Down with laughter
This is no time for jokes, comrades.
Democracy’s stilts are showing, and the people’s power has come into question for the umpteenth time in human history. We’ve been in trouble for a long time, and it’s kinda hilarious.
There is a camp of people who believe the oppressed can finally be freed from those in power, liberating us from wretched hierarchy…by using power, of course. The flaw in this logic is immediately apparent, but there are those who adamantly reject that this is a self-defeating strategy - AND THAT’S FUNNY AS HELL.
I’d bet my right titty that there are plenty of confused readers ready to unsubscribe on sight, but that’s why I’m writing this: to educate ya’ll and to entertain anyone who already gets it.
To understand why de-oppressors’ futility and Bill Cosby gifs are funny, we have to understand humor itself…
which we don’t. I’ll just clear that up right now. We have little evidence to help us understand how humor came to be, what it does now, and god forbid what the future of humor looks like. What we do have is enough to kinda see what we find funny.
Humor has been scorned, suppressed, rejected all before we really had a clue what it is.
Only in the last 300 years have we really started to understand what we find funny. Since the late 1770s the dominating theory of incongruity suggests that we find humor when “one of these things is not like the other”. When we find something unexpected, our thoughts have to suddenly switch gears and this is where we laugh.
Before this, thinkers believed humor to be about superiority, and sometimes it is. This is what we call “punching down” today. When we laugh at someone’s expense, we’re backing up Plato’s thoughts on humor. Plato found humor to be dangerous in that it is uncontrollable, overriding our cognitive control. Plato was a hater about comedy.
Plato decreed that “No composer of comedy, iambic or lyric verse shall be permitted to hold any citizen up to laughter, by word or gesture, with passion or otherwise” (Laws, 7: 816e; 11: 935e).
Now, Plato’s fear of the unhinged isn’t entirely unfounded. Humor is reflexive. One might almost call it a relief. Actually more than one has. The relief theory of humor suggests that humor (especially dark humor) can help people cope with stress, fear, or anxiety. Think of it as a mental Kit-Kat.
Now, maybe you can see a few different ways we could find humor in the sad realization that things can get worse: Bill Cosby is going on tour.
In all seriousness, it isn’t particularly funny that humans haven’t learned from their mistakes. We keep falling and not all of us make it back up. We have outpaced ourselves technologically, and are building upon a mental house of cards. Humans can’t hang with all the information they’ve created.
What’s worse, laughing at all of this, for any of the above reasons is socially unacceptable. I get it though. The proles are trying to seize control, and in doing so, they absolutely must have a handle on what is deemed funny. The only problem is that humor is a great display of social dominance. Recent evidence suggests that when it comes to busting a gut, social kings are more disinhibited than those with a lower social standing1. The fact that those leading the charge can’t take a joke is… problematic.
There’s a lot of people talking about “dismantling” and “defunding” and “deconstructing”, and those same people are pushing ideologies that don’t have a better historical track record than our current system. Over the last century we’ve “dismantled” quite a few of those types of systems, and well… we’ve all seen who gets the last laugh.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022103116302359
Dunking!