So Bored I Could Laugh

How would you define boredom? If you are a philosopher (my condolences), you may have some convoluted answer involving words like "existential" or "ontological." If you're Google, you opt (unhelpfully) for "the state of being bored." Most of us would find it easiest to involve an example in our demonstration: a long meeting that could have been an email; sitting in a dentist's office waiting room with a dead phone and only old magazines as company. Perhaps this exercise has grown old — boring, even — and so I present a follow-up: How would you define humor? Again, you might go to Freud or Plato, if you're into such things, or you might offer some examples: satire, slapstick, irony. The reality is that boredom and humor, although seemingly in opposition, both operate in a similar kind of ambiguous state: not easily defined in absentia, but recognizable in situ. However, I suggest that the two affects have more in common than just that. 

A basic definition might pit the two against each other: humor is the state of being entertained, boredom is the state of not being entertained, or even engaged. Furthermore, the former has long been identified as a weapon for combating the latter. Studies relating humor to boredom demonstrate how humor can be used to combat boredom in the classroom or workplace, and to alleviate the effects of boredom in everyday life.1 Although the two may appear to be antithetical affects, however, there is also a kinship between them. The relationship between boredom and humor is not simply a canceling-out, but can be a constructive relationship in which one emerges from the other, demonstrating resonances between the two affective fields and, in turn, illuminating the complexity of each of them. Can something boring be found funny in its very boring-ness? And, can the two affects coexist at once, playing off and against each other?

Humor is a notoriously slippery concept. As philosopher Simon Critchley writes, humor is "a nicely impossible object for a philosopher."2 It is a deeply personal and yet necessarily social phenomenon, requiring an individual sense as well as an interpersonal trigger. Henri Bergson, writing on the "comic" — that complicated subgenre of humor — states that he "shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it, above all, as a living thing."3 Humor is often treated with such reverence that I, for one, cannot help but agree with Mark Twain's famous sentiment that a joke explained is like a frog dissected — always already dead.

Here, perhaps, is our second connection between boredom and humor: defining the latter is, necessarily, quite a tedious endeavor. It is not an uncommon introductory statement in many philosophical treatises on humor to acknowledge that their imminent theorizations are, by virtue of their seriousness, actively un-humorous.4 This is an understandable, if not paradoxical, issue with humor theory. The prevailing theories of humor — first developed by Aristotle, then supplemented by heavyweights like Bergson and Sigmund Freud — are the triad of relief, superiority, and incongruity. Briefly, these theories tend to dissolve humor into three distinct categorizations, in the process often conflating the concept (humor) with the reaction (laughter).5 

Relief theory argues, unsurprisingly, that humor — and by association, laughter — is the experience of the release of built-up psychological tension produced through fear, anxiety, or nervous energy (Freud was, unsurprisingly, a major proponent of this theory). Humor becomes the release valve for compacted affects with otherwise unclear paths to resolution. The second dominant theory of humor, superiority theory, is attributed to Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes, among others, and is also self-explanatory: we find humor in the inferiority of others. Finally, incongruous juxtaposition theory is a slightly wordier (if ultimately no less obvious) theorization that humor develops as a result of an unexpected incongruity between expectations and reality. This is observed most clearly through jokes, where an unexpected punchline produces a dissonance between the set-up and the conclusion (hence why predictable jokes invoke groans and not sincere laughter — unless, of course, we are laughing at the predictability of the joke in itself). 

Like humor, boredom is also, as Ralph Greenson admits, "a phenomenon which is easier to describe than to define."6 It has been variously connected to and framed in terms of malaise, depression, and ennui, among others. Peter Toohey argues that "boredom does exist" — no argument there — "but it exists as a much simpler, more normal and more useful emotion than most critics will allow." He identifies two types of boredom which emerge from the literature: existential boredom and simple boredom. "Existential boredom," he writes, "often seems more of an impressive intellectual formulation than an actual emotion. Simple boredom has a direct bearing on our ordinary emotional lives, keeping company . . . with depression and anger while protecting us from their ravages."7 For Toohey, therefore, boredom is not just an inevitable fact of life; it is also a potentially useful indication that we should remove ourselves from a situation, some sort of vestigial warning bell disguised as mundanity. 

