There was a wonderful science fiction story written many years ago by Murray Leinster called "First Contact" which concerned the first contact between an alien race and human beings. The contact occurred far off in space; our space ship contained diplomats and military men. Both races took great pains to conceal the location of their home worlds and made contact with a fair amount of anxiety and paranoia about the intentions of the other. The story ended with one of the characters, an enlisted man if my memory serves, expressing confidence that our two races would find a way to co-exist in peace. His reasoning? All the while the senior diplomats and military were parlaying, he had spent the time with a junior soldier of similar rank telling jokes to each other. The idea that the aliens had the same sense of humor as the earthlings was enough for him.
In a similar vein, one of the places that computers routinely fail the Turing Test is to fail to "get" humor. Try to joke with a computer program and you will find the "intelligence" you are involved with to be quite alien indeed.
Humor is one of our most effective and most sophisticated defenses. It can defuse the ability of anxiety, depression, anger, and a myriad of other uncomfortable emotions to control us. It is considered one of the most mature defenses. As might be apparent, humor does not resolve dysphoric affects but robs them of much of their power and intensity just as it allows an attenuated expression of the affect.
Ideologues typically are humorless. What humor does get expressed by them is usually bitter and angry and directed at their enemies. This is one reason ridicule is an effective weapon against such people. They take themselves and their ideologies extraordinarily seriously and cannot tolerate ridicule. One recent example occurred when the outtakes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi 's last videotape were placed on the web. His ineptness with a rifle inspired laughter rather than fear; his death was assured at that point.
In today's Huffington Post, Erica Jong, a writer who made her reputation writing humorous novels, shows the damage that ideology can do when it destroys one's sense of humor. She is angry that male reporters routinely comment on Hillary Clinton's appearance:
Misogyny, Momism and Militarism
So what is wrong with American men? Particularly male journalists. I think it was discovered long ago and labeled "Momism" by Philip Wylie in a virulently sexist book 1942 book called Generation of Vipers. The book went through many, many printings in the forties and fifties. It apparently struck many nerves. Momism is a kind of Oedipal obsession with the bad mother -- to counter a boy's attraction to his good mother.
Wylie's book is as livid as the Malleus Malificarum -- that textbook for witch hunters. No one could hate so much without having loved. And love is the problem, of course. You cannot fuck your mother so you must revile her.
... in uptight American Christianity, the only role for the mother is as puritanical disciplinarian who eschews sexuality in favor of punishment. Punishment evokes rebellion. And tender little boys grow up to be Momists. When a powerful woman comes along -- whether Hillary or Eleanor Roosevelt or Gloria Steinem, the reaction is kneejerk. The rage against her spills over into idiotic name-calling, which only reflects badly on the name-caller. And we are all the losers. We get mediocre male politicians with comb-overs and drinking problems rather than acknowledging that women have brains that might be put to use to save us. Goddess help the U S of A.
I will simply note Jong's pre-occupation with male politician's looks, which might be considered a contradiction to her argument, and focus on her angry lack of humor. First, lets admit that Jong has a grain of truth. When in the public eye, a woman's looks are more remarked upon than a man's looks. This may have something to do with the biological and cultural distinctions between men and women that the feminists have been busily denying for the last 40 years, but it is a fact of life. In reality, the war between the sexes has been going on for at least a few thousand years. Lysistrata, noted by Wikipedia to be " the first completely positive female leader portrayed in drama (who was a mortal and not a goddess)" remains a rather brilliant and humorous example of the power that women exercise through their special attributes that elicit male desire.
Humor almost always includes anxiety and aggression in its expression. Male anxiety about the power of women, which includes womb envy (metaphorical and real) is as real as female anxiety about the power of men, which includes penis envy (metaphorical and real.) Turning anxiety into anger and enhancing it with the force of unconscious and conscious aggression may make the venter feel temporarily empowered and less defective, but it does nothing to lessen the intensity of the wishes and fears that are hidden behind the anger. That is the job of humor. There are many comedians who have made an excellent living reporting from the front lines of the Battle of the Sexes. There is an entire genre of internet e-mail depicting just such humor. Laughing at such humor neither makes a man a sexist pig nor a woman a man hating feminist (though for some of the more unvarnished aggressive mots that some pass off as humor, one may wonder); what the best of such humor does is to change a potentially anxiety producing reality, that men and women so often have different interests, different ways of approaching the world, and can sometimes feel to each other like alien creatures, into a shared jest where we can all recognize part of ourselves.
Note that in Jong's piece there is no evidence of any recognition that while perhaps unfair, male journalist attention to looks is inevitable; worse, both men and women are typically curious about how a woman presents herself. I might add for Ms. Jong's edification, that how a man looks is also fair game for journalists. Mitt Romney may well have lost the primaries, in part, because he looked "too perfect" for many voters and his looks were commented upon with regularity. The salient point is that Erica Jong has lost her sense of humor and it shows in her tiresome and uninformative piece.
Questions about the use of humor are important for the current Presidential campaign. Noting how and when the candidates use humor is, and will continue to be, instructive. The best humor for a candidate is self deprecating humor, especially when done naturally, rather than as a stilted and rehearsed technique. Recall how Hillary's self-deprecating humor humanized her; unfortunately, she has returned to presenting herself as grim and humorless in recent months (or at least that is what the MSM has presented) and Jong could have profitably made that the point of her essay had she been less outraged. Ideologues tend to use humor as a directed weapon; in other words, they attack their enemies in ways which allow an audience that agrees with them to laugh at the objects of the attack. Thus far, this appears to be a specialty of Barack Obama, who presents himself as non-ideological, but whose dearth of humor suggests otherwise.
Murray Leinster had it right. We recognize our common humanity when we laugh at the same jokes. Everyone can see some of themselves in self-deprecating humor. Humor that divides is always a troubling sign.
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