Connecting "categories of thought and social experience"

One of Loyola’s Jesuit ideals is this concept of reflection—taking a step back from our daily lives and looking inward in order to discover deeper meanings in our experiences.  Whether a student goes to Loyola University Maryland or any other Jesuit school, part of a Jesuit education is all about being reflective so we, as products of a Jesuit school, can identify our place in the world and where/ how we can best use our education productively for the betterment of society.  On our own campus, reflection is stressed as part of Campus Ministry, CCSJ, and ALANA, along with several other clubs on campus.  “Reflection” often seems to imply that a person is sitting in a chair, looking thoughtful and pondering life’s questions.  However, if we were to synthesize all of the stories we read for today, it becomes apparent that reflection can take several forms. 

We can reflect either on a specific issue or on our own lives by serving others (like CCSJ and the woman in Plan B), on retreats (like Campus Ministry), by travelling (like Embarkation), by being part of a play (in Anti-Temporality) or by laughing (like Douglas describes in “Jokes”).  Our Jesuit education and the readings all combine thought with social experiences because to have one without the other would render many life events meaningless.  This combination of thought and social experiences teaches us that we cannot just analyze the “social structures,” but we should analyze "thoughts systems",  our response to the existing social order, to challenge our own thinking (146 Douglas).  Douglas’ whole point in “Jokes” is that humor confronts social patterns by first amusing, then shocking, but ultimately there is a deeper meaning to be found and examined (158 Douglas).  Douglas writes how the form of a joke depends on the social experience; to have a joke form without the social context puts the attempted joker at risk of obscenity and offense.  However, the only way to recognize the joke is by being aware of both the social context and then the joke which is the opposite of that context, so a joke requires reflection/ awareness, as well as it grants us an opportunity to reflect upon the deeper meaning (as we’ve discussed with Tales of the Tikongs and Candide having a broader social point that we are supposed to think about).   

The woman in “Plan B” completely mirrors Douglas’ thoughts on humor and reflection, but she reflects in being of service to someone else.  Douglas wrote in his essay that a joke “represents a temporary suspension of the social structure,” the same social structure that the woman was losing her mind over.  It took the intrusion of another character in “Plan B” to be that temporary suspension for the main character.  While the story is not necessarily funny, this interruption was much needed for this woman because it caused her to disengage from the chaotic and overwhelming social order that “set about killing the desperately poor on behalf of the obscenely rich” (4-5 La Mott).  Similarly, we see the same trend in “Embarkation,” when the man meets and Icelander and he forces himself to stop and think “why am I so attracted to high altitude, barren places?”  While he is not as overwhelmed as the woman in “Plan B”, he asks himself this question and realizes where he fits among Erik Erikson and all of these great Vikings in history. 

Lastly, Victor Turner mentions in the end of his speech that theater creates dualism and distancing which creates “the possibility of critique” (255 Turner).  In other words, we, as the audience, can objectively say whether the play was awful or not because we are removed from the actors on stage.  Turner uses this example to support his claim that liminality—a phase in time where no rank or status exists-- permits us to “play with the factors of sociocultural experience, to disengage what is mundanely connected” and to simply realize, if not try to explain, the disarticulated parts of life. 

                These readings remind me of a video called “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace which is an excerpt of a commencement speech Wallace gave at Kenyon College about realizing this is water—that all of the tedium and mundaneness of everyday life is water and we can choose how to respond to this by looking at life objectively.  Like our authors for today, Wallace poses two options: by disengaging and stepping outside of ourselves, we can embrace this monotony or we can remain unconscious, what he calls “our default setting”.  While Wallace focuses on disengaging from ourselves and our own egos, our authors for today focus on stepping back from the social structures and analyzing our responses to these structures, and this is the difference between Douglas’ “analysis of social structures” versus the “structural analysis of thought systems”.

The major take-away from all four readings is that this reflection is necessary.  Detachment and self-reflection in these essays, at Loyola, and in Wallace’s speech, are crucial in order to see the contrast between form and formlessness, control and lack of control, superiority and inferiority, and the sacred and sacrilegious.  However, the only way to recognize these contrasts is by detaching ourselves, using reflection in this case.  Whatever form this reflection takes, whether it’s in the form of a joke, service, meditation, travelling, an interaction with another person, or going to a theater—all of these events allow us to disengage from the social structures we are all inherently part of.  Analyzing social structures alone will give us an opportunity for a joke, but we will miss “the full human experience of the joke” that Douglas urges us to exploit fully.  “The structural analysis of thought systems,” on the other hand, will give us the social experience and the joke form to fully exploit the joke; realizing our own thought systems is the only way social change is possible, or else we would just be looking at social structures for what they are and maintaining the status quo. It is only when we see both sides of the coin in our thought systems that we realize incongruity in jokes, but more importantly how to be fully and independently human, and not just a product of our social structures. 

