Ryan Standfest on Art Young, Faith, and Black Humor

Yesterday I posted an article about Art Young, faith, and humor. As I mentioned, the article was originally commissioned for Ryan Standfest’s upcoming anthology on black humor.

Unfortunately, Ryan decided he couldn’t use my essay in his book. I found his reasons, and his responses, interesting and thoughtful. I asked Ryan if he’d let me reprint his email discussion of the essay, of humor, and of Art Young, and he very gracefully agreed. Below are his most substantial emails to me on the subject. (I have not included my responses, which are unwieldy since they include revised versions of the essay. Instead I figured I could talk about our differences a little in comments if there seems to be an interest.)
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Hello Noah–

Yes, I’ve read your article, and I’ve actually been wrestling with the direction it took. I must confess that as an atheist I am struggling with the connection you propose between faith and humor. The confusion for me lay primarily in the use of language, I think, that makes use of the concept of “faith” or “belief” in relation to theological matters, rather than finding a more secular use of such concepts in power structures– not necessarily in religion (or the concept of “god,” “evil” or “heaven.”)

At the start of the piece, you had me hooked with regard to the containment or reproach of power and power structures through the use of humor. I think the article is VERY STRONG up until the paragraph that begins with “Yet it wouldn’t be correct to say that Young eschewed faith.” It was with your juxtaposition of the words of the apostle Paul with an image of Young’s, where the piece heads into a territory that I find unconvincing. The juxtaposition feels a bit like an imposition to me, in order to arrive at a final paragraph that states positions that I am not sure I entirely agree with, nor see any evidence to support.

I think it is fair to say that humor may not prevent or deter tyranny (I am intentionally avoiding an abstract and far-ranging concept such as “evil” here), but it certainly puts it and abusive power structures into a context that weakens their position by means of the altering of perceptions. The statement “Humor is not anarchic liberation,” is of course a subjective and highly individualistic reading of humor that is contrary to what many others believe humor to be (see: Dada, Surrealism, the Marx Brothers). Alas, I am not convinced by the notion that you cannot have mockery without believing in something that is not mocked. I think a humorist or a satirist is perfectly capable of mocking something that he or she does not believe in and may in fact not have anything in mind to put in its place. The essence of Black Humor certainly brushes against the nihilistic concept that almost all power structures cannot be believed-in, or accepted. This is what makes it so black.

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Emperor and Inferno

Laughter can topple tyrants. Or it’s nice to think so anyway. When the little child guffaws at the naked emperor, we like to believe that said emperor will blush, admit the error of his ways, and put some pants on, rather than, say, hanging the child from the nearest lamppost and covering his own royal unmentionables by bathing in the blood of anyone in the surrounding throng who happened to utter a sympathetic giggle. When John Stewart gets off a particularly pointed jibe, we like to think it matters to somebody, rather than that it’s just going on to dissipate affectlessly into the virtual ether. Philosopher Simon Critchley may say, “I…want to claim what goes on in humour is a form of liberation or elevation that expresses something essential to the humanity of the human being,” but in that initial nervous “I…want to claim,” and in the over-enthusiastic resort to italics he reveals, perhaps that this statement is as much hope as certainty. He adds, “By laughing at power, we expose its contingency”…and then, with fetching inevitability, he starts to talk about the emperor’s new clothes, that parable for skeptics which we are, of all parables, not to take skeptically. [Critchley 47-48]

Art Young’s Inferno certainly participates in the hope that the jester might threaten the Khanate. Inspired semi-ironically by Dante and Doré, The Inferno is a description of Young’s journey through Hell, circa 1934. This was actually Young’s third book exploring the pit: the first two were Hell Up To Date from 1892; the second, Through Hell With Hiprah Hunt, from 1901. Both of these were cheerful and non-threatening, focusing on devising witty punishments for modern sins. Unfeeling editors are consigned to red-hot wastebaskets, unattentive husbands are dressed in drag, hobos are forced to bathe, and justice is more or less inoffensively dispensed.

In 1906, however, Young became a convert to socialism. The Inferno, written during the Great Depression, is, then, not a light-hearted fantasy about a just universe, but rather a Marxist panegyric, which explicitly uses its humor to castigate the status quo. As I wrote in a 2006 article for The Comics Journal:

Young reports that “Big Business organizers and Bankers” had been going to Hell in such numbers that they had managed to take over. Satan retains a ceremonial role, but the real power is now vested in an All-Hell Congress controlled by business interests. The new overlords have no interest in punishing the unjust; rather they want to “make money out of Hell.” To this purpose, they establish schools which are “operated like factories to produce standard size thought” and hospitals to which “poor sinners are sometimes grudgingly admitted.” The sophisticated Hellions have even, Young notes, “learned to use the word ‘sorry.’ A gentlemanly Hellion tears out the heart of his brother, spits on it and says, ‘I’m sorry.’” [Berlatsky 133]


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