Humor and Totalitarianism: Humor and Politics Meeting – January 20, 2015
Our theme that month was “Humor and Totalitarianism” and we discussed the film The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin and the short play Largo Desolato by Vaclav Havel, with short theory selections from Hannah Arendt’s On Violence and Slavoj Zizek’s For they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. We compared Arendt’s account of jokes and laughter as undermining the authority of a totalitarian regime with Zizek’s more pessimistic view of entertainment as a way of maintaining the reigning ideology. We debated the meaning of the final speech in Chaplin’s film and compared its analysis of evil with the one from Havel’s play. We found both hope and despair in the jokes in this session and left with questions about humor in a non-dysfunctional political order.