The Power of the Clown

I had a conversation recently with my dad about when him and my mom first started dating; he told me about how my grandma hated him and made little to no effort to disguise that fact.  My dad, a man who had previously in his life been sent to his elementary school principal for putting a tack on his teacher’s chair (something I respectfully refuse to believe actually happened in the old days), saw her feelings towards him as an opportunity or incentive rather than a deterrent.  He used her own hostility to his advantage by actively poking fun at her distaste for him, much to bystanders’ delight, and her dismay.  He used these jokes as a leverage of sorts to, however briefly, implicate my grandma for her unfounded and biased opinions of him and question the soundness of the system of parental approval.  In this way, my dad took the liberties Turner claims are afforded to THE CLOWN when he “scoffs, lampoons, and judges people’s foibles, crimes, sins, and folly” without negative repercussions [Turner, 260].  “As much as they may want to, they can’t attack you if you’re just making a joke,” my Dad said as he was finishing up his story, “humor is an important tool to have at your disposal.”

I’m sure there’s no way my Dad could have recognized how what he said fit in with the anthropological, philosophical, and sociological theories of humor we have encountered in this class, but the connections certainly didn’t elude me.  This was a perfect example of the power dynamic being altered and questioned (as the superiority theory presents as a possibility) as well as a form of a sort of Freudian release of my dad’s own animosity.  He took up the mantle of the archetypal clown in order to criticize what he saw as injustice towards him (from a safe distance of course).  As Douglass says in Jokes, “humour chastises insincerity, pomposity, stupidity” and a joke is “seen as an attack on control” [Douglass, 148-149]. 

I think my dad, along with many others including myself, at some point in time came to the conclusion that humor is sometimes the only viable resort in situations where you feel powerless or confronted with something that is beyond your control is some manner.  This sentiment is echoed in Anne Lamott’s piece, Ham of God, as the narrator struggles to make sense of the chaotic and violent world that she is living in.  She is overwhelmed by the stories of the death and destruction in Iraq that she is bombarded with by every news outlet and despairs at the state of humanity.  Her story is purposefully exaggerated and light-hearted, but her question to her ‘Jesuit friend Father Tom’ is not meant in jest and resonates with readers who may have felt the same sort of dread: “How are we going to get through this craziness” [Lamott, 5]?  Lamott makes use of a playful, almost sacrilegious, tone to bring up her very serious doubts concerning a higher power or greater purpose to life.  It may be funny when she says that “the problem with God—or at any rate, one of the top five most annoying things about God—is that He or She rarely answers right away,” but, it also raises questions that are too large for any individual to approach [Lamott, 9].  Where is this God when horrible things are happening in the world?  This is a question that we can never truly grapple with and so, what better to do than use humor to try to make light of what we can?

As I am beginning to piece together from our studies of the various uses of humor- a clown, joke, or laugh are so much more than just manifestations of our amusement.  They are also tools that we must use to face the inexplicable and unsettling aspects in our lives.

Laughing Through and Because of Experience

            Recently I encountered a very stressful situation. I had a soft deadline for an application (which    I met early), but was told the day before the hard deadline that I needed to select, memorize, and film two three-minute monologues. A dear friend of mine, to whom I described the situation, said, “let me be your anger translator,” and subsequently acted out a scene in which he would stand behind me across from the offender(s). In his scene, I calmly responded: “Well it is a bit difficult to learn two completely new monologues in less than twenty-four hours, but I will do my best.” He then jumped and spun around, describing the situation exactly as it was, with no fear of offending anyone.

            This is humorous for a few reasons. First, it made me laugh and release tension that had been building up from when I heard the news. It also brought in superiority theory, for it was a form of the oppressed lashing out at the oppressor. And finally, it involved incongruity theory, because the absurdity of my buttoned-up friend jumping and screaming and “sass”-ing does not fit the everyday context of people professionally interacting with people.

