TY - JOUR
AU - WILLETT, JULIE
AB - ABSTRACT The function of the comic in the midst of tragedy is not clear. After all, is it simply comic relief that wounded nations, communities, or individuals seek? Tragedy has long been cast as memory and mourning while comedy offers for the masses a Nietzschean moment of joyful forgetting and for the Stoic mind a measure of transcendence from our grief. The latter view came into prominence for modern American culture with the nineteenth-century satirist Mark Twain, who wrote that “the secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow,” which has been interpreted through the often-quoted formula: comedy is tragedy plus time. The assumption is that we need some distance emotionally in order to mock or transcend the tragic. While we grant the humor of transcendence can produce some momentary relief through emotional distance, we wonder if there might be another way that humor can deal with suffering? Popular psychology often speaks of five stages of grief, and while that progression seems too linear and simplistic, we find that the now much more inclusive comic stage has something to offer their audiences struggling to make sense of a volatile world. There does have to be a revolution of form in order to accommodate different voices. -Hannah Gadsby We often turn to comics to lighten the burden of the day's news. Various scholars point out that Americans look less toward erudite authorities than to stand-up comedians for both perspective and guidance (Day 2011, 3; Greene and Gournelos 2011; Meier and Schmitt 2016). If the trusted news anchor once consoled a nation mourning an escalating war or the loss of a president, television audiences have been more likely to turn to Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and Samantha Bee after hearing news of the latest terrorist attack or school shooting. Indeed, Rebecca Krefting argues that 9/11 ushered in the age of stand-up. She observes, “in the wake of 9/11, humor also began to spring from collective pain and uncertainty owing to this and other global atrocities” (Krefting 2014, 73). But the function of the comic in the midst of tragedy is not clear. After all, is it simply comic relief that wounded nations, communities, or individuals seek? Tragedy has long been cast as memory and mourning while comedy offers for the masses a Nietzschean moment of joyful forgetting and for the Stoic mind a measure of transcendence from our grief. The latter view came into prominence in US culture with the nineteenth-century satirist Mark Twain, who wrote that “the secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow” (Twain [1897] 2006, Chapter X epigraph), which has been interpreted through the often-quoted formula: comedy is tragedy plus time. The assumption is that we need some distance emotionally in order to mock or transcend the tragic. While we grant the humor of transcendence can produce some momentary relief through emotional distance, we wonder if there might be another way that humor can deal with suffering? Popular psychology often speaks of five stages of grief, and while that progression seems too linear and simplistic, we do find that the now much more inclusive comic stage has something to offer their audiences struggling to make sense of a volatile world. Whether or not there are distinct stages of grief, we argue that the comedian turned moral arbiter offers five corresponding techniques using humor to take on emotional turmoil in the face of sad and even traumatizing events. We are not suggesting that a single stand-up performance could possibly respond to every stage of grief nor could complicated emotions be so quickly redressed. But we do find in various comedic performances all five techniques for transformation and catharsis. This is why, in the midst of the tragic, we insist humor cannot wait, especially when the function of the comic is not to rise above or temporarily escape a situation but instead directly confront it to create new shared possibilities and serious relief (Willett and Willett 2019, 149–153). “Good evening, hello. I have cancer, how are you?” stand-up Tig Notaro told her 2012 audience. In just a few short months before that appearance she had been faced with a life-threatening illness, the loss of her mother, a breakup, and then the diagnosis of bilateral breast cancer. However, she did not retreat from the comic stage, but has reimagined the social possibilities of it. For Notaro, “this is when everything started to seem funny.” On stage, not knowing whether or not she would live much longer, she ponders the classic formula. “It is weird because with humor, the equation is tragedy plus time equals comedy. I am just at tragedy right now.” Not sure if time was on her side, Notaro embraced humor in the here and now as she wondered out loud to a receptive audience, should she try to date? “Should I go online and make a profile … Profile: ‘I have cancer. Serious inquiries only.’” In a response to a Daily Beast interview inquiring whether it is “weird that so many strangers … know all this stuff,” Notaro responds, “I'm just so completely used to it. And I'm fine with it. It's part of the strength of sharing and vulnerability and honesty and comedy, all mixed in. You can't go wrong when you're that wide open” (Leon 2016). In this case, the comedic soul chooses to share and engage, to work through, not detach as we live in the moment to change the moment. This is why we celebrate Notaro's philosophy that