I really enjoyed this reading. Having grown up in the era of
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, and struggled with young adulthood with Lena Dunham
and the women of “Broad City,” I am acutely aware of the importance of women in
comedy and feminism. One point in “The Seriously Erotic Politics of Laughter”
that really struck me was in discussing Wanda Sykes and her ability to point
out social and political issues, her message is much more palatable because “she
refuses moral or epistemic privilege to her standpoint”(31). Not taking a specific
stance and acknowledging equality with everyone in terms of fault, Sykes makes
these serious issues more approachable. I think a major part of comedy, and
comedians, importance in addressing issues facing society is that it is
observational and personal. Comedians do not tell people that they’re right,
just lay out a situation with humor, and people can digest the message and come
to conclusions on their own. These personal anecdotes are humorously framed,
placing the responsibility of digesting the message and coming to conclusions to
the audience.
Hey Maria, great post! However, I’m going to push back on two things: the divide between the audience and the comedian that your formulation creates and this personal aspect of comedy that you pose. One specific passage in the book leads me to believe that there is a community built through comedy and this specific type of community breaks the barriers between comedian and audience. It states specifically:
ReplyDelete"Community does not result from recognition of a shared identity position or 'shared subjectivity,' but rather from a loosely defined inter-subjectivity. The unity of this intersubjectivity-of laughing together-occurs through suspending reified positions of identity. (24)
So basically, through comedy and through shared laughter, the "I" centered subject is suspended and what results is a concept of "we" that is unbounded by the categories of identity that the subject is limited by. So it is not a time of personal reflection but a time in which the individual is dispossessed or undone and therefore has the potential to understand the politics of the other, who has now become bounded up with the I. As for the divide between the comic and the audience where the comic tells the joke and the audience receives it, that divide is nonexistent for the same reason, because of the suspension of "reified positions of identity." There is no I that exists as a distinct entity from the other.