No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity

By Angela Rosenthal, David Bindman and Adrian W. B. Randolph

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, this collection—which gathers scholars in the fields of race, ethnicity, and humor—seems especially urgent. Inspired by Denmark’s Muhammad cartoons controversy, the contributors inquire into the role that racial and ethnic stereotypes play in visual humor and the thin line that separates broad characterization as a source of humor from its power to shock or exploit. The authors investigate the ways in which humor is used to demean or give identity to racial, national, or ethnic groups and explore how humor works differently in different media, such as cartoons, photographs, film, video, television, and physical performance. This is a timely and necessary study that will appeal to scholars across disciplines.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
• Release date: Nov 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781611688221

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PREFACE

This collection of essays treats a topic very much at the core of the being and writing of my late wife, Angela Rosenthal. She, along with David Bindman, conceived and convened a term-long Humanities Institute at the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College that took place in 2007 addressing race and humor in visual culture. The institute brought together scholars from a range of disciplines and subfields to explore issues relating to visual humor and difference, broadly conceived in terms of religion, race, nationality, gender, and identity. Subsequently, Angela drew together some of the papers presented at Dartmouth and some other materials, with the plan of publishing a collection of essays. The project, however, was cut short when she died in November of 2010. In the last year of her life, Angela sought to complete a number of projects and brought this one tantalizingly close to publication. This volume is, therefore, a memorial to Angela and a contribution to her life’s work.

Angela was a joyous and critical individual and scholar. She passionately believed in the transformative power of art and imagery. Her scholarship on eighteenth-century art focused on gender and race, and emerged quite naturally from political commitments to equity. Yet she was never simply a partisan voice; she believed in the richness of history, wherein one may find all manner of unexpected traces. She also never shied away from difficult topics. This is especially the case when treating such potentially explosive materials defined by the terms race and humor.

There is little doubt in my mind that her interest in both these topics stemmed from her personal experiences growing up in Germany, and from her early engagement with the art of William Hogarth. In Germany, Angela was involved in various movements fighting for women’s rights and human rights. Intellectually, she was drawn to eighteenth-century British art, and, working with David Bindman, first at Westfield College and then at University College London, she developed a deep interest in William Hogarth and the comic visual tradition. She was fascinated with British humor and felt a deep affinity for its balancing mordant directness with a certain obliqueness. This mapped well onto her own frank and open yet complex personality.

Choosing to match humor with race did emerge, as David Bindman points out in the introduction that follows, from topical events. Writing as I am, in the wake of the tragic killings in Paris in January 2015, it is impossible not to reflect on visual humor’s power to move. Among those killed were those working for Charlie Hebdo, a publication known for its scathing visual humor. Without fully knowing or understanding the motivations of the killers, I think it clear that the events demand we reflect, yet again, on the ways in which we interpret visual humor. Much is at stake in such interpretations.

Angela’s engagement with race developed not only in response to such events, but also from her fascination with contemporary diasporic art. She was an avid student of contemporary art, and it was in the galleries and exhibitions of New York, London, Cologne, and in Italy, as well as in her personal contact with artists from around the world, that her interests in race were forged. She treasured the opportunity offered by the Humanities Institute at Dartmouth to examine, in deep conversations, the problematic entwinement of humor and otherness that bedevils so many discussions of race.

Angela did not write a finished introduction to this collection; David Bindman has stepped in to provide that. I would, however, like to include here some notes Angela did pen in preparing this volume; these draw on a text she and David prepared to accompany an exhibition at the Hood Museum of Art, which complemented the Humanities Institute:

Humor has always been a valuable strategy through which highly sensitive and difficult issues could be raised for serious consideration. Etymologically derived from the ancient Greek theories of the bodily fluids, or humors, this word now describes a fundamental human emotion. Humor fulfills a broad range of functions, and because it is linked to subtle mental processes and moral issues, it can also tell us much about the mentalities, customs, sensibilities, and anxieties of different peoples and cultures. It is a powerful force that can elicit pleasure, release, or outrage, and those who wield it often intentionally transgress social boundaries. Humor can be a form of self-assertion and defense. It can also be a particularly effective weapon with which to ridicule others, as is so often the case in visual satire and caricature.

