Risible

Front matter

Laughter without Reason

and the Reproduction of Sound

RISIBLE

Part Two. Laughter As Mass Sound Reproduction

4. George W. Johnson's Laughable Phonography 89 5. Contagion 112 6. Canned Laughter, Gimmick Sound 137 Conclusion 159 Notes 165 Bibliography 203

Index 217

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although I didn't start writing this book until 2017, many of the seeds were planted as early as nine years prior, in my graduate school coursework at the University of Pennsylvania. I vividly remember offering a bunch of scattered notes and graphs to my soon-to-be adviser, Jairo Moreno, who urged me to consider how the comic and the laughable are not the same thing. This book begins with a reflection on the risible that has grown out of that provocation. Jairo has been the best of mentors— a combination of warmth and sharpness that I have tried replicating with my own graduate students ever since, to no avail. In my cohort in graduate school, Neil Crimes, Carlo Lanfossi, Maria Murphy, Lee Veeraraghavan, and Daniel Villegas all heard the earliest versions of my ideas on laughter and helped shape them; Lee and Maria kept on plotting and laughing with me through the grim later stages of manuscript completion. I thank Tim Rommen for allowing me to present at UPenn in October 2022—and the grad cohort who attended my colloquium for their incisive comments. In particular, I owe the notion of vitalist laughter that appears in chapter 3 to Juan Carlos Castrillón Vallejo, who used the term in conversation with me. Naomi Waltham Smith, whom I met at UPenn, productively challenged me many times about my ideas, most recently when she served as my named peer reviewer for the final version of the manuscript; I am grateful for her uncompromising rigor and support. Another named peer reviewer, Amy Cimini, was a guiding light throughout the whole process and considered the argument of the book with a generosity of spirit that I only hope I can pay forward one day. And finally, Anca Parvulescu, who peer-reviewed the initial book proposal and sample chapters, is, as is obvious from this book, one of my models for how to write an intellectual history of laughter; to have her comments and support has meant more vii viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS to me than I can say. My editor at University of California Press, Raina Polivka, was such a bright light throughout the whole process, and I am grateful that she saw this manuscript to completion even as she transitioned into a new role.

I have had the good fortune of passing through some extraordinary music departments in the past fourteen years; aside from UPenn, I was nestled at Jesus College, Cambridge, where I wrote little but read much about laughter and made lifelong friends with Ben Walton and Bettina Varwig, who have shared my thoughts and hopes at many a key juncture. Elsewhere in the United Kingdom, Roger Parker generously taught me how to think and write from the early days of my grad school applications. He warned me early on that writing about laughter might be a bad idea, and then helped with it when I chose to do it anyway. At a moment when I thought I would never be able to get back to this book again, he tended to my enfeebled writing and counseled me on how to grow aubergines in my garden, all while six thousand miles away.

Over the past five years, I have been lucky to work at the University of California, Berkeley, as an assistant professor; the kind of support and love I received from my colleagues there convinced me, at last, to set aside my doctoral research and start a new project instead. Thanks to Mary Ann Smart for her extraordinary mentorship, support, and friendship. Nick Mathew read Bataille with me and made me laugh to tears many times. I wound up echoing some of his wry comments about neoliberalism in chapter 6, smirking as I wrote. James Davies's warmth and cosmic pessimism were a balm to me, and he shared incisive feedback on the early versions of my thoughts on sound reproduction. Maria Sonevytsky and Emily Zazulia challenged me, steadied me, and talked to me frankly about writing, deadlines, drafts, editing, and all manner of important and unimportant things; we exchanged bits of writing, hopes, and dreams, and although our paths have now diverged, they shared their maps with me at every turn, and that helped enormously. Lester Hu, who came after me at Berkeley, taught me by example how to be unflinchingly honest with myself. He is bracing and funny, and I wish him all the best on his upcoming five-volume monograph. The graduate students at Berkeley, currently fresh from an extended strike and ever full of ideas, have been fabulous interlocutors all the way through. I am especially grateful to Susan C. Bay, Virginia Georgallas, Sarah Grace Graves, Melanie Gudesblatt, Alessandra Jones, Mara Lane, Danniel Ribeiro, Kim Sauberlich, Danni Simon, Jenni(f)fer Tamayo, Rosie Ward, and Collin Ziegler for sharing their thoughts about voice, laughter, politics, and sound reproduction. Olivia Ting, a Berkeley graduate and San Francisco-based artist who designed this book’s cover image, snuck into one of my undergrad seminars five years ago and has been a friend and a source of wonder ever since.

