A phenomenological reflection on humour and moralism

Where is Larry David?

There is something tragic about dissecting humour as a phenomenon. It is like a joke you have to explain: never mind, then. The point lies precisely in that unexpected turn inside a frame we both already know. And yet the anatomy lesson cannot be avoided, because the patient on our table, the human capacity for liberating, uncomfortable humour, is not in good health.

My own moment of shock did not take place in the dissecting room but at home on the sofa. One of my favourite series is Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000), in which Larry David, co-creator of Seinfeld, plays himself. He is perhaps best described as a philosopher of the everyday social order, disguised as an insufferable man.

What makes Curb Your Enthusiasm so good is not, in the first place, that Larry makes funny observations. Its fundamental mechanism is that he says out loud the social conventions that can only work as long as they stay covert. A great deal of social life, after all, consists of fictions in which everyone politely takes part. We act as though we sincerely regret a missed invitation while in truth we are relieved; as though a present really pleases us; as though we happened not to see someone; as though the host who says “you really needn’t bring anything” means that you needn’t bring anything. Almost always Larry has a point in strict logic, while in human terms he ruins the situation completely. And that is exactly what a joke does: it makes a social convention transparent. I find this extremely funny.

Fast forward to the present. In Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, we see the same Larry David, dressed as an eighteenth-century figure, admonishing personalities from American history, finger raised, about their social failings. Where the viewer once doubled up over the fearless breaker of taboos who was himself a small-minded little man, he is now treated to a moraliser in period costume. The rebel has become a preacher.

But what we are watching in Larry David does not stand on its own. It is spreading across our media landscape and across the way we deal with one another. What has happened to our cultural order, that humour no longer primarily disrupts but must justify itself morally?

How it came about

People have always laughed and always mocked. It belongs to the human condition: the capacity to notice how far short we fall, and to smile at it. Aristotle already counted wit among the virtues. The Middle Ages had carnival, in which the social order was turned upside down for a few days. And the king kept a jester, who was allowed to say everything nobody else was allowed to say.

Both survive, after a fashion. Every spring the American president sits at a dinner in Washington and is mocked from the lectern, after which everyone shakes hands and goes home. The frame is intact; it has merely acquired a seating plan. When Donald Trump stopped attending in 2017, the striking thing was not that he was thin-skinned. It was that the ritual had depended on his turning up.

However human humour was, it was bounded: to the appointed day, inside a frame, after which the order was restored intact. The fool was allowed everything because he was harmless. Laughter had a fence around it, and it was precisely that fence which made it possible. Beyond that order, parody or satire was often blasphemy, and it could cost you your head.

When the liberation of the individual became a collective phenomenon in the sixties, comedy went through a stormy development. How God left the village, the Dutch writer Geert Mak described it in a Frisian village called Jorwerd: nobody drove him out, the church simply emptied. The “I” that took his place could take its own thoughts and feelings more seriously. And with the “I” the other appeared, the “you”, to whom anything could be said, and that other could be an authority as well. Suddenly an individual could mock the order freely, which had been unthinkable before. In the young modern society of that time, satire and irony were the ultimate proof of intellectual maturity and of the ability to hold things at arm’s length. The Dutch stage satirist Wim Kan ridiculed the minister from the stage while the minister himself sat in the theatre and was laughing out loud.

But parody and satire are art forms that, in order to work, need something more than freedom alone: a recognisable authority, a shared picture of reality against which the individual can push. Chaplin needed Hitler in The Great Dictator. Spitting Image needed a cabinet, and a country willing to recognise its own everyday paltriness in the puppets. Satire mocks the prevailing order, or it does not exist.

And then the attention shifted. Where we had once looked forward to classic comedies like Frasier or Yes, Minister, we were soon sitting in front of the set with popcorn and cola watching Big Brother. The format, incidentally, was Dutch: Endemol, 16 September 1999, on a channel called Veronica. Within a year it was everywhere. Why parody anyone when the reality star does it better?

Comedy answered by borrowing the camera. The Office (2001) was shot as a documentary about an ordinary workplace: strip lighting, a manager who talks too long, people discussing essentially nothing. It was fictitious, ánd it might just as well have happened in reality. Parody had stopped exaggerating the world and begun to imitate it.

