Even Laughter? From Laughter in the Magic Theater to the Laughter Assembly Line

Previous articleNext article FreeEven Laughter? From Laughter in the Magic Theater to the Laughter Assembly LineAnca ParvulescuAnca ParvulescuPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThere was a time when the literary and artistic avant-gardes defined themselves through their laughter. Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche and later Georges Bataille, they saw in laughter a space of freedom—from norms, from form, from the artist's ego. The artist aspired to laugh a true laugh; for it was clear that there were fake laughs, too. The path to laughter was tenuous, but its promise was rarely questioned. Laughter was the secret to a subjectivity capable of genuine art. And art, as with all avant-gardes, was to be indistinguishable from life. It needs to be emphasized that such laughter was not necessarily comedic. This is a story about laughter valued in itself, regardless of what mechanism produced it, whether that be comedy, jokes, humor, and so on. It was in the burst of laughter, often awkwardly and sometimes tragically produced, that promise lay.Yoshua Okón's Canned Laughter (2006) can be said to be nostalgically diagnosing the loss of this laughter.1 In the installation, contemporary laughter is produced in sweatshop conditions in Mexico, on an assembly line, and is carefully canned for long-term consumption by tame and unquestioning audiences. Gone is the spontaneity of laughter, its evental promise, its touch of the sacred. The revolutionary potential of laughter has given way to the seriality of the laugh track. In this essay, I read Okón's installation, drawing out what I take to be its project and its effects on the installation visitor. I also offer an analysis of a text the installation tacitly invokes: Hermann Hesse's novel Der Steppenwolf (1927), a modernist celebration of the promise of laughter, the presumed loss of which Okón deplores.2 Throughout, I trace the ramifications of a few questions: Is Okón's installation a symptom of our contemporaneity? Is nostalgia an appropriate affective relation to modernist laughter? What is the interplay between spontaneous and canned laughter? How are we to think of laughter after the laugh track?This, then, will be a meditation on laughter and only ancillarily on comedy. What I am proposing is a methodological reversal of the relation between laughter and comedy. We usually start with comedy and assume that it leads us to laughter; we subscribe to the presupposition that we laugh in the audience of a comedy or in the wake of a comedic situation. Sometimes we do, but often we do not. We sometimes laugh in response to tragedy (Bataille is fond of quoting the famous lines in Nietzsche: "To see tragic natures sink and to be able to laugh at them, despite the profound understanding, the emotion and the sympathy one feels—that is divine").3 Furthermore, recent studies have shown that most of the laughs we laugh are noncomedic in nature; we laugh by way of punctuating conversation, out of nervousness, embarrassment, awkwardness, and shock and, indeed, often gratuitously.4 In short, there is no stable connection between laughter and comedy. We might say, provisionally, that the relation between laughter and comedy is analogous to that between sexuality and gender in the queer theory of the 1990s; they are distinct categories, in need of distinct analytical frameworks of study. Like sexuality and gender (recall Eve Sedgwick's second axiom in Epistemology of the Closet), laughter and comedy sometimes intersect, but we cannot tell in advance how.5 This means that after we strategically posit their separateness and linger on their distinctness for a while, the challenge is to sometimes bring the two together, through careful reading, at the points where they most forcefully converge, in ways that cannot be anticipated.6 In this essay, I start from laughter, I dwell on laughter, and, at a few junctures, when laughter leads me to it, I touch on comedy. This reversal takes the conversation beyond the question of genre, beyond texts recognizable conventionally as comedies (neither Hesse's Steppenwolf nor Okón's Canned Laughter are comedies), asking us to ponder moments of comedy opened up by laughter rather than the other way around.Canned LaughterOkón's artwork has been exhibited, in various spaces, in three formats: a video installation; a single channel video; and a photograph.7 Canned Laughter came into being in the context of a program (Proyecto Juárez) within which artists were asked to create artworks based on their experience of the city of Ciudad Juárez.8 The city is located on the Mexican-US border and is known in the international media for smuggling, drugs, prostitution, and violence. It is also the site of a number of maquiladoras, factories that operate in sweatshop conditions and avail themselves of the tax benefits of the border location. Okón, who lives in Los Angeles and Mexico City and exhibits his work globally, interviewed former maquiladora employees (he did not get access to actual, highly securitized maquiladoras) and asked them about their lives and work. He then rented a warehouse and hired the same workers he had interviewed to work in a fictional maquiladora named Bergson. In this space, Okón orchestrated and recorded a chorus of the workers' laughter and staged a fictional assembly line on which the workers produce cans of laughter for American sitcoms. In the installation, visitors walk between tables that serve as improvised replicas of this assembly line and handle some of the 160 red cans, labeled Canned Laughter, with subtitles like Hysterical Laughter, Evil