Early last year, we went to hear the New York Philharmonic play the score to Hitchcock’s Vertigo while the film itself was projected onto a giant screen hanging behind the orchestra. Before the performance, the four of us—H and me, and our friends G and D, who invited us, and who are writing a children’s book together about AIDS—had dinner at Fiorello, a New York institution that’s also a bit of a tourist trap, in that rare way that can sometimes confirm and enhance the feeling that you’re really somewhere instead of just anywhere. We spent the meal talking about that funny feeling and catching up on each other’s lives. G told us about how a recently deceased friend’s body had wound up at a morgue where another friend of his is a coroner, who, because he had met the departed once before, had to recuse himself from performing the autopsy. It wasn’t a funny story, but G has a talent for making even the most harrowing event seem, if not lighter, then more approachable, less earth-shattering. When he’s telling a story, especially a story like this, he radiates an infectious good will, and so the three of us were able to stay interested and engaged without overlooking the gravity of the episode being recounted. Each of us said “Wow” more than once, and even laughed, both because of what he was saying and because he had said it so well.
I was glad we went to dinner before the performance, and glad it was with these people. G doesn’t drink, and it had only been a few weeks since, having realized (and having it impressed upon me) that I had been overdoing it for a bit too long, I decided to take not only the month but the whole year off booze. This in itself was a strange experience: I had been shooing the thought of taking a serious break into the back of my mind for months, only to make the decision one morning with the ease of turning off a lamp in a sunlit room. And yet, as happy as I was in my newfound abstinence, a life spent ringside at the battles of friends and family kept me mindful that even a sparring match with sobriety like mine risked sore ribs and a bloody nose. So I wasn’t surprised when, as we stood up from our back-corner table and made our way through the crowded restaurant, the aroma of wine and gin as powerful as that of the red sauce and fried clams, I felt a heat rising up my neck, my fists tightening in my pockets, my teeth clenching and unclenching as though chewing not so much on the desire to have a drink as whatever a drink would have helped me not notice. “The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”—the last lines of the first Wallace Stevens poem I ever read came back to me with new meaning. Stevens was a drinker, which made his other failings worse.
The feeling more or less passed, or at least became less acute, once we were caught up in the bustle of finding our seats, two pairs on opposite sides of the orchestra floor. H and I took in our neighbors, nearly all of whom seemed to be well-to-do boomers, but again, more of a tourist type than the usual Phil audience: slightly dressed-down, a little more excited to be there. When the conductor, a handsome young man I didn’t recognize, made his way briskly onto the stage and took a bow from the podium, I wondered if his smile was really as stiff, as perfunctory as it seemed to me to be, or if I was projecting some of my own struggle to stay cheerful onto this pleasant and professional musician. Probably I was, but it didn’t stop me laughing when I pointed this out to H and she asked if I was thinking of the last scene of Tár.
Well, the performance was fine through the first half. Bernard Herr-mann’s score is extraordinary, and the Phil is the Phil. To be honest, after a while I was so wrapped up in the movie that I hardly remembered that the magnificent music was being played live in front of me, a lapse in attention about which I felt and still feel a little guilty. But it was in the second half, following the intermission—an intermission? for a two-hour movie?—that things started going wrong. Not with the music, but with the audience. If you recall, Vertigo has a mind-melting symmetry to it, as Scottie, having just ridden out a stretch of catatonic grief in a psych ward, tries desperately to turn someone he meets into the woman he lost, unaware that they are in fact the same person, a delusional repetition compulsion that leads him unknowingly to confront the deception that sustains and destroys lives in the same fell swoop (as it were). James Stewart plays Scottie with the pitch-perfect mania of someone who has learned to conceal his symptoms to the point of being able to get through the day, but only just; the cracks appear left and right, and he scrambles to appeal to reason as he foists his inability to mourn onto the person he is avoiding mourning. What can I say? It resonates, even when I’m not feeling on edge, or nervous, or fragile.
Under other circumstances, in another context, the laughter Scottie’s descent into madness elicited in the audience might not have gotten to me quite as much as it did. But things being as they were, it drove me to distraction. At every turn of the screw, every new iteration of Scottie’s heart-breaking insistence that Judy become Madeleine, there was an outbreak of chuckles and guffaws, as though narcissistic abuse born of soul-disfiguring guilt were a really great bit. After a while I stopped trying to pay attention to the movie and started dissecting the laughter. Was it nervous? Was the portrayal of this insanity too faithful? Or was it cynical? Was it possible that witnessing Kim Novak’s dark festival of masks that she dons and strips off like lengths of her own flesh was, to these semi-tony out-of-towners, funny? I didn’t want to believe that. It’s not the kind of thing you want to believe.
