issue. Virginia Woolf, for instance, in a footnote to Three Guineas (1938), speaks of laughter "as an antidote of dominance," while Judith Butler defines drag as a mockery of "both the expressive model of gender and the notion of true gender identity" and consequently sees subversive laughter as the welcome byproduct of certain "parodic practices."9 In Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter (1996), Jo Anna Isaak appropriates Bakhtin's and Freud's vocabulary and claims that "women have a special purchase on laughter as a strategy of liberation" and that laughter is "a metaphor for transformation, for thinking about cultural change."10 What happens, though, once a structure of authority has been successfully subverted and once an individual's freedom is no longer restricted? Is there still a place for laughter in such a hypothetical situation? If we are to believe Hazlitt, who thinks comedy is so successful as the provider of moral hygiene that it "naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies or weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at,"11 the answer to the dilemma could easily surprise us. When humanity through natural progress, or even with the help of laughter, reaches a stage where there are no inequalities and injustices, there remains a distinct possibility that laughter will become unnecessary. Since in such a society there is no binary division of Self and Other, laughter with its craving for difference could starve itself out and become

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an outmoded method of social remedy. As long as it is true that we always laugh at someone's expense, a perfect world could well end up a laughterless place. The best way to determine whether a successful and permanent subversion of ideological hierarchies results merely in the transformation of derisive and offensive laughter into its gentler reincarnation or whether it leads to its total superfluity is to examine the epistemic position of laughter in idealized societies. An analysis of how laughter is treated in Plato's Republic, Dante's Paradise (completed in 1321), Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) - in conjunction with Erasmus of Rotterdam's Praise of Folly (1509) - and in Mayakovsky's Marxist comedies should enable us to address many of the important aspects of this question. As these four visions of Utopia are historically the most representative cases of grand eschatological projects, the relatively small sample should be sufficient to give us a credible answer to our query. Plato's dialogue The Republic is often considered to be the first serious attempt at abstract political theory. Its elaborate articulation of the foundations of an ideal state makes most scholars think of Plato's treatise either as the original manifesto of social engineering or as an early study of the purpose of education. The Republic is both, but one should not forget that it starts as an examination of the essential ethical question: that of justice and injustice. The self-contained society that Socrates describes is primarily motivated by his desire to live in a world where no one has the right to hurt others, not even in the pursuit of happiness. It is very well known that in such a state there is no place for poetry but less so that Socrates, as Plato's mouthpiece, also worries about laughter. In Book 10 of The Republic, Plato writes that the vicarious experience of emotions that poetry brings about desensitizes us to the point where we are no longer capable of functioning as active members of our society. "And it is the same with the causes of laughter," Socrates warns Glaucon, "with comedies, or in private talk. When you take the greatest pleasure in things so low that you

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would be full of shame about them if they were yours, you are doing just what you do at the tragedy. Sometimes you let yourself go so far that before you know it you become a clown yourself in private."12 Just as tragedy foments instead of subdues passions and thus makes us vulnerable, comedy and jokes, by inducing laughter, make their audience enjoy the ugly and the bad rather than the beautiful and the good. In this sense, laughter is a sign of the loss of identity. When I laugh, I am no longer my-Self: I am temporarily an-Other. Yet this is precisely why Plato does not banish laughter altogether from his Utopia. Though in the perfectly just environment of the ideal state there is nothing that deserves ridicule, laughter remains a useful means by which children can counter one of the great external dangers to the state, the emotionality of the fictitious representations of loss and grief. "If our young people listen seriously to such things, instead of laughing at them, how are they to develop selfcontrol?" Socrates asks Adeimantus in Book 3 of The Republic.13 Laughter is so subversive that, when carefully administered, it can even undermine the influence of poetry. Because laughter by its very nature tests the authenticity of representation, it is ideally suited to exposing the shadowy nature of art as a copy of a copy and something that is, by definition, always "three moves away from true being."14 Laughter is thus a prime defence mechanism for keeping mimesis and its chief vehicle, poetry, out of the republic. But laughter is also so efficient in its dismantling of representation that it should not be employed in conjunction with power or else it may turn against the very institution that is attempting to harness it. "On the other hand, our guards are not to be much given to violent laughing, for after that generally comes an equally violent reaction," Socrates continues after his earlier observation on the suitability of laughter for education. "So we won't let Homer tell us about the gods laughing long to see Hephaestus pouring wine for them and so on."15 Inasmuch as laughter is an unavoidable part of Becoming, it has no role in Being. Laughter is fine while I am becoming my Self, but once I am myself, there is no need

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for it. Whereas for children laughter may still fulfill a constructive pedagogical service, to fully integrated members of society such as the "guards" with their duty to ensure the safety of the state, its effect is detrimental rather than beneficial. According to Plato, citizens with a sense of humour are dangerous: once they acquire a taste for laughter, their appetite for malice overcomes their essential responsibility to others. Instead of maintaining their interest in the public good, they are preoccupied with public mischief. In Book 7 of The Republic where Plato introduces his famous parable of the Cave, another two crucial references to laughter appear. First, Socrates describes the situation that occurs if a prisoner is released from his chains and allowed to leave the Cave and get used to the daylight. He continues his questioning in the following manner: "And, if he were to go down again out of the sunlight into his old place, would not his eyes get suddenly full of the dark? And if there were to be a competition then with the prisoners who had never moved out and he had to do his best in judging the shadows before his eyes got used to the dark which needs more than a minute - wouldn't he be laughed at? Wouldn't they say he had come back from his time on high with his eyes in very bad condition so that there was no point in going up there?"16 A few lines later, Plato allows Socrates to elaborate further on this analogy. "There are two ways in which the eyes may be troubled," he writes: "when they change over from the light to the dark, and from the dark to the light." Anyone who knows this is aware that "the same thing takes place with the soul, and ... wouldn't be over-quick to laugh at a soul unable to see something, but would be careful to note if it were coming from a brighter light into the dark or were on its way from the deeper dark of little knowledge into daylight and if its eyes were unclear because the light was over-strong."17 In both of these instances, laughter is tied to blindness. In the first passage, the ex-prisoner is laughed at because he cannot see what everyone else does, even though in fact he

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has already seen much more and has insight beyond mere appearances into the world of ideas. In the second quotation, Plato seems to suggest that laughter should remain limited to those who actually see rather than to those who think they see. The fact that laughter is not contingent on (objective) knowledge but can also be based on (subjective) opinion, that it can occur on the level of the visible and not just on the level of the intelligible, is perhaps the most compelling reason why its role in an ideal state is severely restricted. Plato's understanding of laughter is ultimately an elitist one. Since, in his own words, "only what is wrong is to be laughed at/'18 the sole group of people in the republic who are properly equipped to laugh are the ones at the top of the social hierarchy, the Guardians. Only the wise can consistently see beyond the shadows on the Cave wall; only the intelligent can always detect the difference. Everyone else is better off silent. Before we take a closer look at Dante's Divine Comedy as the second Utopia on our list, we should remember that in the medieval view comedy was not necessarily associated with laughter. As Dante points out in his "Epistle to Can Grande/' (c. 1315) comedy differs from tragedy not in its audience response, but in its style and subject matter. "Tragedy uses an elevated and sublime style," he writes, "while comedy uses an unstudied and low style." Similarly, "tragedy is tranquil and conducive to wonder at the beginning, but foul and conducing to horror at the end," whereas comedy "introduces a situation of adversity, but ends its matter in prosperity, as is evident in Terence's comedies."19 It is no less surprising to find that laughter does not feature prominently in the first part of the Divine Comedy, the Inferno. Though in the Middle Ages various major and minor devils were the main comic characters in mystery plays and miracles, Dante's hell and its inhabitants are never funny. His Lucifer is not a grinning idiot or an arrogant rebel but an utterly joyless outcast whose life is devoid of any form of pleasure. The few references to jesting that do appear in the Inferno seem coincidental and unrelated.

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In contrast to the InfernoandPurgatory,inParadiseevery one smiles, in particular Dante's beloved Beatrice. From Canto i onwards, her words smile and her eyes laugh.20 Dante frequently describes Beatrice's smiles with images of light and radiance. She wins him over "with the light of smiling eyes," and her eyes glow "as she smile[s]."21 As with Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Beatrice's serene smile is a direct expression of the divinity of human nature: "For such a smile was glowing in her eyes / That with my own I thought to touch the depths / Both of my grace and of my Paradise."22 In fact, in Canto 9 Dante implies that even an earthly smile can be seen as an approximation of heavenly "effulgence."23 Beatrice's smile works very much like laughter in Georges Bastide's article on "Laughter and Its Ethical Significance": it transforms "menace ... into sympathy" and "hostility ... into friendship."24 In Canto 21, however, Beatrice temporarily stops smiling. She and her companion have just come to the seventh heaven of Paradise and are now so close to God that her smile can hurt the narrator. "If I smiled," Beatrice tells Dante, verily wouldst thou become Like Semele, when ashes she was made; Because my beauty, which along the stair Of the eternal palace kindleth more, As thou hast seen, the higher our mounting there, If it be tempered not, so far transcends In its effulgency thy mortal power That this were as a leaf the thunder rends.25

The closer to knowledge the smile is, the more likely it is to harm. Even when the smile is a reflection of divine radiance, it will still cast a shadow. Yet the proximity to the Christian equivalent of Platonic episteme does not absolve the smile of its implied condescension: here, too, it denotes the difference between the enLight-ened and the overshadowed, between we who know and they who do not, between the Self and the Other. It is not until Canto 23 that Dante has learnt enough to be able

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once again to sustain Beatrice's smile.26 Until then, the epistemic impotence that Beatrice's disarming and seemingly harmless smile brings forth is jarring. Because Dante is in the realm of total forgiveness, one cannot expect him to complain about his predicament, but the momentary suspension of Beatrice's smiling is nonetheless a good indication of the ethical ambivalence of her articulation of joy. Her pleasure might be pure, but its exclusiveness needs a period of adjustment. Just like laughter in Plato's Republic, smiling in Dante's Divine Comedy is reserved for the select few: only for those who make it to Paradise. At the very top of this small group is God. In the final canto of his masterpiece, Dante describes God in the following words: "O Light Eternal, that in thyself alone / Abidest, alone thyself dost understand, / And lovest and smilest, self-knowing and self-known!"27 Only the absolute Self is safe from the Other; only a total awareness of one's identity can consistently mark the difference. Beatrice smiles at Dante because she knows more than he does; she even speaks of his "childish thought" that prevents him from trusting the truth.28 God smiles because He knows (Himself?) more than everyone else. And no one smiles in Hell. The Divine Comedy was written by a pious Catholic, and More's Utopia by a saint. Yet More never shies away from using mechanisms of laughter in relating Raphael Hythlodaeus's descriptions of the life on "the new island of Utopia." As Edward Surtz suggests in his introduction to Utopia, More regularly resorts to irony, satire, humour, and farce.29 To the readers of his own era, More was the comedianphilosopher, an author who could deliver the most scathing criticism of the policies of Henry vn and Henry viu, and of papal arrogance, with great charm and quick wit. He apparently loved laughter so much that his good friend Erasmus called him after the laughing philosopher of antiquity "a Democritus in the mortal life we all share" and even went so far as to dedicate his series of satirical orations,

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The Praise of Folly, to More.30 In fact, the original title of Erasmus's book, Encomium Moriae, is a clever Latin wordplay on More's name. The other aspect in which More's Renaissance Utopia differs significantly from Dante's late medieval conception of Paradise is its worldliness. While the philosophical cornerstone of the Italian poet's vision of Heaven is asceticism and sublimity, in More's hedonistic, neo-Epicurean interpretation of the ideal state the well-being of its inhabitants depends on their pleasure. The happiness of the citizens no longer relies on abstract notions of justice or love but on the tangible experience of individual and collective pleasure. More's "paradise" is a country where people travel freely and effortlessly, where gardening is a favourite pastime, where supper is always accompanied by music and dessert, and where they "burn spices and scatter perfumes and omit nothing that may cheer the company."31 Property is still collective as it is in Plato's republic, and everyone must work, but if Utopians do not enjoy this arrangement, the whole experiment is bound to fail. Since laughter is clearly a form of pleasure, one might expect More's Utopia to provide us with a comprehensive theoretical discussion of the ethics of laughter. The future saint with a great sense of humour, however, spends relatively little time in his book on this particular question. There is only one substantial passage in which he offers his readers a glimpse into his view of laughter. It can be found in the midst of Hythlodaeus's summary of the Utopian legal practices, right after the information on how to punish an individual for tempting "another to an impure act."32 Here is the relevant excerpt in its entirety: They are very fond of fools. It is a great disgrace to treat them with insult, but there is no prohibition against deriving pleasure from their foolery. The latter, they think, is of the greatest benefit to the fools themselves. If anyone is so stern and morose that he is not amused with anything they either do or say, they do not entrust him with the care of a fool. They fear that he may not treat

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him with sufficient indulgence since he would find in him neither use nor even amusement, which is his sole faculty. To deride a man for a disfigurement or the loss of a limb is counted as base and disfiguring, not to the man who is laughed at but to him who laughs, for foolishly upbraiding a man with something as if it were a fault which he was powerless to avoid.33

Several conclusions can be drawn from this quotation. First, there is definitely a place for laughter in Utopia. Just as with other forms of pleasure, laughter should not be proscribed but encouraged, and people who enjoy it actually have a special privilege: the right to the fundamentally ethical act of taking care of another human being. Second, for More too the ethics of laughter is tied to the principle of reversibility. Since he, like Plato and Aristotle, considers laughter a response to a manifestation of ugliness, he only deems laughter acceptable when it is provoked by a temporary distortion or a corrigible error. Even in a society where pleasure is the gauge of happiness, an individual's right to gratification only extends to the edge of another's pain. Most importantly, More restricts laughter to a particular social group, fools. As uplifting and justified as laughter might be, it has to be practised in a safe environment with conscious, willing, and possibly marginalized participants. While ridiculing figures of authority such as the Renaissance popes and kings and making fun of popular habits such as gambling and hunting is not only permissible but also desirable in the imperfect world of More's England, in the much more sophisticated society of the Utopians no one but fools, as the self-foregrounded representatives of the Other, deserve laughter. Perhaps the main reason why More, who apparently loved fools himself and used them several times in Utopia as crucial characters in his parables, did not elaborate further on their ethos or on the relationship of foolishness to laughter is that it had already been done comprehensively a few years earlier by Erasmus. In many ways, The Praise of Folly is a natural predecessor of Utopia, and its main postulates are

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implicit throughout More's own argument. Though Erasmus's book is not on laughter but on an attitude towards life, laughter is indispensable in his universe. The only way to wisdom is through laughter. "'Curing by amusing was [Erasmus's] favourite device/' James McConica writes, "inseparable from his most serious scholarship and works of piety in his personal mission to Christian Europe."34 Erasmus defines laughter as a wise man's response to foolishness and in this description does not differ much from his predecessors or peers. The true originality of his polemic lies in his acceptance of both foolishness and laughter. While most other theories tend to perceive laughter as a legitimate, but ultimately unpredictable and unethical, expression of one's recognition of the lack of reason in another person's actions and decisions, Erasmus not only sees this lack as a welcome sign of one's individuality and subjectivity but even believes that laughter is not a cruel punishment for it. Instead, laughter should be treated as a symptom of willing complicity in a world in which sense is not just temporarily but possibly permanently absent. After all, folly does not equal dishonesty nor reason wisdom. Almost a whole century before Shakespeare, it is "morosophoi,"35 the wise fools, the progenitors of Feste and of King Lear's nameless companion, who represent Erasmus's ideal of acquiring wisdom. Although in Erasmus's view folly is associated, among other things, with ignorance, self-love, pleasure, and madness - all characteristics of human personality that are rarely seen as positive - this in itself is not an indication of its paucity of substance but is rather viewed as typical of an essential paradox of our existence. The fact that wisdom can also be achieved in a non-traditional manner does not necessarily mean one should give up on it. In the context of the emerging rationalism of the early modern era, being ignorant or self-loving may not fit the standard ethical cannon; one should not take it for granted, however, that ignorance and self-love do not have their own merits. Ignorance, for example, is a condition of innocence, and self-love an integral aspect of Pauline caritas as the foundation of the discourse

