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Delia Casadei, "Risible: Laughter without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound" (U California Press, 2024)
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A
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B
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed, and the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hello, I'm Nathan Smith, a host for the New Books Network. I have the pleasure today to speak with Delia Cassidy, an independent scholar, researcher and writer based in Italy and the UK about their book Laughter Without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound, which was published by the University of California Press in 2024. To steal some good words from the inside Flap, Risible explores the forgotten history of laughter, from ancient Greece to the sitcom stages of Hollywood. Delia Cassidy approaches laughter not as a phenomenon that can be accounted for by studies of humor and theories of comedy, but rather as a technique of the human body, knowable by its repetitive, clipped and proliferating sound and its enduring links to the capacity for language and reproduction. This buried genealogy of laughter reemerges with explosive force thanks to the binding of laughter to sound reproduction technology in the late 19th century. Analyzing case studies ranging from the early global market for phonographic laughing songs to the McCarthy era rise of pre recorded laugh tracks, Cassidy convincingly demonstrates how laughter was Central to the 20th century's development of the very category of sound as not quite human, unintelligible, reproductive, reproducible and contagious.
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D
And with that, Delia, welcome.
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A
It's so nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
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D
Hey, the pleasure's all mine. And I, I feel bad for all of these listeners that are only now jumping into our conversation because we have just been chatting about everything for like an hour.
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A
A lot of laughter.
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D
Yes, there has been quite a bit of laughter. So I just want to like flag that I'm going to, we're going to have to try to like not have our own inside references to our conversation over the past hour of just like chatting. So. But introduce us a little bit to yourself. Can you say something about yourself and how you got into this project? Like what's the origin of the book?
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A
I guess, ah, this, this book is kind of the, the first thing that I ever knew. I wanted to write as a kind of, you know, trainee musicologist. So I actually remember sitting down on the floor at the party that my leaving party before I left for grad school in Philadelphia and drunkenly saying to people, I'm going to write a thing that's called Laughing Matters. Which I then found out right away that was a book that had already been written a long time ago, so I had to change the title. But I think I always knew to an extent that the relationship of sound, laughter and music was important to me and that I would get to it. I just didn't know when. So this is sort of. So I think that there is a kind of, kind of kinship with this project and me that is sort of started from, from the get go and then everything just sort of took a lot of twists and turns as life does, you know. I wrote a more sensible thesis about sort of mid century Italian modernism and its relationship to the city of Milan and the geopolitics of Italy and other genres. And I loved that project. And then, you know, once I, you know, I got a job, I had to decide whether I would adapt like a good girl, my PhD thesis into a book or just do something else. And I thought for various reasons that I just wanted to make sure that this was the first thing that I wrote that was published as a book as opposed to like the second thing I wanted to make sure that the first book was the thing I really wanted to publish as opposed to a thing that I do in, like, that it felt more like the thing that I did in order to stay in my job. Yeah, no, I found that very strange because then I left my job before the book was published. So I don't know if. I'm not sure if I would pass on that advice because I think, you know, it does funny things to you when you do what you want. But. Yeah, so it's sort of. It's a project that's been in my mind and has basically accompanied my journey as a music historian, like, from the training until, you know, the moment I decided to go freelance. So, yeah, I think over the next few years I'll have to sort of separate myself from this book, but as of this moment and it's been published, like now, nearly two years ago, it feels still very much like this book is me, which is not necessarily a good thing, but for better and for worse, I feel very attached to it.
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D
Yeah, I mean, it does indeed come across as a very detailed, but also like, it's like the mixture of, like, intense scholarly analysis, but also a labor of love and like, how those two things kind of get intertwined and like a, you know, I don't know, like, generate productive and really insightful things because you clearly care about what's being said and it like, drives you further into some of these sources. Yeah, I found it. You know, I. I'm glad that you didn't do the mid century Milan thing. I'm sure it would be very interesting. I'm not sure I would have read it unless, you know, like, you know, I don't think I would have pulled that off the shelf based on my own things and to my own detriment. I'm sure I would learn a lot, but it's a lovely book.
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C
Yeah.
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A
Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. I think I feel like I probably answered that question too personally and I should be more. Do you want me to say something more. More scholarly?
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D
Yeah, well, might as well. Yeah.
