Villainous Laughter, Part 1

JERRY: I think Superman probably has a very good sense of humor.
GEORGE: I never heard him say anything really funny.
JERRY: But it's common sense. He's got super strength, super speed; I'm sure he's got super humor.
GEORGE: Either you're born with a sense of humor or you're not. It's not going to change even if you go from the red sun of Krypton all the way to the yellow sun of the Earth.
JERRY: Why? Why would that one area of his mind not be affected by the yellow sun of Earth?
GEORGE: I don't know, but he ain't funny.

There’s quite a bit of humor in superhero comics (and some of it is even intentional), but here Seinfeld offers us one astute observation: superheroes are never funny. They don’t laugh, and they don’t try to make us laugh. Supervillians on the other hand, they laugh all the time (and often uncontrollably). This structure of laughter extends outside of comic books to pretty much all manifestations of the hero/villain relationship to, for example, cartoon villains (Skeletor, Dr. Claw), villains in James Bond films, &c. Even the villainous characters in Super Mario Brothers (Bowser, Wario) laugh, while Mario and Luigi do not (at least so far as I can tell).



I want to explore why, in these types of narratives, the voice of evil laughs while the voice of good does not.* I want to propose two primary reasons (the first here and the second in a subsequent post).

*To anyone out looking for a counterexample that disproves my theory, I have no doubt that someone could furnish some example of a laughing superhero (and there are plenty of dour villains out there). I am simply proposing that the paradigm of the hero/villain narrative involves a laughing villain in conflict with a serious (super)hero. When I imagine hero vs. villain as a narrative genre, this is really all I can think of.

The most obvious explanation for why (super)villains laugh is a perception of superiority. Their villainous activity is typically driven by a malicious narcissism. Villians so like feeling superior to others that it becomes an essential part of their character. Feelings of superiority given them pleasure, and they express this pleasure through laughter. *

*The fact that villains often laugh during the very moments when they are causing pain might suggest to some that their laughter is even more sinister than I am suggesting, that causing suffering in others—rather than feeling superior to them—is the source of the pleasure that gets expressed through laughter. This sort of sadistic laughter merely proves my point, however, as being in the position to inflict pain or even death is the supreme affirmation of superiority—in this case, superiority expressed as control. As a result, it is likely to produce the greatest amounts of pleasure that are, in turn, expressed as laughter.

The idea that human beings laugh from a perception of superiority is the oldest theory of humor. It was proposed in its earliest versions by both Plato and Aristotle and expressed in its most famous form by Thomas Hobbes—an expert on the human pursuit of superiority—in his declaration that “Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.” Hobbes’s observation corresponds with the way villains laugh in hero/villain narratives: The Joker proposes a scheme to kill Batman and laughs with pleasure at his fantasy; Batman beats the joker up while interrogating him and the Joker’s laugh affirms that Batman is too weak to hurt him. In Hobbes’s terms, the joker is feeling “sudden glory” in the perception of his “sudden conception of eminency” over the perceived “infirmity” of Batman. Again, this sudden glory validates the villain’s narcissism, producing feelings of intense pleasure that are expressed as laughter.

But my superiority scenario is complicated by one thing: though he always defeats the villain—thereby earning him the metaphorical “last laugh”—the hero never laughs. The Green Goblin laughs maniacally as he attacks Spiderman, but Spiderman does not take the same pleasure when he proves his ultimate superiority at the end of the fight. If laughter is the pleasure of superiority, then why does the superhero fail to express his (or her) pleasure in this way at the moment of ultimate victory at the end of the narrative?*

*Sure, the hero’s laughter is only “ultimate” in the sense that it produces narrative closure. A supervillian is rarely defeated completely, thereby leaving the door open for him (or her…or it) to reemerge in subsequent installments of the serial narrative. But still, the hero defeats the villain in the final battle of every narrative and still does not express any pleasure through laughter.

