interview by Oliver Kupper
Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič comes from the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis, which includes, most famously, Slavoj Žižek. Using the theoretical frameworks of Hegel, Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan, Zupančič and her contemporaries have produced fascinating insights into social, cultural, and political phenomena. She has written about sex, death, ethics, love, and comedy. Her book The Odd One In: On Comedy (2008) is an expansive and integral Lacanian examination of the subversive machinations of comedy and laughter’s short-circuiting powers, which draws elucidations from Aristophanes, to George Bush, to Deleuze, to Borat. For Zupančič, the object of comedy is the name for all that is funny, which begs the question: how the hell can we laugh in a time like this?
OLIVER KUPPER I heard you on a podcast talking about the origins of comedy—that it comes from ancient Dionysian rituals. Can you talk a little bit about this?
ALENKA ZUPANČIČ Well, Lacan used to say that the original fantasy is the fantasy of origins. We should always be careful when speculating about the “origins” of something, particularly about what this origin is supposed to mean or explain. That being said, yes, there seems to be an agreement among scholars, based on the Aristotelian account, that comedy started with Dionysian rituals called “phallic songs” (also referred to as “penis parades”). This doesn’t tell us so much about comedy as about the so-called “phallic reference” that is central to comedy. Before we jump up and dismiss comedy because of its “phallocentrism,” we better see exactly what this means.
Just think for a moment about the depicted scene: people marching in procession, carrying a phallus of huge proportions made of animal skins, singing obscene songs, full of ambiguous innuendo. Now, ask yourself this question: what is ambiguous innuendo doing in this setting if, at the same time, we have there no less than the phallus itself, in person, and fully blown? If one cares to think about it, it is indeed a bit strange. Usually, we have either the thing itself or the allusion to it. But here it seems that we have both at the same time and the same level. What does the fact that the two appear on the same level tell us? The first conclusion that imposes itself is that the phallus is just another allusion, innuendo. Yet we must be more precise: phallus is not just another allusion, it is the allusion par excellence, the mother of all allusions, so to say. It is the innuendo par excellence. More precisely, it is a signifier of allusion, or allusion as a signifier. This is precisely the Lacanian definition of the phallus. It is a “signifier without the signified,” an “empty signifier,” and as such, the “signifier of signification as such.” The play on signification, its instability, reversal, as well as its surprising material effects are indeed central to comedy.
KUPPER Through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis and your philosophical examinations of comedy, what is your interpretation of levity, humor, and laughter in these particularly dark, unfunny times?
ZUPANČIČ As you said, levity can mean many things, and it is impossible to answer this in a general way. So, I’ll try to say something about the specific “levity” of comedy as I understand it. The weightlessness of comedy is often associated with its being without substance. I’d rather say that its substance is very delicate. It’s a kind of soufflé, in contrast to something like pudding. It is a substance shot through with air, and yet, it still demonstrates a consistency, a structure. This demands both wit and skill, or technique, including timing. This is why bad comedy is like a fallen, collapsed soufflé. In this sense, the art of comedy is that of introducing levity into some solid structure, of drilling into it as many holes as possible, without letting this structure collapse. I’m not saying that comedy doesn’t have the power to bring structures down, yet this is more its possible after-effect. Comedy is usually associated with entertainment, and we should perhaps take this word at its etymology (from old French entretenir). That is to say not simply referring to something funny, but to something that holds (tenir) things together in their interval (entre), with the help of the space between them, across this space, rather than by gluing them together.
Concerning the zeitgeist of doom and our dark, unfunny times: This has never been a problem for comedy, on the contrary, comedy often thrives in dark times. The problem is not doom, but its affective solidification, and the morbid pleasure that this solidification seems to offer. Affective solidification of doom squeezes out all space for thought. Because thought operates in the holes of structures. Comedy can introduce the space for thought and the time to pursue it. Thinking, even the most serious thinking, implies a kind of levity. Otherwise, it gets buried under the weight of things before it even starts.
KUPPER In your lecture, The End Of Laughter, you explore comedy through the context of the Hollywood system and how different comedic directors address the ultimate question: is it an artist’s responsibility to respond to the times they are living in? Can you talk about this responsibility and comedy’s place in this reflection?