After the performance, I started complaining. H had noticed the laughter, too, but it hadn’t bothered her as much. She described it as a kind of empty recognition, as though the mechanism of thought were activated without any content: seeing something you know you should respond to somehow, but with no real sense of its meaning or context. That sounded right to me, somehow more sympathetic and more damning than my anxious theories, but when I confessed those concerns, H said simply that it could be those, too.
And why not? Laughter is capacious, accommodating every meaning and none. It’s unmistakable, and it could always be something else. Hearing it brings joy as often as paranoia. The act itself is often discomfiting, even frightening. It breaks our rational capacities down more swiftly than any intoxicant. It renders us totally vulnerable, bringing us to the brink of ego-death, sometimes because a well-made joke has reoriented our sense of a social habit, sometimes because we saw a beloved family member trip over the sliding door frame. To learn that the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus died of laughter is to scoff at the absurdity of such a death; to enter the second minute of a laughing fit is to know with near-certainty that it is about to happen to you. And yet there are whole genres, entire industries, millennia-old and worldwide institutions devoted to producing this compulsive explosion. We pack clubs and theaters, make an industry worth billions, listening and reading and watching, so as to sit comfortably in the dark, mouths open, abdomen clenched, eyes closed. There is also, of course, the grim matter of tickling, which we generally confine to childish play, but for which the genius of human resourcefulness has found applications in torture and in sex. It is a matter of scholarly debate whether Jesus ever laughed. Whether he did or didn’t, which would be harder to believe?
The best theoretical discussion of laughter is a short book by Henri Bergson, titled simply Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Bergson emphasizes the strange liminality that laughter emerges out of, and the contradictions it seems to rest upon. “Several philosophers have defined man as an animal that laughs,” he writes. “They might equally have defined him as an animal which is laughed at.” In this simultaneous projection and reception, emotional investment is suspended, but so too are the social conventions that make ordinary life possible; everything becomes absurd, the difference between people and objects becomes unclear, and the body itself fails to respond to even the simplest demands the mind makes upon it. This breakdown is evident in comedy, which he argues depends on the identification of character types and classes and their interactions, as opposed to drama and tragedy, which are concerned with an individual’s facing down the whole of society. The role of comic art, for Bergson, is the reconstitution of the social, either as we found it, as in a comedy of manners, or re-shaped, as in satire. “In this respect,” he writes, “it might be said that the specific remedy for vanity is laughter, and that the one failing that is essentially laughable is vanity.”
Of course, a relationship of mutual destruction can also be one of mutual dependence. Indeed, it is often those who most consciously wield the comic as a weapon against the mighty who seem possessed of ineradicable vanity. Consider a recent well-publicized exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum curated by the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby. Entitled It’s Pablo-matic, the exhibition aimed at unseating the long-reigning king of modern art, Pablo Picasso, by exhibiting his work alongside puerile jokes, inane commentary, and work by women chosen apparently at random, since it didn’t seem to have anything to do with Picasso, or the Brooklyn Museum, or Gadsby. Now, leaving aside the fact that Picasso’s depredations have been exhaustively discussed by critics, historians, and the broader public, as has the more general question over how to understand the relationship between great art and the less-than-admirable artists who create it, it was, by all accounts, a bad exhibition: narratively incoherent, thematically stale, and smacking of tokenism. When negative reviews came in, Gadsby and their collaborators (all middle-aged and presumably successful in their chosen careers in the arts) posted gloating Instagram stories, reveling in having made a New York Times critic “very emotional”—in this instance a bad thing, apparently. Fair enough; I’m sure the whole production was very expensive, and one protects one’s investments. But for a show apparently meant to harness the power of comedy to dethrone a tyrannical reputation and make space for other kinds of greatness, it seems odd that they should have been, as far as I can tell, the only ones laughing.
As it happens, H and I were in Paris not long before the performance of Vertigo, and had decided to visit the Musée Picasso. We went because we thought it would be fun, and because, never having thought much about Picasso but knowing that his work was broken into periods, I was interested to see what themes developed over the decades, what spoke to me in his work, what didn’t. I can’t remember my mood going in (perhaps I was tense: the trip had been somewhat impromptu, and I’m not sure how I feel about surprises), but I left the museum shaken, nearly overwhelmed by the violence of Picasso’s work, the clarity with which he extracted whatever within the human resists humanization, and the paradox of his beauty, which he impels us by the sheer force of his vision to see in the depths of suffering, of madness, of alienation. His aristocrats are bloodless; his primitives are ill-formed and plodding, or else otherworldly gods who meet our gaze with unwelcoming reticence. His bullfights, by contrast, rendered with a delicate touch in luxurious black ink, are the only works that seem to contain any peace: at a glance, you might mistake the ritual of blood and death for a garden party. As I approached the final room of the chronological collection, I felt beaten into submission by the profundity of Picasso’s fatalism, nearly believing that this violent beauty, the iridescence of chaos and despair, might be the only or at least the final truth.
