Laughter is a Serious Business

“Laughter is the most democratic of all the facial expressions: we differ from one another by our immovable features, but in convulsion we are all the same.”(1)

Milan Kundera


Laughter is that uncontrollable spasm to which all of us are prone. It is a moment when we cannot help but give in to the ridiculous, the unusual or the unexpected. Bakhtin suggests that it is the sole force that cannot be fully incorporated and controlled (2) and Milan Kundera in his novel Immortality would have it that there is an equalising force to laughter. Laughter brings a sameness to an otherwise infinite number of differences which can be found in the straight faces of the unamused. Such equality means that laughter is not only a reaction to amusement, but something deeply subversive - undercutting hierarchies in an uncontrollable way. This can be the hierarchy within a group of friends, whereby for example a usually sensible friend will make a fool of himself while inebriated and become the object of ridicule, or it can be the undercutting of a much larger social order - publications like The Private Eye obtain their readership by making fools of political figures. With the ability to ridicule; to break up the usual order of things, satire and laughter become powerful interjectors in the everyday running of that order. In the words of UKC lecturer John Jervis: “In subverting seriousness, laughter is a serious business.”(3)

So we may all be equal in the convulsion of laughter, but in acting such we show the sheer power of something which once unleashed is uncontrollable and powerful in subversive ways. Yet laughter may also be utilised by those who are in a position of power as a useful political tool. A politician such as former US President John Kennedy, who is typically pictured laughing gains the image of being a friendly, down-to-earth and normal (equal) human being, and may well get public support for these traits. This, Kundera suggests, is a product of the postmodern age, for if one looks at paintings and pictures of political leaders before the 1950s, it is almost always the case that they will be shown straight-faced. Power was portrayed by the ‘immovable features’ designating a difference between the leader and the public. The sensible, controlled face of a politician was a sign of his ability to lead - “a bust of a laughing Julius Caesar is unthinkable”(4) writes Kundera. Postmodern Western politics saw huge leaps in emancipation for almost all previously excluded parties. It seems fitting then that it should be the case that affinity and equality would be what people looked to in their leaders also.

So with both subversive and emancipatory possibilities what else has laughter provided us? In 1893, Freud conducted an experiment on a woman under mild hypnosis who, having seen a picture in a book as a child of some ‘Red Indians’ dressed as animals, had gained a fear of the image. When he had lulled her into a relaxed state he “instructed her not to be frightened of the pictures of the Red Indians but to laugh heartily at them”(5) . The woman laughed and Freud had succeeded in dispelling the woman’s long-held fear of something alien to her, something she saw as a child as society inverted, and as such, frightening. The carnivalesque images had thrown a known order upside-down. This experiment leads us to the main point of this essay, for the example is used by Stallybrass and White in their The Politics & Poetics of Transgression to signify the links between laughter and the notion of carnival. “Freud had managed a singular restitution, salvaging torn shreds of carnival from their phobic alienation in the bourgeois unconscious by making them once more the object of cathartic laughter.”(6)

Carnivals have been held for centuries all over the world. I will discuss the particulars of what exactly the carnival is and was presently, but for now what is important in thinking about Stallybrass and White’s comment is that it could be read that with the abandoning of tradition carnival in the nineteenth century, came a revival of the fear of the carnivalesque. The woman was frightened because she did not know how to laugh at the unusual. Let us now go back in time and follow the life of the idea of carnival from its traditional beginnings to the aforementioned point of ‘abandonment’ in the nineteenth century to understand this point better.

