In our benighted age, an unsurprising number of people consider the art of humor to have “died,” and a whole cottage industry could be built on the theories and expert opinions regarding the exact time, place and method of its murder. In his recent book That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore (subtitled On The Death and Rebirth of Comedy), the libertarian comedian Lou Perez offers us one of his personal “lowest points in comedy” prior to giving his full autopsy, the low point in question occurring on the erstwhile industry standard for live televised comedy, Saturday Night Live. Following the “act of incalculable cruelty” in which “the universe…killed Leonard Cohen and Hillary Clinton’s dream of becoming the president of the United States in the same week,”[i] Perez bemoans SNL’s decision to bring out Clinton impersonator Kate McKinnon, in character, to sing Cohen’s signature song “Hallelujah” with clearly no intent to deliver a joke. As Perez recalls, “Hillary’s white power suit was now funeral garb and there were no punch lines in McKinnon’s performance – just grieving over the Donald Trump presidency to come.”[ii]
On face value, this seems like another comic insider’s lament that SNL joined the remainder of the entertainment industry in predictable, partisan campaigning, though it is easy enough to read between the lines (and, indeed, the more complex elaboration that follows Perez’ statements above). Recurring criticisms of SNL’s currently stale or tepid quality, whether or not they come from comic insiders like Perez, are not mere acknowledgements that SNL was funnier in prior incarnations: they regularly come with insinuations that it willfully discarded a vibrant tradition of experimentalism and risk. After all, the show grew out of the bona fide experimentalism of improvisers like Del Close and formal innovators / disruptors like Michael O’Donoghue, whose unequivocal commitment to de-standardizing reality often meant an inspiring viewing experience whether or not any jokes “landed”. Disillusionment of this kind strongly implies a widespread belief that a popular comic entertainment was also, at one point, part of the avant-garde. I would agree with that assessment, and take it one step further by insisting that much of the human creativity taking place under the banner of “comedy” is as “avant-garde”, if not more so, than forms of artistic experimentalism that don’t aim at provoking laughter. Yet this is far from being universally affirmed, and so it is worth wondering why.
Richard Kostelanetz, for my money one of the better chroniclers and analysts of anything to do with the avant-garde, is also among the more reliable believers in a “funny” version of the same: he goes so far as to state that comedy is the “preferred mode” for avant-garde art, given that “one theme of Comedy is possibility not only with the materials of art but in human existence.”[iii] It is an almost defiant statement given the attitude of enforced solemnity that is supposed to follow the official avant-garde movement. Its primary works, and the secondary criticism that springs up around them, are often so devoid of comedy as to make Kostelanetz’ statement seem like an outsider view. Given, I was never the most attentive reader of solemn critical journals like October, and so may have missed them, but I don’t recall any discussions therein on, say, the formal innovations of Andy Kaufmann, Buster Keaton or The Marx Brothers, let alone a concerted focus on the humorous aspects of film directors with an unconventional emotional range (e.g. Fassbinder). The description of a “meme”-related article in the current issues doesn’t look promising, either. Elsewhere, bodies like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences rarely seem to acknowledge the art of comedy as something suitably forward-looking and challenging, if the paltry number of “Best Picture” Oscars is any indication (only one of these in the 21st century to date, for, ironically, a film called The Artist in 2011).
To understand why this is the case requires at least some attempt to define what the “avant-garde” really is, and again Kostelanetz is a good one to defer to here. Amusingly, some of the definitions of avant-gardism that he proposes across multiple anthologies hint at it being a forum for comical mischief while more explicitly calling it out as charlatanry (I refer here to the definition of avant-garde art as “whatever artists can get away with.”) For the purposes of this article, though, Kostelanetz’ has another three-pronged definition that will be workable enough and a little more flattering to those not self-identifying as professional hucksters. In his reckoning, avant-garde art is one that:
“transcends current artistic conventions in crucial respects, establishing a discernible distance between itself and the mass of current practices,”
“take[s] considerable time to find its maximum audience,” and
“will probably inspire future, comparably advanced endeavors.”[iv]
I might also add that these divergent tendencies keep “avant-garde” from being a definable genre, but instead a set of specific practices embodying the above characteristics. Among the more recognizable of such practices, I would include breaks with “narrative” logic or so-called linear thinking, and aesthetic subversion of any sort of socio-cultural a priori codes via “de-familiarizing” techniques (see Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of ostranenie). As the critic Geoff King notes, all of these practices and their parent tendencies are natural fits for comedy, which attains its true avant-garde character not only by abrading away at existing norms, but also by having the “affirmative” feature of “reconfirming that which it recognizes through the act of departure.”[v]
We do run into some problems though when considering the difficulty of determining if avant-garde art is intentionally funny, as the comedy of the entertainment mainstream more explicitly does. It cannot “prime” audience expectations as well as entertainment industry products do (via such outright propagandistic measures as the pre-recorded laugh track), since doing so would mean the surrender of its “experimental” quality. Avant-gardism, whether “funny” or no, does not have the luxury of assuming a uniform reaction of its audiences, and is limited as to how much it can explain itself before lapsing into the kind of doctrinaire, didactic exercises: these run counter to established avant-garde features such as audience participation and a general open-endedness in which audience reactions either “complete” a work or help it continually evolve and re-apply itself to new situations.