Laughter, Manly Laughter, and so on. Headphones attached to some of the cans allow them to listen to the recordings of the laughing workers. Against the assumption that laughter is contagious, none of the visitors in the exhibit seem to be laughing. As Slavoj Žižek might put it, there is already laughter going on; there is no need for visitors to laugh.9In the video part of the installation, a camera is fixed on a chorus of laughers (fig. 1). The Mexican workers are lined up in three rows on choral risers and dutifully follow the cues of a German conductor. There are two recording microphones on each side of the chorus and a recording table to its left. The workers wear navy robes with the company logo written in stylized font on their chest (Bergson). As if worried about the hygiene of the production process, they wear hairnets. They laugh in unison, mechanically. Some are barely opening their mouths, some are yawning, some are visibly embarrassed, some make large, soundless mouth movements. Their facial expressions are often impassive, sometimes forced, sometimes pained. There is no laughing sparkle in these laughers' eyes. An abyss is opened between the sound of laughter and the facial expressions of the laughers. While, in itself, the sound might allow for some pleasure, or at least fascination, the facial expressions of the workers foreclose any such possibility. The effect on the viewer is of sadness mixed with a dose of horror. And, of course, revolt: Is this what laughter has become?One minute into the laughing choral, the German conductor announces, in Spanish, that the workers will now do Witch Laughter from his homeland in the Black Forrest. The ensuing unison laughter is as flat as the previous laughs.10 The laughers are out of sync with the sound, which seems to be superimposed on the images of laughter. The laughing faces are in fact out of synch not only with the sound of their own laughter but with the idea of laughter tout court. Okón's video frames a triangular clash between the visual, the aural, and the conceptual. We could not be further from the revolutionary potential of witch laughter that second-wave feminists tried to revive in the 1970s. Even the laughter of the early modern witch, which for a while functioned as a learning text for in-your-face, feminist laughter, seems to have been canned by a global capitalist laughter machine. Historically trusted to be one of the most authentic, place-specific sounds, Black Forrest laughter is now made in Mexico. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément's gloss on Jules Michelet's figure of the witch ("As she left she laughed, the most awful burst of laughter") acquires macabre resonances; unlike the witch's laughter, which sounded awful to some ears but registered as music in many feminist ears, the laughter of the contemporary laughing chorus imitating witch laughter is indeed awful.11 The pained faces of Mexican maquiladora workers testify to it.In another segment of the video, the workers are taking a break, holding hands and meditating. In case the viewer might be tempted to think that this is a union meeting, the counterpoint to the assembly line, Okón explains that the workers he interviewed told him about mandatory "spiritual breaks" in the maquiladoras; they are organized, in his words, for the workers to be "thankful for being exploited."12 It is as if, instead of nineteenth-century experiments that electrocuted the laughing muscles of the face in order to capture the elusive expressions of laughter, we have invented an even ghastlier, ever larger machinery that forces some people to laugh for their survival and then, perversely, asks them to express their gratitude for their chance at being exploited. The predicament repeats in nuce the familiar neoliberal refrain: it is better to work in sweatshop conditions than to not have a job at all. This means that all working conditions and all work are fair game.13 We know that in the flexible phase of capitalism we are asked routinely to commercialize the recesses of our affective life. We have sold our smiles long ago. But our laughter—even our laughter? The affective resonances of this question are of intense, indignant surprise; the installation visitor is left with a sense of too muchness, of things pushed too far.Laugh tracks for American sitcoms were for a long time produced by a machine called the Laff Box. In the words of its inventor, Charley Douglas, the Laff Box was "an organlike mechanism with six keys that when played with the left hand, can provide small chuckles, medium chuckles, small laughs, medium laughs, medium heavy laughs, and rollin'-in-the-aisles boffs."14 Laugh tracks produced by the Laff Box (there were about one hundred variations) were introduced in the 1950s and were thought to induce a sense of immediacy at a time when television shows were increasingly filmed rather than live productions. In fact, even when television shows were live productions, producers believed that audiences could not be depended on to laugh at the appropriate time. Laugh tracks were superimposed on the unreliable laughter of live audiences. The presumably original moment of recording a laughing chorus has always been an illusion. One could think of Okón's chorus as providing the recording for a fictional Laff Box, in which case it is appropriate that the Mexican workers are in fact not producing the sound of laughter. The sound comes from the recording table, which has already typologized laughter into giggles, chuckles, and boffs of different intensities. The can of laughter does not imprison any "real" laughter; canned laughter is always already recorded laughter.Laughter's association