This complication has a fairly simply answer: As we have said, the (super)villain laughs because his vicious narcissism is validated pleasurably by a perception of superiority. Unlike the villain, the (super)hero does not pursue victory out of narcissism; he typically follows an emotionless moral logic. In opposition to the purely self-interested villain, the hero stands for “the good” without any concern for the self. The hero is superior but takes no pleasure in that fact, and, as a result, he is never moved to laughter.

As the foregoing analysis suggests, the structure of superhero narratives offers a pretty severe indictment of laughter. It is not only the fact that evil (as embodied in the villain) laughs and good (as embodied in the hero) does not. The most cutting reproach lies in the motivation behind that laughter. In a superhero narrative, the only psychological state that produces laughter is narcissism, which is also the psychological state the produces villainy. In other words, laugher and evil do not simply coexist in the same types of characters; they share a common cause. An inclination towards laughter always represents a corresponding inclination towards evil. Conversely, the hero’s moral virtue requires self-renunciation in favor of the common good, but successfully defending the interests of the masses apparently fails to produce an equivalent pleasure. Superheroes purport to leave us with a better world, but in the world of their narratives eradicating evil must necessarily eliminate the joy of laughter (and a laughless world seems mighty villainous to me).

I’ll pick up on the second primary cause/meaning of villainous laughter in my next post.

The Ethics of Laughing at Violence, Part 3: The Problem of Ambiguity

Humor is, at its core, a medium of representation.  But its indirect and ironic nature in which an intended meaning is often different from (and even opposed to) what is stated, makes humor different from most other representational modes.  When an individual laughs at a joke depicting violence, we might be inclined to say that that person is taking pleasure in violence, but often the opposite is true: violence may be presented, but the underlying meaning of the joke actually ridicules or undermines the very structures of violence that the joke represents. Consider the following joke by shock-comedian Sarah Silverman:

 “I was raped by a doctor, which is a bittersweet experience for a Jewish girl.”

This joke presents its audience with several objectionable ideas.  First, of course, is the blasé attitude that reduces the violence of rape to little more than a “bittersweet” experience.  Second is the stereotype of the gold digging Jewish American Princess who is eager to sleep with a doctor (or other wealthy individual) at any cost. 

Though the straightforward meaning of her language presents the sexual violence and ethnic stereotypes uncritically, it seems clear to me that Silverman is not actually endorsing these viewpoints.  Squeezing all of this material into a single sentence makes the content of this joke not simply objectionable, but hyperbolically objectionable.  In comically exaggerating these offensive elements, Silverman ridicules a society that adopts these attitudes while simultaneously performing the cultural work of bringing these often unspoken issues into the cultural discourse.

Indifferent attitudes toward sexual violence and ethnic stereotyping not only serve as Silverman’s object of ridicule, but also create the conditions that make this joke problematic.  While I engage in what I feel is perfectly ethical (even morally corrective) laughter at the joke’s indictment of sexism and bigotry, it is not hard to imagine an audience—even a large audience—who laughs sympathetically with these elements.  This audience laughs primarily out of relief that these ideas that society forces them to repress are released into the open.*  In other words, the necessary repression these violent and racist feelings—feelings that individuals may not even be willing to acknowledge that they possess—during the course of everyday life constitutes a psychological hardship that is temporarily alleviated when Silverman gives public voice to them, thereby producing a pleasurable response of laughter for the malicious and/or bigoted.

*I’m willing to acknowledge that there is an element of this relief in all of our laughter, but there is a distinction between the relief felt in an act of transgression itself (the act that breaks restrictive social imperatives) and the relief that specifically validates or cultivates latent racist or violent beliefs. In other words, I experience some relief—manifested as laughter—in the fact that Silverman boldly defies social standards governing what is speakable, but that has nothing to do with the more problematic act of taking pleasure specifically in bigotry or sexual violence, which results in an entirely different kind of laughter.

As we can see, there are two perfectly plausible responses to Silverman’s joke.  One (morally unproblematic) laughs at the absurdity of our culture’s commitment to violence and racial stereotypes, while the other (morally problematic) laughs with these elements, not only affirming them but taking pleasure in the fact that these socially repressed beliefs are given voice. 

