All right, I’ll admit it. The mistress joke made me laugh.
Don’t hate me.
It’s not like it’s my favorite joke in the whole world.
And I certainly know better than to defend the politics of it.
But simply because the politics of the jokes are indefensible doesn’t mean the joke itself is not funny.
That’s part of the problem with jokes.
Even as we speak, people are now flying to the International Society for Humor Studies’ annual conference. At this wonderful yearly conference, hundreds of people, very few of whom will be wearing red clown noses, will spend days discussing the psychological, emotional, spiritual and, god help us, intellectual bases of every kind of funny you can imagine — and several kinds that you’ve never thought of, or at least never though of sober.
I’ve spent some time dealing with humor as an academic. I wrote They Used to Call me Snow White, but I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor (Penguin), Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in British Literature (Wayne State University Press), and edited The Signet Book of American Humor, The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor, Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy, and New Perspectives on Women and Comedy (these last two both published by Gordon and Breach). I’ve only just finished teaching Jokes and the Unconscious for my Freud grad seminar this last semester. And probably the best recent conference I have been fortunate enough to attend was “Joking Apart: Gender, Literature and Humour, 1850-Present” at the Center for Modernist Studies, University of Sussex. In Sussex, a whole bunch of us spent a long time talking about sex, politics, culture, and what makes humor funny.
I say all this by way of explaining my non-street cred.
What I found most interesting about the responses to the Brainstorm post — in contrast, for example, to the responses to the Psychology Today post — is the fact that most of my academic colleagues seem to consider the joke outdated. Some are angry that the joke seems too rehearsed, misogynistic, punishingly narrow stereotype of traditional heterosexual gender roles. Many yawned, their sense of sophisticate irony irritated.
In contrast, my friends at PT were interested in the sexy, monogamy/polygamy/fooling-around generally aspect of the joke. They wanted to talk about money and power, too, but didn’t think it should be abstracted into the theory-sphere.
Only a few people thought it was downright cheesy, which I thought would be the big complaint.
So what made me laugh?
Part of it, I guess, is the old “You live by the sword, you die by the sword” mentality: If indeed you marry a man (or a woman, or one of Leona Helmsley’s doggie heirs) for money and power and he/she/it marries you for looks and vulnerability, and you’ve both traded (consciously or unconsciously) on this sort of package deal, then all the joke does is to expose the unspoken, underlying formal dynamic of the relationship.
It is, as my friend Cathy would put it, like a fart in church. It explodes the pious, sanctimonious, and superficial nature of the occasion; yes, it’s about incongruity, but it’s also about reminding us that we’re creatures of the flesh.
At least in theory.
cross posted with Psychology Today