ZUPANČIČ Shakespeare is the author of the famous line that says art holds the mirror up to nature. The only way one can agree with this is to add that this mirror is a very peculiar one; not such that it reflects reality, but such that it also brings to light the hidden presuppositions of this reality, as well as things that this reality represses in order to appear consistent. The picture we see in this mirror is thus never the same as what we see when we look at reality. It is always somewhat “distorted.” Yet it is precisely this distortion that brings out some truth of reality. This is why to illustrate his thesis that “truth has the structure of fiction,” Jacques Lacan also comes up with the example from Shakespeare, the example in the context of which the famous line about art mirroring reality is pronounced: namely the mousetrap, or play within the play in Hamlet. Fiction can render a reality that a simple mirror misses, yet which is essential for the given reality. Truth needs fiction to register in reality. I suppose that in one way or another, artists always respond to the times they live in. This is part of the artistic sensibility. It’s kind of inevitable—perhaps especially inevitable in what we call “timeless” art. Timeless does not mean something that remains the same across different times, it rather suggests that there is something about this or that particular work of art that keeps changing with time and with different configurations, which rings new and different in different configurations—a reality which is not directly visible, and gets articulated in different configurations in different times…
The more specific question today, to which I guess you refer, is the question of the so-called engaged art: Should artists engage directly in social and political struggles? Again, the answer is not simple, because sometimes engaged art does little else than consolidate the ruling ideology, whereas art that pretends to be there just for people’s pleasure, and stays away from direct engagement, sometimes subverts the hegemonic ideology, since it doesn’t fit or respond to any ideological demand, including that of being appropriately “critical.” The two examples that I discuss in the lecture you refer to are examples of this. I discuss the “political” difference between Preston Sturges and Frank Capra. They both made movies in the times of the Great Depression and the related social hardship, and they both reflected on the position of the film as popular art in relation to that hardship. I cannot reproduce my analysis here. Let’s just say that when it comes to social issues and hardship, Capra leans toward sentimentality, whereas Sturges manages to preserve the levity, and with it the true political edge of his comedy.
My point is not that Sturges is better because he opts for art that is not directly engaged, whereas Capra advocates engagement. My point is that in the end, Sturges’s films—at least some—are much more political and radical. Capra’s slogan is “poor is good.” Poor people are rough at the edges, but they have a golden heart, and we should like, accept, and reward them for that. Sturges offers another axiom: “Poor is bad.” There is very little good that comes from poverty, so it makes no sense to romanticize the poor on account of their inner richness. This is pure ideology. Poverty is like a plague. It corrupts you, rather than makes you noble. It should be eradicated, not romanticized. I thus argue that Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941) is politically much more interesting and subversive than, say, Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936).
KUPPER You wrote a book called The Odd One In: On Comedy—who is the odd one, and more importantly, why should we let the odd one in?
ZUPANČIČ Generally, we construct our world and make it viable by excluding and repressing some things from it. If something thus excluded (or perhaps repressed) reenters our world, we usually experience anxiety and disorientation, sometimes we even feel that our world is falling apart. Comedy usually finds a way of bringing the odd one in so that we don’t experience this as immediately threatening, but rather as “funny.” By bringing the odd one in, comedy allows us some time and space to entertain the idea or possibility of this foreign element being part of our world, without our world collapsing, or without us reaching full blown anxiety. It brings it in as a possible source of pleasure even. This does not mean, however, that we necessarily end up accepting everything we are offered to entertain in this way—on the contrary, we may well end up rejecting it again, and sometimes for very good reasons. Letting the odd one in is in this sense an interesting exercise, which shatters our horizons in a strangely pleasurable way, but does not simply follow the normative or moral imperative of “letting the odd one in.” To repeat: despite—hopefully—being entertaining, comedy is not just a pastime, but rather something like a time off for thought, for entertaining odd ideas, configurations, and surprising connections.
KUPPER The book was published in 2008—how have you seen comedy, humor, and the comedic evolve, especially in a post-pandemic world?
ZUPANČIČ Well, this is a huge question, carrying in itself a variety of different questions. Ranging from the issues of political correctness and related self-censorship to willful transgressions of all decency as—supposedly—a matter of courage and “balls.” The two often go in pairs, inciting one another. But comedy is not the opposite of censorship. It is something that uses censorship to create new and different ways of saying, and imagining something. And comedy is certainly not simply about publicly “saying what is on your mind,” this is rather vulgar and lacks imagination, which usually relies for its success on brute—physical or economic—power.
