Off to the Gallows...

In the book, Comedy after Postmodernism:  Rereading Comedy from Edward Lear

to Charles Willeford (2001), Kirby Olsen attempts to articulate the rapport between the

genre of comedy and Postmodernism. Olsen explains 

                   Comedy by definition requires stable referents, norms against which behaviors may be deemed                           humorous. In the absence of such norms, it is impossible to define comedy. Some comics responded               by becoming metacomedians whose performances took the impossibility of being a comedian in the               postmodern world as their subject. (107)

Olsen's thesis that comedy is not longer able to be defined in the Postmodern moment due 

to the destabilization of norms and normal modes of signification is an important one to 

which novels like Joseph Heller's Catch-22  are a testament. A war novel without a clear 

moral compass, bedlam (one of the text's most frequently used terms) becomes the new 

norm, both to the readers delight and horror. In Catch-22 deconstructs established mores 

and leaves ambiguity in its stead. "Insanity is contagious" (22) and during a war, everyone is 

insane. But I do not think that Catch-22's humor is as much inane as hopeless. Its zaniness 

is rooted in despair when confronting an existential lack of meaning, much like the complex 

absurdity of Kafka's laws and insurmountable bureaucracies.  



Gallows Humor is a variation of black humor (not the ethnic "Black humor" of Tyler Perry 

or the Brothers Wayans) which strengthens the morale  of the oppressed person even while 

he or she is confronted by an insurmountable or dire situation. A good example of this kind 

of humor might be the dubious last words of Oscar Wilde who reportedly asserted from his 

deathbed "either those curtains go or I do."Here is an example from a page that I have 

found indispensable to my understanding of Gallows Humor which provides a panoply of 

examples from all 

varieties of media, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GallowsHumor. 


This joke involves two German soldiers near the close of WWII:

Eins: I was thinking, after the war ends I will go for a walk around the perimeter of the 

Greater German Empire.

Zwei: Oh? And what are you planning to do in the afternoon?

Told by Germans faced with the inevitable fall of the Reich the tellers would confront the 

ineluctability of an undesirable socio-political situation with humor; however, if told by an 

American the joke becomes an example of Aristotle's "Inferiority Theory" of humor in which 

humor is used to deride the other.


Anyway, for this week, please post an example of "Gallows Humor" in which the joke reveals 

a hopeless, morbid, or otherwise undeniable truth. 

"The Second Oldest Profession": Political Humor

Ronald Reagan supposedly once remarked, "It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first." The "first" oldest profession is generally understood to be prostitution and when compared to politics, at least from  a moral perspective, one might make the argument that this assertion amounts to an insult against prostitution rather than the inverse. The amount of subterfuge employed by politicians is legendary, and deception for political or personal gain seems the defining characteristic of even the most ostensibly well-motivated politicians.

Political humor is universal in so far as it concerns the polis (Greek for "city," or "state") of which all individuals within a given system in one way or another form a part. Political humor depicts the polis' paradoxical stake in and as well as powerlessness against the secret machinations of their respective political systems. Political humor's unique and frequently transgressive point of critique allows political parties, ruling elites, or even impenetrable bureaucracy to be attacked through a pithy turn of phrase, and this offensive might be waged from any end of the political spectrums. [N.B. I write "spectrums" here in reference to the Nolan Chart (https://www.nolanchart.com/survey-php) which features four axes: "Right" and "Left" but also "Authoritarian" and "Libertarian."] To revisit the Mel Brooks quote with which we began the semester, "Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because 

Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with 

comedy, they stand no chance." If rhetoric is the art of spinning an untruth to appear veridical, 

perhaps comedy's power is the art of disguising the truth as an entertaining lie.



In the U.S. we are currently embroiled in an election year (and from my own perspective a very 

depressing one at that). The upside of the rather dismal political reality is that we are constantly 

bombarded with many hilarious examples of political humor. One bit that received a good deal of 

coverage was Larry David's masterful depiction of Bernie Sanders on Saturday Night 

Live in October of 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfmwGAd1L-o

From a political perspective, Saturday Night Live received some flack from the media as well as 

Bernie supporters for seemingly delegitimizing the Sanders' campaign through the skit's writing, 

while the majority of viewers simply found the bit to be an entertaining and accurate impression of 

the Democratic candidate. Memes have also been particularly perspicacious and witty this campaign 

season, including the following particularly scathing one that went viral on Facebook a few weeks 

ago (Confession: in my own anti-Trump fervor, I even shared this one on my Facebook 

wall): "Donald Dump"



This week, I would like you to post an example of political humor. It may be a joke, a meme, a bit, or anything else that may have caught your attention. What does it reveal about the broader but more understated political discourse with which it takes part?