            I felt the resonance of Anne LaMott during this interaction, for she too uses humor to work through her experiences. In her stories, she laughs instead of crying, or makes her readers laugh, and then is able to work through the situation to a truth and sometimes reverence. Note she begins “ham of god,” by telling her readers, “On my forty-ninth birthday, I decided that all of life was hopeless, and I would eat myself to death” (LaMott 3). This provides humor not only because she is using it to work through her pain, but also because of her blunt attitude. This breaks the social norm that we experience daily of people trying to cover everything up for one another, so we seem capable and proper individuals. Thus, for her humor to work, we need to be socialized creatures. We have all felt these feelings, and we may remember many times in which we have hidden our truth in favor of conventional experience. LaMott’s work allows us to experience her truth as well as our own, for through humor, she illustrates that it isn’t so terrible to be honest.

            Millman’s humor converses with experience in a slightly different manner. His humor is more that of situation. Many anecdotes which he relates are absurd, so the incongruity theory brings us right into his world, but some are also potentially disgusting, and he gives them a humor treatment instead of lamenting the gross aspect. For example, he begins by chronicling his travel by ferry and the subsequent “plague of seasickness” (Millman 1). He describes the situation with the phrase, “Nobody bothered to get up; they simply leaned over the side and heaved,” and follows the story with, “And yet quite a pleasant mood prevailed among my fifty or so bunk mates. They’d all seen much worse than a little half-digested sheep’s brain salad on the floor” (1). This humbles Millman as well as all of the other passengers, in a similar way to LaMott’s humbling of herself. He humbles most people he encounters, for he even describes the Vikings, known for being strong and mighty and tough, by referring to them as “cranky, restless people” (7). Thus he takes our experiential and socialized conventions and flips them on their sides.

            Victor Turner and Mary Douglas were both British anthropologists (born a year apart), and both studied symbols and rituals/rites of passage. Thus their works, too, depend on experience, but not as that which creates the need for laughter, as in LaMott and some of Millman. Anthropology, by definition, deals with humankind and their social roles and interaction. In her work, Douglas describes the development of intellectual thought with regard to joking as having “moved from the simple analysis of social structures current in the 1940s to the structural analysis of thought systems” (Douglas 146). She explains that the new problem is the dialogue between thought and social experience, for joking had not yet been explored in its “total relation to other modes of expression” (146). Thus, as anthropologists, Turner and Douglas work with experience to understand to what extent experience of a culture is needed to fully appreciate the humor.

            In Turner’s exploration, though he reminds us that he is “not a theologian or a mystic,” he takes an almost transcendentalist approach (Turner 244). He explains that as we are social creatures and thus form groups as we go through our uncertain lives, hoping that our sociability can be permanent. He also asserts that we “seek to rest our restless minds in meaningfulness” (245). This hearkens back to LaMott’s work, for on her forty-ninth birthday in her state of pain and despair, tries to ground herself in meaningfulness by following Matisse’s tenant: “I don’t know if I believe in God or not. . .But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer” (LaMott 6). Turner takes the group experience to then explore jokes as a function and product of a shared group experience. As I learned this week in my own stress and read from these four authors, experience is, then, a major player in how humor is created, why humor is created, and what a particular type of humor is.

Context is Key

            As Douglas talks about The Joke, he highlights the idea that humor draws attention to social structures and relationships. We have often discussed this in class, and I found Douglas’ assertion, that “the joke form rarely lies in the utterance alone, but that it can be identified in the total situation” (148), particularly apt. This is something I could not help but experience in my own humorous adventures.

Americans usually find jokes from different cultures less humorous than jokes from their own soil. I have a friend from France, and he told me this joke the other day:

A guy walks into a bar and yells, “It’s me!”

Everyone turns around, but it wasn’t him. [End.]

When he was finished, awkwardly waiting to see if I found it as funny as he did, I could muster only confusion. He rolled his eyes and explained that the “me” in this situation was subjective, so the people who turned around could have been expecting any “me.”  I kind of half-smiled and he was satisfied.

            Without the larger context of French as a first language, I was excluded from this joke. It was simply not as funny to me, because the words required a larger context, about which I was ignorant. Even after he explained the joke, though, I cannot say that I would pass it on to my friends, except here as an example of a joke that I’ll never find funny.

            The context for a joke is important even with instances of humor from our own backyard. Though we have often discussed the highlighting of a larger context through a joke, this reading of Douglas specifically reminded me of political cartoons. This genre might not always be side-splittingly, laugh-out-loud humorous, but, as Douglas points out, “one can appreciate a joke without actually laughing, and one can laugh for other reasons than from having perceived a joke” (148).