The last work in the collection, Le jeune peintre, was completed in 1972, a year before Picasso’s death. It’s a simple painting, dark oil on pale canvas, depicting a slightly hunched little figure in a straw chapeau, holding a paintbrush and flashing an impish grin. Primed, perhaps, to feel put off, I felt as if I had come across the devil himself. The description written on the wall beside the painting, if memory serves, suggested that the work is a kind of send-off, and also an encouragement to younger artists to embrace the joy of creation. I could only see a taunting leer, a mirthless giggle, a rebuke to pretenders to his throne—and to anyone who would reckon with his appalling vision, a dare to follow him as he recedes into the darkness.
The point I’m making is not that Picasso’s greatness is beyond reproach, or that we should in some way excuse his dreadful behavior. To the contrary: what I mean is that Picasso is great precisely because he elicits our terror, our dread, our desire to condemn, and leaves us to stew in it, redemption being just another dream that will soon become a nightmare. Whether this is generalizable or not I don’t know, but in Picasso’s case I would say that there is no way to separate the art from the monstrous artist, because the art is itself a kind of monster, a great beast striding across our consciousness, demanding not that we become more human, but that we accept our incorrigible inhumanity. I don’t know if I believe this. All I mean is that I find it difficult to make fun of Picasso while his terrible laughter is ringing in my ears.
At this point, I want to pause and make a nervous interjection. I hope you’ve enjoyed the preceding. I hope you’ve laughed at some of it. I have. I laugh all the time. Laughter still does everything it’s supposed to do, even if it also does everything it’s not. The darker the cloud, the heavier the rain, the greater the relief when it falls.
Laughter puts us in the audience of life, but our shouts nevertheless mark us out as participants, even when we would prefer to stay in the dark. It opens a gap into which anything might rush, if only to fill the emptiness. (It’s telling that a nervous laugh tries to do just this, while always accomplishing the opposite.) It’s frightening and freeing in equal measure, and in an age when we are constantly performing and constantly criticizing, we know less and less what to do with it. We often think of laughter in opposition to violence, the comic as opposed to the self-serious and dictatorial, even as we become ever more acquainted with the notion of the buddy boss, the cool cop, the guffawing génocidaire. Our contemporary compulsion to ask whether it’s acceptable to laugh is always a kind of question-begging: we always know the answer, we’re just wondering what we can get away with, how much silence we need to fill.
Not long after the screening of Vertigo, I attended a lecture by the Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole on the late style of the recently departed poet Louise Glück. It was a brilliant talk, the best I’ve heard in years, carefully structured and elegantly delivered, including unabridged readings of some of Glück’s longer poems. Cole seemed intent on drawing out a certain premonitory interval in Glück’s final work, the separation of body and spirit prefigured in an ongoing interrogation of multiple selves, multiple interiors, endlessly multiplying desires that collapse into an openness, receptive to experience yet resolutely undefined. I was transfixed, but once again I heard audience titters at lines I couldn’t imagine finding actually funny. There I was again, cycling through the questions, always coming back to the same rhetorical, internal outburst: what the fuck are they laughing at?
In the Q&A following the talk, a colleague of mine who was a student and close friend of Glück’s, as well as an astute and subtle reader of her work, remarked upon the laughter, saying that Glück had been a riotously funny person and an equally funny poet, and asking Cole to comment on the humor of these late poems. I was embarrassed, and glad that my complaints had only been in my head. Cole smiled through the question, but in his response he took a contrary view. “There is no greater insult today,” he said, “than to accuse someone of humorlessness.” But Glück, he continued, hated reading her poems aloud, and while she was open to other people’s laughter, she was nevertheless deathly serious in what she said, even at her most outrageously morbid, her most forbiddingly stoic. Part of the thrill of her work, Cole suggested, comes from our repeated, almost involuntary refrain: is she for real? She is, he concluded. Some things just aren’t funny.
My colleague, needless to say, was unconvinced. So was I, to tell the truth, even if my prejudices had been flattered. I felt that somehow both things can be true, that seriousness and humor can, in very particular moments, not only coexist or even cast each other in relief, but really meet, like siblings in some dark moment of indecision, like the sisters of Glück’s Marigold and Rose, her final published work. Who knows, I wondered. Perhaps Glück was laughing even then, not there but elsewhere, somewhere out there, beyond human hearing.
Jack Hanson is associate editor of The Yale Review and a lecturer at Yale. His writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Drift, The Nation, and elsewhere.