Taking Back the Laugh

Previous articleNext article FreeTaking Back the Laugh: Comedic Alibis, Funny FailsWilliam ChengWilliam Cheng Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreEighteen days after 11 September 2001, a new season of Saturday Night Live premiered on schedule, making big headlines given how most other television programs were getting replaced by round-the-clock news coverage. The NFL and MLB called off games, the Emmys were doubly postponed, Rockstar delayed the release of Grand Theft Auto III (set in a fictionalized New York City), and Disney’s parks closed their doors.1 Entertainment across the United States—sitcoms, sports, rollercoasters—screeched to a halt, ground to zero. For SNL producer Lorne Michaels to reboot his laugh factory was saying something.2Specifically, Michaels wanted the host Reese Witherspoon to say “fucking.”3 He told her to work the word into the opening monologue’s punchline, declaring he would happily pay whatever Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fines came their way. Although Witherspoon chickened out at the last minute (replacing the teleprompter’s fucking with the word balls for her joke, leaving the audience none the wiser), Michaels’s original plea conveyed how the arbitrary taboo of an F-bomb could feel ridiculously immaterial compared to the fire and brimstone a few miles away. With the world crashing down, a little uncensored fucking—scandalizing everyone but, really, no one—would have rhetorically embodied what all of the talking heads were claiming anyway: the country had been forever changed, no going back, no take-backs. After abundant media jabber about the death of irony, Michaels wished to send the message that, for at least one night, all bets were off and all laughs fair game.4Fast-forward to 18 June 2015, the night Jon Stewart ran out of jokes on The Daily Show.5 As Stewart told a stunned audience, he couldn’t bring himself to write funny material in the wake of the previous afternoon’s massacre of nine black worshippers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Stewart’s silent treatment made loud news. The moratorium on comedy flashed across the internet as sagacious testament to the stupefying effects of tragedy.At the time, the respective acts of foreign and domestic terrorism sent shocks through the citizenry’s collective funny bone, exploding entertainment’s permissions and proclivities. SNL dared to make ‘em laugh; The Daily Show dared to desist. Lorne Michaels wanted to take back laughter (to retrieve it and return it to the nation’s viewers); Jon Stewart sought to take out laughter (solemnly hushing the audience and flipping the studio soundscape on its head). Opposite tacks, yet both got away with it, snatching praise and publicity for good measure ... funnily enough.Laughing out of CourtRemember the last time someone told you to lighten up? It’s a gut punch, a low blow. Accusations of “why so serious?” feel like serious attacks, striking at a core failure of character in societies ruled by laugh tracks, witty tweets, and punny headlines.6 Even (or especially) in times of strife, humor should presumably serve as fantastic armor against no-good realities. But this armor is not so much iron as it is ironic; for within neoliberal logics, people who endure systemic oppression (blacks, queers, crips)—who might have the least reason to lighten up arbitrarily—tend to be the ones who are most exhorted to gain a sense of humor, to take a joke, and to laugh things off. A quotidian illustration involves men who goad women to smile, as if an unhumored female countenance (Resting Bitch Face) were an affront to physiognomic aesthetics and social mores.7Yet when disenfranchised people do appear overpeppy or do laugh out loud, they can get slammed anyway. On 22 August 2015, eleven women (ten black, one white), part of a book club called Sistahs on the Reading Edge, were kicked off the Napa Valley Wine Train because they allegedly made too much noise while celebrating a member’s birthday. For the record, when the laughers asked the maître d’ whether passengers had voiced complaints, he replied: “Well, people’s faces are uncomfortable.”8 In other (or no) words, the maître d’ addressed the noise violation by reading into the passengers’ silent expressions. The incident birthed the hashtag #LaughingwhileBlack, a spin on #DrivingwhileBlack. For a persecuted population to laugh, this meme suggests, risks circumstantial vulnerability and sanctions. Because minoritized individuals bear higher evidentiary loads for propriety, mirthful outbursts can sound amplified to suspicious or envious ears. Laughter may be damning not only for the chronically marginalized but also for anyone in temporary hot water—a child being lectured by parents, a student in detention, or a defendant on trial.Consider the 1988 appellate proceedings of State v. Parker, in which the court found the defendant unremorseful based on his laughter during the prosecutor’s statements. Although laughter can bubble up from all kinds of feelings and conditions—nervousness, despair, incomprehension—this court’s litigious