Both humor and boredom can be usefully designated as what anthropologist Kathleen Stewart calls "ordinary affects," which she defines as "a problem or question emergent in disparate scenes and incommensurate forms and registers." In order to attend to such affects, one must trace the seemingly inconsequential scenes in which they appear. In documenting these ordinary affects, Stewart writes, we might "fashion some form of address that is adequate to their form; to find something to say about ordinary affects by performing some of the intensity and texture that makes them habitable and animate."8 Thinking of boredom and humor as ordinary affects might help to figure out the quotidian connections between them. 

One example, in my experience, is that a heightened state of boredom often lowers the threshold for what we find funny. Throughout the pandemic, I have found my standards for boredom and humor have shifted, in opposite directions. I have been bored, but in a way that has caused me to become easily entertained, to an almost child-like degree. I find myself laughing out loud far more often than I used to, and at far lesser stimuli. When I make television recommendations to friends, I include the caveat that, although I find it amusing, "I'll find anything funny these days." It's possible that this connection is, partially, that we seek out engagement in moments of boredom, which might bring us to humor's doorstep. Or perhaps, the two emerge from similar contexts. After all, boredom is often tied, when pathologized, to melancholy, and a strong sense of humor can be a co-morbid companion to depression (the unsettlingly-named "sad clown paradox"). Perhaps, finally, it is that, with the right attitude and arrangement of words, the boring can become the humorous with very little fundamental change. 

In recent years, people have asked me for book recommendations which are lighthearted or funny, to escape from the everyday horror of living through multiple impending and ongoing apocalyptic events. Perhaps other people would suggest David Sedaris or Phoebe Robinson — decidedly comedic writers, whom I do recommend from time to time. However, I frequently find myself recommending Elif Batuman and, much to many people's surprise, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Despite his reputation as an overwhelmingly pessimistic or tragic author, an underappreciated aspect of Dostoevsky's writing is how seamlessly he weaves humor with boredom, and in so doing demonstrates their inherent kinship — Ivan Karamazov holds that "the world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen".9 In books like Notes from Underground, The Possessed, and The Idiot, Dostoevsky presents a view of the world that is equal parts tragedy and comedy, often catalyzing into a world overrun by tedium. The ultimately tragic nature of the world is presented in comedic fashion, ever attentive to the humor present in even the cruelest and most boring injustices of life. The world that Dostoevsky presents in his fiction is one that demonstrates how humor is, at various points, a precursor to, a product of, and a mode of communicating the futility of life itself. If the world is full of absurdities and meaninglessness, it is so out of necessity. Humor is what chains the two together. 

Writing on Dostoevsky's poetics, Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that "the catharsis that finalizes Dostoevsky's novels might be . . . expressed in this way: nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future."10 If everything is still in the future, as Dostoevsky insinuates, then the present is but an endless period of waiting. How tedious, you might think. But in this waiting rests humor, more often than not. An example of Dostoevsky's boring humor is in The Brothers Karamazov where, in one scene, Fyodor Pavlovich, the patriarch of the Karamazov family, meets with his youngest son's mentor, a monk, and makes a fool of himself in the process. He asks the Father Superior to confirm a story he says he once heard about a saint: 

This is at face value a somewhat boring exchange, in its absurd circularity that does nothing to advance the plot or even the conversation at hand. However, it is also (in my opinion) quite funny. It develops a profound sense of Fyodor as a buffoon, one of Dostoevsky's many common character tropes. And it is through the tedium of the exchange, the surface-level banality, that humor emerges. 

