Thursday, April 9, 2009

Excising the Joke: A Problem for Scholarship

Continuing from my last post about how we should approach studying humor, I argue that we should, indeed, study it. The question remains about which approach to doing so is the best.

In class, we've taken a few different approaches.

For many of the stand-up comedians we watched full length shows of their performances, analyzing them (mostly) in their entirety. Though we may have focused on particular jokes momentarily, the brunt of the discussion centered around thematic elements: Chris Rock's use of gestures, Ralphie May's tendency to make the audience uncomfortable, etc.

We took a similar approach when we looked at the female stand-ups, but we only got short glimpses (five minutes!) at most of their work. The conclusions we drew, to me, highlighted the small sample we had to work with. They seemed contrived, forced, and not very insightful. Perhaps a longer view of these works would have provided much more illumination into the elusive female stand-up.

For written works, for a few authors we have read multiple pieces. Similar to the longer stand-up, reading multiple works allows for a more holistic view of the writer's use of humor. This enabled us to make (as we did in class on Wednesday) a catalog of "typical" tropes for individual authors or for an entire genre of humor. As we discussed, the Southwestern comics used dialogue, played on the country v. city tension, and frequently depicted slapstick.

In other written works, we had smaller sample sizes, but for some reason these were more fulfilling scholarly endeavors for me than the short clips of stand-up. The pieces, even though not as revealing as a series of the author's work, were typically complete, stand alone works. This allowed insight into the way that individual authors used familar tropes successfully (or unsuccessfully).

We haven't, however, done much close textual analysis of individual jokes. The book I am reading for the review works almost entirely from this methodology and I am questioning its validity. For example, the author, John Limon, closely analyzes a joke from Carl Reiner/Mel Brooks skit to conclude that a "male-male comedy team is an odd couple, and an odd couple is a union that cannot declare its essence to be this or that" (49). He extends this to an examination of the abjection of homosexuality in these duo comedy teams.

Regardless of my opinion on the conclusion, I do think this method is questionable. Can a single joke be that revealing? Jokes, as Limon himself points out, are more audience and context-dependent than just about any other art form. Doesn't taking a single joke in this way negate that context and radically alter the audience? What about all of the performance leading up to this joke? What about all of the performance moving away from it?

We do similar things with other literary criticism. I have written a paper about a single line of a poem. Somehow that doesn't seem as questionable to me, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps because the poetry is less audience dependent than a comedic performance?

2 comments:

  1. I agree with what you are saying about the difference between poetry and humor, but only to a certain extent. Certain kinds of humor do reach mass audiences. It's not always as specialized as you describe. I know we talk a lot about audience like all this humor is a cult-following or something, but in reality, the names we know, the movies we see, they all touch people's funnybones in a similar way, otherwise the mass media marketers wouldn't toy with comedy or stand-up. For instance, you can get Chris Rock's new stand-up routine in any redbox near you. In sum, the audience isn't all that different necessarily all of the time. A single line is thought about quite a lot. Comedy is more audience dependent, but not so much so that the comedy necessarily lacks the depth of poetry merely because it has to be changed slightly to different audiences in stand-up (it doesn't have to be changed at all in stable media forms like video).

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  2. Single lines are also oft remembered--I think this is a function of advertising strategy, where the tag line is so memorable that we can remember it long after we have forgotten the product. But I agree that analyzing a single joke from a repertoire of them often can be misleading--just as one line of a poem can also be if we don't connect it back to a central theme or some other characteristic of the author's work. Does Limon do this in the study you mention?

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