To be sure, the history of avant-gardism shows a varied approach towards exposing true intentions (especially considering how radicals like the Italian Futurists and Surrealists poured as much energy into their manifestoes as they did into their artworks), though I still struggle to think of many specific examples in which audiences were instructed to “let down their guard” and approach a work or idea with a comical attitude. The refusal to do so has, unfortunately, led to the belief that avant-gardists are not only allergic to interpretations of their work as humorous, but that they employ obscurantism and enforced seriousness as a means of maintaining their place in a fraudulent intellectual hierarchy.
Indeed, if I had to name one quality of the avant-garde that makes the general public recoil from it, it would not be the unfamiliarity of the material being presented: in my personal life, at least, I’ve had some success in appealing to individuals’ inclination towards solving mysteries or puzzles, encouraging them to find enjoyment in likewise “solving” problems of conceptual or aesthetic opacity. So, I believe it is instead the perceived demand for respect, if not outright reverence, that the non-artist public feels artists are expecting in return for setting up byzantine conceptual situations, impenetrable compositions, or deliberately confrontational performances (for one by-now notorious example of hostility to the latter attitude, the street confrontation between everydude comedian Joe Rogan and transgressive tragedian Lydia Lunch is instructive, and somewhat sad in how easily the two opponents allow themselves to devolve into easy caricatures). Elsewhere, a comic satirist I greatly respect declined to appear on the arts podcast I was hosting owing to a loathing of “experimentalism” – given that I saw a great deal of that quality in his own work, I believe that loathing was related to others’ imperious presentation of the same. Simply put, lack of engagement here isn’t a matter of fearing “difficult” content so much as distrusting the formal attitude that precedes it, which not enough has been done to dispel.
One of the easiest defenses against this is to simply claim that individual works or whole currents are not truly avant-garde if they are incapable of buoyant or comedic feeling, or if they would deny audiences such a response to their content. Kostalentz himself comes close to this in his estimation of Expressionism, implying that the ideas projected by it have no purchase on the avant-garde because they are too “customarily anguished” in their attempts to “[break] down the inhibitions and repressions of society.” However, in other places he takes a more nuanced approach: he aligns tragedy with conservatism on the grounds that it shows us “what cannot or should not be done” whereas those aligned with anarchism will naturally gravitate towards comedy with “its bias towards surprising possibilities.” Alternately, in his overview of the “Theater of the Absurd”, he notes similarities between “existentialist” and “absurdist” schools of theatrical presentation eventually concluding that the latter is more given to dark humor by ”demonstrating the theme of absurdity” whereas the characters of Sartre, Camus, etc. merely “debate it.” As an interesting footnote here, it was none other than Samuel Beckett, that paragon of existentialist literature and absurdist theater, who wrote a 1965 script (“Film”) that remained unfinished at the time of the comic actor’s death the following year.
I would not personally deny an avant-garde status to art simply on the grounds that is incapable of producing a comedic feeling (I’ve encountered plenty of art that kicked off completely new, constructive variations to the human experience in spite of tendencies towards nihilistic violence or morbid obsession). I would, however, agree that the avant-garde does truly distinguish itself as innovative and humorous when it succeeds in this act of “demonstrating the theme of absurdity.” In literature, we can see this easily enough with the satire of Jonathan Swift or Lawrence Sterne, the latter of which had beaten experimental literature to the punch by centuries with his The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: possibly the first book to be composed almost completely of digressions and to feature a completely blank chapter (followed by the author’s meandering discourse on what he would have written in that chapter had he chose to fill it in). In music, we have such gems as John Trubee’s “Blind Man’s Penis”, a blast of a of vulgar psychedelicized insanity in which an otherwise competent “country-western” singer was forced to record as part of a “set your lyrics to poetry” mail-order scam, or perhaps Adriano Celentano’s funky ““Prisencolinensinainciusol,” whose unintelligible lyrics were patterned phonetically after English words and were effectively wry send-up of Italian audiences’ reflexive acceptance of just about any American import song. In the often convulsive, highly energetic recitations of sound poetry coming from the likes of Henri Chopin, or Jaap Blonk, or François Dufrêne, we can also see moments of unapologetic dismantlings of language that nevertheless manage to “crack up” audiences (a reaction that I doubt any of these performers would find invalid).