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of Christianity. Erasmus goes even further in his argument and proposes that not only is Sophocles correct in suggesting in his play Ajax that "ignorance provides the happiest life"36 but also that Folly is absolutely necessary to Nature, if for no other reason than to make our lives bearable. In this context, the main objective of laughter as the preferred reply to Folly is to make an ideal society delightful. When Erasmus talks about friendship, he suggests that there is no infatuation without a certain degree of folly. Whereas the blindness of Cupid may cause people to act irrationally, "this happens everywhere and meets with smiles, but nevertheless it's the sort of absurdity which is the binding force in society and brings happiness to life."37 Laugh at fools, Erasmus advises, they deserve it, but do not think that by laughing you are excluding them from pleasure, for "they're pleased with themselves, lead a life of supreme delight suffused with sweet fantasy, and owe all their happiness" to their abusers.38 In a masochistic act of the transgression of our selfhood, allowing laughter at our own expense does not degrade us but adds to our pleasure. Only when we are willing to wager the autonomy of our subjectivity can we truly be liberated from the constraints of our fear of Otherness. In perhaps the most unusual compliment to laughter, Erasmus affirms its relevance by admitting that he himself "often ha[s] a good laugh."39 The most recent of the great Utopias and, if we ignore the curious but very limited experiments such as the one by the Spanish missionary Vasco de Quiroga to establish a community based on More's principles in central Mexico, just about the only one that was implemented in practice is the Marxist conception of communism. Though Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explicitly rejected the Utopian socialism of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen,40 their vision of a society in which the means of production are owned collectively rather than individually and goods are distributed according to one's needs rather than one's merits was, during their own life, still a theoretical projection

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and not a feasible project. Since the Russian Revolution of 1917, however, many of Marx and Engels's ideas have been tested in a real-life environment, and several countries tried to actualize their dream of a classless society. Of these experiments, the early period of Bolshevik rule in the Soviet Union is usually considered to have been the most promising. The time before Stalin's ascension to power was characterized by great economic enthusiasm, theoretical originality, and officially supported artistic innovation. Old models were discarded, radical thinking was encouraged, and the belief in the viability of Marxist ideas had not yet been shaken by Stalinist purges. No matter how internationally isolated the Soviets were, their experiment with social engineering was closely watched. And how did laughter fare in the Soviet Utopia? It is clear from a number of sources - among them Marx, who in his 1848Communist Manifestospoke of the "loud and irreve laughter" of the proletariat,41 and Bakhtin, with his idea of socially liberating carnival - that laughter was a useful instrument of revolution and that it very efficiently defied authority. What happens, however, once there is no more need for rebellion against hegemonists and for the debunking of the faulty logic of capitalism? Does laughter still have a role in a society that has reached the dialectical peak of historical progression? A quick examination of the treatment of laughter in the age of communist innocence reveals that theory can indeed anticipate practice. The attitude towards laughter in the early years of the Soviet regime echoes closely what Plato, Dante, and More predicted in their philosophical and literary accounts. Just as Plato suggested in his Republic, laughter can be employed in a communist Utopia to defend the identity of the state against the external and threatening Other. In Mayakovsky'sMystery-Bouffe(1918), "an h epic and satirical portrayal of our epoch"42 by the court poet of the Revolution, virtually all ridicule is targeted against such international reactionaries as "Abyssinian Negus, Indian Rajah, Turkish Pasha, Russian Merchant, Chinese,

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Well-Fed Persian, Fat Frenchman, Australian with Wife, Russian Priest, German Officer, Italian Officer, American, [and] Student."43 They are the ones at whose physical weakness, moral corruption, and intellectual immaturity we should laugh. In contrast, the proletarians, or, as the author calls them, the Seven Pairs of Unclean Ones, are strong, brash, courageous, and, above all, hard working. In a universe where only work can lead one to the Promised Land - in Mayakovsky's conception, a futurist version of a working-class city complete with giant factories - any attempt to avoid manual labour should be exposed as ideologically flawed and mocked ruthlessly. A true communist laughs only at a capitalist. The builders of the communist Zion also seem to have adopted More's assumption that laughter is at its most ethical when it is contained and marginalized. The paradigmatic sacrificial fool of the early Soviet era is a character from The Bedbug (1928), another of Mayakovsky's modernist plays. In the first part of the play, Prisypkin, "formerly a worker and Party member," slowly transforms into a materialistic petty bourgeois during the preparations for his wedding with Elzevira Davidovna Renaissance, the "manicurist and cashier in her parents' hairdressing salon."44 Fifty years after his death in a fire that started as a result of a fight at his wedding, the social parasite Prisypkin is found frozen in a block of ice and then revived by the scientists of a new, technologically advanced, and totally sovietized world. His individualism, sentimentalism, selfishness, and alcoholism are now mere historical curiosities, yet still so infectious that Prisypkin has to be locked up in a disinfected cage at a zoo. He spends the rest of the play entertaining the ideologically fully evolved visitors with his outdated habits such as swearing, playing the guitar, and smoking. The only laughter in an ideal world of 1979 is the laughter directed at the leftovers of an extinct past. Since in the totally realized Soviet state there is no more laziness, corruption, chauvinism, inequality, or other forms of human imperfection to serve as suitable fodder for ridicule, laughter

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has become an endangered species. In a totally just world where there is no division between the majority and the minority, laughter too becomes unnecessary and goes the way of private ownership and the dodo bird. Mayakovsky's final take on the ethical society of the future, The Bathhouse (1929), demonstrates that one of the ways in which laughter can survive in an ideal world is by being limited to the select few. In his particular case, the Phosphorescent Woman, who comes from a time machine, leaves behind the bureaucrats, servile artists, and greedy foreigners and only takes with her into the socialist paradise the true Communist party members as the vanguard of the working class. They are the ones who have the last laugh in Mayakovsky's divine comedy while the makers and preservers of red tape longingly watch them disappear into the bright future. As in Dante, the right to smile in The Bathhouse is a direct consequence of one's proximity to Truth: only if one understands and cares about the tenets of MarxismLeninism will one find political deviation funny. In the future, there is no place for people who manufacture dissent; they should be happy to remain in the purgatory of the present and not in the inferno of the past. The Soviet experiment brings forth one other aspect of the relationship between laughter and an ideal society that none of the philosophical speculations predicted: even when it is carefully managed and contained, laughter remains so powerfully subversive that it also affects what is outside its immediate reach. As soon as the presence of ridicule is detected, nothing can prevent laughter from spilling over and contaminating the unpolluted areas as well. Think, for example, of Prisypkin's final speech inThe B bug. The zoo director has gathered an international crowd of observers and tries to impress them by asking Prisypkin, alias the "philistinius vulgaris"45 Pierre Skripkin, to say a few words in human language: SKRIPKIN (Stands obediently, coughs, raises his guitar, then suddenly turns and looks at the audience. His face changes and he

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The Pleasure of Fools beams with delight. Pushing the Director aside, he flings down his guitar and shouts at the audience). Citizens! Brothers! Friends! Mates! Where did you come from? There are so many of you! When did they defreeze you? Why am I in the cage alone? Brothers, mates, come up here with me! Why am I suffering? Citizens!46

"With his barbarous ways," Edward J. Brown points out in his biography of Mayakovsky, "Prisypkin seems no better than an animal to the citizens of the rationalized world of the future," yet it is just as easy to observe how the "pathetic appeal of the caged Prisypkin" can also be "interpreted ... as a veiled attack on the police state."47 Prisypkin may well be the principal target of Mayakovsky's mockery and his address to the audience an attempt to force the spectators to consider their own inadequacy, but that does not preclude one from feeling pity for the caged fool or, more dangerously still, from suddenly realizing that the ideal society is not quite as perfect as it seems either. And there is only a short step from there to laughing primarily at the Utopia itself. Despite Mayakovsky's zeal for the cause and his unwavering political orthodoxy, his plays received a mixed response from both critics and audiences. According to a contemporary testimony, the original production of The Bathhouse did not provoke "a single burst of laughter."48 As funny as Mayakovsky's satire of the decadent West, petty bourgeoisie, and bureaucracy may have been, his laughter was just not reined in enough to allow for a safe reaction. The Soviet Guardians had even less patience with another Russian comic playwright, Mikhail Bulgakov. "Mayakovsky comes out against bureaucratic 'management' of art," the Soviet critic Boris Milyavsky writes. "But in Bulgakov's play the very idea of state, Party management of theatrical life is ridiculed, scorned."49 Bulgakov's allegorical depiction of revolution and its theatrical representation in The Crimson Island (1928), for example, was banned after just four productions. Despite Bulgakov's insistence that the target of his burlesque were poorly written plays about the October

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Revolution and not the Revolution itself, critics clearly felt that there was a fairly good chance that laughter at the politically correct yet artistically challenged playwright Dymogatsky would not remain restricted to Dymogatsky but might also spread to the topic of his allegory, the glorious struggle for the victory of communism. It did not help Bulgakov that the positive red native Farra-Teytey exclaim to the imperialist invaders: "Listen, Europeans! Your attempts to capture the riches of the island will get nowhere, because numberless and politically aware hordes of natives will not give them to you";50 what mattered more was that the author's foregrounding of these lines as part of an awkward play-within-the-play potentially exposes to questioning the very ideas Farra-Teytey so valiantly declares. Within a few years of the banishment of Bulgakov's plays, Soviet scepticism regarding the usefulness of laughter in a communist state increased to the point where simply telling a joke could land the teller in a gulag. Just as in Puritan England, allowing laughter seemed to underline the weaknesses of the society rather than its strengths: in order to maintain the appearance of Utopia, writes Krystyna Pomorska, "the official prohibition of certain kinds of laughter, irony, and satire was imposed upon the writers of Russia after the revolution."51 Even if this trend, as Sergei S. Averintsev argues in his essay on Bakhtin, owes more to the traditional Russian Orthodox view of laughter as sinful and ultimately "impermissible"52 than to the restrictiveness of the Stalinist readings of Marx, it does not change the fact that practical applications of any ideology are deeply uncomfortable with laughter. Both religious and political dogmatism depend too much on rules and control to tolerate their feigned subversion. "There are all the many ways in which laughter spells freedom," Marcel Gutwirth writes in his book Laughing Matter (1993). "The freedom to exemplified in laughter can also be read as a freedom from, as liberation."53 Booth, in his study of the ethics of fiction, centres his critical rejection of

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Rabelais around the identical binary opposition: "Facing a world in which various powers restrain me and various freedoms seem desirable, I can seek either a freedom from external restraints, from the power of others to inhibit my actions, or I can seek a freedom to act effectively when external restraints are removed." Booth elaborates further on this distinction by suggesting that "some freedoms to require the sacrifice of some freedoms from."54 In other words, I am only free to laugh if I give up some of my other freedoms, if I agree to maintain certain restraints. While being able to laugh frees us from whatever form of repression has been imposed on us, the freedom to laugh does not free us from responsibility to others. It is almost as if Booth believes that responsibility is a form of repression: repression for the sake of the Other. At this point in Booth's argument, we begin to see that the Soviet authorities' rejection of laughter was, in fact, a theoretically coherent and methodologically consistent act. Like Marxist ethics, Booth's approach - which is based on the elaborate analogy between one's relationship to literature and friendship, and the duties required to maintain both - is, in terms of its ethical orientation, clearly deontic. And like most deontic systems it tends in certain circumstances towards imperatives and prohibitions as the means of critical enforcement. Virtually every ethical code is founded on the assumption that totally unrestrained freedom is impossible and that an individual's violation of another person's rights is license rather than liberty. In this view, for a society to operate normally limits must be placed on personal freedom. As Gutwirth puts it, "A freedom that gives offense to some at all times, to others on occasion, does no more than live up to its essentially lawless character. I speak here not of political or even moral freedom, which implies some restraint, but of the irresponsible and the gratuitous which laughter opens up to us for a breathless spell."55 Should it then surprise us to read recommendations that, if laughter is indeed based on freeing us from, rather than to, it should not be tolerated? In the most radical

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extrapolation of this opinion, as we have seen in the preceding pages, all laughter is seen as ethically unreliable and is thus categorically discouraged. On the other hand, it is also possible to argue that as soon as a limit is imposed on freedom, one can no longer speak about liberty. Yes, the idea of unchecked freedom for everyone does seem unrealistic and anarchic, but a consistent implementation of the diametrically opposite position - that everyone's freedom should be restricted - will necessarily result in a new and different form of oppression, in the oppression by difference. In this light, a liberation of the Other can easily be perceived as a subjugation of the Self, and an affirmation of the different as discrimination against the same. The constitution of Rabelais's ideal society the Abbey of Theleme (Desire), has "only a single clause: DO WHAT YOU WILL."56 Only in this kind of Utopia is laughter never endangered. Everywhere else, the concern for others inevitably makes laughter an ethical liability. No wonder that Bakhtin's book on Rabelais was refused publication for more than two decades and that Booth is so intent on banishing Rabelais.

CHAPTER SIX

Self-Deprecating Laughter

The one aspect of the relationship between laughter and Utopia that survived our critical investigation more or less unscathed is More and Erasmus's notion of the fool as the willing butt of public ridicule. Regardless of how blatantly the Utopian practice of Soviet communism diverges from the precepts of Utopian theories, fools, with their ability to absorb as much as deliver humorous abuse, remain ethically the least contentious vehicle of laughter. Not only does the restriction of laughter to fools prevent possible accusations of critical libertarianism, which are a logical consequence of one's insistence on the absolute freedom to laugh, but it also opens another venue for a moral justification of laughter. Because most mechanisms of laughter cannot escape the realm of ridicule and are inextricably connected with the reduction of everything to its difference, and because all other attempts at establishing a list of acceptable and less-acceptable targets of ridicule eventually end in self-contradiction, it is safe to assume that the only truly constructive laughter is the one that turns on its producer, that is, self-deprecating laughter. Among the writers who are aware of the ethical potential of self-deprecating laughter, Gogol is once again more perceptive than many of his theoretically better equipped colleagues. In one of the numerous texts he wrote in response to attacks on The Government Inspector, Gogol asks his readers

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and spectators not to be afraid to laugh at themselves. "Not only this comedy/' he writes, "but everything that ridicules the ignoble and depraved, no matter who the author, must be understood as referring to ourselves, as if written about us personally."1 While this idea is in itself not entirely original, it differs from other comparable definitions in going a step further and granting the experience of self-deprecating laughter a spiritual dimension. Gogol calls himself "an honourable functionary of God's great kingdom" who awakened in his audience "laughter born of love for man."2 Though this evangelical proclamation, according to which the role of laughter could almost be compared to that of Job's lesions, may need additional elaboration - perhaps of the type that S0ren Kierkegaard and George Santayana provide3 - the mere mention of the ontological role of laughing at one's own expense not only legitimizes self-deprecating laughter but possibly also validates all laughter. It is not difficult to place Gogol's famous motto for The Government Inspector - "No use blaming the mirror if your face is crooked"4 - in its appropriate historical context. Together with Vanbrugh, who claims in his refutation of Collier that "the Stage is a Glass for the World to view itself in; People ought therefore to see themselves as they are; if it makes their Faces too Fair, they won't know they are Dirty and by consequence will neglect to wash 'em," and Luigi Pirandello, who argues in his essay on Humour that the humorist unmasks the simulations and enables us to "see ourselves live" in this mirror,5 Gogol represents the pinnacle of a critical tradition that, by its literal understanding of the metaphor of art as reflection, squarely positions laughter on the margins of the aesthetic. By exploring the denotative boundaries of the metaphor with which this interpretation of the term realism is commonly defined, these three playwrights, each in his own century, simultaneously isolate the essential dimension of laughter and note its main limitation. If the function of art is to reflect reality, and if the function of comedy, humour, and other strategies of laughter is to reflect distortions of reality, it is only fair that the first glance

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into such a mirror belong to its owner. That is, that the first object of reflection be the subject of reflecting. The philosophical implications of this kind of critical stance are intriguing and far-reaching. "The sudden realization that one's own excitement is -'unreasonable/" as the origins of laughter are described by Koestler, "heralds the emergence of self-criticism, of the ability to see one's very own self from outside; and this bisociation of subjective experience with an objective frame of reference is perhaps the wittiest discovery of homo sapiens."6 While self-deprecating laughter cannot singlehandedly reverse the effects of two millennia of Western dualism, the impact of its temporary breeching of the gap between the subject and the object should not be underestimated. If nothing else, Bakhtin argues, festive laughter, which is so unique precisely because "it is also directed at those who laugh," ensures that its practitioners "do not exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world."7 Unlike all other forms of laughter, self-deprecating laughter both separates and joins us; it confines and liberates. It is at the same time laughter at (oneself) and laughter with (those who laugh at us) and may thus offer us the best hope so far of dispelling the critical allegations against laughter in general. Since in this kind of laughter the subject and object of ridicule are one and the same, it could well end up being totally inoffensive. A couple of well-known scenes from Edmond Rostand's pseudo-neoclassical play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), a heroic comedy whose main character is at the same time self-effacing and marred by an incurable congenital defect, serve as a nearly perfect example to test this hypothesis and determine whether it, too, is plagued by the same misgivings that characterized our other attempts at finding ethical laughter. The audience is gradually introduced to the irascible hero of Rostand's popular but critically neglected play during the first act, which takes place at a famous seventeenthcentury theatre, L'Hotel de Bourgogne. The appearance of

