What a grace: a cultural history of humor

Terry Eagleton, Eminence of Literary Studies, in 2018.Paul Musso

This Terry Eagleton book was expected.

Other colleagues of his had written similar things: Simon Critchley,

On Humor;

Slavoj Žižek,

My jokes, my philosophy

, and Alenka Zupančič,

On comedy

, so his had to fall sooner or later. In previous works, he already discussed the difference between comedy and tragedy or the relationship between absurdity and history, and, yes, he told more than one joke. To be a book by a Marxist, it mentions Marx only once and, curiously, not to remember that history occurs twice, the first as a tragedy and the second as a farce. In the second chapter, Hegel, Marx and Brecht jump onto the scene, but throughout the book the Marxist spirit operates with discretion. The absurdity of Beckett, which has interested him so much, has less room than expected, while Bakhtin's carnival theory has more than desired. Henri Bergson's theses are excellently explained, but somewhat simplified.Freud's theory of humor inevitably appears and succeeds in giving a loose interpretation, not just sexual, to the idea of ​​repression.

Let's clarify that

Humor

is not a book about humor, but about certain theories of humor. The reader will not find insights into current

stand-up comedy

,

censorship and political correctness, cynical humor in delusional capitalism, or bullshit in the

Trump era.

Asking Eagleton for an analysis of the videos of kittens that make us laugh would be like asking an

influencer

a comment on the ironies of Laurence Sterne. It alludes in passing to a dozen comedians (including Stewart Lee and Frankie Howerd), but does not discuss their different styles and logics. The basic references of this sly old leftist are still prose, poetry, theater, philosophy and literary criticism. Unlike Žižek, he has never talked about cinema, but is it possible to understand the humor of the last hundred years without taking that mass art into account? It does allude to various comedians and suggests that they make people laugh not only because their jokes are good, but because they have embodied "a lifestyle, a way of seeing the world or an eccentric personality." It is so, but then, why not delve deeper into that mood? What does the author think of the suicide rate among comedians and comedians?

Think of those cool, delusional comedians whose explanation of a joke may be a better joke than explained.