This book seeks to deepen our understanding of the wounding and healing properties of humorous representation. The collection of essays engages with a broad range of objects and images, ranging from seventeenth-century Italian paintings and eighteenth-century satires and caricatures to nineteenth-century Japanese woodcuts, and from racist cartoons from Argentina to humorous passing in U.S. American television. These works do not address one race or nationality but demonstrate how humorous stereotyping has been deployed across and between groups that only in the nineteenth century were classified into races. All, however, reduce the subject to a limited number of easily grasped generalities. The effect of such condensed imagery is both powerful and pernicious. Contemporary artists have sought in various ways to demonstrate and counteract the continuing influence of such imagery, by exposure, irony, and appropriation, in some cases turning the tables by inverting stereotypes. In order to come to grips with both past and present prejudice, it is essential to analyze, historically and critically, the sometimes deeply offensive ways in which humor has been used to posit cultural, ethnic, racial, and national differences.

The goal of this book is not to reopen old wounds but to initiate discussion about the multilayered and complex ways visual humor has attracted our attention throughout history, and across different media and geographies. The essays here collected explore the interrelated themes of human representation and classification, and how visual images (not just art) have constructed and provided the means to produce troubling degrees of human worth, through stereotyping, emphasizing beauty or ugliness, by association, or by ascribing spiritual properties to facial features, or a combination of these. These have often been linked to race, nationality, or ethnicity, which are best understood not as fixed categories but as historically contingent and fluid. Such issues show history acting directly on the present in ways we do not sufficiently understand, but which we need urgently to examine if we are to deal constructively with increasingly multicultural societies and their diverse historical memories, constructs, and—importantly for us—images. To begin thinking about such racially inflected visual images constructively requires expertise across the disciplinary boundaries that often separate art, literary, political, and social history, psychology, perception, geography, ethnic studies, etc.

I have decided to focus on humor because it is simultaneously easy and difficult. Easy because everyone responds almost automatically to the comic; it is a transcultural way of dealing with human difference. Difficult because it can be a weapon of prejudice and it can provoke involuntary reactions and discomfort. It is a topic that immediately stimulates debate and therefore seems appropriate for a publication that I hope will have a long-term impact.

Angela would want to have thanked many individuals, but especially her mother and father, Anneliese and Peter Rosenthal, and her sister, Felicia Rosenthal. Many of the ideas that fueled this project were the topic of conversation with our friends Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Diane Miliotes. Thanks must also go to the participants in the Humanities Institute and the attendant conference—the contributors to this volume, along with Michael Chaney, Ada Cohen, Marty Favor, Deniz Göktürk, M. Thomas Inge, the late Esiaba Irobi, Alexandra Karentzos, Adam Kern, K. Dian Kriz, Josh Kun, Christopher Marshall, Jacqueline Stewart, and Rebecca Wanzo. I also wish to acknowledge the generous support of the trustees of the Leonard Hasting Schoff Publication Fund of the Columbia University Seminars. Angela’s colleagues and friends in the Faculty Seminar on Eighteenth-Century European Culture applied for this funding in her memory. Thanks, in particular, go to Al Coppola, Frank Felsenstein, and Alice Newton.

Moreover, I would also like to mention the formative relationship that Angela enjoyed with other scholars and practitioners: the sadly departed Maud Saulter, Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, and Susanne Zantop, as well as Roland Augustin, Malcolm Baker, John Brewer, Marie-Antoinette Chiarenza, Chris Cozier, Bernardette Fort, Mark Hallett, Andreas Haus, Daniel Hauser, Lubaina Himid, Melissa Hyde, Christina Threuther, and Karl Werckmeister. The colleagues at Northwestern and Dartmouth who supported Angela in her work and life are too many to mention, but I know that she appreciated the intellectual community she found at both institutions. The exhibition that took place at the Hood Museum of Art in 2007 embodied Angela’s belief in the productive symbiosis that should exist between museum and the academy. I know that she would want me to thank Kathy Hart for her efforts in staging that exhibition, as well as those of Brian Kennedy, then director of the Hood. Moreover, I know that Angela would want to extend her warmest thanks to Jonathan Crewe, director of the Leslie Center for the Humanities when her proposal for the institute was accepted, and to Isabel Weatherdon, who addressed the administrative details of arranging for the institute with such professionalism. And finally, thanks go to David Bindman, Angela’s adviser and friend. It is fitting that he should be the one to help draw this collection together and, in the text that follows, introduce it. I would like to add my thanks above all to David, for helping me through this rather difficult but important project.

