Do I Hear an Eco

The past couple of weeks have seen a burst of think-pieces on the nature of comedy in the post-Trump cultural landscape, sparked by the firing of Shane Gillis from Saturday Night Live only four days after his hiring was announced (a move prompted by public backlash against certain remarks Gillis has made in the past). To some, the comments made by Gillis on his podcast (such as calling Judd Apatow a “white faggot”, or his liberal use of a particular racial slur) were evidence of a profound and irredeemable moral failing, the social remedy for which is professional ostracism. To others, the backlash against Gillis is not just a symptom of a zeitgeist of irrational political correctness, but a veritable crime against the concept of art itself. And to the rest of us, Gillis is an utter irrelevance who we didn’t even know existed, but we nevertheless find ourselves begrudgingly taking a side in the great culture war over the ramifications of his fate.

Is the purpose of comedy to push boundaries, to seek to make uncomfortable? Does freedom of speech necessarily entail freedom from the consequences of said speech? Does the levying of disproportionate penalties on comedians over offensive speech (whether intentional or otherwise) have broader implications on our society’s relationship with art, and act as a barrier to entry for emerging artists? Do prejudicial statements, even when delivered ironically or sarcastically, inherently reinforce and normalize the ontology of power in our society (and the toxic dynamics that inevitably ensue), regardless of the actual political beliefs of the original speaker?

None of these are easy questions to answer. I could think of no one better situated to try and resolve this dilemma than the great literary critic and semiotician Umberto Eco. Luckily, he has been dead for almost four years! So I contacted a local necromancer who specializes in the precession of simulacra, and interviewed the re-animated corpse of Eco to see what he would think of the whole affair.

B: Thank you for talking to me today. I’m sure you are aware of all the details of the Shane Gillis controversy. My question for you is: what is right for him to be punished for his past offensive jokes? Is there a line with comedy that just shouldn’t be crossed?

ECO: To even begin to attempt to answer that question, we should first consider the case of Ibn Rushd, or Averroës, as told to us by Borges. As you probably know, Averroës was an expert on Aristotle, namely the Poetics. However, Averroës had no concept of theater. Because of the Muslim taboo on representation, he had never seen a theatrical performance. Borges imagines our philosopher friend wondering about two incomprehensible words he had found while translating Artistotle: tragedy and comedy. As he ponders this problem, he is disturbed by some noise coming from downstairs. On a patio a group of boys are playing. One of them pretend to be the muezzin and climbs on the shoulders of another one, who is pretending to be a minaret. Others are pretending to be the crowd of believers. Averroës only glances at this scene without thought and goes back to his book, trying to understand just what in the hell “comedy” means. Later, Averroës hears a strange tale from a merchant, who while in China found a wooden house with a great salon full of balconies and chairs, crowded with people looking towards a platform where fifteen or twenty persons, wearing painted masks, were riding on horseback without horses and fencing without swords and dying without dying. Averroës and his companions cannot comprehend this scene, or even entertain the notion of someone showing a story rather than telling it. In the end, we are told that Averroës could only conclude that a “tragedy” was meant to praise something and a “comedy” was meant to condemn it.

B: You are saying that comedy is, by its very nature, a commentary. Specifically, a critique. Would you then say that it is right for a comic to broach controversial topics, such as racism, since doing so is by definition an act of opposition to those topics?

ECO: What I am really saying is that we are in the same position as Averroës, but that is precisely what puts us in a better position than Averroës. As Borges wrote, “I felt that Averroës, trying to imagine what a play is without having suspected what a theater is, was no more absurd than I, trying to imagine Averroës … I felt, on the last page, that my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story, and so on, ad infinitum.” Us trying to imagine not knowing theater is as Quixotic as him trying to imagine knowing it. But that’s precisely what puts us in a better position, since we cannot eliminate our background knowledge of what “theater” is (and, consequently, what “comedy” is), so far as it is possible for us to determine what “is” is.

B: Let me see if I follow. You are saying that it is true that you can conceptualize jokes (about racism, sexism, violence, or whatever) as inherent critiques in a vacuum. But we don’t have a vacuum, we can only conceptualize jokes within the broader structural framework of our culture, and all that goes with it (including taboos). But what’s our recourse when our culture does NOT provide such clear mandates about whether a particular joke is acceptable or not? When we have multiple simultaneously competing frameworks, which aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, arriving at incompatible conclusions?

ECO: As soon as the comedian has been put up on the stage and shown to the audience, they have lost their original nature as a “real” body among real bodies. They are no more a world object among world objects, they have become a semiotic device. They are now a “sign”. A physical presence referring back to something absent. What is our comedian referring back to? A comedian. But not to “the” comedian, but to “a”comedian. They are an open expression referring back to an open range of possible contents, mediated by essential characteristics established by iconographic convention. But the comedian is playing a double-game: they are a sign that is pretending not to be a sign. In order to be accepted as a sign, they must be recognized as a “real” spatio-temporal object, a real human body. In order to be recognized as “a comedian”, they must also be recognized as “Sarah Silverman”, or “Richard Pryor”, and so on. Thus we have an object, first recognized as a real object, then assumed as a sign in order to refer back to another object whose constitutive stuff is the same as that of the representing object.

B: I have nothing to add to what you are saying, but the layout of the interview would look better if I were to interject around here.

