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Sobre o riso

Looking at laughter from the perspective of an anthropologist, it’s possible to claim that all humour is essentially political. That insight transcends comedic forms such as satire; my point here is that humour in general, whatever its content, is political by nature. Down to the smallest details of our lives, our relationships and encounters involve exercises and exchanges of power. In the face of these dynamics, laughter is an equalising gesture, a restoration of a rightful order in the face of an unjust hierarchy.

Similarly, when we find something funny, it’s often because of some incongruity between mind and body, the ideal and the real. That division is political to the core. The humour of medieval carnival, according to Bakhtin, relied on the way that the body makes a mockery of the lofty purposes of the mind. Buttocks, thighs, coughs, splutters, farts, ‘the bodily lower stratum’ – all mock the spiritual solemnities of humourless bishops and other supposed guardians of morality. Comedy is about exposing the gap between our supposedly noble intentions, and the grimier truths about our condition. For this reason, the amusing features of life are never far away; if something seems funny, it’s because it’s uncomfortably close to home.

Perhaps this explains why nothing in nature can be truly comical. A strange rock formation or a pattern in the clouds might seem weird or intriguing, but it can’t be amusing; rocks and clouds don’t have human-style intentions and motivations, so they can’t be tripped up. Animals might seem funny, but only because we anthropomorphise them. They can’t really be brought down to earth, because that’s where they are already. For a situation to provoke genuine laughter, it must form a pattern that we recognise from our own mental and social lives.

Laughing, then, appears to be intimately tied to our ability to reflect back on ourselves. When we chuckle at our own foibles, we show that we are no longer trapped inside our individual egos, but can see ourselves through one another’s eyes. Likewise, when speaking, we separate ourselves from those around us by using words such as ‘I’ or ‘me’, drawing attention to ourselves as one person among others, as if from outside. Language would be impossible without the ability to adopt such a reverse-egocentric standpoint.

Humans are instinctive egalitarians, who work best with one another when no one has absolute authority, when teasing is good-natured, when there is sufficient affection and trust for shared tasks to constitute their own reward. Laughter is a vital part of this picture – not simply a psychological relief valve, but a collective guard against despotism. When moved to laugh by those around us, we reveal ourselves to be truly human.

— Chris Knigh, Does laughter hold the key to human consciousness?

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"He was in a residential area now, completely lost. A man in an undershirt dragged three garbage bags across the street. A clean light soaked into the shaggy bark of a eucalyptus and it was a powerful thing to see, the whole tree glowed, it showed electric and intense, the branches ran soft fire, the tree seemed revealed. The man dumped the bags at the corner and came back across the street and Bill nodded to him and walked on, hearing a garbage truck work up the hill."

— Don Delillo, Mao II

Microcosmo como macrocosmo

      “O átomo era um sistema cósmico carregado de energia, e em cujo seio gravitavam planetas, numa rotação de espantosa rapidez, em torno de um centro semelhante ao sol, e cujo éter era percorrido a uma velocidade só mensurável em anos-luz, por cometas mantidos nas suas órbitas excêntricas pela força do corpo central. E isso não é uma simples comparação, tão pouco quanto o seria a que define o organismo multicelular como um “Estado de células”. A cidade, o Estado, a comunidade social organizada segundo o princípio da divisão do trabalho não somente era comparável à vida orgânica, mas até a repetia exatamente. Da mesma forma repetia-se no seio da natureza, na mais extrema redução, o universo estelar macrocósmico cujos grupos, nebulosas, constelações, configurações pairavam empalidecidos pela lua, acima do vale cintilante de neve, ante os olhos do nosso adepto. Não seria lícito pensar que certos planetas do sistema solar atômico — esses enxames e essas vias lácteas de sistemas solares que compunham a matéria —, ora, que um e outro desses corpos celestes do mundo interior se encontravam numa condição semelhante à que fazia da Terra uma sede da vida? Para um jovem adepto meio embriagado no seu íntimo, e cuja pele se achava num estado “anormal”, para um homem que já não estava completamente sem experiência no terreno das coisas proibidas, tal suposição não somente não era extravagante, mas até se impunha com uma insistência inelutável, parecendo evidente e tendo todo o cunho de lógica e de verdade. A “pequenez” dos corpos celestes do mundo interior seria uma objeção pouco incisiva, já que a medida do que era grande ou pequeno perdia-se, mais tardar, no momento em que se evidenciava o caráter cósmico das partes “mais minúsculas” da matéria, e já que os conceitos de “exterior” e “interior” também viam abalada sua solidez. O mundo do átomo era um “exterior”, ao passo que o astro terrestre que habitamos era, se considerado do ponto de vista orgânico, um profundo “interior”, provavelmente. Não chegara certo sábio, nos seus sonhos audaciosos, a falar dos animais da Via Láctea, monstros cósmicos, cuja carne, cujo esqueleto e cérebro se compunham de sistemas solares? Mas, se isso sucedia assim como se afigurava a Hans Castorp, tudo começava apenas no instante em que se imaginava ter alcançado o término! Era possível que, no fundo íntimo e mais remoto do seu ser, talvez se encontrasse ele mesmo, o jovem Hans Castorp, mais uma vez, e mais cem vezes, bem agasalhado num compartimento de sacada com vista sobre a noite glacial e enluarada dos Alpes, a estudar a vida do corpo, com os dedos enregelados e as faces ardentes, sob o impulso de um interesse médico-humanista?”

— Thomas Mann, A Montanha Mágica, p.327-8.

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Insignificância e sentido
 
Last year, I went to the memorial service of a man I had never met. He was the younger brother of a friend of mine, and had died suddenly, in the middle of things, leaving behind a wife and two young daughters. The program bore a photograph of the man, above his compressed dates (1968-2012). He looked ridiculously young, blazing with life—squinting a bit in bright sunlight, smiling slightly, as if he were just beginning to get the point of someone’s joke. In some terrible way, his death was the notable, the heroic fact of his short life; all the rest was the usual joyous ordinariness, given form by various speakers. Here he was, jumping off a boat into the Maine waters; here he was, as a child, larkily peeing from a cabin window with two young cousins; here he was, living in Italy and learning Italian by flirting; here he was, telling a great joke; here he was, an ebullient friend, laughing and filling the room with his presence. As is generally the case at such final celebrations, speakers struggled to expand and hold the beautifully banal instances of a life, to fill the space between 1968 and 2012, so that we might leave the church thinking not of the first and last dates but of the dateless minutes in between.

—    James Wood, Why?

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A arrogância humana

[...] I’m frightened by what the most extraordinary of Italian poets, Giacomo Leopardi, calls “the night sky full of worlds”. I’m also frightened by the conceited small-mindedness of human beings when they consider themselves elect creatures. I have no liking for the throne we have assigned ourselves by declaring that we are beloved children of God and lords of the universe.

The pride that derives from that distresses me – that, although we are animals among animals, we believe we have the right to enslave the rest of the living world. This makes us dangerous, and at the same time ridiculous. However much we empower ourselves with increasingly sophisticated technology, we remain comic creatures, like the cat that a child dresses as if it were her doll. It’s urgent that we learn to confront the truth of ourselves, before we’re destroyed by our obstinate determination to become immortal. The animal man has to be self-critical. The future that interests me is a future of absolute openness to the other, to any living being, to everything endowed with the breath of life.

— Elena Ferrante