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A
Yeah. Okay. I. Okay. I felt very much that I wanted to write about laughter. And I then found myself kind of diving into the scholarship from, you know, the 90s that dealt with humor and music. You know, there was, you know, a fair bit on Haydn and kind of musical jokes and. And that was very interesting. But it always felt to me like if the sort of. The question of laughter itself was sort of being left, you know, on the side. So it's the idea of what. What in A piece of music might cause laughter, might be designed for laughter, but never the act itself. And I, I remember casting around trying to figure out what would it take, you know, to kind of focus in on this aspect. And I. A big turning point for me was when I discovered Anka Parvulescu's book Laughter Notes on a Passion, which came up with MIT press in, I want to say, 2011. And it was the first book, and this comes from a kind of literary studies. And she was really analyzing the way that various branches of modernist literature had dealt with laughter and was really sort of seizing upon the idea of the sort of phenomenon of laughter having a particular political significance independently of what might have caused it. You know, so it has a kind of laughter without causes. I mean, not that the cause wasn't important, but it wasn't this sort of central aspect. It was more about what laughter did, if I can remember. And that book was really important to me. And that's when I then started realizing that it was something I could work on. And I was then lucky that in some of the kind of mid century Italian modernist stuff that I was doing with the Italy's first electronic music studio, that they had quite a bit of laughter in their pieces. And so that was then a kind of training point. So you'll notice, like if you, if you're lucky enough to go through my publishing list, that the stuff that I, my articles that I wrote about the Studio di Phonologia, of which there are two, both contain kind of sections that are devoted to laughter. And it's because I was sort of like keeping as a side project, sort of trying to work out some ideas, thinking this could be something that I could develop. Because there were these pieces where there was basically this laughter. Sometimes it was kind of recorded laughter that was then manipulated. Sometimes they even took like phonemes and arranged them in a shape that looked like laughter. And so this idea of constructing a kind of sound world of laughter for its own sake that had its own aspects, expressive value, was really interesting to me because I think to me it had to do with a kind of political rupture of language that signified a lot of things about, in that particular case, Milan's relationship to the rest of Italy. These composers kind of blending of their own kind of identity as sort of like young post World War II Italians with the kind of ambition, international ambition, as electronic composers and what this would do. And so after I then finished that project, I then started casting around and looking for more sources and I came up with this very strange book which we should talk about because, I mean, I think that speaks to kind of the eclectic nature of the book. Right. It's not really. There is a. There's a part that's philosophical and there is a part that's historical. That's fine. But even within the philosophical part and the historical part, it's very much a kind of like, curated selection of places where I found some of the ideas that I thought should exist about laughter. And then it turns out they did exist. And the practice, and this musical practice around laughter, it exists. So the whole book, if you like, it is like a massive confirmation bias that I am really glad worked out, you know, but I sort of. I was casting for something that reflected this insight that I have. And I, of course, what I found really surpassed and challenged anything that I might have thought. But. Yeah, so that's sort of the. The journey to. To the book itself in a kind of more scholarly.
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D
Yeah, right. No, and that was. Hey, that was adequately scholarly. I will give it a solid end. The. Yeah, no, and I guess I should also flag. That's an interesting perspective and obviously just didn't like talking with you, you know, the past hour, but then also hearing that as well, that. That illuminates parts that I may have missed the first time going through the book, but come out especially in the conclusion where you do a little bit more of a reflection on what, you know, I guess. I guess the discipline of musicology, its relationship with the academy, how you see these things being positioned. And also like, hinting at. In which we've just kind of discussed like, the possibility of.
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Yeah.
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D
Not. I don't want to say just like a new turn, but like, you know, insofar as, like, there's often these, like, every five, ten years there's like, oh, this is the material turn or the linguistic turn of like, people really start focusing on one thing.
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C
And you.
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D
You do a great job of reflecting on kind of. And I guess this is two years ago, so I want. Don't wanna. I'm not saying you need to see whether your prediction was right, but I. I found it, you know, as a academic also having this feeling of like. Yeah, there's a lot of liberatory aspects and being able to read broadly, but is there still a spot to be a Chopin scholar or a. Whatever and like, what is that? And like that kind of like reflection. So it was just interesting to. Interesting to hear some of these both personal and academic stuff, because I. That really does illuminate a little bit that conclusion where you fuse those two in like a reflection on the discipline a little bit and as well as summarizing the book and you know, braiding in a little bit of everything.
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A
Yeah. Do you think. Do you think that we are. Sorry. I know this is. I'm not supposed to ask questions.