The tradition carnival represents a fascinating anomaly in the societies of pre-modern history. It is laughter magnified into a social phenomenon, and as such contains all of the same tenets. Carnival is presented by Bakhtin “as a world of topsy-turvy, of heteroglot exuberance, of ceaseless overrunning and excess where all is mixed, hybrid, ritually degraded and defiled.”(7) It was a time when men dressed as women, the poor as kings, and a celebration of the ridiculous was had by people who could not, on a non-carnival day, have frolicked in such a way - a short period where normal life was abandoned and replaced with its opposite. Further while carnival lasted, there was no other life outside it.(8) At a time of strict social hierarchy, with tiers varied and numerous, it represented a reprieve from the seriousness of this system. We may then see it as the concept of identity, and in particular the subversion of established social identity, which provided the reprieve via simulation - what sociologist Jean Baudrillard calls “to feign to have what one doesn’t have”(9) . “The grotesque inappropriateness and foolishness of the carnival masquerade displays the impermanence of any relationship between an individual and the social identity claimed by the symbolism of his clothing”(10) A crown is just a hat; a bucket can be a crown. On the face of it, it provided a certain equality which could be found in this momentary upturning of social difference. High culture, politics and the church were open targets to ridicule and to a degree, the authorities allowed it. There are two reasons that I can see for this. Firstly, they had no choice. If carnival represents the uncontrollable convulsion of laughing at an established way of life, then to try to control it would by definition be impossible. To try to ban something as popular as a carnival would have been folly in itself if one wishes to avoid political unrest. Secondly, and possibly more importantly, carnival provided a means of control. The festivities were temporary, and to allow a temporary reprieve did two things. It quietened feelings of revolt - a short period of anarchistic living can sate disillusionment with order. Life could be lived from carnival to carnival, when one ends, you plan the next - there was always a reprieve on the horizon. It also instilled in people the “realisation that established authority and truth are relative.”(11) People would not want life to be permanently topsy-turvy, nor do they want to feel that they are forever trapped in a social/sexual strata. Carnival throws forward the idea that neither of these have to be so, and this relativity of authority and truth, showed people what life was really like, no matter what governing power was in office, as it were, or what they claimed, revolt was possible against the authority so ridiculed. A temporary subversion may quell revolutionary thoughts but it does so by being the embodiment of them while leaving a structure to everyday life - the sort that is needed for a society to function. Its allowance in fact helped to perpetuate an order.

The grotesque body played a major part in carnival. The convulsed face of a laughing person can once again metaphorically reveal much about the nature of the festival. Jenks suggests that carnival as an event “becomes a bodily function and the celebration of carnival a bodily movement”(12) The images of genitals broke taboos and the ugly (perhaps being a metaphor for the poorer sections of society) was glorified in masks. The mask of folk tradition being connected with the joy of change and reincarnation.(13) It represented the ability to recreate oneself at carnival time, and to revel in the change. The idea of the carnival as a marker in the year once again crops up, as the renewal of the established order returned after the festivities, with the promise of the reincarnation of carnival, order, carnival, order and so on.

The grotesque also lent itself to the sheer theatricality of the carnival. If carnival was to be used as a spectacle then it was through the use of the grotesque that society was shown up for what it was. The theatre increasingly emerged as carnival events declined and was historically seen as a subversive medium, for it acted as a carnival on a smaller scale. The theatre was most often involved in the derision of social life and politics, using the image of the grotesque and the power of upturning identities. Bristol argues that the festive misrule of the carnival was “not merely the disruptive negation of established ideological forms. The indecorousness and symbolic anarchy of carnival masquerade provide their own order of rules for interpreting social reality.”(14) It is in this interpretation that we are able to see the way in which the ordinary people saw the authorities that rules them. High political life can be seen as something of a self-travesty by those observing from below. In the same way as the media today reveal the doings and mistakes of politicians, the carnival and then the theatre did so too. But just as with today, the theatre did not have to invent, parody or make humorous/tragic the doings of their authorities, as Bristol reiterates: “The tragedy and violence of contingent historical events like the fall of a king are witnessed in the public square as grotesque and bloody self parody”(15) High political life was then, it is suggested, highly theatrical in itself, and further that folly and transgression are the covert reality of rational government.(16) This undermining of what is supposed to be rational can lead to fears similar to those experienced by Freud’s patient, that underneath normality and order may lie the topsy-turvy world of the carnivalesque. Theatricality was and is clearly a powerful thing in forming public opinion, whether it be staged or real. The traditional carnival can once again be seen to have subversive elements to it.

