What are you laughing at? Humor and tricky topics
Readings/Films:
— Rabelais : Pantagruel (1532)
— Voltaire : Candide (1759)
— Mérimée : Tamango (1829)
— Milan Kundera : The Joke (1967)
— Muriel Barbery : The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2006)
— Matthieu Kassovitz : La Haine (1994)
— Roberto Benigni: Life Is Beautiful (1997)
— Lionel Steketee : Case Départ (2011)
— Stand-up shows by Louie CK and Dave Chappelle
A course reader will include essays by Baudelaire, Freud, Bergson, Genette, Ménil and more.
Course Description:
In the millennia-long search for the elusive causes of laughter, scholars have succeeded in agreeing on one thing: There is nothing funny about the study of laughter. As the editor of le Traité sur les causes physiques et morales du rire — an eighteenth-century survey co-authored by Montesquieu — pointed out, manuals on the causes of ire or fever would not be expected to make the reader either angry or feverish; much in the same way, a treatise on humor should not (necessarily) elicit laughter. In this course, we will explore various theories of humor — from the baudelairian construct of laughter as evil to the freudian theory of relief — that will help us decipher and discuss ludic processes in literary texts, films, memes, and stand-up acts. We will focus particularly on humoristic expression that occurs in contexts considered too serious for lightheartedness, such as death, race, and disenfranchisement. Together, we will wonder whether everything can be a laughing matter, if irony is even funny, and what it means anyway. Should laughter occur throughout the semester, its causes will be dutifully analyzed and become the object of full-length papers.
This class will introduce students to approaching textual material critically, and will stress the idea of writing as a process through a variety of assignments and revisions geared to guide the development and clear expression of coherent argumentation.
Additional Information:
French R1A satisfies the first half of the Reading and Composition Requirement. Classes are conducted in ENGLISH.