This leads us to the ethical question at the heart of this post: should we be producing and laughing at humor that may be as likely to affirm its audience’s violent and bigoted fantasies (even unintentionally) as it is to challenge them? To me, this is the question at the heart of debates around racist and violent humor.  There is nearly unanimous agreement that telling willfully malicious, racist, or sexist jokes is wrong, but what about jokes in which there is no malintent on the part of the speaker, but members of the audience don’t laugh in the way he or she intended?  Should the comedian be denied the power to speak (and we the pleasure of laughter) simply because some members of the audience lack the intelligence (or are simply to racist, violent, &c.) to understand the object of ridicule?

Linguists and semioticians have long recognized that an individual speaker (or writer) lacks the power to control all of the meanings present in his or her language.  The inability to determine what aspects of racial humor the audience takes pleasure in led Dave Chappelle to walk away from a $50 million contract.  Chappelle’s abrupt flight to Africa amplified the discussion about the ethics of engaging in race-based humor that is often misinterpreted in a way that promotes rather than condemns racism, but it did little to settle the debate. 

Though considerably more space would be necessary to settle this debate conclusively, I will end by suggesting why comedians like Silverman and Chappelle should continue to engage in humor that ironically embraces violence and race-based stereotypes.  Despite the potentially negative social consequences of individuals laughing at these representations as endorsements of racism and sexual violence, I simply do not think that a bigoted failure to understand the intent of a joke gives an individual the authority to deprive both the speaker and more perceptive audience members of the pleasure of humor.  If anything, such shortsighted stupidity should deprive these individuals of this cultural authority.  Allowing those likely to misinterpret the meaning of a joke to influence the moral implications of telling it confers on these individuals an authority over social standards of speakability, which, it seems obvious to me, is an authority they have not earned. 

So let the great transgressive comedians continue to embrace violence and stereotypes in ironic ridicule; let those who don’t get the humor continue to be offended; and let those who misapprehend it continue to validate their thoughtless bigotry.  Just because we allow the pleasurable circumstances that reinforce these bigoted beliefs to persist doesn’t mean we have to accept the beliefs themselves.

The Ethics of Laughing at Violence, Part 2: Laughter as Validation

A primary critique of laughter at humorous representations of violence (and racism, sexism, &c.) is that it involves taking pleasure in the subject of the joke.  The idea that violence done to another could somehow lead to the pleasure of laughter has led to an outcry against such humorous representations.  This fact seems quite understandable.  If we believe that these jokes perpetuate an inclination (involuntary or otherwise) to take pleasure in others’ suffering, we should seek to limit the spread of this anti-social sentiment in our culture as much as possible.  But does the perpetuation of violent jokes create such a sentiment?  Consider the following joke that seems absolutely certain to offend:

What has 8 hairy legs and makes women scream?
Gang rape.*

*As you may notice, my past few posts contain a selection of jokes involving rape and sexual violence.  This is not simply to maintain consistency of theme.  I have tried to work with jokes likely to elicit the strongest negative response.  In other words, I am seeking to engage with the most offensive (or potentially offensive) jokes possible.  Because the violence of these jokes is intensified by misogyny and sex, I think they work best for my purpose.

Structurally (and unlike many examples of violent, racist, and sexist humor) this is at least a competently constructed joke.*  The opening question, “What has 8 hairy legs and makes women scream?,” sets up an initial expectation by strongly suggesting the most obvious answer: a spider.  However, that seemingly specific question also contains enough ambiguity to allow for other possible answers, including the invocation of gang rape that closes the joke.  This shift in the expected logic of the joke constitutes the humorous reversal or moment of comic surprise that should be recognizable from more traditional (i.e. less objectionable) jokes.  One additional (and especially troubling) reversal in the joke is that the opening question suggests a child’s riddle—the kind of thing you might read on a popsicle stick—that is reversed with the taboo (and decidedly adult) punchline.  This juxtaposition of childhood innocence and sexual violence is, for me, the most deeply troubling emotional component of the joke.