Lastly, I offer a long list of succinct, often humorous but not always accurate illustrations of various political and economic systems using cows as an extended example of more traditional political "jokes" (these were all taken from Daniel Kurtzman at About.com http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/jokes/bljokecowspolitics.htm).  A CHRISTIAN DEMOCRAT: You have two cows. You keep one and give one to your neighbor. A SOCIALIST: You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor. AN AMERICAN REPUBLICAN: You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. So what? AN AMERICAN DEMOCRAT: You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. You feel guilty for being successful. You vote people into office who tax your cows, forcing you to sell one to raise money to pay the tax. The people you voted for then take the tax money and buy a cow and give it to your neighbor. You feel righteous. A COMMUNIST: You have two cows. The government seizes both and provides you with milk. A FASCIST: You have two cows. The government seizes both and sells you the milk. You join the underground and start a campaign of sabotage. DEMOCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE: You have two cows. The government taxes you to the point you have to sell both to support a man in a foreign country who has only one cow, which was a gift from your government. CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE: You have two cows. You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows. BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE: You have two cows. The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the milk, then pours the milk down the drain. AN AMERICAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when the cow drops dead. A FRENCH CORPORATION: You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows. A JAPANESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create clever cow cartoon images called Cowkimon and market them World-Wide. A GERMAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You reengineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves. A BRITISH CORPORATION: You have two cows. They are mad. They die. Pass the shepherd's pie, please. AN ITALIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows, but you don't know where they are. You break for lunch. A RUSSIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 12 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka. A SWISS CORPORATION: You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you. You charge others for storing them. A BRAZILIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You enter into a partnership with an American corporation. Soon you have 1000 cows and the American corporation declares bankruptcy. AN INDIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You worship both of them. A CHINESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim full employment, high bovine productivity, and arrest the newsman who reported on them. AN ISRAELI CORPORATION: There are these two Jewish cows, right? They open a milk factory, an ice cream store, and then sell the movie rights. They send their calves to Harvard to become doctors. So, who needs people? AN ARKANSAS CORPORATION: You have two cows. That one on the left is kinda cute.

Toilet or Scatological Humor

On the one hand, toilet or scatological humor is ostensibly that genre of comedy with the most stigma: In polite society one must refrain from even mentioning bodily functions, let alone performing the communicative act of joking about them. On the other hand and rather paradoxically, scatological humor is that brand of comedy that figures most prominently into many of the most revered works of the literary canon. From the Greek playwright Aristophanes to Chaucer to Rabelais to Shakespeare to Rowan Atkinson's persona, Mr. Bean, the fart joke seems a stinkily ascendant art form.  

Despite their ubiquity, I am not sure that I have ever found toilet humor very funny, but as the father of a young child, my understanding of the genre has broadened. Scatological humor allows us to chuckle about something taboo, and perhaps in this case Lord Shaftesbury's "Relief Theory" of humor seems the most compelling understanding of how the joke functions. The theory was later adapted by better known thinkers like Sigmund Freud and the American philosopher John Dewey. The "Relief Theory" of humor suggests that when we laugh, laughter releases nervous energy that had otherwise been applied toward repressing certain psychical mechanisms. (From Freud's perspective this made the world of comedy akin to that of the world of dreams as in these two seemingly liminal spaces repressive mechanisms lost their hold; for more, see his intriguing and thoroughly readable Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious [1907].) Thus, when I joke by even saying the "potty word" of "poop" with my four-year-old daughter, perhaps we both laugh because of the seemingly transgressive nature of the word. She is not allowed to use it at school for one reason or another because it is taboo, but as her mother and I explain to her, at home only the context renders it taboo. If we are eating dinner together, "poop" should most certainly not be mentioned; however, at any other time the saying of the word (within moderation!) is fair game. 

Louis C.K. explains to Jon Stewart why fart jokes are funny [Louis C.K.: "You don't have to be smart to laugh at farts, but you have to be stupid not to."]

As the great Roman playwright Terence (185-149 BCE) famously wrote in his play, Heauton Timorumenos, "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto," or "I am human, and nothing human is alien to me." If humor bridges the gap between human experience and our collective fears about the human condition, then any subject matter that we encounter seems within the domain of the joke.

This week I would like you to share your favorite examples of scatological humor. The jokes can be as offensive or harmless as your stomach (or bowels) can handle, as long as they pertain to the more disgusting, corporeal aspects of human experience, i.e. peeing, pooping, puking, et al. I also request that we hold off on sex jokes this time around, but do not worry, their time will come (pun VERY much intended!!!).

Q: Why don't you fart in church?
A: Because you have to sit in your pew.