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Laughter and Liberation: In

Response to Zavarzadeh
John Hutton
Published online: 05 Jan 2009.

To cite this article: John Hutton (1991) Laughter and Liberation: In Response to
Zavarzadeh, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 4:1,
115-119, DOI: 10.1080/08935699108657957

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 Rethinking MARXISM Volume 4, Number 1 (Spring 1991)
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CORRESPONDENCE

Laughter and Liberation: In Response to Zavarzadeh

John Hutton

In his “Theory as Resistance” (Rethinking MARXISM, Spring 1989) Mas’ud

Zavarzadeh made a thoughtful critique of (among other things) certain poststructur-
alist approaches, particularly with regard to radical pedagogy. There was much to
applaud in his analysis, but in one key area, his critique seemed both simplistic and
misleading: his examination of the idea (which he links to Mikhail Bakhtin and
Gregory Ulmer) that “laughter” can provide a way of deconstructing dominant
beliefs and/or practices. He writes that “The reversal of concepts/ideas through
parody, satire, jokes, and other textualizing means, far from being means of
decentering, are in fact the most common strategies for conserving (through renew-
al) the prevailing common sense” (61). He continues:

Common sense uses parody, pastiche, and similar strategies to reassert itself whenever
its limits are transgressed by oppositional discourses. It not only parodies the intruding
discourses but, at its most radical moment, in fact directs the parody at itself in order to
jettison those elements in its knowledge repertoire which have become historically
unviable (6 I ).

“Laughter” then is far from being “radical”:

it is a very conservative device. Overthrowing bourgeois solemnities when they have
become historically counterproductive is in fact one of the pastimes of the bourgeoisie
(61).

There are several problems here. One is the manner in which an abstraction
becomes a historical actor: “common sense,” after all, does nothing whatever.
“Common sense” is merely one aspect of hegemonic discourse and, like any
hegemonic relation, is constantly being challenged and reasserted, whether in
 116 Hutton

essays or books, artistic media, the political or social apparatus, or in the streets.
The battle over what makes sense4onducted on whatever terrain-is an integral
component of any form of cultural resistance. As Raymond Williams put it,
hegemony has “continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is
also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own”
(Williams 1977, 112).
Bakhtin’s argument, in Rabelais and His World, is that laughter not only can be
but historically has been both a part of and a precondition for resistance to dominant
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political and social relations. He stresses particularly the “victory of laughter over
fear” in the Middle Ages: “It was not only a victory over mystic terror of God, but
also a victory over the awe inspired by the forces of nature, and most of all over the
oppression and guilt related to all that was consecrated and forbidden.” He adds, “It
was the defeat of divine and human power, of authoritarian commandments and
prohibitions, of death and punishment after death.” He acknowledges that the
“victory” in question was (at best) fleeting: “The truth was ephemeral; it was
followed by the fears and oppressions of everyday life, but from those brief
moments another unofficial truth emerged” (Bakhtin 1968, 90-9 I ) .
It is precisely this aspect of Bakhtin’s argument that Zavarzadeh omits. Instead,
for him “laughter” is always a top-down phenomenon: George Bush “eating pop-
corn and watching My Stepmother is an Alien” (62). Certainly, much of what passes
as “satirical,” even “subversively satirical,” in contemporary culture is embedded
within a manipulative process identical to that which Zavarzadeh describes. Jerrold
Seigel, for example, has examined the ways in which Bohemian society in
nineteenth-century Paris, far from performing an oppositional function, was in
fact a necessary component of a bourgeois social order (Seigel 1986). But Za-
varzadeh essentializes this process and converts it into an absolute. There is no
place in his critique for “laughter,” for satire or parody to serve in a process of
empowerment. He can see the utilitarian function of laughter for the dominant; he
overlooks the corrosive edge of laughter and the ways in which it can assist the
dominated.
Zavarzadeh’s dismissal of Bakhtin’s analysis of the role of the carnival confirms
this judgment. He argues that the “subversion” offered by the medieval carnival is
actually a confining of subversion to a “second world,” while the real world and its
social relations remain utterly untouched. “Change” thus becomes illusory-a
means of temporary escape.
Zavarzadeh is surely correct that conservative pedagogy has attached itself to
such a view; nor is it surprising that a conservative elite would d o just that. A
number of sources (Davis 1975; Burke 1978; Muchembled 1985) indicate that
Bakhtin’s view of the subversive role of carnival was in fact too optimistic, that
European rulers gradually (but steadily) clamped down on the various man-
ifestations of carnival in order to prevent it from serving as the center of a popular
explosion. Nonetheless, it is also vital to note that those rulers found it necessary to
make the effort in the first place; they were aware that carnival not infrequently had
 Correspondence 117

served as the origin (or the catalyst) for popular violence (3urke 1978, especially
199-204), often directed against the wealthy and/or the powerful.
It is, of course, true that to laugh at a figure of authority does not-in or of
itself-involve any change in social relations. To laugh at a ruler or local lord did
not prevent either from having one flogged or garrotted or burnt at the stake in
response. But there is no necessary either/or choice to be made: that is, either one
laughs at authority or works to combat it. Rather, the two are bound together
inseparably.
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Michael Shapiro has distinguished between “pious” and “impious” modes of