*As will become clear below, I am not approving of the joke’s content, just its form.  Like all jokes, violent jokes work by creating an unexpected incongruity.  But there are varying degrees of artfulness in that creation.  Consider this deplorably racist joke (told by soldiers in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket):

How do you keep five black guys from raping a white girl?

Throw them a basketball.

The structure of this joke is identical to most shock humor; it works by invoking an incongruity between what is acceptable to say and what is actually said.  In this case, the joke simply expresses racist stereotypes in a social context in which such speech is socially prohibited.  These types of social transgressions are not only easy to construct, they don’t really function in the way that most jokes do, by creating an initial expectation and then reversing it. In fact, the feeble “basketball” joke doesn’t even fulfill the structural or definitional criteria for a joke proposed by cognitive linguists like Victor Raskin, Salvatore Attardo, and Rachel Giora.  My point is that the “8 hairy legs” joke does satisfy those criteria (albeit disturbingly).  In terms of form, the joke is no different than other non-controversial jokes, thereby making it a useful example for our analysis.

In assessing the ethics of what it would mean to laugh at this joke, the most pertinent question becomes: what exactly are we laughing at?   Are we laughing at (and thereby taking pleasure in) the comic reversal (the form), or are we laughing at the sexual violence of gang rape (the content)? 

It has to be a little bit of both.  The phrase “gang rape” isn’t funny on its own.  It is the fact that it reverses an expected context that gives this sequence the status of a joke.  In this way the “8 hairy legs” joke is no different than this, more benign one (cited by both Raskin and Giora):

“Is the doctor at home?” the patient asked in his bronchial whisper. 

“No.” the doctor’s young and pretty wife answered in reply.  “Come right in.”

Both jokes use an opening scenario to establish an expected resolution, only to undermine or reverse that expectation by exploiting an unseen ambiguity in that initial context for comic effect.  Whether the reversal invokes cuckoldry or gang rape, to laugh at this shift in meaning is, to some extent, to take pleasure in the unexpected shift in meaning common to joke structures.

But jokes are surely more than just their form; the content has to play a role in the humor as well, and this is where taking pleasure in such a joke becomes morally problematic.  The linguistic codes we use carry a certain emotive force, and this force is, to a large extent, necessary for the general maintenance of our moral order.  The concept of gang rape carries with it an overwhelmingly negative response, and needs to do so to maintain social vigilance against violence towards women.  The moment in which we, as a culture, can reference gang rape with emotional neutrality is the moment in which our vigilance against such violence has sunk to dangerously low levels.  Any inclination one might have to laugh at the form of the “8 hairy legs” has to be counterbalanced by revulsion at the violent punchline that achieves the comic reversal.  In this way, the appropriately ethical response to this joke is one of cognitive dissonance in which an inclination to take comic pleasure of the joke’s form is offset (if not undermined completely) by disgust at the revelation of its appalling content.

In this way, the ethics of laughter is a complex topic that demands a complex answer.  The form of a joke is always morally neutral, but in the case of violent humor, the content within that form carries profound moral weight.  There is nothing unethical about taking pleasure in a joke’s formal reversal, but taking pleasure in violence or the suffering of others is always deeply problematic (and should be).  As a result, the only appropriately moral response must amount, at the very least, to a repudiation of any impulse to laugh at an instance of violence.

Whether or not we are always laughing at the violence depicted in violent humor is another question.  I’ll tackle that one in my next post.

The Ethics of Laughing at Violence, Part 1: Laughter as a Moral Act

Given my contention that the reflex to laugh is involuntary,* the question with which I ended my previous post--"is it okay (ethically) to laugh at violent humor?"--is really two questions:

      1. Is it morally blameworthy to laugh at a violent (or sexist, &c.) joke?

      2. Should we be laughing at such jokes?

I'll answer the first question here and the second in a subsequent post.

*I don't really think this is debatable, as any laughter that we would consider authentic must, to some extent at least, be a product of an unwilled reflex to laugh.  I am not discounting that this reflex could be socially conditioned (for the most part, I think it is).