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his huge nose is always the first climax of the play and the build-up to it is intentionally deliberate. Because of this and because of the typical audience's innate sense of respectability, the initial response to Cyrano's facial aberration tends to be restrained and is usually not accompanied by an audible reaction. The situation starts to change after Cyrano's conversation with a boorish audience member attending Montfleury's pompous production in which the long-nosed chevalier scares the Kibitzer away by suggesting very aggressively that the nameless spectator was looking at Cyrano's nose. Laughter is finally assured a few lines on when Viscount de Valvert bravely dares his fate and, unlike the cowardly Kibitzer, openly tells Cyrano, in front of the parterre full of spectators, that his "nose is, you know, is - how shall I put it? -/ Rather large!"8 The following dialogue ensues, rendered here in Charles Marowitz's blank-verse translation: CYRANO

(gravely) Rather ... VALVERT Rather large! (Suppresses a nervous laugh. Pause.} CYRANO (imperturbable} Is that it? VALVERT (slightly dismayed} What's that? CYRANO Are you done? VALVERT (uncertain) Yes, ha-ha - I think so. (As he turns to go CYRANO bars his path.) CYRANO But my dear fellow, That will not do at all. There is so much To say on such a topic, I can't believe You'd throwaway the chance. - You might begin Par exemple, aggressively: "Were that My nose, I'd have it surgically removed!" Or Amiably: "How can you drink with such A monstrous protuberance? Why I'd

n6

The Pleasure of Fools Forego the mug and simply use a barrel!" Descriptively: "Why it's a rock, a crag, A promont'ry; an archipelago!" Inquisitively: "I say, is it some kind of Carrying-case for a trombone or a tuba?" Courteously: "Do you adore the birds So much that when the robins come to roost You give them that to perch on?" Insolently: "Be wary when you take a smoke, for sure, They'll think your bloody chimney is on fire!" Warily: "Don't tread on any marshes, The weight of it will sink you 'neath the ground. Pensively: "Perhaps a large umbrella Will stop the colors fading in the sun." Pedantically: "Now Aristotle wrote Of some enormous mythologic beast "Hypocampelephantocamelos." (pointing to his nose) "Could this be the fiend he had in mind?" Whimsically: "Now throw a tablecloth Across the thing and all King Arthur's knights Would have a place to sit." Eloquently: "When it's blown, the typhoons rage and all The hurricanoes roar." Rhetorically: "When it bleeds, the Red Sea!" Practically: "What a fitting shop front it would make For a parfumerie?" Or, Lyrically: "The horn of Roland summ'ning Charlemagne Was but a penny-whistle next to this!" Respectfully: "O, may I lay a simple Wreath beside the tow'ring monument?" Rustically: "A nose, you say, pshaw! It's a watermelon that's gone mad!" Militarily: "Now, you take the right flank And I, the left, and when I give the signal We'll pound it till it drops!" Commercially: "Raffle it off. It'd make a grand first prize!" Or, as mighty Marlowe might have put it:

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"Was this the nose that launched a thousand sniffs And burned the topless towers of Illium?" These, my friend, are things you might have said Had you had some sprinklings of wit To spice your tedious discourse.9

It is only once Cyrano shows off his linguistic brilliance by describing his nose in nineteen different ways that the spectators are finally comfortable in their laughter at the unfortunate deformity on his face. While before this moment the more tactful observers might still have harboured some reservations about the civility of their natural instinct, after Cyrano's own recognition of the apparent difference between himself and others the infamous protrusion ceases to be perceived as an object of sympathy. If before this speech the spectators might have had mixed feelings whenever they looked at his disproportional face, Cyrano's employment of humour at the expense of his deficiency sends them a clear signal that laughter is not only a possible but also a permissible response to the sight of his nose. In part, it is the ingenuity of Cyrano's metaphors that convinces the tolerant and considerate spectator that laughing at his nose is not equivalent to endorsing an insult, but in an equally important measure this task is accomplished by Cyrano's conscious marking of his body's transgression. The quips stop acting as insults once they move from the Other to the Self. By generating laughter at his own expense, Cyrano ultimately absolves the audience from its responsibility as the subject, and indirectly also from its duty to act ethically. When Cyrano decides that it is possible to mark an aberration from normality, he does several things. First, he affirms the existence of the concept of normality and probably even reinforces its importance for the production of laughter. Second, he disempowers the silent majority by replacing silence - as the main expression of its identity - with laughter. And finally, he disturbs the construction of the Other by taking it over. Of course, he may inadvertently accomplish

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something else as well: deliver a blow against all those critics who argue that the engagement expected of ethical art must be expressed in a social action and not merely in a discursive stance. Cyrano's articulation of alterity from the perspective of the Other demonstrates that an ethical world is not necessarily limited to ignoring the differences but may even foreground them. In other words: being different can mean being funny. We should not forget, however, that one of the main reasons for the freedom of laughter in the scene from Cyrano de Bergerac lies in the spectators' implicit realization that in a theatrical production the hero's nose is not a permanent disfiguration but merely a prop that the actor in Cyrano's role will be able to remove as soon as the show is over. One could easily defend the hypothesis that there is absolutely nothing wrong in finding humour in Cyrano's nose as long as the snout is made of latex and is not real. The situation is thus comparable to many other theatrically based sources of humour where laughter originates in the exposure of the contingency of the transrepresentational area between performance and reality. No matter how sophisticated the means of stage illusion are, they remain limited, and comic playwrights in particular like to exploit this grey area of representation. Just as it is easier to laugh, as Dryden points out in his Essay ofDramatick Poesie (1668), "when the Actors are to die" than when they simply trip because the act of dying "can never be imitated to a just height,"10 so does the likelihood of laughter at Cyrano's nose proportionally increase with its length. Even a considerate spectator will laugh at Cyrano's eloquent foregrounding of his difference when it is clear that this difference is reversible. In terms of the ethics of criticism, this could be interpreted to mean that the offensiveness or non-offensiveness of laughter depends on the degree of representation involved in the construction of the Other. The awareness of all but the most naive theatregoers that Cyrano's nose is not real clearly indicates that laughter in this scene originates not only in the ridicule of difference but also, if not predominantly, in

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the recognition of the liminality of theatrical representation. Simulation becomes dissimulation, and the production of laughter is moved from the level of personal invective to a general realization of the imperfection of performativity as a category of reality. What happens, though, if the role of Cyrano is performed by an actor who is endowed with a particularly prominent nose and does not need a prosthetic appendage? Does this not change the audience's perception of his monologue? If Gogol and Lear, both of whom were apparently very selfconscious about the shape and dimensions of their own noses, are any indication of the possible answer to this question, the response should be a resounding yes. While Lear's limericks regularly use human deformities as their subject, noses are not only the most common target of his five-line jabs but also a particularly bizarre source of his poetry. They curl, they are so long that they have to be carried around, and they can accommodate "most birds of the air."11 Yet Lear's nose imagery rarely makes one laugh and is, more often than not, curiously personal, serious, and even sombre in its tone. Similarly, Gogol's short story The Nose (1836), in which the collegiate assessor Kovaliov loses his nose, finds it in a carriage, and then has a perfectly civilized conversation with it, is so grotesque that it may confuse rather than amuse the reader. In trying to resolve the question of the ethics of theatrical laughter, we cannot ignore what Bert O. States calls "the ontology of the actor," that is, the suggestion that in theatre "the inevitable starting point of any discussion of the actor's presence on the stage is the fact that we see him as both character and performer."12 Cyrano's laughter is always at the same time Rostand's laughter, yet the two are not remotely identical in their reception. The reaction that I have discussed so far, for example, can be applied to the spectators in the auditorium but probably not to those on the stage. Though Rostand's stage directions prescribing the fictional spectators' response to Cyrano's tirade are few,

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Cyrano's jokes at his own expense can surely be seen as a tacit permission to laugh at his wit, at least when it comes to the audience present in the imaginary world of the seventeenth-century theatre. The idea that self-deprecating laughter is the most ethical of all forms of laughter might be deceiving: what it gives us is a falsely comforting sense of being just, when in reality we are still heartless enough to be amused by a disability. The hypothetical possibility that an actor could be cast in the role of Cyrano who might serve as a poster-boy for rhinoplasty radically changes the complexion of our discussion. When we remember with the Czech structuralist Jifi Veltrusky that a theatre performance is not only an "acting" but also an "enacted event,"13 the ethics of Cyrano's selfdeprecating laughter is displayed in an entirely new light. Even if it is true that in a production of Rostand's play the spectators laugh largely because they know Cyrano's nose is fake and because they see no need to worry about feeling sympathy with him, one cannot overlook the possibility that by their act of laughter these spectators join the audience in the Hotel de Bourgogne in their callous passing of judgment on the shape and size of an unfortunate man's nose. In this context, it is particularly interesting to note the poetic licence with which Rostand treats historical facts. According to Richard Aldington, the size of Cyrano's nose may have been greatly exaggerated and owes more to a fictional account by the nineteenth-century French poet Theophile Gautier than to the swordsman's contemporary portraits. It is quite possible that Cyrano's nose was unique not so much for its size as for its disfiguration, which, the speculation continues, may have been caused by a number of injuries the real-life Cyrano de Bergerac incurred during his aggressive duelling career. When Cyrano is represented as having been born with an unnaturally large nose, it can almost be seen as an element of inherited guilt, a less-glamorous version of the original sin, and can thus easily make him into an object of sympathy that does not deserve to be laughed at. If, conversely, the irregular shape of Cyrano's

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nose could be attributed to the character's own impatience and belligerence, it would be hard not to perceive his injury as a justified punishment that should not be safe from a righteous grin. This bizarre ambiguity is addressed thoroughly in Leslie Fiedler's account of bodily normality and distortion entitled Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (1978). When Fiedler speaks of Tod Browning's 1932 cult film Freaks and its 1973 remake called The Mutations, he says: "In the end, however, the manufactured Freaks of Mutations, in part because they are palpable and not very convincing illusions, move the audience to snicker in embarrassment and condescension instead of crying out in terror." He then points out that "the very word 'Freak' is an abbreviation for 'freak of nature,' a translation of the Latin lusus naturae, a term implying that a two-headed child or a Hermaphrodite is ludicrous as well as anomalous. Even now, many normals laugh not just in the presence of unconvincing Freaks but of any Freaks at all, making traditional jokes at their expense."14 If nature can make jokes and if self-deprecating laughter is not offensive, can one posit that the ultimate expression of ethical laughter is a side or freak show, a production in which the people on whom nature played a joke publicly foreground their abnormality by participating in a spectacle of objectification? Three further questions have to be answered before a more conclusive reply can be given to the first one. First, do freaks, by giving the viewers permission to watch them as deformed beings, produce selfdeprecating humour, or does the willing display of their bodies simply indicate the ability to tolerate laughter at their own expense, in which case the construction of selfdeprecating laughter is done by the supposedly passive audience and not by the freaks themselves? Second, does the mere act of acquiescing, of allowing one's Self and not one's representation to become a part of a spectacle, give the spectators the right to laugh at the joke of nature? And third, is the freak show really a natural extension and exaggeration of Cyrano's dilemma?

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Though tolerating laughter may appear to be a reaction rather than action, it too implies a conscious decision not to refuse and, moreover, to giye permission. To tolerate is quite likely a more passive act than to encourage, but it is still an act and therefore at least contributes to the construction of a humorous identity, if not constructs it by itself. From this argument probably follows the answer to the second question: sitting in a Coney Island side-show tent, agreeing to be part of a spectacle, by definition means to expect an audience response. While in the case of a freak show sympathy may well be the preferred audience reaction, the precarious liminality of representation is the reason why sympathy can only be guaranteed if certain responses, for instance snickering "in embarrassment and condescension," are never allowed. Finally, assuming a freak show is not a natural extension of self-deprecating laughter, not just a stage in its evolution, one's eagerness to foreground one's difference cannot be taken as the decisive and essential element of humorous marking. Yet in most postmodern discussions of freaks normality as the necessary condition of laughter at the abnormal is itself described as a construct. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla in the introduction to their book Deviant Bodies (1995) argue that "'normal' and 'healthy' bodies [are] fictions of science," while Rosemarie Garland Thomson, in her collection of essays entitled Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996), writes about the "Cultural Construction of Freaks."15 If normality, just like freakishness, is a cultural construct, then there is no point of reference from which the foregrounding of the difference can be undertaken. Since cultures are in a constant process of redefinition, the criteria for what constitutes normal behaviour and image keep changing, and the Barnum-and-Bailey giant of yesteryear will become the basketball star of today. Since everything is just as likely to be normal as it is to be abnormal, laughter can never promote a majority at the expense of a minority or subvert the majority views to empower a minority. In simple or, if one does not agree with this

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argument, simplistic terms, this vicious circle can only mean one thing: the implosion of self-deprecating laughter. There is only a short stride from the view that self-deprecating laughter is tied to the ability to objectify one's alterity to the old Platonic idea that knowing oneself is connected to a sense of self-irony. An epistemological acknowledgment of the restrictions in one's understanding of the world and an examination of one's identity as if it were a priori lacking are not that far removed from Gogol's, Vanbrugh's, Pirandello's, and Bakhtin's requests to expose our differences and laugh at our own expense. It is at this intersection of distance and the attempt to know oneself without reservation that the debate that began with Plato's Philebus meets Kierkegaard and his understanding of irony. Gogol, who most likely was not familiar with Kierkegaard's work but certainly knew Friedrich Schlegel and some of the other German romantics who influenced the Danish philosopher, was obviously not entirely alone in his interpretation of laughter. In Kierkegaard's philosophical system the relationship between laughter on the one hand and humour and irony on the other is implicit rather than explicit. His suggestion that irony constitutes "the boundary between the aesthetic and the ethical" and humour "the boundary that separates the ethical from the religious"16 is nonetheless a welcome addition to the philosophical justification of the ethics of self-deprecating laughter. If the desire to recognize the ethical, which Kierkegaard defines as "the persistent striving for truth,"17 is indeed bracketed, first, by one's ability to perceive the difference in the Other and, second, by a comparable ability to recognize it in the Self, laughter too, and not just its auto-critical variety, should be embraced rather than rejected. Despite Kierkegaard's contention that both laughter and self-deprecating laughter linger on the margins, not in the core, of the ethical, the aesthetic, and the religious, their strategic position enables them to be hugely useful in comprehending ethical, aesthetic, and religious concepts.

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Does this mean, then, that the ability to laugh at oneself is a sign of a truly open and unbiased sense of humour as well? In other words, is the ability to detect differences associated with the willingness to construct one-Self as Other? Let me try to answer this question with another example from Cyrano de Bergerac that in many ways functions as an exact counterpart to the scene quoted at the beginning of this chapter. In act 2, scene 9 of the play, Cyrano and Christian de Neuvillette, two of the main characters in the comedy, finally meet. The cadets warn the newly enlisted Christian that the one thing he should never mention in front of Cyrano is his nose, or any nose for that matter, but the young Gascon tries to gain their respect, and in the process establish his discursive identity, by deliberately and, considering his usual lack of verbal agility, wittily interrupting Cyrano's tale to his comrades with repeated references to a nose. Since Cyrano is bound by his promise to the secretly beloved Roxane to protect Christian, he cannot react to the provocations in his usual intimidating manner. The following anthological dialogue ensues: CYRANO

I went alone to seek the blackguards out. The moon above was like a silver watch And then, as if that watch were thrust into A pocket, it all went dark and not a cloud Was in the sky. No lamps upon the streets. So dark, you couldn't see beyond CHRISTIAN - your nose? (An electric pause as everyone looks to CHRISTIAN then back to CYRANO who slowly turns towards CHRISTIAN.) CYRANO (quietly] Who is that man there? IST CADET - The new recruit. He arrived this morning. CYRANO This morning, you say? CARBON

(softly]

His name is Christian de Neuvil -

Self-Deprecating Laughter CYRANO

CHRISTIAN CYRANO

CHRISTIAN CYRANO CHRISTIAN CYRANO

CHRISTIAN CYRANO

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(realizing) Oh yes! (By turns, his face turns white then red. He is almost set to pounce on CHRISTIAN when, with a superhuman effort, he suppresses his anger and resolves to continue as calmly as he can.} As I was saying, it grew dark, quite dark. You couldn't see your hand before your eyes. And I was thinking, for the sake of one Poor drunkard, I was going to offend A mighty prince by sticking in my ... ... nose. Oar! - sticking in my oar where it Did not belong. - And in doing so, I might have to pay ... ... through the nose. The piper! - Pay the piper\ - So I drew close, So close in fact that we were ... Nose to nose!? Eye to eye! - And since I'd come this far I had to see it through. Then suddenly, A blade flashed in the darkness so I climbed A fountain and I quickly took a nosedive? A leap across the bridge! - To no avail For in a moment there were dozens more; So close in fact, that we were ... ... rubbing noses? Hand to hand\ With fifty more approaching. I countered one and handed him ... - a nosegay? (Leaps at CHRISTIAN confronting him directly. The others scramble over to get a better view. CHRISTIAN has not stirred; CYRANO, breathing heavily, tries again to master his emotions as he forces himself to continue.} A slash across the skull! He dropped at once. The others all fell back upon their ...

