I. Gender - Laughter - Media: Theoretical Crossings

Pailer, Gaby, Andreas Böhn, Stefan Horlacher, and Ulrich Scheck (Eds.).
Gender and Laughter :

Comic Affirmation and Subversion in Traditional and Modern Media. Rodop B.V., Amsterdam &
New York. 2009.
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
I. Gender – Laughter – Media: Theoretical Crossings

Copyright 2009. Brill | Rodopi.
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Stefan Horlacher
A Short Introduction to Theories of Humour, the Comic,

and Laughter
Establishing a decisive nexus between gender, laughter, and media, this article not only
critically discusses the often contradictorily defined concepts of humour, the comic,
and laughter but also introduces to the most important theories in these fields with ref-
erence to Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Baudelaire, Sigmund Freud,
Mikhail Bakhtin, Helmuth Plessner, Anton C. Zijderveld, Judith Butler, Bernhard
Greiner, Hans Robert Jauß, Peter L. Berger, and others. Basic concepts such as the
“significantly comic” versus the “absolutely comic” or the “comedy of denigration and
exclusion” versus the “comedy of valorization and inclusion” are interrogated and the
link between comedy, citationality, performativity as well as parody is established.
Moreover, this article explores the sociological, psychoanalytical, bodily and theo-
logical dimensions to laughter and questions notions such as the carnivalesque and the
grotesque. It is argued that the liberating potential of “full laughter” can be understood
as the return of the body, of the repressed, and of the Other, and that if it is precisely this
‘other realm’ which ultimately makes laughter possible, laughter simultaneously is
humankind’s best means of dealing with it.
But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh. It is the peas-
ant’s entertainment, the drunkard’s license; [. . .] laughter remains base, a
defense for the simple, a mystery desecrated for the plebeians. [. . .] Laughter
frees the villein from fear of the Devil [. . .]. Laughter, for a few moments, distracts
the villein from fear. But law is imposed by fear, whose true name is fear of God.1
Gender – Laughter – Media

For more than three years, the Canadian-German research project and confer-
ence series “Gender – Laughter – Media” has concentrated on how humour, the
comic, and laughter question, subvert, criticize, ‘correct’ but also strengthen
and affirm gender identities and gender norms. By doing so, “Gender –
Laughter – Media” has related the vast territory of laughter – which oscillates
between valorisation and denigration, inclusion and exclusion, affirmation and
subversion, and extends to the grotesque, the ludicrous, nonsense2, and the
plainly silly – to gender identities and their representation and construction
across various media. That there is indeed a decisive nexus between gender,
1
Jorge of Burgos (Eco 474f.).
2
For a more detailed discussion of nonsense and of linguistic manifestations of
humour such as spoonerisms and puns cf. Stemmler and Horlacher; Horlacher,
Nonsense; Zijdeveld, Trend Report 10–12. For a discussion of laughter and comedy
in Anglophone postcolonial literatures and cultures cf. Reichl and Stein.
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18
laughter, and media has, at least partly, been observed by Manfred Pfister in his
History of English Laughter, where he argues that one “of the main incentives Pfister: gender and
or targets of laughter has, indeed, been the sexual sphere, and, in particular, sex as typical
female sexuality”, and that “gender roles, relations and hierarchies – and, in
targets of humor
particular, their transgressions! – have proved the common laughing stock of
cultures otherwise far apart from each other” (Pfister vi). Analysing the pos-
sible subversion or affirmation of gender identities through humour, the comic,
and laughter becomes even more relevant if we consider Sigmund Freud’s line Laughter (in producing
of argument that we “are inclined to give the thought the benefit of what has
pleased us in the form of the joke”, so that we “are no longer inclined to find pleasure) can disarm us
anything wrong that has given us enjoyment and so to spoil the source of a and make the
pleasure” (162). From this it follows that to “perceive a situation as humorous unacceptable seem
causes it to appear less discriminatory, and more acceptable” (Bill and Naus harmless or 'just for
659). But if sexism “disguised by and delivered through humor” is potentially
fun'
interpreted “as being harmless and innocent” (646), and thus tends to escape
criticism altogether, if “[p]erceiving and labeling an incident as humorous
appears to diminish its sexist content” (660), this only increases the necessity
for a critical analysis of the “comic mode” (Lodge 170) with special attention
to its ability to hide patriarchal, sexist, and even misogynist tendencies in
literature, plays, films, and other media.
As a matter of fact, a study of the medial creation and representation of
laughter should enable us to “reveal the fault lines of the anxieties and the
social pressures at work at any given historical moment” (Pfister vii) and in any
culture or society we choose to analyse. For such a study, the literary, auditory,
theatrical, and televisual, or cinematic representations of laughter have the
advantage of revealing these points of contention and debate even more clearly
than actual laughter does since they allow us to analyse “the symbolic systems
of representations” – that is “culture as first, second and higher order systems
of signs”3 – rather than the social reality they represent and to include the
diachronic, historical dimension as well as the anticipatory power of art con-
ceived of as a savoir littéraire in the broadest sense (Horlacher, Literatur).
Art is thereby considered as a special sign system which, notwithstanding its
historical imprint, transcends any narrow notion of mimesis that would reduce
it to a mirror or a simple image of reality. Whatever the medium of artistic
expression, be it literary texts, radio plays, theatre, film, body art, or other per-
formances, all of these art-forms are a central part of that “larger symbolic Pfister:'history of
laughter' is discursive-- a
3
Pfister vii. Any ‘history of laughter’ – just as any ‘history of sexuality’ – “can only
be the history of social discourses, representations, performances and practices
collection of ways of
through which cultural processing of laughter is effectuated”. A history of laughter is telling jokes; practices;
then the history of the – often conflicting – norms giving social shape to and circum- recognizable
scribing “the anthropological impulse of laughter in a particular society” (Pfister v).
representations; and an
understanding of the
social norms.
19
order by which a culture imagines its relation to the conditions of its existence”
(Matus 5). Notwithstanding their medial form, imaginative ‘texts’ “are able to Humorous imaginative
‘mobilize fantasies without legislating action,’ and can constitute a space in 'texts' allow the
which shared anxieties and tensions are articulated and symbolically addressed” symbolic articulation of
(ibid. 7). They not only represent the laughter of a particular society but
social anxieties and
simultaneously give shape to it, analyse and frequently problematize it (cf.
Pfister). Moreover, these texts, or works of art, are especially rewarding objects tensions -- laughter
of analysis since they have the ability to articulate impressions, intuitions, men- allows release
talities, and pre-scientific forms of knowledge long before – if ever – they
reach the status of the collective consciousness (Horlacher, Daniel Martin);
they are forms of knowledge which cannot be articulated or even conceived of
outside the realm of art because this is exactly the space where – analogous to Like dreams, the space
dreams – the borders of (self-)censorship are potentially lowered and the of the comic/joke
unthinkable, the liminal, the forbidden, and the experimental, in the sense of
Raymond Ruyer’s utopian mode (mode utopique), can be articulated. The dif- allows the lowering of
ferent forms of art analysed in this volume all have the potential to create a one's mental barriers
simultaneity of the unsimultaneous, of the clearly possible and the barely con- and therefore, the
ceivable, of the officially sanctioned and the expressly forbidden. Their unique entertaining of what is
potential rests in their capacity to render the possible worlds or realities they
taboo, forbidden, out-
create ‘real’ in the sense of liveable (that is able to be experienced, tested and
criticized), so that they can be understood as a privileged space where the of-the-question, in our
important work on a cultural imaginary takes place (cf. Fluck 7–29). ordinary social life
The Quixotic Interrelatedness of Humour, the Comic, and Laughter

While Mikhail Bakhtin argues that “[l]aughter is essentially not an external but Bakhtin: laughter as
an interior form of truth” that “cannot be transformed into seriousness without expression of an interior
destroying and distorting the very contents of the truth which it unveils” (94), truth which, if expressed,
Minois: laughter is Georges Minois contends that “[l]e rire est une affaire trop sérieuse pour être
laissée aux comiques” (9) (“[l]aughter is far too serious to be left to comedians”). would destroy the
serious because it These contradictory statements raise the question of how far it is possible, or authenticity of the critique
has a social even desirable, to write seriously (not to say dry-as-dust à la Sir Walter Scott) being made
critical purpose about laughter (cf. Kuschel 11), and how far it is reasonable to expect that
“after having thoroughly examined the structure of comic experience” one can
with a serious demeanour “declare to the world what it is” (Berger xv).
Laughter is evanescent, negates differences, and harbours paradoxical traits.
The problems for analysis arising from this are well documented in scholarly Comic experience is
literature: “How many jokes”, Peter L. Berger asks, “could survive treatment
situational and
by philosophers?” (xiv). And if the comic experience is fragile and inherently
fleeting, if laughter is volatile, “an ephemeral performance, not a lasting text or therefore, ephemera or
monument”, if laughter “vanishes with the situation that occasioned it” (Pfister fleeting. If the context
vii), how can it be taken apart or held up for scrutiny? That there is no simple or moment passes, the
joke may no longer be
funny.
20
answer becomes obvious if one takes a look at Minois’s impressive Histoire du

rire et de la dérision and his reference to Edmund Bergler’s Laughter and the
Sense of Humour, where already in 1956 Bergler listed more than 80 theories
of laughter. Although philosophical theories of laughter may explain different
and complimentary aspects of laughter, and despite this list having become
much longer by now, none of these theories really manages to comprehensively
explain the phenomenon of laughter. One of the reasons for this may well
reside in the fact that the term “laughter” comprises many different and con- Psychoanalyst Jacques
tradictory realities, that in analogy to Jacques Lacan’s famous “THE woman Lacan's observation that
does not exist” (Il n’y a pas La femme), THE laughter does not exist either: “Le THE woman is a
rire n’existe pas” (Minois 484; cf. Pfister v). THE laughter is an illusion since
construction. So also is
there are always only endlessly proliferating forms of laughter, their only point
in common being their physical manifestation; however, a physical manifest- THE laughter since it
ation that can stand for a whole variety of feelings, ideas, and intentions does not stand for just
(Minois 484), that has a historically and culturally variable and instable signif- one form of humor, set
icance, and therefore needs interpretation. Moreover,
of emotions, or
[f]ür das Lachen ist [. . .] keine Wissenschaft zuständig; es entzieht sich jedem be- motives, and therefore
stimmenden Zugriff. Die Vorstellung eines objektiv erkannten Lachens wäre lächer-
lich; sie verfehlt das Lachen, indem sie es zu einem Gegenstand der Erkenntnis needs to be interpreted
macht. Das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Lachen, Philosophie und Wissenschaft
scheint unaufhebbar (Kamper and Wulf 9).
[there is n]o single academic discipline [. . .] expressly devoted to the study of

laughter; it exceeds any attempt at precise definition. The idea of an objectively
definable notion of laughter is risible; it misses the point of laughter by making
laughter an object of knowledge. The relationship of tension between laughter, phil-
osophy and science appears to be irresolvable.4
More recently, Renate Brosch has also argued that until “today no transhistori-
cal cause for laughter, no transhistorical definition for a joke has been found”
(158). If one of the main problems seems to be the ‘nature’ of the object of
analysis itself, another problem is that in scholarly literature about humour, the
comic, and laughter these terms are either used without clear definitions or the
definitions given are contradictory. It seems that what one scholar calls
humour, another defines as belonging to the comic. The problems arising from
this for the “Gender – Laughter – Media” project as well as for this introduc-
tion are obvious: On the one hand, no serious survey of theories of humour, the
comic, and laughter can work without defining these concepts or phenomena;
on the other hand, it makes no sense to simply impose new definitions and – by
4
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. All emphases in citations are
according to the original. I would like to thank Dr. Sigrun Meinig, Claudia Lainka
MA, and Peter Stear MA for their editorial help and for the stimulating and reward-
ing discussions.
21
doing so – to create, in all likelihood, yet more artificial categories that cut
across the multiplicity of notions and concepts already available to literary the-
orists, social scientists, and philosophers.
For this reason I shall not endeavour to (re-)structure or (re-)categorize the
relevant theories of Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Baudelaire,
Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin, or Anton C. Zijderveld only to then ascertain This is important
that there is a mutual incompatibility between these theories since each of them because different
works with slightly different internal differentiations between the terms in ques-
scholars use these terms
tion so that sometimes the terms humour, the comic, and laughter even appear
interchangeable (cf. Zijderveld, Trend Report 2; Titze et al. 201). I shall instead differently or as
adhere to a primarily but not exclusively descriptive approach, in other words, a constituents of what
tour d’horizon of a selection of the most relevant studies on humour, the comic, makes up the framework
and laughter as well as of the multifarious definitions – and problems – they
of what we consider the
advance.5
Mahadev L. Apte ascribes in his book on Humor and Laughter the follow- humorous act or incident
ing three attributes to humour: “1) sources that act as potential stimuli; 2) the
cognitive and intellectual activity responsible for the perception and evaluation
of these sources leading to humor experience; and 3) behavioral responses that
are expressed as smiling or laughter or both” (13f). Apte has to concede, how-
ever, that the
Apte and Greiner are
term ‘humor’ and other expressions derived from it have been used to refer to all
three phases or to any one of them. [. . .] Similarly, meanings of ‘humor’ include the discussing the
behavioral responses of smiling or laughter. For many scholars the term ‘laughter’ is challenges of
synonymous with the term ‘humor’ [. . .], and the phrase ‘theories of laughter’ often
means theories of humor (14). theorizing humor
(theories of laughter)
Bernhard Greiner argues along similar lines when he states that “[s]ystemati-
scher Aufarbeitung hat sich die Komödie bisher verschlossen. Hierzu bedürfte
es eines integrierenden Blickpunktes, an dem es offenbar gebricht” (Greiner 3)
(“comedy has up to now evaded systematic research because no integrative
perspective has yet been found”) and that the situation is even more problem-
atic if one takes a look at theories of humour or of the comic:
Auch aus der Komik-Theorie wurde ein übergreifender Blickpunkt nicht gewonnen.
Das mag in dem eigenartigen Mißverständnis gründen zwischen hochkomplizierten,
zugleich autistischen Entwürfen auf der einen Seite, die frühere oder gleichzeitige
Theoriebildung nur marginal zur Kenntnis nehmen, und einem letztlich doch nur
5
This approach accords with Georges Minois (11) who argues that it is always too
early or too late to try to elaborate a synthesis of the major theories of humour, the
comic, and laughter. Therefore I can only ask the reader not to take this essay for
more than it is, namely a selective and necessarily incomplete introduction and not a
rigorous synthesis or re-conceptualization.
22
verbrämten Fortschreiben der schon immer herausgehobenen Dichotomie zweier