The rise of theatre as carnival declined leads us on to the next period in the history of what we have seen to be a festival of the other - the reversal and undermining of the usual social order; the other side of life that can only be met with laughter. It reappears to a degree and “reveals its political dimensions… [in] the importance of popular carnival practices in German Reformation struggles against Catholicism”(17) The ridicule and ritual defilement of the Papacy during the Protestant Reformation of the 176h century, once again showed the subversive power, the carnivalesque has. Jervis explains: “The episode in 1520 when Luther burnt the papal bull excommunicating him - was followed by an impromptu carnival procession through the streets, with an imitation pope, who was mocked and ridiculed by everyone.”(18) Soon after this event though, the reformers outlawed carnival for its use of iconography (a touch hypocritical perhaps?) as well as its generally raucous and undermining nature. It is in the popularity of the ‘masquerade’ in the eighteenth century that a greater, and more concrete revival can be seen. The eighteenth century masquerade continued the tenets of carnival with its “indiscriminate mingling of the social ranks and the sexes, the collective return to various sorts of atavistic behaviour, the upsetting of erotic taboos.”(19) However the motives behind the new masquerade differed slightly from the traditional kind. Public political subversion may not always have been a deliberate and reasoned motive in the tradition carnival, but it was often effective as such anyway as we have seen. This new version was more often a pastime of the higher classes. Following the self-imposed distancing of the nobility and gentry from the public, there had been a division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture as never before. Though the carnival is traditionally associated with the mass public, the eighteenth century nobility found its kinship with what Castle has described as “those rituals of possession and collective frenzy found in traditional societies”(20) Masquerade, particularly evident in the revival of the grotesque mask, saw the carnivalesque traditions of old as a way of attaining a “perfect freedom - a state of intoxication, ecstasy and free-floating sensual pleasure”(21) and “an environment where repressed impulses could be acted out safely.”(22) For if ever there was a word for the public side of sexual and social graces of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it is ‘repressed’ (thanks partially to the religious convictions of the Reformation period). The mask was adapted to this updated carnivalesque theatre of high society. Bakhtin tells us that at this time “the mask hides something, keeps a secret, deceives.”(23) It is no longer the source of joyful change and regeneration, but a disguise by which people were able to fulfil certain needs which society deemed otherwise inappropriate.

The popularity of masquerade diminished in time and by the end of the nineteenth century, carnivalesque festivities were infrequent. Age old traditions were adapted to give them a level of respectability in the Victorian age that thrived on the idea. For example, the maypole - the once potent symbol of fertility, was by this time being ‘innocently’ danced around by young children. The Victorians had reappropriated what they saw as the inappropriate. Where then did these Victorian sensibilities come from, were they the sole reason for the change, and where did people go to sate their repressed desire for the carnivalesque? For if history is anything to go by, that desire seems to crop up wherever it is stifled - the eighteenth century and Freud’s patient being the two examples I have so far mentioned.

Industrialisation and the modern age go hand in hand, and things that spawned from it largely put an end to the traditional carnival. One of its major effects was that the traditional communities who had taken part in the festivities for centuries were torn apart. The fragmentation caused by the movement of huge sections of the population from rural to urban work and residency broke the traditional consciousness (including the planning and living of carnival) and formed a new class consciousness based on urban working hierarchies. Carnival was marginalized, the Victorian ‘freak show’ being a good example. The carnivalesque was marvelled at for its difference but kept at a distance. Such people as giants and the Elephant Man were presented in a psuedo-scientific way, and the carnivalesque was once again reappropriated in the public mind. They were looked upon with fear and disgust with no reprieve whatsoever for them. The marginalization that was imposed on this sort of frivolity - the carnivalesque and grotesque, can be seen in the way the Victorians spent their leisure time. The English seaside resort can be seen as the traditional and quintessentially Victorian holiday location, but what is often overlooked is that this was the place where people could get that much needed reprieve from the normal social order. People could wear very little (the idea of the body as social had by this time been abandoned in favour of the ‘hidden’ and individualised body) and frolic or relax to their heart’s content.