            The cartoon below can only be appreciated if the viewer is informed about Obama and his healthcare policies, thinks that a smug Obama or a precocious child is laughable, or perhaps simply gets a kick out of the President being dressed up as the symbol of Christmas and called “Obama Claus.” Without any of these qualities of the viewer, however, this cartoon is either offensive, as to one who wholeheartedly endorses Obama’s healthcare policies, or confusing, as to someone who has none of the context with which to appreciate it.

            Douglas is quite right to point out the importance of context in humorous situations. Sometimes, the context is highlighted by the joke, but other times, the context must be a prerequisite to the understanding of the joke. It seems possible that this kind of humor is less effective than the former. In Tales of the Tikongs, for example, any readers are invited to laugh before they consider the larger ideas represented. Only those that already agree with the ideas represented in political cartoons can appreciate them and their like.

Lack of Control in Kindergarteners

            In Douglas’s Jokes excerpt he provides an extension to our previous reading on Freud’s theory of humor. He restates, from Freud, that jokes become funny when our conscious control gives way to our unconscious thoughts: then, there is a moment of relief in the freedom to unchain the unconscious. Douglas presses onward to say that children (among others) are funny because they are not in control of the line between conscious and unconscious. Essentially they say whatever comes to their mind because, at least what I took away from it, their brains have not fully formed that divide of consciousness yet.

            I think that this statement is definitely true and this one small part of the readings for today caught my eye because it most definitely related to my service at Tunbridge Charter School. I have seen Douglas’s theory on children proven during my times in the classroom. I was assigned to work with a kindergarten class and kindergarteners are usually the funniest age group because they really have no filters, they say what’s on their mind and that lack of restraint is what makes their comments so funny to adults. I think it is when kids are not trying and speaking their mind that they are funny rather than when they try to tell a joke. The kids in my class crack me up although I don’t think they intend to: they’re just telling life like it is from their perspective in the world.

            The first example of this would be my first day of service. Earlier that day I had a minor surgical procedure on my toe. I was fine I just had to wear flip flops instead of a closed-toed shoe and sport a large blue bandage over my big toe. I arrived in the classroom when they were all lining up for lunch and the teacher told them all to say hi to Ms. Toni. They all yelled hi, some waved, and then one student—obviously just curious—yelled out “What happened to her toe?!” To which the teacher replied, “I don’t know, why don’t you ask Ms. Toni.” To which I got “What happened to your toe?!” I explained that I had a boo boo on it and had to keep it bandaged. Within seconds shirts and pants were lifted up, arms, elbows, knees, stomachs all exposed so everyone could show me their boo boos. I found this hysterical. I was like the shiny new toy in class that everyone wanted attention from. The kindergarteners were being completely serious showing me their boo boos, no joke involved, but their lack of a filter in asking about my toe and what proceeded caused me to laugh about it.

            I then walked to lunch with them and sat with a small group at the lunch table. Amidst talking about the movie Box Trolls and telling me their names this one kid, said, “I want to, you know, make it passed kindergarten and, you know, go to the real first grade.” Another hysterical moment for me. Now this kid wasn’t trying to be funny, he was stating facts: he wanted to go to first grade, just like I would say I want to make it to graduation. Yet the manner in which he said it and the funny possibility that he didn’t already know he would be making it into the “real” first grade was funny to me. His unconscious desires were conscious therefore letting him speak his mind, no line and no filter from which to hold back thoughts or feelings.

            I have experienced a few other funny moments such as the ones I described during my three weeks at Tunbridge, however the rest have currently slip my mind (maybe I should remember to write them down next time). I can concur with Douglas’s statement that children are funny because of their lack of control. As kids and learning minds they honestly want to know things or give an opinion but we find what they question or come up with funny sometimes because of their lack of knowing and lack of control. 

Beyond the Laughter

Humor is subjective. While many have sought a comprehensive explanation for the physiological or psychological act of laughter, traditional knowledge dictates that the degree to which a person finds any individual joke funny is entirely contingent upon the social context in which it is delivered. This explains why a joke translated from a foreign language often falls flat, and why we scratch our heads reading about the Dogon tribe’s practice of playfully exchanging excrement (Douglas 147). However, some cultural anthropologists have challenged the notion that a culture-free analysis of joking is impossible, and have pointed to several key components of humor that transcend societal barriers.

In Jokes, cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that the common denominator in all jokes, regardless of their cultural context, is their subversion of power and control (149). This is not pure superiority theory, however, because she contends that the “joke pattern” must include elements incongruity and relief. She writes: “The essence of the joke is that something formal is attacked by something informal, something organized and controlled, by something vital, energetic” (149). While LaMott’s Ham of God may seem like a straightforward example of this theory – the informal “Birkenstock type” speaker beams her complaints against The Man (the Bush Administration, but also the media and mainstream political culture more generally) – a Dogon’s tossing of excrement also serves as another example of a joke that seeks to level out the hierarchy within a particular subgroup.

