Comedy, committees and Marx
Is laughter compatible with the left?
Comedy springs from the mockery of the established thing. Nothing could be more worthy of ribbing than that whose rigorous organisation, the acceptance of which is seen as sacrosanct, permeates the whole of society and structures its mores. The danger of comedy for dictators lies in its bathetic quality – it undercuts the seriousness of the dictator and makes him seem a fool, and his regime seems foolish. Nothing cuts into the regime’s utopian raison d’être, nothing denies the ‘daily plebiscite’ (as Ernest Renan put it) of a regime’s demanded loyalty, than undercutting its fundamental seriousness. What could be more fatal for the Divine Right of Kings than James Gillray’s ‘A Voluptuary Under the Horrors of Digestion’: a king (George IV) enormously overweight, brilliantly prone to the excesses of human nature? What could be less divine?
Given the fact that in Western democracies, political power is impermanent and moves between ends of the political spectrum, one could be forgiven for assuming that comedy simply responds to the establishment in question, and that it has no fundamental features in its political context. Yet in the modern age, this could not be further from the case. What comedy takes aim at, over and above everything else, is the politicising, revolutionary logic that for the last two hundred years has been the characteristic feature of the political left-wing. Notwithstanding his own Jewishness, comedy became Marx’s greatest enemy. Comedy is the enemy of the deterministic driving towards utopianism that the revolution of the proletariat entailed, that gloriously self-justifying overturning of the oppressive order and restitution of an egalitarian Eden.
To understand the fundamental opposition of comedy to this leftist mythology, the latter cannot be understood purely as a political phenomenon – rather, its institutional form is just as, if not more important. For in the institutional setting, the revolution's undisputable logic becomes real, physical. In the brutalist precincts of the post-war polytechnic, the revolution is rationalised, intellectually and architecturally. It is in the university, rather than in the parliamentary chamber, that the earnestness of the revolutionaries became ‘physically’ institutionalised. The centralising and ‘governmentalising’ direction of Western politics since the mid-nineteenth century has certainly created an establishment against which comedy has sought to react and mock. Yet the democratic basis of Western politics means that the Marxist revolution has not been able to play out, with the changeable, chimerical nature of parliamentarism forming a constant antithesis to the permanence required of a revolution, of a utopia. In the debating chamber, democracy in its truest form, discursively unpredictable and occasionally gloriously irreverent, continues, if only just. It is in universities, comprised of councils and committees and sub-committees, of chancellors and vice-chancellors, of bureaucrats, that Marxist earnestness could have taken hold with far greater strength and tenaciousness.
This is the great tragedy of universities and their great contradiction. For these places envisaged as retreats of discussion, depoliticised havens of probing, challenging, mocking and stimulating, in which the serious overall pursuit of learning could happen in a setting characterised by freedom and exploration, became institutionalised. This transformation was first evident in the growth of nationalist schools of historiography in the nationalist nineteenth century, most prominently in the Prussian school. It was in part this tendency towards institutionalisation that led Nietzsche to reject mass education. In the late twentieth century, institutionalisation was reinforced by universities’ adoption of market capitalist logic and even greater expansions in size and number. The irony of the latter is clear: while universities were adopting the competitive logic of neo-liberalism and capitalism, which stemmed from the inimitable sense of freedom of the Enlightenment, their ideological capture made them impervious to the intellectual lessons that such liberalism entails. Crucially, in the course of universities’ modern development, they had come to inculcate the institutional rigidity so characteristic of the bureaucracies of the nation-state and late-stage capitalism. It was this transformation that must be understood as the necessary corollary to universities’ capture by the moral seriousness of Marxism, of revolution, of progress, of centralisation. The sprawling, be-togaed Athenians of Raphael’s eponymous School could never have fit into the garish plywood auditorium of Oxford Brookes.
Comedy had no place at these universities. This conclusion was only reaffirmed by the inexorable rise of Wokeness in the summer of 2020, that time of grievance outpourings and guilt-trips, but more importantly, centralised diktats of departmental reorganisation and reckoning. Universities, which had long fought for their independence from political authorities, over the course of one hundred and fifty years, progressively internalised the centralising and rationalising logic of that equally transforming state. The place of revolution became the place of committees. Nothing epitomised this transformation more than the great contradiction at the heart of the revolutionary summer of ’68 – that of the meth-addled Woodstock and the committee-forming Berkeley. While purporting to break free from the established social mores of the evil West, those same revolutionary hippies were adopting its fundamental political logic. They were imitating Foucault’s governmentality, except not in the Hohenzollern Palace but in the psychedelia of so-called counter-culture. Insofar as comedy is antithetical to organisation and centralisation – that which was so central to ‘68’s student revolts – comedy had become decoupled from leftist political activism.