Just as tradition carnival and the masquerade found their justification, the late nineteenth century found their own in matters of health. Tradition carnival it may be said looked to social health in allowing this reprieve, now the carnivalesque “combined the (largely mythical) medicinal virtues of the spa resorts with tourism and the fairground.”(24) We have arrived at a point which sees the abandonment of traditional carnival and the marginalization of the carnivalesque. Perhaps Freud’s patient would not have felt a fear for such things if it had not been for this. Then again perhaps she would, for it seems fairly typical today that people fear the alien, the ugly and the unruly as much as they have ever done.

We still have events which we call carnivals today. In England these are typically a parade or procession through the centre of a town or village which are now seen as a bit old-fashioned. This alteration I think is important. By passing through a town, not encompassing all within it as tradition carnival did, it can be seen as a journey. Misrule passes on by, affecting our lives for only the time it takes for the floats and people taking part to go past. Onlookers are usually to be found lining the streets but sticking to either side of the procession. There is a fairly clear distinction between the participant and the onlooker, who attends the parade as a form of entertainment. Laughter here is a reaction to being entertained, and as such once the spectacle has passed, the laughter will subside. The carnival then, does not really affect the community or surrounding area in an unruly or subversive way, nor does it make all equal within a community. There is an increasing tendency for the floats and cars in the parade to be adorned with advertising slogans and sponsored by companies. How a festival of upturned social conditions and conventions can be run by companies, and have the mayor’s daughter as ‘Miss Wherever’ seems difficult to justify if we are to keep attaching the label ‘carnival’ to these proceedings. Perhaps the saving grace of this system, is in the promotion of charities in the festivities. However much they may save the procession from being entirely devoid of carnival traits, even organisations set up for charitable purposes can hardly be see to portray the carnivalesque. It seems that the use of advertisements and charitable causes lends itself not only to the funding of these carnivals, but also fits perfectly into the modern way of thinking. The need to justify silliness and festivals reflects the very modern need for everything to have a purpose. This type of procession emerged out of the Victorian era, which held on tightly to the conventions created during the Industrial Revolution, and to the beliefs to an extent of the religious reformers of centuries past, and as such stifled the carnivalesque nature of carnival itself.

What then of the other sort of carnival that exists to this day? These are much larger events, not like the village and small town processions I have described, but processions for the most part nonetheless. “Venice, Notting Hill, Rio, New Orleans, are stylised reconstructions, festivals in effect”(25) argues Jenks. Though larger festival gatherings can turn to an anarchistic demonstration quite often such as the Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York, where a festive occasion turned to revolt over political issues.(26) Politics holds sway in many areas of this form of festival - sexuality (particularly homosexuality) and ethnicity being the two most common issues it raises. The greater vibrancy as well as the size difference sets these carnivals apart from most other forms of festival around today. The streets and businesses nearby shut down as people dress up (though not usually using grotesque imagery - the body is still used to represent the social body, just not to use the body in ridicule) and take over the area for the day. People look forward to the carnival throughout the year both in the local communities and the rest of the world as both liberating and entertaining. Yet even sharing many of the traits of the tradition carnival, there are still crucial alterations brought on by time and changed attitudes. The carnival still exists here, its social importance with it, yet can it be said to be in the traditional sense carnivalesque? It seems to perhaps be a little too ‘packaged’ for this to be the case. The authorities as they did in times past, allow the event, but if the carnival is not a subversion of hierarchy, then it no longer represents a reprieve from the usual order of things. Entertainment is not liberating in the way that the traditional carnival can be seen to be.

