Review: Lightning Rods seminar on "Is the academy just not funny enough?"

It's an interesting place to work, the HRC. Sometimes we linguists can feel a bit like interlopers who've snuck in under the radar, when all the circulated emails are about Edwardian culture and whole reading groups dedicated to Finnegan's Wake. However, I decided to make a much more effort to get involved in HRC life this year through things such as Christmas Crafternoons (SO much glitter) and discovering that English lit students make great duetting partners for German translations of Beatles' songs.

Sie liebt dich: ja, ja, ja...
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Another, slightly more academic, way of getting involved is to trot along to some of the seminars that they hold here. There's two seminar series, of which the one I went to last night, Lightning Rods, is the less "utilitarian" and more "indulgent" one (so says Judith Buchanan, director of the HRC). Works for me.

Actually, the title of this talk was what drew me in particular - "Is the academy just not funny enough?" I have a latent interest in humour theory anyway as a legacy of the legendary Dr Penny Simons's module on Le Rire Gaulois (Medieval French Humour) from the final year of my undergrad. But it's also something that's been interesting me and my coursemates recently: it seems that academics so frequently say blatantly funny things with a po-face and serious bearing, or seem just about ready to pop with pomposity, while we're suppressing our sniggers and trying to work out how to turn into "serious academics". Are the academy and humour mutually exclusive? And if not, why are we so reticent to have a bit of a giggle at ourselves and the subject which impassions us?

A unicorn and a lion playing chess. That's pretty funny.
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The session was chaired by Professor Jason Edwards (History of Art) and there were four brave speakers from throughout the university: Professor Guy Halsall (History), Dr Lisa Peschel (Theatre, Film and Television), Dr Bryan Radley (English) and, interestingly, Dr Carolyn Hunter (Management). Professor Edwards opened with a few thoughts framed in a rhetorical style that would make Carrie Bradshaw proud, and ensured the first giggle of the night came good and early. He wondered aloud whether humour is seen as "juvenile, escapist, defensive" in an academic world in which "criticism and hostility are employed as modi operandi", before handing over to Professor Halsall.

Did you just nick my style there, Edwards?
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Eminent historian Professor Halsall was also quick to jump on a bit of humour, this time at his own expense, by referencing his recent mini-media storm. He then went on to question that "subjective, moveable fine line" which dictates whether something is acceptably funny or an acceptable target for humour, or whether things have "gone too far". He also looked at how the ethics of humour interact with the ethical responsibilities of the historian to represent and analyse historical events as carefully as possible. He noted that somewhere between "complete empathy and complete alterity" with/from sources may lie the key, but that humour helps historians both to distance themselves from and engage with sources, to the point that we (or at least he) often find ourselves laughing both with and at Sisyphus as his boulder rolls back down the hill, because our sense of shared humanity helps us see just how ridiculous humanity really is. He concluded that maybe it wasn't a question of having gone too far with humour in academia, but "maybe, we haven't yet gone far enough".

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From this Arts and Humanities perspective we segued into a more utilitarian perspective from Dr Hunter, who researchers the use of humour and play in corporate environments. Apparently there's a long tradition of studying the role of humour in management studies, and (as I too had noticed) humour is coming back into vogue as something which can be harnessed and used in the workplace. She talked about how corporate bods used humour - a good thing as long as it results in higher productivity, and it can even be seen as anti-corporate not to join in the fun - and that, following Bergson, there is a sense that empathy and emotion inhibit humour, so in order to build a more coherent workplace, people need to distance themselves from their natural emotions and laugh. This paradox of humour both distancing and forming bonds between people was a recurring theme, as you have probably already guessed. Dr Hunter concluded that humour certainly can be a serious thing, although the downside for a humour researcher seemed to be that all her study participants seemed to expect her personally to be and perform as 'a funny person'...pressure, much?!

Our next speaker, Dr Peschel, seemed more than happy to perform however - literally, as she and Dr Radley performed a skit about...the Holocaust. And it was genuinely funny. She challenged us to think about whether the writers, in this case two prisoners in the ghetto, should be celebrated or condemned, in the same way that Roberto Benigni faced both acclaim and revulsion for his 1997 film Life is Beautiful, inviting thoughts not only on distance and acceptability of topics, but also whether the position of the writer and his/her circumstances lends either credibility or insult to the given theme.

