Disenchanted With the Jargon of Laughter

… a false sense of liberation masking blind conformity to a cruel social order. That in sum is the view of the comedic arts from Theodore Adorno (1903-1969), philosopher, musicologist and culture expert. These arts fell into what Adorno termed the ‘‘jargon of authenticity”, which employed the use of language as a divisive tool to compartmentalize groups and create social isolation.

This jargon was, according to him, a system of disorganization as its principle of organization through its extensive use of stereotypes, put downs and false pretenses packaged for advertising and marketing purposes. these were all barriers to attaining what he termed, ”an objective transcendent truth” which he felt lay at the kernel of thought which opposed to the existentialist view and its notion of creating our own worlds through our choices.

 

 

” In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is drawing it into its worthless totality. To laugh at something is always to deride, and the life which according to Bergson, in laughter breaks through the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric life, …self assertion prepared to parade its liberation from any scruple when the social occasion arises”. Adorno, admired the work of Chaplin, who in a film like Modern Times revealed a vision of man transformed and commodified by industrialization and its productive forces. Chaplin showed man adjusting himself to the machinery of society and not these productive forces at the service of man. Man must play the role of adapter and shape themselves to the wheels of commerce.

Adorno could forsee the degree to which advertising would become naturalized in our consciousness as a appendage and complementary to other forms of mass entertainment. He felt the pervasiveness of the industrial model, by instinct of survival, would extend well beyond the realm of labor and into what is called ”culture”; and that within this cultural framework both high culture and low culture would be degraded in the process.

 

 

Writing on Adorno, Alan Tomlinson stated, ” if we think we are free when our choices have in fact been consciously constructed for us, then this is a dangerous illusion of freedom… there is a double danger in this illusion of freedom. First consumer choice is highly  constructed. Second, millions unemployed by anyone and un

ted by Visa are, simply and brutally, excluded from the sphere of freedom.”

Adorno said Chaplin’s anti-nazi satire, The Great Dictator, is a category of failed art which reinforced an existing cultural framework through a ”visual commodification” of the horror that Hitler and fascism represented. Academic Jennie Lightweiss-Goff said (Adorno) felt art fails in its committment because it cannot produce accurate representations because it must reduce its subject for the sciope of its form or moment. She added, ”the film has moved from using the tramps body to assure us of Hitler’s absurdity to using Hitler’s body to communicate Chaplin’s message. The profound entanglements of body and personality within visual culture make this manoeuvre politically untenable”. Political reality is being trivialized, and as such Chaplin does fail, but to appropriate the metaphor from Shakespeare, It was better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all.

To close: ”…all the laughter he brings about is so near to cruelty, solely in such proximity to cruelty does it find its legitimization and its element of the salvational”. ( Adorno on the 75 th anniversary of Chaplin)