I wrote most of this book on a research leave supported by the UC Berkeley Humanities Research Fellowship and the Institute for Advanced Studies at

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

Princeton—I thank both very warmly. My months at Princeton, spent hidden between the wood panels of the mathematics library, were strange and charmed; Iam grateful to Nicola di Cosmo and Myles Jackson for their mentorship and friendship. Myles read a version of chapter 3 and gave me generous feedback. An early version of chapter 2 was presented at the IAS and prompted a lively discussion, the result of which is the argument of chapter 1. Special thanks here to Emily Kadens—who trained her keen legal-historian eye on my work (and inevitably found it wanting)—and Rosanna Dent, who turned me on to Sylvia Wynter when I found myself at an impasse. At the final stages of writing this book I gave a colloquium at Cornell that helped to sharpen some of my arguments into their final form: thanks to Judith Peraino, Annette Richards, Benjamin Skoronski, and especially Drew Hicks for their thoughts.

The people in this last paragraph are so close to me that they are, in fact, part of this book, whether or not they like it. Marina Romani, my dearest friend who also worked as my developmental editor, has read every word here and made everything infinitely better. This book became a beloved world to us, full of shorthand, in-jokes, and even matching sweatshirts. It is only by imagining our future collaborations that I can think of giving back to her what she has given me here. Anna Barker valiantly dipped out of a London pub on a March evening to rush home and lend me a hand with an obscure bit of Aristotle and was a guardian angel to me in my last three months in Berkeley. Paola Gallo, who passed away suddenly and too soon, lit up with mischief whenever I mentioned the topic of this book to her. Guido Casadei read parts of the manuscript and discussed ideas with me at every point; I hear our mother’s erudition and wild imagination when he speaks, and it moves me deeply. My very best friend, Gavin Williams, taught me how to share a mind, how to be generous, how to write, how not to wither in the rarefied air of the academy, how to be risible, and how to imagine something better. Luciana de Bernart, my mother, was a great laugher; she taught me to think and unthink, and untangling my mind from hers and then reknitting us together has been the task of writing this book. I dedicate it to her and salute her ghost—now gentle, now fiery—as it flashes past these pages.

Introduction

Let’s begin with a journey into the language of laughter. To most contemporary readers the word risible means something to be laughed at, and more specifically, something to be mocked or derided. This has not always been so. Only since the eighteenth century has risible increasingly come to denote only the object of laughter rather than the subject who laughs, with the laughter coming to have a derogatory connotation. For most of its long linguistic life-span, the word risible also meant simply “capable of laughter”! In this forgotten earlier meaning, risible (and its Latin ancestor risibilis) also implied laughter as a specifically human property.’ Behind these two understandings of risible, ancient and modern, lie two very different worlds, two different political philosophies of laughter. Risible 2.0 points to the laughter that is exclusively associated with humor, comedy, and it insists that laughter is something directed at a risible object and so, in some way, explained by its cause: one laughs at the risible and because of the risible, be it a risible person, thing, phenomenon, or set of associations. As we laugh at the risible and because of it, we assume that laughter has a direction, a point, and meaning that can be verbalized.’ By contrast, Risible 1.0 tells us nothing about the cause of the laughter or its object; it simply summons laughter as a phenomenon of which some beings are capable, a phenomenon that—just by its very appearance—marks the boundary between the human species and its neighbors. In the realm of Risible 1.0, you and J are both risible creatures because we both have the ability to laugh, and so in some way the capacity to register as humans.