with a can has always had negative connotations. The intertextuality with Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) cannot be missed. Warhol's paintings of Campbell's soup cans dramatized the seriality of consumer choices (there were thirty-two identical soup cans differentiated by one word on the label). Okón likewise produces quasi-identical laughter cans differentiated by one word and by the shape of the laughing mouth on the label. Canned laughter is serial laughter. Unlike canned Campbell's soup, however, to which one might prefer authentic soup (today we would say organic) but that nonetheless has its uses (Warhol is said to have been fond of the predictability of eating soup out of a can), canned laughter is strongly oxymoronic. In their tacit invocation of modernist conceptions of laughter as the epitome of spontaneous singularity, Okón's serial laughter cans register a contradiction in terms.During their exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962, Warhol's cans were displayed on shelves imitating store shelves, like products in a grocery aisle, in a gesture towards performance that Okón's installation pushes to another level. Warhol's soup cans were paintings (portraits of cans), but in 1964 the Factory also produced oversized Campbell's soup boxes, which were displayed in a gallery, with visitors walking between them. Visitors—their bodies and affective performance—were inducted into the world of the installation. Okón further develops this strategy, having the visitors in his installation space stand by the tables that function as replicas of the assembly line and thus temporarily occupy the position of the workers in the video. They experience, among other things, the alienating effects of the spatial distribution of bodies along the assembly line and the troubling resonances of the focus on hygiene. In other cases, visitors walking through the installation listen to the recordings attached to some of the cans, uncomfortably standing in for the American sitcom viewer hailed as the consumer of canned laughter. The result is a mixture of fascination, guilt, and repulsion. Even laughter?Okón interpellates the visitors in the installation at the same time as spectators (they contemplate the space), performers (they interact with the space and with each other), and coproducers (the artwork is simply not complete without their presence). In an interview, Okón talks about his work as a "hybrid between video installation and performance." He explicitly claims allegiance with the historic avant-gardes: "bringing art and life together, which is not a new idea."15 Beyond Warhol and the installation art movement, what tradition is Okón's installation invoking? What exactly did laughter use to be? And when did it become this hateful, canned thing? Did it become this hateful, canned thing? And are all canned things to be thought of as hateful?Modernist GelotoscopyOkón's installation weaves together multiple layers of intertextuality. Alongside Warhol, Okón is in dialogue with Piero Manzoni's "Artist's Shit" (1961), which consists of ninety tin cans filled with the artist's feces. Aside from the can connection, however, the installation works with the assumption that the visitor is somewhat familiar with a Western tradition of writing on laughter. This is an old tradition, going back to Aristotle and passing through a thick early modern moment (Laurent Joubert, Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes,), but Okón's installation specifically claims familiarity with its modernist configuration. Modernist laughter can be said to start with Nietzsche's laughing Zarathustra, pass through Charles Baudelaire's meditations on caricature, and culminate in Bataille's thoughts on laughing sovereignty. Okón, somewhat unjustly, condenses this diverse genealogy in the name Bergson, a reference to the philosopher's well-known 1900 essay on laughter.16 Rather than help explain the workings of laughter, in 2006 Bergson becomes the ironic name of the laughter factory.Hesse's Der Steppenwolf will be my point of entry into the modernist genealogy Okón's installation tacitly takes as a reference point. The novel was written in 1926 by a German writer in exile in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland and in dialogue (often tense) with other avant-garde and modernist artists. To briefly set the scene: The novel's protagonist, Harry Haller, understands his alienation in the modern world through the figure of the divided self; he has a "dual and divided nature" (S, p. 43). He is both wolf and man.17 Like other modernist heroes, he claims kinship with artists: "Many artists are of this kind. These persons all have two souls, two beings within them" (S, p. 44). Over the course of the novel, he slowly learns that his idea of a dual and divided nature is a convenient fiction, nothing but a pose. With the help of two other characters, Hermine, a wise prostitute, and Pablo, a handsome Mexican saxophonist, both ambiguous characters in terms of gender and sexuality, Harry proceeds to take apart the illusion of a "dual and divided nature." The Steppenwolf slowly learns to enjoy the pleasures of dancing, eating, and sex. The path leads to the magic theater, an externalization of Harry's fantasies.18There is only one solution to Harry's crisis: learning to laugh. Glossing the language of learning and training, drawn from the tradition of the bildungsroman, Theodore Ziolkowski avers that the novel could well have been titled Harry Haller's Apprenticeship.19 Against assumptions that laughter lurks at the background of consciousness, to at any Hesse's novel that laughing takes the spontaneity of laughter