The first question is easier to answer on the small scale, but more difficult to answer on a larger one.  To the extent that our laughter is involuntary, it seems difficult to blame an individual because she or he is inclined to laugh at such humor.  Certainly the openness with which an individual expresses her or his laughter will color our attitude toward its ethics.  In American culture, we typically feel compelled to express shame or guilt when laughing at something that might be considered transgressive.*

*Following a production of The Producers, my mother-in-law, for example, expressed guilt at laughing at "Springtime for Hitler."

At this point the conclusion seems to be that involuntary laughter at a violent joke is not morally blameworthy, but an individual's attitude toward her or his own laughter is.  Implicit in this stance is, of course, that our reflex to laugh is to some degree conditioned by our culture or upbringing.*  The deep-seated nature of our laughing response would suggest that we may not want to be around people who laugh at violent jokes, because this response reflects something significant about their character.  But it hardly seems reasonable to blame an individual for an involuntary response.

*This is not to say that we cannot condition ourselves to laugh.  Initially, I found the skewed logic of Jewish humor (as described by Ted Cohen in Jokes) mystifying, but after repeated exposure I now count these types of jokes among my favorites.  I'm trying to warm up to British humor in the same way (but failing so far).

So who do we blame?  If we want to uphold the notion that laughing at violent jokes is morally blameworthy--a position I will destabilize a bit in a subsequent post--then the moral blame must be cast on the culture or group of individuals who produced the laughing response.  In effect, it is the fault of a national (or regional or familial) culture if individuals produced by that culture find themselves inclined to laugh at violent jokes.  As the fact that Americans are significantly more inclined than citizens of other nations to laugh at violent humor is the foundational premise of this blog, the ethical blame for the creation of laughter at violence rests, in this case, with American culture (or its various subcultures).

Of course, a culture is a difficult entity to hold to a moral standard.  This is not only true because it is so large, but also because it is difficult to attribute intent--typically at the foundation of moral judgment--to something so amorphous as culture.  While American culture may produce individuals inclined to laugh at violent humor, it is difficult to say that it does so willfully.  This is not to say that this is an acceptable fact about about American culture or a reality we shouldn't be working to change, I am simply suggesting that casting moral blame on a culture is a rationally problematic and, from a pragmatic standpoint, decidedly unhelpful means of producing social change.

Throughout this post, I have been working from the assumption that laughing at violent humor is bad, that it is something we should seek to eliminate form our culture.  My guilt over laughing at the shovel joke in the previous post suggests that it is an impulse I would like to eliminate from myself.  I think this assumption needs to examined more thoroughly.  I will address this question more thoroughly in my next post.

Pleasure, Guilt, and Violent Humor

This post will be about the aesthetics of violent joking as it relates to the guilt we feel about laughing at violence.  But first, a brief reflection in the source of the joke that will serve as the focus of my analysis in this post.  

The joke cited below comes from folklorist Gershon Legman’s Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1968), which along with its companion volume No Laughing Matter, constitutes a nearly 2000-page study of dirty jokes.  A true labor of love!  Rationale of the Dirty Joke (the first nine chapters of Legman’s study) has been re-released based on its inclusion in the recent film The Aristocrats.  No Laughing Matter (the final six chapters of the study), which contained the dirtiest jokes—what Legman called the “dirty dirties”—had to be paid for by subscription, has never been re-released, and is, for the most part, only available through Interlibrary Loan in college libraries (how I got my copy).  Legman’s meticulous cataloguing of where and when he heard each joke adds to the interest of these volumes.  While Legman’s Freudian approach to the significance of dirty jokes may seem outdated to many—it certainly does to me—anyone who is interested in the study of humor should know about the existence of these works.

