Humoring Resistance: Laughter and the Excessive Body in Latin American Women's Fiction

CHAPTER ONE: Challenging Humor Theory with the “Humored” Body

13 CHAPTER ONE / Challenging Humor Theory with the “Humored” Body It cannot be that [the] laughter . . . is due simply to an irksome attitude of the mind: some other cause must be thought. Herbert Spencer, “The Physiology of Laughter” The body has been regarded as a source of interference in, and a danger to, the operations of reason. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies The essence of being radical is physical. Michel Foucault, Foucault Live In “The Cultural Overseer and the Tragic Hero: Comedic and Feminist Perspectives on the Hubris of Philosophy,” Susan Bordo argues that classical philosophy’s near dismissal of comic discourses can be traced to demonstrable links between the comic, the material body, and women. Although rarely quoted in this context, Bordo’s article constitutes a crucial moment in contemporary humor studies not only because of its contribution to an understanding of the subversive potential of comedic discourses, but also because its argument may well be the first critical attempt to theorize the link between a semiotics of the comic and the materiality of the body from a gendered perspective. One of the earliest attempts to theorize the devaluation of the comic on the grounds of its “feminization,” Bordo’s essay arrives at the startling conclusion that the preference for the tragic over the comic in the history of philosophy may be yet another way in which the early thinkers sought to privilege the masculine ideal of abstraction over female embodiment, 14 HUMORING RESISTANCE of mind over concrete matter, of generals above particulars. Clearly implicated in Bordo’s argument is the contention that Western culture’s denigration of comedy is a gendered act, one with obvious repercussions not only for comic genres but for women’s bodies. A detailed account of women’s role in the history of humor theory is beyond the scope of this chapter. My more modest aim is to present a brief and selective sketch of some of the important turning points in that history, emphasizing the ways in which these key moments have influenced our conception of different kinds of humor and of women’s roles in helping shape the theories or hypotheses that emerged from these. A frequent criticism of comparative and schematic approaches such as the one I attempt in the first part of this chapter1 is that they tend to reinforce existing assumptions by playing off contrasting but widely held generalizations. Adopting David Damrosch’s view of comparative literary projects as following an “inherently elliptical” method, one that can lead to a modified understanding of the different areas under analysis, my aim in examining important turning points in humor theory (and theories of the comic) across national and historical borders is to show how different national, and sometimes transnational, views of humor practices and comic worldviews have echoed or supplemented each other in excluding or censoring women from the production and reception of humor. “DISAPPEARING ACTS”: WOMEN AND BODIES IN HUMOR THEORY Scholars have speculated that Plato’s condemnation of comic laughter probably grew out of his disapproval not only of the viciousness of Attic comedy but also of the pornographic excesses committed by the drunken revelers who engaged in these rituals, rituals that were still practiced during Plato’s lifetime.2 Relatively recent evidence of the significant role that women played in these ancient festivals and cults, however, makes it all the more plausible to speculate that among Plato’s prejudices against Attic comedy and Attic clowning was the suspicion of widespread female participation in these practices. In “The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language and the Development of Attic Comedy,” classicist Jeffrey Henderson claims that the practice of obscene humor and joking in Attic Greece can be traced back to the cults associated with fertility rites, many of which were ostensibly performed by women. Writing specifically about the festivals of Demeter, Erica Simon speculates that the jesting and “scoffing” said to be typical of these ancient fertility CHALLENGING HUMOR THEORY WITH THE “HUMORED” BODY 15 rites may have been an attempt on the part of the celebrating women to distract the goddess Demeter away from her grief over her daughter’s loss. Simon’s speculations as to the possible function of humor in ancient rituals are of particular interest when viewed in the context of the classical condemnations of comic genres. Most classical philosophical treatises assume all expressions of humor to be a form of ridicule and...