Crucially, the organising impetus behind student revolutionary movements – and the concomitant embedding by university committees of that same leftist fervour – produced a specific attitude that was and is antithetical to comedy in all its forms. That is the Marxist belief in Utopianism, that of the revolution that must be brought about. This is not the Schillerian utopianism of the romantic imagination, which roots it in moments of personal transcendence and overcoming unbound by existing morality or structures, but necessarily the Marxist utopianism that can be catalysed and traced scientifically, whose laws (the revolution of each class against their superiors) can be understood and explained. Thus, Marxist Utopianism is actually anti-utopian – its utopia is deeply structural, not transcendent but integral – capitalism fails by its own logic. This utopianism and the earnestness of the scientific revolutionary central to it, thus becomes intrinsically antithetical to comedy.
It was in the deeply structured, committee-based atmosphere of the universities that this progressive rationalisation could be understood and implemented most potently, effectively excluding comedy. There was no place for comedy in the revolution of the proletariat. This is, of course, what Ludvik learns to his peril in Milan Kundera’s The Joke (1968), finding himself alienated from the university system of communist Czechoslovakia for a seemingly innocuous joke. For the universities – whose youthful membership and committee-based nature were perfectly suited to inculcate the seriousness of revolution – this was, however, far from innocuous. That a joke could destabilise the ineffable logic of the revolution – that the joke could disrupt the urgent minutes of the pre-revolutionary committee meeting – made comedy anathema to campus life.
The very basis of the comedy of the post-war campus novel comes from the contradiction between the revolutionary seriousness and the joke. In David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), the gloriously gormless Philip Swallow, through sexual curiosity and gawping after Californian flashiness, comes accidentally to be a major figure in the Euphorian campus protests of 1968. In Nice Work (1988) by the same author, the merciless Marxist-feminist logic of Professor Robyn Penrose is ridiculed in the face of the very factories whose industrial development she has sought to diagnose – in the literary sense, of course. ‘Oh, Flora, where’s your radical passion? What’s life without confrontation?’ demands the radical professor Howard Kirk of his mistress in Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975), requiring such infidelities to maintain the bourgeois pretence of marriage with his wife, Barbara. Both the ideological and institutional progressiveness of campus culture, in all their self-gratifying and committee-forming glory, interact with the real world – whether sexually or industrially – and emerge ridiculed. There could be nothing more in keeping with the anarchic, anti-structural (not post-structural) spirit of comedy than watching the Marxist utopian rationalisations and earnest ideas of these academics be brought down to the level of the vulgar and the real. Ironically, the Brueghels and other painters of Dutch seventeenth century realism, who would so prod these academics’ notions of emerging proletarian consciousness in the cultural Early Modern World, depict that vulgarity and reality that falls far from the tree of Marxist earnestness.
The rebellion of the unserious, in Marxist terms, is deeply democratic – the eponymous characters of Brueghel’s The Peasant Dance (1568) could not be further from the Habsburg seat of power, in their poverty but more importantly in their drunkenness, in their ridiculousness, in their indignities. Yet it is this very spirit that is so anathema to the prevailing spirit of seriousness of the universities. This drunkenness strikes at the very heart of the committee-forming logic – its volatility contrary to the planned and televised revolution, its hangover contrary to the promptitude of the early morning meeting. If comedy is antithetical to the structuring and institutionalising of political logic, it is at one with the anarchy of the Brueghel. It is at one with the very contradictions that the fundamental humanness of the Marxist sociology professor – his shameless sexuality – lay bare. It is at one with the glorious indulgence, dissolution and chaos of the apogee of Zola’s diagnosis of Paris working class life, L’Assommoir (1877), in which the impoverished neighbours feast on the washerwoman Gervaise’s short-lived and improvidently spent munificence.
Comedy fundamentally takes aim at deterministic logic, wherever it rears its complacent and hubristic head. It is in universities — shielded from the exigencies of politics yet organised with the bureaucratic rigorousness of the state, that this determinism sprang from Marx’s attempt to scientise the end of the loathsome capitalist ideology — could be institutionalised so rigidly. Universities thus became impervious, insofar as they embodied the seriousness of the incoming revolution, to the anarchic potential of comedy – that is, within their walls, within their committees, within their hierarchies. Comedy is thus central to the great angst of the leftist determinists who so dominate the academic setting. For if the realisation of the egalitarianism latent in Brueghel’s aesthetic revolt against his deeply oppressive society is the goal, does that mean true equality, or rather the deeply unstructured obliviousness and chaos of his peasants? Does it mean the vanguard revolutionary committees and their apparatchik students, or the ultimate levellers that are human weaknesses, drunkenness, sexuality – and laughter? Does it mean the seriousness of the ideological rectitude, or the anarchy of the unserious – of comedy?
This article was written by Jake Westmorland, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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