Nineteenth Series of Humor

P. 135, Substitution, analogy, and example, generally speaking, are forms of humor. Humor requires a flow through a singularity and a subsequent displacement, such that in retrospect, we can understand the difference between the model and the simulacrum. Remember the quilting point we spoke of earlier? Humor is the flow through that point, and then an abrupt turn, such that we can measure the difference in trajectory, as we might comment on someone's sharp wit. Another example would be the films of Werner Herzog, how he will have a character (say Kinski) step out from behind the camera and then turn to face the camera. The move is very off-putting and jarring, as if Kinski's body is flowing through this sharp U-turn which is meant to disorient us but at the same time provide a new perspective of his character. I think of Herzog because I just watched his new film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and in it, he provides the same camera trick, except he does it with a camera attached to a small helicopter. It as if he has become Kinski, seeing the move as if the camera was the character.

You might feel that this is a too-broad generalization of humor, but I think Deleuze is getting at (perhaps unintentionally) that lived life really only has two valences, two moments, tragedy and farce (humor). There is the shooting off, the aufhebuhn, line of flight (tragic), and the moment of the turn, the stitch, the change in the sign of the first derivative of a line (humor, farce). I think this conversation extends back to Marx and Hegel, though Deleuze might deny it.

Humor "hurls us into the ground of bodies and the groundlessness of their mixtures." (135) Humor is fundamentally a mortifying moment. It humbles us, and reminds us of the smallness of our aspirations and acheivements, makes fun of the gods and masters that we hold dear. Socratic irony "tears the individual away from his or her immediate existence." (137) If the moment is truly magnificent (e.g. Monty Python), we enter the realm of humor as nonsense -- signification has been cut up and unthreaded to the point that all navigation markers have been lost. The sensation of pure sense is to be so caught up in the number of bowling pins thet juggler juggles that we reach a state of immanence with the marvel and time, future and past, contracts and extends without measure (Aion). This infinite moment, at the surface, is where the line rises up and then turns, finally stitching itself to another line or surface. Hence, as Deleuze says, where the space where the line turns -- this "void is the site of sense", "harmonizing" with its own nonsense, the two sides of the coin, etc. (137) The void is the "paradoxical element", the space between, the aleatory point, the space underneath the curve. (137)

Deleuze take a sideline here to speak of Zen and the "absurdity of significations". (136) He seems to return several times in his work to Eastern philosophy to show what I would call the "flattening" of thought, as if one was to take thought and push it into 2-dimensions, as one might take an event and stretch or spread it along an "ordinary line". E.G. A picture using perspective becomes Hokusai, etc.

"[Irony] is the demon who holds up to G-d and to his creatures the mirror wherein universal individuality dissolves." (140) (E.G. The mousetrap (play within a play) set for Claudius in Hamlet.)