Grundformen des Komischen, einer Komik der Herabsetzung, des Ver-Lachens, als
intellektuelles Phänomen und einer Komik der Heraufsetzung, des Bejahens von
Unterdrücktem und Verdrängtem und damit der Anerkennung des Lustprinzips (3).
An overarching perspective could not be gleaned from comedy theory either. This
Greiner: two basic forms
may arise from the peculiar misunderstanding between, on the one hand, the highly
complicated and at the same time autistic designs that refer to earlier or contempor-
of comedy -- denigration
ary theory formations only marginally and, in the final analysis, a scarcely veiled
& exclusion (laughing
continuation of an always already emphasized dichotomy of two basic forms of the
comic: a comedy of denigration and exclusion, of laughing at, as an intellectual phe-
at) and that of
nomenon, and a comedy of valorization and inclusion, of celebrating the oppressed
and the repressed, and thereby of accepting the pleasure principle. valorization and
The pleasure principle takes us, of course, directly to Freud, who discusses the inclusion (laughing with)
phenomena in question in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious as well
as in a short article published in 1928 in Imago. Freud advances the following
definition:
We are now at the end of our task, having reduced the mechanism of humorous pleas- Freud and the economy
ure to a formula analogous to those for comic pleasure and for jokes. The pleasure in
jokes has seemed to us to arise from an economy in expenditure upon inhibition, the in expenditure of the
pleasure in the comic from an economy in expenditure upon ideation (upon cathexis) joke; regaining pleasure
and the pleasure in humour from an economy in expenditure upon feeling. In all three
modes of working of our mental apparatus the pleasure is derived from an economy.
that is lost in rational/
All three are agreed in representing methods of regaining from mental activity a pleas- logical thinking activities
ure which has in fact been lost through the development of that activity (Freud 293).6
Peter L. Berger, to continue our survey, defines humour as “the capacity to per-
ceive something as being funny”. He calls humour universal and argues that Berger: humor is
“there has been no human culture without it” since humour is “a necessary con-
universal and what
stituent of humanity” (ibid. x; cf. Zijderveld, Trend Report 37f.; Titze et al.
201). What we have to be aware of, however, is the fact that “what strikes people makes us human;
as funny and what they do in order to provoke a humorous response differs varies culturally and
enormously from age to age, and from society to society” (Berger x). Thus, according to historical
humour is both an anthropological constant and historically relative. “Yet, period
beyond or behind all the relativities, there is [. . .] something that humor”,
understood as an inherent human trait or ability, “is believed to perceive”
(ibid.). This “something” is, if we follow Berger, the phenomenon of the comic.
Thus the comic would be “the objective correlate of humor”, and humour The "comic" is the
would be regarded as a “subjective capacity”. What Berger suggests is a hier-
archical structure which consists 1) of the comic which – as he argues – is object that provokes
humor, which is what
6
Cf. Zijderveld, Trend Report 39 and 27 for a commentary typical of research on the
we internally find funny
comic. Among other things, Zijderveld calls Freud’s “distinction among what he
called Witz, Humor and Komik [. . .] like most conceptual differentiations concern-
ing humour, quite arbitrary and rather vague”.
23
beyond good and evil, 2) of humour, which can be used for good or evil pur- Zijderveld: humor is a
poses, and 3) of laughter as the expression of our finding something humorous. 'play' on the values and
For the sociologist Anton C. Zijderveld humour is “something living in norms of society. It
something (institutionally) mechanical” (Trend Report 21) and can be con-
challenges or overturns
sidered as “an interaction in which people play with institutionalized meanings
established ways of
within a situation that ought to be defined as being humorous and funny
seeing and
through laughter. In defining the situation as humorous or not, values play a
decisive role” (9). Why values are important becomes obvious if we consider understanding these
that for Zijderveld (Jokes; Trend Report) humour can be defined as playing norms or values.
with the institutionalized, traditional, and differentiated values and norms of a
given society. A humorist or a comedian is a homo ludens who engages in cul-
tural juggling: He or she playfully reshuffles the components of the surround-
ing nomos, turns the established order of opposites such as masculinity and
femininity or good and evil around, and inverts traditional hierarchies. By
doing so, special attention is paid to the ambiguities and incongruities of the
human condition since they form the essence of most verbal and practical
jokes. Although the humorist is sometimes a homo homini lupus, stressing the
aggressive and derisive dimension of laughter, humorous words, acts, and
events normally tend to constitute a mirthful interlude, not a rebellion or revo-
lution that aims at the fundamental change or destruction of the traditional
Humor allows us to
order.7 Another important characteristic of humour for Zijderveld, one that it
shares with literature or art in general, is its potential to anticipate knowledge, challenge rules because of
to create alternative worlds, and to bypass censorship because of its feigned the pleasure it produces in
lack of seriousness, because we are not “inclined to find anything wrong that the guise of just being in
has given us enjoyment and so to spoil the source of a pleasure” (Freud 162). fun or being silly. In the
Humour carries an enigmatic quality: it is itself unrealistic and thereby able to process, it opens our eyes
demonstrate that reality as we know and live it could well be otherwise; that alter-
natives, as unreal and absurd as they may seem to be, are not unthinkable. Humour
to seeing other
shares this with utopias, and it is up to the audience to decide, by a laughing possibilities we would not
response, whether a utopia is nothing but a joke (Zijderveld, Trend Report 58).
have otherwise entertained
If humour “is viewed as an emergent property of human interaction”, emer-
ging, as we have seen, “because of the defining work of laughter”, it follows that
“[a] situation is defined as humorous by the laughing response that it elicits”
(Coser 172). In accordance with this, Zijderveld argues that in a sociological
sense laughter is the only appropriate language of humour and is a constitutive
component of the humorous situation.8 This emphasis on the importance of
laughter, however, leads to our next question, namely: How to define laughter?
7
As Zijderveld argues, destroying the cultural order would for the humorist or homo
ludens be equivalent to a child destroying its toys.
Laughter as marking
8
“[L]aughter is more than a response: it is constitutive of the emerging symbolic the symbolic social
interaction” which, if laughter arises, can “be called a humorous incident”. interaction : the
(Zijderveld, Trend Report 34).
"humorous incident"
24
Throughout history laughter has often been ‘forbidden’ and been regarded as
dangerous; laughter is rather unpredictable and the intention to be humorous or Laughter as dangerous
funny is neither sufficient to make people laugh nor essential to humour or to
the comic.9 Aristotle states in his De Partibus Animalium that man is the “only
one of the animals that laughs” (69). In other words, humans are defined by
their ability to laugh. Similar opinions are voiced by Rabelais – “Le rire est le
propre de l’homme” (cf. Siguret 103) (“laughter is the property of man”) –,
Baudelaire – “Laughter is satanic, and, therefore, profoundly human” (117)10 –
and Nietzsche: “Das leidendste Tier auf Erden erfand sich – das Lachen”
(Nietzsche, Aus dem Nachlaß 467) (“The earthly creature that suffered most Nietzsche: Humans
discovered for itself – laughter”). According to Nietzsche, human beings suffer must create laughter to
so intensely that they needed to create laughter in order to survive: “the anx- survive and deal with
ious, crouching creature springs up, greatly expands – man laughs”.11 From
this one can conclude that laughter indeed appears to be an anthropological
the anxiety & suffering
constant and “a human feature that has defined humanity as homo ridens or, at of life
least, homo risus capax” (Pfister v; Zijderveld, Trend Report 6).
Moreover, laughter is certainly more than “a gesture or psychic mechanism.
It is [. . .] a human expression, comparable and congenial to crying”, with these
two expressions having in common “that they lie on the borderline of the con- Plessner: idea of a
scious and meaningful on the one hand, and the unconscious and psychical on social body; physical
the other” (Zijderveld, Trend Report 28). For Helmuth Plessner laughter as well
and psychic split
as crying reveal “the essence of the conditio humana, which consists in the fact
that human beings not only have a body, but at the very same time also are a between body-we-have
body” (Plessner; cf. Zijderveld, Trend Report 28), that they are both physically and body-we-are
and psychically determined. This fundamental ‘ambivalence’ is regarded by
Plessner as being unique in the cosmos and corroborates his notion of “man’s
eccentric position in nature”. In this line of argument, both crying and laugh-
ing “are caused by circumstances to which people cannot respond readily and
adequately” (Zijderveld, Trend Report 29), such as a sudden event or an unex-
pected word:
We lose our heads, we capitulate as persons, and the body-we-have takes the lead –
through laughter, or tears. The body-we-have is now no longer an instrument of
mind, language and behaviour. On the contrary, the crying or laughing body has
9
“A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear/ Of him that hears it, never in the tongue/ Of him
that makes it” (Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost V.ii. 843–845). On the one hand,
there are numerous acts, words and events that are not at all intended to be funny or
humorous, and yet are experienced as being so by those who witness it; on the other
hand, thinking of stand-up comedians, there are people who – often desperately – try
to be funny, yet are perceived not to be so by others.
10
Cf. Siguret 103; Minois 489.
11
Nietzsche, Human, all too Human 89; cf. Minois 474–477; Greiner 106–108.
25
taken command of the mind and expresses what the body-we-are could not express.
In this sense, crying and laughing are autonomous expressions, and thus not mere
responses to stimuli (ibid.).
As both Bergson and Zijderveld among others have argued, “[l]aughter is

always a fait social. This is as true of convivial laughter as of the lonely or even
pathological laugh of an alienated individual. Each instance of laughter is inex-
Laughter and social/
tricably tied up with social and power relations and framed within a social situ-
ation” (Pfister, vi) or constellation. Thus there is a triangular relationship power relations: link
between (1) “the ‘laughter-maker’” as the person “who incites laughter by between 'laughter-
making a joke or drawing attention to some absurdity, (2) the ‘butt of laughter’ maker', the 'butt of
as its target or victim, and (3) the ‘laugher(s),’ i.e. the laughing audience” (vi).
laughter', and the
This social triangle is “constructed along parameters of gender, class, race, age
or other crucial differences operative in the respective culture” (Pfister vi; cf. laughing audience
Brosch, 158). Laughter, therefore, functions as an indicator of the tensions and
contradictions existing in a given society and enables us to critically analyse
Laughter from the center
social situations and mechanisms. As the bonding effects of laughter, to give but
one example, tend to establish rhetorical or discursive communities (Hutcheon; marginalizes those on the
Titze et al. 204), laughter can be seen as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion, margins (exclusionary) vs
of valorisation on the one hand and of denigration on the other. Moreover, laugh- laughter from the margins
ter is often caught up in the distinction between the centre and margin any given that challenges dominant
society employs to establish and stabilise its identity: in one society, the predom- ideologies at the center
inant form of laughter can be that which aims from the site of the ideological or
power centre at what is to be marginalised or excluded altogether; in another, the
most significant form of laughter can arise from the margins, challenging and sub-
verting the established orthodoxies, authorities and hierarchies (Pfister vi).
However, if many theorists tend to view laughter as a rather one-dimensional

phenomenon, namely as a social corrective linked to power, one should men-
Bakhtin: "full
tion that there are also other conceptions of laughter such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s
notion of “full laughter” which is universal, liberating, and revitalizing. For laughter" that
Bakhtin laughter abolishes frontiers, is immune to death, spreads everywhere demolishes borders, is
and covers all aspects of life. It is seen as a dynamic link between our body in life-affirming, and
the sense of its animal and biological aspects, and our culture in the sense of encourages plurality and
intellect. Moreover, for Bakhtin laughter entails plurality and ignores interdic-
tions. It is the enemy of censorship and allows mankind to temporarily enter the looking beyond what
utopian realm of universality, liberty, equality, and abundance. divides us to what unites
us as humans
Mechanisms of the Comic: Comparison/Exclusion/Denigration –
Identification/Inclusion/Valorization – Citationality/Performativity/Parody
In attempting to define what makes us laugh, scholars usually refer to Aristotle’s
Poetics, where the Greek philosopher states: “For the comic is constituted by a
26
fault and a mark of shame, but lacking in pain or destruction: to take an obvi- Aristotle: the comic may
ous example, the comic mask is ugly and misshapen, but does not express be aroused by flaws and
pain” (36). Thus, for Aristotle the phenomenon that something makes us laugh
is characterized by flaws, distortion, and the absence of pain. This implies a distortions but is devoid of
transgression of norms which, however, is only experienced as funny if it does pain, and does not cause
not cause real harm. harm
“[J]e nachdem ob das Komische der Herabsetzung eines heroischen Ideals
in eine Gegenbildlichkeit oder ob es der Heraufsetzung des materiell
Leiblichen der menschlichen Natur entspringt” (Jauß 104) (“Depending on
whether the comedy is intended to denigrate an heroic ideal thereby turning it
into its opposite or to celebrate and valorize the bodily of human nature”), Hans
Robert Jauß differentiates between two fundamental aspects inherent to the
comic; firstly denigration or exclusion (Komik der Herabsetzung und des Ver-
Lachens), which works with the help of contrasts and incongruencies
(Inkongruenz- und Kontrastkomik); and secondly, valorisation or inclusion
(Komik der Heraufsetzung und des Mit-Lachens; cf. Andreas Böhn’s contribu-
tion in this volume), which is liberating and has recourse to the grotesque,
thereby emphasizing the corporeal and the creaturely. In Greiner’s description:
Die Komik der Herabsetzung stellt einen Helden in seiner erwarteten Voll-
kommenheit, eine Norm in ihrer behaupteten Gültigkeit in Frage. Der komische
Held ist dabei nicht an sich selbst komisch, sondern vor einem Horizont bestimmter
Erwartungen oder Normen. So ist Komik der Herabsetzung eine der Gegen-
bildlichkeit, was Vergleichen voraussetzt. [. . .] Die kognitive Funktion der Komik
der Gegenbildlichkeit bzw. der Herabsetzung kann so darin erkannt werden,
Normen zur Debatte zu stellen, zu verspotten bzw. zu problematisieren, was in
destruktiver wie affirmativer Hinsicht geschehen kann. Die Herabsetzung schließt
ein, daß der Betrachter, der den komischen Helden an Normen mißt und an diesen
als scheiternd erkennt, sich überlegen fühlt. Die Versetzung des Helden in eine
komische Situation löst den Bann der admirativen Identifikation und läßt den
lachenden Betrachter (als lachenden Dritten gegenüber Subjekt und Objekt der
Komik) ein Moment der Überlegenheit und Unbetroffenheit gegenüber dem ihm
sonst überlegenen und ihn betroffen machenden Helden genießen (97).
The comedy of exclusion or denigration questions the assumed perfection of a hero,

the presumed validity of a norm. The comic hero is thus not funny in himself, rather
he is so against a horizon of set expectations and norms. The comedy of exclusion
or denigration is as such representation by contrast, which presupposes the act of
comparison. [. . .] The cognitive function of comedy based on contrastive represen-
tation, i.e. denigration, can be ascertained in that it opens up norms to debate, mocks Comedy of
or problematizes them: an act that can be destructive or affirmative. Denigration
includes the fact that the viewer, who judges the comic hero against norms and denigration: the comic
views him to have failed with regard to these, feels himself superior. By placing the anti-hero whose flaws
hero in a comic situation, the spell of identification through admiration is broken
and allows the laughing viewer (as the laughing third party in contrast to the subject elicit laughter, not
and the object of comedy) to enjoy a moment of superiority and detachedness admiration and allow us
towards the otherwise superior and empathy-inducing hero.
to feel superior by
comparison
27
As a matter of fact, most modern theories of laughter “revived the instrumen-

