The Tyranny of Humour

I was in a class with some of those young people yesterday and they were discussing the appropriate writing style for a blog they'd been assigned to produced. And they all agreed that what was more important than pretty much anything was to keep your tone light and humorous. And I started thinking about this, probably cos I was in a gloomy and contrary frame of mind.

And then yesterday on the comedy film nomination thread, somebody said this

i've thought about this now and again and decided that i've probably never loved a movie or book or whatever that didn't make me laugh at least some of the time. you can do comedy that's devoid of other modes of expression/entertainment but it's hard to do anything truly compelling that's totally devoid of humor

and i thought some more.

I feel as though those are two widely accepted social truths, and I wonder if this feeling - that a sense of humour is near-vital to artistic communication - is an expression of our age or of western culture or of human thought in general? I feel as tho it isn't, as if this is quite modern, this insistence on humour above all else. Well not above but at the heart of all else perhaps.

This is a dense knot in my head that I'm trying to delineate rather than fully untangle here. So this thread might fly or die accordingly. But some questions

Are we socially more obsessed with humour now than our ancestors might've been? Why? Is humour always an important or useful thing? Are there other emotional modes that deserve to be foregrounded by the culture? Is everybody somehow a David Brent at heart now?

And so on.

humor is, maybe, the most important way we connect with other people?

like maybe nothing will catapult you faster into the front of the group of people whom dayo esteems than by me discovering you laugh at the same things that I do, and more importantly, for the same reasons

well that's a big question i think. humour seems to have a self-protective function as much as a reaching out function, and of course there's whole sections of humour designed to hurt or belittle. but now more than ever i feel like "being funny" is in some way at the heart of social discourse.

we communicate more, with more people, more freely, with less at stake? Allows for levity/risk (significant ingredients for humour) to an extent that may not have been likely/possible when communication was expensive/arduous.

and yeah it can be bonding but the most important means? or the safest means? i dunno i can't conceive that that's always and everywhere true.

allied to yer more leisure time/demand for entertainment

Just thinkin out loud by text here

More leisure time? Not in the work-till-you-drop UK!

i feel like i work with and meet a lot of people for whom "being funny" is more important to them than the sense of what they're trying to communicate. i feel like i have been that kind of person, often.

this thread is for thinking out loud, obv

Well, a knee-jerk response I often have in my head is that people are frightened of seriousness 'now', and use a continual low-level humour, or non-directional irony in their writing and speech out of fear of assertion and subsequent contradiction, and therefore argument and thought. It's almost become an adjunct of 'niceness'.

Tend to associate this with 'comedy' as a present cultural thing.

But, thinking further, I'm really not sure about that 'now'. English (in particular) notoriously obsessed/associated with mocking, belittling, cynical humour. (Can't speak for the distinction of this from other nations really, but I have a vague sense of having gained this impression from a reasonably wide range of historical reading).

Can't carry on thinking this through here now, 'cos I got work to do, but I think it's a thing - just where that 'thing' is located in time and national space, and if or how it's changed are thorny matters.

It's almost become an adjunct of 'niceness'.

This is horrible.

Of course humour is a very important bonding tool, but it has penetrated into areas where, y'know, I don't want to bond. I can do without bonding with my fruit smoothie, for instance. I can do without bonding with sheets of paper that are giving me instructions. I would really rather not bond with these things, and I find it incredibly rude and presumptuous that they seem to think it's okay.

I feel as though those are two widely accepted social truths, and I wonder if this feeling - that a sense of humour is near-vital to artistic communication - is an expression of our age or of western culture or of human thought in general?

http://img2.imagesbn.com/images/102970000/102977274.jpg

oh emily that is another thing yes, humour infecting even the dryest of informational material.

xp to nv

Earnestness/sincerity are perfectly fine in many ways, but as personality traits aren't they v close to the bottom of the list of 'positives' you'd ideally be looking for in ppl you've to spend time with?

I know that's what you're asking tho (lol beg the question)

Thought this was going to be about the tyranny of the excelsior thread.