Similarly, Elif Batuman's work exposes the humor in the banal by reveling in tedium itself. Batuman is a Turkish-American author who is, herself, a great fan of the classic Russian writers, as her titles evince. Her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010), is described by Adam Kirsch as a "smartly comic" memoir about academia which displays Batuman's "wry, detached sense of humor, always on the lookout for scholarly absurdity, and the understated wit of her writing." The book, as Kirsch writes in a review titled "A Comedian in the Academy," is humorous largely in the ways that it exposes the "contrast between [scholars'] human flaws and the noble ideals they serve."12 Taking the superficially boring concept — especially for those of us who have attended them — of academic conferences and infusing it with humor is undoubtedly a witty accomplishment, one which settles nicely into the incongruity theory of humor. 

Batuman has proven herself to be adept at such boring-to-funny transformations. Her debut novel, The Idiot (2017), is about a college student in the 1990s who develops an email-based romance, attends Russian class, and volunteers to spend her summer teaching English in a small Hungarian village. Don't let that description fool you into believing that there is any substantial plot in this book, as there is not. As Dwight Garner wrote in his New York Times review of the book: "Small pleasures will have to sustain you over the long haul of this novel. The Idiot builds little narrative or emotional force. It is like a beautiful neon sign made without a plug. No glow is cast."13 And yet, it is one of my favorite books, partly because it is terribly funny, and much of that humor comes from her descriptions of mundane, relatable, and arguably boring situations. As another reviewer put it, "loose, largely plotless, and sweetly funny, The Idiot rejects the doctrine of omitting needless words in favour of marvelling, over more than 400 pages, at the complexities of language and communication."14 

In the section where Selin, the main character, travels to Hungary, we find one example of Batuman weaving humor and boredom and demonstrating the interconnectedness between them. Upon arriving in Hungary, the students spend little time in Budapest before heading to the remote village on a very early train. The woman who meets them there inquires as to how they've spent their time in Hungary thus far, and this exchange ensues:

In this exchange, not only is the woman's character herself finding humor in the boring experience of sitting in a crypt at six o'clock in the morning, but the exchange itself is, for the reader, quite funny. We can locate our own experiences of boredom within the peculiar context of Selin's early morning crypt visit. 

This breed of boredom-humor can be folded into what anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli calls the "quasi-event," very simplistically defined as something that has both happened and not-happened (akin to Schrödinger's cat living and dying simultaneously in its uncertainty). Povinelli develops the idea of a quasi-event through her description of "the thick subjective background effects of a life as it has been lived."16 She finds these quasi-events within, as she writes elsewhere, "the fog of becoming; something that might be something if the conditions of experiencing it or the conditions of supporting it are in place."17 Povinelli is particularly interested in the "indeterminate oscillation — the virtual space that opens up between the potentiality and actuality of an alternative social project"; a space, one might argue, of waiting. Melding humor theories and boredom with Povinelli's quasi-events leaves us in an interesting space in-between the potentiality (the expected) and the actuality (the punchline, as it were).18 A period of waiting that is, at times, quite funny.

Georges Bataille situates laughter, humor's faithful foot-soldier, "at [the] point of slippage which leads to that particular experience, [where] the laughter . . . becomes divine insofar as it can be one's laughter at witnessing the failure of a tragic nature."19 As we enter the third year of a global pandemic which has caused near-endless turmoil, tragedy, and tedium, we can perhaps more than ever identify with existing at this "point of 'non-savoir,'" as Bataille words it, perched on the edge of the limits of knowing. Humor and boredom become simultaneously known and unknowable ordinary affects, quasi-events which both puncture and sustain daily life. Rather than being unlikely bedfellows, humor and boredom often exist on the same plane of consciousness and philosophical indeterminacy. After all, when one approaches life as a bored spectator, the inherent folly of existence made bare leaves little else to do but laugh.

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Sarah Chant is a PhD candidate in anthropology at The New School. Her dissertation looks at affective strategies in activism, archiving, and everyday life among queer and trans southerners, specifically in Alabama, with a particular focus on how affects like humor and imagination operate to make claims to belonging in the American South.

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