Adrian W. B. Randolph

INTRODUCTION

No Laughing Matter

Visual Humor in Practice and Theory

DAVID BINDMAN

The idea of connecting humor with race, nationality, and ethnicity was stimulated by recent evidence of the topicality and even urgency of the subject and the way it demonstrated that history was a living force in contemporary life. The first impetus was the furor over the publication in Denmark in September 2005 of newspaper cartoons satirizing the prophet Muhammad, and the violent events that followed it. Another, less-serious example from the same year was the Flying Pigs advertisement put out by the British Labour Party, in which two Conservative politicians were shown with their heads on the bodies of flying pigs, with the caption The day the Tory sums add up. The fact that both politicians, Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin, were Jewish reminded some Tories of the racist association, going back to eighteenth-century satirical prints, made between Jews and pigs, and the supposed forbidden desire of the former for the latter.

These cases were very different examples of the power and offensive potential of visual images and the persistence of memory across the centuries. Humor can of course also be for minority groups a form of self-assertion or a defense, adopting the terms of hostile assumptions as a way of coping with them. At the heart of such humor is the stereotype that implies a deviation from the unstated norm of the dominant group and which opens the minority group to contempt or ridicule. A stereotype may be verbal or visual, but it can be critically adopted or internalized by those stereotyped, or disguised and implicitly reasserted through passing as a member of another group.

In addition to the topicality of visual satire there has been a resurgence of interest in its history, especially that of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, with notable books by Richard Godfrey, Diana Donald, and Vic Gatrell, and a number of exhibitions in London and elsewhere that have brought such artists as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, George Cruikshank, and Richard Newton into the artistic canon. The concern of recent writers on the subject has been to look at such images in their own right, with their own methods and conventions, not just as illustrations to political history.

These new concerns have brought up a number of issues Angela Rosenthal and I thought would provide the focus for the two-month-long seminar we convened in 2007 at Dartmouth College. Is there a process by which visual humor works in a similar way across global, racial, national, and ethnic divisions, over different periods of time? In other words, are there common strategies in the way humor is used to demean or give identity to racial, national, or ethnic groups? Does humor work differently in different media, such as the cartoon strip, photographs, film, video, television, and physical performance, with their interplay between the visual, the verbal, and the performative? And connected with this, what work does visual humor do that goes beyond verbal humor?

Such questions determined our choice of participants, and we were delighted to recruit scholars with a wide range of geographical and temporal experience, encompassing Europe, Africa, Japan, and South America, working on periods from the ancient world to the present, in a wide range of media, including comic strip, photography, early television, and contemporary film. The institute, as will be evident from the chapters that follow, was in the fullest sense interdisciplinary, and, quite unusually, ranges over issues in relation to Africans, Jews, Japanese, and the Hispanic and native peoples of South America.

The chapter based on the keynote address to the institute by Kobena Mercer is concerned with the theory and practice of humor, and especially of laughter, which Mercer identifies as predominantly communal rather than private, but, in defining the limits of belonging to a group, potentially divisive. Noting that laughter not only is essentially human but distinguishes our humanity both from nature and from higher ideals, Mercer considers Mikhail Bakhtin and his definition of the antagonistic interdependence of laughter and seriousness, as found in late medieval society, expressed particularly in paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. He is therefore concerned with the ambivalence of humor and the way it counteracts lofty and abstract ideals by emphasizing the physicality and contingency of normal life. For that reason it is necessarily opposed to the claims of official or high art, just as in Bakhtin’s late medieval world the comic and the serious represent antagonistic worldviews, and the comic can itself be redemptive to the extent that Protestant religious authority tried with limited success to suppress it or reduce it to a low genre. Above all, the low road, with its emphasis on bodily functions as opposed to the spirit, lives on in modern art and in popular culture, from Duchamp’s urinal Fountain to the more racially inflected work of Chris Ofili.

Turning to blackface minstrelsy, Mercer notes the ambivalence of the genre, how the imitation of black figures by white men can contain the flattery of imitation as well as a process of othering, but could also be identified with by immigrant groups struggling for assimilation. But it is only in the 1960s that African American artists were fully able to exploit the carnivalesque implicit in blackface and other demeaning representations. Laughter becomes another weapon of protest against marginalization, along with more serious images, and, as in Robert Colescott’s paintings, deliberately subverts with coarse humor icons of serious art, while other artists have worked with the most abject materials of demotic life.

The next five chapters deal with historical satire, works conceived within a humorous context with the aim of comic ridicule based on stereotypical images. While the chapters of Frank Felsenstein and Katherine Hart look mainly at eighteenth-century English satire, Paul Kaplan’s looks at a unique late sixteenth-century Italian painting by Passarotti, in which an African couple has a prominent place in a low tavern scene, the very epitome of a Bakhtinian emphasis on bodily functions. This fascinating painting shows that some of the tropes of later racism were already established in the sixteenth century: an emphasis on Africans’ sexuality, louche associations, and animality.