But Eagleton is brilliant, sure, and the book starts off really well. “Humor and humor analysis can coexist perfectly. Understanding how a joke works doesn't have to ruin it, just as understanding how a poem works doesn't spoil it, ”he writes. Absolutely true, and if not, think of those cool, delusional comedians whose explanation of a joke may be a better joke than explained. The good news is that Eagleton knows a lot of theories of humor very well and the bad news is that he turns them all around. He ignores scientific theories, "full of graphs, tables, diagrams, statistics and reports on experiments", and focuses on those that, he says, can be plagued with discrepancies, but be very productive, "just like a blurred photo of someone can be more useful than not having any ”.At times, one would even say that Eagleton does not mind being comic in the style of Tristram Shandy: “Because (…) of the need to leave absolutely nothing untold (…) in his concern — parodic kind and sentimental — not to To deceive his readers by organizing his story and editing it, Tristram manages, with a barely concealed sadism, to plunge them into the deepest confusion ”. Eagleton does not drive the reader crazy, but it does make him dizzy. As one reviewer has said, he sometimes seems caught up in the hamster-wheel logic of humor: he argues in one sense of the wheel, but immediately turns the other way. Perhaps that is the grace of dialectics. As Eagleton himself also recalls, Brecht said that no one without a sense of humor could understand her.one would even say that Eagleton does not mind being comic in the style of Tristram Shandy: “Because (…) of the need to leave absolutely nothing untold (…) in his concern — parodic kind and sentimental — not to deceive his Readers organizing his story and editing it, Tristram manages, with barely concealed sadism, to plunge them into the deepest confusion ”. Eagleton does not drive the reader crazy, but it does make him dizzy. As one reviewer has said, he sometimes seems caught up in the hamster-wheel logic of humor: he argues in one sense of the wheel, but immediately turns the other way. Perhaps that is the grace of dialectics. As Eagleton himself also recalls, Brecht said that no one without a sense of humor could understand her.one would even say that Eagleton does not mind being comic in the style of Tristram Shandy: “Because (…) of the need to leave absolutely nothing untold (…) in his concern — parodic kind and sentimental — not to deceive his Readers organizing his story and editing it, Tristram manages, with barely concealed sadism, to plunge them into the deepest confusion ”. Eagleton does not drive the reader crazy, but it does make him dizzy. As one reviewer has said, he sometimes seems caught up in the hamster-wheel logic of humor: he argues in one sense of the wheel, but immediately turns the other way. Perhaps that is the grace of dialectics. As Eagleton himself also recalls, Brecht said that no one without a sense of humor could understand her.“Because (…) of the need to leave absolutely nothing untold (…) in his concern - parodic friendly and sentimental - not to deceive his readers by organizing his story and editing it, Tristram manages, with a barely concealed sadism, to plunge them in the deepest confusion ”. Eagleton does not drive the reader crazy, but it does make him dizzy. As one reviewer has said, he sometimes seems caught up in the hamster-wheel logic of humor: he argues in one sense of the wheel, but immediately turns the other way. Perhaps that is the grace of dialectics. As Eagleton himself also recalls, Brecht said that no one without a sense of humor could understand her.“Because (…) of the need to leave absolutely nothing untold (…) in his concern - parodic kind and sentimental - not to deceive his readers by organizing his story and editing it, Tristram manages, with a barely concealed sadism, to submerge them in the deepest confusion ”. Eagleton does not drive the reader crazy, but it does make him dizzy. As one reviewer has said, he sometimes seems caught up in the hamster-wheel logic of humor: he argues in one sense of the wheel, but immediately turns the other way. Perhaps that is the grace of dialectics. As Eagleton himself also recalls, Brecht said that no one without a sense of humor could understand her.plunge them into the deepest confusion. Eagleton does not drive the reader crazy, but it does make him dizzy. As one reviewer has said, he sometimes seems caught up in the hamster-wheel logic of humor: he argues in one sense of the wheel, but immediately turns the other way. Perhaps that is the grace of dialectics. As Eagleton himself also recalls, Brecht said that no one without a sense of humor could understand her.plunge them into the deepest confusion. Eagleton does not drive the reader crazy, but it does make him dizzy. As one reviewer has said, he sometimes seems caught up in the hamster-wheel logic of humor: he argues in one sense of the wheel, but immediately turns the other way. Perhaps that is the grace of dialectics. As Eagleton himself also recalls, Brecht said that no one without a sense of humor could understand her.

Anyone who has not read many books on humor should read this one, because thanks to it they will read many others

Anyone who has not read many books on humor should read this one, because thanks to it they will read many others. Anyone who has read many should read this book because perhaps they will read them in another way. The book connects well different expressions of the phenomenon (laughter, joke, sarcasm, irony, comedy) and is more interesting in the first chapters, where it analyzes three well-known theories of humor: as a mechanism of relief or discharge, as a gesture of superiority and as acceptance of incongruity. He is extremely adept at dismantling the second theory and ends up proposing a combination of the discharge and incongruity theory. At that point in the book he makes it clear that he especially likes William Hazlitt's perspective (by the way, the second chapter, 'Scoffers and mockers', translates as 'Buzzards and mockers',but it was not necessary to resort to a term so little used and it would have been worth 'mockery and teasing'). In the fourth ('Humor and history'), Eagleton goes back, as in

The role of criticism

and in

Aesthetics as an ideology

, until the Enlightenment, and tells the story of good humor and wit as an ingredient in the bourgeois ideology of courtesy and sociability. Hobbes, Swift and Shaftesbury, among others, parade through his chronicle, and you can tell he likes Hutcheson. In the fifth, instead, he inserts a too long comment on

Comedians

, by Trevor Griffiths, and does not connect well with the final part dedicated to Bakhtin and the carnival, a concept that is somewhat old-fashioned to understand the contemporary varieties of satire and parody.

The final allusion to the carnival character of Christianity falls short and would have required further development, only that it would have gotten him into a theology discussion with Žižek that he might not have liked.

The discussion of the body, the commoner, and the grotesque also deserved an update, but Eagleton dismisses his book by leaving the matter open, hiding among a garden hedge he's gotten into, just like Homer Simpson in a very popular meme.

Humor

Author:

Terry Eagleton.

Translation by Mariano Peyrou.

Publisher:

Taurus, 2021.

Format:

216 pages, 17.90 euros.

Buy for € 17 on Amazon

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