Although cultural anthropologist Victor Turner focuses less on the individual joke and more on the joker, he too argues for the universal capacity of humor to confront power dynamics. In “Images of Anti-Temporality: An Essay in the Anthropology of Experience,” he discusses the inevitability of “social dramas,” and the necessity for relief constructs (246). This relief can come in the form of a “performance,” in which the performer is afforded the “unusual power” to “criticize society as a whole with impunity” (256). Entertainment is thus cathartic in this way no matter which cultural brand of comedy it may practice.

As a non-Western example of this, Turner points to a Hindu performance in which the Kutiyattam actors entertain in a way which critiques the caste system while evading the wrath of those ridiculed (256). In contemporary American society, the satire of the “organized and controlled” by the “vital” and “energetic” is a billion dollar industry. Our options for televised late-night ridicule of political figures and institutions are endless. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report might come first to mind, but Saturday Night Live, Real Time with Bill Maher, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, South Park, Family Guy, American Dad, and countless others would fall under this category. The entertainers on these shows are offered impunity to be the “dialectical dancing partner” of the social dramas we encounter; joking on the sometimes painful elements of the social hierarchy that governs all societies.

The funniness of any particular joke will always vary from person to person. Human beings, after all, are deeply preferential creatures. This is a subject Lawrence Millman touches on in Embarkation, in which he reflects humorously on his travels, writing: “The person who delights in Paris might turn up his nose at smelly Rome or odorless Copenhagen. An aficionado of deserts might prefer the Desert of Maine to the shamelessly overbearing Sahara” (7). Similarly, I might personally laugh out loud at a willfully ignorant sports announcer but not at a cat on an underwater treadmill. However, Douglas argues that it is wrong to assume that “the acid test of a joke is whether it provokes laughter or not" (148). Rather, a joke can be universally evaluated based on its capacity to refract, distort, and subvert a certain element of a social hierarchy. With this in mind, it is important to remember to think beyond the laughter and appreciate a joke for the micro-rebellion it wages instead. 

Joking at Tunbridge

Rooted in the belief that active students are engaged students, Tunbridge Private Charter School places a strong emphasis on mixing work with play. The resulting environment is unlike any other I’ve encountered (granted, I don’t pretend to have spent a lot of time in schools). On my first day, students in the third grade class I’d been placed in opened their morning by thoughtfully contemplating a question of actionable intent (how do actions speak louder than words?) before immediately moving into a rousing variation of rock, paper, scissors that involved a great deal of squatting, standing, sitting, squatting, and standing again. After they had been given the opportunity to move around a bit, the students then sat down to begin their vocabulary lesson with increased focus.

Humor certainly has its role within this hyper energized curriculum. On the day I started my service, the entire school was participating in an “orange out,” celebrating the excitement of the Oriole’s launch into the postseason by wearing -- wait for it -- all orange (not a difficult task, given that the school t-shirts are actually orange).  The motivating punchline: if every student participated, the principal would take a pie to the face at the end of the day. As you can imagine, this generated a fair bit of excitement amongst the student body. A principal taking a pie to the face follows the joke pattern outlined by Douglas in this week’s readings, with a chaotic source disrupting a formal establishment of power. Simply put, you can bet the whole school will be laughing at the image of a pie-covered principal.

 Laughter plays an important role within individual classroom lessons as well. On my second day of service, I was placed in a lively fourth grade classroom in which the teacher lightened the mood by infusing frequent jokes into her vocabulary lesson. For every piece of vocab she asked the students to come up with a corresponding sentence that displayed their understanding of word at hand, at which point she would often playfully challenge their statements. For example, when a student called rapper Eminem “illustrious,” she went on to voice her preference for rapper Jay Z instead. This served to relieve the tension built by the students’ challenge to understand advanced vocabulary words. Additionally, it appeared to increase student engagement. Everyone listens so as not to miss out on the joke and students are eager to participate in the hope of sharing a comic interaction with their beloved teacher.

Though my activity at Tunbridge has been limited to grading papers thus far, I have thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to see humor at play within the teacher-student dynamic and larger school community. I look forward to gathering a better understanding of how humor can be used as a teaching tool and how joking can affect energy levels and morale in an educational institution.​