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CHRISTIAN - noses? CYRANO Heels. I skewered two, disarmed a third And as another lunged, I left their leader Wailing loudly with a ... CHRISTIAN ... bloody nose? CYRANO (exploding) Out, I say! All of you!!!18

What a spectator observes in this scene is a situation that seriously challenges many of the basic assumptions about self-deprecating laughter. Just as the audience has finally become comfortable in its laughter at Cyrano's nose, it is forced to reconsider its attitude. This time, Cyrano's role in the production of laughter is clearly passive, and, what is even more surprising, he refuses to recognize wit that is not that dissimilar from the wit he deployed in the first act. Even though none of Christian's interventions directly comment on the size or shape of Cyrano's nose, Bergerac takes exception to the mere use of the word. The ability to make fun of himself is entirely gone and is instead replaced with controlled anger. From the audience's point of view, this situation is confusing: should they again start feeling sympathy with Cyrano and find the handsome Christian's interruptions of the powerless and restrained master swordsman tactless, or should they enjoy Christian's presence of mind and Cyrano's deserved embarrassment? This scene does something else for our argument. It proves that the talent for invoking self-deprecating laughter is not identical to the ability to laugh at one's own expense. While the target and the mechanisms of laughter may be the same in both cases, the reason why the responses differ probably lies in the diametrically opposed influences that the two processes exert on the construction of one's identity. Making fun of myself, and even consciously putting myself in a position where others can make fun of me - that is, the performance of my Otherness and my explicit permission for its construction - directly contribute to the assertion of my subjectivity. On the other hand, merely recognizing the

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relevance of someone else's marking of my alterity places me in the permanent position of an object. A belated admission that I am different is but a concession that I was not capable of discovering this myself. For any self-respecting critical theorist, such an interpretation can only mean one thing: generating self-deprecating laughter might be ethical, but the same cannot be said about laughing at oneself. And here we arrive at the final paradox of this stream of thought: since self-deprecating laughter only truly comes into being once I laugh myself, our argument about the ethics of selfdeprecating laughter has obviously returned to square one. That is to say, by laughing at a self-deprecating joke I implicitly confirm that its production was unethical as well. No surprise, then, that Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics sees "self-depreciation" as an extreme manifestation of laughter and not as a virtue.19 How this paradox operates in practice can be seen clearly in the example of long-nosed spectators. They too may frequently, and collectively, behave like Cyrano in the second scene quoted above: regardless of how imaginatively Cyrano describes his nose or the keenness with which an actor is willing to showcase his less-than-ideal face, some audience members will never appreciate the jokes that indirectly relate to them as well. Instead of tacitly accepting their own difference, they protest by regarding the ridicule of any nose, even when this ridicule is self-administered, as tasteless and demeaning. Self-deprecating laughter is not, in military parlance, an intelligent rhetorical weapon. It does not exclusively strike the guilty but invariably results in collateral damage as well. A few years ago, a controversial exhibition entitled "No Laughing Matter" took place at the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax. As the notices suggested, "This important exhibition of activist art [was] intended to draw attention to various social problems through the use of humor and irony."20 An essential part of the event were six works from Carrie Mae Weems's series of collages called Ain't Jokiri. These

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combined "photographs of black people with texts from racist jokes, riddles, and folklore."21 Though the curators and gallery staff took every possible precaution to ensure that no one could take Weems's works literally and, by using university facilities, targeted what was presumably the most intelligent and open-minded audience possible, the exhibition ended up being picketed and generated a major headache for the university administration, ultimately causing the university president to issue a nervous disclaimer. Despite the fact that the artist was black, her intentions not covert but overt, and the installation labelled as humorous and ironic as clearly as if a laugh-track were played, the supposedly sophisticated audience still did not muster enough latitude to appreciate what could be understood as a particularly radical manifestation of self-deprecating laughter. One might try to justify the Haligonians' disapproval of the exhibit by suggesting that they did not perceive Weems's laughter as being addressed at herself: after all, her collage ridiculed the bias and the bigots, not the members of her own race, which is what one commonly expects of self-deprecating laughter. Yet we should not forget that all self-deprecating laughter is ultimately subversive. The reason why it is usually seen as a strategy of empowerment is precisely that it helps to turn the tables on the privileged and the dominant and exposes their hegemonic intentions. By laughing at myself, I show my strength and take the power to control discourse out of the hands of the oppressor. "When looked at closely," Buckley observes, "one finds that self-deprecatory humor seldom amounts to an acknowledgment of inferiority."22 Kierkegaard is probably right: ethics and humour may border on each other, but they cannot cross into each other's territory. The problem with self-deprecating laughter is similar to that which afflicts all other forms of laughter: as we saw in the chapter on the typologies of laughter, no object of ridicule resides in a world of its own but instead shares it with others. Thus, when a subject constitutes itself as a willing object of laughter, it inevitably also marks as different all

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those unwilling members of its community who share with it the ridiculed attribute. A pun about Cyrano's nose is always at the same time a pun about Pinocchio's nose and about the nose of any self-conscious spectator who has ever shown up at a production of Rostand's play. To laugh at myself is always to laugh at ourselves, but without consulting Others. As Nancy Reincke comments in her article on women's laughter, "When women laugh at self-deprecating humour, they are laughing against themselves, indirectly reinforcing male bonding and denying female knowledge." Only "[w]hen they are laughing for themselves, [do] they create female bonding."23 The fact that the black community in Halifax refused to treat Weems's juxtaposition of racist jokes and photographs as ironic may define this social group as lacking in humour, but by the same token it demonstrates that no degree of humorous ingenuity and responsibility can guarantee that self-deprecating laughter can be considered ethical. Self-deprecating laughter, obviously, has its ethical merits but also its critical drawbacks. Whereas its subversion of narrative authority is a welcome respite for all those spectators who might otherwise feel too guilt-ridden to laugh, one cannot afford to ignore the possibility that for some spectators self-deprecating laughter is a vehicle of self-disparagement and moral relativism and thus, instead of fulfilling a social responsibility, alienates them from the purveyor of such laughter. Insofar as the concept of selfdeprecating laughter may serve to alleviate the pragmatic and ethical challenges connected with laughter, it may also lead to its critical dismissal. To the same degree that selfdisparaging laughter may make us lose respect for its author, it enables the ethical critic to disregard its artistic value. Since the authors of this kind of laughter do not take themselves "seriously," there is no need for the critics to behave any differently: such is the logic that is often employed in these circumstances. Free will is individual and not transferable, and so is the ethics of self-deprecating laughter: while I can never offend myself with laughter at my own expense, I can still alienate everyone else.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Comedian

Comic playwrights are well aware of the specific position of self-deprecating laughter and do not hesitate to capitalize on its inherent ethical benefits. As early as in ancient Greek theatre, pambasis as the main vehicle of ridicule in New Comedy is utilized not only to mock the playwright's competitors but also to poke fun at the author's own expense. Aristophanes thus regularly uses parabases to deride his own staging mannerisms, dramaturgical shortcomings, and even his physical appearance. In Wasps, for instance, the chorus makes light of its silly tight costumes, while in Clouds, among all the accusations of vulgarity heaped on his rivals Cratinus, Ameipsias, and Eupolis, Aristophanes finds time, first, to acknowledge grudgingly that in his production of Knights he may have misjudged the audience, and second, to joke about his baldness. Similar metatheatrical self-mockery is employed in a variety of other plays, from the radical conclusion of Christian Dietrich Grabbe's Jest, Satire, Irony and Deeper Significance (1827), where Grabbe himself is supposed to appear on the stage as a kind of deus ex machina, to Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), where the theatre's manager mutters the following derogatory remark: "Is it my fault if France won't send us any more good comedies, and we are reduced to putting on Pirandello's works, where nobody understands anything ..."1

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Few authors, however, have exploited self-deprecating laughter as skilfully as Moliere. Not only did Moliere explicitly comment on his craft in several of his comedies but his autobiographical and at least in part auto-critical Rehearsal at Versailles (1663) literally started a whole new dramatic subgenre of plays-about-plays. The blurring of the line between the subject and object of ridicule is so prominent in his plays that Segal actually argues that "Moliere painted only one character who appears in various guises in all of his plays - himself."2 Moliere's first-hand experience of bloodletting and enemas, and his hypochondria, for example, enable him not only to laugh safely at everything connected with patients but also to make fun of medicine and doctors. Similarly, his marital problems offer him enough comic fodder for a number of plays about cuckoldry, jealousy, and impossibly pert young women. Based on this, and on his reputation as one of the greatest comic playwrights ever, one might assume that Moliere's laughter is beyond critical reproach and that seventeenthcentury audiences could not find fault with it. Indeed, many of his comedies, such as The Doctor in Spite of Himself (1666), Doctor Love (1665), The Imaginary Invalid (1673), The Miser (1668), The Would-be Gentleman (1670), and The Misanthrope (1666), were received warmly and without controversy. On the other hand, a number of others, from The Affected Ladies (1659) and The School for Wives (1662) to Tartuffe (1664) and Don Juan (1665), encountered serious critical resistance and almost ruined his career. In order to determine more specifically why this discrepancy in the reception of Moliere's laughter occurs, we have to examine carefully the phenomenology of the performance of self-deprecating laughter. Two crucial questions have to be addressed in this context: first, why is the comedian an exemplary producer of selfdeprecating laughter, and second, how does the subject construe itself as an object in a stand-up act? The most efficient manner in which a comedian such as Moliere can take advantage of self-deprecating laughter is

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by establishing a surrogate stage identity that stands both for himself as a person and for his character as the vehicle of his laughter. In the one-act play Rehearsal at Versailles, his final response in the polemic surrounding The School for Wives and its dramatized defence entitled The Critique of the School for Wives (1663), Moliere accomplishes this task in the most obvious method imaginable: by placing his whole company behind the proscenium arch. In this way, all the words uttered on stage - including some of Moliere's and Mile Bejart's most famous lines - are inevitably perceived as phenomenologically peculiar. At the same time, they are seen as the text belonging to a literary figure whose name happens to be Moliere or La Grange, as the discourse of the actor La Grange who is speaking the lines of a character La Grange, and as the dramatist's own words. The situation is additionally complicated when the members of the Troupe de Monsieur, who are practising how to impersonate fictitious characters such as the prude or the coquette, then talk about the real people who happen to be standing on the stage right next to them, in full view of the audience. Few pieces of dramatic literature are as convoluted in their relationship to reality as the famous dialogue in which Moliere, in and out of his role as a ludicrous marquis who passionately dislikes Moliere, is trying to explain to his colleague Brecourt how to act. Here is an excerpt from scene 4 of The Rehearsal at Versailles: MOLIERE "Here's the very man. Chevalier!" BRECOURT "What is it?" MOLIERE Very good, Brecourt. You sound exactly like a marquess. But you're not playing a marquess. As I said before, I want you to speak naturally. BRECOURT I'll try again. MOLIERE Good. "Chevalier!" BRECOURT "What is it?" MOLIERE "We're engaged in a dispute over who is the model for the marquess in Moliere's play. He bets I am, and I'm betting he is."

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BRECOURT "And I say it's neither of you. You're both foolish to read yourselves into that play. The other day I heard Moliere arguing with some people who charged him with the same offense. He replies that nothing displeased him more than being accused of taking particular people as targets. His aim, he said, is to portray types and not individuals, and all the people who appear in his plays are imaginary, phantoms if you like; he invents them as he goes along, in such a way as to entertain the audience; and he would be embarrassed if they resembled actual people."3

One can just hear the wheels spinning in the minds of the spectators of Louis xiv's court as they try to follow the ontological leaps in this dialogue. As Bermel notes in his introduction to the translation, "Pirandello, the master of this kind of many-dimensioned writing, never invented a more complex situation."4 What the audience could witness at the 14 October 1663 production was an actor, who happens to be enacting this actor's foe, instructing another actor on how to defend the first actor by using an argument that actors should never use devices that force the audience to read the play as if it were directed at actual people (such as the two actors). Moliere's self-deprecation reaches the level of pure metaphysics in this scene. The hybrid identity, which the comedian created for himself in order to deflect the accusations of the ethical questionability of his ridicule, is folded into itself so many times here that the spectators surely must have been forgiven if they could not suppress a burst of laughter. Whenever a joke was cracked during the original production of The Rehearsal at Versailles, the audience could reinstate its willingly suspended disbelief, treat both the actors and their characters as Erasmus's fools, and consequently assume that it was given an unconditional license to laugh. The self-referential dimension of Moliere's comedy enabled the Versailles courtiers, and later the middle-class PalaisRoyal patrons, to behave as if the limits of the play were the

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limits of their ethical universe. When I am acting myself, my Self is just an act, a performance, and as such cannot be harmed by laughter (which only affects true identity). In a particularly perverse form of collective voyeurism, the seventeenth-century spectators could legitimately feel comfortable in their laughter: not only were the objects of their pleasure physically on the other side of the stage-auditorium divide and implicitly relegated to the other side of the social topography as well - think of the Church's initial refusal to bury Moliere within the consecrated ground of the SaintJoseph cemetery - but they also publicly flaunted their difference and so freely accepted the sacrificial role of the Other. What changes, though, once the original cast of an impromptu of this nature is no longer available? Is the "authentic" experience of this play still possible once its performers retire or die? One of the ways of overcoming this concern is to speculate that the layer of laughter, which is lost when the self-deprecating dimension of a play can no longer be reproduced, is so essential for the success of the production that self-mockery must somehow be reintroduced. In other words, The Rehearsal can only work in the nineteenth century if Moliere is replaced by Constant-Benoit Coquelin, and in the twentieth by Louis Jouvet. Jean Giraudoux had precisely this in mind in his Rehearsal in Paris (1937): he wrote an auto-critical comedy for the famous actors of his own times (but, interestingly, not for himself). If no suitable performers can be found whose private lives are in the public domain, then The Rehearsal at Versailles should not be performed but simply read as a historical document. In order to maximize the possibility of ethical laughter, Moliere attempts to substitute what States calls the "binocular vision"5 of the actor as both character and performer with a situation in which there is no need for such a stereoscopic approach, and where the perpetual switching between observation of the actor's skill and immersion in the character's life is unnecessary. His goal is to convince the audience that the actor is not performing a character but himself. States writes that in an act of performance "the

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actor (I) speaks to the audience (you) about the character (he) he is playing."6 In a paraphrase of this statement, the stand-up act as the phenomenologically distinct manifestation of performance could be described as "I speaking to you about myself." Instead of representing another's absence, the comedian is an actor who risks his own presence. If an actor is indeed "the being who grants [the character] an existence,"7 then a stand-up actor, the comedian, is the being who grants existence to his own projected identity. And if, as States continues, "the ancient association of actor and prostitute is justified" since "the actor is someone who consents to be used,"8 then the stand-up act where an actor abuses himself in public can only be compared to the fundamentally ludicrous activity of exhibitionist masturbation. The Rehearsal at Versailles is perhaps one of the most radical instances of such a phenomenological coup, but there is no shortage in Moliere's opus of other less-complex cases of self-referential situations that are conducive to selfdeprecating laughter. Instead of trying to distance himself from the figures in his plays with the customary disclaimer about coincidental similarities, Moliere the stand-up comedian ignored the conventionally raised boundaries between life and fiction and kept reminding his audiences of the potential parallels between the private and the public sides of his stage persona. It was in his interest as the creator of laughter to encourage the belief that he was a hypochondriac or a cuckold not only on the stage but in his private life as well. Only if he could bypass the possible ethical reservations about his laughter as abusive of others by directing it at himself could he afford to produce it at all. In this light, the creation of an assumed identity that bridges the gap between the acting and the enacted grants Moliere's comic performance a distinct critical advantage: in addition to helping him find a physical form for his laughter, it merges the imaginary and the real and thus moves his laughter out of the reach of everyday moral criteria. Not only is the identity of the subject and the object of ridicule

