/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Alenka Zupančič

This paper was written for the conference “Beyond the Joke: Psychoanalysis and Comedy”, which took place at Freud Museum, London, in May 2019.

We live in times when comedy—and especially comedy with an edge—is often threatened from the right and from the left. Maybe even more so from the left: as Angela Nagle has pointed out, we’ve been witnessing lately a curious turn in which the new populist right is taking the side of transgression and rebellion, traditionally associated with the left: they talk about breaking the taboos (of speech, but also of conduct), they dare to speak up, say the forbidden things, challenge the established structures (including the media) and denounce the “elites”. Even when in power, they continue with this “dissident” rhetoric of opposition and of courageous transgression (for example against European institutions, or against the “deep State”). This general turn from simple conservativism to transgression on the right also has its comedic moments. For example, even the disregard for the most benign social norms of civility can be sold off as a courageous Transgression. I insult someone, and then I claim I’m defending the freedom of speech. Transgression seems to be “sexy”, even if it simply means no longer greeting your neighbour, because, “Who invented these stupid rules and why should I obey them?” In this constellation and after giving up on the more radical ideas of social justice, the left has paradoxically ended up on the conservative side: defending the rule of law, conserving what we have, and responding to contradictions, excesses, and even catastrophes generated by the present socio-economic system (crises, imminent ecological collapse, wars, huge economic differences, corruption, the rise of neo-fascist ideas) by means of introducing more and more new rules, regulations, and adjustments that are supposed to keep that “anomalies” at bay. This growing—and the often impenetrable corpus of rules and sub-rules, which are usually easily disregarded by the big players, but tend to drastically complicate lives of smaller players and individuals—includes “cultural” rules and injunctions that have become in the past decades, the main battlefield between the “left” and the “right”, particularly in the US. When the question of obeying and supporting or not the rules of political correctness (and identity politics) becomes the principal and exclusive field of social struggle, something has gone very wrong. Or very right, that is certainly much to the right. The right has won not simply because more and more people subscribe to its ideas, but because of how the very thing that makes the difference (between right and left) has shifted and became thoroughly redefined as a cultural war.

Related to this, but more specific in its functioning and its ideological role is the accent on affect, victimhood, vulnerability, hurt feelings, offence, and the appeal to the social authorities to protect us from this. A kind of massive “infantilization” of our societies. We are encouraged to behave like children: to act primarily upon how we “feel,” to demand—and rely on—constant protection against the “outer world,” its dangers and fights, or simply against the world of others, other human beings.

Important social movements (such as #MeToo) are often channelled exclusively into the logic of “joining the club” (of the victims) and demanding that the Other (different social institutions and preventive measures) protect us against the villainy of power, instead of aiming at empowering ourselves and becoming active agents of social struggle and change. Valorisation of affectivity and feelings appears at the precise point when some problem—injustice, to say—would demand a more radical systemic revision as to its causes and perpetuation. Social valorisation of affects basically means that we pay the plaintiff with her own money: Oh, but your feelings are so precious, you are so precious! The more you feel, the more precious you are. This is a typical neoliberal manoeuvre, which transforms even our traumatic experiences into possible social capital. If we can capitalize on our affects, we will limit our protests to declarations of these affects—to say, declarations of suffering and hurt. I’m of course not saying that suffering should not be expressed and talked about, but that this should not “freeze” the subject in the figure of the victim. The revolt should be precisely about refusing to be a victim, rejecting that position on all possible levels.

It is rather obvious that this turn to feelings, affects, sensibility, and their consideration/protection (as opposed to being equipped to fight, retort, and deal with things) is a very unfriendly environment for comedy (and jokes). In times when we need trigger warnings to be able to read certain passages in Shakespeare without getting hurt, comedy has very little space to breathe.

I knew a girl once who became rather obsessed with the idea of avoiding all possible bad, unhealthy food, and with establishing a perfect harmony within her body. At some point, she was telling me how close she has come to achieving that goal. As proof, she told me that if she eats as much like a small piece of chocolate, she throws up. Her body has found perfect harmony and is now able to detect and immediately reject the slightest foreign or bad element.

And we can ask, with Nietzsche, what the “great health” is all about? Is it about being able to digest and deal with some amount of “bad” food and other “foreign” elements, or is it about collapsing and violently throwing up at the slightest sight of something “bad” or “foreign”?