The forgotten and rather arcane meaning of Risible 1.0 disappeared with its transformation into Risible 2.0, and I wish here to reverse that disappearance, at least in part. What would happen if allowed the rich and strange meaning of Risible 1.0 to flood the more familiar and cleaner meaning of Risible 2.0? As early as the Latin translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge in the sixth century CE, and for a long time afterward, humans were routinely defined as risible animals—that is, animals with the unique property of being able to laugh. Yet Risible 1.0 was, from the get-go, a troubled definition of the human. Risibility bypassed, in uncomfortable ways, the—supposedly—exceptional human capacity for language, reason, and learning and in some ways actively challenged it (laughter being, as we will see, far more like an animal squawk than like reasoned speech). Risible 1.0 defined humans as laughing creatures, and so creatures who are in some way alienated from their own, uniquely human, capacity for language; we could amp this up and say that risibility defined humans as those who fail to be human. The history of this thought, which I trace in this book, has long been hidden in plain sight. In 1727, the philosopher Giambattista Vico hinted at the contradictions of Risible 1.0 by noting that, yes, laughter might help someone feel human, but only because humanity is by definition fragile and already tending toward animality: “Precisely because laughter is a human prerogative, they feel that by laughing they are experiencing that they are men. But laughter comes from our feeble human nature, which ‘deceives us by the semblance of right? And, in fact, from this interpretation of laughter, laughing men [ridiculi] are halfway between austere, serious men and the animals.” Risibility for Vico—and, as I argue, for many before him and after him—marked humanity in a moment of disidentification, of loss of species specificity, and so had the power to trouble the very category of humanity which it apparently buttressed. Risibility defines humanity, yes, but humanity intended— as Sylvia Wynter teaches us—as an unstable, violent, implosive category.” Indeed, the capacity for laughter may have become such a powerful philosophical construct precisely because it could hold a foundational doubt about who and what makes a human and how the human-nonhuman boundary is to be drawn through the senses.

But why, other than out of antiquarian fascination, should we stubbornly revive a lost meaning? What about the far less confusing and far more commonly held definition of Risible 2.0? What, in other words, have we to learn by rethinking the meaning of risibility tout court? The short answer is that I believe that risibility— consigned as it was to linguistic disuse and so, in some way, to the realm of the unthought—opens up the doors to a history of the phenomenon of laughter that we might otherwise be unable to track. I am interested in seeing what happens once we accept, as we must in investigating risibility’s history, that the cause of or reason behind a peal of laughter is not as important as the event of the laughter itself, and what such an event tells us about those who laugh. If risibility was, at its origin, a strange human property, a way of crystallizing an uncertainty about the human, this uncertainty then became the foundation for the cleansed and simplified notion of Risible 2.0, the risible we commonly use today. Theories of laughter have been, usually, theories of Risible 2.0, of laughter as something that needs a reasonable, discernible cause. But even among those who seek to trace the causes for laughter, there has long been a palpable frustration, a tacit understanding that a systematic account of laughter’s causes may be impossible, or even undesirable. I believe that this frustration is not circumstantial but symptomatic of a repressed truth, something that is both profound and historically documentable: Risible 1.0’s foundational doubt about humanity’s access to language and reason. That is, Risible 2.0 insists on finding reason for laughter precisely because Risible 1.0 frighteningly set up the human as that which loses its reason, which has reason only by losing it. The breach in the definition of the human brought in by Risible 1.0—the constitutive instability of reason in establishing the human—is addressed, and never resolved, by Risible 2.0. Thus, it is only by reconsidering risibility in its older, messier, and more unsettling implications that we can move past its enduring limitations as a theory of laughter’s causes and reasons.

The alternative history of laughter that I tell in this book darts from definitions of “the human” foundational to Western philosophy, through contemporary literature on assisted reproduction and folktales about princesses and divinities who refuse to laugh, to the history of phonography and, at last, the worried listeners of laugh tracks in mid-twentieth-century television. This history links the physical and aural phenomenon of laughter to the production and reproduction of humans, by which I mean both the physical acts of procreating, gestating, and giving birth to humans, as well as the sustaining of human life through economic and social processes, and the very definition—always already political—of what a human is, does, and sounds and looks like. Consider the following example. In one of the dustier, user-deserted corners of YouTube lies a video showing the playback—on a 1920s electrical gramophone—of a 1906 recording by the Neapolitan singer and vaudeville performer Nicola Maldacea. It is called “La risata” (The laugh),° and it sounds like this: the piano plays the intro, a breakneck eight bars in duple meter with ascending phrases that ratchet up energy until Maldacea comes in—not singing, but laughing. It is a very good laugh, a rippling peal of ha, ha, has that lands on a low chuckle. But then something odd happens. A moment or two later, the chuckle settles into a loop of hiccuping convulsions: not so much laughter as sharp intakes of breath in a perfectly repeated pattern, a loop that sounds exactly like a skipping record. It’s an astonishing trick. Laughter’s convulsions and the skipping of the phonograph align so perfectly that I confess to zooming in on the video to see if the needle was stuck in the groove. But no: before our ears, Maldacea uses laughter to transform himself into turnstile and needle, into the machine that is playing back his own recorded voice. His laughter and the skipping record are one. For a brief, unsettling moment, singer and gramophone, human and hardware join in common convulsion, becoming one and the same: becoming risible.