humor cannot wait. I. A BRIEF HISTORY: THE COMIC AND A NEW PULPIT We understand that comedy has long been dismissed as a mere safety valve for pent-up emotions and temporary relief that fails to alter the status quo. A joke is just a joke and jokesters are just silly buffoons, clowns, or oddballs. But as Krefting points out, our post-9/11 age of crisis is also the age of the comic which should not surprise us given that the history of crisis is also the history of comedy (Krefting 2014). Mark Twain's political satire emerged against the backdrop of American Imperialism. Lenny Bruce transformed the comic stage during the Cold War with his bold salute to free speech. In the late 1960s, television audiences who could not escape the war in Vietnam and the daily body count tuned into the politics of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In (1968–1973), which brought bawdy stand-up to a primetime variety show. Just as powerfully, Richard Pryor used comedy not to ignore but to reveal virulent racism. Such male humorists did not lead audiences to rise above the turmoil or to forget it but to become woke to serious moral and political issues (Zoglin 2008, Intro, Chap. 3). But if the entertainer can use their craft for earnest engagement this is because formal politics and moral appeal have never really been that formal. From the nineteenth-century saloons that touted union meetings to beauty shops that challenged Jim Crow disenfranchisement, a range of spaces and styles of discourse have nurtured reflection on serious issues (Willett 2000; Day 2011). Indeed, informal political actions and attitudes remind us that the comic stage is also a place where one can speak truth to power. Whether it is Jon Stewart exposing the Veterans Administration's tragic backlog (The Daily Show 2009), John Oliver's attack on Big Pharma (Read 2019), Stephen Colbert's salute to the invisible labor of immigrant farm workers (Silverleib 2010), Samantha Bee's exposé on various states mishandling of rape kits (Full Frontal 2016), or Negin Farsad's challenge of the conflation of Muslim and terrorist on Twitter, the comedian has found the way to the bully pulpit. Performance studies scholar Amber Day explains: “If we conceptualize public discourse as existing only in the socially sanctioned outlets of serious debate, we miss a plethora of concurrent political, meaning-making sites” (Day 2011, 19). As she further points out, while moral and political theorists from Rawls to Habermas focus narrowly on that which they define as a rational argument and discourse, “there is plenty of discursive exchange that takes place in the form of the seemingly ‘irrational’-in the registers of parody, satire, fiction, and nonsense” (Day 2011, 19). Noelle McAfee and Iris Young among a whole host of other feminist critics have argued that communication in the public sphere varies in location and as well as in medium of expression including narrative, gesture, and the use of emotion (Young 2000; McAfee 2008). We concur with Day that much of political and moral discourse occurs “not as serious, rational argument, but in every other register of exchange, including sarcasm, irony, parody, and satire, all of which afford the opportunity to say things one otherwise might not say in ‘serious’ debate” (Day 2011, 20). While cis men have dominated late-night comedy shows, stand-up has also welcomed the oddballs and clowns who do not fit proper norms or respectable social identities. As Day observes, in comedy “the specificities of the embodied players are particularly salient,” and so it would not be a coincidence that mainstream audiences may be more likely to listen to who is “able to poke fun at his own authority and at others’ because he has some to begin with” (Day 2011, 9) Yet this bias has diminished, Humor Studies scholar Kirsten Leng argues, as we have now entered into the golden age of feminist comedy (Leng 2016). Women's entry into what was once only seen as the domain of the kings of comedy is just part of the larger democratization of the comic stage as witnessed especially in the past few decades. Comedians require artisanal skill but they do not require formal training which is why, for example, the once admired Roseanne Barr, a divorced and not slim mother from Denver, was able to grab the spotlight with her portrayal of the “unruly woman” in her 1980s and 90s sitcom and stand-up routines (Rowe 2011, 50). Even more, since the 1980s, the proliferation of comedy clubs and the rise of HBO and Comedy Central Network with cable television and more recently the use of social media tools has circumvented managers (Krefting 2014, 104) and offered an even more diverse range of comedians who have found their niche. Now thanks to Trevor Noah and Samantha Bee, the coveted late-night pulpit is no longer exclusively white and male. It is with this more inclusive comic stage that we see humor in the face of tragedy altering norms and our collective mood. II. TECHNIQUES FOR OVERCOMING GRIEF FROM A COMIC PERSPECTIVE Psychologists have proposed five stages of grief that have seeped into our popular consciousness as steps toward achieving effects ranging from temporary relief to an enhanced perspective on life. These key stages are: (1) denial, (2) bargaining, (3) anger, (4) depression, and (5) acceptance. For psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and psychologist David Kessler, the stages “are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one” (Kübler-Ross