Felsenstein’s chapter on the representation of Jews in England highlights the particular characteristics ascribed to each race. Following Shakespeare’s characterization of Shylock, Jews appear in English eighteenth-century caricature prints and in popular culture as rapacious tradesmen and especially as peddlers, selling trinkets and hats, which they wear multiply on their heads. Their vocation is to swindle Christians, but they are also represented as uncommonly lecherous, and this they share with the characterization of Africans and with other racial, national, and ethnic groups.

If Felsenstein’s chapter explores the specific characteristics ascribed to Jews across the centuries, Hart’s chapter emphasizes the importance of chronology in the humorous representation of those of African descent. In eighteenth-century England there were distinctive conditions that governed their representation. First there was the presence from the previous century of chattel slaves in wealthy households, then there was the influx of former slaves from the American War of Independence that brought many of them to the streets of London. Above all, following the French Revolution, there was the threat of upheaval in both the French and English slave colonies that heightened the fear of difference. There were also, as Hart points out, changes in the theory of representation, so that the physiognomy of blacks could be related to their supposedly lower level of civilization, the basis of scientific racism in the nineteenth century.

The complications surrounding the concept of a racial other are brought out in Allen Hockley’s chapter, which discusses a French humorous illustrator in late nineteenth-century Japan, Georges Bigot, whose comic strips were deeply admiring of traditional Japanese culture and defensive of it against the influx of European globetrotters or tourists. Yet he was also increasingly critical of Japan’s urgent move toward modernity and centralization in the later part of the century, and in the end left Japan to return to France. This is a case that goes against the simple stereotyping of the other but nonetheless plays with national stereotypes for comic effect.

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz’s chapter addresses two themes that are important in this collection. The first is the complex racial dynamics of South America, with its long-established tradition of importing slaves in large numbers from Africa and the persistence of plantation slavery until the 1880s, and the way in which racial prejudice against those of African descent became an overwhelming presence in the advertising and packaging of everyday goods, especially in Cuba. The discussion of Cuban marquillas cigarreras or cigarette wrappers, though emphasizing their use of traditional demeaning stereotypes, also points out their topicality in relation to the political-racial conflicts of their time. This is a case of visual imagery at its most potent. It is very difficult even with hindsight to grasp fully the corrosive effect on any society of the omnipresence of such imagery, not only in South America but in the United States and European countries.

Ana Merino’s chapter inaugurates the part titled Racial Humor and Theories of Modern Media. It is also concerned with South America, in this case Argentina, but it deals with graphic novels and their more complex relationship to racial stereotypes. Patoruzú, created by Dante Quinterno in 1928, is a stereotypical if fantastic native Indian who arrives from Patagonia with Carmela, a large domesticated ñandú, a species of American ostrich. Patoruzú is a noble innocent thrust into the urban world of Buenos Aires, where he is adopted by a porteño, or man about town, Don Gil, whose way of life is the main object of the satire. Patoruzú bears little relationship to the real fate of the Argentinian Indians; in fact he becomes closer to a Walt Disney character, and indeed Quinterno eventually struck up a relationship with the American company. Though Patoruzú became something of an Argentinian archetype himself, he exists in a world of deeply racist stereotypes of Africans, Chinese, Japanese, and also Galicians, and is arguably a racist stereotype himself in his very innocence, though he was treated with great affection by both author and public.

Mark Williams raises two fascinating issues. The first is the almost lost world of early Los Angeles television and the phenomenon of passing—that is, of adopting the concealed persona of someone of another race, nationality, or ethnic group. By focusing on the extraordinary career of the musician Korla Pandit, an African American who successfully adopted the career, appearance, and manner of an upper-class Bengali, to the point of total concealment of his own origins, Williams draws out the power of stereotypes to be actively misleading. The humor lies in our own recognition in hindsight of the incongruities of the construction of an alien character, enabled by the new medium of television.

Photography, as Tanya Sheehan brings out, from its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century was caught up in the urgent matter of race and skin color in both Britain and America. The racial implications of the use of the negative, which made white people appear black and vice versa in one stage of the process, was almost from the beginning a source of humorous racial comment, and given a particular charge by the advent of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the American Civil War.

