The Tweet Has Two Faces: Two-Faced Humor, Black Masculinity, and RompHim

Beginning in early summer of 2017, the internet was abuzz about the RompHim, a romper designed and intended for men. The incredulity of the prospect of men wearing rompers soon turned comedic as a means to make sense of this new fashion trend. RompHim, like its predecessor the man purse, or "murse," exposed a schism in idea(l)s about the sartorial choices of heterosexual men. RompHim provides an ideal case study to explore humor in the twenty-first century for three reasons. First, it rearticulates the ways humor often works to reassert the hegemonic order. Second, and related, it helps illuminate how offline forms of humor, particularly those invested in maintaining the status quo, are imported into online spaces. Third, RompHim provides an ideal opportunity to examine the ways humor functions when black masculinity, (homo)sexuality, and fashion collide.

With respect to RompHim and Twitter, the rhetorical question became how to articulate displeasure with the RompHim without appearing antagonistic toward it and those who might choose to wear it. Platforms like Twitter allow users to build their online communities by both curating what content they see and who can see their content (depending on settings, one can also control the ability of users to share their tweets). Particularly when discussing humor, this selection bias functions much like the audience for a stand-up comic: those who have "opted in" are considered part of an "insider" crowd, affording the Twitter user the ability to joke freely because she or he is "among friends."

This insiderness is particularly important when discussing the kinds of humor that can occur digitally, because it can be disciplinary. Simon Critchley reminds us that humor functions as a "form of cultural insider-knowledge, and might, indeed, be said to function like a linguistic defense mechanism … [that] endows native speakers with a palpable sense of their cultural distinctiveness, or even superiority."¹ In this way, humor and jokes adhere to the contours of localized notions of taste and decorum and endow the joke teller with a status "above" those about whom jokes are told. Jokes, then, are hegemonic in that they labor to shore up the boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not. Wylie Sypher suggests that "one of the strongest impulses comedy can discharge from the depths of the social self is our hatred of the 'alien' especially when the stranger who is 'different' stirs any unconscious doubt about our own beliefs."² In this brief essay, I use RompHim to examine the ways humor and heterosexual masculinities collide to elucidate what I call "two-faced humor." My theorization of two-faced humor builds on Freud's tendentious jokes, which he suggests require three people, "apart from the one who is telling the joke, it needs a second person [archetypally a woman] who is taken as the object of the hostile aggression … and a third person in whom the joke's intention of producing pleasure is fulfilled."³ Concomitantly, the expression "two-faced humor" is rooted in popular vernacular, where referring to someone as "two-faced" means they display duplicitous behavior. Within the context of RompHim, the "first face" might include someone telling a man he looks great in his RompHim. The "second face" emerges when that abject person is imagined as outside of the intended audience for the joke. In this sense, while the person may compliment the wearer of the RompHim, when he is not around, a joke about his RompHim might be deployed, thus demonstrating the "second face." While Freud's triumvirate includes a third person who is responsible for producing the "pleasure" of the joke, two-faced humor is explicit in its operation as a somewhat covert form of humor in that its humor is deployed when the abject person is removed from the situation in which the joke is told. In illuminating the function of two-faced humor via RompHim, I examine the ways such two-faced humor exposes fragile fault lines around gender roles and fashion. Put another way, both gender roles and gendered fashion...