Saturday, September 20, 2014

Too Soon?


First, I want to apologize for neglecting this blog for so long.  My negligence (it’s been almost a year since my last post...) was borderline abusive, like NFL running back abusive (too soon?). 


My intention was not to ignore the mess of thoughts ricocheting around my head like a racquetball or my commitment to providing my friends a means of procrastinating and questioning my sanity.  No.  Instead, I was busy getting a dissertation[1] completed, defended, and formatted for electronic publication (which is like publication, but not at all like publication... The whole thing is really just a cruel lie that we tell ourselves after we spend a year or more slaving over a document that maybe 50 people will read all while knowing full well that at least one of those people is our mother.  By the way, thanks for reading my dissertation, Mom!).  Oh, and I started professoring a small Midwestern liberal arts college in a large Midwestern metropolitan area (which is academic double speak for Notre Dame College in Cleveland, OH).  And my daughter was born.  She’s awesome, but is not a fan of me writing anything.  Ever.

Having completed this lengthy preamble, I would now like to wade back into blogdom with a brief thought piece on rhetoric, comedy, and the exigence.

The art of rhetoric is deeply entwined with the notion of exigence.  For Lloyd Bitzer, exigence was “an imperfection marked by urgency,” a reason to speak, a defect that needed to be (and could be) addressed.[2]  Rhetoric, then, is the art of appropriately identifying and addressing (speaking to) exigence.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about comedy in much the same way.  Comedy, rather than being about the appropriate response to an exigence, however, is more concerned with the exploitation of exigence.  Imperfection, defect, problem, and contradiction are the stuff of comedy.  They are the comedian’s raw materials.  Comedy and laughter, in this way, can function to indicate or uncover latent exigences in cultural discourses. 

WTF does that mean?  Essentially, I’m suggesting that comedy functions to direct our attention to things that we should be talking about.

Consider, for instance, the all-to-common joke script where a potential merry-maker comments on some disaster or tragedy and tags the comment saying, “too soon?” (see, for example, my mostly tasteless quip at the beginning of this post).  In almost every case, the “too soon” joke is an attempt to capitalize on some tragic exigence in public culture.  The “too soon” jokester’s humor hinges upon the prominence of the exigence in public discourse—that is how many people are talking about it—and the gravity—how tragic it is/was—of the event in question. 

The joke at the beginning of this post, for instance, addresses an exigence that somehow occupies 48 hours of coverage in a 24 hour newsday for ESPN (prominence) and, in each case, involves horrific violence inflicted upon a more or less defenseless person (gravity).  I would post the pictures and video here, but they still make my stomach turn.  By joking subjects that are both timely and serious, comics, meme writers, and bad jokers (that last one is just for me) draw attention to already exigent issues like domestic violence in the NFL.

What I find interesting about this kind of comedy, however, is not just that is directs attention to things worth talking about, but that it stands as a constant reminder that whichever exigence comes to the joker’s attention has not been appropriately addressed.  If the imperfection could be corrected then it would cease to be fodder for laughter.  In this way, I would argue that comedy does more than merely attracting attention to its subject because in the very act of selecting a subject the comic rhetor sorts through myriad exigencies in order to discover which is most inappropriately addressed and therefore laughable.

It may be in poor taste to make a "too soon" joke, but it's also an important reminder that some exigences--even those about which we are speaking--haven't gone away.




[1] “Laughing at American Democracy: Citizenship and the Rhetoric of Stand-up Satire” is available on an electronic database near you!  If you don’t have access to an electronic database, I’m happy to forward a copy along.
[2] The quotation is from his essay on the “Rhetorical Situation” (p.6)