As Gaëtan Brulotte published some 300 articles (mostly in French), only the most recent one in English is posted here. For articles in French see this link. For a selective list of Brulotte's articles, click here.
Invited introductory chapter to a volume Laugher and Power edited by
"Qui prête à rire n'est pas sûr d'être remboursé"
Raymond Devos
If we define power as the opportunity to influence the behaviour of others and to impose one's will upon it (this is the definition that
Today, the exercise of power is founded principally on organised persuasion. One might imagine a society à la Fourier in which everything was based on laughter, and seriousness was prohibited. This, then, would be a society in which laughter would be in power; but no such society exists, nor is it ever likely to do so. In
Laughter is therefore not in power and probably never will be, since it is power's most feared enemy; but it does have power. The question is: how does it exercise this power? Given the inherent force it seems always to have possessed throughout history, laughter is characterised by its fundamental ambivalence. To begin with, from a female point of view, it has long been under the aegis of a dominant male discourse, the second sex being a favourite target, from misogynistic medieval farces depicting the tyranny of wives, to modem comédies de boulevard featuring the cuckolded husband. Women have been conditioned to leave humour to male power in the public arena, taking refuge themselves in self-censorship or respectful silence, or else they have limited its expression to specific areas left unoccupied by the first sex -literature, for example.
Secondly, laughter often expresses a revolt against power or against boundaries in life. According to some theories, it is a rebellion of sons against fathers (a rebellion of daughters, too, we might add), and bears within it the seeds of dissidence and subversion, as in carnival. This is why the dominant discourses always keep a close watch on impertinent jesters. On the other hand, laughter may just as easily express alienation, like that of the madman crushed by authority in the form of officialdom. As much as revolt, laughter can voice a response of submission and dependency: think of the jaundiced laughter of confusion or of fear; think of the grimace of impotence faced with the absurdity of the universe.
Laughter can also signify solidarity (laughing with), or be a sign of welcome, integration and fellowship. It has the power of social cohesion, implying companionship, shared memories and collective activity. It offers the shortest route from one human being to another. But it can also express exclusion (laughing at), signalling unacceptable difference, voicing disdain, rejection, slander or malice. Witness those ethnic jokes bordering on xenophobia: about Poles, Belgians, Newfies and other racial scapegoats. In other words, laughter has the power to divide as much as to unite.
And yet it can also invite sympathy, for it carries an element of identification which helps the person laughing to share the inner life of the comic character, thanks to a range of experiences and observations that they both have in common. I recognise myself to some extent in ridiculous behaviour, particularly if I make fun of myself, for in spite of what some theorists may say, we do not only make fun of others. If I laugh at the failings of another, it is also because I am potentially guilty of the same failings. Do not vanity, power, money, ambition and seduction underlie everyone's existence? A Jourdain or an Harpagon merely represents the excesses and aberrations which their absurdity encourages us to avoid; hence the educative potential of a comedy that Molière himself acknowledged in the Preface to his Tartuffe. I project myself into scenarios close to my own cultural universe or to my own way of thinking. Is it not the case that it is often difficult to appreciate humour in a foreign language? Similarly, an in-joke that makes mathematicians or carpenters fall about laughing may easily go over my head. I enjoy Proust's subtle evocations of Parisian society, or David Lodge's hilarious satires of the academic world, but I am far from certain that a schoolboy would appreciate such humour. The success of comedy presupposes shared interests. Laughter is a way of making contact with others and with the world (this is especially so in the case of teasing), and yet (and this is another of its fundamental ambivalences), it also implies distance because, in order to laugh at something or someone, we need to view it/them from a detached perspective. Laughter does at least allow us to distance ourselves from the realities of existence, and makes us into spectators of humanity, which means that it can make us insensitive as well as sensitive.
Given its profound ambivalence, it is understandable that theorists constantly complain of the difficulties of defining the comic and of identifying its constants. It is true that, more or less throughout history, humans have laughed, but not necessarily at the same things. For the ancients, the comic is associated with a physical or moral ugliness that does not offend. Today, we hardly ever laugh at deformity any more, although irregular movements of the body such as grimaces, exaggerated gestures, clumsiness or absent-mindedness are still an endless source of humour. The psychological comedy, the picaresque tradition and the mocking ironic humour of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have nothing in common with medieval farce or with the carnavalesque bawdy of Rabelais. The twentieth century was more interested in comedy that shocked, provoked, confused, shook people out of their habits, expressing a metaphysical Angst and sense of the absurd.
