The Humor We Fear Most: a Response to Sarah Wasserman

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Sarah Wasserman, Frances McDonald, and for that matter all of us appear to be part of a rising wave of reappraisals about what literary critics do when we critique. Why does the mood of our methods have to be so "serious," as Sarah says, serious here being shorthand for distant, cynical, and hostile, but most of all "safe"? Finding lost affective orientations in humor, Sarah deftly notes that humor has been most commonly considered the cool apanage of crimson anger and contempt, but going back to relatively uncharted Freud, she encourages us to remember that it can just as powerfully "foster connection." Two years ago, the journal PMLA dedicated an entire issue to thinking about what it would mean for our writing if we met texts and each other not with detachment and suspicion, but with "appreciation" and "openness"—Fran's words—or "empathy" and "compassion," Sarah's words for the affective mechanisms that humor seems uniquely equipped to employ. The PMLA issue came out of Rita Felski's 2015 The Limits of Critique, a clarion call for scholars to welcome an age of post-critique. Responses from the likes of Heather Love, Bruce Robbins, Stephen Best, and Susan Stanford Friedman expressed a range of moods: tart condescension, polite indifference, heaps of "angry funny," as Sarah might say, all of which ironically was the source of Felski's frustration, but nothing approaching the riskiness of "empathetic humor."1 Given the almost parodic prominence of these respondents in literary studies, there could be no better cast to suggest just how risky "empathetic humor" is. What makes this humor so frighteningly risky?

Sarah offers a number of explanations, the first explicit, the others not. The only thing worse, she begins, "than having an argument deflated by a piercing question" is "having a joke...bomb." She then promotes an approach that seems at first to avoid this danger: instead of "laughter without humor," a "humor without much laughter," a humor that recalls Kenneth Burke's famous motto for what he considers good writing, "perspective by incongruity." But it is clear that this humor without laughter is much more than perspectival, expressly much more than intellectual, more than a mere "appeal to intelligence." It is the exposure to this muchness, this excess, that I think is so risky.

We can puzzle out from Freud, who weds humor to empathy in his 1905 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, that to empathize is to be exposed to the muchness, the too muchness, of ourselves and others. On empathizing, or in the German Einfuhlung, Freud says, "the putting of oneself in the other person's place [a translation of Sichhineinversetzen which Freud uses interchangeably with Einfuhlung] and trying to understand him is clearly nothing other than the 'comic.'"2 Freud says that "comedy relies...upon empathy" because both are based on making comparisons between ourselves and another: "we refer the comic pleasure...to a comparison."3 Tabling for a second what makes this comparison pleasurable, we laugh for many reasons, for instance, when a jester makes an old grinch look like a child, but primarily because empathy, as the faculty of comparison, of understanding others, allows us to do so. We do not put ourselves in the place of the grinch, but in the place of the person contriving the grinch. The empathy moves between us and the jester. We're use to thinking of empathy as what you extend to the duressed, but for Freud it's our ability to extend ourselves to others at all.

That humor is empathic because it allows us to imitate or mimic in our minds someone or something else, thereby putting us in "the other's place," probably sounds rather benign. But Freud's definition of empathy in his later Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego evinces its dangers to our mind and bodies: "'Empathy,' he says, "plays the largest part in our understanding of what is inherently foreign to our ego in other people."4 This is a tricky construction, and Freud's translator James Strachey is doing his best with an even trickier phrase: das Ichfremde anderer Personen, which in the sentence would translate literally as "understanding the I-stranger of other people." The difficulty, the danger, lies in the fact that this alien "other" we encounter is not the person to whom we offer our empathy, but nor is it someone alien to both of us. That's how psychoanalyst George Pigman reads Freud's "Einfuhlung," the faculty that "enabl[es] us to understand what is foreign to the selves of other people, things which they don't understand about themselves."5

The problem with Pigman's interpretation is that it leaves intact the constitution of not only those outside the joke but also those telling it, for the alien is "foreign to" or outside them all. This reading ignores the cryptic ambiguity in the "I-stranger," the person who is myself and not myself while also "in" another. The point is that empathy shows us neither our separability nor our embeddedness, but the inability to know which is the case. Encountering the "I-stranger" is like seeing your face in the mirror as the face of someone you've lost, and to make matters worse, perhaps someone you've never met. This is not alienation of the self through another, the fantasy of liberalism that absolves oneself by recognizing in another what one cannot know: it is the far more disorienting zone of uncertainty about whether you've been alienated or not, uncertainty about everything you thought you were, and thus never knowing who this other person could be in relationship to you. Maybe the fear of having a joke "bomb" is really the fear that the bomb has already happened—we've already come apart—and the audience's silence, the confirmation.

How does this psychic ricochet relate to humor? For Freud, known as the progenitor of the relief theory of humor, something is funny when we save mental energy we didn't expect to, when someone's brevity of wit makes connections and insights that would otherwise be much more strenuous to find, hence, Freud writes, "the comic effect apparently depends...on the difference between the two cathectic expenditures—one's own and the other person's as estimated by empathy."6 That other person is the one who thinks the whole idea through. We can say then that, for Freud, our relief that the encounter with the I-stranger was quick, unexpectedly condensed, is what issues forth in the form of laughter.

This "I-stranger," a transpersonal mobius strip, is what humor condenses and circuits us through. It seems that this is the strip Sarah unravels and stages for us all to see, conducting a humor with laughter, when she describes the funny malformations of a McDonald's "nugget buddy": "Isn't it strange to process a live animal into a nugget, something utterly inorganic, only to reanimate it for children as a sympathetic friend or action hero?" The poor kids, playing along with this humor for some marketing trick. "I guess," adds Sarah, "it makes some kind of marketing sense, lodging the chicken nugget deep into the child's psyche." But the marketing undoes itself by way of the uncertainty it deploys to complete the lodge. Who is the nugget, and by mutual extension, who is the child? Since the I-stranger is literally consumed, what is he doing to the child's body? It may be no coincidence that Sarah chooses this scenario to help her process her "mother's illness [that] made her believe things were alive in frightening and dangerous ways." I'm not suggesting that humor replicates those same ways—that would be absurd—but its ways are terrifying in their own way, too. Humor no doubt can "foster connection," but also forces us to ask, connection to what?

Irvin Hunt is Assistant Professor of English, African American Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Earning his M.A. at The University of California, Berkeley in 2007, and his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2014, his research interests include African American literature and cultural history, humor studies, performance studies, social movement theory, and political theory. His current book manuscript Before the Utopia: A Cultural History of the Black Cooperative Movement, 1890-The Present uncovers how four generations of African American artists—W. E. B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and their circles—established local cooperatives as alternative to global capital. He argues that these artists used cooperatives as arenas to experiment with new ways of forming a leftist social movement, exploring the question, how do you chart a movement without investing in progress? His most recent publications have appeared or are forthcoming in African American Literature: In Transition (Cambridge UP), Contemporary Literature, American Literature, Public Books, and American Literary History. His awards and fellowships include a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a Rutgers University Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American Literature, and Columbia University's John W. Kluge Award for a New Generation of Faculty Excellence.