Rib-tickling, gut-wrenching, horror-inducing, or all of the above?
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After his cameo appearance in the skit, Dr Radley was our final speaker. He focused more closely on the question asked in the title of the seminar, and the consequences of such a statement. He wondered whether the academy could be funny, and if so, what the purpose of this would be. He highlighted how engaging an issue humour and seriousness is in the Arts and Humanities by linking back to the current political and economic situation, noting that it is possible that "we take ourselves too seriously, while no-one else takes us seriously at all", and that humour can be an incredibly powerful tool in holding the attention of and making connections in the minds of your students while teaching (something that Professor Halsall had also noted). As for the study of humour itself, he noted that even Bergson admits that it is hard to theorise humour coherently, and that none of the three humour theories - relief, superiority and incongruity - can alone account for human laughter without seriously warping either the source, or the theory itself. He also recognised how trying to study humour invariably seems to kill it flat, quoting E.B. White:

Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind. (source) 

...and Dorothy Parker:

I had thought, on starting this composition, that I should define what humor means to me. However, every time I tried to, I had to go and lie down with a cold wet cloth on my head. (source)

I want to know more about this woman...
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(...there was a Classical quote too but I've forgotten who it was...)

Dr Radley concluded that it wasn't helpful to create any kind of binary relation between humour theory and the study of tragedy, as neither is completely uncontaminated by the other, and it is that "contaminant" which is so interesting and so ephemeral.

There were some interesting discussions once the floor was opened up, from whether humour is appropriate in a teaching context or could undermine and put pressure on teachers, especially PGWTs; whether "enforced humour" from management is actually productive and whether it can be counted as humour at all; and the big question of who decides what is an appropriate target for humour - the answer to that, it seemed, was that no-one has the right to outlaw any topic, while Professor Halsall insisted that no topic was out of bounds of his funny-bone.

I asked two questions; I was interested in the distance-engagement paradox and, off the back of Dr Peschel's performance, asked whether humour would in fact be a very useful tool for studying history, as it breaks through emotions which stop historians from seeing the finer details - in the case of Dr Peschel's skit, we saw the real humanity of someone trying to survive in an utterly inhuman and dehumanising situation, and the humour allowed us to see through the head-spinning numbers (6 million) to see one person and how they coped. She agreed with me and a small debate followed on the ethics of laughing at history, but the importance of not being blinded by very human emotions in academia. I also asked whether it is more difficult for Arts and Humanities scholars to be humorous in their work, given that they are judged not only on their words, turns of phrase and opinions, but other people's interpretations of what they write; as such, it's much more dangerous for them to introduce any ambiguity e.g. through irony, whilst scientists, mathematicians and even theoretical linguists can throw in all the gags they want, because their evidence is in graphical or numerical form and will be judged (largely) in isolation.

Linguists: if you don't get this joke, we can no longer be friends.
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It was concluded from the open discussion that introducing humour into academia involves some quite serious risk-taking: the risk you will be misunderstood; the risk that you will offend; the risk that you simply won't be seen as funny. But there seemed to be an overriding air that maybe, it might just be worth taking that risk a little more often than we currently do.

**I want to say here that everything written above is my memory and interpretation of last night's session, and that I am sorry and willing to edit anything which may be seen as a misrepresentation of the excellent speakers and audience present. Please let me know if you were there and think that anything needs to be altered!**

And if you're interested: people who were mentioned last night or have made interesting contributions to this field (this is just intended as a starting point):

Henri Bergson

• Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic [Le rire](1900)

Ted Cohen

• Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (1999)

Simon Critchley

• On Humour (2002)

Sigmund Freud

• 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria' and 'Jokes and their relation to the unconscious' in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey (1973)

Dorothy Parker

• Just about anything, it seems! Let me know if there's a particularly good source and I'll add it here.

E.B. White

• 'Some remarks on humor' in Essays of E.B. White (1941)