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D
You can ask whatever you want.
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A
Do you think that the discipline. Because, you know, I've been sort of outside of it professionally or at the edges of it, so you might know better. But do you think that the discipline is. Is moving towards kind of like broad reading, broad ranging things still? Or do you think that this kind of. So I remember at the end, at the conclusion there is. I mentioned this kind of thirst for close reading that I thought I felt, you know, especially with my graduate students. What do you think of that? Like, do you see things having developed one way or another or even.
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D
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've been on. I guess in broad strokes, I would say, like, my gut tells me it's still in the kind of like. Like the impulse to do broad, like larger humanitarian work is still holding sway. But I. I don't know. I guess the bit that I.
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A
You.
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D
You talked about, like the advantages of that, but possibil the possibility of perhaps like the limitations of that, like free for all almost of like humanistic scholarship. And so that resonated a little bit with what I feel I often have to do, which is, I don't know, it's kind of. It's the balancing act of like, yes, we can make connections out of everything. And I can draw from film and media studies and linguistics and music studies and philosophy, but it has that. I guess it's trying to like develop a scholarship or an ethics to reading or whatever you want to call it, that tries to talk about how to like a more. A more grounded way of doing that. And this is, this is not which I think of which this book is a very good example where you are simultaneously drawing from the entire history of, you know, Western civilization, quote, unquote. You know what I mean? But, but, but also which we'll get to in a second, framing the, you know, like the historical fold in which all of these things acquire a specific valence. So it's like doing both, like the broadness but also having that, you know, it's kind of, you know, a little bit. It's just the reflexive turn, but it's like a reflexive turn that has, you know, attempted to, I don't know, attempted to bring out things that are perhaps more relevant or pertinent to do to a historical moment and to talk about. How to talk about, you know, let me. I guess to put it this way, how to talk about the present in a way that's meaningful with the past. And so, like, I feel like sometimes you'd get things where people would be like, I read Deleuze now I'm going to talk about how Haydn was rhizomatic. I. I don't know if that's someone. And I'm sorry if I've outed you, but that's kind of bonkers or. It feels bonkers to me if that's the epitome of this, like, do your. Do your free reading. And I. So I guess the way that I would frame it in. Relate to what I said of, like, the kind of. Like a more critical or reflexive understanding of how to position ourselves within a broader humanitarian field. It's more of like you. Not. Not just taking, you know, a theory or a historical or philosophical lens and applying it to Object X, but. But putting them into attention and also trying to, like, using that not as a moment to brush away history, but to gather together history in a way. Like something that, like, it's a. It's an impetus to further research. I guess that's kind of like a rambling answer, but like, I. I guess a different.
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A
No, that's very interesting. I really. I really like the way you put that. So I think just to. So I'm sort of bringing it back to the book, you know, to sort of try and think how what are some of these nice things that you've said are actually relevant, or if I deserve these nice things to be said about it.
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D
But I. Dear, dear listeners.
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A
No, I think so. I do talk. I think. I don't remember now. I think. Must be in the introduction about the idea of this. Of. Of this kind of historiographical fold. It's not the Deleuzian fold, although probably it is, because I feel like if you look close enough at almost everything out to be delusion. But I think I'm. It's not. Not. But I think it's also the idea of. So I. I spoke about a confirmation bias earlier. So, like a nicer way of saying that is. I knew that there was something quite modernistic about the idea of paying attention to the sound of laughter in and of itself. And I knew that this kind of ability to focus on it was probably in some way enabled by a kind of phonographic regime in which could, in fact detach the sonic aspect of laughter from everything else. And luckily there is actually documentation of the fact that recorded laughter was one of the most powerful commodities in early pornography. So this is true. So then I imagined what it would do to inhabit this kind of modernist fold where you pay attention to laughter and what laughter becomes a very important kind of means also of activating phonography in a kind of social sense, in the sense that people like listening to laughter together or laughter helps them make sense of the phonograph as a kind of new commodity. And then from that actually reach back to some of the