Comedy clearly sides with the first option and is indeed an interesting phenomenon in this respect: it demands great feeling and sensibility when it comes to scanning the social structures and detecting its paradoxes, contradictions, and neuralgic points, but it also demands some degree of bluntness and insensitivity when presenting these points in its own specific (comic) way.

Source: Netflix / Dave Chappell “Sticks and Stones” Netflix special.

Also, some degree of blasphemy and of a possible offence, of “crossing the line”, are almost constitutive elements of comedy (and of jokes). Not simply because comedy favors transgression, but because it essentially works with what is on the other side: with impulses and ideas that we tend to have, but won’t allow ourselves to express them, or simply don’t (want to) think about. And we could say that from the civic and civilized point of view it is often good that we don’t allow ourselves to express these impulses. But what is, or would be, also good from the civic point of view, is that we didn’t simply repress them, but confront them and deal with them in by means other than repression. What is presently going on in this respect is gigantic repression, accompanied by the necessary return of the repressed. (And comedy is a social form that allows for other ways of dealing with it.)

In the classical Freudian account, most of the jokes (the so-called tendentious jokes) work with and because of our resistance. There is something in ourselves that resists the content, or the point of the joke—if expressed in a plain, non-joke form. The technique of a joke circumvents this resistance or breaks through it, thanks to an additional, unexpected pleasure derived from this technique itself. The opposition is not simply that between a direct and an indirect way of saying something (this would rather constitute the form of politeness): a joke says things very directly, but with non-standard, unexpected means. Its technique allows for a direct point to surprise us, catch us off guard.

But let’s go back for a moment to the question of resistance. We can further complicate this account by distinguishing between two kinds of resistance. There is a simple configuration that could be described as follows: I (more or less secretly) agree with the point the joke makes, but resist it because of external “cultural” rules (“one shouldn’t say such things aloud”). And then when somebody finds an ingenious way of saying it, I can find pleasure in it and laugh.

Then there is another form of resistance which is more interesting because I resist the content itself: it is the content, and not just its expression, that I find disturbing or inadmissible. Here we are usually dealing with the configuration where something like repression (in the strict Freudian sense of Verdrängung) concerning a specific content of our desire has taken place. Here the configuration changes, it is no longer that of “I would like to say it, but cultural norms, considerations of respect, politeness, etc. prevent me from doing so”. No, I would not like to say it or hear it, for that matter. When repression (of a certain content-specific impulse) takes place, this does not imply that I secretly very much want to do it, just wouldn’t admit to it; it rather means that I’m profoundly repulsed by it (I have very strong feelings about the matter, or against the matter). There is an old saying according to which all the most zealous, fervent, fanatical anti-gay people are “repressed homosexuals”. This is probably true in some cases at least, yet it does not mean that they are secretly gay, but just wouldn’t publicly admit it. No, they genuinely hate this impulse in themselves, which is why they tend to react so violently when they perceive it in others. This is not simply about duplicity (public/private), it is about the fact that our most authentic feelings can already involve some form of repression which manifests itself precisely in our immediate, spontaneous feelings.

Now, again, this does not involve a culturally or morally clear-cut, unambiguous stance. The structure of some other reactions of repulsion (other than homophobic ones), reactions that we find good and worthy, is no less “pathological” and has a similar origin. For example, it is following the same mechanism that we can find cannibalism, or torture, repulsive, and deeply disturbing. Because these impulses are not simply unknown to us but have become unfamiliar, “foreign” in the process of our dealing with them in a “civilized way” (mostly by means of repression).

Traditional conservative moralists hated Freud for revealing and pointing to a non-moral source of all morality, which would allegedly lead to the latter’s utter relativisation and abandonment. Yet Freud’s point was that this was a much more powerful and resilient source of morality than its grounding in abstract principles, in (Divine) Good or “pure reason” could be. The claim that the source of morality is not itself “moral” does not undermine its efficiency, but rather explains it. This is what led Freud to famously say that “the normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows.”[1] Morality or conscience are themselves not fully conscious. Moreover, morality and moral censorship are not simply performed upon the id, but in complicity with it – hence the affects of “genuine” repulsion or attraction involved in different moral stances. (The Superego, or conscience, literally feeds on the renounced/repressed drives and their pressure or “energy”.) So, and to put it very simply, we could say that from the social point of view there are many “good repressions”, in the sense that they can be very efficient, immediate ways of dealing with various anti-social (or socially destructive) impulses.