and Kessler 2005, 18). Although updated and critiqued, these five stages have become part of a larger cultural narrative that influence films, music, and everyday conversations, and offer parallels on the comic stage. Reflecting on these idioms of grief, corresponding techniques for redressing sorrow and hardship take center stage in the world of stand-up: (1) distracting moments of comic relief; (2) self-humiliating humor; (3) anger infused, truth telling as in satire; (4) the unmasking of defenses and baring of souls; and finally, (5) the catharsis of toxic identities and norms with an ethical plea for a more inclusive society. We begin with denial, which Kübler-Ross and Kessler suggest, is “nature's way of letting in only as much as we can handle” at a time (2005, 10). Denial finds its counterpart in the temporary diversion of comic relief. Moments of comic relief that afford a brief smile and chuckle or a full throttled belly laugh release tension and offer at minimum a temporary reprieve from the misery at hand. Second, when paralyzed with thoughts of what could have been done “if only,” together with locked-in fantasies of returning to the past, the grief-stricken engage in a psychological defense known as bargaining. Kübler-Ross and Kessler explain that with bargaining “we remain in the past trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt” while suffering self-blame and guilt (2005, 17). We might plead with a god to bring back a loved one with promises of better behavior. This stage turns on self-deception, and yet for Kübler-Ross and Kessler it is viewed as a step in a process toward final acceptance and resolution. We see a parallel with a certain brand of humor in which often targeted groups shuck and jive for laughs. Masking one's self to play the fool, the dumb blonde, or the sambo may offer a tentative pass but not necessarily an altered trajectory that challenges toxic norms or allows for genuine catharsis. Third, as the bereaved and traumatized recognize the self-harm and deception of bargaining with fate, they drive negative energies and emotions outward into anger. Anger shifts the direction of our drive to attribute blame, turning guilt and shame from the victims of suffering toward perceived perpetrators. In comedy, the anger of truth-telling satire witnesses self-deceptive defenses and cycles of self-blame dropped as the comic steps beyond humiliating rituals and routines. Here satirical techniques unmask hypocrisy and cruelty with mockery and ridicule that takes aim and punches back. As ridicule strips off the facades and fake norms, it redistributes shame toward those who are really to blame. Fourth, aspects of depression or a despondent sadness appear when one exposes one's own vulnerability and acknowledges real loss and harm. In working through grief, the comedian similarly drops any last defenses along with their comic mask. As they take a break from the familiar routine, a stark moment of honesty deepens a sense of the tragic. In other words, when the comedian pulls off the mask and plays it straight, they are not ceasing to be comics but instead using the comic stage for an especially powerful means for exposing vulnerabilities. In this baring of the soul, authentic feelings of pain and sorrow are revealed along with an appeal for empathy which turns us to the fifth stage. A fifth and final stage in the psychological process brings resolution when there is acceptance of loss and closure for a tragedy to be mourned, not denied. Yet comedy's penchant for a happy ending conjures a vision that moves beyond the tragic. It allows for challenges to the very conditions that allowed for the tragedy. After unmasking troubling identities and all too familiar norms, a return to comedy offers an ethical appeal for a more inclusive society and possibilities for a genuine and typically collective catharsis. II.A. A First Technique: Comic Denials, Diversions, and Relief So why do so many of us turn to comedy in the midst of crises, disasters, and tragedies? A simple place to begin is that humor offers a measure of relief and thus a moment of decompression to catch our breath before we face the obstacles that lay before us. Even a silly joke, a piece of slapstick, or a witless pun can help lift our head above water. We acknowledge that it is less a fix than a diversion that allows one to snap out of the moment and experience a brief change in mood to endure another day. Even if a joke is just a joke, a means of temporary denial of harsh realities, this break allows moments to recoup. Late-night stand-up Stephen Colbert recalls how a tragic past led him to comedy. When he was ten years of age, two of his brothers and father died in a plane wreck and for the young Colbert “the world didn't make any sense.” His mother, however, was the most devastated and his strongest desire was to help her feel better. In fact, he recalls that “I sort of kept her going.” Reflecting back on his career as a comedian, it was at the moment he wanted to make her smile that he sees as the impetus of his career. In fact, he vividly recounts during a somber visit to the cemetery “one of his sisters, Mary, making another sibling, Margo, laugh so hard ‘she fell on the floor of the limo and snorted laughing, even in the midst of how we were feeling at that moment. I remember thinking, I want that. I want to be able to make that connection’” (Corinthios 2015). An iconic example of comic relief in the face of the tragic appeared