The lost laugh: Comedy and perversion.

摘要

This dissertation argues that comedy is perverse. All modes of comedy, from puns to feature length films, emerge from the polymorphous perversity of childhood sexuality. This fluidity of early human identity profoundly influences the development of the "sense of humor" in terms of both form and content. Each chapter combines clinical and theoretical literature on perversion with film and literary scholarship on comedy in order to explicate a specific area of significant overlap between comedy and perversion. By examining these junctions, this project establishes that both phenomena are best understood as psychic strategies that are designed to alleviate anxiety, generate pleasure, and stabilize an identity in crisis. Laughter, typically considered a necessary marker of comedy, signifies the success of simultaneous transgression and restitution. Laughter relies on the psychic defense mechanism of disavowal, the ability to allow co-existence of two contradictory thoughts or images without either one impacting the other. This defensive process is likewise the cornerstone of perversion. Both comedy and perversion are narratives that deny death. Comedy performs this denial through the "happy ending." Even the joke has a punchline, which functions as a kind of happy ending. Perversion is a scripted performance that foregrounds risk and danger, but also guarantees the successful refusal of death with the achievement of maximum, possibly orgasmic, pleasure. Both strategies have developed congruent figures that blur or exaggerate signs of sex, gender, and sexuality in order to accept and deny sexual difference. These figures include the absent mother, the phallic woman, the heterosexual couple, the "inadequate" or gay man, and the male cross-dresser. Perversion and comedy also disavow signs of age and generational difference. By enacting fantasies about age reversals and becoming another size, these strategies fulfill the wish to be younger or older, to be smaller or bigger. The conclusion addresses the seemingly contradictory transgressive, yet conservative nature of both comedy and perversion. The final statements argue that adults can never again play as children do, but that comedy and perversion are ways to resurrect the lost laughter of childhood.