Yet, as Freud has also insisted, morality based on repression comes with a price. This price can be seen and felt in symptoms or, more generally, in what he termed das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Discontent in civilization). The more we progress in our civilized ways, and the more morally sophisticated we become, the more we experience the weight of this discontent.[2] This Freudian stance was and still is, sometimes perceived as implying that liberation would come with the abandonment of all morality; or as implying that we should return to some simpler and more spontaneous stage of social interaction. Yet Freud’s point was different, and Lacan picked it up in a form of the explicit, simple, yet difficult question: Could there be a morality, or ethics, not based on and fed by repression? And if the answer is yes, what would these ethics be, how would it function? As clinical practice psychoanalysis is supposed to go a long way in lifting or dismantling the mechanism of repression. Do we become immoral as a result of it? Yes and no. It is certainly not that we become without restrains in respect to our impulses and defy others by simply following them. We deal with them by means other than repression (for example sublimation). And we do need to deal with them, because these impulses are (and remain) contradictory and conflictual already in themselves, and not simply in view of or because of the cultural and social norms inhibiting them. In other words, it is not by ‘lifting’ or abandoning our cultural regulation that we could expect the malaise, the discontent to simply disappear and life becomes harmonic. Culture is a solution to the inherent contradictions of impulses, but it is also a solution that produces new contradictions and new levels of problems. And it does not exist simply in the opposition to impulses, but in complicity with them.

Now if we look from this perspective at our current social and political landscape, what do we see?

The main-stream left (the so-called “cultural” or “liberal” left) mostly insists that discontent in Kultur can only be managed by more Kultur, by a denser and denser network of rules and regulations, and that any problem that occurs can be solved or dealt with by means of coming up with another (even more specific) rule. (This leads, among other things, to the exclusion of all manifestations of enjoyment and desire from the social space, because enjoyment and desire as such already involve a transgression, an invasion into the space of the other.)

The “populist” right, on the other hand, operates by means of performing a cut between two kinds of laws/rules: between, on the one hand, what they claim to be eternal, natural (or divine) laws—such as embodied for example in our “Christian tradition”, national identity, “natural sexuality”, and, on the other and, the mere (multi-)”cultural” laws which are all “artificial” and inhibit our freedom and natural spontaneity. In other words, the right exempts some laws as sacred and diverts all the popular rebellion and discontent produced by maintaining the repression that also these laws are based on, towards the other laws, which it deems “cultural”. This explains the stunning surplus investment which is clearly there for the right when it comes to attacking certain rules of political correctness. I’m the first to say that political correctness is a rather insufficient and actually “politically incorrect” strategy, because it avoids the source of the problem, and replaces the task of dealing with it with more additional rules. But the surplus investment with which the right receives some of these rules clearly indicates that there is much more going on here – a genuine Freudian Verschiebung, displacement.

What both these strategies have in common is that they completely ignore or avoid precisely the difficult, vexing question of repression; they don’t want to know anything about what we can all “systemic causes” of the trouble. The centrist “left” is busy attending to the symptoms, using the signals and expression of the discontent. The strategy of the right, however, is proving to be much more efficient, because—to put it very simply—it allows people to show discontent, and to rebel at certain regions, without diminishing the levels of repression, and its cost, involved in the sustaining of the “fundamental” laws that define its world-view and its world-economy. Moreover, by increasing the number and complexity of rules and sub-rules the liberal left tends to increase the levels of repression, Verdrängung, and the right directly profits from this increase, channelling the outlet of pressure in the direction that suits it in concrete circumstances. This is true both on “personal” and “social” levels, which are deeply connected anyway.

It is here, in this configuration, that the political importance of comedy today comes in, even when its content has nothing to do with politics. Obviously, this is not to say that comedy can replace politics. The claim is simply that comedy is a cultural form that can work on repression, do something to and with it, and that this is also where it political dimension lies. “Comedy” is obviously a very general term. Things that we list under comedy (all things that make us laugh) can have very different political effects, including very reactionary ones. But the fact is that comedy does have at its disposal techniques which, combined with thinking and the right talent, can make us deal with these impulses by means other than repression, and in this way make them useless as unconscious food or fuel of our actions. Comedy can lure us out of our well consolidated (moral) chair, expose us to considerations and ideas that we would normally tend to resist. It lures us out of this comfort not by means of awakening enlightenment, but by means of a (different kind of) pleasure. (Freud compared this Vorlust to the effects of intoxication, alcohol). We could also say that it invites us to think by way making us discover thinking as possibly pleasurable, as a joy. Nietzsche made the expression “gay science” largely know and popular with the title of one of his books (die Fröhliche Wissenschaft), but the term originates in the Provencal troubadour poetic tradition (gai saber). Lacan writes on this tradition extensively in the context of “sublimation” (defined already by Freud as “satisfaction of the drives without repression”), and invokes a possible emancipatory potential of “gay science”. I think good comedy is something very much like gay science.