Earnestness/sincerity are perfectly fine in many ways, but as personality traits aren't they v close to the bottom of the list of 'positives' you'd ideally be looking for in ppl you've to spend time with?

Not as long as they're funny with it

'incredibly rude and presumptuous' seems a v strong reaction tho.

i dunno that i'm asking completely that, but the terms we think about it are telling i think. like surely you cd be pretty earnest most of the time without being a huge pill. and of course the qualities i'm looking for in friends aren't necessarily the same qualities i'd want from a co-worker or a writer or an MP or my doctor

The funniest people I know are all serious

'incredibly rude and presumptuous' seems a v strong reaction tho.

Really? To be honest I thought I was being quite restrained. I find false attempts at closeness by marketing types to be personally violating and demeaning to all of my real relationships. I hate hate hate hate it.

Also, sincerity is totally not at the bottom of my list of positives. Earnestness has a slightly different connotation, though.

Yeah, what's wrong with sincerity anyway?

i think i might be looking for the same qualities in all those ppl, though, again the element of risk/trust that seems to me to be implicit in reaching out through humour is important. aching sincerity is great in its place but doesn't invite me to participate, i dunno.

heh i guess i'm more than usually averse to sincerity nm it's not ye it's me

The funniest people I know are all serious

― Charles Kennedy Jumped Up, He Called 'Oh No'. (Tom D.), Thursday, March 1, 2012 9:26 AM (4 minutes ago)

It's almost become an adjunct of 'niceness'.

This is horrible.

The sentiment or the phrasing, Tom?!

Earnestness is difficult, because it often seems to preclude humour, which in itself precludes something leavens conversation.

Sincerity, yeah, nothing wrong with that. To follow up my 'niceness' comment, that low-level pretty unfunny conversational humour often seems to undermine sincerity, it's a block on discussing things seriously, and seems to be an expression of an uncertainty that doesn't want to admit itself.

Whereas good humour will often illuminate sincerity, and be a consequence of it.

Even Shakespearean tragedy uses humour as a release valve and/or commentary. Struggling to think of many great works of literature that don't utilise humour in some way.

The alternative is looking po-faced, and no one wants that when they're trying to make a serious point.

FUCK COMEDY

FUCK "LIGHT" AND "HUMOROUS"

a bit flailing around rn but THIS IS A SUBJECT OF INTEREST TO ME because i want to ERADICATE IT

:)

^^^ Fronting.

The sentiment or the phrasing, Tom?!

Sentiment!

Lex virtually every r&b or rap quote you have ever posted has been humorous in some way. "Humour" =/= comedy.

Jesus imagine how terrible rap music would be if you eradicated all the humour.

This is something I struggle with so much.

It's that kind of British kneejerk thing of snark or "comedy" as a way of saying "yes, look, I'm being self referential and reflective about this" when actually it's almost the opposite of being properly reflective and becomes reflexive rather than reflective.

I don't see the problem with taking things seriously. The problem is that "humour" as become a kind of shortcut for "self aware" and yes, I think that self awareness is hugely important to make great art, but it's like humour is the easiest, cheapest and lowest form of self awareness.

The problem is that "humour" as become a kind of shortcut for "self aware"

News to me

humor is, maybe, the most important way we connect with other people?

like maybe nothing will catapult you faster into the front of the group of people whom dayo esteems than by me discovering you laugh at the same things that I do, and more importantly, for the same reasons

― flagp∞st (dayo), Thursday, March 1, 2012 9:12 AM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is very much true for me. I just feel like people who have a similar sense of humor to me just sort of get me better than those who do not. Someone can be perfectly pleasant and engaging but if we don't laugh at the same things I sort of know we're never going to be great friends.

I don't see a problem with taking things seriously either but think you can value both seriousness and comedy highly. Also agree with the thing about the funniest people I know being quite serious.

if we don't laugh at the same things

Obviously I don't mean all the same things all the time but just in a general sort of way.