hearing of the defendant’s laughter pegged the act as evidence of impenitence or even evil.9 Alternatively, take the case of Sgt. Robert Bales, currently serving a life sentence for murdering sixteen Afghan civilians in 2012. During the trial, prosecutors played a phone recording of Bales and his wife laughing as they discussed the case—again, a putative blow to claims of remorse.10 In these instances, courts assumed that laughter spills secrets, always saying something. To extrapolate from Miranda warnings, anything you say—and any laugh let loose—may indeed be used against you in court. Most recently, the public doubled down on its vilification of former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli, who, when testifying before Congress in February 2016 (on charges of price-gouging drugs), repeatedly pleaded the Fifth Amendment while smirking and looking “as if he were about to burst out laughing.”11 Here, just the look of suppressed laughter—no less so than any sound of laughter—sufficed to cement Shkreli’s reputation as “the most hated man in America,” racking up accusations of immaturity and douchery to boot (fig. 1).12Figure 1. Martin Shkreli testifying before Congress.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointOr rewind to the biblical story about the birth of Isaac. God tells Abram and Sarai, who are one hundred and ninety years young respectively, that they will bear a child. Incredulous, Abram falls facedown and laughs, enacting the first ROFL in Hebrew scripture. Later, when God repeats this prophecy, Sarai laughs to herself. God asks her (rhetorically, since He obviously knows the answer), “Is anything impossible for the LORD?”“I did not laugh,” says the fearful Sarai.“Yes, you did laugh,” God replies.[Genesis 18:14–15]It’s a classic case of He said, she said, except there’s little room for negotiation here; the He in this case is the final Word, the divine rule of law. Although Sarai tries to retract her laugh, God operates under the schoolyard principle of no take-backs. “Once laughed, a laugh persists,” points out Anca Parvulescu in her reading of this Bible passage. “God would not hear of it.”13 (Or, rather, God would not not hear of it.) Notably, both Abram and Sarai laughed, but God gave the latter a harder time. Gender politics aside, this discrepancy may owe to how Sarai laughed quietly (whereas Abram LOL-ed), as if attempting to get away with it. And if there’s one thing God can’t stand, as the Old Testament certifies, it’s people who underestimate his omniscience.Such stories about laughter’s liabilities run counter to more common portrayals of laughter and humor as subversive, free, and empowering.14 Comedians and laughers, after all, often demand get-out-of-jail-free cards by professing something to be just a joke.15 The just in just a joke serves double duty, meaning not only only, but also fair, as in “all’s fair in love” and comedy. A homophobic punchline or an act of sexual harassment might dodge censure if the case can be made that it was performed in good fun.16 This is comedy’s signature alibi. Alibi hails from Latin’s alius and ibi, roughly meaning “someplace else.” With a license to kill, comedians are expected to boast, “Oh yes, I went there!”—there, meaning “someplace else,” out of bounds and beyond the pale. Comedy’s anything-goes exemptions conjure the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, a state of upheaval where “serious matters are suspended, things do not count, absolution is offered ex ante.”17 Comedic alibis can be so powerful that they drag errors and faux pas into the realm of respectability, enabling even the most egregious ethical or aesthetic failing to pass for ... well, passing.18 Given how critical alchemy can turn just about any catastrophe into comic gold, the arena of risibility in today’s media appears virtually boundless.For how many of us can claim immunity to comedy’s exculpatory rationales? Even Christie Davies, who has spent decades researching jokes and humor (in effect, studying why jokes matter), peppers his work with disclaimers concerning how jokes might not matter, noting that they do not “have any significant social consequences or express profound moral or existential truths.”19 Against the familiar notion of rapier wits, Davies insists that most jokes neither embody nor engender antipathy.20 A set-piece joke, he says, “cannot be used as a sword; it is merely decoration on the scabbard. Jokes are entertainment only, a mere laughing matter.”21 This said, excuses about levity don’t always succeed. Telling someone to “lighten up!” or “take a joke!” can fetch the killjoy retort that “you can’t joke your way out of this!” (an appeal against effectivity) or “you hurt my feelings!” (an appeal to affectivity). So while comedic alibis have potential to excuse failings of aesthetics and ethics, they might fail unto themselves—not least in the face of a hostile jury.A familiar saying is that “against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand,” a Mark Twain gem uttered today in inspirational contexts (despite the lesser-known fact that it’s spoken by