Even in the realm of so-called “performance art” or event-based artwork, wherein the genre’s foundation stones include performances of stark psycho-physical testing and abject self-abuse, we encounter plenty of work qualifying as comical madness. See for example the Soviet-era “NecroRealist” group: describing their acts alternately as “energetic idiocy” and “dim-witted merriment,” it was fairly clear that this group did not succumb to the plague of taking themselves and their talents too seriously. This reckless and anarchic cohort built a reputation on risky acts of “provokatsiia” with hapless, uninformed audiences. Among their documented activities is a spontaneous brawl beginning in the forests outside Leningrad and moving onto a passenger train, in which numerous perplexed individuals would “be dragged into the brawl and eventually would get completely confused, not knowing whom they were fighting, for what reason, and what was going on.”[vi]
There are so many thousands of additional examples that can round out this inventory, that a thick anthology wouldn’t be enough to list them all, let alone a hit-and-run column like this one. Suffice it to say that our question should not be whether shocking or alien forms of creative innovation can make us laugh, given the embarrassment of riches that can do just that: rather we should be wondering why they do not get more attention than they actually do. Kostelanetz again has a possible answer, distinguishing as he does between avant-garde tendencies that indicate the beginning of something new, and the academic art that has successfully marketed itself as being “avant-garde” while instead relying on institutional rules and procedures that have already been established or ossified. Since much of the latter can be obscure and incomprehensible, and often is so by design, it becomes easy to confuse for something that doesn’t wish to be so, yet is difficult to immediately grasp because it has not yet entered into our shared aesthetic experience. I believe that the acts of “cultural antagonism” noted by Kostelanetz – in which “the ‘avant-garde’ leads artists in their perennial war against the Philistines” are in reality carried out more often by those in the realm of academic art, since this is a realm relatively more concerned with gaining and maintaining status, or with art having some kind of financially remunerative ability. Certifiably avant-garde art, knowing that it is more likely going to be judged by a future audience than a present one, is not burdened by these concerns and this, again, I believe lends it nicely to a presentation in which humor is never off the table.
By contrast, much of the art of the academy, and the official Art World that it supports, is concerned both with these strategic aims and with tending the flames of “authenticity,” a nebulous concept that seems to gradually have more and more to do with encouraging and rewarding suffering as a means to attaining some ill-defined truth and / or “real” self. The doctrine of The Authentic, valuing as it does the debatable concept of a supreme reality over one that is merely livable and good, is responsible for much dichotomous and divisive action. When in the service of an official, academic Art World, it can throw up all kinds of unnecessary binary distinctions that, while perhaps inverting the social hierarchies that exist outside of the Art World, nevertheless still insist on a new set of hierarchies. For whatever reason, it has been decided that the expressionistic mode of being “customarily anguished” is more authentic than a life lived largely in contentment or even happiness, and that such qualities must have been attained by submitting to some grand social manipulation or by refusing to acknowledge one’s existing within a simulacrum / prison of comfortable falsehood.
The idea that comedy has no place in a realm of “serious” artistic experimentation, or that seriousness cannot be infused into a life of pure playfulness, is one whose expiration date should have come up long ago. That these two tendencies can’t peaceably alternate and co-exist within the same artist, movement, or individual work has been refuted on far too many occasions – anyone arguing to the contrary should, I think, is motivated by factors that have little to do with the creative act of diversifying experience. In the words of Wyndham Lewis, leading light of the avant-garde British Vorticist group:
I would not have you think that I am shut out from a sense of what is called by the Japanese ‘the Ah-ness of things’; the melancholy inherent in the animal life. But there is a ho-ho-ness too. And against the backgrounds of their sempiternal Ah-ness it is possible, strictly in the foreground, to proceed which a protracted comedy, which glitters in the darkness.[vii]
[i] Perez, L. (2022). That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore: On the Death and Rebirth of Comedy. New York / Nashville: Bombardier Books / Post Hill Press.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Kostelanetz, R. (2019). A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. New York: Routledge.
[iv] Richard Kostelanetz, “Introduction: What is Avant-Garde?” in the Avant-garde Tradition in Literature, ed. Kostelanetz, R. (1982). Amherst: Prometheus Books.
[v] King, G. (2002). Film Comedy. London: Wallflower.
[vi] Yurchak, A. (2005). Everything was Forever, Until it Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton university Press.
[vii] Lewis, W. (1967). Blasting and Bombardiering. London: Calder & Boyars Ltd.