Why did Maldacea, an entertainer famous for his impressions of others, make his laugh sound like a skipping record? Why does the trick still work, phonograph and singer overlapping so beguilingly? The answers to these questions move forward and backward in time, and far beyond the intentions of Maldacea as an artist. The song he sings is a version of a contrafact by Berardo Cantalamessa of a song by the Black American artist George W. Johnson. Cantalamessa’s version, ®A risa,” is none but the infamous laughing song in Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (and its cinematic adaptation by Luchino Visconti), which is sung by a troupe of terrifying itinerant musicians in a courtyard full of wealthy Mittel European patrons in Venice, under the gaze of the horrified protagonist. Before Mann, the song had been picked up in Naples off a phonograph record cut by Johnson. Johnson's song became a global commodity in the 1890s, although his name was all but erased from it in the process. Yet I argue that the relationship between his voice and the phonograph that extracted it passed—in complex ways—into the song’s contrafacts, thanks to the particular bind of laughter and phonograph as techniques of vocal reproduction. Indeed, and as we shall see, the history of phonography brims over with the sound of laughter. In the 1920s, records of women laughing at blundering male singers and instrumentalists took over the market. A couple of decades later, sound engineers working in TV devised a taped version of laughter to optimize the cost of studio audiences in American sitcoms, creating the soundscape of ready-made chuckles that haunts televisual entertainment to this day.

Media historians have written about this broad phenomenon: Jacob Smith has made the point that laughter “helped” phonography seem more “human” to audiences in its early days; Maggie Hennefeld theorized laughter as an affect tied to representations of women under capitalism.’ In this book I combine and further these arguments—namely, I specify that what Smith calls the labor of “helping” the phonograph can more precisely be called reproductive labor: aiding the continuation of capitalist production, and making, carnally and theoretically, something that looks like a human. The subject of Hennefeld’s key insight on the relationship of laughter to gender under capitalism can likewise be articulated as reproductive labor, a labor that tends to be racialized, gendered, and unrecognized. Indeed, this is why laughter was so often, in the twentieth century, a figure for an unsteady type of human, one too animal, or too inarticulate, or too feminine, or too racialized, or too mechanical. But the key to the reproductive labor of laughter is that in helping, it also undermines: it reveals that which it aids as discontinuous, treacherous, and far from a natural default. Laughter manages to do this thanks to the particular ambiguities—between sonic proliferation and disruption, between convulsion and repetition—of its sonic profile. To put this another way, the phonograph became implicated in the manner by which reproductive labor crossed over with sound and listening, and it was the sound of laughter that broached and articulated that relationship. Answering questions about laughter and its role in phonography involves, then, complex histories of racialization, stolen songs, human properties, the blur between vocal repetition and mechanical reproduction, and that between mechanical sound reproduction and biological, as well as social, reproduction.

