Missing out / fields of difference

Adam Phillips & Paul Holdengräber discuss 'Missing Out'

On jokes:

Paul Holdengräber: Jokes are problematic on so many levels because they demand a response. They’re not unlike gifts, which demand a response as well. But a joke also excludes… A joke is also there to humiliate.

Adam Phillips: Jokes are really a test of sociability, because if I tell a joke… If I say to you, ‘I’m going to tell you a great joke’, obviously I can’t tell you a great joke. I can tell you a great joke and you will tell me whether it’s a great joke with your response.

If I were to tell a joke now, it could be excruciatingly embarrassing or a roar in success. But it would be like some love test to the audiance: ‘am I, are we all together in this? Or am I an isolate?’ So it’s a real test of sociability and a real test of one’s relation to the group. The other bit which I think is very interesting (which I think Freud says)  is that , ‘we never really know what about a joke amuses us’. And in that sense, jokes are like some tacit communications in the sense of, if we get it we laugh. But what we don’t get is what getting it involves. We don’t actually know what we’ve got. All we know is that we’ve been amused. And Freud makes a lot of this because there is a lot in it. It’s a very strange form of… You never know, with a joke, whether it’s creating a collusion or a collaboration. Whether you’ve got a sort of gang of accomplices who all share a sense of humour, whether it’s a cult, so to speak, or whether it’s a group of differently minded people. Whether you’re coercing a sort of group by shared sense of humour. And Freud’s obviously very on to this, because he’s wondering what kind of intimacy jokes create… And do they, in a sense, gloss over differences between people or are they a sort of magical act between people? 

People will say, ‘we share a sense of humour’, then…

All those things, Freud is suspicious of. Not in a cynical way, but in a genuinely questioning way. Wondering what we’re doing with this stuff.

[…]

Adam Phillips: Any culture that puts so much value on knowing, must be very frightened of not knowing… And it’s very clear that there are limits to knowing.

About Paul Holdengräber

"The way we miss our lives is life" - Randall Jarrell