kind of longer history of people paying attention to laughter in that particular way. But what I wanted to make sure to say is this is clearly an act of projection. I am coming from a kind of modernist sensibility about laughter, which is the sort of the inheritance that I have taken from Pavulescu's beautiful book. And then kind of imagining what this could help us do in rewriting a history of laughter that is not totally bound up with a regime of causality of the comic and so on and so forth. So it's not that I don't think that the things that I found and the texts that I read, you know, which are really broad ranging, like I have Porphyry, Aristotle, Montaigne, it's like a kind of really like early 21st century dead white guy, kind of like Constellation and like very like openly so. But I'm saying I'm revisiting these kind of old texts, looking for traces of an epistemology of laughter that I don't think was invented by the 20th century, but in a way it's kind of like an underground river coming back to the surface. And I do think intellectual history is like that, you know, so. So that's very much. I wanted to make sure that it felt kind of honest on the one hand, but also to make that kind of kind of historiographical and philosophical confirmation bias into a kind of self conscious methodology so that people will be like, well, she found them because she was looking for them. It's like that's absolutely true. But I think that, I actually think that that's how the history of idea works. Right. So is that kind of Benjamin saying about things sort of like snapping into place in Constellation at a moment of crisis, you know, So I. So one of my kind of favorite texts when I was in grad school, the Trower Spiel book by Benjamin, where he does exactly the same thing. Like, clearly he's a 1920s guy looking at all kinds of forms of modernism and kind of combination of, kind of emotional detachment and at the same time disillusioned with the political reality. And then he's looking at all of these like pulpy 17th century German theater that nobody's ever going to want to watch in the theater. And he, it's clearly a fold of that in that sense and it's very powerful. Right. He's able to say something about it, something powerful because he's seeing in it something of his own condition as a philosophical thing. And I think when it's done honestly, that is sort of some of the best work you can do. But you have to be honest about it. I think that's very important. Yeah.
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D
And Doug, here we have the Limu.
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B
Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
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D
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera.
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B
They see us.
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D
Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com. liberty, liberty, liberty. Liberty Savings. Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts. Yeah, no, and that's, that is a, that's a good way of framing it of like, I, I guess. Okay, so there's like one where you're, you know, let's to, I guess reframe with those terms as well. It's like the first pass of like research is just like broad faced assertion. This is what it is. And then you get something like a reflexive turn where people point out like, oh, anytime you say anything, it. Or find something, it is indeed. What's the bias?
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A
The confirmation bias.
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D
Confirmation bias, yeah. Like you, you, you found what you were looking for. And like this comes in anthropology in the sense of like, you know, like Spivak and everyone. Like, can the subaltern speak? No. And it, that's the, what you're calling confirmation bias is in some sense like, no, because what can be confirmed is already the bias that tells you that they're subaltern. So anything they say gets filtered through that. So like if that's the reflexive move, which is in some sense like there's a critical moment, right, where then everything gets put into play and it's like, oh, maybe things aren't as cut and dry, but what you, what, what I appreciated about what you said, you know, the way you approach this text, as well as what I was kind of reflecting about how I imagine the discipline, it's also to like, okay, yeah, you can always do the, the confirmation bias, it's always there. But so, like, the options are then, was there reality? Or is there. Or is everything a fiction? And it's like, well, no, that's. That's getting us into the same problem. How can I. How can I work ethically with the past in a way that acknowledge, you know, it's more. It's a. It's a messier. More. I don't know. It's a. It's trying to get inherently plural, if.
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A
You'Re honest with it, because you know that there is something about. And this sort of goes back to this PIVAC thing. It's very interesting. Right. When I think about the subaltern speaker, is that kind of really halting conclusion, right. Where she reads sort of suicide of this young woman as she. And. And she reads it politically, you know, And I won't give away all the details because it really feels very spoilery because it's like, you have to earn that conclusion kind of.
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D
Yeah, right.