Most modern theories
tal view of the Aristotle-, Hobbes-, Shaftesbury-tradition of laughing at”
(Brosch 157). This tradition defines “laughter as an essentially malicious of humor: examine the
instinct” and justifies it “not only for its subjective and social functions but also maliciousness of
through the ridiculous properties of the laughable object itself ” (ibid.). Thus the "laughing at" the object
blame for laughter is laid on its object, while the laugher is conceived of as “a of humor
discerning individual who exposes the defects of someone to justified and cor-
rective ridicule” (ibid.). What has to be noted, however, is that the ‘laughing-at-
position’ implies a ‘laughing-with-position’ insofar as laughing at someone Laughing at comic
who transgresses a norm always requires the implicit acceptance of and identi- object and therefore,
fication with the norm. Thus either we laugh at someone and therefore with the affirming or being on the
norm or, if the norm is felt to be absurd or obsolete, we laugh at the norm and side of the norms that the
with the transgressor. From this it follows that either the transgressor or the
transgressed norm is being denigrated and consequently – at least as long as the comic person is violating
notion of the comic referred to is based on comparison (which presupposes a or laughing with the
contrastive image or a kind of disorder that creates a cognitive and moral transgressor and
dissonance) – that the widespread but simplistic differentiation between a therefore, at the norms.
‘laughing-at-position’ and a ‘laughing-with-position’ is not a particularly perti-
nent one but much more one of perspective and hierarchy.
A slightly different notion of the comic is advanced by Emil Staiger in his
Basic Concepts of Poetics, in which he argues that the comic “falls out of the Staiger: idea of
framework of a world and exists naturally and unproblematically outside of this laughing at what falls
framework. [. . .] But the phallus and belly in Aristophanes, the huge red nose outside the framework
or ear that stands out like a spoon: these fall out of the framework, too. The
framework is made up here of the network of relationships within an organic
of what we consider to
whole of the type we have in mind when we look at a human body” (170). be the normal individual
The key elements that for Staiger define the comic situation are a transgres- or social body.
sion of or a deviation from norms, the absence of suffering (cf. Aristotle,
Poetics), and what he calls Fraglosigkeit or unquestionability. By this term he
means a happy ignorance of the system of norms held up by the social frame.
Thus he implicitly reduces the importance of norms and of the faculty of com-
parison and comes close to Jauß’s notion of a Komik der Heraufsetzung und des
Mit-Lachens. In accordance with this position, many critics have argued that in An intellectual
direct contrast to the position of ‘laughing-at’ and the thereby implied position
inclusive laughter
of ‘laughing-with’ offered by the comedy of denigration, an inclusive comedy
of valorisation that exalts life offers a ‘laughing-with-position’ (Mit-Lachen) of that means we are
a quite different quality. It is open to debate whether, as Greiner and others have laughing with the
reasoned, this notion of the comic really works entirely without an intellectual transgression and
moment of comparison and differentiation. Also questionable is whether phe- therefore, identify
nomena such as the proliferating body or the grotesque are really beyond
norms or whether the norms are still there but simply less relevant since this form with the absurd body
of the comic privileges identification over comparison and differentiation. One
28
could even ask whether the grotesque, just as with the aesthetics of deviation, The grotesque as the
has not in itself become a norm. What we can say, however, is that norm
[d]ie Komik der Heraufsetzung [. . .] den Abstand zwischen Rezipienten und Helden
in einem lachenden Einvernehmen verschwinden [läßt], sei dies ein Einvernehmen
über die Befreiung des Sinnlichen, über das Sich-Durchsetzen des Lustprinzips oder
des Triumphes über die Gewalten der normativen Welt (Greiner 98).
[t]his inclusive, valorising and elevating notion of the comic [. . .] allows the dis-
tance between recipient and hero to dissolve into harmonious laughter, whether this
is a harmony about the liberation of the senses, the acceptance of the pleasure prin-
ciple or a triumph over the authorities in the normative world.
Jauß has called this notion of the comic, which will be discussed in more detail Jauß and grotesque
below, grotesque comedy (groteske Komik), comedy: challenge to
established morality
denn das Groteske kennzeichnet, was den Reiz dieser Art Komik ausmacht: das
Aufheben aller Grenzen, das Mischen, Durcheinandergehen, unbekümmert um and norms and
Gebote der ‘Sitte’ und Normen, damit auch eine verschmelzende, den einzelnen in manifesting itself
seiner Besonderheit zum Verschwinden bringende Partizipation, das Entstehen und
ordnungslose Sich-Ausbreiten von Lachgemeinden aus dem Einvernehmen im through body/bawdy
Freisetzen von Affekten. Daher hat die ‘groteske Komik’ einen elementar unbe- humor that is in excess
wußten Charakter, manifestiert sie sich wesentlich körperlich, an dem in Sitte nicht
gebändigten Körper (Greiner 98). of and therefore,
disruptive of, the
because the grotesque typifies what constitutes the appeal of this form of comedy:
the transcendence of all boundaries, an intermingling and muddling up with scant normative.
regard to the demands of morality and norms, concomitantly a dissolving of the
individual’s singularity through participation, the creation and unstructured spread-
ing of communities of laughter due to the harmonious freeing up of emotions. That
is why ‘grotesque comedy’ has such a fundamentally unconscious character, mani-
fests itself essentially through the bodily, through a body that is not subject to the
norms of morality.
Another form of the comic which depends on the body and escapes the Judith Butler's notion
dichotomy of denigration versus valorisation is epitomized by Judith Butler’s
notion of performativity. For Butler, performativity effectively links sexual iden- of performativity and
tity, and foremost gender, via citationality to parody, subversion, and the comic.12 Susan Sontag's concept
In analogy to Susan Sontag’s concept of “camp” – “To perceive Camp in of "camp" --
objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest performing gender and
extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre” (Sontag 280) – which
sexual identity as a
allows for an interpretation of “camp” as a set of techniques of resignification in
socially constructed
12
Since this nexus has already been alluded to in the introductory essay by Gaby "role", hence, "Being-as-
Pailer, I will restrict myself to some additional remarks pertaining to notions of per- Playing a Role."
formativity, to the role of the body and to parody. For a more extended discussion of
parody and camp cf. Hutcheon, Theory of Parody; Meyer and Meyer.
29
which irony, the burlesque, pastiche, and parody all converge (cf. Preciado), Gender transgressions
Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal call Butler’s concept of gender “a kind of impro- as intentional acts of
visional theatre” and stress “the possibilities opened up in Gender Trouble of upsetting the
being able to use transgressive performances such as drag to help decentre or
established gender
destabilise gender categories”. However, it should be kept in mind that based on
Foucault, Lacan, and on Derrida’s rewriting of Austin,13 Butler clearly tran- performances that are
scends the notion of camp when she 1) argues that gender can be considered as seen as oppressive and/
“a corporeal style, an ‘act’ [. . .] which is both intentional and peformative” or exclusionary. Pushes
(Gender Trouble 139), 2) identifies a “desire for a kind of radical theatrical for recognition that
remaking of the body”, 3) locates the possibility for subversion of patriarchal gender is an artificial
power in subversive performances of gender, and 4) states that there “is no gen- social construct, and
der behind the expressions of gender”, i.e. that gender identity “is performa- therefore, there is "no
tively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (ibid.
gender behind the
25). If performativity thus becomes “the vehicle through which ontological
expressions of gender"
effects are established”, and if to perform gender means that “acts, gestures,
enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence
or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured The importance of the
and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means”, it should be body as the means for
noted that this ultimately stresses the importance of the body. Bodies do matter expressing and visually
since 1) cultural expressions such as discourse, speech, and language are deter- confirming social norms;
mined by their embodiment (Butler, Excitable Speech 10f. and 141f.), 2) speech
relation between body and
“is literally enacted because the body acts and is active when we speak” (Meinig
71), and 3) the relation between speech and the body can be regarded as scan- language (as with
dalous (Butler, Excitable Speech 10) and ultimately takes the form of a chias- gendered pronouns) that
mus: “Speech is bodily, but the body exceeds the speech it occasions; and impose identity, etc.
speech remains irreducible to the bodily means of its enunciation” (155f.).14
13
Cf. Butler, Excitable Speech 148–151; Lloyd 197: “Butler’s theory of gender per-
formativity echoes both Austin and Derrida in proposing that the performative
‘enacts or produces that which it names’ [. . .]. She differs from Austin, however, in
rejecting the idea that there is an autonomous agent that authors performative utter-
ances. Instead, she takes from Derrida the idea that intentionality is always limited by
the iterability of the sign. Repetition is central to performativity. This means that per-
formative utterances are not singular events but, rather, the effects of ‘citational The importance of re-
doubling’ [. . .]. Performativity [. . .] thus operates through the ‘reiterative power of
citation and repetition
discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’ [. . .]. It is not in
a single act of constitution or invention that the subject is brought into being, but (iteration) through which
through re-citation and repetition. This [. . .] has an important bearing on the capacity an individual is
of parodic recitation to produce certain transgressive effects”. constituted as a subject,
14
“The body doubles what we say when we use expressions which are saturated with
social and historical meaning and thus opens up a realm beyond those already estab- and through which
lished expressions. Thus, new meaning and also self-determination become possible. transgression is also
It is this inherent opportunity for enactment and even self-conscious theatricality effected
which Butler refers to as performativity” (Meinig 71; cf. Krämer 253–255).
30
If, as Meinig argues, “the embodied view of performativity alerts us to the

agency and the opportunity for subversive acts that result from our embodied
speaking”, it is (especially in Butler’s earlier work) above all drag which by
“disclosing that there is no original to imitate” fulfils a denaturalizing function,
“divulging the culturally fabricated nature of gender”, and revealing “all gen-
der as only ever parody” and therefore as inherently subversive. However, if the
fact that “the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological
status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (Butler, Gender
Trouble 136), this entails in Butler’s reading a ‘radicalization’ of the notion of
parody since gender parody can then of course not assume
that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of
the very notion of an original [. . .], so gender parody reveals that the original identity
after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without origin. To be more precise,
it is a production which, in effect – that is, in its effect – postures as an imitation. This
perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to
resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic
culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities.
Although the gender meanings taken up in these parodic styles are clearly part of
hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalized and mobilized
through their parodic recontextualization. As imitations which effectively displace
the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself (138).
Referring to Fredric Jameson’s article Postmodernism and Consumer Society,

Butler concedes that “the imitation that mocks the notion of an original is char-
acteristic of pastiche rather than parody” (ibid.; cf. Lloyd), that whereas pas-
tiche is a “neutral practice of mimicry”, parody is characterized by having an
ulterior motive, a satirical impulse, is geared towards laughter and haunted by
“that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which
what is being imitated is rather comic” (Jameson 114). Nevertheless, already
the “loss of the sense of ‘the normal’ [. . .] can be its own occasion for laugh-
ter, especially when ‘the normal,’ ‘the original’ is revealed to be a copy, and an
inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can embody. In this sense, laughter
emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived” (Butler,
Gender Trouble 138f.). Moreover, there is another point where the comic and
laughter interpolate into Butler’s argument: Drawing on Lacan’s article The
Signification of the Phallus and on the notion of masquerade, Butler argues
that the supposedly original heterosexual – as well as any other – sexual pos-
ition is intrinsically and fundamentally comic (46f.; Lacan 289) and becomes a
constant parody of itself:
It’s not just the norm of heterosexuality that is tenuous. It’s all sexual norms. I think
that every sexual position is fundamentally comic. If you say “I can only desire X” ,
what you’ve immediately done, in rendering desire exclusively, is created a whole
set of positions which are unthinkable from the standpoint of your identity. Now, I
31
take it that one of the essential aspects of comedy emerges when you end up actually
occupying a position that you have just announced to be unthinkable. That is funny.
There’s a terrible self-subversion in it (Butler qtd. in Osborne and Segal).
Sociological and Psychoanalytical Dimensions to Laughter:

Henri Bergson, Anton C. Zijderveld, Sigmund Freud
While humour can be regarded as the subjective capacity to experience some-
thing as being comic or funny, a sociological perspective allows us to define
humour as a matter of social interaction and communication. Indeed, humour
and laughter are social “by nature”, and laughter is always a group phenome-
non.15 For Henri Bergson, whose notion of humour derives from his philosoph-
ical concept of vitalism, laughter creates a kind of complicity among people
since it is linked to the popular imagination. Life is a continuous stream of con-
sciousness, of time-awareness, of durée which is characterized by a souplesse
intérieure, a certain plasticity and elasticity. Deficiencies in these qualities lead
to a mechanization of the individual, to illness, stiffness, and inadequacy.
Comedy, then, arises from a mechanical repetition across time – from la mécan-
isation de la vie – in something living and vibrant, and can be considered as a
process whereby a human being is turned into a thing, an object, a machine, a
robot. “Society will therefore be suspicious of all inelasticity of character, of
mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a slumbering activity
as well as of an activity with separatist tendencies, that inclines to swerve from
the common centre round which society gravitates: in short, because it is the
sign of an eccentricity” (Bergson 73). If an individual as part of an organically
conceived society lacks elasticity, which Bergson considers characteristic of any
evolving community, and if he or she threatens to transgress social norms, soci-
ety uses laughter to re-socialize and to reintegrate him or her. And since laugh-
ter arises because the mechanical is unexpected, because le mécanique plaqué
sur du vivant takes us by surprise, Bergson’s theory is another example for a the-
ory of the comic based on contrast and incongruency. In a positive sense laugh-
ter serves to revitalize and to de-mechanize the individual. It is less a sign of
superiority on the part of those doing the laughing than it is a reaching out, an
attempt to save the individual and to reconnect him or her to life. Pierre Siguret
has called Bergson’s definition of laughter
particulier en ce qu’il rend le mal pour le mal, mais en vue du bien. Il souligne l’in-
sensibilité du spectateur indifférent, et il a pour fonction d’intimider en humiliant,
car il possède un fond de malice et même de méchanceté. Par son biais, les excen-
tricités sont réprimées, ce qui conduit à une amélioration, voire une perfection
générale (Siguret 108; cf. Minois 481).
15
“Our laughter is always the laughter of a group” (Bergson 64).
32
special in so far as it fights evil with evil but with the intention towards good. It
stresses the insensitivity of the indifferent onlooker, and its function is to intimidate
by humiliating because it contains malice and even maliciousness. Thereby, eccen-
tricities are censured, which leads to amelioration and even to general perfection.
The counter-position to Bergson is represented by Zijderveld. According to

him, the systems of values, norms, and meanings which structure the lives of
individuals in any given society possess three basic characteristics: They are
institutionalized, traditional, and differentiated. Values and norms constitute a
meaningful moral order or nomos intended to enable individuals to live mean-
ingful, coherent lives and to interact accordingly. In order to participate in the
moral order of one’s society, it is necessary to connect to the chain of tradition
and to its synchronic dimension, i.e. to the values prevalent at a given point in
time. Institutionalization is paired with enculturation, and since human life is
subject to institutions, patterns and structures, it can – at least from a socio-
logical point of view – be called mechanical. Not Bergson’s durée, not his
vitalist individualism, but habitualization, routinization, and role-behaviour
are the sociological characteristics of human life. Only because of this are, as
many sociologists argue, our actions, thoughts and feelings predictable,
understandable and accountable. Through humour, this sociological order is
temporarily (until the laughter has ended) disrupted: Contingencies, surprises,
and defamiliarizations occur during humorous interaction so that humour can
be defined as a social game in which human beings play with the values,
norms, and meanings of their society. From this it follows that, in contrast to
Bergson’s view, for Zijderveld humour or comedy cannot be interpreted as a
mechanization of life, but rather as a vitalization of what happens to be socio-
culturally mechanical. There is moreover an added dimension to Zijderveld’s
argument when he points out that in most cultures this humorous play with
institutionalized values, norms, and meanings is itself organized and institu-
tionalized, so that even a putative de-mechanization of life is subjugated to
mechanical control.16
In a brief analysis of Freud’s book on jokes, Tobias Döring argues that with
the exception of Sarah Kofman’s Pourquoi rit-on? Freud et le mot d’esprit,
“most other recent studies in the field of humour research [. . .] rarely refer to
Freud, let alone engage with his laughter theory in any sustained or even critical
manner” (123). If, for obvious reasons, this introduction does not intend to offer
the critical analysis asked for by Döring, it can at least attempt to counteract the
16
Even if, as the “societies of fools”, court jesters, and feasts such as carnival prove,
the play with traditional and sacred values seems to be an inherent human need, it is
nevertheless viewed as threatening by those in power and is kept under control by
means of institutionalization and organization.
33
neglect of Freudian thought in this area. In his Jokes and their Relation to the
Unconscious, Freud states that in laughter
the conditions are present under which a sum of psychical energy which has hith-
erto been used for cathexis is allowed free discharge. And since laughter – not all
laughter, it is true, but certainly laughter at a joke – is an indication of pleasure, we
shall be inclined to relate this pleasure to the lifting of the cathexis which has pre-
viously been present. If we see that the hearer of a joke laughs but that its creator
cannot laugh, this may amount to telling us that in the hearer a cathectic expendi-
ture has been lifted and discharged, while in the construction of the joke there have
been obstacles either to the lifting or to the possibility of discharge. The psychical
process in the hearer, the joke’s third person, can scarcely be more aptly described
than by stressing the fact that he has bought the pleasure of the joke with very small
expenditure on his own part. He might be said to have been presented with it
(181f.).
Döring correctly argues that if “a joke only works for those who hear it and
who, like a present, receive it free, their laughter signifies the working of a
rather ambiguous relation between the joke-creator and the joke-hearer” (127).
As has already been shown, this connection needs three agents to function
properly, so that Freud’s theory of laughter is based on a “triangular construc-
tion that cuts across the fundamental” and simplistic distinction of ‘laughing
at‘ versus ‘laughing with’. For Freud these two versions coincide since they are
socially linked and functionally dependent, thus bearing some semblance to
what has been described above as a comedy of denigration in the sense that by
laughing at someone or something one always, and be it only implicitly, also
laughs with someone or something. Döring summarizes the functioning of a
tendentious joke as follows:
In his triangle of relations, Number One bribes Number Three into complicity to
laugh with him at Number Two. In this way we can see how the social relationship
established by joking emerges as an economy of exchanging substitutes, with laugh-
ter operating as the currency of payment. Number One tells the tendentious joke
instead of satisfying his desire for Number Two directly; Number Three receives the
satisfying joke for free instead of having to approach Number Two himself; so
Number Three now has surplus pleasure which he pays off by laughing; his laugh-
ter, in turn, serves Number One, who is satisfied to receive at least this much pleas-
ure instead of his own laughter (128).
From this we can conclude that
laughter results from a process not monitored by conscious knowledge. The mech-
anisms of its pleasure in the discharge of psychical energy largely operate in
the unconscious and must effectively remain there to operate below the level of
control. This is why Freud concludes that the symptom of laughter always hides as
much as it reveals: it shields the whole economy of secret pleasures from
34
the censoring power of our consciousness and, instead, reveals them only in the
substitute form of compressions or omission – as they become manifest in the lin-
guistic form of jokes (128).17
What remains to be explained, however, are the “mechanisms” which “operate

in the unconscious” and which “must effectively remain there” on the level of
psychological or psychoanalytical deep structures: in other words, how are we
to fathom 1) what laughter hides and 2) why, when laughing, we re-enter “the
mood of our childhood” (Freud)?
Joachim Ritter has suggested that laughter is able to reconcile the ruling order
with its excluded other. According to him, “[w]as das Komische ausmacht, ist
dies, dass immer mittelbar und unmittelbar in den einen Bedeutungsbereich, der
sich harmlos und einwandfrei zulässig gibt, der andere hineingespielt wird, der
in jenem gerade ausgeschlossen und als nicht dazugehörig beiseite gebracht ist”
(Ritter 73f.) (“[t]he comic can be defined by the fact that it indirectly as well as
directly introduces into a seemingly harmless and acceptable semantic field a
second semantic field that significantly was excluded from the first because it
was viewed as being inappropriate”). Although the first semantic field excludes
the second, evoking Jacques Derrida’s logic of the supplement, it can never do
without the other and is therefore linked to, interspersed or intertwined with it.
Das Wesentliche ist immer die Bewegung, in der eine an sich nicht gemeinte und
ferner in der anständigen Rede auch nicht zugelassene Sphäre in diese anständige
Rede selbst derart eingewoben wird, dass sie selbst diese kundtun und aussprechen
muss (Ritter 74).
What is essential is the tendency whereby what was unintended and as a sphere not
even permitted in respectable speech becomes itself so interwoven into the fabric of
respectable speech that the latter must reveal and express the former.
Thus the comic compels the excluding power, i.e. the realm of the morally
acceptable, the symbolic order etc., to verbalize what it intends to exclude: the
chaotic, the unreasonable, the outrageous, the semiotic (cf. Kristeva). Another
important feature of the comic as envisaged here is that it consists of a triple
movement, namely 1) a transcendence of the existing symbolic order, 2) a
reaching out for the realm of the excluded, and 3) a manifestation of what has
17
For Freud’s topic model and its relation to humour cf. Pietzcker; cf. also Titze et al.
216f.; Döring 128: “While humour [. . .] offers a way to avoid or alleviate suffering,
Freud’s account of its psychical working does not abandon the triangular construction
established in his analysis of jokes. In the case of humour, though, the triangle appears
internalized and seems to correspond to his topic model of id, ego and super-ego. Thus,
humour functions within the individual and lies entirely in internal psychical dynamics,
whereas jokes operate in a social setting and typically involve three people”.
35
hitherto been excluded in and through the symbolic itself, or, in other words,
the manifestation of the excluded area in and by means of the excluding area
itself (cf. Greiner 117).
Similarly to Ritter’s line of reasoning, namely that seriousness excludes
wishes and desires which nevertheless are an integral part of life, the symbolic
order excludes – or at least endeavours to exclude – drives and semiotic inter-
ferences. But since the fact that these interferences are excluded does not mean
that they no longer exist, one can assume that that which is negated is the prod-
uct of the very system which negates it and that instead of being destroyed it is
implicitly validated. Thus, in analogy to Michel Foucault’s work on power,
repression ‘produces’ the repressed and simultaneously verifies and attests to
its belonging to the repressive system itself. Laughter, then, 1) demonstrates
that the ostracized is and has always been a part of the very order that excludes
it and 2) proves that there is an implicit and secret identity between the power
of exclusion and that which is excluded. From this perspective laughter is
simultaneously criticism and affirmation. It criticizes the ‘serious’ world and
its order and is an expression of happiness and plenitude, accepting or even
celebrating the right of the excluded. However, if the comic implies the pres-
ence of something excluded, i.e. the instinctual drives of the id, as part of the
excluding power, that is the super-ego, this also recalls Freud’s work on dreams.
During sleep a lowered censorship allows our dreams to manifest our desires,
albeit coded and transformed, among other things by condensation and dis-
placement, by metaphor and metonymy. A joke, Freud argues, works analo-
gously and partially reverses the work of repression imposed on us by culture.18
For obvious reasons, cracking a joke can be read as a re-entry into the Oedipal
constellation. Given that the early Oedipal relationship characterizes the
human ego by a basic structural negation – “Thou shall not!” – and that old
fears are reawakened whenever the ego is confronted with an analogous con-
stellation, it is possible to say that the person who laughs represents the exclud-
ing and censoring order. He is a negating listener who – just for the duration of
the joke – takes a bribe and allows forbidden desire and pleasure while the
object desired becomes the target of aggression and derision. Instead of attack-
ing Lacan’s “Name-of-the-Father”/”No-of-the-Father” (nom/non du père), i.e.
the forbidding father and the castrating symbolic order he symbolizes, instead
of attacking the super-ego and its representative(s), i.e. the listener(s), these
‘authorities’ are turned into allies against the original object of desire. Why this
18
Whereas we constantly have to invest psychic energy into inhibitions in order to
keep up the barriers which a repressive culture erects in our minds, the “pleasure in
jokes [. . .] arise[s] from an economy in expenditure upon inhibition” (Freud 293), so
that we laugh because we have saved the energy needed to repress the repressed (cf.
Minois 483f.; Brosch 158).
36
object is attacked becomes clear if one takes into consideration that what is
desired in the Oedipal constellation is the mother, that this desire can never be
granted and that this non-fulfilment entails aggression. A successful joke
momentarily deprives the Oedipal structure of its power to intervene, and the
listener, representing the symbolic order or the super-ego, conserves psychic
energy and is free to laugh and to accept chaos. This only works, however,
because even in a joke the incestuous desire to possess the mother is never ful-
filled, because aggression takes the place of desire and because the person who
laughs does not run the risk of being lost in a chaotic universe since they are
always backed by the narrator of the joke, who does not laugh, and therefore
remains solidly rooted in the symbolic order. While the audience is freed from
its self-censorship and internalized structure of self-repression, it is never
bereft of the support of the symbolic order so that although the power that
excludes gives a voice to the excluded, it never loses control. In contrast, for
example, to a ‘radical’ reading of Bakhtin (see below), Freud considers the cul-
ture of laughter as a part of the symbolic order which firmly stays in control
(cf. Zijderveld, Trend Report 9). From this it follows that his conception of the
comic and of humour is rather conciliatory, integrating the repressed and thus
disarming it (cf. Louis Ratisbonne qtd. in Minois 478).
Charles Baudelaire, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the Liberating Potential