But new things happen and break down the smooth or linear logic, which keeps the two sides of this movement on a kind of autopilot mode and produces completely automatic, predictable reactions. Take the most recent example: the war in Gaza. Many activists of the so-called cancel culture have been themselves “canceled” for expressing their views on the conflict. If Netanyahu continues with his devastating politics and uses the word “antisemitism” to silence any critical take on it, the word will soon lose all its meaning. And yet it shouldn’t! Comedy is also not about “relativizing” everything, but rather about pinning down points and meanings that escape this relativization…
I also noticed this recently: more and more, top politicians act as bad comedians, and top comedians act as good politicians—they make excellent, incisive political points and suggestions. What comedians such as Jon Stewart or Bassem Youssef have done recently is not simply what we call political comedy, but along with their comedy, they say things that make all political sense and which on the other hand are in terrible shortage among official politicians.
KUPPER Slavoj Žižek wrote the foreword, in which he talks about short circuits—what is a short circuit in the context of comedy?
ZUPANČIČ It is similar to how many jokes work: they produce and work with surprising, unexpected, odd connections, yet such that nevertheless make sense, even a lot of sense. A short circuit of this kind not only makes you see the connections that are there, but not visible, it also changes the whole landscape, or perspective, and opens new lines of interrogation. This is the idea, at least. Differently from jokes, however, comedy has a temporality in which these short circuits are not its endpoints, retrospectively changing our perspective on the narrative of the joke, but are rather its inaugurating points. A comic sequence, say, often begins with some kind of unexpected short-circuit, or perhaps we should say with an unexpected occurrence, which is then used to create a time and space for its resonation with other elements of a situation, producing other short-circuits along the way. We can also call this comic suspense.
KUPPER You talk about the collective power of comedy. Can you elucidate a little more on this?
ZUPANČIČ Comedy can be collective-forming, all the more so when it involves a live audience. Comedy not only creates, but also presupposes something like a collective, in the sense of a certain common cultural background, web of references, proximity of experience, and so on. We could perhaps say that comedy usually works and operates between the two collectives: the one that it presupposes and the eventual new or slightly different one that it creates. There are comedy shows that clearly lack the second, and mostly work by consolidating, reaffirming, and boosting—for better or worse—the pre-existing “collective.” But even this is usually done with an eye on some minimal difference or oddity that we are asked to entertain during the comedic sequence, and which can make a difference, even if it is dismissed at the end. But some shows are more ambitious in this respect and also take bigger risks. They risk going more insistently against the grain of some collective presuppositions of the audience, attempting to form a collective around something slightly different, or simply other additional ideas from those that people have arrived with. They can use the familiar to make us think collectively of something else, and less familiar. If they are successful, this collective thinking doesn’t come as a strain, but as an enjoyable exercise.
KUPPER I want to bring comedy into the fold of the new culture and class wars we are currently living through, because comedy seems to be seriously provocative on both sides of the battle—with calls of blacklisting, censorship, and then, of course, you have “cancel culture.” How does Freud’s theory of the pleasure principle enter the fray? What would Freud say about cancel culture?
ZUPANČIČ What Freud would say about cancel culture? I suppose he would discuss it under the general heading of what he called Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, usually translated as “civilization and its discontents.” According to Freud, and from the very outset, culture—in the broadest sense of the term—is double-edged. It has its intrinsic impasses, difficulties, and ways of producing its own libidinal substance, enjoyment, and “dirt.” This libidinal thrust is an inherent dimension of culture and not some intrusion into it from the “raw” outside…. Culture, or civilization, is not simply a remedy for aggression and conflicts, nor simply the evil without which we would live in some kind of natural harmony. It is a remedy that itself produces new problems that it needs to deal with. While inescapable, culture is not without inherent contradictions and antagonisms.
This constitutive contradiction of culture is precisely what both sides of the so-called culture war ignore. A bit simplified, we could put it like this: For the partisans of censorship, blacklisting, and cancel culture, culture is essentially good, and it should be used as a weapon against lower instincts (hatred, enjoyment, racial, and other “naturalistic” prejudices). In other words, the idea is that we need more culture (more rules and stronger regulation), which sometimes becomes a caricature of bureaucratic thinking that is easy to mock and ridicule. According to the other side, culture is essentially bad, it restrains our “freedom” and potential; it is a prohibitory network of rules formulated by the “elites” that is designed to keep those elites in power. It is not only that both these perspectives are wrong, it is also that because of their wrongness they are perfect for feeding each other with more arguments for their problematic positions. And I would say that they are both symptoms of the absence of any real social politics, which consists precisely of efficiently negotiating cultural and social contradictions and differences for the general benefit. You also mentioned class war, which is certainly at the center of all this, but in an obfuscated, barely recognizable form. Also, paradoxically, at this point, it gets mobilized more by the right than by the left.