If in what we call carnival, the carnivalesque is found to be wanting, is there another area of contemporary life that contains some of its traits? The rise of consumerism has at first glance seen the revival of the mask, the upturning of social hierarchy, and commissioned frivolity. People today are encouraged to have a specific and individual identity, a mask or an image. This of course could be said to be something of an illusion. There are people who control fashion and identity through being clothing designers, musical trend-setters (fashion and music are seemingly inseparable these days), and the heads of the companies under which these practices go on. The image of the individual is to a degree sold to people, and many people take on that identity at the same time. The mask of fashion though sold as an individualising force, in fact joins individuals under the banner of that mask controlled by certain powerful groups, thus removing any of the historical meanings from identity politics. Even so called ‘alternative’ guises are sold thusly, with the intention of incorporating even those who dislike mainstream identity and fashion into the system. Alongside this identity led social melée, the companies acting as generals, their public forces fighting hand-to-hand in the way they present themselves, we have seen the emergence of youth culture. Particularly, and important in this discussion, youth-orientated culture. This change in orientation if it were as at first it seems, would largely reverse historical conventions in making youth the centre of cultural codes. Long gone would be community elders and respect for experience and stability. But this again is an illusion. The image of youth empowerment is formulated and led in a consumer culture by companies run by middle-aged men in order to fatten their wallets. They allow a temporary subversion in this empowerment on the surface of social hierarchy, whilst in reality being in charge behind it all. In fashion and youth orientation we see frivolity encouraged by the people in power, but because they control it, and as such what may at first seem to be a carnivalesque trait, is in fact quite the opposite. This interpretation of consumer culture is of course just one possible interpretation of many, but worthy of inclusion in this essay for the implications on the carnivalesque in contemporary society if it could be said to be true.

I have a problem with labelling any of the forms of carnival we have today as truly being carnivals in the traditional sense. There has been such an alteration over time in community practice and societal thinking that there seems to be little left of the carnival in modern festivities. Where carnival is still potent is in the discussion of the concept of the carnivalesque. We find in the study of carnival in sociology, literature and history, a means of understanding certain elements of the history of society, which cannot be found elsewhere. The carnival represents an anomaly in the normal running of society, and as such the potential for difference. This difference may well take on the form of the alien, and the fear of it. It may also give hope to those who wish for difference - “The visionary anti society [the carnival] projected was at heart utopian, for along with other oppositions, that of upper class and lower class was temporarily abolished.”(27) Even if non-traditional manifestations of carnival have not quite embodied the original notion and method of their predecessors, it is the potential that is found in the carnivalesque that has led to its discussion and often idolising.

Literature has provided a continuity in the study and recording of the carnivalesque. From Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (with its theatrical nature, both in being of course a play and the use of theatre within it, and its use of both beauty and the grotesque), through Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World to Grass’ The Tin Drum (for its use of what Michael Minden calls a ‘grotesque realism’ and the contrasting forces of the order of the Nazi regime and the carnival(28)) we find it. The political implications of the carnival in literature can be found in both its content, as with The Tin Drum, and in the way the work was written and for whom. Wills suggests that “it is only in literature that popular festive forms can achieve the ‘self-awareness’ necessary for effective protest.”(29) Literature is a written statement, publicly accessible, and for this reason it has great impetus on the social world. It is in the difference between the official and the public that this becomes more important: “the mixing of popular and official languages which occurs in texts drawing on the vernacular as well as classical and mediaeval Latin brings an increased awareness of the difference between historical epochs”(30) Wills suggests that literature which combines the past with a story, joins politics and history with the populace through the use of language, allows us to show the end of the old and birth of the new. The traditional carnivalesque value of regeneration is to be found then in this form along with the many carnival themes within the works themselves.

