> Laughter often gets produced by practices of exclusion (excluding the
> object of laughter from the shared understanding of the comic and his/her
> audience) and inversion (overturning the traditional hierarchy of
> valuation). Exclusion as a mechanism of production of laughter is in itself
> politically neutral and, depending on the object and the context of
> exclusion, it can be reactionary or progressive. It goes without saying
> that racist and sexist 'humor' serves to cement the ties that bind the
> dominant group by virtue of its power to reproduce the shared understanding
> that casts out the subordinated as 'abject.'
But I would argue that Leftist, subversive, genuinely progressive humor really is qualitatively different from Rightwing humor. It's too simple to claim that laughter is this natural, human function, and that politics determines where this primal capacity endowed to us by Nature ends up being deployed. Leftwing humor has no abject, but is rather an attempt to grasp, however briefly, our common abjection under capitalism; Rightwing humor is the canalization of that abjection or oppression, and its displacement onto so many psychological, quasi-Freudian registers (the raped female turns into the Evil Bitch, the abused child turns into the Little Monster, etc.; and of course, the logical result of this process is the identification of the powerless subject itself with the Maximum Leader). That is, Rightwing humor is fundamentally a reprivatization of social anxieties, whereas Left humor collectivizes such in a nonviolent way. Robin Williams' wonderful line on the Jay Leno show, "I was very impressed with Pat Buchanan's speech the other day, it was a wonderful speech... of course, it was *much* better in the original German..." (or words to that effect) is a good model of this: he literally unlocks the anti-German prejudice of ordinary Americans, who all too often associate the homeland of Goethe, Mozart and Adorno with genocide, by underlining Buchanan's own hideous, neofascist racism and immigrant-bashing as precisely the culmination of such thinking: Buchanan's stupidity is the stupidity of our entire mass-culture, which in the midst of the blossoming transnationalism of late capital, spends most of its time rehashing the most dismal, disgusting national prejudices. With Robin Williams, we laugh with ourselves, not at ourselves, or at anyone else.
> Laughter might be produced by the combination of exclusion and inversion of
> reactionary sorts. Think, for example, of straight frat brothers putting on
> a drag performance without identifying at all with women or sexual
> dissidents.
Which proves my point -- the frat bros are a fractious, competitive lot, often tested during "fall rush" by all sorts of bizarre rituals in order to "prove" their worthiness of admission into the fraternity, and one of the key ways this happens is by ritual denigration of themselves or others (e.g. drinking games, general humiliation, etc.). All very military, and the perfect microcosm of late capitalist business culture generally; this is the superficial hilarity of the office party, where everyone is obliged to laugh at the bosses' joke. But noone, deep down, is smiling (except the shareholders).
-- Dennis