>>> Richard Marens writes:
Dhlazare wrote:
>
>
> By the way, Trotsky was far from humorless -- I'd describe his style as
> quietly witty. Lenin had his flashes of humor too, while Marx, of course, was
> devoted to the dialectical paradox -- religion as a plea for mercy in a
> merciless world and the like -- which, if not actually witty, was at least
> sharp and entertaining.
>
Marx was pretty funny at times. Wasn't there something in Critique of the Gotha program about someone swindling for all he's worth to end Capitalism?
Charles - I agree with Dan Lazare. Religion is a common area for Marxist jokes. God is sort of like Santa Claus, hohoho. Anything involving superstition , and all religion is, is subject for snickering. Marx and Engels start the Communist Manifesto off with a religious joke: "There is a Spectre haunting Europe". "Boooooo. You scaredy cats !" They sort of say.
In the period when they wrote things like _The Holy Family_ their writing is choked full of humor. Critique of The Critical Critical Critical philosophy or whatever, Saint Max. They have all these joke nicknames for intellectual joke opponents.
The section on Commodity Fetishism in Chapter 1 of Capital is pretty funny. Although part of the problem is the sense of humor is different then, and we can't get all of the jokes; or I can't. But some of the syntax is obviously a joke, but funny in 1867, not now.
Frankly, everything I read in Marx I feel his humor lurking there. That's one of the things that make it enjoyable to read. There is a lot of word play that I can get; and I can't get half of it. Not only that, it is simultaneous, multilingual word play sometimes ( I think). It certainly comes through to English from German sometimes.
Yvonne Kapp's biography of Eleanor Marx gives a more personal look at Marx and Engels than the classic texts, and their humor can be more fully discovered there. There I learned that Engels favorite expression was "Take it aesy"; Engels would have delivered large shipments of wine to the Marx household sometime. You can imagine they had a good time when they drank that.
I have no evidence of this, but I always imagined Marx going to working class pubs and speakeasies on his way home from the British Museum at about 3:00 am. I would think that he would want to have that kind of intimate and concrete contact with the living workers to complement his abstract understanding. I know he visited factories. But I could be wrong about visiting pubs.
Lenin said things like "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we hang them." _Two Steps Forward, One Step Back_,has a sense of the movement laughing at its Charlie Chaplin self. Leftwing Communism, an Infantile Disorder is a pretty witty cut , a very fresh Freudian joke, on some political oppenents. The title is. The content is not mainly funny.
In the movie Reds, a young Boshevik tells John Reed, who has just been released from a Finnish prison in exchange for some Russian professors, that Lenin said he would trade fifty bourgeois professors for Comrade Reed. It might have been authentic from Reed. If I think long enough, there are a lot of jokes like this by Lenin, often in the oral tradition.
_What is To Be Done_ is a play on the title of a popular play of the same period by a materialist Russian play writer. It would have been considered very witty, in the intellectual culture of that era, I think.
I think the general issue that Louis has raised about humor on the left and Doug drabness can be analyzed in part in terms of the classical theatrical categories of comedy and tragedy. This is the cross between theatre and politics. The transnational bourgeoisie have already exploited this in the current era. Both Reagan and the Pope were actors/politicians. Reagan was hilarious to a huge number of "regular" Americans. I hated his guts,so it was hard to find him funny. But I realized at one point that those silences and blank looks that "egghead" liberals mocked as "dumb" were a kind of Jack Benny funny silence for millions of Reagan movie generation Americans.
The long post by Marx on LIncoln I sent a while ago really does make as a main point that LIncoln's humor was the main expression of his common touch; and at that time America represented more of the domain of the common "man" compared with Europe; and Lincoln personified it in Marx's description. If you throw in Lincoln, with Reagan (yuk), the issue is that the working class requires and demands a very good sense of humor if it is going to listen to what you have to say. It will accept "smartness" much more readily as "wit" than as overt profundity.
Part of the problem for Marxists is that Marx focussed us so much on economics, the dismal science. JUST KIDDING !
Charles Brown