just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when Saturday Night Live (2001) began its season premiere. Surrounded by two dozen members of the New York Fire and Police Department, the otherwise controversial and ever problematic New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani solemnly reminded all how “On September 11th, more lives were lost than on any other single day in America's history. More than Pearl Harbor, and more than D-Day.” After a salute to the first responders, and Paul Simon's passionate rendition of “The Boxer,” SNL producer Lorne Michaels joined Giuliani on stage and asked the mayor with a measure of deference “can we be funny?” With an unexpected quip Giuliani replied, “Why start now?” and as the audience laughed, he declared SNL “one of our great New York institutions” is back in business. For many fans of the show, SNL’s return to funny business as usual invoked relief, defiance, and a means to fight another day (9/11 Tribute 2001). II.B. A Second Technique: Bargaining As a means to negotiate entry into the all exclusive club, comedians often entertain stereotypes and distorted tropes that risk perpetuating the damage. The history of the minstrel stage stretches back to the nineteenth century when Irish Americans would put on blackface and perform music and skits in an exaggerated character playing the buffoon for laughs. “By the time blacks came to the minstrel stage, they had to perform in blackface,” explains choreographer Leni Sloan. “And so, you had black men darkening their already dark skin, with soot. And widening their mouths and portraying themselves.” Yet Sloan reminds us that “These black actors perceived the minstrel show as a doorway, a doorway out of hunger, a doorway out of the south, a doorway to other opportunities … at the same time that we have a perpetuation of a stereotype.” Comedians from the margins have often attempted to negotiate the hurt by donning the clown's mask sometimes making it into the spotlight but not without paying a price (Ethnic Notions 1986). In 2018, the self-identified lesbian stand-up Hannah Gadsby too opens her groundbreaking Netflix performance “Nanette” with a classic minstrel formula of self-ridicule. Then, she startles her audience and in the middle of her performance changes her tone with quips that begin to reveal the deeper psychological processes at stake. “Why aren't you laughing? What are you? Some kind of lesbian? Classic. Go on. You gotta laugh. Lighten up. Stop taking everything so seriously! Fucking learn to take a joke.” With an apparently ambiguous gender identity, something that marked her as an easy target-Gadsby grew up knowing that she was not expected to be able to take a joke, let alone to make one. Her solution to the tension of what she saw as a burdened identity was to bring moments of relief by making jokes that were about herself: “When I first started … the comedy, over a decade ago, always, nothing but. Nothing but lesbian content. Wall to wall.” Indeed, “My first ever show … was classic new gay comic 101. My coming out story. I told lots of cool jokes about homophobia. Really solved … that problem. Tick.” Jokes helped, or so it seemed, to relieve the tension, but only for those homophobes unnerved by her command of the stage, not for their target (Gadsby 2018). In fact, these all too familiar jokes served as a “survival tactic” that made Gadsby “sick”: “Laughter's the best medicine, they say. I don't! … Let me explain to you what a joke is. And when you strip it back to its bare essential … components, like, its bare minimum, a joke is simply two things, it needs two things to work. A setup and a punch line.” Gadsby then explains to her audience, “it is essentially a question with a surprise answer. Right? But in this context, … a joke … is a question that I have artificially inseminated. Tension. I do that, that's my job. I make you all feel tense, and then I make you laugh, and you're like, ‘Thanks for that. I was feeling a bit tense’ … You know, I've been learning the art of tension diffusion since I was a child.” (2018) But, this queer comic confesses, “Back then it wasn't a job, wasn't even a hobby, it was a survival tactic. I didn't have to invent the tension. I was the tension.” Her job was to relieve it. Gadsby then begins to tell a story of how she had “built a career out of self-deprecating humor. That's what I've built my career on. And … I don't want to do that anymore. Because, do you understand … [audience applauds] … do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It's not humility. It's humiliation” (2018). Self-humiliating humor may allow the socially marginalized to bargain their way into the club, but not without paying a price. Such humor reduces the threat that the marginalized pose and thus comforts audiences who enjoy all the laughter and relief. II.C. A Third Technique: Anger and Truth Telling through Ridicule Sadness can weigh down the soul and make the comic seem irrelevant or even offensive. Nothing is more irritating than finding a genuine sorrow treated lightly or ignored. Yet if sadness can quickly turn to anger, anger fuels the militant irony of the satirist. The editors of the satiric digital purveyor of news The Onion assumed after the 9/11 tragedy, it would be difficult to publish again. But within a couple of weeks, The Onion regained a sense of vital mission as they took aim at the cynical manipulation of public fears, reporting: “washington, d.c.