It’s been argued—by myself among others—that comedy can have both reactionary and emancipatory effects, it can both disarm the power and consolidate it, empower the people or just entertain and divert them. This double way of comedy has little to do with the comedian’s a priori political choice and preferences (the latter rather follow from a certain way of understanding and doing comedy). In the last part of my talk, I would like to propose a few points to help us navigate in the often muddy area of this distinction, with the help of what I’ve said so far.

As the terms that could name this difference, I propose “stand up comedy” and “sit back comedy”. Both terms are meant as metaphors, and not as referring to postures in which one does the comedy (standing up or sitting down), nor – in the case of “stand up” – simply referring to the style of performing known as stand-up. The main difference between them consists of what they do, or not, to and with the individual and social repressions that feed any current “state of affairs”. Do they tackle them, shift them, dismantle them, or mostly just use and perpetuate them?

“Sit back comedy” typically cashes in on our repressions, further consolidates us in our beliefs and, more importantly, in our righteousness, our (moral or intellectual) superiority. It can involve strong elements of irony understood as drawing, and playing upon, the line between ourselves (who get it and are on the right side), and others (who don’t get it). James Harvey made this point very nicely:

“Where a successful joke connects you to an audience, an irony may do just the opposite. Mostly, an audience ‘gets’ a joke or else it falls flat, as we say. But an irony … may only confirm itself, may begin to seem richer than it did even at first if half the audience misses it.”[3]

This may behalf of the audience present, but it may also refer to the others “out there” who don’t (or wouldn’t) get it; yet this place of “the (stupider) other(s)” is structurally built into irony, and into the gliding differentiation it implies.

I’m not simply identifying “sit back comedy” with irony, only suggesting that it often contains this particular element of irony. If you side with irony, you can never be on the wrong side, it’s always the others, the “naive believers”, the “fools” who are wrong.

Photo: Screenshot of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert / CBS — Photo: Screenshot of *The Late Show with Stephen Colbert* / CBS

For example, I would qualify much of what Stephen Colbert does on The Late Show in relation to Trump as “sit back comedy” (even when he is standing up doing it): you fill the audience with democratic voters, and then you make fun of Trump, week after week after week, with more or less funny jokes. There is no risk taken there; you play against the background of general consensus (which you take care to never disturb), laughing at the stupidity of other(s). The effect of this is, even if progressive in content, largely conservative. We get to “enjoy our Trump”, as well as enjoy not being Trump, being on the right side of the divide, being right. (I guess this could be a very good definition of the mainstream left today: it is all about being right, with all the ambiguity that this way of putting it can have in English. So I’m tempted to ask: Why not be wrong for a change?) A few minutes of ridiculing Trump per day seem to be enough to fulfill our political agenda or duty.

There is no real (comic) questioning hear about what makes Trump possible and sustains him, on the contrary; he is presented as the main and only problem. Without him, America would become great again, to borrow his own slogan.

What I call “stand up comedy” does not overlap with stand up as performance category, but it does contain some of its elements. To begin with: you don’t perform in a controlled environment or address your act to those who already think exactly like you, share your views and convictions. Clearly, you prepare well for your act, but you do not simply perform, play out your script. You do it, in part, by responding to the response of the audience, and not necessarily by simply playing into its hands. By this I mean: say your joke is making a point which doesn’t go down too well with the public. I imagine you then have a choice between abandoning that point and moving on to something else, or rising the stakes, insisting and finding a yet funnier way of saying it, which convinces the public to take the point in and consider it.

Convincing the audience, “winning it over” (also there where it isn’t already “yours”), attempting to leave no one out, is a very important element of “stand-up comedy”, which involves both taking some risk and engaging in the art of convincing. But above all, the crucial element of what I call “stand up comedy” is that it makes the audience stand up (in their head), walk around, and dwell in spaces outside their consolidated area and well-established divides. And even enjoy this.