Well, a knee-jerk response I often have in my head is that people are frightened of seriousness 'now', and use a continual low-level humour, or non-directional irony in their writing and speech out of fear of assertion and subsequent contradiction, and therefore argument and thought. It's almost become an adjunct of 'niceness'.

Pretty otm. People seem to be terrified of sincerity anymore, and almost every cultural utterance seems tainted with an ironic smirk. But it's so often forced and unnatural and used as a distancing mechanism that I find it generally off-putting. As a society, we know how to follow the formula of a joke but we don't know how to replicate the soul of it.

This is kind of a formless idea, but it can be instructive to look at the television commercials that come out of a particular era in trying to get a sense of that era. '80s commercials seem so earnest about wanting to sell the good people a product, whereas today they're jokey and barely about what's being sold and, more often than not, fairly inhumane. To the extent that we accept that marketers have their finger on the pulse of society, it seems like a fair metric by which to measure how we interact as a society.

This is a big, big topic that I have lots of thoughts about. Let me get them properly in order.

"Humour" as a shorthand for "self aware" = "oh look, we are laughing at ourselves by laughing at our subject matter, we are aware that taking things seriously is kind of uncool, therefore we are using this kneejerk humour to distance ourselves from it, and show that we are in on the joke and also self aware."

This thread is clearly going to delineate along the usual lines of those for whom humour shows some kind of camaraderie and those for whom it's a slightly presumptuous assumption of intimacy. I'm not going to draw any cultural conclusions, but I tend towards the latter. But I'm also one of those po-faced fules who values sincerity.

People seem to be terrified of sincerity anymore, and almost every cultural utterance seems tainted with an ironic smirk

this seems a little overstated. there's plenty of sincerity to be found all around you. maybe not on the L train but

Struggling to think of many great works of literature that don't utilise humour in some way.

First thoughts are Greek tragedy (they're presented next door to satyr plays, iirc? but the things themselves are dead serious), Paradise Lost, the works of William Wordsworth. maybe even some shakespeare… there's not much fun in Coriolanus or Timon is there? (I may be forgetting the light relief scenes)

Very big generalised rough idea would that you need quite a serious belief system, and a belief in some ultimate high seriousness that can be found in art – I think that's there in Romanticism & its descendants through high modernism (in Europe, horrors of 1st half of the century have a part to play in earnest art too); it's not there so much now - we tend to be suspicious of things that claim high purpose and have no time for entertainment.

& then there's a secondary british argument about puritan or non-conformist tradition, maybe, that creates an art with less time for joking (is the Pilgrim's Progress funny? I remember it being really, really not).

I'm prone to liking stuff with jokes (or facing terrible universe with bitter stoic laughter etc), but unseriousness can be a real irritant – feel like Beckett is often pushed, nervously, as 'actually very funny', which is true, sure, but dodging some of the heart of it.

it's pretty hard to be sincere without being funny

guess it could almost be reduced, even for argument's sake, to two outlooks- 'the world is a serious place, in spite of it all' vs 'the world is a humorous place, in spite of it all'.

When I'm writing something it comes naturally to me to insert maybe a little bit of humour. But often I read back something after it's published and just think "what was I doing?!". Humour is an effective tool but a dark art. One shouldn't wield it unless one knows what they're doing.

irony is pretty much our primary tool as a feeling species and eventually when all of us who grew up in the 1990s are finally dead people will remember that the word doesn't mean "making fun of stuff" but refers to an attunement to the failure of expectations that is at root deeply humble, and that since probability and not physics is on some level the mother of the sciences lacking or failing to develop this sense is like never understanding that objects move when you push them, i.e., you won't ever have any idea what's going on

Learning to be funny is a hard path for the uncool adolescent to take, but it bears rich fruit.

So by the time you get to college if you have figured out how to make people laugh turning it off is going to seem dangerous.

IMO.

Also had a prof who apparently didn't understand sarcasm, pretty weird to not be able to reliably use that register with someone. He just gets concerned when people are sarcastic at him.