-In a televised address to the American people Tuesday, a determined President Bush vowed that the U.S. would defeat ‘whoever exactly it is we're at war with here’” (Onion 2001). Their mock news turned out to be a prophetic foretelling of what would become a seemingly endless war on terror serving a neoconservative political agenda. Through ridicule our comics find the tools to speak truth to power, not to rally the troupes for war but to expose our own domestic bullshit. This practice of speaking truth through ridicule or irony recalls the ancient practices of the Cynics as described by Foucault. Foucault himself in his later writings aims to emulate this ancient practice of truth telling, or what the Cynics term parrhesia. For example, the Cynics would use the philosophical technique of reductio ad absurdum-but instead of pointing out the fallacies of arguments, they exposed the absurdity of what would pass for common sense (Flynn 1991, 102–118). In the process, their occasionally obscene antics, including masturbating in the streets, would upset public mores. In effect, these philosophers were the Lenny Bruces of their day. When feminists practice the art of speaking truth to power through irony and verve, they too take up in their own way the spirit of parrhesia. In our golden age of feminist humor (Leng 2016), the fourth-wave feminist anger over unyielding misogyny propels an explosive mix of firebrand humor that stand-up Kate Clinton has dubbed “fumerist”: “it captures the idea of being funny while wanting to burn the house down all at once” (Barreca 1992, 178). In 2016, Samantha Bee found her way to a primetime comic stage to begin a full-frontal assault on the misogynist tendencies embedded in too many American practices and institutions. In one of her early episodes she revealed to her audience that 40,000 rape kits have not been tested across the country. After all, as Bee notes, would not most of us assume that forcing women to go through a four-hour examination would not be for nothing? But one should never assume. There are sheriffs like Idaho's Craig Rowland who did not think rape kits needed to be tested because as he insisted in too many cases “it was not actually rape: things just went too far and someone got scared.” Yet, as Bee points out, “that's what rape is!” (Full Frontal 2016). The effect of the ridicule is to turn shame around from the victim, who may be isolated and silenced by sexual violation and self-blame, to the cultures and social norms as well as the individuals who perpetuate such injustice. Woke to the self-harm of the minstrel act, Gadsby too goes full frontal and turns to truth-telling anger and fumerism in substantial segments of her 2018 stand-up special. She tells us that she came of age in the Bible belt of Tasmania when being a lesbian was a still a crime and also the butt of the joke. Trained in art history, she finds in her routine a means to reject the legacy of a discipline and a culture that has celebrated without question the reputations of “dead men” who “were dead then” and “are just deader now.” A middle-aged Pablo Picasso justified having an affair with a seventeen-year-old girl because they both, in his troubling words, were in their prime. Gadsby sees a legacy that celebrates the brilliance of cubism with its perspectivism yet masks a history of misogynist crime in the name of reputation. “Well, tell me, any of those perspectives a woman's?” she asks. No, otherwise he would not have referred to an underage girl as in her prime. Reputation seems to be all that matters. “I'm gonna call it: High art-Bullshit!” Yet, while anger-infused ridicule provides a necessary vehicle for truth-telling provocation, Gadsby does not end her performance there. On the contrary, in a yet another striking pivot, she reflects further with the audience, pronouncing that kind of humor troubling and toxic. It is true, she opines, “the only way … I can tell my truth and put tension in the room is with anger. And I am angry, and I believe I've got every right to be angry! But what I don't have a right to do is to spread anger. I don't. Because anger, much like laughter, can connect a room full of strangers like nothing else. But anger, even if it's connected to laughter, will not … relieve tension. Because anger is a tension. It is a toxic, infectious … tension. And it knows no other purpose than to spread blind hatred, and I want no part of it. Because I take my freedom of speech as a responsibility.” Anger by itself cannot bring about resolution. By itself it leads to more tension, which prompts this comic in the midst of a mesmerizing performance to declare: “I must quit comedy” (Gadsby 2018). If anger is the final defense against felt grief and suffering, Gadsby prepares to drop this last mask; and yet despite her declaration she does not in fact quit the comic stage but only the “strictest definition of what comedy is,” as she later explains (Sebag-Montefiore 2019). Offering a “revolution of form,” this stand-up doubles down on the comic trope of unmasking together with her trademark wit to expose vulnerability and share pain. The result is not an exile from comedy but a more enlightened community and an altered formula for what comedy is. II.D. A Fourth Technique: Unmasking, Authenticity, Empathy Depression is an unavoidable stage of grief. The tragic can lead to the feeling that you do not quite seem like yourself along with a sense of helplessness. It may be a surprise that in these moments of complete disarray that one