Informative digression aside, onto the joke:

The groom asks his best man if there is any sure test of his bride’s virginity, and is told to take a bucket of red paint, a bucket of blue paint, and a shovel along on his honeymoon.  “Paint one ball red and one ball blue, and then if she says, ‘That’s the funniest pair of balls I ever saw,’ hit her over the head with the shovel!” (496)

First let me say that, ideologically, this joke is repugnant (it needs to be to illustrate my point).  Aside from the obvious idea that sex before marriage validates extreme violence against women,* the instrumentalization of the bride and assumption of male authority over female sexuality contains an inherent violence.**  But there are two personal facts about this joke that make me want to explore it further:

1. I am inclined to laugh at it (even in repetition)
2. I feel guilty about my laughter (for the ideological reasons outlined above)

 *Legman, who heard this joke in New York in 1943, cites an even more violent variant—heard in DC during the same year—in which the man wields a hammer rather than a shovel.

**A charitable interpretation redeems the joke somewhat.  If we feel we are laughing at two bumblers and their ridiculous “test” then the joke demeans the men rather than the woman.  However, even in this case, the violence of the joke is purely gratuitous and, bumblers or not, the men’s ideology is no less threatening, even if  the joke itself doesn’t endorse that ideology (by ridiculing the sexist and violent men).

To account for the simultaneous existence of my guilt and my laughter, I want to propose a distinction between the aesthetics (or pleasure) of a joke and its ideological content.  I have always been fascinated by people who felt it reasonable to collapse the distinction between aesthetics and ideology, who believed that something had to be ideologically sound in order to be aesthetically good.  Though many people I know would profess to hold a position similar to this (though probably a more nuanced one), I don’t think this approach to culture withstands scrutiny, as I highly doubt that it is possible to be moved only by things one agrees with (or is neutral toward) ideologically or to be moved by such things all the time.*  Though none of us are royalists, we (at times) mourn the deaths of kings in literature; we dance to music that endorses vulgar consumerism and materialism; and I feel a propensity to laugh at jokes like the one above.

*I realize here that I am conflating the idea that something is aesthetically good with whether or not it moves me.  These are not always the same thing (I am moved by some pretty crappy art).  But since both involve taking some pleasure in a text, they will serve my purpose here.

The key fact for my contention that the aesthetics of a joke are separate from its ideology is that humor is involuntary.  Certainly there are those who would argue that our culture conditions the kinds of things we laugh at (and I wouldn’t disagree).  Others suggest that we laugh in submission to those more powerful than ourselves (this I highly doubt).  In social situations in which such laughter would embarrass me in front of my peers, I have enough self control to stifle the “grotesque facial expressions and barking sounds” that Vonnegut characterizes as laughter's physical manifestation, but what I cannot stop is my inclination or reflex to laugh at the violent joke above.  And given that I am generally averse to depictions of violence in my daily life—I don’t watch violent television shows, listen to violent music, play violent video games, &c.—I have a hard time accepting that my culture has conditioned me to laugh at the violence in this joke or at its aggressively sexist content.

So why am I inclined to laugh?

I would suggest that I laugh primarily because this joke is clever (to some extent at least).  The best man’s proposed test of the bride’s virginity is superficially shrewd and realistically idiotic, and this incongruity is amusing, particularly in light of the groom’s (misplaced) anxiety about his wife’s purity.  The tensions within the joking scenario—which I would characterize as a joke’s aesthetic—are funny, and these are largely (though not completely) separate from its sexist and violent content.  Of course this aesthetic is not culturally independent.  The history of American humor is loaded with laughter at bumblers’ bizarre machinations, and as a good American—or a tool of American culture—I find myself inclined to laugh at such jokes.

My theory that the pleasure of a joke is distinct from its ideology is reinforced by the many (many) other jokes in Legman’s study.  I don’t really laugh at most of them.  However, this is not because I don’t like their ideological content (and generally I don’t), but because they are crappy jokes—poorly constructed, weak tensions, predictable punchline, &c.  Some violent jokes are better than others, not because they are less problematic ideologically, but because they are simply better at using their form to do the kinds of things that good jokes do to make us laugh.

So is it okay to laugh at sexist and violent jokes?  I’ll pick up on this question in my next entry….