Humour as a shorthand for self-awareness usually smacks of insecurity and defensiveness to me. That said, when you see things (especially in the corporate world) that are really po-faced and serious or just idiotic and unaware how ridiculous they are it can be pretty fucking funny.

Honestly, I do think being able to craft a good barb or retort is a great skill, used wisely. But I also like fart jokes and puns. Why not sample everything on the humour platter, rather than restricting yourself and everyone else to a single type?

xp - I forget, were you formerly "the useless moderator how's life"?

She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie... methane

xp - yes, but I understood that one.

no offense, but I get you and man alive confused.

not all mans

BEST JOKE I HAVE RECENTLY HEARD
There are 2 kinds of people, those who can extrapolate from incomplete information

Privileged to be a guest at the consecration of a new bishop @LiverpoolMet yesterday. Some subtle wit here from @Pontifex in the papal mandate for a Liverpool bishop. pic.twitter.com/GZEbnULJOy

— Crispin Pailing (@crispin_pailing) September 4, 2021

i didn't get it, then i read the comments, now i get it but i'm angry

I guess I still have some schoolboy latin because I got it right away & smh, my nightmare is being around ppl for whom this kind of stuff is the pinnacle of wit

Also not sure what is “subtle” about this bit of local pandering

the pope doing this = fine, w/e, have fun

people guffawing about it like it's the most witty thing ever written = fuck right off

some of the deeply weird anglican/catholic latinists/priests in the replies/quote tweets really got off on this. Which is what I find very amusing.

see also: cunts who laugh at bad humping jokes in Shakespeare

OMG THE ACTOR DONE A HUMP MIME I THINK MY SIDES HAVE SPLITTED

country matters amirite

I did get the Latin on my second try, but I admit my first thought was "you're going home in a fucking ambulance". Which tbf I probably would have found funny coming from the Pope.

the humor of tyranny

is that like when stalin joked about how he was going to purge you one day and you had to laugh

the final form of banter

Banter road leads to Belsen

Stalin's idea of top bantz with priests was after decades of bulldozing down churches, confiscating monasteries and sending clergy to the gulags he called some chief hierarchs during the war and said what is wrong with you miserable fuckers - we need to work together here!

Cops bantering with the people they arrest, another manifestion of the same thing.

this dog outfunneyed the pope

in mexico this dog walked through a parade for the pope thinking it was for him pic.twitter.com/wCBw9AMWWp

— Humor And Animals (@humorandanimals) September 5, 2021

the tyranny of humour and animals etc

"the humor of tyranny"

a genuinely funny imo example of this is the scene in To Be or Not To Be where the actor playing Hitler walks onto the set to a chorus of "Heil Hitler's" and responds "Heil Myself".

I hadn't seen this thread before so I'm just going to reply to the original question instead of the revive. Sorry to jump into the middle of a conversation! But this made me think about how two of my favorite songwriters are Springsteen and John Prine, and they're in many ways very similar in their preoccupations and the kind of stories they tell, and yet they have these very different approaches to humor that I think end up defining their reputations in a big way. Like, John Prine is known for his humor, it's one of the first things mentioned in all the articles that came out after he died, and that despite his having a ton of grim, grim songs in his catalog. Whereas Springsteen, who can be very funny when he wants to - you see it a ton in his concerts - I think has a general rep as a songwriter for intense seriousness unleavened by humor (or at least not intentional humor.)

And I think that's an exaggeration of both of them but it does get at something real. Like, John Prine's humor isn't a set of haha jokes so much as a kind of detached self-awareness and a constant sense of the absurdity of human existence, which is sort of relatable and distancing at the same time. He'll write something like, "The streetlamp said as it nodded its head, 'It's lonesome out tonight,'" or "bowl of oatmeal tried to stare me down/ and won," and you get the sense of someone looking at his own unhappiness from an ironic distance, like ah yes, we're all just wandering through this absurd, surreal world where streetlamps and oatmeal and knickknack shelves and whatever have opinions on how crappily we're living our lives. it me. it all of us.