of “Full Laughter”
Not to lose control is, as Baudelaire writes in his essay “The Essence of
Laughter”, a sign of the “Wise Man” who “does not laugh, does not abandon
himself to laughter, without an accompanying tremor. The Wise Man trembles
because he has laughed [. . .] [and he] pulls himself up on the brink of laughter
as on the brink of temptation” (112).
For Baudelaire mankind is torn between good and bad. Laughter is fuelled by
these two elements and characterized by its double nature, showing our uncon-
scious pride as well as our fear of damnation: “It seems certain, if we adopt the
orthodox view, that human laughter is intimately connected with the accident of
an original fall, of a degradation both of the body and the mind” (ibid.). The
angelic and the diabolic work together and are both present in a laughter which
is essentially as human as it is contradictory, being proof of “infinite grandeur
and of infinite wretchedness: of infinite wretchedness by comparison with the
absolute Being who exists as an idea in Man’s mind; of an infinite grandeur by
comparison with the animals. It is from the perpetual shock produced by these
two infinities that laughter proceeds” (117; cf. Siguret 104).
Principally, Baudelaire distinguishes between (at least) two different kinds
of laughter: The first form of laughter which he calls the “significantly comic”
(comique significatif ) is a comedy of superiority since it is characterized by
37
satanic aspects – “laughter is man’s way of biting” (113) – and since those who
laugh mainly enjoy the fact that they are superior to those they laugh about,
Satanic laughter is inexhaustible and completely free of compassion or pity, the
only exception possible being the laughter of children, which Baudelaire links
to the concept of joy.19 But even the laughter of children “is not wholly devoid
of ambition” given that children are but “Satans in the bud” (120). Thus, in the
last consequence, laughter really becomes diabolic; it serves as proof of the
human feeling of superiority, of the desire to make other people suffer, and it is
linked to madness.
Laughter, they say, comes of superiority. [. . .] A satanic idea if ever there was one!
Pride and aberration! Now it is a notorious fact that patients in a madhouse are all of
them suffering from the idea, developed beyond the normal, of their own superior-
ity. [. . .] It should be noted that laughter is one of the most frequent symptoms of
madness. [. . .] Indeed, what more obvious sign of debility can there be than the
nervous convulsion, the involuntary spasm, comparable to a sneeze, provoked by
somebody else’s misfortune? (115f.).
But Baudelaire’s theory is neither free of contradictions (cf. Greiner 105f.) nor
limited to the “significantly comic”. As he argues, laughter out of superiority
contains a moment of ridiculousness which can be regarded as a self-reflexive
element: “It would not surprise me to find that [. . .] the physiologist himself
bursts out laughing as he thinks of his own superiority” (cf. Baudelaire 115).
Laughing-at, therefore, is always already undermined by its own ridiculous-
ness. Moreover, Baudelaire introduces the notion of the “absolutely comic” as
a kind of laughter in league with nature, as a laughter that casts a spell over
people, causes frenzy or dizziness, and breaks down frontiers. The absolutely
comic, “[l]aughter provoked by the grotesque”, is characterized by “something
profound, axiomatic and primitive, which more closely relates it to innocence
and to absolute joy than does the laughter occasioned by the comedy of man-
ners” (121). Whereas the significantly comic “is an imitation, [. . .] the
grotesque is a creation” (ibid.). It is “much closer to nature”, “has a unity which
must be grasped by intuition” (122), and consists of “fabulous creations whose
raison d’être, whose excuse, has nothing to do with common sense and arouses
in us a wild and excessive hilarity translated into interminable fits of rending
and uncontrollable mirth” (121). Nevertheless, “laughter caused by the
grotesque still expresses the idea of superiority, not this time of man over man,
but of man over nature” (ibid.). It is in this sense that Baudelaire gives due
warning that when he uses “the words ‘absolutely comic’ [. . .] we must be very
much upon our guard. From the point of view of the definitely absolute, there
19
“Joy is a unity, whereas laughter is the revelation of a double, not to say a self-
contradictory, sentiment” (Baudelaire 120).
38
is joy and nothing else. The comic can be treated as absolute only in relation to
fallen humanity” (122).
For Konrad Lorenz laughter is a mechanism preventing human beings from
turning against their own species. It functions as a kind of sublimation of
aggressive and/or sexual drives (cf. Minois 570f.). The fact that laughter is a
good way to release pent-up aggression harbours the risk of it being conserva-
tive, as for example when laughter is sponsored and used by the ruling classes.
In this case it functions as a kind of catharsis and as a prophylaxis for revolu-
tion, an often cited example being carnival: “Most politically thoughtful com-
mentators wonder [. . .] whether the ‘licensed release’ of carnival is not simply
a form of social control of the low by the high and therefore serves the interests
of that very official culture which it apparently opposes” (Stallybrass and
White 13). Yet such a spatially and temporally delimited envisaging of carnival,
which is less a subversion of the ruling order than part and parcel of the con-
servative framework it ultimately reaffirms,20 is indeed a very domesticated
and pacified form of Bakhtin’s original notion of the carnivalesque. It is no sur-
prise, therefore, that there is also another, more radical interpretation that links
the carnivalesque to the positive elements attributed to the grotesque by
Baudelaire and that views Bakhtin’s conception of laughter as part of the car-
nivalesque and of an aesthetics of the grotesque (also in the sense of
“Renaissance realism”), which Wolfgang Kayser has interpreted as “a form
expressing the id” (Kayser qtd. in Bakhtin 49).
If one emphasizes the revolutionary potential of Bakhtin’s theory one can
argue that for the Russian cultural theorist carnival possesses not only a regen-
erative and transfigurative impulse but is also linked to the principle of trans-
formation and to the future (Bakhtin 24f.). The carnivalesque is characterized
by a positive, life-embracing, and elevating concept of the comic, which does
not laugh with someone at something but supposedly functions without com-
parison, exclusion, or denigration.21 Instead of being marked by distance or
difference, Bakhtinian laughter is characterized by a close identification between
the spectator/reader and the actor/protagonist, whereby both are in a full agree-
ment about the setting free of sensuality, bodily needs, and the pleasure
principle. Bakhtinian carnival, just like “full laughter”, unites contrasts and
20
Cf. Eagleton 148: “Carnival, after all, is a licensed affair in every sense, a permis-
sible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively
ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art”. Cf. Björk 89–92; Hutcheon, Modern
Parody and Bakhtin 99.
21
As argued above, the following issues need consideration: 1) whether the grotesque
has not already long ago become an aesthetics and a norm in itself and 2) whether
even within this exaltative and inclusive model of the comic, which puts a premium
on identification instead of differentiation, norms are still there but simply less rele-
vant and less visible than within a model of the comic based on denigration.
39
oppositions, the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the insignificant (cf.
Siguret 106). It calls for change and precipitates crises so that destruction and
creation go hand in hand. Moreover, Bakhtinian laughter is ambivalent and
linked to the body, especially to those functions which are officially tabooed
and not allowed to manifest themselves:
The people’s laughter which characterized all the forms of grotesque realism from
immemorial times was linked with the bodily lower stratum. Laughter degrades and
materializes. [. . .] To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order
to bring forth something more and better. To degrade also means to concern oneself
with the lower stratum of the body [. . .]. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new
birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one
(Bakhtin 20f.).
From a carnivalesque perspective, the realm of the body is valorised and the
body itself is conceived of as decentred, grotesque, uncontrollable, and as
metonymically coinciding with the people. Bakhtin’s body is not a closed sys-
tem subjugated and domesticated by culture, rather it is an open, living, prolif-
erating, incorporating, and excorporating organism which interacts with other
bodies and ignores fixed borders. Hence carnivalesque laughter is not intellec-
tual or exterior to the body but springs from within: “Laughter liberates not
only from external censorship but first of all from the great interior censor; it
liberates from the fear that developed in man during thousands of years: fear of
the sacred, of prohibitions, of the past, of power. It unveils the material bodily
principle in its true meaning” (94). Refusing any fixed identity, super-ego or
censor, Bakhtin characterizes the carnivalesque body by profanation, multipli-
cation, and the denial of death. This constant mutability and non-identity of the
body is not considered to be menacing but liberating and hilarious. It coincides
with and causes laughter as a kind of fusion of death and resurrection, change
and renewal. What Bakhtin is calling for is a full laughter, strong enough to
attack official ideology and to valorise popular culture; what he insists on is the
social and even chorus-like dimension of laughter; of a laughter that aspires to
community and universality and is in strict opposition to everything official,
serious, and monosemic (cf. Siguret 108f.).
For the theological mainstream, this all-embracing, exaltative and life-affirming
form of the comic, which works without comparison and negates hierarchies, has
long been considered as the opposite of “God’s gift of grace to mankind” and as
“a result of its fall from grace – together with labour, disease and death one of the
evil consequences of the Original Sin and the Fall from innocence into know-
ledge” (Pfister 181). If, as has been shown, Baudelaire links laughter to Satan
and to madness, it is indeed no surprise that “the history of laughter is first and
foremost a history of the attempts at disciplining it and bringing it to heel” (ibid.).
A reference to Umberto Eco’s blind Spaniard Jorge of Burgos for whom laughter
40
dehumanizes and even questions our humanity should suffice to make this point
clear: “Laughter shakes the body, distorts the features of the face, makes man
similar to the monkey” (Eco 131). In other words:
He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it.
Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing
at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating. [. . .]
[T]ruth and good are not to be laughed at. This is why Christ did not laugh. Laughter
foments doubt. [. . .] Certainly one who accepts dangerous ideas can also appreciate
the jesting of the ignorant man who laughs at the sole truth one should know [. . .].
With his laughter the fool says in his heart, ‘Deus non est.’ (131f.).
Although Berger (x) argues that the “experience of the comic is [. . .] a promise
of redemption” and that “[r]eligious faith is the intuition (some lucky people
would say the conviction) that the promise will be kept”, a brief consideration of
the discourses on laughter from classical antiquity and the Fathers of the Church
to the present demonstrates that its critics easily outnumber its advocates, that
laughter has often been regarded as a symptom of stupidity and heresy,22 and
furthermore, that during the Renaissance and the Middle Ages “theologians and
clergymen were the most vociferous critics of laughter” (Pfister 181). What
fuels this kind of vituperative ‘theory’ is the fear that the transformation of val-
ues, the changes in society, the deceptions and playful games ensuing from
laughter could make it impossible to distinguish good from bad or true from
false. In the final analysis, the prevailing fear is that in and through laughter God
and the Devil will coincide, that religion will disintegrate, that human beings
will gain their freedom – and ultimately take responsibility for themselves.
If the art of laughing is the highest human fulfilment, if by and through
laughing human beings gain control of their destiny, lose their fear and break
all kinds of hierarchies, then death and damnation can no longer function as the
final sanction and anchoring point (point de caption) from which religion
erects the vast edifice of its power. Where laughter equals revolution, where
there is no longer any need for redemption, and where psychological liberation
goes hand in hand with political liberation, theologians are wont to consider
these developments as leading to the abolition of any binding truth(s), thereby
unleashing chaos and anarchy.23 In Bakhtin’s view it is no accident that the
frontiers between what causes fear and what causes laughter are erased in
popular culture, that fear can be vanquished by laughter, and that laughter leads
to justice. The reason for this is that laughter comes from within and is equated
22
For an extended discussion, cf. Loewenstein.
23
Cf. Kuschel; cf. Sarrazin 19, who argues that there exists a believing kind of laugh-
ter (“un rire croyant”) and two religious logics, one that pretends to impose (one)
sense, truth, dogma and lacks humour and another which is open to the incredible, to
paradoxa, to nonsense and which embraces laughter.
41
with ‘truth’. Not, however, a theological, logocentric or even phallogocentric

truth but a kind of truth which is inherent in all laughter and which cannot be
transformed into seriousness or into the symbolic without suffering loss. It is a
kind of truth which is liberating with regard to internal as well as external cen-
sorship, such as the fear of the sacred and other deeply rooted human fears. But
if laughter enables mankind to leave behind the world of everyday compromises
and mediocrity without having to cling to ‘one’ truth or to a metaphysical
signified, this is exactly the reason why, in the public sphere at least, it has
effectively been circumscribed and even forbidden. The demise of carnival
since the 17th century provides just one example for the fact that
die Statthalter der Wahrheit auf Erden das Lachen nicht [lieben], denn es gefährdet
ihre Ordnung, die früher die Ordnung Gottes war, über den zu lachen ein Sakrileg
darstellte. Mit der Durchsetzung des Ideals einer nicht lachenden Öffentlichkeit in
der Neuzeit wurde das Lachen ins Private vertrieben. [. . .] Dieser Ausschluss des
Lachens aus der Öffentlichkeit ist Teil der neuzeitlichen Disziplinierung der körper-
lichen Expressivität, die durch zahllose kleine Verbote im Lebensalltag durchgesetzt
worden ist (Kamper and Wulf 9).
the earthly powers that be who administer truth are not at all well predisposed
towards laughter, the reason being is that it endangers their order; an order that was
previously divine and about which it was considered a sacrilege to laugh. Once the
ideal of a non-laughing public sphere was established in modernity, laughter was
banished into the private sphere. [. . .] This exclusion of laughter from the public
sphere is part of the modern disciplining of bodily expressivity and has been pushed
through in everyday life by means of innumerable rules and regulations.
Let us conclude this introduction to theories of humour, the comic, and laugh-
ter by suggesting a further dimension to laughter that pursues and even
perpetuates Bakhtin’s notion of “full laughter” and that similarly stresses the
role of the body. As Kamper and Wulf argue, laughter is a bodily reaction
directed as much against abstraction as against the intellect. Full laughter
implies that the body takes over, that it expresses itself and counteracts the
instrumentalization and subjugation it suffers in daily life:
Im lebenden Körper zeigt sich eine lange, verlorene, vielleicht nie wirklich
gegebene Einheit. In seinen konvulsivischen Bewegungen schwinden die Sinne, die
die Verbindung zur Außenwelt halten, mit ihnen der Sinn. Der Lachende braucht
keinen Sinn, weder im Lachen noch anderswo (7).
The living body displays a long-lost, perhaps never really existing, unity. Amid its
convulsive movements, the senses connecting the body to the outside world are
diminished and any sense of meaning is lost. To those that laugh meaning is irrele-
vant, whether in the act of laughing or otherwise.
Moreover, laughter can have a self-reflexive quality. If self-reflexivity initially

seems to presuppose distance and, with Baudelaire, a dedoublement of the
42
human subject, a psychoanalytic perspective reveals that this doubling is not