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A
It's tough, but I think. And there is clearly a sense in which she is making herself vulnerable. Says, I'm going to tell you what it means. But it's not. It's not really a simple gesture. I mean, she could have opened with that. Right. But she didn't. Right. And so it's like, who. If the history is a series of complicated messages and code, then people send to one another. And this is actually gets kind of deeply into the moment where I talk about George Washington Johnson's Laughing Song. Right. Who has the right to read those codes? And what do you do when you are met with resistance? You know, And I think, think, obviously I am not a member of the subaltern, if we're still using that. So there is a sense in. Which is very important when I write that I don't assume that everything is available to me or not. But weirdly enough, because writing is such a lonely process, you sort of have to create or kind of find that resistance yourself. I think there is. There are moments where you say, I don't know what this is. You know, I don't really feel like there is a point after which I can't. I risk over interpreting this and stuff. And I felt that most uncomfortably with the laughable phonography job Washington Johnson chapter, which is the one that I rewrote the most times. And it's also the first one that I wrote and the last one that I finished, you know. Yeah. So it's easier when you're dealing with Montaigne. I feel like I used to write one about Montaigne, like He doesn't need me to defend him. You know, people love going to. Almost always know Montaigne is long after I'm forgotten. But I think when you're actually dealing with something as delicate as a kind of. You know, we're talking here about a laughing song that was recorded by this African American street performer. It's one of the kind of like, in critical race theory, this song is legend. Everybody has to pass through it in one way or another. Because it was this unbelievably successful early phonographic commodity. Because the artist who did it didn't get paid enough and he died poor. Because it kind of connects to all kind of network of things. Phonography, the payment of black artists. Minstrel theory. Sorry, Minstrel theory. Minstrel. Minstrel C. Yeah. Minstrel C. And so it has been very intensely interpreted in the past. And I knew, as I was sort of reaching back for it, that I was participating in this discourse of intense interpreting of this little object. And I had to sort of constantly remind myself that it wasn't for me necessarily. Right. And that's. That's hard. That's. It's. It's a very strange position, right, to read something and think. And actually, here I'm. I'm. I'm citing a graduate student who said this. I remember we were reading Moton. I said, I find this very, very hard. I was teaching the classes, and I find this very, very difficult. I don't understand it. She said. They said, actually, well, maybe it's not for you. And nobody had ever said that to me before. And it actually blew my mind. I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, like, things are not necessarily for me. Yeah, yeah.
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D
And if I. If I can, like, jump off of that a little bit. Because, like. I mean, like, yeah, the, like, one. One part of it is, you know, I guess, kind of to talk a little bit about, like, what I found productive about the text is like. And I feel like we. We reach that. So that's part of also the reflexive moment of the. This isn't for you. And that. That in the importance of, like, feeling that and coming to terms with that. I feel. And this is where you get all the, like, oh, my God, like, insane politicians being like, white men are oppressed. They can't speak thing. You know, like, they're being told some stuff isn't for them. And it's like, yeah, like.
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A
Like, why is that a problem?
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D
Yeah, yeah. But also, it's like the only way that one can read or that people often read that is like. Like a complete shutdown, which strategically, it can be. There are a whole bunch of different ways. And they. It gets read as like a slap in the face. Whereas I think that the. And I guess, you know, that. That. That's kind of the. The cancel culture version. But you actually, like, led to an. You know, like, with that object, for instance, you acknowledge those portions at which. This wasn't for me directly. But you also talk about its circulation in Italy. It's relations. You know what I mean? And you don't take that as refusal as like, oh, might as well give the fuck up. You're like, no, this is important. How did I come to this recording? How did this recording or, you know, how did this recording come to me historically, geographically? And so I guess that's kind of what I mean by the. It's not like the confirmation bias. The kind of. The limitations of that reflexive move and not taking that as like, well, we can't do anything, but as a. A prod to digging deeper into one's, like, position, you know, and, like, trying to do a more, I don't know, like, draws you further, not shuts you down, I guess, is what I would.
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A
I think that there is. I mean, in my. I think that one of the reasons why I'm drawn to laughter as a phenomenon is because it has that kind of. Not for you built into it. Right. It is a kind of sound that is like some people associate with. With being in common, but being. Sorry. Being common with. Well, yeah, with commonality, with community. But there's also something about it that's distancing. Right. It's a kind of retreat from language. It's a way of masking. Right. So that incredible performance by Maya Angelo.
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D
Oh, yeah, right.
