Tuesday
In a recent essay on Arthur Koestler’s theory of comedy, the New York Review of Books’ Liesl Schillinger cites a passage from Koestler’s Darkness at Noon to explain Donald Trump’s attacks on Saturday Night Live. In his fictional account of Stalin’s show trials, Koestler shows that authoritarian personalities lack a sense of humor.
Loyal Bolshevik Nicholas Rubashov suddenly finds himself being questioned for counter-revolutionary tendencies. He is caught off guard when his “Neanderthal” interrogator asks him what appears to be a light-hearted question:
Gletkin looked at Rubashov with his usual expressionless gaze, and asked him, in his usual expressionless voice:
“Were you given a watch as a boy?”
Rubashov looked at him in astonishment. The most conspicuous trait of the Neanderthal character was its absolute humorlessness or, more exactly, its lack of frivolity.
Schillinger thought of this Koestler passage when Trump recently tweeted an attack on a rerun of Saturday Night Live:
“It’s truly incredible that shows like Saturday Night Live, not funny/no talent, can spend all of their time knocking the same person (me), over & over, without so much of a mention of ‘the other side.’”… This was not the first time Trump had gone off on SNL. In February, too, he had denounced the show. “Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC!” he tweeted. “Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution?” In his March SNL tweet barrage, he renewed the call for payback: “Should Federal Election Commission and/or FCC look into this?”
Humor has long been used by the powerless when other weapons are denied them. Schillinger observes that comedians have traditionally “used the dagger of wit to stick the powerful, exposing hypocrisy and abuses that threatened the public good.” Comedy has this edge because, according to Koestler, it arises out of “aggression and apprehension”:
Given the insult implicit in laughter, Koestler suggests, it was not surprising that powerful men would seek to thwart those who inspired others to laugh at their expense. “Under the tyrannies of Hitler in Germany and of Stalin in the Soviet Union, humour was driven underground,” he writes. “Dictators fear laughter more than bombs.”
As long as comedy has a higher purpose, all is well and good. Laughter also has a darker side, however. Thomas Hobbes argues in Leviathan that we laugh at “the infirmities of others” to affirm our superiority over them. It can be used to exclude the marginal as well as to empower them.
To be sure, a comic satirist like Jonathan Swift said that laughter should not be used this way. Speaking of himself posthumously in “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” he says that he never made fun of infirmities, only pride:
He spar'd a hump, or crooked nose,
Whose owners set not up for beaux.
True genuine dulness mov'd his pity,
Unless it offer'd to be witty.
The assumption here is that comedy should perform a higher purpose. It is used for tribal purposes, however, by someone like Trump, who during the 2016 campaign mocked a reporter with arthrogryposis. Or in another egregious example cited by Schillinger, shock jock Alex Jones claimed to be engaging in performance art when he went after the parents of children who were killed at Sandy Hook and Parkland, calling them “crisis actors”:
To give himself cover, Jones caricatures himself: his lawyer, Randall White, has reportedly said Jones was “playing a character” and that his online persona did not reflect his real self. This is similar to the tactic alt-right bloggers and commenters use, masking provocation and bigotry as “only joking.”
About such people, Swift, again thinking of himself in the past tense, writes,
For he abhorr'd that senseless tribe
Who call it humour when they gibe.
In short, humor, like religion or patriotism, is a force for good when wielded by good people but a noxious weapon when it falls into the wrong hands.