But Springsteen will write "The dogs on Main Street howl 'cause they understand," and if you stop to think about that it's just as absurd, and yet you don't stop to think about it, the song doesn't let you. This is not funny, it's deadly serious, you are pissed off as fuck and those dogs GET IT!

And you'd think that lack of detachment and self-awareness would be a weak point, and I do think it repels some people, but also invites a really intense and wholehearted commitment once you get past that initial barrier. Like, if you listen to this you'd better be prepared to BE King Lear as a 30-year-old mechanic screaming at the sky for four and a half minutes, and if you can't do that without rolling your eyes, then go away, this isn't for you.

Awesome post

I think the kind of facetiousness of Prine puts me off sometimes even tho I know, when I do listen to him, that I like him a lot

Thanks! Awesome thread question. I think I was lucky in that my first encounter with Prine was the album Common Sense, which might be his darkest one, and it definitely shaped my impression of his humor as sad existentialist absurdity rather than haha goofiness.

there are Prine songs I have to skip b/c they are so dark ("Sam Stone"), but that's not the case with say "The River", Springsteen somehow manages to have this level of detachment there, where you are listening as an observer and not a participant? thanks for that post.

Yeah, rereading that, I didn't mean to suggest Prine wasn't dark or immersive; I think he can be very dark, but I often get a double-exposed feeling even from his grimmest stuff, a sense of standing inside and outside the story at the same time, experiencing it and also seeing how it looks to others. Even when he dials the humor way down, that little self-mocking smile is still there: "Thought I saw a neon sign/flash my name with the time/ prob'ly didn't see a thing/ crazy dreams and a broken wing."

Springsteen - just thinking this out - I think maybe he deals more in characters who are lacking perspective and self-awareness; like that inability to step outside your own story and see yourself as absurd is something that appeals to him. So there are layered narratives and irony and humor, but you have to look harder for them, because the character doesn't know they're there. And his detachment, when he has it, mostly comes from somewhere else. Maybe in "The River" it comes partly from the framing device where you're listening to someone tell his story, and partly from the sense of resignation and inevitability he brings to it?

This could all be nonsense. It's easy to think of exceptions to everything I'm saying - what about the line about the car wash in "Downbound Train?" What about all of "Reason to Believe?"

Maybe I should start a Springsteen v. Prine thread.

KNOCK KNOCK
WHO THERE

YR MUM LOOOOOL

on an unrelated note a work colleague - somebody i don't work that often with - just signed off an email to me with a "xx". i'm not perturbed but i am v much "this is ok now?"

Now I use heart emojis at work all the time, age makes clowns of us all

Think this might at least partly be a thread about depression

Not you Poopy, obv

Reading this thread it strikes me most of the objections to "banter" culture at the time were about it being cruel, punching down, bigoted, etc. Not to say that's disappeared but it seems less central to the thing now - you won't find much of it in your average panel show, and ppl tend to steer clear of what might offend in interpersonal banter too, even when they're actually quite nasty pieces of work in their worldview (caveats about London elite bubble apply I'm sure).

This is obviously preferable to the previous status quo but current banter culture remains imo terrible. The other day someone started talking to me about pineapple on pizza, pineapple on pizza, truly, I ask you.

It seems aimed at placing everyone on the same lowest common denominator of human interaction and yet in the UK there seems to be a smug sense that it is part of the National Character and a great tradition of humour - when so much of that tradition was built on saying things that ARE uncomfortable, that not everyone will be onboard with. Thinking of ppl like Wilde (Irish, I know) or even Peter Cook here.

I'm disatisfied with this post as I type this because humor as Truth Telling, comedy that can shock or upset, etc. all of this has been co-opted by the worst ppl in the world. Hopefully I'm familiar enough by now to most posters that you won't think that's what I'm getting at here.

iirc you are actually describing what the thread *was* originally getting at

Perhaps. I'm focusing specifically on posts about banter, such as this one:

I think of "banter" in the Corden usage as the point at which straight-up bullying pretends to be mild teasing between people on a level playing field. See also Just A Bit Of Fun.

