-
6. Humor and the Suppression of Sentiment
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
6. Humor and the Suppression of Sentiment “Under the mask of humor, our society allows infinite aggressions, by everyone against everyone.” “At the root of a great many jokes . . . lies a deepseated hostility and a desire to degrade.” “American humor is violent—and often sexist,racist,brutal and disgusting as well.”1 These contemporary characterizations of humor as aggression are, of course, typical, and the catalog could be easily extended.The perspective they embody derives directly from Sigmund Freud’s observation on the tendentious joke in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious that “there are only two purposes that it may serve. . . . It is either a hostile joke (serving the purpose of aggressiveness, satire, or defence) or an obscene joke (serving the purpose of exposure).”2 That humor would seem to be at the command of less than seemly motives was hardly original with Freud. Freud’s particular accomplishments on the topic were the close analysis of particular jokes and their techniques; the delineation of the deep analogy between jokes and dreams; and the integration of humor into a comprehensive theory of the mind.That theory asserted that the rational, conscious mind was directed by powerful, unconscious, sexual, and aggressive impulses,3 impulses that must be repressed or suppressed for the creation and maintenance of civilization. By distracting the forces of repression and suppression, the techniques of humor permit the expression of sexual interests and hostile intentions in another guise. The individual is thus reallied with forbidden sources of infantile pleasure, but in a way that does not threaten the structure of social relations.4 These are the ideas that underlie much of the scholarly as well as current popular understandings of the nature and function of humor. Within a grand psychological theory such as Freud’s,it is difficult to imag- 72 engaging humor ine what human impulses, other than sex and aggression, could warrant severe suppression or repression. What other emotions, after all, threaten society so fundamentally and necessitate such strict control? What, besides sex and aggression,would need to seek expression under a guise of humor? These questions are difficult to answer. Still, instead of broaching the problem on the level of a universal psychology,the questions might be reformulated with parameters of time and place. That is, instead of asking “What human impulses need to be suppressed in the interests of society?” one might be led to ask “Other than sex and aggression, what is repressed or prohibited in contemporaryAmerican society that might find its expression in humor?” In this form, the question demands the consideration of solutions that are necessarily local and historical. In this form,the question can also be readily answered,and the answer that most immediately springs to mind is “sentiment.” By sentiment,I mean feelings of goodness, affection, tenderness, admiration, sympathy, and compassion . I employ the term “sentimentality” to refer to the constellation of these sentiments as well as the larger psychological and philosophical context in which they were expressed, appreciated, and understood. I contend that as sentiments and sentimentality have been criticized and suppressed in modern society, they have had to develop special channels for their expression. Humor is one of those channels. The primary definition of “sentimentality” in American dictionaries is pejorative. This was not always the case. Sentimentality has a history; and something of this history must be grasped to appreciate the place of sentiment in contemporary American society.Through the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries,the word “sentimental” denoted something positive and good.5 Sentimentality was an idea that was rooted in the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century. The third earl of Shaftesbury (1671– 1713), Adam Smith (1723–90), and David Hume (1711–76) all contributed to the development of an “ethic of feeling.” Despite the differences between them, they agreed that reason was an insufficient basis for morality. Morality was less a matter of judgment and calculation than of sensitive and refined feeling. It was the heart rather than the head that discerned and fostered virtue .People were moral not because they obeyed a moral law but because they were motivated by inbred feelings of sympathy, affection, and benevolence. A moral person was simply one who followed the dictates of inner natural passions. Those who did not cut themselves off from their feelings—who trusted their impulses—were inevitably moral.6 These eighteenth-century philosophers were to some extent anticipated by the Cambridge Platonists, those seventeenth...