Humour

Humor: The Mind, The Body, and Affect

I am very interested in the corporeal aspects of humor and how this relates to the affective subject.

As Simon Critchley writes:
Let me go back to the body. If humour is, as I suggested, the return of the physical into the metaphysical, then it is important to point out that the human being remains an ineluctably metaphysical entity…if the bodily dimension of the comic takes place in the gap between being and having, between our souls and arseholes, then this hole cannot be plugged or bunged up. We cannot simultaneously be what we have. The critical distance with regard to the world and nature that opens up in the incongruities of humour is testified to in the alienation we experience with regard to our bodies. This is why the experience of the body in pain is so oddly analogous to the pleasures of laughter—which is why it can hurt when you laugh(50).

Firstly I do not know what this means. Not wholly. But I felt here are a few key ideas that I would like to work through and to a degree “flesh out.” Critchley defines humor in terms of a gap between the physical body and the metaphysical self and the returning of those two dimensions to one another. I frame this in my own mind—humor is a reconciliation of the supposed mind/body dichotomy or split. Humor affects not only the body in the form of something physically happening, but we can only make sense of this humor through the logos of the mind, of realizing that whatever funny thing just happened, broke with logic of the mind. And I think maybe this is what Critchley is getting at—that humor is not located solely in the body or in the mind. Humor is located at the intersections of both body and mind.

But there is a place I think that humor works that is maybe not even in the realm of just a simple mind/body split, but that instead humor exists in its next affective nature. Humor exists somewhat in its public nature, in its ability to affect people in public scenarios. Humor wouldn’t necessarily be funny if someone else wasn’t around not to witness it. Thus, humour is both in the mind, in the body and in the affective gaps between, around, and underneath, these temporal and spatial locations.

Incongruency is key here. Humor is all about incongruency and the complexities of non-sense making. The things that are funny are so in part because they are unexpected and do not meet normative expectations. I am reminded of Margaret Cho, an Asian-American bisexual comedian and some of her skits. There is one part in a skit where she takes on the identity of an old “Washer Woman” named Gwen. When you would expect to her to be coming around asking to take in work like laundry, or ironing (as is stereotypical Asian women’swork) she instead pretends to be going around using the line “Hi, my name is Gwen and I’M HERE TO WARSH YER VAGIIIIIIIIINA!!!!!!!!” It’s funny because it is unexpected and really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But I laugh because I find it humorous that an Asian woman, supposedly old, a/de sexualized is walking around asking women if she can warsh their vaginas. It does not make sense but we cans see the connection of the mind and body while simultaneously sublimating them. The body is necessary but the mind is also. In the scenario as an audience we are affected by the consequences of stereotyping of Asian women and ways to de normalize those stereotypes.

I don’t have any answers, but I do think that humor is not as simple as we sometimes assume it to be. It is not just that some things are funny and others are not. There are gaps where humor occurs, spaces between bodies and minds. And even then, humor is not simple; it is a complex set of relations, practices, and performances of bodies and the affects of these performances on others. Is there ever an original place of humor, or something’s inherent funny-ness? I don’t think so, which is why I think it is important to think of the humor in terms of the mind, the, body, and affect.