Satan in Twain’s novel).22 Beyond its advocacy of using mirth against malevolence, however, this quotation can be read another way: that when our bodies are assaulted by our own impulsive laughter, we show our cards and lose our moral credibility, leaving no leg—nothing—to stand on. If you snicker at a comedian’s racist joke, it becomes that much harder for you to scramble onto high ground because, listen, you laughed; the evidence is in the vibrations, right here (not someplace else, no alibi). Yes, you may argue after the joke that you were laughing cynically and knowingly at the structural racial injustices that fuel such cruel comedy, but by this point you’re necessarily on the defensive, carrying the burden of proof. In any case, having to say something was just a joke already implies that court is now in session, that some possible offense lies in need of retraction or explication. Complicating every aspect of the comedic alibi, furthermore, is the fact that people don’t always know (how to describe) why they laugh.23 And just as people hate explaining jokes, most loathe having to rationalize their laughter out loud.In this article, I perform an acoustemology of comedy’s alibis in contemporary media. I listen for means by which laughter—its emission, contagion, suppression—can serve as audible barometers of how alibis either fly or bomb. A paradox emerges from the ways spontaneous-sounding laughter can simultaneously free us from societal scripts while shackling us within our own telltale, tittering bodies. A laugher’s accountability poses a moving target precisely because so much of comedy’s generic success relies on procedures of failure, impropriety, and breakage. Through three progressive cases, I delve into modern technologies of taking back laughter via the breaking and hacking of cultural texts. Each case features a do-it-yourself (DIY) phenomenon that exposes the stakes and choreographies of comedy’s consumer sovereignties: first, television fans who, through techniques of editing and recomposition, remove laugh tracks from comedies (The Big Bang Theory, Friends) or, inversely, add laugh tracks to dramas (Breaking Bad, The Wire), using the silence or surplus sound to break the show’s original mood; second, a YouTube game show that tries to make contestants break into smiles or laughter by presenting them with outrageous videos; and, third, Apollo Theater audience members who, through brash laughter and boos, use their collective judge-it-yourself authority to make or break the dreams of hopeful performers on amateur nights. All three of these examples hinge on the breakage of norms and the breaking in of new normals, embodying or eliciting laughter that may variously sound ambivalent, uncomfortable, or out of line. Lending a musicological ear to laughter’s stubborn materialities and technical hackability opens resonant perspectives into some of comedy’s funniest alibis. I conclude with a tribute to laughter’s Debbie Downer cousin: the groan.Hacking Laughs: Big Bang BombingBombing is the sonorous metaphor for the devastating silence that greets a floundering comedian. A maw of muteness engulfs the performer, turning an atmosphere of optimistic joybringing into cringe-worthy desperation. Just as bombs blast away landscapes, so bombing demolishes the ideal soundscapes of comedic call-and-response.One domain of comedy where bombing remains virtually impossible is a television show with either a laugh track or a cued-to-laugh studio audience. So long as there’s no audio malfunction or audience reticence, every gag and punchline should fetch reliable, lively chuckles. But although producers have historically used laugh tracks to bestow this sense of liveliness and liveness, the tracks can strike a deadening tone. Slavoj Žižek says he experiences both catharsis and unease when he watches a show with canned laughter. “Even if I do not laugh,” he declares, “but simply stare at the screen, tired after a hard day’s work, I nevertheless feel relieved after the show ...: my most intimate feelings can be radically externalized; I can literally ‘laugh and cry through another.’”24 Canned laughter—or, as Ron Rosenbaum calls it, “Mirth Muzak”—is as flat as funny gets.25 Ontologically, a recorded or synthesized laugh track is all surface, a veneer of jocund artifice; amplitudinally, decibels for canned chortles versus canned guffaws vary minimally, since television audio requires volume equalization according to the FCC, the European Broadcasting System, and comparable national broadcast-safe standards. Even at live tapings for sitcoms and stand-up comedy specials, face in of how to members may be to laugh and as they would than in a for The Big Bang Theory, a producer told the audience, is you need to do is to back, do not your This was to like a to an of a laugh track for the of of what matters in of and either studio or synthesized sound a can for laughter as a need for no of comic But to has at how on “the in such that is the that is laughing and having a good For some a laugh track already and the potential of laughter more the of the and its of of other people