Humor and War: Humor and Politics Meeting – October 22, 2014
Our theme in October was “Humor and War” and to that end we discussed Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb along with an excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (the Eschaton) and short theoretical readings from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and Montaigne’s That We Laugh and Cry at the Same Thing. We discussed the role of humor on the brink of total annihilation, comparing Nietzsche’s golden laughter that prides itself on the ability to stare into the abyss and Montaigne’s account of our ambivalence towards extreme actions. We wondered whether war humor or gallows humor is more a respite from the violence and fear instead of an overwhelming triumph. We thought about the construction of characters in Kubrick’s film and the choice of ending and compared it to the depiction of children playing nuclear war in the Eschaton. We thought about dark comedy as a genre and why it works, then we ended the session with the music video from The Decembrists – The Calamity Song.