― Homosexual Satan Wasp (Matt DC), Thursday, 1 March 2012 15:56 (twelve years ago) bookmarkflaglink

...which doesn't at all line up with how I perceive "banter" being used in 2024, but maybe it was in 2012? I had just moved to London.

It wasn't what I initially meant, but the thread definitely went there

I think it was originally more about the urge to be ingratiating at all costs, above everything. If you look at old photos, from a certain time back - 100 years ago sure, more recently maybe - people would rarely smile, like it was undignified, or at least like it wasn't socially expected

As somebody who talks to people for a living I get real tired of my own shtick quite often. I don't want to make general moral principles out of my own self-irritation tho

Maybe this wasn't about a world of David Brents (ok it definitely was about that really) but about the social fear of seriousness

It's definitely related. I think I'm more sympathetic than I used to be to people flailing around in the world of observational/recognition empty phatic or lubricating bantz - it's awkward and dull but it's an attempt to find conversational consensus or make a connection in a fucked UK where everything is broken and everything is a fight.

And fuck knows I don't somehow stand above it

i always took the difference to be between nv's original (imo v interesting) thrust of "obligation towards humour as a default transmitting/receptive mode is tiresome" and the thread's somewhat immediate turn towards "someone was mean to me once and therefore nothing can be funny" which is a different question - still possibly interesting but only if we agree that being funny can take any shape at all and does not have vectors only an impact on the individual's gut laughter response

There's a specific kind of banter which is better thought of as bookishness and that might be tiring sometimes but generally you don't come across it unless you opt in so it's hardly oppressive in the big scheme of things - if i don't wanna be around that then i don't have to go to the pub

Mocking people's opinions isn't really tyranny of humour either, it's a natural consequence of publicly expressing opinions, dumb or otherwise, and we're all fair game for that

Blokishness, not bookishness ffs

My social circles and their humour:

- Writing group I'm still in the WhatsApp of despite never attending. Absolutely fucking desperate normie nonsense of exactly the sort Daniel is on about
- Football forum. Skews far older than my other circles. Often quite funny but also often quite uh yeah...risqué! Mean! Morally indecent! But also, yeah, often quite funny. My cricket club is similar but nicer, mostly I suspect as we're all meeting face to face.
- Discord server for a certain art-rock group. Pretty good humour to be found here, but that's as much due to the nature of the band as the youth of the participants. Other servers I'm in are far more deadly-serious (and what humour there is tends to be entirely shitpost-oriented).
- People we bump into around Camberwell. Fucking atrocious craic

Conclusions? People are probably getting less funny, or less willing to take a risk for humour's sake. But those who do and get it right are absolutely to be treasured, because good humour can still seem effortless and joyful without anyone even close to being ostracised. Also, upper middle class Londoners are collectively about as unfunny as it gets

If you look at old photos, from a certain time back - 100 years ago sure, more recently maybe - people would rarely smile, like it was undignified, or at least like it wasn't socially expected

In terms of portraits, people had to sit still for long periods when being photographed which is one of the main reasons they didn't smile.

I always find it funny when people have their stupid opinions mocked and then start whining “I have a right to my opinion!” Like calm down nobody said you didn’t, we said it was stupid!

Xp That's a good point and at least partly explains it. I love old works football team photos from the 50s tho where they've all got "serious business" faces

I'm sure somebody wrote a book about how the growing respectability of smiling was linked to the French Revolution - plus let's not forget Saint-Just's pithy "Happiness is a new idea in Europe".

xpp yeah also of course you have a right to an opinion it's physically impossible to stop somebody thinking something but that's not the same as a right to annoy people at will

that thing upper middle class Londoners do when they disparage etc

and look what happened to Saint-Just!

I thought the revive might be about Ethel Cain's rant.

Still baffles me the amount of time people put towards memes and reaction gifs. There's no way that's rewarding.