The components of laughter doubtless vary along with the forms that power takes. From the times of the Fabliaux, of La Farce du Cuvier or Les Quinze Joies de Mariage, misogynistic comedies have nevertheless attacked the institution of marriage which became a symbol of slavery after the Church made it indissoluble. Nowadays the ease of divorce has rendered this kind of humour redundant. Molière felt the need to attack medical and religious discourses, whereas now our democratic way of life makes individual politicians the targets of more and more audacious criticisms. Ultimately, laughter is subjective and personal; comedy is what makes me laugh, and this will not necessarily make you laugh.
Laughter functions according to the laws of relativity, for it varies not only according to period, but also according to the individual's intelligence, quickness of mind, education, culture, social milieu, mentality and psychology as well as context. The comic effect is dependent on this relativity, and its power is all the more limited as a result. There are forms of humour that do not amuse everybody. Personally, for example, I have never found
Running through the many theories of the comic that have been propounded one still finds a notable constant in its relation to some form of power, to the idea of outdoing and dominating others. When we laugh at the faults and setbacks of our fellow men and women (a clumsy action, for example), we express a feeling of superiority and a corresponding demeaning of the person laughed at. This is a well-accepted theory that can be traced back to Hobbes. There is no doubt that, in this case, laughter generates a pleasurable sense of pride, implying a narcissistic satisfaction, crowning our success and confirming our higher status, and Roland Barthes has demonstrated this association of laughter with power. The discourse of laughter is highly discriminating, dividing the world in two, separating the good from the bad, the serious from the ridiculous, highlighting faults and weaknesses, punishing them with scorn under the pretext of exorcising them. Laughter thus has critical, moralistic and civilising qualities. But at the same time it also embodies the voice of Truth, of which we moderns have learnt to be suspicious. As Baudelaire so shrewdly observed, laughter can be both conservative and judgmental: in his words, 'juste bon à dénoncer les vices'.
And yet -and it is in this that we rediscover its fundamental ambivalence -if it possesses any kind of power, it is the power to free us from servitude and illusion. This is why those in power fear it, and why they surround themselves with thinkers who study the threat it poses and view it as dangerous. Plato sees laughter as a potential source of disorder in the city-state. Jesus takes himself far too seriously ever to laugh. For more than a thousand years, Christian discourses condemned laughter and its profane power. Laughter seems incompatible with religion, and throughout history the Church has inveighed against comedy. The Islamic overreaction to Danish cartoons is to be put into this context. Laughter is a socially disruptive force that challenges sacred symbols, customs, conventions, morality, logic, transgresses taboos and flouts laws, undermining civilisation and learning. It gives voice to impropriety, disrespect, aggression and the absurd. With laughter, the social machine creaks, its herd-like unanimity falters, its habitual cohesion breaks up, and its mechanical reactions break down. Everything comes to a grinding halt. Sceptical, nihilistic, anarchic, it overturns the ambient system. Among those who fear the dangers of laughter is Hegel, who attributes the very degeneration of civilisations to its negative and anti-social tendencies.
Laughter, admittedly, has a long history of complicity with dissidence, but, as we know, dissidence does not necessarily have destructive consequences: it also possesses a transformative power of which we in the modern period are well aware. Quite unlike those discourses that opposed it, black humour was made into a revolutionary weapon by the surrealists, a weapon that shook the foundations of the established order and proposed a new vision of the world, and a reminder of those theories whereby humour does good both to the individual and to society. Humour is characteristic not only of the joy of living but also of freedom of thought, and, contrary to what Hegel believed, it is a force for progress in society.
From the carnavalesque of Rabelais to Nietzsche's 'gay knowledge', via Montaigne, Diderot and Voltaire, from Thackeray to Leacock via the 'deranged' characters of Louis Fréchette, the anxious smiles of Kafka (who could not help giggling as he read his own works), the hopeless figures of Beckett's world, the slyboots of Roald Dahl, the mystifications of Calvino, and the melancholy humour of Woody Allen, laughter is a form of lucidity that allows us to transcend the human condition, to expand our awareness, and to become more civilised. From metaphysical Angst to Sartrian doubt, humour allows us to disengage from the surrounding universe, and in an instant, to contemplate existence from above, as if it were a simple game of the imagination. To laugh at life as it presents itself to our consciousness is a means of appreciating it more fully, of bearing the unbearable and of finding different solutions to our problems. Hence Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power: 'The most unhappy and the most melancholic of animals is also, and quite rightly so, the most gay.'
In this sense, there is no doubt that laughter, as it feeds on misfortune, retains the potential to protect us against the hostilities of the world. Raymond Devos developed his own brand of humour in the concentration camps. In his moving and controversial film La Belle Vie, Roberto Benigni is portraying in the midst of the Holocaust an imprisoned father who resorts to humour to make this reality more bearable for his young son, wrapping him in a cocoon of unreality. He has him believe that it is all an elaborate game in which every activity (such as hiding, keeping quiet, obeying orders) allows them to accumulate points to win a tank. Humour thus becomes the only way of escaping insanity, the only way of preserving hope and humanity in a world that is completely devoid of both. For Devos, laughter is a companion to intelligence and reason. It is a counterweight to the tragic and to the absurdity of existence. An instrument of clarity for some, it affords an escape into illusion and unreality for others.
