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

The conviction of Count Dankula sets a dangerous precedent for freedom of speech

"There were an abundance of people who hated this “alternative” comedy as much as I hated Manning but that’s the point – comedy is subjective. You can’t say something isn’t a joke just because you don’t find it funny [...] The terrifying thing about this conviction is that the judge sided with the prosecution who said “context and intent are irrelevant” in a joke? In a bloody joke? Context is everything in a flipping joke!"

Here

Anger is an energy

"This is why I must quit comedy. Because the only way I can tell my truth and put tension in the room, is with anger. And I am angry, and I believe I've got the right to be angry. But what I don't have a right to do is to spread anger. Because anger, much like laughter, can connect a room full of strangers, like nothing else. But anger, even if it's connected to laughter, will not relieve tension, because anger is a tension. It is a toxic, infectious tension. And it knows no other purpose than to spread blind hatred, and I want no part of it because I take my freedom of speech as a responsibility. And just because I can position myself as a victim does not make my anger constructive. It never is constructive. Laughter is not how medicine… Stories hold our cure. Laughter is just the honey that sweetens the bitterness."
Hannah Gadsby, Nanette

On cunts

Q: What's the difference between a pussy and a cunt?
A: A pussy is a sweet, juicy, succulent, warm, fun and useful thing. The cunt is the thing that owns it.
[jokes4us.com, "Vagina Jokes"]

"When a woman faces a workplace in which her male peers want to show her she is unwelcome, similar words or images targeting or insulting the vagina will often surface [...]
Of course, cultural and psychological motivations play a part in this form of harassment. But the role of manipulating female stress in targeting the vagina should not be ignored. This behavior — ridiculing the vagina — makes perfect instinctive sense. These acts are often impersonal and tactical — strategies for directing a kind of pressure at women that is not consciously understood but may be widely intuited, and even survive in folk memory, as eliciting a wider neuropsychological "bad stress" response that actually debilitates women."
Naomi Wolf, Vagina

At the drug convention...

"The sight of a 344-pound police chief from Waco, Texas, necking openly with his 290-pound wife (or whatever woman he had with him) when the lights were turned off for a Dope Film was just barely tolerable on mescaline – which is mainly a sensual/surface drug that exaggerates reality, instead of altering it – but with a head full of acid, the sight of two fantastically obese human beings far gone in a public grope while a thousand cops all around them watched a movie about the "dangers of marijuana" would not be emotionally acceptable. The brain would reject it: The medulla would attempt to close itself off from the signals it was getting from the frontal lobes... and the middle-brain, meanwhile, would be trying desperately to put a different interpretation on the scene, before passing it back to the medulla and the risk of physical action."
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

O que a pornografia está a fazer aos cérebros do pessoal

Couples in their late teens tell me no one they know can have sex without porn playing on a screen. A guidance counsellor at a private school asks where he can find help for his students - many of whom are so addicted to online porn that the obsession is affecting their schoolwork and social development.
Aqui.

livra!

Quem fala assim não é gago. Eu voto nele, já! Onde está a versão portuguesa deste gajo?

Tem legendas em português (no Youtube).
Aqui.

"We no longer have the luxury of tradition. But before we change the world, we need to change the way we think."

eheh

ou: "Não vás ao médico!"

da assertividade e da prepotência / remando contra marés

Cuidado! Ele há loucos perigosos...  Que levam à loucura!