representation, “the former having the effect of reproducing or reinforcing the
prevailing modes of power and authority and the latter tending to challenge them”
(Shapiro 1988, xii). He stresses that the “reality” (or lack of it) in an image is not
“invented from moment to moment by viewers,” but is rather “forged over a period
of time by the social, administrative, political, and other processes by which various
interpretive practices become canonical, customary, and so thoroughly entangled
with the very act of viewing they cease to be recognized as practices” (135).
“Impious” representations make (or seek to make) “the objects of representation
problematic and ambiguous, thereby making possible the recognition that what we
have regarded as political realities could be rendered otherwise” (xii).
Humor-laughter, satire, parody-can provide emancipatory impieties, though
Zavarzadeh is certainly correct that they are often used as modes of manipulation
and control. That has been evidenced, if in no other way, by the manner in which
systems of social control have responded to them. Francisco de Goya published his
Caprichos in 1799, only to be threatened immediately with the Inquisition if he did
not recall them. The threat was not incidental, nor mere paranoia on theqart of the
Spanish Bourbons: in the midst of an unprecedented era of revolutionary upsurge,
Goya’s images struck directly at the pretentions of both Church and State, inverting
and reinventing traditional political and religious icons as a means of attacking the
social structure they supported. The images-a proud jackass pointing to an album
full of all his jackass ancestors; peasants fearfully worshipping a tree covered with a
monk’s robe; nobles imprisoned in their coats-of-arms like straightjackets, their ears
padlocked and their eyes sewn shut as they are fed gruel by a ragged man in a
donkey-eared blindfold-provide an abundance of iconographical complexities for
modem scholars (Klingender 1968; Williams 1976; Held 1987). In part, this stems
from the inevitable disjunctures between the period of their production and our own
era; images and references that were common parlance in Goya’s time cannot be
neatly reconstituted in ours. More importantly, however, they were never intended
for such an academic critique, for a “disinterested” dissection of source, context,
and iconography. They were weapons of attack, invested with a shock value by
their very existence as oppositional images. During the Spanish Civil War, an-
archist circles sometimes disinterred saints’ relics, tried them as oppressors, and
“executed’ them by firing squad for their crimes. The goal was to break down the
pomp and especially the awe with which those relics were viewed. Goya’s prints
 118 Hirtton

served a similar role, mocking and ridiculing the most deeply rooted myths of the
regime and its official faith.
Goya himself. to be sure. had a deeply ambiguous relationship to the social
system he mocked; he stood at the pinnacle of the world of Spanish art-member of
the Royal Academy, first painter to the king. Recent efforts to turn him into a
twentieth-century liberal, a sort of Enlightenment Ben Shahn (Sanchez and Sayre
1989) are as misdirected in this regard as earlier attempts to recruit him as a
precursor of the Frrrite Poprrlnr (Klingender 1948) or to view him through the lens
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of a frustrated sixties radical (Williams 1976). The issue is rather the manner in
which Goya’s images functioned CIS images in the social matrix within which they
were generated.
The era of mass production of art raised new pressures on art and artists. In at
least one case, however, it was the opposition to dominant authority that gained the
upper hand: in France after 1830, with the rise of illustrated satirical reviews that
pilloried the July Monarchy; notable among these was the Churivari of Philippon,
especially for the lithographs of Honore Daumier. The draconian press laws enacted
by the Orleanist state after the abortive revolt of 1834 demonstrate their fear of that
satire. Daumier in particular made use of the so-called “pear” campaign (derived
from the alleged resemblance of the monarch to the fruit in question, whose name in
French was a slang term for “fathead’) not merely to ridicule the king but to call into
question the whole state apparatus he headed. (Daumier served six months in prison
for his Gargmtun, in which a pear-headed Louis Philippe is shown devouring the
wealth of France while excreting new revenue bills.)
Zavarzadeh, to be sure, has anticipated this objection to his argument: these
would presumably serve as examples of “common sense” jettisoning “those ele-
ments in its knowledge repertoire that have become historically unviable.” It is
here, however, that Zavarzadeh’s use of an abstract (and historically fluctuating)
category as a social actor becomes most problematic. Who decides which elements
of that repertoire have become unviable? And why’?-in response to what‘? A
“knowledge repertoire” does not become unviable by itself-much less the elements
of a coercive state or social apparatus. What Zavarzadeh is describing (or glossing)
is a continuous struggle for definition of what is or is not viable. And dominant
power seldom yields easily: a king and his ministers, unlike “common sense,” can
have one jailed or killed, if only to demonstrate that rumors of their loss of viability
have been grossly exaggerated. Sometimes that struggle can be contained: small
reforms are made, certain antiquated practices are junked, a king is replaced by a
president. At other times, however, there is a rupture that cannot so easily be
contained.
Nor can this process of struggle, conducted at least partly in and through satirical
imagery, be neatly confined to a preindustrial era, or even to the period before the
introduction of mass replication of images via the printed press, film, and televi-
sion. The last major social upheaval in the United States-the rebellions of the
‘60s-saw frequent and abundant use of satire and parody as mobilizing tools.
 Correspondence 119

Whether one is considering the activities of radical theatrical troupes (including

Bread and Puppet Theater, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and The Committee),
the use of satirical cabaret in antiwar organizing (FTA, for example), or the use of
comedic playlets as a consciousness-raising tool in the women’s movement, it
seems inescapable that a crucial part of the effort to break the hold of hegemonic
ideas in the ’60s was to mock them, to break down the hold they had on the
populace.
In the ’ ~ O S ,as the tide of Reaganism seems to be ebbing, it seems premature at
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the very least to concede control of a powerful weapon to those in power. In that
endeavor, I would think that the use of satire can be a liberating force in the
Bakhtinian sense. As Bakhtin points out (1968), “All the acts of the drama of world
history were performed before a chorus of laughing people. Without hearing this
chorus, we cannot understand the drama as a whole” (474). He cites the fear of the
usurper in Pushkin’s Boris Godunov: “The people swarmed on the public square1
And pointed laughingly at me,/ And I was filled with shame and fear.” Surely that
fear haunts more than one ruler today.

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