The more the individual matters in his own right rather than for the role he fills within a shared order, the more interesting the flat everyday world apparently becomes than any parody of it. Reality television cleared away the intellectual double meanings and replaced them with the exhibitionism of the uninhibited ego in front of the camera, and a pinch of voyeuristic superiority in the viewer in front of the set. Exhibitionism and voyeurism, thoroughly human qualities if not the most elegant, were given free rein.

The development reached its climax when reality finally overtook satire. With the arrival of figures whose daily conduct was more grotesque than any impersonation, the objective frame of reference evaporated. In 2017 the actor Alec Baldwin said of his impression of Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live:

“Playing Trump is not a lot of fun. He’s tense, he’s angry… We’re just repeating back what he says. Doing this is strange, but what is even more strange is that it is real.”

So we ended up in an age when the daily and factual appearance of one of the world’s highest authorities could no longer be told apart from the best conceivable parody of that same person. When the person no longer stands out against the office, when caricature and reality coincide, the distance disappears. And with the distance, the authority. What remains is an echo: remarkable, perhaps, but no longer funny.

When the order tipped

Are there then no elites, authorities or powerful people left to mock? Power is still perfectly easy to locate: it sits with whoever allots the airtime, awards the grants and decides the programming. What has disappeared is not the above. It is our relation to it.

The court kept a fool. Not out of tolerance, but because it was a sign of power and strength to let yourself be mocked. The fool had no formal power, but he did have a position, and the mandate for it came from above, from the very man he ridiculed. Such an arrangement presupposes an order with a top and a bottom, and two unequal parties who know each other within it.

That order has tipped. The pillars in which social life was once housed, church, party and union, each with its own schools and newspapers, stood upright. What took their place organised itself horizontally, in identity groups. Such associations no longer know an above and a below, only an alongside. One belongs to them not by birth or by place, but by opinion.

And that changes what criticism is. Where belonging rests on opinions, contradiction is experienced not as contradiction but as an assault on identity. Inside an identity group there is little room for putting anything in proportion. Whoever is not a member is therefore not a fool either. The mocker is not banned and his view is not refuted. He is cancelled.

Take the Dutch comedian Hans Teeuwen. Twenty years ago, he was the court fool par excellence: absurdist, unpredictable and coarse as hell, and celebrated for exactly that by the cultural elite. His register has not essentially changed since. What has changed is the category in which he is placed. For part of the established order, he is no longer a jester who goes too far, but a right-wing extremist who has failed to understand. The judgment has moved from the joke to the man, and with that the matter is closed. English-speaking readers will have their own instance: when Dave Chappelle’s The Closer went out in 2021, part of Netflix’s own staff walked out of the offices in protest, not against a broadcaster that had silenced him, but against one that had not.

So, parody lost its subject in two ways at once. The one can no longer be parodied because he stands out against nothing. The other cannot be parodied because he does not permit it, and he can afford that, because the airtime is his. And outside ourselves there is nothing left to put us in proportion either, because the “I” has become the absolute authority.

Clapter

Paralysed by the fear of giving offence, and because reality no longer lends itself to parody, the cultural elite has taken refuge in what American writers’ rooms have come to call clapter: a contraction of applause and laughter. It is a term of art from the trade itself, in circulation since the Saturday Night Live writers Tina Fey and Seth Meyers used it to describe what their own audience was doing. Asked which she would rather hear, applause or laughter, Fey answered: laughter, you can get applause by holding up a sign.

Clapter is the psychological escape route of an audience that can no longer bear to have anything put in proportion. When a comedian says something today, the room runs through this moral checklist:

1. Is this statement in line with the norms of my ingroup?
2. Does it confirm that we are on the “right” side of history, without wounding anyone inside the group?
3. If so: we clap and chuckle in agreement.

The difference from laughter is not one of degree but of kind. Applause can be decided on. Laughter happens to you. The assent comes before the applause, and that is why it feels safe: it is the “yes, provided” of someone who still wants to set his conditions. Laughter has thereby been transformed from a disruptive reflex into a calling card of one’s own moral excellence.

The voyeurism has changed character too. Whoever applauds in agreement confirms not only the speaker but himself. We no longer look down on the man making a fool of himself in front of the camera, but on the man who has not yet understood. The object changed; the pleasure stayed the same. Moral display is the condescension of the credentialed.

It is not that comedians have grown less funny. It is that the audience wants to know first whether laughter is permitted. The audience that does laugh still exists. It simply no longer sits in the halls that exist on subsidy.

