Stupid Pratfalls and Serious Blunders
On knowing whether to laugh
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There it was, out of nowhere as always: the first icy slip-and-fall of the season, with yours truly on the ground in some shape I didn’t know I could get into, much less that quickly. Thankfully, this year’s official welcome into winter took place in my backyard, mostly out of view of neighborly eyes—but I didn’t wind up feeling less stupid for all that, even while also recognizing whoever might have caught the whole thing had just been treated to comedic gold. And so also as usual, I picked myself up, offered some thanks that nothing was bruised or sprained or broken, and had a chuckle at my own expense.
At some point, after any number of life’s embarrassing stumbles—up the stairs, down the stairs, on carpets that offer nothing at all that should trip me up—I finally developed at least some sense of humor. It could just be that’s what happens when you get far enough away from the terrible period of adolescence and young adulthood when it seems like the universe is lying in wait to take your reputation down a few notches. It could also be that somewhere in my thirties, I grew to appreciate Charlie Chaplin, and gave in to enjoying the easy hilarity of at least some physical comedy—including Wipeout and its Japanese predecessor, Takeshi’s Castle.1 The absolutely mindless game show features contestants trying their best to navigate an obstacle course that seems about as winnable as, say, the lottery. During the episodes I watched, that set never changed: contestants had to cross the same slippery, twisting surfaces, get past the same padded mechanical fists springing out of walls. And yet it didn’t get tiring; I spent more than a few evenings sitting with the neighbors, trying not to spew out our drinks as we surrendered to the idiot joy of watching bodies go flying and bending in ways they were never intended to.2 The commentary was dumb; the show’s use of water, especially given its set’s location in arid Southern California, was offensive; the whole thing could have shut down, and the world would not have gone into mourning. But to have turned up my nose at all that laughter, especially thanks to people who were obviously having the time of their lives getting beat up by cartoonish punching bags—well, that also would have been silly.
More than once, though, I thought I should get up and do something useful; that half hour could be devoted to volunteering or signing a petition or something. Or I could at least tune in to The Daily Show or Democracy Now!, keeping up on everything, learning where the world’s problems were, whom to blame, trying not to get depressed and overwhelmed while figuring out what I was supposed to do about it.
I first watched Modern Times when it was assigned in a seminar: a duty, we all thought, that we’d just have to sit through and observe for the important commentary it provided on industrial society, etc., etc.3 A silent film: what a drag. It took almost no time, though, for our whole group of self-important grad students to drop our sophisticated masks and wipe the tears of laughter from our eyes. By the time the eating machine scene came around, with its rogue corn cob, all our carefully managed dignity had crumbled: ancient physical comedy had gotten the best of us, and it felt amazing.
The film was funny, of course, because it was also smart, and it was making a point about how things were, or could be, shaping up in the age of the assembly line—and doing so without romanticizing anyone or dumbing things down. Show it today to workers at Amazon or FoxConn, and they might find it funny—but also a little too close to home.
It was around the time we were cracking ourselves up with silent film that I started reading Simone Weil, the twentieth-century French philosopher and religious thinker who died in her early thirties when, safe in London but ill with tuberculosis, wouldn’t eat more than the average French person’s rations during World War II. It was one of many serious gestures of solidarity she made over the course of what seemed to be a very thoughtful, very uncompromising, very serious life: refusing sugar because World War I soldiers couldn’t have any; ditching a teaching position to work in a factory; running off to join the anarchists in Spain’s Civil War—all choices and activities, given the state of her health, her apparent lack of coordination, and a background that had provided zero experience that might have been helpful in any of these situations, for which she was, to put it mildly, ill suited. Among other things, her military adventures ended when she tripped over a fire and wound up with her foot in a pot of hot oil. I wouldn’t be surprised if, once they’d cleaned everything up and taken care of her and probably lamented all the trouble she’d caused and the loss of a perfectly good and probably hard-to-come-by volume of oil, her compatriots sat back and had a good laugh at the total absurdity of it all: a frail schoolteacher bumbling about learning how to play soldier while people were getting killed. I would also be unsurprised, especially since she considered the embrace of suffering as a way for people to come together over their differences,4 if Weil never saw anything remotely funny about that or other incidents from which she had to walk away. As Sarah Pheasant described the philosopher, “She was, hilariously, dead-serious, and sarcasm was a major sin.”5