- [32:05]
A
Like laughter is this kind of survival apparatus in that it provides the. This mask that will communicate different things depending on whether fundamentally. And are very reductive whether you're black or white. Right. Yeah. And so it's sort of. I mean, of course, critical race theory is essential because it has already configured, you know, exactly all of this. The idea that there are. There are kind of. There is a multiplicity of communicative political codes happening within the same country and that they create this effects of distance and proximity that are impossible to quantify in any kind of single form. And like, you know, the work of. Oh, no, I have forgotten the name Stephen Best, the work of Stephen Bast is a great example of that, you know, and even a book like None Like Us is playing on exactly this. You Know, like what is this identity? What does it mean? You know, but it's, it's something that. And so I think laughter is a way of accessing exactly this. It's even in relationship to the idea of the human, which is what I talk about in the Risible Creatures chapter. So in the kind of, you know, the book has, the first three chapter are broadly, let's say more philosophical. And then the last three chapters that are more historical and that's where I talk about phonographic laughing songs and their wide circulation both in the US and abroad. And then I have a chapter on canned laughter and laugh tracks in American television. But in the kind of philosophical chapters I basically say that what is interesting about laughter is that it's been used consistently as a way of defining the human as such. And that as that definition has consistently also failed, but this has not prevented it from being sort of positioned again and again and again and again as the thing that, you know, only humans laugh. It's something that we hear even now, you know, only humans are the only laughing animals. Only humans are capable of, of laughter, which is in some way connected to the idea that only humans are capable of intellect, of speech. And then, you know, if you want to sort of go down the Aristotelian route, that because they have logos, they are also capable of determining themselves politically, forming society and so on and so forth. But actually if you look at the literature, it's sort of, there's always a moment in which it sort of collapses where somebody says, hang on, but like horses laugh too. Also like when you laugh, don't you like become more stupid? I of secretly paraphrasing very fast? You know, it's like, don't you lose your reason when you laugh? And like how can you be the only animal endowed with reason if you so often lose it and you have a sound that indicates that you have lost your reasons. So then what are we talking about when we're saying that human identity is bound up in language when actually their most distinctive sound is the sound of their losing such language. So it's very, it's a very anti identitarian. And it's not just a sound, of course, because non semantic sounds have an intellectual tradition behind them. And I think it's very important that we talk about them like through the kind of intellectual tradition that has brought them to us. In the case of laughter, it has this unbelievable power of honor. It has this unbelievable power to both define and undermine that definition of making it feel like it's something that belongs to you as a human, say, and also not right. So it's like when I laugh, am I more human or am I more animal? Do I become more mechanized or am I still, you know. And that I, I just loved, you know, that kind of metamorphosing power that laughter seems to have and the way that it's bound up with its sound. So I think, yeah, my fascination with it comes precisely from this desire to kind of almost like seize on a seed of non identitarian thinking and then kind of let it carry me. And I always felt like with laughter I could really rely on its intellectual history to, to lead me to a place where I could not define it. But at the same time without being flaky, like it's, it's sort of like, it's a very uncomfortable inability to define which I like, you know, I, I, it's. Yeah, sorry, I'm talking too much so I'm gonna.
- [36:21]
D
No, hey, this is, I didn't write the book. I don't know what I'm, I don't know what I'm talking about.
- [36:26]
A
I don't know that I do either. It's been a while.
- [36:30]
D
No, you, it was, yeah, it was great. Yeah, everything you said, perfect. And like just so, I mean like. Okay, I, I guess like one thing that we can do probably to, to help the listener so you know, because you've kind of like laid out some of the. So this ability to simultaneously define yet in the act of doing it you're relinquishing it. These things are going to come up again when we start talking about recording. So I just want to flag that bit of this simultaneously constitutive but disappropriative or distinctive as in can be separated from process comes up and so I guess like one thing to like wrap up, I guess kind of the methodology thing and push us a little bit more into some of, you know, this idea of laughter without reason and then why recording is so important there is to think about like I don't know, you mentioned like the historical foe the fold and you're like ah, maybe it is the loosing. I don't know. But like I think that there are parts of it, it reminded me of like one part in Delos and I think it's, I think they're just riffing on Marx in Capital which is like the, it's so, it's an interesting, there is like a long tradition in this approach where it's like you're trying to understand. So like in, in Marx. It's like all of the components of capitalism pre existed and were present, but they were not. They were a necessary but not sufficient condition, you know, to. As you said with Benjamin or Benhamene, Sorry, to create a constellation, like, you need the stars, but the constellation is a certain resonance that picks up the stars and puts them into dialogue. So, like, what you're talking about with this, like, you're simultaneously reading all the way back to Aristotle, but also trying to understand your present. And it's like that's kind of that moment where it's like the history are all of these stars. And you're also trying to locate the moment at which those stars started congealing into a constellation, if that kind of makes sense.
- [38:44]
A
Amazing. Yeah.
