Humor and Spontaneity

One aspect that stuck with me from the reading today was Gurba’s discussion of spontaneity in relation to humor. Gurba gives an example in horror movies, writing, “Film theorist Carol Clover coined the term final girl to refer to the last female character left to confront a killer in horror movies. She, too, exists according to script, according to formula, and she suffers a static status. Humor, however, disrupts stasis. Humor is a form of action. It requires spontaneity, and that’s what’s missing from the pious scripts about sexual assault that bother me”. She goes on to describe how Dr. Jack Saul believes that a trauma patient has recovered when they exercise the ability to be spontaneous.

            The first thing I want to point out is how this goes all the way back to our discussions regarding the humor theorists. Plato wrote that the most common kind of joke is one in which we expect one thing while another is said. It is this “disappointed expectation” which makes us laugh, with the joke being heightened if something spontaneous is added. Spontaneity allows us to act and break free from the script, which is how we’re able to talk about dark topics with such ease. We saw this in the second half of Perry’s book when Madea talked on depression, and we are seeing it again now with Gurba in her article on sexual assault.

            I’ve seen this in my personal life, too. When my parents got divorced, it wasn’t pretty. My mother was wholly devastated, and for a time, she seemed like a shell of the person she once was. I tried to help in the only way I knew how at the time: making her laugh. When I would start to see her laugh and tear up (which I can only imagine was a brutal combination of joy and pain), I saw my mother come back, even if just for a couple minutes. THAT was the mother I knew. Again, this is a fairly dark topic, but it becomes easier to discuss between parent and child (I was around seven at the time and didn’t really have a clue about what was going on) when humor is thrown into the mix, disrupting the static narrative we have come to accept.