I will be the first to admit that this puts a lot of weight on a single, and apparently rather minor, historical-sonic phenomenon: recorded laughter. I can only hope that the book as a whole will bear and distribute this weight, and I am emboldened in this by the knowledge that I am far from alone in considering the phenomenon of laughter with such sustained intensity. Indeed, laughter has meant a great deal, politically and aesthetically, in the twentieth century. In his celebrated study Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin famously makes the point that medieval and early French Renaissance laughter was a powerfully physical phenomenon, unrelated to later theories of amusement and wit.’ In this sense, Bakhtin offers his readers an image of laughter very much unlike that of his French contemporary Henri Bergson, who is, in many ways, still the most distinguished spokesperson for Risible 2.0—that is, laughter explained as and reduced to a comic prompt. Bakhtin’s laughter, on the other hand, is random, rebellious, messy: it is a technique of the body used periodically, and ritually, by the larger population to (obscenely, loudly) relieve the pressure of their existence on the bottom rung of a theocratic society. Another Soviet literary critic, Vladimir Propp, further elaborated the connections of laughter to biological reproduction of both sexual and nonsexual kinds and rigorously tracked the agrarian economic systems that originally sustained such connections.’ The fact that laughter features prominently in the work of the two most famous Marxist Soviet literary historians should, if anything, tell us something about the strength of its relationship to labor, particularly labor that is depreciated and rendered invisible." I see the legacy of this kind of thinking in my own work, as well as the work of contemporary laughter theorists who have greatly influenced me here, scholars such as Anca Parvulescu and Hennefeld, both of whom have examined the more recent relationship among economics, gender, race, and laughter."

There are, of course, many other glitches (not just laughter) in the history of human vocalizations: coughing, stuttering, spluttering, and other paralinguistic phenomena. Researchers before me have tracked these disturbances as a whole— Steven Connor’s Beyond Words and Brandon Labelle’s Lexicon of the Mouth are two influential examples.” But, unlike laughter, such actions were not annexed, at the dawn of the Western philosophical tradition, as human properties: the disturbances they created did not have the power to simultaneously ground and unsettle definitions of the human and notions of human exceptionalism. So my concentration on laughter is also a methodological insistence that not all sounds that are paralinguistic are created equal, for the simple reason that the discourse that accompanies them is not detachable from them, and laughter came loaded, from the start, with the weight of defining humankind and also of marking the presence of reproductive labor. That is the weight—or the explosive cargo—that it carries, ready for lighting, into the hypersonic, phonographic twentieth century.

Because of this particular angle—a history of Risible 1.0 animated and illuminated by the relationship of laughter and recording technology—this book has a double soul, one that is reflected in its structure. Its two parts are meant not as a sequence but rather as the outlines of two sides of the argument, which can be combined and rearranged. My contention here is that music and sound studies have something extraordinary to offer to our political understanding of laughter as a sonic and physical phenomenon, and that in turn, this new understanding highlights some key moments in the history of mass-reproduced voices and other sounds. In this sense, historical and theoretical approaches echo each other throughout the book: the sound of laughter in mass phonography helps us see political undertones of laughter that had, in fact, been a part of the theory of laughter all along. To put this another way, part 1, “Laughter without Reason,” explores the philosophical and intellectual history of laughter unshackled from theories of causality, a laughter that is emancipated from the constraint of verbalizing its reasons. This history leads us to consider the long, insistent, and dubious tether linking laughter to the definition, production, and reproduction of the human. Part 2, “Laughter as Mass Sound Reproduction,’ investigates the historical links between sound recording and laughter in North America and Europe—with some consideration of colonial markets—between the 1890s and the 1950s. The book is not meant to be read as a sequence—instead, I invite the reader to combine and assemble chapters as they see fit.

And now for a road map to the book as a whole. The first part encompasses the first three chapters, which tackle the intellectual history of laughter in relation to logos and causality, as well as evolving ideologies of humanity and reproduction. Chapter 1 (“Unknown Causes, or the Limit of Logos”) opens by recounting Maya Angelou’s live poetic performance of the mysterious laughter of a Black maid riding the bus home from work. Angelou refuses to parse the laughter as something caused by anything in particular and allows it to hang in the air as a marker of experiences that touch the boundary of the thinkable, sayable, and explainable. I track this suspended laughter as it appears, fleetingly and in a different guise, in the writings of a wide range of authors, from Aristotle through Thomas Hobbes to Immanuel Kant, as well as more recent thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Anca Parvulescu, and Maggie Hennefeld. The thought that gathers together all these authors is in fact an implicit and productive ambiguity as to what constitutes laughter’s reason (and lack thereof). I make the claim that there is such a thing as what I call “laughter without reason,” where reason holds both of its traditional meanings in English and Romance languages: cause, but also logos writ large. Yet the externality and privation of cause and logos implicit in the term without also entail a stubborn juxtaposition: laughter is and remains in the shadow of its reasons, even when those reasons are unknown. It is this historical ambivalence with regard to logos that makes laughter a slanted entry point into problems that have plagued scholarship and aesthetics of music for a long time. Laughter’s quality of being a temporary failure of language rather than— like music—an extension or overcoming of language lends us an interesting lens through which to consider its political and philosophical significance, as well as a way of understanding its relationship to writing, sound writing, and the history of phonography.