My own chapter begins the third part, Performative Comedy and Race. I look specifically at laughter and what I argue is the ambivalence in the idea that we laugh at someone or something, that is, the ambivalence between the physical act of laughter and what may be a silent mockery. In other words, laughter can be performative, involving physical actions, or it can be implicit in a comment, text, or image. This raises the question of what spectators of minstrel shows, racial postcards, or advertisements actually do with them. Though people do actually laugh in a communal situation, even horrifyingly at lynchings, they do so less frequently when they are on their own looking at a print or postcard.

Cherise Smith deals with contemporary performance art through the work of Eleanor Antin, who acted out fully the persona of the Ballets Russes ballerina Eleanora Antinova, who is presented as a black woman. There is a clear sense here of passing, but, unlike with Korla Pandit, the clear artistic intention is to tease out the implications for herself and her audience of adopting another persona. As Smith argues, It is, in fact, a work of art, a rhetorical performance, and a performance of a performance wherein Antin exercises and negotiates her many selves. Antin points to the fact that blackness is a sign separate from and sometimes but not always related to African Americans and African American culture. She plays on the humor that arises from the incongruity of her different roles as a pretend ballerina with the exoticizing Ballets Russes and as a Jewish woman adopting the role of a black ballerina, calling into question the signs of race and ethnicity.

Sam Vásquez opens up another visual genre for examination: the postcard, and in particular twentieth-century postcards from the Caribbean. She probes beyond the obvious signifiers of colonialized leisure, the perpetual sunshine, the golden beach, women either provocatively dressed or carrying buckets on their heads, mules, and so on, to see resistance to, collusion in, and the ambiguity of such stereotypes, noting in some of them mockery of Western tourists.

Veronika Fuechtner’s chapter also deals with contemporary imagery, this time of humorous representations in German film of Adolf Hitler, through an examination of Dani Levy’s 2007 feature film My Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler. The question of whether Hitler can be regarded as a laughing matter is, of course, bound up with the whole history of Germany since the fall of the Third Reich, and questions of denial, acceptance, and the fear of bad taste in finding humor in such a monster. Fuechtner argues that in a subject surrounded by taboos Levy broke a particularly sensitive one by applying Jewish humor to the Third Reich, creating, rather as Charlie Chaplin had done in The Great Dictator, a kind of Jewish antitype to the Führer.

It will be clear from this brief account of the content of the volume that the subject of the relation between visual humor and concepts of race, nationality, and ethnicity is a complex and rich one that defies easy generalization. Though in one sense prejudice and stereotyping of others are common to all periods, places, and times, they are nonetheless subject to a host of historical and social factors, inflected always by the medium in which they are expressed. What will be clear from the range of contributions in this volume is the sheer variety of media that raise the question of humor and race, nationality, and ethnicity, at least since the invention of photography and film. What are the common factors in visual satire as applied to groups? The first is the reduction of complex signs to the general and recognizable—in other words, caricature. Dark skin or prominent lips can stand for a person of African descent, a big nose for a Jew, or a peasant-like demeanor for an Irishman, and so on. The second is surely repetition, for techniques that allowed for multiple production like engraving, invented in the fifteenth century, allowed for the possibility of the endless replication of stereotypes.

It is often assumed, as Bakhtin claimed, that humor is essentially subversive of the established order; but though this is the case in certain times and circumstances, it was very frequently deployed to reinforce racial hierarchies. Furthermore, visual humor is not always applied on behalf of one race, nationality, or ethnicity against another; it sometimes may be deployed against errant members of the same group by invoking those from outside.

A final thought, one that I leave with readers to explain. It is striking that in the study of visual humor, and humor in general, the authority of theorists of the early twentieth century still remains dominant. The authors most cited in this volume are Freud, Bergson, and Bakhtin; why has their analysis of what makes people laugh yet to be superseded?

ONE

Carnivalesque and Grotesque

What Bakhtin’s Laughter Tells Us about Art and Culture

KOBENA MERCER

Laughter matters for all sorts of reasons, and, by way of beginning, I will try to identify three of them. Because it gives us pleasure, laughing is something we enjoy for its own sake: it really serves no useful purpose, and yet it has the power to change our feelings in an instant. When we say that good humor lightens our mood or lifts our spirits, we acknowledge the way pleasure mitigates anxiety. In the face of tensions that inevitably arise when one self encounters another, we might observe that humor breaks the ice—it lifts the tension in a way that loosens us from rigid bodily postures of fear or anxiety. This brings me to a second observation, which is that although we may laugh alone, laughing is an intrinsically sociable experience. Whatever its medium of expression—verbal, visual, literary, or theatrical—there is a communal aspect to laughter whereby the boundaries that separate one solitary individual from another are momentarily lifted as we become members of an audience, a crowd, an imagined community. As Henri Bergson suggested in 1899, laughter appears to stand in need of an echo . . . our laughter is always the laughter of a group.¹ But if laughter is highly sociable, then this is also the very point at which humor and comedy reveal their antisocial side. Wherever in-jokes are performed at the expense of out-groups that find themselves on the receiving end of a punch line, laughter reveals its violently divisive potential. Laughter is thus essentially ambivalent as a phenomenon of social bonding that also brings to light the symbolic boundaries of group belonging.