KUPPER Can you talk about the relationship between love and comedy, the pas de deux?
ZUPANČIČ Alain Badiou once remarked that art (and he was talking particularly about literature, including theater) seems to have no means of talking about love in its duration. It either focuses on the event of the encounter as an ecstatic experience that cannot be properly integrated into reality (and thus sooner or later tragically fails or disintegrates), or else it focuses on all the obstacles that need to be overcome for love to finally be possible and able to flourish so that we end up with some version of “and they lived happily ever after,” without seeing any of this happy love life. When Badiou first introduced this idea, my immediate reaction was: how about the art of comedy? Is there not—besides or beyond the romance often constituting the narrative line, the “content” of comedies—a singular temporal and spatial dynamic that relates love and comedy in their very form? “Love is a comic feeling,” wrote Jacques Lacan in his seminar Le Transfert. I believe this should not be taken as a casual remark, but rather as an invitation to a serious consideration of the particular temporality and topology—a “scene,” indeed, a pas de deux—at work in both love and comedy.
The question here is not simply the question of longer or shorter duration or something like everlasting love and its impossibility. We can think of love as a sequence, even a relatively short sequence, and explore what happens during that sequence. Yet it still seems that there is little if any art interested in deploying this sequence for itself. But I think comedy does this, not necessarily or always in relation to love, although the latter is rarely far away when we talk about comedy. This is why I argue that in many aspects, which I cannot really develop here, comedy is structured like a love sequence, and vice versa. They have a structurally similar logic of temporality and causation, as well as a similar way of dealing with the impossible as something that happens.
Also, I believe we should think about the happy endings in comedies a bit differently than we usually do. What if happy ending narratives were not seen as simply leading up to, say, a love that finally works (in the end or after the end), but rather as celebrating the happiness or the workings of love that have already taken place during the narrated sequence? In this sense, “the happy ending” would not be a promise of a brighter future, but rather a punctuation mark that returns and refers us back to what we have seen or read. It is like a declaration that we have indeed been witnessing a love sequence, love in (some) duration, obstacles, and misunderstandings notwithstanding. I think that comedy, or what I call a comic sequence, involves a similar kind of temporality that gets created and extended through obstacles and mishaps. Not in the sense in which obstacles and prohibitions incite and fuel the desire for the “impossible,” but in the sense of the obstacles as an integral part of what happens.
KUPPER Why are we so obsessed with the end of things? In your lecture, The Fantasy of The End, the end is a distinct fantasy of capitalist society. How can we cure ourselves of this constant loop of doom?
ZUPANČIČ I was interested in the fantasies of the end that proliferate in our social climate. A few years ago, I published a book in Slovenia called The End, which interrogates the ways we think about the end, fantasize about it, and even need to imagine the end of the world to go on as before. This last aspect is something that I discuss further and more specifically in a small book called Disavowal which will come out with Polity Books soon. In any case, I would say: Don’t expect too much from the end of the world. Don’t expect some kind of cathartic, redemptive apocalyptic moment that will liberate us from all ills, dead ends, and problems we’ve accumulated so far. And don’t expect it to be something momentary, after which we could resume again, or not. As I put it in another article on that topic: “the apocalypse is disappointing.” Rather, picture the end of the world as a kind of limbo, an indefinite prolongation, and aggravation of problems and suffering, without any possibility of a good collective response. We are already there, aren’t we? And most of us obviously don’t like it.
KUPPER What can comedy, laughter, or levity tell us about our own humanity and our future?
ZUPANČIČ Nothing. Not because it is impossible to say what the future will be like, but because it is impossible to say what the present is. Our present is breaking up, there are huge tectonic shifts taking place, and comedy struggles with “understanding” the present and its changing coordinates like most of us do. More often than not, we still ask questions that come from a horizon that is no longer here. We still talk about the future as if we had any. Big mistake. I’m not talking about the end of the world, I’m not saying that time will stop. There will be “future time” for sure, but thinking about it in terms of what we used to call the future is pointless. Think instead about the present, and of the past battles. It’s a bit like in the movie Back To The Future: we have to change something in our past, and present, if we are to have a future, or even the present. In the movie, the main character, who travels to the past, starts disappearing from the photo of the “present” that he has in his pocket. His task is not simply to find a way back to the future, that is to his “present,” without the technology he used to travel to the past, he also has to make sure that there is any future to return to. This is how we should think. And of course, Back to the Future is a comedy.