laughing in no way from this laughter, if as or or can the laughs out of our own a flat a flat laugh track might a on our and no for the and sound like familiar of canned laughter since its as of the most sitcoms today is none other than The Big Bang Theory, which and against the show’s egregious laughter, fans (or have with taking out this laughter through sound editing and out the laughter while leaving the and The of this is that into A YouTube has a of such with the to my for the television show Big Bang I how the show is when you take out the laugh to a Big Bang canned laughter is the for the show’s comedic both and with a is the of a made by a a on a first with an from I can’t here to little of laughter replaced by of and so you of to little little of laughter should it’s of laughter have much of loud laughter have been for you because you were so of laughter you Yes, I you could being that of laughter been of you’re a you that have an high of laughter as high but are more than so in you’re of laughter of laughter for who have the original this of a laugh track can be and In of a of the blow a of a made all the more by and the noise of laughers, about and sound on the and any of just because no one is The however, the to fail so that it to funny on another an the can laughter from the YouTube who may the and than laughing with the we laugh at the A laugh track to take back their laughs, to the of laughing and, to humor in the The Big Bang and other part of what laughter sound is the with which it a character will say or do something and laughter another character and more laughter and on it to let laughter out the or a in people do not for laughter every nor do laughers their if a tells a joke, it might everyone to up for a of time, people to their the point however, that these of are with studio and the laughter that from a in the time, it is these and that a to out the laughs with than a laugh track from a show is a laugh track using sound did just this for the laughter, the as a an a and a The original is to be with the on her through the Just a of laughter the have laugh tracks to and such as The and as as to in a racist on her in getting by his on The of and little her on (fig. with laugh tracks on and The Large ImageDownload of laughter as a break down in where laughter make us less to laugh or where we laugh in to out in an of the when on a first with a man who, it has a low for what he funny and, a In during the he laughs and so that he the of who their to laugh; she is The tells her spent the of the either talking about or the or the most things I could anything just to make not laugh in was to use her to remove the laugh of she to or mirth had no off So in the of and another and tries to do the into laughing so that her can at least hear how he After the women the to only his As the three women are stunned into with (fig. and up all the in the while and The three women fail to his it yet it is also this failure to the show’s who stand to be like to laugh out and in to Large ImageDownload laughter out to be a given that he with of up of and when Canned laugh tracks are But a talking laugh of not because he to laugh at or jokes moral but because he laughed and a in the of with and her neither what he found so funny nor why he laughed so Laughter indeed always or alibis and liabilities on A says not mirth or release but and the point remains that when people laugh, their and physiognomic to and to Because laughter can be hard to its with The is that people who are laughing may do so something in the For even when someone appears about to laugh Martin Shkreli testifying before we might to know what all of laughter of character ... or so the and YouTube for Shkreli at the mere of his smirking it to none other than the of laughter. a of YouTube called which contestants with smiles and while on The or you from the The is a face against the of For the contestants and an of the that they are to for the of all contestants the of they will not breaking into or laughter at an In one the contestants are a YouTube of a young man with some contestants to a but don’t last The producer a young you And like the Sarai to the of tries to get away with it, I I I I to no she is from the (fig. are to laugh at not to laugh at an of a man the laugh the operates and within within Large ImageDownload of these is to and to YouTube who are to laugh at contestants from someone to a face can be a funny yet As the contestants to from or they show and other of where an is about to burst out of The of suppressed laughter up this laughter as that would from release from and But for all of their funny contestants may us with how they in a like a a “but when I I can be If any aesthetic in the of funny she let nothing the of we might have into the of the and through a of and the case of the in which the of a double by the of who recorded was by of YouTube and media and points in a way that up doubly the original of aesthetic and leaving it a we our and a of funny we to the laughing game with the funny thing about this is we would

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