is to be through a through a Unlike other who their in their or early Harry is of as to his the novel the of as a the modern has among other things, an in the of laughter essay in this the Steppenwolf is to that which his has in order for Harry to to laugh he needs to between different of laughs, to in laughter. The novel could be said to be a de of of modernist laughter. The of its his to in relation to these different In the I out the novel's work of laughter. This is a of its own Okón's installation but it is to that laughter has long been canned into various a of is the of by laughter. and had their in the but their well into We to see their in our It is to that the of laughter into in the tradition thought to have given us the laughter that we often to the unison with its one of the laughs the in Hesse's novel is laughter, or laughter. the of the novel, laughter is the of the not of as a tradition of writing on laughter from Aristotle to Bergson has of like Thomas with he had a long that some like the wolf his can if as a had a a and or a then the wolf his at him and and him with this was in the of the (S, p. The wolf his the gesture but instead of who laughs cannot the "dual and divided nature" in which the Steppenwolf laughter can only be at the the modern through laughter has of it and one could say, in line with recent on shows the to be a in the part of the novel, Pablo, a and a the he is through that were that are always while his always laughed, and this laughter them into (S, p. laughing help laughter, the of the on the between the and the Laughter in fact becomes the of the like a to the In the of the novel, is as a fiction, Mexico from the of other than the assumption people might not have to laugh are already worried that they might have to It is also that laugh with his eyes. In the de experiments the of can be "real" laughter becomes as both the and the mouth of laughter in relation to which the Steppenwolf learns to position is laughter, by Hermine, a to Harry's of a "dual and divided she story a make me (S, p. proceeds to laugh at Harry on a number of as she to need me to to and to laugh and to (S, p. him another who him the pleasures of the (S, p. is an who Harry of a the rather gender of the novel (the wolf is a it is Harry's the he develops through his with Hermine, that laughing and to his multiple the of laughter. As in other avant-garde and modernist texts this has an is a one the novel to as a is there to help with Harry's by him of the laughter within But in laughing cannot be the of an to of laughter, this time located on the between the and the is laughter. In to its other laughter in Steppenwolf is a trusted to to an Harry the benefits of laughter through I thought of that article and its of words, a laughter in and the of of the came back to me It like a the world in on its and then (S, p. the experience of a of Harry laughing and, in the of his an The of this experience condenses a of the of order of as Michel might say own of came through his own laughter at a of The and burst of laughter, a has long-term laughter in its leads to laughter. into the novel, Harry has a about his literary from he a about the for and the of In Harry's face was and and he We do not like things to be We like is an of (S, p. and is the of an The of Hesse's are his is a The we with laughter. I have Nietzsche Unlike in the tradition, who laughed, the of art The gesture of the is in fact their laughter. In this modernist in is a of an the of in this a a to in this case the of the Harry his to this as a of of his that can only be in in a Harry his other in a in the magic when he saw my long He so that he a in the and played with his (S, p. The of laughter like early modern of laughter in which it would not have been for to in the of This is a moment of a novel that could not be further from the of comedy. Harry's for laughter leads him to the instead of his point to it as the at The way to this out is to that we might be on the of is with his and of the in one of the of comedy, out to be the of the when with Harry it he does not to it with laughter. It the other who get the however, are always it is to tell which of their laughs are a response to the of the magic Harry has a the time I laughter, the laughter of the It was a laughter without an It was simply and (S, p. It is to the laughter does not have an This is Hesse's way out of the laugh at or and laughter works by It takes three to I always laugh with and at the or of the The of the by from the of laughers. In the laughter of the in Hesse's has no a laughing with rather than a laughing given the appropriate as we have is no small laughter a of laughers. as it seems to this of laughter, however, Hesse's novel does not its the of the novel, when the Harry for his they laugh at laughing him out of the magic Like the laughter of other or this an by way of learning not to take Harry needs to to laugh at Nietzsche's has the of to laugh at as one Harry needs to laugh at his "dual and divided nature." shows him his in a Harry indeed (S, p. is of the to the of the illusion of Harry laughs his illusion it it, one might into a of He is back into the world to his He having a for and having a to his He cannot the world of the in an beyond the novel he will have been to is thus the story of Harry's of his relation to a number of he slowly up his for laughter; he through a moment of with laughter; he laughter; he to the laughter of the and he laughter promise is that the laughing a in a of And the spontaneity of laughter can only be through a long-term what I have been an And it can only be in the magic theater, on through In

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