necessary since human beings are always already not only double but multiple,
fragmented, and decentred. The old humanist unified subject is not only for
Lacanian psychoanalysis largely a fiction or ongoing narration (cf. Rusch 374;
Moi 8): If for Freud laughter arises because for a short moment in time we do
not have to suppress our desires or drives and can conserve this energy while
we remain securely integrated in our culture, i.e. the symbolic order, one
should also ask whether the liberating, elevating and redemptive effect of
laughter can not be regarded as the result of the fact that human beings are for
a short moment allowed to discard the cultural edifice and fiction of the unified
and rational Cartesian self. Maybe the Rabelaisian and Bakhtinian notion of
full laughter stems, among other things, from the fact that by retrieving and
having recourse to the corporeal human beings are ‘freed from themselves’
since they do not have to uphold the construction of a single and unified self:
“Im Lachen wird das Ich vom Ich befreit. Der rationale Mensch weicht dem
lachenden; er zeigt sich von etwas überwältigt, das er, um als autonome
Persönlichkeit zu gelten, kontrollieren muß” (Kamper and Wulf 8) (“During
laughter the ego is freed from itself. The rational being gives itself over to
laughter; it reveals itself as being overwhelmed by something which, in order
to function as an autonomous personality, it must control”). From this perspec-
tive, laughter could be understood 1) as a bodily reflex that exceeds sense and
can only be converted into meaning a posteriori, and 2) as harbouring the
potential to free human beings from their cultural obligations by laying open
their decentredness and eccentricity (Plessner) as well as by subverting ration-
ality, objectivity, and distance. Thus the enormous relief which laughter grants
us would not only be the result of a conservation of psychical energy but also
of the acknowledgment of the never fully knowable or controllable foundation
of human existence. It is precisely because laughter can negate the difference
between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘true’ and ‘false’ that it has the power to attack and
to expose the very basis of a culture founded on these presumably natural but
ultimately constructed and culturally relative dichotomies. In this sense full
laughter can be understood as the return of the body, the repressed, the abject,
the semiotic (cf. Kristeva), the supplement, and the Other. Because full laugh-
ter is not subject to the principle of difference, it is beyond what founds the sign
(cf. Greiner), and possesses the anonymous violence
eines [. . .] überwältigenden, die Abwehrstrukturen durchbrechenden Fremden.
Einbruch des Anderen, Entmachtung des Vertrauten auf der einen Seite und eine
momentane, die Grenzziehung aufhebende Versöhnung, ein Einverständnis mit dem
Fremden auf der anderen Seite, beides sind Erfahrungen des Lachens (Kamper and
Wulf 8).
of an [. . .] overwhelming Other that breaks through all defence mechanisms. On the
one hand, there is the breaking in of the Other, the disempowerment of all that is
43
familiar, on the other hand, a reconciliation that momentarily suspends the bound-
ary, a mutual agreement with the Other beyond, both being experiences of laughter.
In the final analysis full laughter implies the possible loss of balance, tears of
laughter, the merging of laughing and crying, of pleasure and pain, and distantly
evokes Lacan’s notion of jouissance. But if laughing is a privileged means to
make the horror of existence bearable (cf. Nietzsche), this does not signify that
laughter loses its ambivalence or that in laughing human beings can abolish
once and for all their sense or premonition of the ultimate precariousness of
their existence. The traces of memory, be it of the fragmented body (corps mor-
célé), of an original lack (manque) or of “a certain dehiscence at the heart of
the organism, a primordial Discord” (Lacan, The mirror stage 4), will always
continue to haunt us on a sub- or unconscious level. What is remarkable, how-
ever, is that if in a paradoxical turn it is exactly this ‘other realm’ which makes
laughter possible, laughter simultaneously is still our best means to deal with
it: If our intrinsic otherness founds laughter, laughter is also its best remedy.
Or, to close with Kamper and Wulf:24
Es gibt einen Taumel am Rande des Katastrophischen. Solange wir lachen, sind wir
nicht in der Katastrophe, wir vermeiden es, besänftigen das drohende Schicksal. Die
Erschütterung des Lachens birgt den Triumph über das Entkommen. Wenn nichts
mehr geht, bietet das Lachen noch immer einen Ausweg, den man sich jedoch nicht
suchen kann, der sich vielmehr von selbst ergibt oder verschließt (8).
There is a feeling of giddiness at the edge of the catastrophe. As long as we laugh,
we are not in the catastrophe, we avoid it, have put off the inevitable. The shock of
laughter contains a sense of triumph at escaping. When nothing else seems possible,
laughter offers a way out, which cannot however be sought but either occurs of itself
or not at all.
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Andreas Böhn
Subversions of Gender Identities through Laughter

and the Comic?
The paper raises the question whether subversion of gender identities through laughter
and the comic is possible and how subversive and affirmative laughter could be dis-
cerned with respect to gender matters. The difficulties in interpreting forms of the comic
are compared to the interpretation of other forms of indirect communication such as
parody or irony, and the relation of the comic to social norms is analysed in the light of
this comparison. The discussion of three movies as examples of different comic treat-
ments of gender roles and social norms reveals that it is more the type of normativity
than the structure of the comic that explains the difference between ‘subversive’ and
‘affirmative’ laughter.
Research on laughter and the comic is a very serious thing. Although it is doubt-
ful whether many jokes could survive scientific analysis, this theoretical and
methodological reflection will start with a joke (Berger xiv). Some years ago I
attended a conference which concluded a research program that had been ongoing
for several years, all the time funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
(German Research Foundation). The title of the research program was: “Theatre
as Paradigm of Modernity”. The title of the concluding conference was “Theatre
as Paradigm of Modernity?” (Balme et al.). I found this curious question mark to
be a perfect symbol of the discrepancy between research in the humanities and its
practical results. From that time on I have been looking for an opportunity to
reproduce this joke.
My aim is not to explain that joke, but to use it to explain the title of my con-
tribution. In truth, it might not be the worst outcome of a scholarly effort if one
can put a question mark to an assumption one has been dwelling on before, as
long as one has sufficient reason to do so. And it might even appear as an
advantage – not only to the admirers of Occam’s razor – if, by doing so, one can
get rid of a terminological dilemma which has puzzled oneself and others
before. In this case, the dilemma is the dichotomy of affirmative versus sub-
versive laughter which still plays a major role in theories of the comic, and, sig-
nificantly, in the context of exploring the way the comic works in relation to
gender roles and gender identities. Other notions that often come up in this
context are parody and travesty. In a cross-dressing comedy, for instance,
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot, gender roles
are treated very much in the same way that literary texts or other works of art
are treated in parodies or travesties of these works: they are imitated to a cer-
tain extent, but with minor differences, and one central element is completely
50
opposite, which results in our laughter. But what exactly is laughed at in cross-
dressing comedies? Is it the traditional gender roles, as the analogy to parody
and travesty would suggest, because parodies and travesties usually make fun
of their pre-texts? Or is it the protagonists who try to take on the gender role of
the opposite sex but cannot fulfil this task properly? Or, conversely, is it their
deceived victims? Or, is the object of ridicule the very existence of distinct
gender roles and the boundaries that define them?
That these and similar questions arise when we examine comical treatments
of gender might result from a certain quality the comic shares with parody,
travesty, and other literary and artistic, but also everyday modes of expression
like irony. These modes do not convey normal, direct communication in which
signs are used to designate conventional meanings, but rather indirect commu-
nication in which signs seemingly violate the convention on which their use is
based (cf. Böhn, Thesen). If someone does not like at all what I have done and
says to me: “You’ve done a good job!”, it seems that what he or she is saying is
simply wrong, and that I can interpret his or her linguistic behaviour in two
ways: I can deem this person insane, or I can look for an assumption, a specific
frame, for the behaviour of that person which allows me to make sense of it. In
this case, the frame would be irony; he or she speaks ironically, when saying the
opposite of what he or she wants to express. Irony as a possible communicative
mode is one we do not, and cannot, use all the time, since this would really sub-
vert the conventions of communication. Therefore, the detection of irony and
other forms of indirect communication always calls for a special interpretation,
a re-framing of communication, and that is why ironic statements are often eas-
ily understood in different ways, and why they always raise questions of the
kind that emerge in the context of cross-dressing comedies (Harras).
Let us therefore take a closer look at the relation of the comic and indirect
communication. The comic is based on incongruity (Palmer; Haider-Pregler),
for example, the real behaviour of a person and the observer’s mental represen-
tation of normal, expected behaviour. Indirect communication is also based on
incongruity; the element communicated in indirect communication is incon-
gruent with the intended meaning. Irony, as in the previous example, has been
characterized as ‘saying the opposite of what is meant’. If we are quoting
someone, we ourselves do not necessarily agree with what was said, we merely
state what someone else has said. Quotation would thus be another example of
indirect communication, but some theorists even claim that all indirect com-
munication can be reduced to the quotation of an actual or presupposed/
assumed communication. According to Sperber and Wilson’s study Relevance,
irony would be the quotation of the actual or presupposed/assumed statement
of another person, which is the opposite of one’s own statement. In any case,
what makes clear that I am communicating indirectly is the incongruity of my
actual communication and my expected communication in the given situation.
51
Indirect communication is based on two types of incongruity: a) incongruity of

actual and expected communication; b) incongruity of what is said and what is
meant.
The first type of incongruity in indirect communication has the same basic
structure as the incongruity in the comic. The second type of incongruity can
also appear in specific modes of the comic. Indirect communication therefore
can have comical effects (very often in the case of irony), but it does not nec-
essarily need to (rather seldom in the case of metaphors). The voluntarily pro-
duced comical effect has developed certain modes which incorporate the two
types of incongruity in indirect communication, namely parody and travesty.
Parody reproduces a form and combines it with an unexpected content, thus
creating incongruity of the first type; the form itself is not meant, but only
quoted to state a different meaning (incongruity of the second type). Travesty
reproduces a content and combines it with an unexpected form, thus creating
incongruity of the first type; the content itself is not meant, but only quoted to
state a different meaning (incongruity of the second type).
In both cases the comic effect usually is produced by disparaging something
highly valorised, or at least by making it more familiar. Parody seems to be less
dependent on historical conditions than travesty, although parody’s status has
undergone important changes. Travesty has been mainly used in historical peri-
ods that were characterized by a strict correspondence of form and content, in
the field of art as well as in social interaction, in which one’s apparel, behav-
iour and actions were essentially related to a specific social background.
Baroque poetics, for example, is founded precisely on such a strong connection
between social status and adequate modes of representation, and thus incon-
gruence of both can be easily produced. In our times, there is no such clear
relation of status and appearance, which causes problems for travesty. Parody
and travesty can use gender role models as form or content, thus producing
cross-dressing or change of gender roles. The comical use of gender role mod-
els relies on certain conditions: a) a general assumption that sex can be dis-
cerned with certainty, independent of the actual behaviour of the person; b) a
general assumption that to each sex there is related a corresponding appearance
and habit (congruity of sex and gender); c) sex and gender are combined in a
way that is not in accord with their usual or accepted correspondence (incon-
gruity), which can happen in two different manners: A person of sex A exhibits
an appearance in accord with sex B such that this person can be taken for a per-
son of sex B by others, and behaves according to the conventions of sex B, the
result being incongruity of two different assumptions about the sex of the per-
son (cross-dressing). Or, alternatively, a person of sex A behaves according to
the conventions of gender B, with respect to at least one element of the com-
mon role model of gender B, without necessarily exhibiting an appearance in
accord with gender B; the result is incongruity between the assumption about
52
the sex and the assumption about the gender of the person, possibly also intra-
gender incongruity of appearance and behaviour (change of gender roles).
The same conditions apply to any stereotypical cultural difference. Gender
role models are one instance of such differences, others being differences
between national cultures or classes. Quotation can thus serve as the most gen-
eral concept for an indirect statement of stereotypical cultural differences
(Böhn, Das Formzitat 33–44, 100–105). The integration of the quotation in the
surrounding communication and in the actual situation brings about incon-
gruity of the first and of the second type and can also create comical effects, as
in the case of irony, and usually does so in the case of generic comical modes
like parody and travesty. In all these cases, incongruity can only be produced or
occur if we expect congruity, which means that we have to have concepts of the
normal or expectable, be it the conventional relation of signs and meaning in
general which rules direct communication, or the more specific relation of sex
and gender which forms the background of parodies and travesties founded
upon that relation, cross-dressing and change of gender roles included. That
leads us back to the distinction between affirmative and subversive laughter.
On the one hand, these comical representations of gender rely on general
assumptions of normality and conventionality which, in turn, these representa-
tions seem to affirm; on the other hand, these comical representations of gen-
der produce incongruity between the expected and what is actually given and
therefore seem to subvert the normal and the conventional. Now, what has the
theory of the comic to say about this puzzling contradiction?
Theories of the comic are numerous and heterogeneous, as Stefan Horlacher
demonstrates in his theoretical overview in this volume. Such diversity is not
an unusual phenomenon in the humanities, which often have been ascribed plu-
ralism of methods and theories as one of their key characteristics. But theories
of the comic are not only different from one another with respect to their sub-
ject, the aspect they emphasize, or the goal they are pursuing. They also differ
in quite basic characterizations and explanations of their subject. Surveys of
theories of the comic therefore have tried to categorize them according to their
divergent views of the comic, distinguishing, namely, ‘laughing-at-theories’,
which emphasize the aspects of comparison, exclusion, and denigration, from
‘laughing-with-theories’, which underline the possibility of exaltation, inclu-
sion, and identification through the comic (Greiner 97–114). Theorists like
Hobbes, Kant, Bergson, and Hegel are named as examples for the laughing-at-
position, or the comic of denigration, whereas Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and
Bakhtin are nominated for the laughing-with-position, or the comic of exalta-
tion. While Horlacher explores in more detail the historical ramifications of
this distinction, I concentrate on its systematic and methodological aspects.
As can already be seen by looking at the cited names of the theorists, the
laughing-at-position is the older one. It seems to have always been quite clear that
53
laughing can be aggressive and used as a sanction for breaking social rules.
Typically, a group laughs at someone who by this act is temporarily excluded
from the group. The members of the group consider themselves as being in con-
formity with a certain norm which is accepted by the group, whereas the
laughed-at person is considered as having violated this norm, being unable to
meet its requirements. Being laughed at causes shame, a typical reaction to a loss
of social acceptance. The shamed individual can seclude him- or herself from the
group or can endeavour to modify his or her behaviour to regain acceptance. In
both cases, the group successfully defends the norm at stake by less rigid means
than, for example, direct violence or institutional disciplinary measures.
The laughing-with-position is closely connected to modernism, although
Bakhtin tries to trace it back to at least the Middle Ages and to the concept of
the grotesque (4–27). The point of convergence between laughing-with and the
grotesque occurs when they have an analogous relation to a norm. The
grotesque violates an aesthetic norm, causing its rejection in classical aesthet-
ics and poetics from Horace to Hegel. But in concordance with the general turn
towards an aesthetics of deviation since the late eighteenth century, with its
preference for the immoral, the deformed, the morbid, the uncanny, etc., the
grotesque has also been revalorized as a positive term. Consequently, the norm
it violates is questioned, or possibly even laughed at and, by this act, rejected.
Seen from the standpoint of the laughing-at-position, the grotesque itself
should be laughed at because it does not fulfil the requirements of the norm.
Theorists like Bakhtin were able to argue that, on the contrary, we laugh with
the grotesque character at the norm which we no longer accept. In fact, Bakhtin
himself does not stress this point of laughing at a norm, which would be con-
nected to comparison and exclusion. He conceives of the grotesque as some-
thing that transcends such boundaries set by norms, and that instead leads to
inclusion and identification with the person who induces laughter (12, 26, 62,
92). The liberating force of such a comic emphasis on the corporeal and the
creaturely added greatly to the attractiveness of Bakhtin’s concept and stimu-
lated its reception in the context of post-structuralism and deconstruction,
where it was often reduced to a means of subverting social norms such as, for
instance, gender norms.
The laughing-with-position in the form of a comic of subversion of norms
would seem to form part of a modernist aesthetics with its key-concepts of the
avant-garde, transgression and negation. These key-concepts are mainly nega-
tive and temporal; they conceive of modernism as something standing against
another position. This opponent position is situated in the past, and modernism
is moving away from it with the progress of time. Therefore it is not surprising
that the laughing-with-position shares an inherent paradox of modernism. If
modernism prevails, how can it continue if its essence is the negation and over-
coming of a former position? What do we do and where do we go if there are
54
no more traditional boundaries to transgress? Like the concept of progress in