And yet, as Pheasant also observes, we can’t just snicker at her pratfalls and dismiss Weil or her thoughts or actions as ridiculous. Unqualified as she was for many of her undertakings, she did more than just preach a lot of ideals; she took the hard road and tried to live them out. Had she had more of a sense of humor, she may have had more success—but that of course, is pure speculation. “Ultimately uncomfortable in her skin,” says Pheasant, “she makes us all feel awkward. So maybe we have to laugh at Weil to relieve our own traumas, to make ourselves feel more at home in the world or to share the common experience of our embarrassing humanity. But there is something nervous in our joking at her expense. No matter how hard we try to laugh her off, she remains that big joke whose absurdity we cannot quite resolve.”6
I’ll allege that if we do laugh at Weil’s trying and clumsy failing, our amusement rings a bit hollow for the way it masks our own shame at not even trying, period—at not even wanting to try, or really caring. And as Pheasant and others have also observed,7 had Weil been a guy, we might not be so tickled about any of this. Immanuel Kant, for example, was never in the best of health, suffered from apparent hypochondria, and, if Heinrich Heine wasn’t exaggerating, was stuck in a routine so carefully managed that the neighbors could set their clocks by it.8 Workaholic Friedrich Nietzsche just kept on plowing through his headaches and keeping to his own regulated habits.9 Although both men seem to have had more social skills than Weil, neither their hang-ups nor their very serious commitment to their thoughts tend to serve as grist for fascinated jokes. At the same time, Pheasant is a little too quick, I think, to cry foul for Chaplin’s being celebrated for his on-screen falls while Weil is mocked for her real-life ones;10 after all, Chaplin’s cinema antics were planned and practiced and skillfully carried out—and were designed to induce laughter, even as that laughter relied on depictions of need or injustice.
The intentions, and the preparation, if not necessarily the physical comedy, are evident in The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight.11 Both comedy news updates are just that: comedy—but the jokes work because there’s something truly pathetic, sad, depressing—something that’s intended to make you take a more critical look at the world—at their center, and because the hosts or reporters often make themselves the butts of all this derision, including themselves in the collective dysfunctions and injustices they’re describing. And even when any of them do get serious, even embarrassingly earnest, that seriousness works because of the recognition of their own frailty—an understanding, say, of the real chances of one person or show, even a famous one, overcoming entrenched habits, cultures, and powers and making a significant difference in anyone’s life. They also manage to highlight the absurdity of what’s happening, including our own lamentable ability to allow it to continue, to be, in our inaction, guiltily OK with it.
On the other hand, incredible and yet humor-scarce journalists like Amy Goodman and Masha Gessen somehow leave you—no, I can only say “me”—feeling condemned and frivolous, blameworthy, for instance, for laughing at five seconds’ worth of cat videos while autocrats are doing their worst and conspiracy nuts are growing more fearless and organized.12 Feeling as if anything less than full-time activism makes you a selfish worm. And then within that discomfort—that maybe-legitimate sense that you’re no more nor less than part of the problem—is the question whether I really have any right to be saying any of this, whether my observations about Goodman and Gessen and Weil are another variety of women being asked to smile in all circumstances or be able to take a so-called joke, and/or whether I'm somehow refusing to accept the fact that a sense of humor may simply be a luxury that some jobs or tasks or situations cannot afford. These thinkers’ intention is/was not, after all, to make anyone laugh, or even to feel remotely good. And when your questions and your reporting could very well get you beaten or jailed or killed, being told to lighten up goes so far past disgusting that you don’t even know how to categorize the request.
Things get even messier—in this case literally—when you consider other very earnest actors like the anti-oil activists who not so long ago were tossing soup and potatoes on great artworks and adhering themselves to the walls next to their chosen paintings.13 When one glued his head to the painting itself, it seemed as if the line into comedy had been crossed, setting us into the realm of A Christmas Story’s kid who gets his tongue stuck to a cold flagpole,14 or The Big Bang’s Howard with his privates clamped in the hand of a glitchy robot;15 imagine all the awkwardness and goofy maneuverings that went into getting that real-world head off the painting, and the amazing haircut that could have resulted. The difference, of course, is that the fictional Howard and the movie kid are in trouble for letting their curiosity (or their libido) take over; the climate activists, on the other hand, are fighting for an actual adulthood and old age on something other than a burning planet. What’s there to laugh about, after all, when the water’s gone and the food won’t grow and it’s too hot to do anything, even just stand still?