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an autobiographic curiosity, but it plays a crucial role in the reception of a stand-up act. Think, for instance, of what was arguably Moliere's most successful play, The Would-be Gentleman. Perhaps the main reason why the aristocratic spectators for whom this lavish comedie-ballet was written enjoyed it so much is that the target of laughter was a pretentious bourgeois as represented by another parvenu, Moliere himself. Despite all of Louis xiv's support and despite the royal business connections of M. Poquelin senior, in the audience's mind Moliere remained the son of an upholsterer, a middle-class man whose home was right above his father's shop and not in an inherited chateau. He may have been well educated and the Sun King himself may have been his son's godfather, but for all his verbal skill Moliere was ultimately just as much an outsider at Versailles as M. Jourdain was in his newly acquired circle of noble parasites. When the middleaged M. Jourdain experiments with music, dance, fencing, and philosophy, the spectators could easily convince themselves to see in his clumsy efforts a real-life bourgeois struggling to master the skills that were part of their own lives from an early age. To an average seventeenth-century noble, Moliere would have seemed infinitely better suited to playing an ignorant Jourdain than a pompous marquis. The familiarity with the tradesmen along Rue St Honore that, on the one hand, enabled Moliere to portray the hapless nouveau riche with such accuracy was, on the other, a social scar that he could not eradicate. The second important element of Moliere's stand-up act was his obsession with health and doctors. Both Moliere's illness and his hypochondria are well documented; what is more important, they were widely known to his seventeenthcentury audiences. From the mid-i66os on, Moliere was afflicted with a severe form of tuberculosis that affected him to the extent that he had to incorporate its symptoms in his plays. In The Miser, for instance, his Harpagon hacked and coughed constantly. Furthermore, at the end of 1665 Moliere fell so ill that he nearly died and had to interrupt the run of Doctor Love, while in the spring of 1667 another one of this

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plays, The Sicilian which he had written that winter, had to be postponed until he recovered from an attack of neurasthenia, both events that Parisian theatre-goers would undoubtedly have noticed. While recuperating from his illness in Auteuil, Moliere, on the advice of his physician, was subjected to a bizarre diet that required him to eat nothing but milk products for more than three years. Even in a world where the common treatment for gastrointestinal problems was "a good detergent enema composed of double catholicon, rhubarb, rose honey, etc,"9 the rumour of so unorthodox a medical approach must have raised some eyebrows. Moliere wrote a number of plays in which physicians and medicine are the primary target of ridicule - in fact, the famous quip that "their skill is sheer make-believe" comes from Don Juan10 - but what they all have in common is tha Moliere's role in them is either that of the patient or of the phony quack. In the early one-act farce The Flying Doctor (c. 1650), which predates his own medical problems, Moliere's Sganarelle is a doctor rather than a patient. In Doctor Love, written around the time when Moliere first became seriously ill, his Sganarelle is still not sick himself, but it is his decision to attempt to cure his daughter Lucinde's lovesickness by soliciting the advice of four pompous and incompetent physicians. In The Doctor in Spite of Himself, Sganarelle as Moliere's alter ego learns how easy it is to pretend to be able to cure the sick and then blame "the person who dies" if anything goes wrong.11 In the 1669 comedie-ballet Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, the hero of the play is mercilessly tortured by an apothecary, two musicians, and eight costumed dancers who all chase after him with huge syringes in their hands. Finally, in The Imaginary Invalid, Moliere's Argan becomes the model hypochondriac for all ages, a figure that (according to the nasty comedy with the anagrammatic title Elomire the Hypochondriac (1670) by another neoclassical playwright, Le Boulanger de Chalussay) was openly based on Moliere's own paranoia. Fully aware of his personal experience with the painful practices of seventeenth-century medicine, the audiences not only forgave Moliere his assault on the physicians and

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apothecaries but actually applauded his readiness to expose his fears of various experimental and more or less inefficient medical treatments. Had Moliere been healthy, the reception may well have been less lenient. They felt exactly the same way about Moliere's foregrounding of his jealousy and cuckoldry. In many ways, Segal argues in his account of Moliere's comedies, several of his most famous plays can be read, if not as "psycho-dramas," then certainly as "reflections of his wretched [personal] life,"12 in particular of his unhappy marriage in 1662 to Armande Bejart, the daughter of his former mistress. Moreover, Segal continues, all three of his 1668 plays - Amphitryon, Georges Dandin, and The Miser - deal with cuckoldry and have most likely been inspired by Armande's cheating on her middle-aged playwright-husband. "The quantity and quality of her lovers were prodigious," Segal writes/3 and as well known to the average theatre-goer as the romantic liaisons of Hollywood stars are to an avid reader of tabloids. When in the original production of Georges Dandin, Moliere's buffoon Dandin is repeatedly deceived by his young wife Angelique, played by Moliere's young and cheating wife Armande, the spectators must have loved the self-humiliation to which Moliere subjected himself to elicit their laughter. Considering how atypical a comedy The Misanthrope is, and keeping in mind that it was written right around the time when Moliere, as we shall see, was experiencing serious difficulties in trying to stage Tartuffe, it is always surprising to note that the dark play about a bitter man in a failed relationship was actually received very generously, without any of the critical complaints that one might have expected. John Palmer writes that The Misanthrope "was never attacked either upon social, literary or moral grounds by his contemporaries."14 Moreover, as La Grange meticulously recorded, the production was a box-office success, playing for twenty-one days in a row.15 Moliere's first biographer, Jean-Leonor Grimarest, attributes this unexpected praise to the fact that Moliere presented The Misanthrope as part of a double bill with The Doctor in Spite of Himself. But

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as Georges Mongredien, editor of Grimarest's Life of M. de Moliere (1705) points out, the suggestion has since been shown to be factually incorrect.16 Even if a certain Marquis de Montausier did believe that he was the butt of the play's ridicule/7 it is quite likely that many more audience members viewed it as yet another instalment in Moliere's serialization of his domestic troubles. Though Alceste's jealousy may not be entirely equivalent to Moliere's own feelings nor Celimene's inconstancy to that of Armande Bejart, it must have been hard not to read Alceste's lines I'm willing to forget the things you've done; My soul will find excuse for every one; And I'll contrive to view your blackest crimes As youthful foibles caused by evil times ...l8 as a sort of double entendre, as if Moliere the actor was not addressing them to Armande the actress playing Celimene. Not all scholars, of course, are convinced that this kind of interpretation of Moliere's plays is productive. Palmer, for example, emphatically denies the relevance of reading Moliere's matrimonial comedies a clef. After all, the counterargument goes, several of his early comedies, written before his marriage to Armande, deal with the exact same theme. The plot of The Jealous Husband (c. 1650), possibly his earliest preserved play, already revolves around a suspicious husband and his sprightly wife, and this essential conflict, which Moliere may have borrowed from commedia dell'arte anyway, also plays a prominent role in Sganarelle, or The Imaginary Cuckold (1660) and in the infrequently produced Don Garde of Navarre, or The Jealous Prince (1661). Yet few of these comedies manage to improve on their Italian models. Their jokes at the expense of paranoid husbands just do not seem to have the candour and immediacy of Moliere's later, better-informed quips on the same subject. Let us not forget that it was not until Moliere was in his late thirties that his old men became more than campy caricatures.

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When Moliere ridicules Jourdain's bourgeois background, Argan's hypochondria, and Alceste's jealousy, he not only construes himself as the object of laughter but in many ways contradicts what Brecourt advocates in the previously quoted passage from The Rehearsal at Versailles: he takes a particular person as a target and portrays an individual rather than a type. Moliere may not imitate others, but his characters still resemble an actual person, the actor representing them. Despite defying the first rule of ethical criticism and laughing at the sinner rather than at the sin, Moliere's stand-up act achieves the impossible: it convinces the spectators that the only person their laughter can hurt is the one who desperately longs for it. Since in a stand-up act laughter is necessarily addressed at the comedian's identity as a whole in its unique and inseparable status as both character and actor, and not just at one of the individual differences that constitute its alterity, the likelihood that the laughter's target could be shared and laughter, therefore, dismissed is virtually non-existent. In a paraphrase of Diderot's statement, one could say that only a moliere could be offended by Moliere.19 The process of constructing a comedian's identity is a lengthy and complex one. Only the repeated foregrounding of the comedian's differences and the continual performances of his disempowered Self can ensure that the audience will never feel defensive. Before the theatre-goers of Moliere's era accepted that, in laughing at his characters, they were each time laughing at a very specific, concrete, and actively cooperating person, they had to learn that his stage persona was carried over from one production to the next. Because even each of Moliere's full-length plays dramatized a single aspect of his personality and not his total subjectivity, the received memory of his previous appearances - or, as Marvin Carlson calls this aspect of "performance intertextuality," the "ghosting"20 - was absolutely essential in persuading the audience there was no hidden unethical agenda in his ridicule. That is why the name Sganarelle is used for the main character in no fewer than

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seven of Moliere's comedies. Just like the famous commedia dell'arte performers Angelo Beolco and Tiberio Fiorilli, who originated the characters of Ruzzante and Scaramouche, Moliere knew exactly that safety lies in repetition. The identity of a comedian is formed in a lifetime and not in a single evening, and unless the spectators are familiar with the comedian's narrative history, it is always possible that they will take some of his jokes personally. From this perspective, the stand-up act seems to challenge one of the main tenets of postmodern criticism, Barthes's explicit preference for the text over the author. While in his essay "The Death of the Author" writing is described as "the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin" and, further on, as "that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing,"21 in a comedian's performance the voice of the author must be heard, the subject of ridicule must be continually present, and the identity of character and actor not only maintained at any cost but repeatedly reaffirmed. In a stand-up act, laughable texts cannot be treated as distinct and discrete units but only as they belong to the same, to the comedian. "Linguistically," Barthes writes, "the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a 'subject/ not a 'person/ and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language 'hold together/ suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it."22 In terms of the structure of a stand-up act, the author is the text. The comedian is both the I and the instance saying I; and it is the person, rather than the subject, who "holds together" the act and exhausts it in laughter. For the ethics of laughter, the notion of authorship is not outdated but essential: there is no self-deprecating text where there is no author to deprecate. In a stand-up act, the author is still very much alive. Many comedians go a step further in their quest to construe themselves as authentic Other and are ready to

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affirm their commitment to laughter by sacrificing the final vestige of their non-performative identity: their name. I am not thinking here so much of Moliere's own decision to drop Poquelin from his signature - most biographers suggest that doing so may simply have been part of a deal to save his family's reputation when he became an actor - as of many other comedians who opted to use their private names for their public characters. Both La Grange and Du Croisy from Moliere's company, for instance, played under their own names in The Affected Ladies. With this symbolic gesture, a comedian seems to indicate that there is no return to the separation of the imaginary and the real: life becomes performance, and performance life. Since such comedians no longer stand for someone else but solely for themselves, any laughter they provoke is on their behalf and not at the expense of the unwillingly implicated or of the absent. From the sixteenth-century Italian actress Isabella Andreini to the twentieth-century stand-up star Jerry Seinfeld, comedians carefully nurture the impression that their private and public personas closely overlap. In his book on American stand-up comedy, John Limon explains the inner structure of the stand-up act with the help of Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection and the abject. "When you feel abject, you feel as if there were something miring your life," he writes, "some role (because 'abject' always, in a way, describes how you act) that has become your only character. Abjection is self-typecasting."23 A stand-up act performs this abjection. That is to say, a comedian keeps casting himself in an identical role and, in doing so, gradually repudiates his subjectivity until all there is left is his assumed identity. At the end of this process, the subject of ridicule becomes its object. And the audience? The audience can now respond without having to worry that its laughter is offending a real person and not a mere performance of an identity. If Segal's claim that Moliere's comic characters are all variations of himself is true, and if self-deprecating laughter should indeed have protected him against accusations of

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ethical impropriety, why then were some of Moliere's comedies so controversial? In terms of The Affected Ladies, we should begin by acknowledging that the one-act comedy was hugely popular with audiences. In fact, it was Moliere's first success in Paris and is usually considered his first true masterpiece. By the time the play was written in 1659, the pretentious style of the early seventeenth-century salons was already in slow decline so that when Moliere parodied it, the great majority of the Parisian public were quick to laugh with him. Yet the precieuses themselves were not amused, and since they still had some influence, they managed to have the play banned for almost a month. The majority eventually won, though, and The Affected Ladies became the blockbuster of the season. From our point of view, it is not hard to determine why The Affected Ladies experienced difficulties with some theatregoers: Moliere was not a participating member of a salon and definitely not a precieux. The role he played in the production was that of a pompous valet, Mascarille, and had clearly nothing to do with Moliere personally. His target was others, not himself, and he therefore had no moral right to make fun of them. Though one of the leading precieuses of the time, the Marquise de Rambouillet, in a public expression of her generosity and sense of humour, "invited Moliere to perform [the play] on no less than three separate occasions for her own special benefit,"24 and though the published edition of the play contained a preface, in which Moliere explained that he did not ridicule true precieuses but only their provincial imitators, many of the people who felt directly touched by his ridicule, among them both Pierre and Thomas Corneille, still held a grudge. A similar pattern of critical reception, but with much more significant consequences, can also be observed in the best known of Moliere's ethical offenders, Tartuffe. Since the primary butt of ridicule in Tartuffe was exaggerated or false piety - a defect that, unlike hypochondria and cuckoldry, was not Moliere's own - the audience and critics who were stung before could now revive the old arguments and

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attack the play with renewed fervour. As long as Moliere stuck to foregrounding his own imperfections, the critical community could perhaps grumble about the unnecessary simplicity of his dialogue but could not fault him on a moral level. After all, he did what every good Christian should: he dealt with the speck in his own eye first, before he went after the log in someone else's. In Tartuffe, on the other hand, Moliere forgot about t ethical maxim and committed two cardinal sins: first, he laughed at a flaw that a seventeenth-century French actor who was barely allowed to walk into a church, let alone worship devoutly, could not possibly have. And second, Moliere did not even cast himself as Tartuffe but gave the role to the handsome Du Croisy. By his decision to dislocate the object of ridicule outside the sphere of self-deprecating laughter, he immediately lost all critical credibility. His laughter could no longer claim to be measured and inwardly directed but became just as aggressive and potentially malicious as his enemies would want it to be. While it has been periodically argued that Moliere's decision to cast himself as Orgon demonstrates that the gullible host is the intended target of ridicule in the comedy rather than the hypocritical Tartuffe, the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement de 1'Autel, the archbishop of Paris, and the president of the parlement were not interested in such subtleties of interpretation. Not only were productions of Tartuffe banned but anyone who wanted to read the play was threatened with excommunication. Moreover, the vicar of St Barthelemy, Pierre Roulle, suggested in his condemnation of the play that its author "deserves for this sacrilegious and impious act the severest exemplary and public punishment; he should be burned at the stake as a foretaste of the fires in hell."25 As a result, it took two major revisions, five years of waiting, and numerous private performances and readings of the play beforeTartuffefinally opene at the Palais-Royal on 5 February 1669. To make matters worse, in 1665, while he was desperately trying to stageTartuffe,Moliere wrote another pla

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further aggravated his foes with its defiance of the unwritten laws of ethical laughter. His Don Juan, Bermel writes in Moliere's Theatrical Bounty (1990), commits not two but seven unforgivable offences against neoclassical criticism: "he switches the genre from a drame serieux to a comedy with flecks of farce"; again complains about "religious hypocrisy"; assigns himself the role of Sganarelle, "the author's purposely ineffectual mouthpiece"; disobeys both the unity of time and space; moves the play from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century; and, finally, represents Don Juan as a mockery of a gentleman.26 Though, unlike in the case of Tartuffe, few critics tried to defend libertinism and argue (as they tried to do with excessive piety) that it was a virtue and not a vice, they still rejected Moliere's treatment of the subject. Making fun of a middleclass parvenu in The Would-be Gentleman was perfectly acceptable to the aristocratic audience because it was executed by a middle-class parvenu, but when an immoral aristocrat became the butt of Moliere's laughter, the joke was no longer funny. One could perhaps speculate that despite his casting choice there was a part of Moliere in the free-thinking Spaniard, but if this is true, and Don Juan with his atheism and hedonism was indeed another of Moliere's alter egos, he certainly was not part of his public self. As soon as Moliere stopped acting as a comedian and making fun of himself, his license for laughter was revoked. Of the four plays that encountered serious critical resistance, The School for Wives is the only one that departs from this pattern. In many respects, the comedy about a middle-aged man trying to marry his young ward resembles his other plays on cuckoldry, yet unlike most of them, it was not accepted with a condescending wink and hearty laugh. Instead, it resulted in a noisy debate that exceeded in its magnitude, if not in its implications for Moliere's career, the controversy surrounding Tartuffe. Problems started soon after the opening of The School for Wives on 26 December 1662. As early as 13 January 1663, the journalist Loret wrote