Here we touch upon the cognitive dimensions of laughter. The comic effect presupposes a shared knowledge that constitutes its implicit background. This background is a mosaic of logic, received ideas, common sense, conventions, and both biological and acquired instincts. Any break in this common territory, any incongruity relating to it, provokes laughter. Whether it be the mechanisation of life, a confusion of registers (the literal and the figurative, for example), an infringement of etiquette, a misunderstanding or a fault in reasoning, the comic often arises from a fracture in our apprehension of the world. Its power of invention is unlimited, which is why foreign language-learning is an irresistible source of verbal humour, as indeed are the priceless gaffes of schoolchildren or the howlers found in exam scripts. (Here are a couple of typical examples: 'Un croque-mort est un croque-monsieur trop cuit' ; 'Un septuagénaire est un losange à sept côtés'.) And what exactly should we make of over-literal translations, like this instruction for the use of a Taiwanese shampoo: 'Use repeatedly for severe damage'; or this notice in a Japanese hotel: 'You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid'? At times laughter is even close to the fantastic in that it undermines reality and the fundamental principles governing our perception of it. It thus has the power to liberate implied contents, to suggest the presence of sous-entendus rich in meaning, to reveal the fantastic underside of reality, to throw new light on things, to point out the strange in the familiar, to lift censorship, to be endlessly impertinent, to create astonishing coincidences, to shake us out of our apathy and our rut. Whether through the delights of the double entendre (which the libertine writers of the eighteenth century perfected), through plays on words, in which Sol is a French expert (according to 'l'opinion pudique' and 'le conseil des sinistres'), through striking abridgements that capture certain aspects of our lives by telescoping cause and effect -think, for instance, of Desproges's 'Quéquette en décembre, layette en septembre' -or through the alleged wisdom of false proverbs ('Quand le merle chante en mai, avril est fini,' suggests Coluche), the power of laughter can be both stimulating and liberating on a cognitive level.
In literature, we are familiar with the subversive force of comedy as it deploys strategies of mystification, contradiction, diversion, intertextuality, self-destruction or carnival-style juxtapositions. The most striking manifestation of this force is surely that which consists in transgressing the rule of the separation of genres, to the extent that current theory has abandoned all attempts to assign any particular form to the comic. It does not constitute a separate genre, but is rather the underside of all others (Emelina, Defays). Uncategorisable, indefinable, it is a practice in perpetual motion. Parody occupies a privileged role in the comic tradition, and throughout history has given rise to numerous patricidal works that have renewed literature by taking the place of those texts that inspired them. Laughter fights all stereotypes, the sclerosis of thought, the arrogance of those in power, and offers a healthy relativity of perspectives.
Comic discourses are, perhaps, in the end the only ones that are able to defuse their own power when they have it. Thus when a writer of comic tales warns us 'It's just for laughs' or, following a serious statement, says 'I'm just joking', he may be programming reception of the message, but he is also inserting an inoffensive and playful parenthesis into the margins of the everyday. Humour is able to question itself, to turn against itself, or else to claim a gratuitousness, an innocence that relaxes its grip on others or on the world. In this way, humour is akin to game-playing and all those escapist activities that have no practical aim and that human beings find so satisfying.
Today, science takes laughter more seriously, if I may put it that way, attributing to it hygienic and therapeutic qualities to the extent that it is even perceived as a fountain of youth. It reduces stress, strengthens the immune system, cures depression and prolongs life. 'Health is a laughing matter!' people say. The word humour is, after all, of medical origin, and so, in a reversion of influence, it is now being recuperated by medical discourse. It seems that laughing does more good than running, and a researcher on laughter, William Fry of
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albérès, R.-M. Le comique et l’ironie. Paris, Hachette, 112p.
Chapiro, Marc. L’illusion comique. Paris, PUF, 1940, 160p
Defays, Jean-Marc. Le Comique. Parus, Seuil, 1996, 95p.
Emelina, Jean. Le Comique. Essai d’interprétation générale. Paris, Sedes, 1991.
Escarpit, Robert. L’Humour. Paris, PUF, 1960, 128p.
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Sangsue, Daniel. La Parodie. Paris, Hachette, 1994.
[1]See M. Roach, The Power of Laughter: '100 laughs is the aerobic equivalent of ten minutes on a rowing machine. Fry compared the heart rates of study subjects during laughter with his own heart rate during exercise, measured on the rowing machine in his home' (www.three-peaks.net/annette/Laughter.htm).