Chapter 2 (“Risible Creatures”) offers an alternative and, to my knowledge, unprecedented genealogy of laughter, built on its enduring and unsettling relationship to the definition of the human. The chapter opens with a selection of quotes by Renaissance writers from Francois Rabelais through Michel de Montaigne to Erasmus of Rotterdam. I read these canonical authors of Renaissance Humanism for the doubts they express when they discuss laughter: all of them explore the notion of risibility as an exclusively human property, and all of them seem ambivalent—if not actively frustrated—by this very notion. Engaging with Sylvia Wynter’s famous critique of the notion of “man” across European history—as an exclusionary and colonially inflected concept—I argue that, alongside Wynter’s narrative, we can track descriptive statements of the human that were implosive, full of doubt, and disruptive, and productively so. Investigating laughter’s part in one such statement, I lead the reader backward from Renaissance sources in order to trace the origin of the association of humanity with risibility. This is a work of precision and requires some sharp intellectual commentary. The foundational notion of the human as the only laughing animal is usually attributed to Aristotle, but it is in fact the product of the rather unorthodox use of Aristotle made by Porphyry, whose parsing of the philosopher's writings on logic went, via Boethius, into the very bloodstream of Scholasticism and from there into Renaissance Humanism. In this tradition, laughter served to plug a kind of ontological gap: the need for a specific human property beyond the possession of language, which humans share with God. The making of this property of risibility, necessary and unstable at once, generates powerful contradictions concerning the possession of language and the boundary between humans and animals. By the time it intersected with sixteenth-century Hispanic colonialism, this line of thinking had morphed into a discourse of a right to private ownership of land and of one’s self—that is, a discourse of natural mastery versus natural slavery. In the eighteenth century, as we saw above, Giambattista Vico exposed laughter as a paradox: the loss of logos that is, however, proper and specific to the only animal who has logos. Laughter becomes, I argue, a way of naming the particular ways in which humans are sometimes not human. As such, laughter is a powerful political tool for simultaneously reinscribing human exceptionalism (some humans stay human even when they lose human form) and making discriminations between classes of humans (some humans are never fully human to begin with).

In chapter 3, “Laughter as (Sound) Reproduction, I outline the kinship between the sonic phenomenon of laughter and the history of biological, social, and technological reproduction. I do so by coursing through aspects of the Western tradition—here loosely defined as everything from Greek mythology and the Bible to poetry, phonography, and medical treatises. In what emerges, the phenomenon of laughter is consistently linked not only to the most carnal aspects of earthly life but to reproduction in particular. This link takes, as I see it, a specific form: the act and sound of laughter aid supposedly “natural” forms of reproduction at moments of crisis. Laughter jolts recalcitrant matter and people into fertility and proliferation. Working through a variety of sources on the physiology and reproductive power of laughter—from Italian reports on the use of laughter in assisted reproductive technology visits through sixteenth-century novels about confined pregnant women to ancient Greek fertility rituals and medical disquisitions on healthy and unhealthy laughter—I pinpoint the ambiguity embedded in the physiology and aurality of laughter. Laughter is at once a disruption of signal (the voice cut up by the epiglottis) and a moment of proliferation in which a single sound is quickly multiplied by repetition. It is this ambiguity that is key to the reproductive understanding of laughter—namely, in being a signal perched between rupture and proliferation, it makes audible a crisis of reproduction just as it swoops in to solve it. Laughter can thus be considered a technological supplement to processes that are construed as natural and gendered (be they gestation, housework, or emotional labor within institutional settings), working to ensure their continuation. Yet it demystifies these processes, revealing them to be the products of labor rather than nature. Following this strand of thought, I recast laughter as an aural marker of what Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora term “surrogacy”: the off-sourcing and hiding of the reproductive labor that it takes to furnish the illusion of a productive, self-determined human individual.”