I have
picked texts where laughter jars the reader repeatedly. To legitimize my
project to others I have to pick laughs that repeat themselves, that recur with
such frequency and obvious oddness that it is easy to argue that the author or
film-maker (the generator of the laugh) was deliberately using laughter as a
device, to do something.
However,
we need to recognize that “throwaway” laughs are of incident also. In fact, by
way of their very superfluity and fugitivity they more perfectly crystallize
what I believe to be the true nature of laughter. These laughs surface in a
text without the author’s permission and are precisely more interesting because
of this stowaway quality. They are isolated because they are singular,
anomalous because they are of a different (a-structural) order to the text,
they don't "do" anything because they refuse the tyranny of utility
which demands that everything become a means to an end.
When you
read these laughs in a book or watch these laughs in a film, you are jolted
from the narrative, returned abruptly to the outside of representation.
“Ha-ha,” he said.
The laugh
is a glitch that interrupts and makes visible various generic parameters of the
text – the expectation that the plot will move forward and resolve, that the
characters are self-contained individuals embedded in a social milieu, and,
more basically, that internal and external reality can be represented with
letters arranged into words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters.
The
laughter glitch may appear only one time in a whole novel. But across
literature and film, that same glitch recurs with a frequency that is itself
comic (or horrific, depending on your temperament). These laughs are swept away
with a fearful denial we recognize from every horror film: it only
happened that one time, maybe it won’t happen again.
But it
has already happened again, it happens everywhere. The barely concealed panic
that underlies these denials stems from the fear that the generic borders of
the novel, the individual, time itself as a progressive narrative, are coming
apart. The laughter glitch is ignored not
because it is a one-off but
because it’s very fugitivity and particularity indexes the breakdown, the
coming undone, of structures of meaning and feeling.
And we
all know what happens to the teenage girl who ignores the scraping at the
window it's only a branch it
won't happen again.
Whether
this laughter is revolutionary (as Benjamin would have it) or barbaric (as
no-fun-Adorno repeatedly insists) is what I want to investigate.
I am a collector of laughs.