the field of politics, modernism belongs to the ideology of an open and per-
missive society that encounters problems when standards are fully achieved.
New or modified norms have to be constructed to justify the continuous strug-
gle for modernity. (‘We have to go further still; that was only a first step, a false
compromise, etc.’).
The comic is possible only in situations in which the viewer does not experi-
ence physical danger or threat in any other way (Morreall 110). But would it not
be a threat if one of my crucial norms were to be challenged? If laughing with A
means laughing at the norm N, which is violated by A, then we can only laugh
with A if we are willing to dismiss N. But if we are willing to do so, and there-
fore N is no longer really a norm for us, why do we still laugh? Possibly we do
so because N is supported by a majority of the population or by a powerful elite
which impose that norm on us. But if this is not the case, and nearly everyone
laughs, and we conceive of this laughing as laughing with A at N, why do we laugh
at all? To avoid this paradox, Bakhtin combines the laughing-at-theory with the
social dimension of hegemony and suppression, be it the aristocracy and clergy
suppressing the lower classes, the soviet hierarchy suppressing its citizens, or
simply the mind suppressing the body. Yet, already Heinrich Heine formulated a
comparable conception of a social and cultural superstratum suppressing a sub-
stratum that lashed back with laughter (cf. Goetschel; Böhn, Der fremde
Mythos). The vast reception of Bakhtin’s work in the West, beginning in the
1960s, necessitated looking for other pairings of suppressor and suppressed and
found them, even in the relation of modernism and postmodernism, explaining
the latter’s mockery of the first. Eventually, the concept was taken up in gender
studies generating the idea of a subversion of gender identities and relations
through the comic (Butler, Gender Trouble 138f.), although the possibility of an
affirmation of gender conceptions through laughter has also been taken into
account (cf. Benedek and Binder 190f.; Lehnert 110).
It has often been queried with whom and at whom we laugh as the viewers
of cross-dressing comedies, what norm is affected thereby, and in what way it
is affected (Garber; Benedek and Binder 218–232). This discussion will be
taken up on a more general level with respect to the distinction between affir-
mative and subversive laughter (Jenkins). How can we decide which form of
the comic we have at hand in a specific case, and what makes the difference on
the structural level or on the level of concrete design of, for instance, a cross-
dressing comedy? Are we able to elaborate on a set of rules which allow us to
explain why we regard one example as affirmative and another one as subver-
sive? Most theorists of the comic have problems defining such rules: the gen-
eral impression is that answers to these questions can only be found through
analysis of each particular case, while such an approach would be unsatisfac-
tory on the theoretical level.
55
My proposition is to examine things from a different perspective and to skip

the affirmative-subversive distinction. Let us for heuristic purposes claim that
everything comic is affirmative of an accepted norm, and its effect is laughing
at someone who does not fulfil the requirements of this norm. Let us further
claim that the differences we notice are not to be explained on the level of the
comic and its structure and internal functioning, but on the level of the norms
that are concerned. As I outlined above, the distinctions between different
kinds of the comic have emerged since the late eighteenth century. In this
period (Western) societies have changed considerably through a process which
is usually summarized by the term ‘modernization’. To its main effects belong
an increase in social differentiation and a shift from stratified differentiation
through static social hierarchies to functional differentiation according to
changing social contexts that the individual encounters (Luhmann).
In a society differentiated by strata, norms of behaviour depend on the indi-
vidual’s more or less fixed position in society; therefore, the norms are sub-
stantial. They can be formulated in ‘if. . ., then. . .’ clauses with a restricted set
of variables because the types of situations that bind an individual are limited.
In a functionally differentiated society, substantial norms can be given only for
a specific functional area, and, given the ongoing differentiation and rising rate
of social change, it becomes increasingly difficult to obtain a general orienta-
tion for behaviour from substantial norms. General guidelines have to be more
structural and relational, putting emphasis on the ability to adjust substantial
norms to changing circumstances or to infer rules for new situations from
given ones which were formulated according to other conditions, instead of
strictly applying a manual of behaviour in an inflexible manner. Actually, flex-
ibility can be regarded as the super-norm of such societies.
To be unable to fulfil the requirements of this norm (flexibility) can there-
fore consist, for example, of clinging too strongly to a substantial norm which
appears to be at least partially inadequate to the given situation. This kind of
rigid, inelastic behaviour is exactly what, according to Bergson, causes laugh-
ter. Bergson is one of the last theorists of the laughing-at-position, and not by
chance does he defend it in a way that preserves the traditional concept of
laughter as social punishment for violation of a norm, seemingly diminishing
the norm to the somewhat vague idea of avoiding to weaken the élan vital. In
my opinion, his theoretical position is the ‘missing link’ between the older tra-
dition of the laughing-at-position that was connected to a system of substantial
norms and the theoretical framework I would like to propose. Laughing-at
implies laughing-with, and it affirms a norm which does not need to have any
substantial content other than a specification of the imperative of flexibility.
Revisiting the example of cross-dressing, we can discern several examples
of laughing-at that illustrate certain aspects of this theoretical framework. The
cross-dresser can be laughed at (and the spectators can laugh with characters in
56
the play laughing at the cross-dresser) because he or she does not behave
according to substantial norms of gender-specific behaviour. Furthermore, the
victims of the cross-dresser’s mimicry and disguise can be laughed at (and the
spectators can laugh with the cross-dresser at them) because they take these
norms for granted and are not able to adapt themselves to divergent standards
of behaviour. We can explain both cases on the basis of the laughing-at-theory
as affirmative of an accepted norm and do not need to use the affirmative/sub-
versive distinction. In the following analysis of examples, I try to show that
these theoretical tools are sufficient to fully explain seemingly subversive com-
ical elements in the context of cross-dressing.
My first example, To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar
(1995), is a US-American mainstream comedy directed by Beeban Kidron,
with Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, and John Leguizamo in leading roles.
They portray three drag queens on their way to Hollywood who get stuck in a
small town in the middle of nowhere, whose inhabitants seem quite provincial
and not at all up-to-date as far as political correctness in gender matters is con-
cerned. The town males are attracted to the three protagonists, but become hos-
tile when they do not receive the reaction they had in mind. The women are
impressed by their combination of extreme ‘femininity’ and toughness. In a
way, the drag queens are the better women (comparable to Tootsie), who then
give the real women in town a lesson in feminism, or simply how to fight their
dull men. The trio’s most ardent enemy is sheriff Dollard, who is clearly homo-
phobic and the most ridiculed character in the movie. In the end, the spectators
are told in a very moralist way that one’s sex does not really matter, but one’s
intrinsic values do.
First, we laugh at the drag queens, which are played by actors who are known
as attractive, athletic, tough males, possessing a certain macho allure: thus the
difference between their popular image and their appearance in the movie is
substantial. We can deduce from their representation the supposition that to pro-
duce laughter about men impersonating women we need to have very ‘male’,
i.e. stereotypically male actors behaving in an exaggerated, stereotypically
‘female manner’. Then we laugh at the deceived males of the town who behave
badly, get punished by the drag queens, and feel even more humiliated because
they are dominated by women. But mostly we laugh at the sheriff, who is the only
one to defend a norm the three protagonists could be said to violate. This norm
of sex-gender-congruity is presented in the movie as obsolete and is supplanted
by an ‘anything goes’ attitude that finds its ideological legitimization in the
moral evident at the end of the film. The sheriff does not comply with this new
norm, but sticks to the old one, drawing the laughter of others. The one who
should be the embodiment of the norm is actually the only one who is not at all
willing to accept the norm and is therefore excluded from the community – an
aspect of the traditional comedy motif of a world turned topsy-turvy.
57
My second example, Tacones lejanos (High Heels), released in 1991, is a

typical movie by the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who began as an
underground artist in the Franco era and became a symbol of the cultural boom
in the young Spanish democracy because of being eccentric, post-modern, and
erotically overt. Like its filmic predecessor and model, Douglas Sirk’s
Imitation of Life (1959), it is a movie about a mother (Marisa Paredes), who is
a famous artist, and her daughter (Victoria Abril), who feels neglected by her.
In a sense, it is a sequel to Imitation of Life because the daughter is now grown
up and married to a former lover of her mother’s. One of the new elements of
the film is the character of Judge Dominguez (Miguel Bosé), who first appears
as an impersonator of the mother, Becky del Páramo, rendering in drag an only
slightly exaggerated portrayal of her already quite sophisticated and mannered
behaviour. The daughter, Rebeca, is very attracted to the person who so suc-
cessfully assumes the public role of Becky even though she always felt over-
whelmed by the original. Dominguez himself has a very close relationship with
his mother, who is a fan of Becky.
As we learn later on, the real reason for Dominguez’s behaviour is that he is
conducting an investigation under cover. When Rebeca’s husband is murdered,
she meets Dominguez again in his role of judge without knowing that he is the
same person who impersonates her mother. He appears to be disguised either
way, both as a woman and as a man. Nevertheless, the only characteristic he
can surely be identified by and through which the ‘anagnorisis’ can be fulfilled
is a mark exactly on his penis. Although his male sex is never questioned, he
appears as a virtuoso in gender matters. He is able to act as the iconic female
Becky, as a vigorous and virile lover, and as the austere and distanced judge. In
the role of the latter he represents social and juridical norms, and accordingly
he shows a specific male gendered behaviour and appearance: formal suit,
body language that signals distance, self-control, power, and elaborate and
impersonal verbal expression. But despite all this, he breaks the rules when it
seems necessary to him to pursue his goals, be it an altruistic fight for justice
or for very personal interests. He is neither ridiculed as a person nor could we
say that any of his different roles would be heavily derided.
Although there are many comical scenes in the movie and nearly every char-
acter at some point causes laughter, no one is laughed at because she or he does
not conform to a certain norm. The overall impression one draws from the film
is that nothing really follows an expectable rule, although we are familiar with
elements likewise found in other films, or, more generally, from our cultural
traditions. Sirk’s Imitation of Life is a serious reflection upon changing gender
role models and the individual’s problems with coming to terms with them,
whereas Almodóvar’s Tacones lejanos depicts gender role models running
wild, with characters changing from one stereotype to another, and praises the
individual’s sovereignty in playing with these models and norms. If someone
58
lacks that sovereignty, because he or she is too much attached to a given norm,
the result is tragic, not comic. Rebeca always feels incapable of attaining the
oversized gender role model presented by her mother, and therefore the combi-
nation of homage and mockery in Dominguez’s impersonation of Becky is
exactly what attracts her.
So at whom or at what do we laugh at all? I would say we laugh at different
characters, but primarily at Rebeca, during moments when the character cannot
oversee the situation, is bound to an expectation that disappoints, is guided by
a rule that does not fit, etc., and we can laugh at ourselves when we feel that we
are in the same situation. Thus Almodóvar’s post-modern comedy with its
exalted mix of genres, quotations, and stereotypes, revives an element of com-
edy that is quite old and can be found in older comedies that rely mainly on
laughing at violations of given substantial norms. This element of laughing at
a lack of both flexibility and power of judgement gains more and more domi-
nance, for example in the popular theatre of the 19th century.
Johann Nestroy, for instance, begins with plays showcasing moral correction
and shifts more and more away from their clear structure of defined values.
Especially the roles Nestroy wrote for himself as an actor in his own plays form
a cultural model of this comical praise of flexibility. The protagonists played by
Nestroy are diabolical in a very literal sense of the word: the Greek word diabolein
means to mix up, to make a mess, to destroy existing structures. In pursuing
their own selfish goals, his characters initiate the comical action and proceed to
very successfully play bad tricks on other people, show a cynical attitude towards
commonly accepted values, and often get in trouble towards the end of the play
which results in a resolution that brings a new stability and an all-inclusive har-
mony. Nestroy’s later comedies are, however, very unusual, full of artistry and
formal elegance, and lacking any realism and probability. The strange thing is
that, although it is known that Nestroy had rather conservative personal opin-
ions, the position of his comedies regarding the values at stake is in most cases
not decidable if we analyse them carefully. This quality is something he shares
with another great comedian of Austrian origin, Billy Wilder. A comparison
between Nestroy’s 19th century plays and Billy Wilder’s 20th century movies
makes clear that even comedies which at first glance seem quite conservative
may appear subversive if we take a second look. But it would be better to say
that they are affirmative of the norm of flexibility, which could be the genuine
contribution of the comical to the process of modernization.
Having said that, one example of such a comedy deserves more thorough
analysis. Released in 1961, Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three, is a comedy about
the clashing of political systems, economies, cultures, classes, and gender
roles. It thus serves as a good example demonstrating that what was said about
gender identity applies also to social and cultural identity in general. The set-
ting is Berlin after the Second World War. McNamara (James Cagney), the
59
US-American CEO of the local branch of Coca-Cola, endeavours to conduct