There are two ways of losing laughter. The first is old, and occasionally still remarkably topical: a following that cannot laugh at its own leader is protecting the group. As long as there are tribes, this form exists.

The second is new. The cultural upper layer has regrouped into those same horizontal associations, in which shared opinions determine the identity of the group. Whoever derives his identity from those opinions can hardly hold them at arm’s length. This second form of the loss of humour is found among the people who decide what gets made.

Moralism and exhibitionism

Now it becomes visible what has happened to the exhibitionism of reality television. It has not disappeared. It has moved house. Where the uninhibited ego still exposed itself in the Big Brother shower around the turn of the century, it exposes itself today in its moral judgment. The same urge to be seen, only in a more respectable window. From the body to the conscience.

English has had a name for it since 2004, coined by Patrick West with a deliberate debt to Veblen: conspicuous compassion. Both phrases describe a display that is worth nothing unless it is seen.

That this move should be so compelling has a cause reaching further than television. The German writer Malte Nelles summed it up in a formulation you only need to hear once: God is not dead, God has moved, into the self. What man once entrusted to something outside himself, orientation, meaning and finally judgment, he has taken inside. But whoever has saddled himself with the final judgment on everything, and no longer has a confessional, has a problem. There is no absolution from above any more, so the confirmation has to come from the side. The judgment has to be shown, publicly and preferably permanently, because that is the only place where it can still prove itself sound. Moral display is the liturgy of a religion whose god has moved into the self.

Who gets in

So far this has been about the audience. What happens inside the institutions is more distressing: the broadcasters, the funding bodies, the commissioning editors, the production companies. An audience that can no longer laugh is a phenomenon. An institution that no longer dares to commission is a decision, and therefore a question of leadership.

Censorship is the wrong word for it, and a convenient one, because it presumes somebody doing the forbidding. What happens here is closer to what nineteenth-century clubs called blackballing: the members decide, with white balls and black, who is let in. Nothing is banned. You simply do not get in.

Censorship did once exist, and it looked quite different. In 1969 CBS took The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour off the air over its content and replaced it with Hee Haw. There was a network, a decision and a date, and it could therefore be fought. What happens now has none of the three.

Charlie Hebdo supplies the second form as well. In 2015, when PEN America gave the magazine its Freedom of Expression Courage Award, six novelists withdrew from the gala and more than two hundred writers signed a letter of protest. No state was involved. Writers objected to writers being honoured for satire. Freedom of expression was never in question. Membership was.

Three mechanisms keep the paralysis in place.

The first is the confusion of intention with quality. Managers and makers have talked themselves into believing that a work is good as soon as the social intention is sound. A sketch no longer has to surprise; as long as nobody feels wounded and the right normative markers have been set, the institution approves it. That is not an artistic standard. It is the flight reflex of the cowardly.

The second is the blind spot about one’s own position. Satire is supposed to mock upwards, and the moment the established order starts making satire in order to teach its own values, it inevitably turns into instruction and bullying from above. The charming thing, or the sad thing, is that this is not hypocrisy but a mistake of perception. The cultural order that holds the power still feels itself to be the protester at the bottom of the ladder, and kicks downwards in good faith, convinced that it is kicking up.

The third is the disappearance of the editorial correction: that natural check in which somebody dares to tell a maker that this is not a sketch but a sermon. That sentence is no longer spoken, and rarely out of cowardice. It is not spoken because whoever speaks it knows exactly what it costs to fall outside the group, in a world where belonging has to be proved over and over. It is the pattern we know from the reconstructions of editorial cultures that went off the rails: everybody knew, nobody said a word.

Meanwhile there is more laughing than ever. The specials are endless, the podcasts grow faster than the broadcasters, the halls sell out. And all of it happens where no commissioning meeting stands in between. Humour has not disappeared. It has emigrated, away from the institutions that once housed it, to places where nobody has to sign for virtue. That does not refute the diagnosis. It confirms it.

And it explains why a stand-up comedian like Ricky Gervais does perfectly well outside the established order. Even Louis C.K., who was cancelled by networks and distributors after it emerged that he had masturbated in front of female colleagues, which he then admitted himself, has since sold his specials successfully through his own website. And that shows that the audience decides for itself who may be laughed at.

So the laughing will go on, because laughing is an aspect of the human condition, and no cultural order gets a grip on that. That order is none the nobler for trying. Only pettier.