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that "The School for Wives ... was criticized in certain circles/'27 Notable aristocrats very publically left the PalaisRoyal halfway through the production, would-be critics attacked the comedy in their pamphlets, and audiences flocked to see what all the commotion was about. The attacks on his brand of laughter eventually blossomed into what later became known as the "comic war" that led to two other plays by Moliere, The Critique of the School for Wives and the radically self-reflective Rehearsal at Versailles. Despite the presence of autobiographical elements in The School for Wives - Jean Donneau de Vise, in his play Zelinde (1663), written as a contemporary attack on The School for Wives, snidery implies that Moliere, a cuckold himself, was well equipped to write on the subject of jealousy28 - the play's self-deprecating laughter simply did not protect the playwright from critical censure. Though the ages of Arnolphe and Agnes (forty-two and seventeen) are virtually identical to those of Moliere and his recent bride Armande (forty and twenty), many spectators refused to read The School for Wives as a new episode in the comedian's dismantling of his Self comparable to Moliere's ridiculing of his hypochondria or middle-class roots. Why? The most common explanation, and the one that Moliere himself introduces in an ironic manner in his Critique of the School for Wives, attributes the play's difficulties to its lack of morality and to its supposed mockery of women. Also prominent in the early rejections were comments on Moliere's crude realism in the depiction of his characters and on his inability to follow the rules of neoclassical drama. Yet neither his realism nor his disrespect for pseudoAristotelian rules started with The School for Wives; he had made fun of women before, and his innuendo is much dirtier in some of the earlier plays. It is equally hard to argue that in this particular comedy Moliere the bourgeois is laughing at aristocrats, which would certainly have been an acceptable cause for some spectators' dissatisfaction. I contend that from the point of view of the phenomenology of the stand-up act, there is another possible interpretation for

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the ethical reservations concerning The School for Wives. In the original production of the comedy, the role of the hapless guardian was indeed played by Moliere, but the role of Agnes was performed by the ingenue specialist Mademoiselle de Brie, rather than by Armande herself, who in fact did not act in the play at all. Whether this choice was made because Armande was too canny and sophisticated to pass for the innocent and naive lamb Agnes is irrelevant. What really mattered is that the audience probably saw Catherine de Brie, a woman who for a period of eight or nine years before his marriage to Armande was Moliere's mistress, acting the role of her luckier rival. With this kind of an awareness, Moliere's identity as the self-deprecating comedian could not be sustained. Any laughter he produced would invariably appear to have a second, subversive and particularly humiliating layer. And it would certainly not appear to be ethical. Even if this interpretation is not correct, and Armande and Moliere's marriage, Donneau de Vise's gossip notwithstanding, was still in pretty good shape when The School for Wives opened, the whole incident nonetheless demonstrates that the use of self-deprecating laughter cannot by itself protect one from charges of offensiveness. Regardless of the comedians' best efforts, the identity of character and actor is not a permanent one; it can collapse without much notice and once again expose the performers to the mercy of ethical criticism. For States, a typical example of such a "closure" of a stand-up act is Moliere's death on the stage after a production of The Imaginary Invalid.29 Once nature catches up with representation, self-deprecating laughter can no longer hide in the phenomenological shadow of the comedian and invariably loses its critical immunity. A more recent, and to our understanding perhaps more obvious, example of the collapse of identity of character and actor, and of its impact on self-deprecating laughter, is Chaplin's career as the lovable tramp Charlie. The last film in which Chaplin still appeared with his trademark toothbrush

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moustache is the one in which reality and fiction, and not just an assumed and real identity, overlap: the prophetic 1940 parody of Nazism The Great Dictator. As soon as Chaplin foregrounded the undesirable resemblance between his comic alter ego and Hitler, Charlie's existence became redundant. He simply could not compete with the usurper of his difference. In the thirty-seven years that he lived after The Great Dictator, Chaplin made only four more films, all without the iconic moustache and without an assumed stand-up identity, and then wisely realized that in Charlie's absence he could no longer produce innocent laughter. I wrote earlier of the resurrection of the author at the expense of the text in the stand-up act, but I should now perhaps revisit the issue. If the identity of character and actor can indeed collapse, Barthes may have been right after all: the text may matter more than the author even when it comes to laughter. Assuming that even the unrelenting reenactment of authorship, which is essential for the phenomenological status of the comedian, cannot ensure that the audience will approach a stand-up act as an extension of an identity rather than as an instance of text, any critical approach must necessarily treat self-deprecating laughter as an occurrence that can never transcend the division between the Self and the Other. In other words, even self-deprecating laughter is targeted, in each given moment, at differences shared by a number of present or absent audience members, and not at a self-contained and unique network of differences that constitute a comedian alone. Though the comedian as the author acts as an autonomous identity, each joke that contributes to the construction of a stand-up act can still be read as a separate text.30 "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing," Barthes writes.31 To remove the author/comedian from a stand-up act is, conversely, to e-liminate the act's root signified and to break open its performative shell. In this respect, it is entirely irrelevant whether the cause of the closure of a stand-up act is as significant as a performer's death or a world war, or as

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insignificant as a clown losing his red nose. As long as the comedian's identity cannot be guaranteed, neither can the ethics of laughter. In addition to the fact that the idea of self-deprecating laughter as the only permissible form of laughter in itself subsumes a certain restriction of freedom, namely the freedom of ridicule - according to some feminists, Rabelais as a man does not have the right to laugh at women, and, if seventeenth-century Puritans are right, Aphra Behn as a woman has no right to laugh at sexuality32 - there is another factor, clearly, that prevents self-deprecating laughter from being considered truly ethical. Just as those critics who insist that one can only laugh at elements of one's own identity practise a form of epistemological discrimination, so the mere possibility of the closure of a stand-up act indicates that a comedian is not a perfectly benevolent producer of laughter. Unless we entirely deny the need for theoretical consistency and instead argue a priori that categorical judgments cannot exist (by arguing a priori, of course, we immediately subvert this stance), we are left with only two options in our search for inoffensive laughter: the first holds that no laughter is ethical; the second asks, why should it be?

CONCLUSION

Laughter and Insult

Let me begin this conclusion with a brief overview of the results thus far of my investigation into the ethics of laughter. I started the search for inoffensive laughter by observing just how widespread the belief in the intrinsic ethical ambiguity of laughter as an audience response is. Critics question the social and aesthetic purpose of laughter from a variety of theoretical perspectives and regularly advise against its gratuitous use. Their reservations range from attempts to restrict laughter to open calls for its banishment, or at least its replacement with less-aggressive physiological expressions such as the smile. Perhaps the most common strategy of critical containment is the differentiation between acceptable and unacceptable forms of laughter. Laughter with, for instance, is usually seen as far less problematic than laughter at. Yet my analysis demonstrated that even those types of laughter that have traditionally been seen as kinder and gentler are not necessarily ethical. In fact, they are often simply more subtle in their foregrounding of differences and discriminating against the Other: laughter with those present is essentially laughter at the absent. Similarly, even the non-referential forms of verbal laughter cannot exist outside their pragmatic and semantic context and can thus never avoid the fundamentally contentious act of the imposition of discursive authority. As long as language is a means of communication, its abuse can be taken personally.

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The main reason why laughter is so frequently accused of being irresponsible is its arbitrariness. Literally nothing is safe from ridicule. It is just as easy to mock the right and the true as it is to make fun of the wrong and the false. Neither virtue nor beauty protects one from laughter. While laughing at irreversible flaws is clearly unethical, laughter at reversible ones is also not without its drawbacks. In addition to this, laughter cannot be controlled. It can, indeed, be used very efficiently to subvert the structures of power and liberate the disenfranchised, but its subversion continues even after the oppression itself has stopped. Laughter undermines any kind of structure, including the structures of ethics and morality. The subversiveness of laughter is least controversial when laughter is directed at its own producer, that is, in selfdeprecating laughter. By systematically debunking its author's identity, self-deprecating laughter in a paradoxical manner empowers its object. An unexpected problem arises, though, whenever the author of self-deprecating laughter implicates unwilling Others in the process of construction of Self as different. In their attempts to ensure that their laughter will be perceived as ethical, comedians as the prime producers of self-deprecating laughter are even prepared to sacrifice their own phenomenological autonomy, but this radical solution fails to maintain the illusion of ethics once the identity of character and performer inevitably collapses. In certain conditions, too, a stand-up act can be read as a network of separate texts rather than as a performance of the author's Self and is just as susceptible to ethical apprehension as all other strategies of laughter. Laughter occurs in every imaginable situation and is triggered by a wide variety of stimuli. We laugh when we are tickled, when we have just been embarrassed, or when we triumph. Laughter can be an expression of pure existential joy and an overwhelmingly exhilarating experience. It can be affirming, healing, and therapeutic. Laughter can signify our belonging to a community and our willingness to accept blame. In many cases, laughter appears entirely incapable of offending anyone. When we laugh alone, no one is

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hurt, and when everyone participates in our laughter, laughter brings together rather than separates. Everyone laughs for a different reason, and every instance of laughter can, or should, be treated separately, independently of all others. Still, even in the most disparate situations and the most ideal circumstances, the potential ethical liability of laughter cannot be ignored. The fact that no one saw me err does not mean that a mistake has not been made: I know it has. The unnoticed error is now a part of my Self. People laughing at a demeaning thought in their own minds may not be as brazenly bigoted as those who laugh at the articulation of such a thought in public, but neither are they entirely guiltless. When laughter is used as a defensive reaction, it still defends its subject with aggression. We may laugh with a clear conscience and the best of intentions, and we may never realize that we have inadvertently affected anyone, but somewhere a person exists who might have found our reaction inappropriate. And that alone makes our laughter suspect. Readers, I hope, have been convinced by now that all laughter can in principle be seen as unethical. But we still have not answered the question about the role of ethical criticism in the study of laughter. How does criticism, and postmodern criticism in particular, with its belief that every text is political and subjected to the influence of dominant power structures, address a phenomenon that defies the mere possibility of ethics? On the remaining few pages of this book, I will investigate this issue by focusing on the relationship between laughter and insult as an exemplary manifestation of offensive discourse. The laughing potential of insults is considerable. From epic flytings to Kingsley Amis's diatribes in Lucky Jim (1953), invective has regularly been used as a means of achieving laughter. Moliere's Alceste expresses his misanthropy in the form of affronts, and the American comedian Chris Rock built his whole stand-up act around a subversive appropriation of racial slurs. The insults selected here come from

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Gargantua and Pantagruel: my argument started with a look at Rabelais, and it is appropriate that at the end I return to his work. In Book One, chapter 25 of the novel, the shepherds ask the bakers of Lerne "if they could buy some of their cakes." Despite their perfectly polite inquiry, the bakers were not particularly receptive to the shepherds' request. Worse still, they proceeded to give them, instead, a stream of gross insults, calling them toothless beggars, redheaded clowns, drunken bums, bed shitters, thieves, pickpockets, cowards, sweet little morsels, big bellies, fat mouths, slobs, clodhoppers, patsies, bloodsuckers, saber rattlers, pretty-boys, practical jokers, shovel watchers, boors with big mouths, fat-heads, jerks, fools, sharp-tongued bastards, fops, motor tongues, turd herders, shit shepherds, and assorted other unpleasant names.1

When ethical critics approach this kind of passage, they see in it primarily a lack of authorial responsibility to society. Though, as Bakhtin showed, one might be able to read Rabelais's verbally transgressive affronts as liberating, many major ethical critics such as Booth argue that not even attempts to affirm the Self can excuse the belittling of the Other. In its refusal to accept alterity and in its insistence, if I can paraphrase Booth, on treating individuals as members of a class,2 Rabelais's laughter is not only discriminating but openly degrading. Though some shepherds may indeed be pickpockets and others fops, the bakers have no moral right to assign these qualities to all of them. And though some of the shepherds may have the socially unenviable function of collecting and disposing of excrement, the bakers should not further humiliate them by linguistically marking their marginality. There is very little in the idea of foregrounding difference that distinguishes this excerpt from a common case of verbal abuse. In the broadest terms, this study defined laughter as our immediate response to the perception of difference. We laugh to separate ourselves from the Other. Laughter is, in this sense, the instinctive reaction to discovering the negative

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space of our identity. By laughing, we articulate who we are not. In everyday life, for instance, Bergson finds amusing a man who, "running along the street, stumbles and falls"3 and thereby fails to conform to our idea of Homo sapiens as Homo erectus. Laughter originates in errors and exceptions, anomalies and aberrations, and as a result, indirectly and unjustly, validates the world of the norm and the average. When the bakers laugh at the shepherds because the latter are ugly, dirty, and boorish, the bakers implicitly construe themselves as handsome, clean, and sophisticated. And if Rabelais, and through him his readers, also laugh at the bakers and their unwarranted anger and rhetorical excess, the author and his audience simultaneously define themselves as much calmer and less prone to exaggeration. Yet not every difference is received with laughter. As likely as we are to laugh at some transgressions and deviations, many others will leave us in-different. Not every insult is necessarily laughable: all laughter may be offensive and every insult has the potential for making us laugh, but not every single jeer realizes that potential. What distinguishes Rabelais's taunts from a common insult is the author's ability to organize his catalogue so that it reveals the identity of the Other. As he foregrounds instances of disorder, he also points out what makes these instances disorderly. Though in the quotation above shepherds are definitely marked as different, their differences nonetheless form a coherent identity of their own. Rabelais is not only marking the shepherds as country bumpkins but he is marking them with discursive flair. His shepherds may well be a collection of weirdos and losers, but what a complete collection they are. They are so thoroughly outcast that they form a freakish universe of their own. The secret of laughter lies, to use Samuel Johnson's famous phrase, in "discordia concors," in the "discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike."4 Inasmuch as an insult is fuelled solely by the perception of a weakness or defect in a person or issue, an observation of a difference that results in laughter is, conversely, based primarily on the

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unexpected strength and surprising functionality that this weakness and defect exhibit. Criticism cannot forget that laughter is an audience response that exists at the intersection between identity and difference, and that its essence lies in the exposure of the strange sense and method behind the error and the madness: even the absurd needs its pataphysics. The fall of the man in Bergson's example is much more amusing if his stumbling is a valiant effort to maintain balance rather than if he simply falls on his face. Likewise, as Freud observed in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), not all slips of the tongue are facetious but only those that, in addition to misusing a well-known figure of speech, form an alternative message that helps an analyst understand the nature of a person's neurosis. We are much more likely to laugh at a blunder if it is, in its own way, logical and coherent than if it is entirely meaningless. Not all of Reverend William Archibald Spooner's endless list of errors are funny but only those that make a sense of their own. When the venerable Oxford professor allegedly fumbled the sentence "You have missed all my history lectures and wasted the whole term" and said instead, "You have hissed all my mystery lectures and tasted the whole worm,"5 his lapse was worthy of laughter not just because he made a mistake but because his mistake accidentally resulted in another comprehensible phrase. Were Mrs Malaprop's blunders just that - semantic mistakes - they would certainly expose her as uneducated and pretentious, but they would likely not make the spectators laugh. Since, however, her malapropisms repeatedly result in alternative meanings, the audience is given the opportunity not only to note her incompetence, and in doing so insult her, but also to enjoy the whole new degree of logic she produces. On a certain level, Booth is correct in his assessment of Rabelais: the ribald French monk does share with his contemporaries their seriously offensive views on women. As Joseph Klaits points out in his book Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts (1985), Rabelais's description of women as sexually ravenous echoes closely the opinion of Heinrich

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Kramer and James Sprenger, the notorious authors of Malleus Maleficarum (1486), a handbook on how to detect and punish a witch. While the German experts in witchcraft suggest that "all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable/'6 Rabelais offers his take on the woman's appetites, sexual and otherwise, in the following poem: She'll rob you blind Of whatever you're due. She'll be bred in kind But not by you. She'll suck and suck At the end of your diddle. She'll beat you up But leave just a little.7

Though Rabelais's stereotypical views of female sexuality are comparable in their bigotry to Kramer and Sprenger's prejudices, they nonetheless differ structurally from it. His statement is undeniably offensive, but it is at the same time more than just an insult. It creates a vivid image, takes advantage of semantically marked vocabulary, and foregrounds the women's desire by expressing it in a rhyming couplet. In short, it is an insult with a surplus of linguistic value. Rabelais discovers in the women's supposed nymphomania not only their alterity but also traces of their unfamiliar identity. He finds poetry in difference. Kramer and Sprenger's statement is so dry in its articulation that one can see in it nothing but insult. Rabelais's equally problematic stance, on the other hand, is eloquent and semantically complex; it is, literally, humorous. Rabelais's "invincible charm," Rousseau might argue,8 perhaps makes him much more dangerous than Kramer and Sprenger, but it does not make him the same. Rabelais may practise gross generalization, discrimination, and exclusion, but he does so with skill. If we do not grant Rabelais the right to offend, we deny him the opportunity to showcase his skill. And if we deny an author the skill, we deny his laughter.