Examining such artists as Betye Saar, Robert Colescott, and David Hammons—who each welcome laughter into the critical reception of contemporary works that address the legacy of blackface minstrelsy in American visual culture—the issue of ambivalence, and how to examine it, is one of my overarching themes of concern. Ordinarily we try to get at this ambivalence by asking whether an audience is being invited to laugh at or to laugh with a given comic situation. When we make this distinction we get a handle on the enunciative directionality of comic performance; but to the extent that we presuppose a grammar or syntax for laughter—with clear-cut distinctions among subject, object, and predicate, and neat separations between the sender and the receiver of a message—we risk losing sight of the paradoxical and contradictory relationship of laughter to language. It is often said that analyzing a joke succeeds only in killing it. Reflecting on this puzzle, we might well push it further: Is there something about laughter that actively resists language, something that disrupts cognition and confounds the intellect? And does not the pleasure we take in laughter arise precisely because we are being momentarily liberated from rational thinking?

Such thoughts suggest a third point of departure, namely that laughter matters, quite simply put, because it humanizes us: it brings our lofty ideals and our noble aspirations back down to earth, for it reveals us to be the creatures of a finite and contingent world, with little ultimate control over our material conditions. In slapstick this occurs quite literally when a comic performer slips on a banana skin and falls. For Bergson, we laugh because the action is a manifestation of a mechanical inelasticity that interrupts the vital flow of life. Insisting that the element of surprise that brings incongruous elements together in comedic performance is not just a matter of logical incompatibility, Bergson viewed laughter’s social signification as an ontological corrective to the willful rigidity with which humans often pursue their aims. For this reason Bergson argued that laughter "does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly: it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression."²

Charles Baudelaire would seem to agree on this matter, for his 1855 essay On the Essence of Laughter begins by stressing the shock effects of comedic incongruity: In fact, since laughter is essentially human, it is essentially contradictory, that is, it is at the same time a sign of infinite grandeur and infinite misery, infinitely miserable by comparison to the Supreme Being of which it possesses only the conception, and infinitely grand by comparison to the natural world. It is from out of the perpetual shock of these two infinities that laughter emanates.³ Whereas Bergson addressed the sight of someone falling, Baudelaire raises the stakes by evoking laughter as a sign of humankind’s universally fallen condition. What both thinkers seem to be asking is, does laughter have a historicity? In the case of slapstick, originating in seventeenth-century commedia dell’arte in the loud noise or batacchio made whenever a performer was struck, the notion of mechanical inelasticity also fits with the deadpan physical comedy of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936), for example, for the world of industrial modernity provides innumerable opportunities for the mechanical and the organic to coincide with incongruity. Baudelaire’s use of the term shock—in the sense that modern life brings constant jolts or shocks to daily consciousness—similarly suggests a correlation between the disruptive effects of laughter and the interruptive logic of modern art as a questioning of received tradition. Arguing that in the earthly paradise . . . joy was not expressed through laughter . . . man’s face was simple and all of a piece; his features were undistorted by the laughter that agitates all nations, Baudelaire’s view took shape in the aftermath of Romanticism.⁴ Sensing something subversive in laughter, something with the potential to shock, agitate, and disturb the rules of convention and decorum, the idea that laughter originates in the demonic—that laughter is indeed satanic—led Baudelaire to a reappraisal of caricature and satirical cartoons as textual items worthy of attention, despite being dismissed as mere amusement within the bourgeois public sphere. Throughout his essay, Baudelaire quotes a maxim—The Sage does not laugh without trembling—which alludes to a proverbial saying that I recall hearing expressed more recently in a song by Kate Bush: Did you ever see a picture of Jesus laughing?⁵ This may be a roundabout way of saying that humans laugh and deities do not, but it nonetheless points up the foundational exclusion of laughter from the realm of official culture, in which laughing is regarded as sinful and is deemed to be antithetical to seriousness and hence incompatible with the solemnity of high