Humorwork, Feminist Philosophy, and Unstable Politics

Philosophy Compass, 2022

Over the past decades humor studies has formed an unprecedented interdisciplinary consolidation, connected with a consolidation in philosophy of humor scholarship. In this essay I focus specifically on feminist philosophy of humor as an area of study that highlights relationships between humor, language, subjectivity, power, embodiment, instability, affect, and resistance, introducing several of its key themes while mapping out tensions that can be productive for further research. I first cover feminist theories of humor as instability and then move to feminist theories of humor as generative of social relationships. Though I diagnose several tensions between these approaches that require further elaboration and discussion, I conclude that feminist philosophy of humor is a crucial area of humor research that focuses on systematic oppression, political engagement, embodiment, and affective ties.

Studies in American Humor

Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Images, 2016

Based on archival research, scholarship from the emerging field of Feminist Humour Studies, and engagements with feminist and poststructuralist theory, in this article I make the case for recovering a history of humour in feminism, with a focus on 20 th century US-based feminist practices. I argue that retrieving evidence of feminist humour-whether as political performance (street protests, "zaps") or cultural artefacts (comics, music, plays, polemical texts)-enables scholars to re-imagine feminism and its past, and opens up new ways of thinking about both. Using humour as a focal point through which to narrate feminist history allows for a recovery of neglected and marginalized voices from the feminist past. In so doing, humour facilitates a redrawing of the conceptual map that informs prevailing narratives about feminism and its history. Furthermore, engaging humour opens up new lines of inquiry for future researchers, including an investigation of how feminists' engagements with humour-and the new, subversive realities they engendered-helped shape feminist attitudes, subjectivities, and communities over the course of generations.

The Philosophy of Humor Yearbook, 2023

This essay argues that humor can be used as an unstable weapon against oppressive language and concepts. Drawing from radical feminist Marilyn Frye, I discuss the difficulty of challenging systematic oppression from within and explore the capabilities of humor for this task. This requires expanding Cynthia Willett's and Julie Willett's approach to fumerism beyond affect to fully examine the work of humor in manipulating language, concepts, and imagery. For this expansion, I bring in research on feminist linguistics alongside other philosophers of political humor to consider the connection between humor and world-making. I then link this with feminist world-breaking through Monique Wittig's analysis of war machines and Trojan horses against heteropatriarchal language. Finally, I draw out the instability of humor as a war machine by investigating a bit where comedian Patti Harrison disguised herself as an official corporate brand platform to challenge the compulsory commodification of LGBTQ rights.

MA thesis (2019), Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Thesis supervisor: Prof. Dr. Oliver Müller.

2008

This dissertation addresses the possibilities for humor to serve as political action.

Dissertation, 2019

The aim of this dissertation is to offer a new theory of humor that takes seriously both the universality and power of humor in culture. In the first chapter, I summarize historical and contemporary theories, and show how each either 1) fails to give any definition of humor, 2) fails as a theory of humor, and/or 3) underappreciates, dismisses, or does not consider the power of humor in experience. The second chapter explains the failures of prior theories by understanding the problem in terms of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms. These forms of culture are perspectives through which we express and understand our world, and each presents its own unique perspectives through which we can understand ourselves and the world. In the third chapter, I argue that humor is one of these necessary and universal symbolic forms of culture. I argue that confusions in the philosophy of humor stem from approaches to humor that understand it as part of some other symbolic form rather than as a form itself. In the fourth chapter, I argue for the function of humor as that which reveals and exposes epistemic vices –laziness, arrogance, and closed-minded thinking about ourselves and the world. I support this argument by showing not only that all previous theories of humor have within them epistemic revelation as a consistent commonality, but also by showing that this revelation is necessary to the form of humor while it is, at best, accidental to other forms. In my final chapter, I suggest that we ought to approach humor objectively, and that the normativity of the symbolic forms guides us toward such an approach. I offer two objective questions to ask about a given instance of humor: 1) does the humor idealize a liberated end? and 2) does the humor fulfil the cultural function of the symbolic form it represents by disrupting epistemically vicious thinking? If the answer to both of these questions is affirmative, then it is likely that the humor in question is morally praiseworthy. I conclude by offering suggestions for further study.

Feminist Media Histories, 2017

This journal issue is dedicated to the vibrant feminist media histories of comedy that we have seen, time and again, vanish right before our eyes. The ability to laugh in the face of crisis and in the wake of ruins is, after all, the premise of why we commit to archival research: to make visible the forgotten histories of feminist social struggle and of women's cultural authorship, not just in their own right, but against the recurrence of their political obstruction and historical annihilation. This comedy issue follows from that momentous project. Our goal is not to supplement the archive that we already know to be important, but to challenge the ways in which—as feminist historians with our eyes toward the basis of all future progress in the unrealized potentials of the past—we come to know anything at all. These are and have always been the epistemological stakes of feminist archival labor, which we hereby unleash onto the feminist and comedic crises of the present historical moment.

This CFP for a special issue of EJHR seeks original interdisciplinary scholarly work that allows for both the repressive and irrepressible dynamics of humor by locating the actual practices and instances of political humor succeeding, falling flat, or backfiring within their relevant historical, institutional and cultural contexts. Though the campaign and election of President Trump in the US has provoked fresh reflections on political humor this CFP welcomes papers that also address modern and contemporary non-US and non-Western examples. It also welcomes the views of political humor practitioners either in the form of a reflective essay or interview.