We see in the study of the carnivalesque, the way in which the project of modernity rationalised and altered something based on the non-rational and the only temporarily changeable. It is no wonder then that the modern carnival has in many cases declined in popularity, and been abandoned to consumer orientated advertising floats. We have turned what was a ‘second life’ - a transgressive different life existing albeit briefly as opposed to the usual order, into a ‘secondary life’ - leisure time coexisting with the usual order in an everyday sense, and now seemingly becoming part of the usual order anyway. Perhaps this change came about through the greater emancipation and equality we in the postmodern Western world enjoy in politics and opportunities for leisure. Why would we need a short reprieve each year if the usual social order suits us just as well? Jenks goes further to say that “carnival is the perfect postmodern device, it is style unrestricted, method without parameter or rigour, decentred identity and a continuously broken chain of signifiers.”(31) These elements he sees as the very basic tenets of contemporary society, and if as he says they are fairly carnivalesque in nature then perhaps there is a greater continuity via contemporary consumer culture than I have allowed above, and a revival in the post-modern age of much that was hidden by the modernist rationality of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If it is the case that postmodern culture has many carnivalesque tenets at heart though, can it not be said that carnival is no longer a festival of otherness? The concept of the alien still instils fear into our hearts - the existence of race and sexuality politics confirms that. While the traditional carnival may not have been free from this fear (outsiders were often victimised at carnival time), our moves away from an acceptance of difference even for that short and temporary period show a continuation of a fear of otherness despite greater levels of societal toleration of difference and political emancipation and equality.

Literature and study keep alive the themes and traits of the carnival, even if political and social convention change. What is perhaps more integral though is that society will keep on laughing at the ridiculous, the unusual or the unexpected because the carnival that the laughter formed has not disappeared altogether. What we may call a carnival today is not carnival in the truest sense, but it is in small bouts of laughter at small ridiculous breaks in convention that carnival finds its most prominent form of continuation for the reasons I outlined early on. I began this essay with a discussion of laughter and I will end it similarly, for the very history of carnival itself, from its traditional community roots to the present day, began and continues with the subversive and emancipatory nature of humankind’s ability to laugh.

By David Nettleingham

Published July 2006

Notes

(1) M. Kundera Immortality 1991 Faber and Faber p. 361
(2) J. Jervis Transgressing the Modern 1999 Blackwell p. 17
(3) ibid p. 18
(4) M. Kundera Immortality 1991 Faber and Faber p. 362
(5) P. Stallybrass & A. White The Politics & Poetics of Transgression 1986 Methuen p. 171
(6) ibid
(7) ibid p. 8
(8) J. Jervis Transgressing the Modern 1999 Blackwell p. 25
(9) J. Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation 1994 University of Michigan p. 3
(10) M. D. Bristol Carnival and Theater 1985 Methuen p. 65
(11) P. Stallybrass & A. White The Politics & Poetics of Transgression 1986 Methuen p. 6
(12) C. Jenks Transgression 2003 Routledge p. 168
(13) T. Castle Masquerade and Civilisation: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction 1986 Stanford University Press p. 104
(14) M. D. Bristol Carnival and Theater 1985 Methuen p. 67
(15) ibid p. 70
(16) J. Jervis Transgressing the Modern 1999 Blackwell p. 16
(17) P. Stallybrass & A. White The Politics & Poetics of Transgression 1986 Methuen p. 15
(18) J. Jervis Transgressing the Modern 1999 Blackwell p. 21
(19) T. Castle Masquerade and Civilisation: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction 1986 Stanford University Press p. 52
(20) ibid p. 53
(21) ibid
(22) ibid p. 74
(23) ibid p. 104
(24) P. Stallybrass & A. White The Politics & Poetics of Transgression 1986 Methuen p 179
(25) C. Jenks Transgression 2003 Routledge p. 164
(26) T. Castle Masquerade and Civilisation: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction 1986 Stanford University Press p. 89
(27) ibid p. 78
(28) M. Minden A Post Realist Aesthetic: Grass, Die Blechtrommel 1993 Edinburgh
(29) K. Hirschkop & D. Shepherd Bakhtin and Cultural Theory 1989 Manchester University Press p. 131
(30) ibid p. 132
(31) C. Jenks Transgression 2003 Routledge p. 164