ECO: Well done. So, we have established the comedian as “a comedian” on that stage, in the same manner as we would establish the actor as “an actor” on a stage, or the boss as “the boss” in a business meeting, or my friend telling a joke as “my friend telling a joke”. These are all ontologically and semiotically equivalent, insofar as they are all performances. Now, the comedian tells a joke (usually composed of words, though with no loss of generality can be composed of any actions, as in the case of physical comedy). In the case of performance, words are not transparent sign-vehicles referring back to their content (and through that content to things in the world). They are sign-vehicles referring back to other sign-vehicles; phonic objects taken as objects and ostended as such. When the comedian says, “I’m an alcoholic”, they do not mean that the subject of the utterance (“I”) is an alcoholic, they mean that there is somewhere somebody who is an alcoholic and says that (whether this also happens to align with the subject is irrelevant). Words refer back to words about which the comedian is speaking. In a sense, every joke is composed of two speech acts: the first one is implictly performed by the comedian who is making a performative statement – “I am joking”. By this implicit statement, the comedian tells the truth since they announce that from that moment on they will lie.

B: So it’s as Averroës said, “comedy” is inherently a critique.

ECO: As I’ve said, the joke is a sign-vehicle. It is a means of conveying to the audience a referent. This referent itself is a sign, and so on. And whereas the comedian must be recognized as a sign, the audience must not (that is, the joke must not be on them). Even offensive jokes are, in general, about comfort. The type of person who would be offended at Dave Chappelle saying, “BITCH! I LIVE IN A FUCKING TRASH CAN!” are not the type of person who would be at a Dave Chappelle show, or more precisely the type of person who would be at a Dave Chappelle show would not be the type of person who would see themselves as being representative of the type of person who would be offended at Dave Chappelle saying, “BITCH! I LIVE IN A FUCKING TRASH CAN!” Even for those comedians with a tendency to pick out specific members of their audience to tease, they are never referring to that actual member of the audience, instead converting that hapless audience member into a sign referring to some absent object. That is, the joke is inherently a dialectic between “a comedian” and “an audience” about “something”. The tension, whether dramatic or comedic, comes from the ambiguity of these signs and the potential for overlap. So, the type of person who would be at Dave Chappelle’s show who then becomes offended at the Oscar the Grouch bit is forced into confrontation with the fact that they have gone from being “an audience” to being “something”. But immediately we realize the essential impossibility of “an audience” due to the mutability of signs, since each such dialectic with “a comedian” is personal, thus “an audience” is actually composed of almost infinite “audiences”, each with different framing. Similarly, tension arises when the barrier between “a comedian” and “something” becomes blurred (such as looking back at Louis C.K.’s jokes within the different framing now provided to us). Again, for similar reasons, we have an essential impossibility of “a comedian”. And so on.

B: Could you dumb that down for me a little?

ECO: Remember our alcoholic comedian from earlier? Our alcoholic comedian does something more than just connote alcoholism. They are also realizing an irony. The comedian as the victim of their alcoholism stands ironically for the contrary. They are implicitly saying, “I am so, but I should not be like this, and you should not become like me.” But on another level they too are implicitly saying, “Do you see how beautiful I am? Do you realize what kind of glorious sample of humanity I am representing here?” How do we know to interpret the spectacle of alcoholism as an ironical warning and not as an invitation to orgiastic freedom? In order to get the irony, we need the right framing, the right social context. But these concepts are mutable, since they are themselves composed of signs referring to signs, an inextricable mixture of mise-en-scene and mise-en-abyme. A human body, along with all of its conventionally recognizable properties, surrounded by or supplied with a set of objects, inserted within a physical space, stands for something else to a reacting audience. In order to do so, it has been framed within a performative context that establishes that it has to be taken as a sign. From this moment on, the curtain is raised; anything is possible and nothing is predictable.

B: Does the fact that the jokes were made on a podcast, seemingly a more conversational and informal medium, matter?

ECO: Yes, but only in degrees and not in kind. It blurs the framing of the performative context. But it does not mean it is not performative. Say you ask me, “How should I be dressed for the party this evening?” I answer by showing you my tie framed by my jacket and say, “Like this, more or less”. This is also performative, in the same sense as a joke. My tie does not mean my actual tie but your possible tie and I am performing by representing to you the you of this evening. I am prescribing to you how you should look this evening. With this simple gesture, I am doing something that is theater at its best, since I not only tell you something, but I am offering to you a model, giving you an order or a suggestion, outlining a utopia. I am not only picturing a given behavior, I am in fact eliciting a behavior, emphasizing a duty, mirroring your future. My message is at the same time a referential, a phatic, an imperative, an emotive, an aesthetic. The verbal suffix “more or less” is a rather important device, the “I am joking”, that helps you to de-realize the object that is standing for something else, to reduce the pertinent features of the vehicle I used to signify “tie” to you, in order to make it able to signify all the possible ties you can think of.

B: So what can we say to somebody who offends someone with a joke – or, more cynically, who insults someone and uses the excuse of “I’m joking” to defuse the repercussions? Someone who uses the mutability of signs as a panacea? After all, Gillis can easily say that he didn’t call Judd Apatow a “white faggot”, he was simply a sign referring to someone somewhere who called Judd Apatow a “white faggot”. That seems like a rather easy way to escape any personal culpability, does it not?

ECO: Well, I would say that the appropriate response would be to paraphrase the great philosopher, Jeffrey Lebowski. “You’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole.”

B: Thank you for talking with me today.

ECO: BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINS

And thank you, dear readers, for taking the time to consider so many complicated questions and the confusing non-answers that accompany them. You can see Umberto Eco’s re-animated corpse in a recurring role on “Bob Hearts Abishola”, airing Monday nights on CBS. Goodnight, and good luck.