business and to prepare the next step in his career. He must cope with employ-
ees who struggle to leave behind the militaristic habits from the Nazi era and
present themselves as good democratic citizens, but nevertheless treat their
American boss like a new Führer. That is exactly the address his wife con-
stantly applies to him, revealing that in fact he is quite at ease with this behav-
iour. While the democratic West-Germans are former Nazis, the US-American
CEO is a dictator whom his wife calls “mein Führer”.
McNamara finds himself in serious trouble soon after his boss instructs him
to mind his daughter who is coming to Berlin. The young girl, however, falls in
love with an ardent supporter of communism from East-Berlin, Ludwig Otto
Piffel (Horst Buchholz), and marries him. But love between a rich and naïve
American girl and an equally naive young communist does not at all mean
mutual understanding. He truly believes that she will give up all her wealth and
her way of life in order to live with him in post-war socialist East German soci-
ety, deprived of all luxury. She romanticizes their presumably very humble life
as a couple into an intimate love-nest and dons her new role without hesitation,
as if it were a new fancy dress.
Even poverty can be fashionable if one only has to experience it infre-
quently, but in this comedy people seem to be able to take on a new personal-
ity by simply changing their clothes. The young communist must be
transformed into an acceptable son-in-law, and this is quickly achieved by the
right costume combined with a rushed adoption by an impoverished count.
With this motif, One, Two, Three follows an old tradition in comedy. It is the
clothes that make the man (or the woman). It is the manifestation of cultural
difference on the surface that generates the ‘deep structure’ of personal iden-
tity, and not the other way round, as one might think.
The same applies to gender, as Billy Wilder has shown more thoroughly in
Some Like it Hot. Cross-dressing, however, also plays an important role in One,
Two, Three. McNamara’s first strategy before giving Piffel a make-over is to get
rid of him by letting him appear as a saboteur or even an American spy to the
East-German police. This is a successful strategy, but McNamara soon learns
that the daughter of his boss is pregnant. Now that he needs to extract Piffel
from jail, he uses his contact with three corrupt Soviet officials eager to woo
his good-looking secretary, an incarnation of the German Fräuleinwunder
(Lieselotte Pulver). McNamara feigns consent to the arrangement, but forces
his male employee Schlemmer (Hanns Lothar) to put on his secretary’s dress
and assume her role. The Soviet officials get the fake American spy Piffel out
of jail and exchange him for the fake secretary Schlemmer in a scene reminis-
cent of cold war espionage thrillers.
Some comical episodes in One, Two, Three seem to simply follow the well-
known principle according to which comedies show the world turned topsy-turvy,
60
as, for example, when the fanatic young communist crosses the border at the
Brandenburg gate and is taken for a saboteur because he unintentionally carries
the slogan “Ami go home” and a cuckoo-clock with Uncle Sam as the cuckoo.
We get the impression that the world in fact is topsy-turvy in relation to our
expectations. Everyone is not, or not only, what he or she seems to be at first
glance, but also the opposite; people transform from someone on one end of
the cultural spectrum into someone on the other end in the shortest time by
changing clothes and assuming a different habitus, like an actor on the stage.
Cultural diversity is not represented by different characters inhabiting their
respective positions, but rather seems to be inherent in the character, contained
as a whole in each character and manifesting itself in various ways, depending
on the situation and the circumstances. Everything is subject to dealing and is
exchangeable for money. The only character who stubbornly opposes this prin-
ciple is Piffel, and he is also the one who is changed in the most extreme and
thorough manner.
While the film’s anarchic and cynical undertones may have been the cause
for its rejection and neglect by critics at the time of its first release, its popu-
larity later, at least in Germany, is surely based on the fact that the confronta-
tion between East and West and the actual situation in Berlin had lost a lot of
its threatening potential in comparison to the early sixties. In its time, the
movie was seemingly regarded by many viewers as by far too ambiguous and
too disorientating in relation to central values that were at stake precisely at that
moment. It gave the impression that the West-Germans had turned from
Nazism to democracy as if they had changed from a brown shirt into a white
one, that the one and only goal of Western (American) democracy was to sell
Coke to everyone in the world, and that any communist could be turned into an
aristocrat if you gave him a rich girl to marry and the right clothes. That was
not to everyone’s taste in 1961.
We are thus incited to re-examine our bearings because of the instability of
things, of personal identities, and of relations. The signs which usually repre-
sent cultural differences are no longer reliable. We have to decide whether they
are meant the way they normally are meant or if they are used in an indirect
way to symbolize a specific way of seeing things or of representing the world.
This applies to the mise-en-scène as well. The examination of Piffel by the
police, for example, is as much a parody as a travesty of such interrogations
seen in other movies, and so are the exchange of Piffel for the fake secretary
and the car chase through East-Berlin.
According to Judith Butler, laughter is able to weaken traditional, normative
views of things and personal identities (Gender Trouble 138f.). In One, Two,
Three, however, laughter seems to be the effect of such weakening of normative
positions, while the cause appears to be something different: the struggle to
earn one’s living or, when possible, to acquire wealth and power. The latter is
61
condensed in one motif: money. Money makes things and people change.
While on the one hand money surely stabilizes social hierarchies, here it is the
general source of instability.
Money also plays a comparable role in other famous movies that Billy
Wilder directed before and after One, Two, Three. In Some Like It Hot (1959) it
is the main motif of the female protagonist, as it is of the male protagonists in
the German movie Fanfaren der Liebe (Fanfares of Love) from 1951 of which
Some Like It Hot is a remake. Seemingly Wilder felt obliged to create a
stronger motivation for the male protagonists to dress up as women for the
American audience. In The Apartment (1960) the protagonist (Jack Lemmon)
lets his boss use his apartment for his amorous adventures, which causes ongo-
ing misunderstandings and a mixing-up of personal identities. Irma la Douce
(1963) is a movie about a prostitute whose admirer tries to prevent her from
selling her body to someone else by paying her himself with money earned by
taking on another identity. In Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) a would-be songwriter is
so desperate to succeed that he is willing to offer his wife to a popular singer in
exchange for his help breaking into show business. In The Fortune Cookie
(1966) Jack Lemmon portrays a man who pretends to be disabled in order to
extort money from his insurance company.
In all these movies laughter is not the cause of a weakening of the normal
and expectable, but the effect of such a weakening, its cause being money. In
these cases, money makes the world go round, but in topsy-turvy fashion. In
One, Two, Three the protagonist embodying this principle of constant change is
McNamara. He is not in the least a good guy. In fact, he is cynical, selfish,
unscrupulous, and he surely is no liberal intellectual who wants to overcome
binary oppositions and ideological boundaries. Actually, he is a conservative, if
not a downright reactionary, who pursues with frankness his own personal
goals against other people’s interests. In doing so he causes laughter, but in
most cases not intentionally, and the laughter usually is not directed at him but
at other people (which changes slightly towards the end). We probably would
not like him in real life, but we can develop a tendency to like him in an
ambivalent way during the comedy, as an effect of the laughter he causes.
The position of the movie regarding the values at stake is, if we analyse it
carefully, for the most part undecidable. For example: Piffel’s idealism is sati-
rized as naive and ideological throughout One, Two, Three until a pivotal con-
versation takes place with McNamara and Peripetchikoff, a former Soviet
official trying to become a business man in the West. After the ensuing contro-
versy about Piffel’s and McNamara’s convictions, Piffel is devastated, becomes
deeply melancholic, and expresses his hope that at least his children will be
able to build a better world. At that moment McNamara tells him that he has
just quoted Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and the oath of the American
army.
62
At this point, we might well ask what this comic moment could mean in rela-
tion to the aforementioned values. Should we regard the values as ridiculous,
because it was formerly suggested to us that Piffel’s idealism is ridiculous? Or
does this scene demonstrate that Piffel’s ideals are best represented by
American democracy? But wouldn’t that mean that the values of democracy
and communism are essentially the same? And is McNamara, the winner in this
controversy about ethics, a good representative of these values? Analogous
questions could be posed regarding the use of the cuckoo-clock as a leitmotif,
which in a very condensed way constantly reminds us that One, Two, Three is a
film about the American way of life and its values.
The answers that individual spectators might give to these questions rely
heavily on personal dispositions. If the spectators are able to elevate themselves
above the situation they can regard the incongruity as comical and laugh; if not,
they might either experience the incongruity as simply irritating and disorient-
ing without causing laughter, or they might understand the intention to create a
comic situation but deny their consent, and therefore not laugh. In the complex
case of One, Two, Three viewers might even laugh at one person, group, or
habitus that is ridiculed without laughing at another that is also ridiculed
because the latter depends on structures so deeply internalized by the viewer
that the incongruity does not cause a comical effect.
I have tried to show that the comic in general and the comical display of cul-
tural diversity in particular does not necessarily tend to overcome traditional
oppositions and ideological boundaries, as theorists like Butler suggest,
although it mixes up the normal and expectable state of things to a considerable
extent. Comical effects are not necessarily the result of weakened normative
structures, but can be produced by, for example, the representation of the role
of money in capitalist society, which, on another level, surely creates and sta-
bilizes normative structures. The comic is not the ultimate locus from which
one can embark on revolutionizing the world: for scholars specializing in the
field of humour, a topic long neglected by cultural studies, this conclusion
could be a little bit disappointing. I leave it to the reader to decide whether he
or she will accept McNamara’s concluding statement as a relief (also an effect
often attributed to the comic): “Any world that can produce the Taj Mahal,
William Shakespeare, and striped toothpaste can’t be all bad”, and laugh with
him and me, or not.
Works Consulted
Almodóvar, Pedro (Dir.): Tacones lejanos. Spain/France 1991.
Bakhtin, Mikhail: Rabelais and His World. Trans. by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press 1984.
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Balme, Christopher, Erika Fischer-Lichte, and Stephan Grätzel (Eds.): Theater als
Paradigma der Moderne? Positionen zwischen historischer Avantgarde und Medien-
zeitalter. Tübingen – Basel: Francke 2003.
Benedek, Susanne, and Adolphe Binder: Von tanzenden Kleidern und sprechenden
Leibern. Crossdressing als Auflösung der Geschlechterpolarität? Dortmund:
Ebersbach 1996.
Berger, Peter L.: Redeeming Laughter. The Comic Dimension of Human Experience.
New York: Walter de Gruyter 1997.
Bergson, Henri: Laughter. An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. by Cloudsley
Brereton and Fred Rothwell. Mineola (NY): Dover 2005.
Böhn, Andreas: Das Formzitat. Bestimmung einer Textstrategie im Spannungsfeld
zwischen Intertextualitätsforschung und Gattungstheorie. Berlin: Erich Schmidt 2001.
—. Der fremde Mythos und die Mythisierung des Fremden. Heines politisch-
literarische Mythologie in ‘Vitzliputzli’. In: Aufklärung und Skepsis. Internationaler
Heine-Kongreß 1997 zum 200. Geburtstag. Ed. by Joseph A. Kruse, Bernd Witte, and
Karin Füllner. Stuttgart – Weimar: Metzler 1998. Pp. 367–378.
—. Thesen zum Verhältnis von Indirektheit und Komik. In: Von Intentionalität zur
Bedeutung konventionalisierter Zeichen. Festschrift für Gisela Harras zum 65.
Geburtstag. Ed. by Kristel Proost and Edeltraud Winkler. Tübingen: Narr 2006. Pp.
219–225.
Butler, Judith: Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. London – New
York: Routledge 1993.
—. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London – New York:
Routledge 1990.
Garber, Marjorie: Vested Interests. Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York:
Routledge 1992.
Goetschel, Willi: Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland. In: The
Literary Encyclopedia. 17 March 2007. ⬍http://www.litencyc.com⬎.
Greiner, Bernhard: Die Komödie. Eine theatralische Sendung. Grundlagen und
Interpretationen. Tübingen: Francke 1992.
Haider-Pregler, Hilde (Ed.): Komik. Ästhetik, Theorien, Strategien. Wien: Böhlau
2006.
Harras, Gisela: Auf dem Weg zu einer einheitlichen Theorie der Indirektheit des
Sprechens. In: Rhetorik – Figuration und Performanz. DFG-Symposion 2002. Ed. by
Jürgen Fohrmann. Stuttgart – Weimar: Metzler 2004. Pp. 219–245.
Hoffmann, Kurt (Dir.): Fanfaren der Liebe. Germany 1951.
Jenkins, Ron: Subversive Laughter. The Liberating Power of Comedy. New York: The
Free Press 1994.
Kidron, Beeban (Dir.): To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. USA 1995.
Lehnert, Gertrude: Wenn Frauen Männerkleider tragen. Geschlecht und Maskerade in
Literatur und Geschichte. München: dtv 1997.
64
Luhmann, Niklas: The Differentiation of Society. Trans. by Stephen Holmes and

Charles Larmore. New York – Guildford: Columbia University Press 1982.
Nestroy, Johann: Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Ed. by Jürgen Hein,
Johann Hüttner, Walter Obermaier and W. Edgar Yates. Wiem: Deuticke 1977ff.
Morreall, John: Taking Laughter Seriously. Albany: State University of New York 1983.
Palmer, Jerry: Taking Humour Seriously. London – New York: Routledge 1994.
Sirk, Douglas (Dir.): Imitation of Life. USA 1959.
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson: Relevance. Communication and Cognition. Oxford:
Blackwell 1986.
Wilder, Billy (Dir.): Irma la Douce. USA 1963.
—. Kiss Me, Stupid. USA 1964.
—. One, Two, Three. USA 1961.
—. Some Like it Hot. USA 1959.
—. The Apartment. USA 1960.
—. The Fortune Cookie. USA 1966.

I. Gender - Laughter - Media: Theoretical Crossings

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Pailer, Gaby, Andreas Böhn, Stefan Horlacher, and Ulrich Scheck (Eds.).

Gender and Laughter :

I. Gender – Laughter – Media: Theoretical Crossings

A Short Introduction to Theories of Humour, the Comic,

Gender – Laughter – Media

The Quixotic Interrelatedness of Humour, the Comic, and Laughter

answer becomes obvious if one takes a look at Minois’s impressive Histoire du

[there is n]o single academic discipline [. . .] expressly devoted to the study of

verbrämten Fortschreiben der schon immer herausgehobenen Dichotomie zweier

As both Bergson and Zijderveld among others have argued, “[l]aughter is

However, if many theorists tend to view laughter as a rather one-dimensional

The comedy of exclusion or denigration questions the assumed perfection of a hero,

As a matter of fact, most modern theories of laughter “revived the instrumen-

If, as Meinig argues, “the embodied view of performativity alerts us to the

Referring to Fredric Jameson’s article Postmodernism and Consumer Society,

Sociological and Psychoanalytical Dimensions to Laughter:

The counter-position to Bergson is represented by Zijderveld. According to

From this we can conclude that

What remains to be explained, however, are the “mechanisms” which “operate

Charles Baudelaire, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the Liberating Potential

with ‘truth’. Not, however, a theological, logocentric or even phallogocentric

Moreover, laughter can have a self-reflexive quality. If self-reflexivity initially

human subject, a psychoanalytic perspective reveals that this doubling is not

Fluck, Winfried: Das kulturelle Imaginäre. Eine Funktionsgeschichte des ameri-

Preciado, Beatriz: Camp Aesthetics. Pop Performances and “Butch-Fem” Sub-Culture:

Subversions of Gender Identities through Laughter

Indirect communication is based on two types of incongruity: a) incongruity of

no more traditional boundaries to transgress? Like the concept of progress in

My proposition is to examine things from a different perspective and to skip

My second example, Tacones lejanos (High Heels), released in 1991, is a

US-American CEO of the local branch of Coca-Cola, endeavours to conduct

Luhmann, Niklas: The Differentiation of Society. Trans. by Stephen Holmes and

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