Where, I suppose I’m going with this all, is laughter, or a sense of humor, merited or desperately needed or downright unacceptable? The question’s not new, of course, and there are all sorts of reasons we laugh. Where’s the balance, though, between giving the issue or situation its dignified due and recognizing that you as an individual are faulty, not all-powerful, and not always right? That unless you do allow for a little bit of absurdity, your efforts are going to backfire? I’m not at all certain about how to answer any of this, of if there is or even should be one answer. And until I really get myself in gear and do more than recycle and try to use public transportation and write ineffectual letters to my representatives, I should probably remain silent about the demeanor of anyone sticking their neck out for the oppressed, or risking their own safety to let us know what’s going on in the world. Plus, there’s the fact that much as I’ve grown able to laugh about something as insignificant as losing my footing on the ice, I’ve still got some room to grow; I really, really still hope no one’s watching me fall, whether they’re laughing or not.
I never got into The Three Stooges, or much early Jim Carey comedy, though; for the most part, they seemed to be trying too hard. As for Wipeout, its producers argued that it had nothing to do with this and other Japanese shows, but the program was sued by Tokyo Broadcasting System for copyright infringement. See Matthew Belloni, “ABC, Endemol Settle ‘Wipeout’ Copyright Lawsuit with Japanese Broadcaster,’ 24 December 2011, The Hollywood Reporter, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wipeout-copyright-lawsuit-abc-endemol-276301/.
As Sarah Pheasant reflected about Henri Bergson’s take on humor, “Humor is the incongruous encounter of witnessing what we know to be human act like something else.” Sarah Pheasant, “At the Front Line of the Punch Line: Or, Simone Weil goes to War,” Hypocrite Reader 28 (May 2013), https://hypocritereader.com/28/the-front-line.
Written and directed by Charlie Chaplin, distributed by United Artists, 1936.
See Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (New York: Harper & Row, 1952).
Pheasant.
Pheasant.
Christy Wampole describes the ways in which some of these thinkers have approached Weil. See her article “Strange and Intelligent,” Aeon 25 October 2018, https://aeon.co/essays/why-simone-weil-is-the-patron-saint-of-anomalous-persons.
See Mason Currey, “Daily Rituals—Immanuel Kant,” MeaningRing, 17 April 2015, https://meaningring.com/2015/04/17/daily-rituals-kant-by-mason-currey/.
See, for example, Josh Jones, “The Daily Habits of Highly Productive Philosophers: Nietzsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant,” Open Culture 3 October 2013, https://www.openculture.com/2013/10/the-daily-habits-of-highly-productive-philosophers.html.
“We could certainly ask why the male comedian or artist is applauded for faking his own death, for throwing himself headfirst into the fire; why we remember Chaplin’s bodily antics as astute social critique while Weil’s are derided for foolish physical ineptitude.” Pheasant.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is produced by HBO: https://www.hbo.com/last-week-tonight-with-john-oliver; The Daily Show is produced by Comedy Central: https://www.cc.com/shows/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah.
Weil’s niece Sylvie once spoke about the difficulty of feeling condemned by her aunt’s “moral superiority.” See “Sylvie Weil talks about what it was like growing up as Simone Weil’s niece,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71R9vOuQZHI. For more on Amy Goodman, see her bio at Democracy Now!: https://www.democracynow.org/about/staff; on Masha Gessen, see their bio at The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/masha-gessen.
Slate has a summary article about the activism. See Shirin Ali, “How Gluing Oneself to Something (and Ungluing) Actually Works," Slate 28 October 2022, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/10/how-to-glue-yourself-to-something-climate-protests.html.
Jean Shepherd, Leigh Brown, and Bob Clark, A Christmas Story, directed by Bob Clark, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1983, https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0085334/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1.
Chuck Lorre, Bill Prady, and Steven Molaro, “The Robotic Manipulation,” The Big Bang 4(1), directed by Mark Cendrowski, aired 23 September 2010, https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1632224/?ref_=m_tttr_tt.