Laughter and Tricky Topics

Catalog description

This course takes a comparative approach to studying the philosophy and praxis of laughter in a variety of artistic media — texts, films, performances and memes. We will seek to develop a critical apparatus to answer the following questions: How does laughter unite us? How does it divide us? How does it contribute to identity and community formation? We will focus on humoristic expression produced in contexts considered too serious for lightheartedness, such as death, race and gender-related oppression, and disenfranchisement. Together, we will wonder whether everything can be a laughing matter, if irony is even funny (and what does it mean anyway?), and whether humor has the potential to effect meaningful sociopolitical change. Our theoretical corpus will include works by Bakhtin, Baudelaire, Bergson, and Freud, who conceptualized laughter in wildly different ways—respectively as carnivalesque, satanic, social, and as a coping mechanism. In the 1940s, René Ménil, a Franco-Caribbean philosopher, synthesized these early theories and further developed them into a means of resistance for colonial subjects. To see these concepts in action, we will engage with materials spanning three centuries, from a short story written by Jonathan Swift to contemporary French comedies (subtitled in English). Should laughter occur throughout the semester, its causes will be dutifully analyzed and presented in diverse oral and written assignments.