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Rabelais is coarse and crude, yet he is not making us laugh because he insults but because of how he insults. A plain insult is the equivalent of a nonsensical spoonerism: it is noticeable but forgettable. An insult only becomes funny when it finds the right way to point out what is wrong. Saying that a critic is an idiot is obviously not the same as suggesting, with the title of Diana Rigg's book on "the worst ever theatrical reviews," that he is a man who leaves "no turn unstoned." By treating laughter solely on the basis of what it implies and by ignoring the process of implication itself, that is, by concentrating on the meaning rather than on its communication, ethical criticism deliberately approaches laughter in an asymmetrical manner. Rousseau captures this attitude succinctly when he asks: "If the joke is excellent, is it any the less punishable?"9 A methodologically consistent application of ethical criticism to laughter can only have one outcome: it can determine that laughter was provoked by an offensive idea. What it can never do is determine whether this idea was articulated in an imaginative or a predictable manner. In its treatment of laughter, ethical criticism is limited, if I can borrow Freud's terminology from The Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, to "purpose" alone and cannot account for its "technique." It separates the inseparable: it tries to peel the signified from its signifiers. It looks at the discordia but not at concors. Because of this, ethical criticism can never treat a joke as a joke but always as an insult. Since ethical criticism by definition cannot admit that it is impossible to analyse laughter without disregarding its ethical implications, it remains caught in the vicious circle of trying to justify the unjust. Ethical criticism is a priori not interested in evaluating laughter. It never gets to the point where it can even begin to investigate the complexity of difference as the cornerstone of the aesthetics of laughter. Whereas Koestler examines the "originality, emphasis, and economy" of humour, ethical criticism discusses the axiology of the messages implied by laughter.10 If it is true, at least in the abstract, that all laughter is offensive, any critical approach to it that is founded in ethics

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is bound to hit an epistemological dead end. As soon as laughter is reduced to its ethical dimension, efforts to judge it become both counterproductive and profoundly unfair. Ethical criticism ends up either advocating the censoring of laughter in the interest of morality, or exhausting itself in a hopeless search for what does not exist: innocent laughter. As productive as ethical criticism is in its treatment of marginal and decentred discourses, and in addressing the multiplicity of perspectives, it is incapable of dealing with laughter. By refusing to accept that the ability to distinguish between a joke and an insult is already the first step towards a critical validation of laughter, ethical criticism condemns itself to humourless limbo. When we laugh, we should not care about offending. And when we investigate laughter critically, we should forget about ethics.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Booth, Company We Keep, 390. Italics in original. Ibid., 394. Ibid., 470. Ibid., 310. See Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, 69. Chrysostom, Homilies, 88. Ecclesiastes 2:2, 7:3. Ephesians 5:4. Bossuet, Maximes et reflexions, 88, 91. Italics in original. Granger, Familiar Exposition, 50. Hobbes, Leviathan, in English Works, 3:46. Hobbes, Tripos (1684), in English Works, 4:45. Farley-Hills, Benevolence of Laughter, 8. S. Butler, Characters and Passages, 409. Castelvetro, "Poetics of Aristotle," 144. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 1:372. Schiller, Complete Works, 5:256-7. Ibid., 33. Lorenz, On Aggression, 293, 295, 294. Koestler, Act of Creation, 27. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 56. Bergson, Laughter, 150. Italics in original.

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24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Ibid., 150, 188, 189. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 64, 190. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 23, 28. Ibid., 113. Purdie, Comedy, 8. Douthit, Review of Comedy, 229. Castelvetro, "Poetics of Aristotle," 144. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 210. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, 203. Ibid., 327. Booth, Company We Keep, 389, 410. Koestler, Act of Creation, 30. Baudelaire, "Essence of Laughter," 316. Bermel, Farce, 59. I chose Eugene Labiche's and Thornton Wilder's plays as representative comedies from roughly the same historical era as The Inn of the Adrets and Arsenic and Old Lace. 40 The phrase is the subtitle for their book Ethics and Aesthetics. CHAPTER ONE

1 Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 200. 2 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 66. 3 Horace, Ars Poetica, 469. 4 Boileau-Despreaux, Art of Poetry, 186. 5 Ibid., 207. 6 Dryden, Dramatic Works, 1:33. 7 Ibid., 43. 8 Shelley, Works, 7:114. 9 Lukacs, "Sociology of Modern Drama," 165. 10 Holland, Laughing, 17; J. Richardson, Gallows Humor, 8. 11 Jonson, Ben Jonson, 8:643. 12 Ibid., 644. 13 Shaw, Works, 23:44. 14 Ibid., 44-5. 15 Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art, 4:302. 16 Langer, Feeling and Form, 338, 341.

Notes to pages 22-36 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

161

Ibid., 340. Bermel, Farce, 43. Purdie, Comedy, 113-14. Steele, Plays, 189. Spectator, vol. i, no. 51:219. Ibid., 217. Ibid., vol. i, no. 65:279. Steele, Plays, 299-300. Ibid., 303. Sidney, Prose Works, 3:40. Adams and Hathaway, Dramatic Essays, xiii. Voltaire, Complete Works, 50:357. Chesterfield, Worldly Wisdom, 85. Hobbes, Tripos, in English Works, 4:1. Goldsmith, Collected Works, 3:210. Holland, Laughing, 76. Koestler, Act of Creation, 59. Simon, "Condescending Smile," 35-45; Lateiner, Sardonic Smile, 193-5. CHAPTER

TWO

1 Baudelaire, "Essence of Laughter," 318; Pagnol, Notes sur le rire, 42-3; Souriau, "Le risible et le comique," 153; Dupreel, "Le probleme sociologique du rire," 228; Blau, Eye of Prey, 39-40. 2 Swift, Prose Works, 1:140. 3 Pur die, Comedy, 115. 4 Meredith, Essay on Comedy, 48, 47. 5 Ibid., 50. 6 Ibid., 50, 50-1. 7 Aristophanes, Comedies, 2:15. 8 In ibid., 2:146. 9 Ibid., 2:15. 10 Ibid., 2:33. 11 Ibid., 2:141. 12 Ibid., 3:49. 13 Ibid., 3:27.

162 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Notes to pages 36-54 Ibid., 9:103, 99, 105. Boileau-Despreaux, Art of Poetry, 204. Taaffe, Aristophanes and Women, 133. Segal, Deflt/z of Comedy, 20. Goldsmith, Collected Works, 3:212. Milton, Works, vol. 3, part 1:319. Swift, Prose Works, 4:112. Meredith, Essay on Comedy, 28, 27. Menander, P/ays, 115. Meredith, Essay on Comedy, 4. Menander, Plays, 10. Compare Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 43. Menander, Plays, 35. Ibid., 33. Segal, Death of Comedy, 173. Swift, Poems 2:571. Purdie, Comedy, 49. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 198. Diderot, Paradox of Acting, 39. Buckley, Morality of Laughter, 199, 10. Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre, 251. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 6:7-8. Meredith, Essay on Comedy, 44. CHAPTER THREE

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Compare Janko, Aristotle on Comedy, 25. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 118. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 76. Ibid. Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor, 100. Harris, Oscar Wilde, 243; Gardner, "Speak Roughly," 20. Wilde, Lord Arthur Saville's Crime (1891), in Complete Works, 174, andAn Ideal Husband(1895), inComplete Work Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.7.139-40. 8 Wilde, An Ideal Husband, in Complete Works, 519; The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), in Complete Works, 70, 43. 9 Reinert, "Satiric Strategy," 153; Woodcock, Oscar Wilde, 181.

Notes to pages 55-68

163

10 Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, in Complete Works, 332. 11 Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.90. 12 Wilde, Complete Works, 332. 13 See Small, Oscar Wilde Revalued, 99-100. 14 Wilde, Complete Works, 1,095. 15 Wilde, Complete Works, 1,203; Koestler, Act of Creation, 35. 16 Wilde, Complete Works, 1,205. 17 Lessing, Prose Works, 311. 18 Wilde, Complete Works, 1,205. 19 Ibid., 1,204. 20 Purdie, Comedy, 130. 21 Bergson, Laughter, 180; italics in original. Freud, Jokes, 105. 22 Freud, Jokes, 69. 23 Lear, Book of Nonsense, i. Since the pages in Lear's book are not numbered, all the notes on this work refer to the limerick rather than page number. 24 Ibid., 5. 25 Koestler, Act of Creation, 78. 26 Eliot, Music of Poetry, 14. 27 Sewell, Field of Nonsense, 5. 28 Koestler, Act of Creation, 79. 29 See Chitty, That Singular Person. 30 Lear, Book of Nonsense, 43, 104, 14, 64. 31 Ibid., 22, 17, 6, 96. 32 Ibid., 82. 33 Ibid., 44, 98, 105. 34 Ibid., 56. 35 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 121. 36 Lear, Book of Nonsense, 8, 11; 3, 41, and 111; 69; i and 85; 12. 37 Ibid., n.p. 38 Said, who is Palestinian by birth, gained fame with his rejection of Eurocentric and colonizing critical practices. See Orientalism (1978). 39 Lecercle, Philosophy of Nonsense, 22. 40 Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, 116-18. 41 Ibid., 164-6, 219-20. 42 Ibid., 116.

164

Notes to pages 68-82

43 Ibid., 118. 44 Ibid., 219. 45 Clark, Real Alice, 126. Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. 46 See Gardner, "Speak Roughly," 20. 47 Quoted in Cohen, "Hark the Snark," 99. 48 Collingwood, Life and Letters, 143. 49 Lecercle, Violence of Language, i. 50 Ibid., 3. 51 Collier, Short View, 163. CHAPTER FOUR

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Addison, Works, 2:300. Compare Pope, Poems, 4:120. Collier, Short View, 156; Booth, Company We Keep, 310. Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art, 4:301. Buckley, Morality of Laughter, xii. Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, 93-4. Ibid., 35. Collins, Discourse, 21-2. Pope, Poems, 4:325. Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, 92-3. S. Richardson, Works, 2:161. Ibid., 1:263. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 162. S. Richardson, Works, 1:323. Ibid., 2:158. Ibid., 1:201. Ibid., 166. Fasick, "Sentiment," 201. Folkenflik, "Pamela," 261, 268. Pamela Censured, 8. S. Richardson, Works, 1:3. Ibid., 62-3. Fielding, Shamela, 330. Italics in original. S. Richardson, Works, 1:226. Pamela Censured, 21-2.

Notes to pages 83-96 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Collins, Discourse, 8. Bergson, Laughter, 150. In Fielding, Joseph Andrews, x. J. Butler, Gender Trouble, 25. S. Richardson, Works, 1:197; Fielding, Shamela, 338. Bergson, Laughter, 63. Gilmore, Eighteenth-Century Controversy, 25. Anselment, "Betwixt Jest and Earnest," 29. Gilmore, Eighteenth-Century Controversy, 27. See Segal, Death of Comedy, 32. Warburton, Works, 1:156-7. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 76. Sidney, Prose Worfcs, 3:41; Purdie, Comedy, 139. S. Richardson, Works, 1:153. Anselment, "Betwixt Jest and Earnest," 27. Baxter, Christian Dictionary, 355; Addison, Works, 3:146, 452. Dryden, Dramatic Works, 2:246. Ibid., 2:245. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 27-8. Moliere, Plays, 3:157. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 34. CHAPTER

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

165

FIVE

Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, 19. Compare Morreall, "The Rejection of Humour." Gogol, Theatre, 184-5. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10. Ibid., 90, 92. Ibid., 47. Issacharoff, Discourse as Performance, 93. Freud, "Humour," 163. Woolf, T/iree Guineas, 200; J. Butler, Gender Trouble, 137, 146. Isaak, Feminism and Contemporary Art, 14, 5. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 6:149. Plato, Republic, 182. Ibid., 55-6. Ibid., 175.

166 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Notes to pages 96-109

Ibid., 56. Ibid., 125. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 87. Dante, Literary Criticism, 100. Dante, Divine Comedy, 320 and 364, 327 and 360. Ibid., 396, 327. Ibid., 382. Ibid., 356. Bastide, "Le lire," 289, 291. Dante, Divine Comedy, 410. Ibid., 421. Ibid., 470. Ibid., 327. In More, Utopia, xix. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 4. More, Utopia, 81. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 113. McConica, Erasmus, 89. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 13. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 95. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 24:281-325. Ibid., 6:507. Mayakovsky, Selected Works, 3:7. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 76. Ibid., 114. Ibid., 115. E. Brown, Mayakovsky, 332, 329. Ibid., 335. Quoted in Ellendea Proffer's introduction to Bulgakov's Early Plays, 245. 50 Bulgakov, Early Plays, 334. 51 In her foreword to Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, xi. 52 Averintsev, "Bakhtin," 14.

Notes to pages 109-31 53 54 55 56

167

Gutwirth, Laughing Matter, 111, 112. Booth, Company We Keep, 386. Gutwirth, Laughing Matter, 112. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, 124. CHAPTER SIX

1 Gogol, Theatre, 189. 2 Ibid., 190. 3 While Santayana was not a believer in the same sense as Kierkegaard, he shares with the Danish philosopher the conviction that laughter has the power to free human spirit and therefore deserves a place in any comprehensive philosophical system. 4 Gogol, Theatre, 51. 5 Vanbrugh, Complete Works, 1:206; Pirandello, On Humour, 137. 6 Koestler, Act of Creation, 63. 7 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 12. 8 Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, 29. 9 Ibid., 29-31. 10 Dryden, Dramatic Works, 1:29. 11 Lear, Book of Nonsense, 3, 41, 111. 12 States, Great Reckonings, 123, 119. 13 Veltrusky, "Contributions," 577. 14 Fiedler, Freaks, 19. 15 Terry and Urla, Deviant Bodies, 16; Thomson, Freakery, 14. 16 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 448. 17 Ibid., no. 18 Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, 79-81. 19 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 74. 20 Gibson Garvey, "Short Circuit," 280. 21 Ibid., 278. 22 Buckley, Morality of Laughter, 42-3. 23 Reincke, "Antidote to Dominance," 34. CHAPTER SEVEN

1 Pirandello, Naked Masks, 213. 2 Segal, Death of Comedy, 330.

i68 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Notes to pages 133-54 Moliere, One-Act Comedies, 109. In ibid., 96. States, Great Reckonings, 8. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 127. Italics in original. Ibid. Moliere, Misanthrope and Other Plays, 434. Moliere, Miser and Other Plays, 2.2.2. Moliere, Misanthrope and Other Plays, 118. Segal, Death of Comedy, 332. Ibid. Palmer, Moliere, 392. Chevalley, Moliere et son temps, 238. In Grimarest, La vie de M. de Moliere, 93. See Palmer, Moliere, 392. Moliere, Misanthrope and Other Plays, 82. See p. 47, and note 32, chapter 2. Carlson, "Invisible Presences," 113. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 142. Ibid., 145. Limon, Stand-up Comedy in Theory, 4. Palmer, Moliere, 145. Quoted in Palmer, Moliere, 335. Bermel, Moliere's Theatrical Bounty, 2.2.0, Quoted in Mallet, Moliere, 80. Donneau de Vise, Zelinde, 1:54. States, Great Reckonings, 156. Compare Purdie, Comedy, 73-4. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 147. Compare Booth, Company We Keep, 390; see Behn, Five Plays,

5-7CONCLUSION

1 2 3 4

Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, 64. See Booth, Company We Keep, 390. Bergson, Laughter, 66. Johnson, Lz'pes, 1:20.

Notes to pages 155-7 5 6 7 8 9 10

^9

Quoted in McArthur, Oxford Companion, s.v. "Spoonerism." Kramer and Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, 47. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, 289. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 35. Ibid., 36. Koestler, Act of Creation, 82; see Bastide, "Le rire," 300.

