The Anantomy Of a Joke or some such other type of Nonsense

[Tuesday Afternoon]

Robert Frost once joked that “a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in an argument.” This joke is funny to liberals – at least to some liberals – neither because it is literally true nor because it is completely false. The joke is amusing – or at least should be – because it exaggerates a common belief that liberals have about ourselves, namely, that we are reasonable, responsive, fair-minded, and always willing to hear all sides of a debate. It is funny, also, because of its intrinsic paradox. Liberals will “get the joke” only if we possess at least a modicum of the quality of openness that Frost rejects in its extremity. After a moment of self-righteous indignation, for which we are justifiably famous, we will most likely experience a flash of comic self-recognition and, at last, understand the message that had been concealed by Frost’s comic misdirection: do not be ashamed by your openness to arguments (or to jokes) but do not be too open lest you find yourselves perpetually defeated (and mocked) by people who are much more hostile to your aims and aspirations than I am.
The central question of this paper is whether having a sense of humor about politics – including the ability to take a joke presumed by Frost’s witticism – is an aid to serious reflection upon moral and political questions and whether, therefore, it is a habit of mind (or virtue) that should be valued by liberals today. Relatedly, the paper considers whether contemporary political humor can help sustain a culture of openness to comic criticism, as Peter Euben and others have argued Old Comedy did in Aristophanes’ Athens. Most political humor, these days, is shrilly anti-political, portraying politics as something separate from, and to a very large extent beneath, the ordinary citizen, and calling into question the entire enterprise of active political life as sinister and hopelessly corrupt. However, there are instances of more reflective political irreverence that ironically targets citizens themselves, rather than merely their leaders and institutions, and encourages these citizens to take politics more seriously, paradoxically, by taking themselves a little less seriously. Indeed, the paper will argue that popular political comics such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are heirs to a unique way of doing politics pioneered by Aristophanes, perfected by Mark Twain, and prospering, once again, today.
Since the dēmos is both the sovereign and subject to its own rule (and misrule), political humorists can, theoretically, lampoon the sovereign, while appealing to the subject, or ridicule the subject while appealing to the sovereign. Indeed, it may only be by forcing an embarrassing wedge between these two sides of the democratic identity that the political comic can move anyone at all to think or act. This option, unfortunately, is not available to Hamlet. Although he plays the fool so that he may claim the protection afforded by fool’s privilege, this protection is revoked in the final act when he lowers the comic mask and raises the tragic one. One wonders whether Hamlet’s fate might have been different had Denmark been a liberal democracy and its sovereign able to take a joke.

[Oeditpus Rex]

1. Post this in GD

Double-dog dare ya. :evilgrin:

[Tuesday Afternoon]

2. uh-oh

I might need to borrow your asbestos suit :scared: :D