Let me conclude with an example, which is interesting for my purposes because it includes both “stand up” and “sit back” comedy, and it actually uses the “cultural sit-back” comedy to bring in the stand-up, and with it the question of systemic causes (of repression).

What I have in mind is one of the more famous episodes of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who is America, called ‘Building a Mosque in Kingman Arizona’. Cohen (in one of his characters) addresses the assembly of local people in Kingman Arizona. He first asks them if they want to see “huge economic growth” in town, coming from an investment of 385 million dollars. Everybody says yes. Then he tells them what the investment is about – their town has been chosen as the location for building a “brand new, state of the art mosque” – not just any mosque, but the world’s largest mosque outside of the Middle east. People’s enthusiasm quickly dies out, they start protesting and uttering all kinds of objections. From very reasonable ones (Why would they need a mosque like this?) to various islamophobic versions of objections (mosque equals terrorism). At first sight, the episode may look simply like Cohen’s (successful) attempt at provoking a display of collective islamophobia in a small town in Arizona. But I don’t think this “liberal” agenda (we feel good laughing at prejudiced locals) exhausts the interest of this episode. I think the quite predictable “islamophobia” is actually being used here as means of exposing (or at least pointing to) a much more general, subtle and mischievous form of liberal blackmail. The way Cohen presents this project is coined upon a classical “liberal” manipulation: if you want people to accept something, say A, you introduce A as a given background in which they have the choice between different versions of A. You don’t ask: “Do you want A or not?” You ask: “Do you want a green A, or a blue A, or some other version of it perhaps? Whatever you want, you’re free to choose.” And the moment they start considering different choices, people are hooked, they’ve already accepted A.

Photo: Sasha Baron Cohen, Who is America / Showtime

So, in his speech, Cohen starts by telling the local people that they “will have the choice between two different designs” of the mosque, design 1 and design 2, which he shows them on slides. Then he asks, “So who here supports design one?” Nobody, they all protest, and he immediately concludes: “So, you are all for design 2.” People are outraged, they don’t want either one, they say. Cohen continues with his corporate salesman strategy: “Let me ask you something. You don’t like this construction: so tell me about your dream mosque.” In other terms: just keep thinking about the alternatives within the choice that I’m imposing on you. At that point, one of the locals cuts the debate by energetically crying out: “There IS no dream mosque!” We should think twice before simply dismissing this response for its ‘islamophobic’ prejudice, and rather take it as a model of what should be our principled response to any of this kind of “free choice” blackmail situations.

In other words, perhaps we should complicate a bit the causality with which we usually “explain” these things, and say: the man is not saying this because he is islamophobic, he turned “Islamophobic” (or homophobic, or….whatever-phobic) because subjected to this kind of subtle, invisible blackmail and its consequences for decades.

The accumulating yet impotent frustration generated by this seemingly neutral liberal framework of choices is being canalized, in contemporary populist politics—which fully supports the economical side of this blackmail—against designed groups of enemies (Muslims, immigrant workers…), precisely so as not to be directed against its systemic causes.

The episode of “Who is America” is quite ingenious because it manages to expose, at the same time, both islamophobic prejudice and the liberal capitalist framework with its blackmail. It uses one to expose the other, and vice versa.

Alenka Zupančič is a philosopher and social theorist. She works as research advisor at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences. She is also professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Notable for her work on the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis, she is the author of numerous articles and books, including Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan; The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two; Why Psychoanalysis: Three Interventions; The Odd One In: On Comedy; and, most recently, What is Sex?

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Stachey, Hoharth Press, London 1953-1974, vol. 19, p.52.
Shift from external authority to the constitution of the Superego (conscience): in the case of simply external authority one renounces one’s satisfactions (of the drives) to avoid punishment. ‘If one has carried out this renunciation, one is, as it were, quits with the authority and no sense of guilt should remain. But with fear of the superego the case is different. Here, instinctual renunciation is not enough, for the wish persists and cannot be concealed from the superego. Thus, in spite of the renunciation that has been made, a sense of guilt comes about. (…) instinctual renunciation now no longer has a completely liberating effect; virtuous conscience is no longer rewarded with the assurance of love. A threatened external unhappiness – loss of love and punishment of the part of external authority – has been exchanged for a permanent internal unhappiness, for the tension of the sense of guilt.” S. Freud, SE 21, p. 127-128.
James Harvey: Romantic Comedy in Hollywood. From Lubitsch to Sturges, New York: Da capo Press 1998, p. 672.