Guerrilla Comedy

[Valin]

The American Mind

Emina Melonic

June 6 2022

The fight totalitarians can never win.

On one occasion, comedian and film director Mel Brooks said, “The only weapon I’ve got is comedy…if I can make this guy [Adolf Hitler] ludicrous, if I can make you laugh at him, then it’s a victory of sorts. You can’t get on the soapbox with these orators…but if you can make them look ridiculous, you can win over the people.” As Thomas More observed of Satan, “the proud spirit cannot endure to be mocked.”

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Irrepressible

Of course, censoring the human spirit and its propensity for laughter always proves to be a tremendous failure in the end. If one comedian is censored, then another will emerge, or the joke will simply continue to live without an author. This is anathema to an authoritarian. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek tells of an alleged myth that was circulating during Communism in Eastern Europe, namely that there existed a “secret police” that was, as one could imagine, secretly making up and disseminating jokes against the regime. The only trouble with this, claims Žižek, is that the jokes didn’t have an author and as a result, nobody could be blamed. 

Whether or not the story is apocryphal, Žižek points to a rather interesting aspect of humor, namely, its anonymity. Unless we’re watching a comedy special featuring a specific comedian, do we ever really know who composed the jokes that we often laugh at? Ultimately, do we even care? Most of us don’t, because humor is the only art form which doesn’t focus on the author, but on the joke itself. Anyone can claim a joke. 

For example, in his latest book, David Mamet retells a joke he heard many times when he was growing up in Chicago: “Two Jews plot to assassinate Hitler. They know he comes around a corner in Berlin every morning at 9:30. They are in place by 8:00. They wait with their bombs. Nine o’clock comes, 9:30, 9:45. At 10:00, one turns to the other and says, ‘Gosh, I hope he’s O.K.’”

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[Valin]

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