[lbo-talk] Re: Dull, dull, dull

[Dennis Perrin]

The problem of discussing what "is" and "isn't" funny, from a left
perspective (to be modified and adjusted based on class position,
demographics, post-modern affinities, et. al., etc, on and on), is that
h/she must first constitute what the point of humor, primarily that humor
which seeks to deflate regnant social and economic philosophies, as well as
the present ruling structure, "is." The Dutch sociologist Hannah Gorth
argued in her groundbreaking study, "Laughter's Reinforcement of Social
Inequities: A Guide to the Guffaws That Imprison Us All" (Fahrenheit Press,
1977), comedy cannot be accurately defined until some form of social
re-adjustment or substantial reform takes place. "To laugh or to create
laughter," Gorth wrote, "in the present environment is tantamount to
performing pantomime in a slaughterhouse. It is an exercise in solipsism,
disconnected from the cries in the death chamber, free from the blood on the
floor. The truest liberating comedic expression in our day and age is the
frown, the inversion of what supposedly defines 'happiness' for we know that
said 'happiness' is a mass hallucination.Only by being truly sad, truly
grim, can we ever hope to understand what is truly funny."

Gorth committed suicide two years later. In tribute, her funeral was played
out in pantomime.

DP