Jokes and Their Relation to Crisis

The Stone


In June, the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney found himself under attack for a joke he tried to make at a meeting with a group of unemployed people in Tampa, Fla. “I am also unemployed,” Romney announced, insinuating that the job he lacked was the presidency.

His mistake, of course, was to have ignored the very meaning of the economic crisis, including the class-based divisions and anxieties it has aggravated. His statement of identity and identification (“I am also X”) achieved the exact opposite effect, underscoring the unbridgeable gap between the “unemployed” multimillionaire and the out-of-work Floridians. But in a sense, the joke ultimately worked, though not in the way Romney intended: it showed, above all, his own cluelessness. The joke was on him.

The subsequent moralizing responses of Romney’s critics were remarkably uniform. They boiled down to the admonishment that the crisis is not a laughing matter, that poking fun at unemployment is disrespectful to the unemployed, and so forth. But what if, on the contrary, humor and crisis share a common provenance? What if humor invariably germinates in response to a crisis, as a reaction to the excessive splits between us and our social, political or economic reality; or to the divisions within us; or to the rifts within reality itself?

Humor, at its best, is the self-consciousness of crisis.

If so, then laughter, instead of mending the multiple fissures of the crisis, only further accentuates them, makes them finally and fully what they already are. Humor is not, as some believe, a coping strategy or an outlet for the frustrations that cannot be expressed in any other way … or at least it is not just that. At its best, it is the self-consciousness of crisis.

Without changing anything in “objective” reality, humor permits reality to laugh at itself, and in doing so, to stand outside of itself, to become other to itself. At the core of the word “crisis,” which, like “critique,” is derived from the Greek verb krinein, connoting separation and division, is this hyperbolic distancing from itself of the entity that undergoes it. And humor might well be the mechanism that triggers the transition from one sense of separation to the other: from crisis to critique.

Consider, for instance, the following joke: “In America, banks rob people because that is where the money is!” In the reversal of commonsense, which is but another name for ideology, this pithy remark echoes the rhetorical question of Bertolt Brecht, “What is robbing a bank compared to founding a bank?” Implying that the financial system as a whole is an institutionalized robbery of even greater proportions, the joke instantaneously pierces through the veil of ideology. To be sure, a humorous accusation often stops at just that. It accepts the target of its critique as a brute fact of life. While no one supports the conduct of banks stealing from the people, laughter confirms that the audience fatalistically accepts this political-economic reality. C’est la vie! is the secret motto of humor.

Leif Parsons

Still, fatalism is only one piece of the puzzle here. Also at stake in the logic of crisis is nothing less than time and human finitude: our limited capacity to manipulate the future, aging and our impending death.

Suffice it to look at two popular jokes to realize that the issue of time shadows everything that has to do with the crisis:

1. What’s the definition of optimism? An investment banker ironing five shirts on a Sunday evening.

2. A man goes to his bank manager and says: “I’d like to start a small business. How do I go about it?” “Simple,” says the bank manager. “Buy a big one and wait.”

A joke accepts the target of its critique as a brute fact of life. C’est la vie! is the secret motto of humor.

In each case, finite time — time that is about to reach its term; the future, more threatening than ever before — is the object of concern, animating the joke. If crisis puts us face to face with the unknown, it cannot help but provoke extreme anxiety.

How does humor relate to this future and how does it cope with this sentiment? Far from assuaging the anxieties stimulated by the unknown, it is a symbolic device that enables human beings collectively to confront their own finitude and ageing, not to mention the limits of their social, political and economic realities. In the insecure employment (even) of the investment banker and the melting away of savings, we recognize ourselves in the present and, more importantly, in the future, forming, perhaps, a basic bond of solidarity.

Hence: (1) the temporal fissure between the present and the future is the site of the crisis; and (2) humor puts this divide under a symbolic spotlight. But who, exactly, laughs at whom when the temporal structure of the crisis is made visible? Is it the present that laughs at itself? Does it chuckle at its grim future? Or is it our future, laughing at us in the present?

Laughing at ourselves, at the various crises in which we find ourselves, means laughing at our finitude, our irremediable weakness, the feeling of being overwhelmed and crushed by the future. This would suggest a straightforward interpretation, whereby the present laughs at the future, or, at any rate, at its own fear of what is to come. To make fun of the future is to put it under our control, if only for a brief instant of a shared explosive laughter, by mastering the fear it provokes.

Laughing at ourselves, at the various crises in which we find ourselves, means laughing at our weakness, the feeling of being overwhelmed by the future.

At the same time, however, humor reveals the strength of weakness, and, hence, our capacity to face our own predicament without dissimulations, false reassurances or unrealistic expectations. Instead of endeavoring to master the future, we plunge into the chasm between what is to come and the present, deepening the crisis in ironic self-consciousness.

Jokes, even if they are meant to be shared against a background of common cultural and linguistic presuppositions, are the sites of friction: herein lies their affinity to the situations of crisis. Internally contradictory, they spell out the fatalistic acceptance of reality and discontent with what has been thus accepted; powerlessness and a new empowerment; a confrontation with the terrifying future and an openness to the weakness it portends. Humor, therefore, is one of the best outlets for expressing the crisis, itself a result of internal contradictions and divisions that have become unsustainable in their current state.

Paraphrasing Martin Heidegger, we might say that the essence of humor is nothing humorous; it is, rather, the separation, variously called “time,” “self-consciousness,” “critique” or “crisis,” of the I from itself and from the world it lives in. When humor responds to a crisis, it reverts back to its own essence, launching a tacit critique that retraces the divisions and contradictions from which the crisis has erupted. But while the essence of humor is nothing humorous, this should not prevent us from having a good, hearty laugh.

Michael Marder

Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz. He is the editor, with Patricia Vieira, of the forthcoming book “Existential Utopia: New Perspectives on Utopian Thought,” and the author of the forthcoming book “Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life.”