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Index

Adams, Henry Hitch, 1611127 Addison, Joseph, 72, 88 Adorno, Theodor, 5, 9 Adventures of Pinocchio, The (Collodi), 129 Affected Ladies, The (Moliere), 142-3 Ajax (Sophocles), 104 Aldington, Richard, 120 Alice in 'Wonderland (Carroll), 163040 Ambrose, St, 5 Ameipsias 87, 130 Amis, Kingsley, 152 Amphitryon (Moliere), 138 Andreini, Isabella, 142 Anselment, Raymond A., 86-8 Antier, Benjamin, 13, i6on39 Antigone (Sophocles), 45 Apology of Socrates (Plato), 87 Arbitration, The (Menander), 41, 43, 46-7 Aristophanes, 19, 33-4, 38-9, 40, 44, 45, 62, 87; Birds, 50; Clouds, 35-6, 86, 130; Eccle-

siazusae, 37-8, 50; Frogs, 34, 36; Knights, 34,130; Lysistrata, 37; Plutus, 37; Wasps, 130 Aristotle, 21, 102, 116, 146; The Nicomachean Ethics, 42, 51-2, 88,127; On the Parts of Animals, 5; Poetics, 5, 18; Rhetoric, 18 Arsenic and Old Lace (Kesselring), 13, i6on39 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 54, 162 Averintsev, Sergei S., 109 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 93, 109; Rabelais and His World, 3, 12, 94,105,111, 114,123, 153 Bald Soprano, The (lonesco), 71-2 Baring, Evelyn, 69 Barthes, Roland, 13, 141, 148 Basil, St, 5 Bastide, Georges, 99 Bathhouse, The (Mayakovsky), 107-8 Baudelaire, Charles, 12, 32, 92

i86

Index

Baxter, Richard, 88 Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de, 28 Beaver-coat, The (Hauptmann), 48 Bedbug, The (Mayakovsky), 48, 106-8 Behn, Aphra, 149 Bejart, Armande, 132, 138-9, 146, 147 Bergson, Henri, 8, 60, 84, 86,

!54-5 Bermel, Albert, 23, 133, 145, i6on38 Bible, the, 5, 84, 113 Birds (Aristophanes), 50 Blau, Herbert, 32 Bodies in Our Cellar (Kesselring), 13 Boileau-Despreaux, Nicholas, 19.37 Booth, Wayne C, 3-4, 10-12, 73, 109-11, 153, 155 Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, 5 Brecourt (Guillaume Marcoureau), 132-3, 140 Brie (Catherine Leclerc du Rose), 147 Brooks, Douglas, 84 Brown, Edward J., 108 Brown, John, 75 Browning, Tod, 121 Buckley, Francis H., 48, 73, 128 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 108-9 Butler, Samuel, 6, 94 Butler, Judith, 85 Byrom, Thomas, 63

Cardiff, Jack, 121 Carlson, Marvin, 140 Carroll, Lewis (Lutwidge Dodgson), 53, 68-9, 164^5; Alice in Wonderland, 1631140; The Hunting of the Snark, 68; "Jabberwocky," 66-9; Mischmasch, 66; Through the Looking-Glass, 67 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 6-7, 9 Cervantes, Miguel de, 34, 90 Chaplin, Charles, 46, 147-8 Chaponnier, Alexis, 13, i6on39 Charlemagne, 116 Chesterfield, fourth earl of (Philip Dormer Stanhope), 26-7 Chevalley, Sylvie Bostsarron, i68ni5 Chitty, Susan, 163^9 Chrysostom, St John, 5 . Cibber, Colley, 23, 26 Cicero, 71 Clark, Anne, 68-9 Cleon, 34-6, 38, 45 Clouds (Aristophanes), 35-6, 86, 130 Cohen, Morton N., 1641147 Collier, Jeremy, 6, 26, 70, 73, 78, 113 Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson, 164^8 Collins, Anthony, 74, 83-4 Collodi, Carlo (Carlo Lorenzini), 129 commedia dell'arte, 91, 139, 141 Congreve, William, 26

Index Conscious Lovers, The (Steele), 24-5 Coquelin, Constant-Benoit, 134 Corneille, Thomas, 143 Corneille, Pierre, 23, 143 Country Wife, The (Wycherley), 27 Cratinus, 130 Crimson Island, The (Bulgakov), 108-9 Critique of the School for Wives, The (Moliere), 90, 132, 146 Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand), 114-21, 124-7, 129 Dangerous Liaisons, The (Laclos), 27 Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy, 23, 95, 98-101, 105, 107; "Epistle to Can Grande," 98 Darwin, Charles, 72, i6oni Democritus, 100 Dennis, John, 26 Descartes, Rene, 7, 27 Diderot, Denis, 47, 140 Divine Comedy, The (Dante), 23, 95, 98-101, 105, 107 Doctor in Spite of Himself, The (Moliere), 131, 137-8 Don Juan (Moliere), 131,137,145 Don Garde of Navarre (Moliere), 139 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 34, 90 Donneau de Vise, Jean, 146-7 Douthit, Lou Morgan, 9, 160

187

Dryden, John, 30; Essay of Dramatic Poesie, 19, 118; An Evening's Love, 88 Du Croisy (Philibert Gassaud), 142, 144 Dupreel, Ernest, 32 Ecclesiazusae (Aristophanes),

37-8, 50 Eliot, T.S., 62 Ellis, Clement, 6 Elomire the Hypochondriac (Le Boulanger de Chalussay), 137 Engels, Friedrich, 104-5 "Epistle to Can Grande" (Dante), 98 Erasmus, Desiderius, 72, 95, 100-4, 112/ X33 Essay of Dramatic Poesie (Dryden), 19, 118 Etherege, George, 24, 27 Eupolis, 87, 130 Euripides, 34, 36 Evening's Love, An (Dryden), 88 Farley-Hills, David, 6 Farquhar, George, 26 Fasick, Laura, 78 Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated, A (Wilde), 56-8 Feydeau, Georges, 90-1 Fiedler, Leslie, 121 Fielding, Henry: Joseph Andrews, 79, 84, 88; Shamela, 79-83, 85-6 Flea in Her Ear, A (Feydeau), 90-1

i88

Index

Flying Doctor, The (Moliere), 137 Folkenflik, Robert, 78 Foucault, Michel, 47, 58 Fourier, Charles, 104 Freaks (Browning), 121 Freud, Sigmund: "Humour," 93-4; Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 10, 60, 157; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 155 Frogs (Aristophanes), 34, 36 Frye, Northrop, 42 Gardner, Martin, i62n6,1641146 Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais), 3, 10-11, 90, 153, 156-7 Gautier, Theophile, 120 Georges Dandin (Moliere), 138 Gibson Garvey, Susan, i67n2o Gilmore, Thomas B. Jr, 75, 86, i65n34 Giraudoux, Jean, 134 Glanvill, Joseph, 6 Gogol, Nikolai: The Government Inspector, 48, 92-3, 112-13, 123; The Nose 119 Goldsmith, Oliver, 28, 39 Government Inspector, The (Gogol), 48, 92-3,112-13,123 Grabbe, Christian Dietrich, 130 Granger, Thomas, 6 Great Dictator The (Chaplin), 46, 148 Grimarest, Jean-Leonor Le Gallois de, 138-9 Grouch, The (Menander), 41-4, 46-7

Guarini, Battista, 19 Gutwirth, Marcel, 109-10 Hacks, Peter, 39 Hamlet(Shakespeare), i63 Harris, Frank, i62n6 Hathaway, Baxter, i6in27 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 48 Hazlitt, William, 48, 94,162,165 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 22, 73 Heinsius, Daniel, 6 Henry vn, 100 Henry viu, 100 Hitler, Adolf, 46, 148 Hobbes, Thomas, 7, 25; Leviathan, 6; Tripos, 27, i59ni2 Hoffmann, Gerhard, 14 Holland, Norman N., 29, i6onio Homer, 29, 96 Horace, 18-20, 92 Hornung, Alfred, 14 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 4 Humour, On (Pirandello), 113, 123 "Humour" (Freud), 93-4 Hunting of the Snark, The (Carroll), 68 Ideal Husband, An (Wilde), i62n7, i62n8 Imaginary Invalid, The (Moliere), 131, 137, 140, 147 Importance of Being Earnest, The (Wilde), 21, 55-6 Inn of the Adrets, The (Antier, Lacoste, Chaponnier), 13, i6on39

Index lonesco, Eugene, 71-2 Isaak, Jo Anna, 94 Issacharoff, Michael, 93 Italian Straw Hat, The (Labiche), 13, i6on39 "Jabberwocky" (Carroll), 66-9 Janko, Richard, i62ni Jealous Husband, The (Moliere), 139 Jest, Satire, Irony and Deeper Significance(Grabbe), 130 Johnson, Samuel, 154 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Freud), 10, 60, 157 Jonson, Ben, 31; Timber, 21; Volpone 21 Joseph Andrews (Fielding), 79, 84,88 Jouvet, Louis, 134 Juvenal, 49 Kant, Immanuel, 14 Kesselring, Joseph, 13, i6on39 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 113, 123, 128, i67n3 King Lear (Shakespeare), 20, 103 Klaits, Joseph, 155 Knights (Aristophanes), 34, 130 Koestler, Arthur, 7-8, 12-13, 29, 57, 62-3, 114, 157 Kramer, Heinrich, 155-6 Kristeva, Julia, 142 La Grange (Charles Varlet), 132, 138, 142

189

Labiche, Eugene, 13, i6on39 Laclos, Pierre Ambroise Choderlos de, 27 Lacoste, Amand, 13, i6on39 Lamennais, Felicite Robert de, 6 Langer, Susanne K., 22-3, 30 Lateiner, Donald, 29 Le Sage, Alain Rene, 48 Le Boulanger de Chalussay, 137 Lear, Edward, 53, 59-66, 6970, 119 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 67, 69-70 Lemaitre, Frederick, 13 Leonardo da Vinci, 99 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 57 Leviathan (Hobbes), 6 Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 76 Limon, John, 142 Lord Arthur Saville's Crime (Wilde), i62n8 Lorenz, Konrad, 7 Loret, Jean, 145 Louis XIV, 133, 136 Lucky Jim (Amis), 152 Lukacs, Georg, 20, 30 Luther, Martin, 71 Lying Lover, The (Steele), 23-4 Lysistrata (Tremblay), 39 Lysistrata (Aristophanes), 37 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 72 Mallet, Francine, i68n27 Man of Mode, The (Etherege), 24,27 Marlowe, Christopher, 116 Marowitz, Charles, 115 Marx, Karl, 104-5, 1O9

igo Matchmaker, The (Wilder), 13, 1601139 Mauron, Charles, 94 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 95; The Bathhouse, 107-8; The Bedbug, 48, 106-8; MysteryBouffe, 105-6 MeArthur, Tom, 169115 McConica, James, 103 Menander, 33, 34, 40-1; The Arbitration, 41, 43, 46-7; The Grouch, 41-4, 46-7 Meredith, George, 33-4, 37, 40-1, 45, 49 Midsummer Night's Dream, A (Shakespeare), 91 Milton, John, 39 Milyavsky, Boris, 108 Misanthrope, The (Moliere), 90, 131, 138-40, 152 Mischmasch (Carroll), 66 Miser, The (Moliere), 90, 131, 136, 138 Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 34, 40, 141; The Affected Ladies, 142-3; Amphitryon, 138; The Critique of the School for Wives, 90, 132, 146; The Doctor in Spite of Himself, 131, 137-8; Doctor Love, 131, 136-7; Don Garde of Navarre, 139; Don Juan, 131, 137, 145; The Flying Doctor, 137; Georges Dandin, 138; The Imaginary Invalid, 131, 137, 140,147; The Jealous Husband, 139; The Misanthrope, 90,

Index 131, 138-40, 152; The Miser, 90, 131, 136, 138; Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, 137; The • Rehearsal at Versailles, 131-5, 140, 146; The School for Wives, 131-2, 145-7; Sganarelle, or The Imaginary Cuckold, 139; The Sicilian, 137; Tartuffe, 47-8, 131, 138, 143-5; The Would-be Gentleman, 131, 136, 140, 145 Mona Lisa, 29, 99 Mongredien, Georges, 139 Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (Moliere), 137 Montausier, Marquis de, 139 More, Thomas, 95, 100-6, 112 Morreall, John, i65n2 Mutations, The (Cardiff), 121 Mystery-Bouffe (Mayakovsky), 105-6 Nestroy, Johann Nepomuk, 28 Nicomachean Ethics, The (Aristotle), 42, 51-2, 88, 127 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 92 Nose, The (Gogol), 119 Owen, Robert, 104 Pagnol, Marcel, 32 Palmer, John, 138-9 Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (Richardson), 73, 75-88 Pamela Censured, 79, 82 Parts of Animals, On the (Aristotle), 5 Paul, St, 5, 103

Index Pavis, Patrice, 48 Peace (Hacks), 39 Peregrine Pickle (Smollett), 34 Philebus (Plato), 123 Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (Wilde), 56-8 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 53-4 Pirandello, Luigi, 133; On Humour, 113, 123; Six Characters in Search of an Author, 130 Plato, 99, 102; Apology of Socrates, 87; Philebus, 123; Republic, 95-8, 100-1, 105; Symposium, 87 Plessner, Helmuth, 8 Plutus (Aristophanes), 37 Poetics (Aristotle), 5, 18 Pomorska, Krystyna, 109 Pope, Alexander, 72, 74 Proffer, Ellendea, i66n49 Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The (Freud), 155 Purdie, Susan, 8-9, 23, 38, 46-7, 52, 59, 88, i6in3 Pygmalion (Shaw), 51 Quintilian, 71 Quiroga, Vasco de, 104 Rabelais, Francois, 12, 34, 49, 93, 110-11, 149, 154-5; Gargantua and Pantagruel, 3, 10-11, 13, 90, 153, 156-7 Racine, Jean, 23 Rambouillet, Marquise de, 143 Raskin, Victor, 53

191

Rehearsal in Paris (Giraudoux), 134 Rehearsal at Versailles, The (Moliere), 131-5, 140, 146 Reincke, Nancy, 129 Reinert, Otto, i62ng Republic (Plato), 95-8,100-1,105 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 18 Richardson, Samuel, 73, 75-88 Richardson, Jack, i6onio Rigg, Diana, 157 Rivals, The (Sheridan), 155 Rock, Chris, 152 Rostand, Edmond, 114-21, 124-7, 129 Roulle, Pierre, 144 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 90, 156-7 Ruzzante (Angelo Beolco), 141

Said, Edward W, 66, 1631138 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 104 Santayana, George, 113, 167^ Saussure, Ferdinand de, 50-1, 66 Scaramouche (Tiberio Fiorilli), 141 Schiller, Friedrich, 7 Schlegel, Friedrich, 123 School for Wives, The (Moliere), 131-2, 145-7 Scott, Robert, 69 Scottish Girl, The (Voltaire), 26 Segal, Erich, 39,44,131,138,142 Seinfeld, Jerry, 142 Sewell, Elizabeth, 62 Sganarelle, or The Imaginary Cuckold (Moliere), 139

192

Index

Shaftesbury, seventh earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 74-5, 86, 92 Shakespeare, William, 19, 53, 72; As You Like It, 54, 162; Hamlet, i63nn; King Lear, 20, 103; A Midsummer Night's Dream, 91; Titus Andronicus, 90; Twelfth Night, 103 Shamela (Fielding), 79-83, 85-6 Shaw, George Bernard, 21-2, 51/54 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 6,19-20 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 28, 155 Sicilian, The (Moliere), 137 Sidney, Philip, 25, 27, 31, 88 Simon, John, 29 Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello), 130 Small, Ian, i63ni3 Smollett, Tobias George, 34 Socrates, 34-6, 45, 86-7, 95-7 Sommerstein, Alan H., 34 Sophocles: Ajax, 104; Antigone, 45 Soul of Man Under Socialism, The (Wilde), 53, 56 Souriau, Etienne, 32 Spectator, The, 24 Spooner, William Archibald, 155 Sprenger, James, 156 Stalin, Joseph (Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili), 105, 109 States, Bert O., 119, 134-5, 147

Steele, Richard, 26, 30; The Conscious Lovers, 24-5; The Lying Lover, 23-4 Stoppard, Tom, 51 Surtz, Edward, 100 Swift, Jonathan, 32, 40, 46, 49 Symposium (Plato), 87 Taaffe, Lauren K., 37-8 Tartuffe (Moliere), 47-8, 131, 138, 143-5 Terence, 98 Terry, Jennifer, 122 Theobald, Lewis, 72 Thomson, Rosemarie Garland, 122 Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll), 67 Timber (Jonson), 21 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 90 Tractatus Coislinianus, 50-1 Travesties (Stoppard), 51 Tremblay, Michel, 39 Tripos (Hobbes), 27, I59ni2 Turcaret (Le Sage), 48 Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), 4 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 103 Urla, Jacqueline, 122 Vanbrugh, John, 26, 113, 123 Veltrusky, Jifi, 120 Volpone (Jonson), 21 Voltaire (Frangois-Marie Arouet), 26-7

Index Warburton, William, 87 Wasps (Aristophanes), 130 Weems, Carrie Mae, 127-9 Welsted, Leonard, 25 Wilde, Oscar, 53, 59, 62; A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated, 56-8; An Ideal Husband, i62n7, i62n8; The Importance of Being Earnest, 21, 55-6; Lord Arthur Saville's Crime, i62n8; Phrases and

193

Philosophies for the Use of the Young, 56-8; The Picture of Dorian Gray, 53-4; The Soul of Man Under Socialism 53, 56 Wilder, Thornton, 13, i6on39 Woodcock, George, i62n9 Woolf, Virginia, 94 Would-be Gentleman, The (Moliere), 131, 136, 140, 145 Wycherley, William, 27 Zelinde (Donneau de Vise), 146