would turn to comics for direction. The night after the 2015 Charleston church shootings, a loyal television audience tuned in to political satirist Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. Whatever his viewers expected to find, Stewart too quits comedy. In his opening monologue he sets aside his comic persona and reveals his hand: “I didn't do my job today. So, I apologize. I've got nothing for you, in terms of jokes and sounds, because of what happened in South Carolina” (Stewart 2015; transcript at Yahr 2015). These acts of mass killings have become so commonplace that Stewart could not pull “out of the spiral” that gripped him and his audience. Drained of humor, he had no comic relief left to offer, only honesty (Crouch 2015). The expected role of the tragic figure is to prompt moments of quiet reflection together with empathy for suffering. Thus, one would never think the court jester would be the one to lead the charge or guide us through moments of intense grief. But with roles inverted, and the jester off script, the authenticity that comes of the unexpected is channeled by the comic who we already recognize as the truth teller in our age. Amber Day explains the unexpected authenticity we find in the comic against the background of “a highly stage-managed, mediatized discursive landscape” which renders the more conventional expression of inner feeling suspect (Day 2011, 3). She has invited us to consider how “politicians and other overproduced public figures bend over backward attempting to convey” an earnestness and then observes that “there is something about the unabashedly personal, ironic, tongue-in-cheek perspective that appears refreshingly authentic” (Day 2011, 3). We think that the honest acknowledgment that there is nothing left to say from one among the comic breed of truth tellers illustrates why in the years following 9/11, the American public has cast stand-ups in contrast with formulaic newscasters or rigidly scripted politicians as voices of authenticity. Ironically, it is when the comic interrupts the usual stand-up routine and delivers their messages straight and raw that an unexpected outpouring of compassion can shake up the standard narrative that immobilizes those suffering from a grave loss. In 2016, after yet another mass shooting this time in an Orlando disco, Stephen Colbert, host of CBS's The Late Show too understands how one can be “paralyzed” by what he called “a monstrously hateful act.” Concerned that a sad affect can spiral down to more trouble, he declares the need to go off script to offer his audience a path from despair to love. Love allows us to change the script. “So, love your country, love your family, love the families and the victims and the people of Orlando,” he said, closing the remarks. “But let's remember love is a verb. And to love means to do something” (Rosen 2016). When Gadsby breaks from the comic script, however, she takes much greater risks in a bid for compassion and healing. Revealing how she has personally endured unrelenting mockery for being queer and repeated violent sexual assaults, her fumerism seems more than justified. Reflecting on the volatile cocktail of anger and ridicule, such satire, despite its toxic side effects, remains a useful tool in the fumerist arsenal. Looking out at her audience, she declares “To the men in the room … who feel I may have been persecuting you this evening … well spotted. That's pretty much what I've done there. But this is theater, fellas. I've given you an hour, a taste. I have lived a life.” Then with a softened tone she draws power for a moral plea because “the damage done to me is real and debilitating … I just needed my story heard, my story felt and understood by individuals with minds of their own.” Through comedy and love, she bares her soul and exposes how raw her hurt is in a bid for shared feelings, what we have termed solidaric empathy (Willett and Willett 2019, 121): “I don't want my story defined by anger. All I can ask is just please help me take care of my story.” In contrast with either a Stoic transcendence of pain or any easy romanticizing of an artist's suffering, she seeks what we call a “humor of connection” (Willett and Willett 2019, 2): “through all the pain [that an artist like Van Gogh endured], he had a tether, a connection to the world. And that … is the focus of the story we need. Connection” (Gadsby 2018). Gadsby's gripping performance draws its unique power from engaging the full range of comedic devices for dealing with tragedy and grief. Indeed, even her infamous break up with comedy is yet revealed to be a yet another comic technique. Literary scholar Northrop Frye comments that as far back as Shakespeare, “a clown, for instance will make a speech near the end in which the buffoon's mask suddenly falls off and we look straight into the face of a beaten and ridiculed slave” (Frye 1957, 179). The dropped mask goes hand in hand with a critique of norms. In comic theater, the critique often clears the path for a metamorphosis of character and the conjuring of a vision of a more inclusive and happier society. As Frye observes, transformation together with a glimpse into a better world are critical moments for romantic comedy (Frye 1957, 182). Laughter is not just honey; it is also our medicine, functioning, as the ancient theater goers understood, as a collective catharsis (Willett and Willett 2019, 114). II.E. A Fifth Technique: A Comic Vision of New Identities and Norms Dubbed one of