Beyond a Joke: Nietzsche and the Birth of "Super-Laughter"

They that are intent on great designs have not time to laugh.

—Thomas Hobbes ¹

There is no question that in the latter decades of the twentieth century philosophical, literary, and cultural studies were infected with something of a comic spirit. Postmodernism was identified with and through images of play, energy, and movement that sought to ceaselessly and joyfully throw into crisis our faith in the permanence of structures. The only thing that would be permanent now was the need for change that the ascendancy of desire itself as a cosmological principle was driving. Here, of course, postmodernist theory revealed its continuity with, and indeed its debt to, high modernist dynamism—most conspicuously, Nietzsche's Dionysianism, Bergson's quasi-mystical élan vital, and Freud's "energo-economics." Thus when Derrida announced the triumph of "becoming," of endless desiring and jouissance, through his linguistic concepts of signifying force and différance, it was in Nietzsche that he found inspiration: "we must affirm this, in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirmation into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance." ² Desire and play were inseparable, and laughter was the privileged icon—the transcendental signifier, if you like—of that unruly force that drove us.

Amid the excitement the celebration of difference and playful energy introduced, especially as it was reinforced by the not unrelated rise of Bakhtinianism, it was common to overlook the qualifying adjective in Derrida's reference, that "certain." It was just as easy, and perhaps convenient, to overlook the fact that Nietzsche's laughing hero Zarathustra, from whom poststructuralist notions of "Nietzschean laughter" commonly derived, was, first, a fictional projection, and second, not a proponent of laughter in general. On the contrary, as I will attempt to show here, Nietzsche's work is surprisingly consistent in revealing an anxiety toward laughter, and in this respect it shares ground with the philosophical mythologies of those other preeminent modernist figures, Bergson and Freud, both of whom, not coincidentally, wrote extended treatises on the comic. Uncovering the source of that shared anxiety is not merely a matter of modernist intellectual history, since it reveals something important about our more recent postmodern past and present—specifically, the truly ironic reality that amid the ubiquity of images of play and laughter, both in academia and popular culture, laughter had become increasingly ineffectual and genuine laughter increasingly difficult to access.

This irony has been observed for some time, and at first glance an explanation seems straightforward enough. At the end of the last century, Milan Kundera observed how the expanding and increasingly intrusive commercial mediascape collapsed the boundary between the important and the frivolous. Serious events were packaged as spectacle, while entertainment was regarded with a ludicrous gravity, making it difficult to distinguish what it meant to be funny. A character in Kundera's novel Immortality (1991) remarks, "Humour can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border has become unrecognizable." ³ Fredric Jameson had earlier identified much the same phenomenon when he remarked in postmodernity the ascendancy of pastiche, the uninhibited quoting and juxtaposition of different forms and styles, "without laughter . . . without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic." ⁴ Both Jameson and Kundera discerned a lack of something comic theorists generally consider essential to laughter, the ability, amid the proliferation of difference, to recognize incongruity, to notice that something—a hi-tech casino inside a glass simulation of an ancient Egyptian pyramid in the middle of the U.S.A., let's say—doesn't fit.

That occlusion of the perception of incongruity by a spirit of proliferating difference does not, of course, derive from Derrida or Barthes or Kristeva or any of the other postmodern prophets of...