Funny Ha Ha
Last night at Middlesex Universty, Alenka Zupancic gave a cool and subtle talk on the "The Meaning of Life in Bergson's Theory of Comedy." Working to subvert Bergson's vitalism with an artillery of Hegelian and Lacanian concepts, Zupancic's took pains to distinguish between the function of a joke, such as Freud defined it, which she recognized in terms of a discrete utterance that works in terms of regulatory social function "within a parish" and the function of the comic, which she sought to understand in terms of a more universalist phenomenon.
Zupancic drew special reference to the comic terrain of mimicry. Why, she asked, is mimicry funny? And why is it more funny the more accurate it is? As Zupancic understood it, the reason for this is because what mimicry draws attention to the fact that the "original" gestures of the subject supposedly being imitated are in fact themselves already imitations.
This example expressed the basic gist of what Zupancic was trying to do to Bergson. To be specfic: Zupancic perceived in Bergson a dualistic thinker working inside a conceptual matrix whereby an original, elan vital, unable to express itself in its full plenitude through the morbid machine of language, leaves a anxious gap behind itself in its various crude attempts to do so, which then themselves in turn demand laughter for the sake of decorum. Against this, Zupancic counter-claimed that it is in fact only through the morbid machine of language that any kind elan vital can emerge at all.
The structure, as she sees it, is this: an original, phantasmatic one is split into two by the beginning of a comic sequence. This sequence then operates to reveal through construction - by carrying the terms of this original splitting through different situations and scenarios whereby it is explored from a variety of angles. The crucial point is that, for a sequence to remain comic, this original splitting itself must be carried through it, so that throughout the time of comedy it is a split-one being carried through, rather than simply a plethora of new and accumulating distinct and seperate ones being independently juggled. This would just be nothing. As Zupancic understood in sonic terms, the point was follows: not a distinct number of proliferating cries, but rather, a single cry being constituvely split by silence, from itself, over time.
Question time, and Bartleby came up, in something like the following way: "What happens when something stops being funny, and simply becomes disturbing?" Good question, I thought, and I thought of William Burroughs. Apparently, the New York Public Library has just purchased his archives.
Something Kerouac once said: "Naked Lunch- a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork."
Zupancic drew special reference to the comic terrain of mimicry. Why, she asked, is mimicry funny? And why is it more funny the more accurate it is? As Zupancic understood it, the reason for this is because what mimicry draws attention to the fact that the "original" gestures of the subject supposedly being imitated are in fact themselves already imitations.
This example expressed the basic gist of what Zupancic was trying to do to Bergson. To be specfic: Zupancic perceived in Bergson a dualistic thinker working inside a conceptual matrix whereby an original, elan vital, unable to express itself in its full plenitude through the morbid machine of language, leaves a anxious gap behind itself in its various crude attempts to do so, which then themselves in turn demand laughter for the sake of decorum. Against this, Zupancic counter-claimed that it is in fact only through the morbid machine of language that any kind elan vital can emerge at all.
The structure, as she sees it, is this: an original, phantasmatic one is split into two by the beginning of a comic sequence. This sequence then operates to reveal through construction - by carrying the terms of this original splitting through different situations and scenarios whereby it is explored from a variety of angles. The crucial point is that, for a sequence to remain comic, this original splitting itself must be carried through it, so that throughout the time of comedy it is a split-one being carried through, rather than simply a plethora of new and accumulating distinct and seperate ones being independently juggled. This would just be nothing. As Zupancic understood in sonic terms, the point was follows: not a distinct number of proliferating cries, but rather, a single cry being constituvely split by silence, from itself, over time.
Question time, and Bartleby came up, in something like the following way: "What happens when something stops being funny, and simply becomes disturbing?" Good question, I thought, and I thought of William Burroughs. Apparently, the New York Public Library has just purchased his archives.
Something Kerouac once said: "Naked Lunch- a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork."
2 Comments:
It seems you automatically accept that mimicry is funnier the more accurate it is. I don't think it is. In fact, a perfect mimicry wouldn't be even remotely funny.
I am also a little confused by your fourth paragraph; you seem to say that once the "original" is lost all mimicries cease to be funny. Did I misunderstand?
Hmmm...I would say tha there is a certain ambiguity at work here, in the idea of a perfect mimicry, in the sense that it might be thought that a truly perfect mimicry would be rigorously indistinguishable from that which it was mimicking, and therefore, you are correct, not funny at all - indeed, not really anything.
However, against this, the idea is that what mimicry really does is not just simply to copy, but rather, to introduce a split with regard to that which it undertakes to mimic - such that the perfect mimicry in fact does not equate to a perfect imitation, but rather to the thinnest line of difference. Furthermore, as Zupancic understands it, this split is an originary one, and relates first of all to the that object of mimicry itself. So that, in other words, what mimicry makes clear is that we are all in some sense already the imitations of our selves.
Incidentally, for further information on the Zupancic talk, Infinite Thought has a report:
http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/
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