the bravest women in comedy (Angelo 2015), Tig Notaro was overwhelmed by her unsettling emotions after a double mastectomy: “I was trying to get comfortable with my body, and I had some shame and sadness and discomfort about the way I looked after my surgery …” (Gross 2018). Stepping out onto the comic stage to engage in the simple relief that comes from silliness and distraction was part of what allowed her to move past feeling overwhelmed. She could not help but to yield to the fourth-wave feminist mischief as she began to plot a comic routine that would feature her topless. And why not? After all, it was her higher intellect that urged her on: “I was being heckled by my own brain,” which kept saying “Tig, take your shirt off!” (Team Coco 2015). So, she did go full frontal, first at her favorite venues in Los Angeles and New York and then on her 2018 HBO special “Boyish Girl Interrupted.” The revealing gesture was “something that I thought might help me move through it” (Gross 2018). It also allowed her audiences a new norm and herself a new identity that would not render her body invisible or masked with shame (Team Coco 2015). While some popular psychologists counsel that processing grief culminates in the acceptance of loss as “the new norm with which we must learn to live” (Kübler-Ross and Kessler 2005, 25), the comic presents the possibility of creating norms and identities anew. Notaro, never wanting her audience to be the foil-that is, the unsuspecting straight man who is never clued in on the joke-offers as a warm-up act her androgynous body in a familiar post- 9/11 airport ritual. Notaro's encounter with TSA turns not on infamous racial profiling but on an inability to categorize a “Boyish Girl.” Unsure whose hands should be assigned to Notaro's pat-down, she takes delight in the TSA's “awkwardness” upon discovering her missing breasts. Embracing the moment and unwilling to help, Notaro creates even more confusion by adopting a masculine voice. Laughing with Notaro, her stand-up audience wants more and here she nicely plants the seed that it is their idea, not hers, for her to bare all. She playfully teases her fans “don't tempt me” as she takes off her pristine white shirt and reveals “her scars and then,” as one New York Times reviewer insists “through the force of her showmanship, made you forget that they were there” (Zinoman 2014). With her shirt now hanging neatly to the side, and some well-planned corny jokes, her deadpan humor takes command of the stage and amidst waves of laughter reinvents what it means to be a boyish girl interrupted. Only after laughter's combustive force ripples through the audience does Notaro dare slip in the serious statements and unexpected self-exposures that make the provocation and the taboo seem like the new normal. Laughter is a lubricant for fluid identities but also a technique for working through negative emotions and upsetting set norms thanks to the audience's electric interaction it metabolizes new social possibilities. In other words, getting comfortable with a new body is more a tease and a process than a proposition (Zinoman 2014). One could configure this process as a type of comic forgetting as the New York reviewer did, but the new body's slip into background awareness and everyday normality is not erasure or mere distraction but instead an altered body field, and indeed one most likely to be effective when it is not just personal but also collective. To be sure, Notaro's deadpan humor appears to follow the popular advice from the Stoic tradition on the acceptance of fate and forgetful transcendence of life's absurdities. Stoics have long advised that one rises above a situation and resigns oneself to fate. Humor, for the Stoics, was an important means to acknowledge events out of your control and with a restrained smile draw on their wit to transcend hopeless disasters. A classic example from gallows humor cited by Freud pictures a man on the way to his beheading who looks up at the bright sky and remarks with calm that the day is beginning nicely (Freud [1927] 1976, 161; Critchley 2002, 95). This mode of humor allows one to stay calm and carry on in the midst of tragedy and disaster. While Stoics use humor as armor, Notaro's humor like Gadsby's allows the defenses to fall down because she does not conceal but shares her vulnerability. She reveals her vulnerability as she takes to the public stage not for pity but for a measure of control, and an unmeasurable degree of agency that even in one's most precarious state may still offer possibilities. Perhaps this is why she does not find it “weird that so many strangers … know all this stuff” (Leon 2016). For, ironically, Notaro finds empowerment in the very place-the place of shared vulnerability-that the Stoic finds weakness: Self-exposure is “part of the strength of sharing and vulnerability and honesty and comedy, all mixed in. You can't go wrong when you're that wide open” (Leon 2016). In this self-exposure, Notaro wagers a high-risk bet that she can become an agent of change. While a romanticized embrace of an unquestioned agency that celebrates every small step as a path to radical transformation is also problematic, Stoic fatalism resigns one to a sense of passivity. The Stoic legacy partitions off life too neatly into those things one can and cannot control. It assigns mental attitudes and the personal meaning of external events to the self's invulnerable inner core. But life is less defined by the old binary