The power of not being understood: The political dialectics of humor

Abstract

According to Freud, Pirandello, Bergson and others, the notion of humour can be separated from another genres and modalities of the laughable. Not everyone, said Freud, is capable of humorous attitude. In our own previous work, we establish a distinction between humour and the comic from the point of view of the political implications of one and the other. While the comic founds the universe of representations that we use to build the reality; the humoristic, on the other hand, dismantles it. !e comic speaks always in the name of certain normativity, certain common sense that it contributes to create. Humor, on the other hand, works on the basis that no sense is common, that there is not such thing as normativity. However, this distinction would be pointless if we do not admit the probable dialectic between them. A text produced as humoristic can be read as comic and vice versa. Humourist is someone from whom we don’t really know what he really wants and his real talent consists in elude our intention to serious understand what he is doing or saying. In this paper, we will explore the consequences of this perspective using contemporary memes and cartoons about the pandemic, the politics and the politicians. !is differentiation, as we try to probe, can be very useful in times of fake news and flat-earthers were the politicians and the real power use irony, cynicism and jokes to mock about the minorities and its claims.