of fatalism and self-control than our vulnerability to uncertainties and possibilities. In lieu of an attitude adjustment as a resolute act of will before an otherwise unalterable script, Notaro's performance engenders an unknowing agency that is more in tune with life's ebbs and flows. After all, a partial measure of agency in an indeterminate reality reflects an understanding that life as well as our action and attitudes configure an unknowable script. It is not just that the old adage tragedy plus time equals humor is a limited formula; it is that in real life the plot is not linear, it is more complex and multidimensional. The stakes could hardly be more salient than for a skilled comic whose craft perhaps more so than any other requires an attunement to one's own physical presence and its entanglement in volatile social images that cut to the core of who she is. Thus, when Notaro chooses to use the tools of the trade to interrupt gender rather than engage in self-mockery or bemoan the loss of her breasts, we see how energies might take a swing toward opening new possibilities in the present rather than changing an unchangeable past. Baring her chest is part of a cathartic process of working through shame and sadness but not so much to accept the missing breasts as loss and leave it at that. Instead she uses her comic persona to help her and her audience create a new normal, one less about accepting loss than embracing a body identity no longer held hostage to rigid gendered norms. Notaro's techniques, much like Gadsby's, demonstrate how humor can serve as a unique catalyst for processing negative emotions only as it simultaneously transforms audiences. Through humor, catharsis is, as we have argued elsewhere, less a strictly cerebral exercise than a visceral and collective experience fostered through audience participation (Willett and Willett 2019, 118). Again, to take up a figure from the comic stage, think about how difficult it is for the straight man to reason their way out of set scripts and/or renegotiate damaging social roles using sober arguments. Habits of thinking and feeling reinforced by institutional cultures and social images run us along well-worn grooves that are difficult to leap out of. But a spark ignited through contagious laughter raises the general energy level through reinforcing loops of positive charge. Notaro's audiences embolden her while her silliness spurs them on to an ever more elevated mood. As she feeds off the audiences, she harnesses the affect and they respond in kind. For the comic, timing of course is everything. This comic's offhanded way of promoting silliness charges the atmosphere and changes the mood whipping up audience vitality well before beliefs are tackled and ideologies overturned. III. CONCLUSION Just after being diagnosed, Notaro took to the stage, and in the tradition of female comic storytellers revealed to her audience the intimate details of her past few days. Not knowing whether to laugh or to cry, and ever shifting her posture before her fans, this seasoned comic mixed jokes and fears, as she alternately wondered why her fans were laughing and reassured those in tears: “It's OK. It's OK. You're going to be OK.” Adding slyly, “I don't know what's going on with me.” Now surrounded by waves of laughter, she gently roasts one of her more uninhibited fans. “Sir, this should not tickle you so much.” Remember, “I'm not that happy and comfortable”-a punch line that creates yet another round of laughs (Boyish Girl Interrupted 2015). For Notaro, the tools of the comic's trade allow her to build a sense of community and self-validation around the difficulties of her life but on her own terms-one that is not based on the kind of positivity that can sound fake nor on pity, but rather on the kind of teasing that shifts the terrain from sympathy to one based on the strength that laughter can bring. She wants to know from her audiences “That you hear me”-“You understand, but you can't imagine.” Any fake sources of cheer out of touch with realities no less than the brutality of “you're screwed. You're gonna die” are isolating (Brownstone 2013). Notaro is looking for the supportive vibes of a solidaric empathy that can flourish in the camaraderie of a stand-up crowd. Surprisingly, as part of the process of working through sorrow and pain, Notaro and Gadsby along with other comics make use of humor even as they seem to take a break from it. These stand-ups offer something more than the expected formulas for comic forgetting and Stoic acceptance. No doubt loss is real, and at times, such resignation and transcendence are all that is possible. In such circumstances, humor comes only from the perspective along with the armor that distance and detachment offer. Notaro and Gadsby, however, find themselves in a position to be able to risk lowering defenses, and thus unmasking vulnerabilities. Through their humor a means of engagement and connection not distraction or detachment emerges. 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TI - The Comic in the Midst of Tragedy's Grief with Tig Notaro, Hannah Gadsby, and OthersWillett and Willett
JF - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
DO - 10.1111/jaac.12765
DA - 2020-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-comic-in-the-midst-of-tragedy-s-grief-with-tig-notaro-hannah-h6uIW9vMLf
SP - 535
EP - 546
VL - 78
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
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