- [38:45]
D
You know, which is just like. I mean, that's what. You know, it's stuff that, like Marx has said that Deleuze has said. Like many. I mean, whatever. A lot of people say it, but you articulate it incredibly well and without all of the. The pompousness of. Yeah. Marks and to lose of like. But this idea of, like, the condition or the necessary but not sufficient material and ideological conditions preexist the formation, which is what you're actually, you know. So, like, it's this weird thing where you're reading Aristotle, but you're also kind of talking about how you're within the fold of recorded media and why recorded media has selected these stars of laughter and the various discussions going all the way back to Aristotle, et cetera, and help them, like, cohere into a thing, you know. And so I. I just. To kind of like, bring out those. Like. I think that that's. I guess I've thought a lot about this book because I found that very admirable. So I'm sorry if I'm just like, rambling and just like, like, wow, this.
- [39:51]
C
Was done so well.
- [39:52]
D
But this, you know, with this, like, to kind of suture together those two sides. It's kind of a little bit of. The claim, if I'm not mistaken, is that there's something about the historical, ideological, intellectual, epistemic, whatever you want to say what recording media does as people start then to read back into the history of laughter, all the way back to Aristotle. So there's like a shift that allows all of the individual stars to congeal into a constellation. So what could you talk a little bit about, like, what role you think recording? Like, what impact that had on. I don't know, I guess kind of the construction or like this, like, all of a sudden, Bergson is writing about laughter and all these different. You know, like, it becomes a meaningful topic or a newly meaningful or a differently meaningful topic around the invention of sound recording.
- [41:00]
A
Yeah. That was amazing.
- [41:04]
D
And we're just going to be congratulating each other.
- [41:07]
A
Oh, I know. It's actually very obnoxious, like listeners. Sorry, it's. It was. I was very. I. Yeah, I. I love. Sorry you said about. He's going to be really mean to me in a second.
- [41:21]
D
Yeah, don't worry. It's coming. It's coming.
- [41:23]
A
The abuse is coming. But I think. Yeah, so there is definitely a kind of phonographic imagination of laughter. And this really comes as a way of trying to connect what is the kind of, I would say, broadly modernist literature about laughter that you were mentioning. Henry Bergson. Oh, dear. Baktin.
- [41:53]
D
Baktin, yeah.
- [41:56]
A
Benjamin, to an extent. And there's. Oh, God, a Vladimir Prop.
- [42:04]
D
Yes. Yeah. I was just.
- [42:05]
A
If I don't have at least two Russian laughter theorists, then I think they are actually the best at. As well as. As far as I've. I've been able to find early 20th century. And I. I was trying to imagine what kind of sonic music and sonic historical event really made that kind of imagination possible. And I honestly think. And actually, maybe the most important thing for me would have been that I talk about Thomas Mann's death in Venice. And there is a laughing song. So if anybody has read the novella, there is this sort of, like, terrifying scene where Aschenbach is at the Hotel de Ben and this troupe of Neapolitan entertainers come in and they sing this, like, laughing song. And he is just something about this laughter, you know, it totally exceeds the performance and becomes this thing that is in some way profoundly about him. And it's not obviously about him. Like, it's obvious that the performance is not really doing that. He's sort of doing that. But there comes this moment where, like, we just don't know what is happening. And it's. It's very. It's very disquieting and profound. And I honestly do not think that that imagination could have happened without a phonograph. Like, I am convinced that a lot of these writers sort of started thinking about laughter, you know, Vach Teen, you know, who was, you know, talking about how we need to care about laughter rather than the kind of sense of wit and sense of humor. I think that there is something behind this that is tied to the phonographic imagination. I really do. So this. In. In this sense, this kind of twist is almost technologically deterministic. And it is in the sense that I think the moment of being able to isolate the sound of laughter and kind of putting it to work as something that is entertainment in and of itself is something that happens with like 1890s phonography. And it's not it actually there are. It's not only technologically deterministic because I actually think that laughter is in and of itself already a bit of a technology. So there is a kind of bind and it has to do with a lot of things. I think one of them about the fact that we started having phonographic records that needed to travel very widely. And it was sort of certain genres at the beginning were maybe considered to be too nation bound and so on. So like if you had laughter in it, that was considered something that would be understandable in very different context and independently of musical taste. So I think that there is a sense in which it is kind of. It's sort of convenient from a capitalist point of view, you know, to have laughter bracket. There's also like something very important about the fact that the very profile of something like laughter being a discontinuous and quite loud sound, keeps better in a medium that's so prone to kind of damage and degeneration as the wax cylinder. It's very, very delicate, very difficult to get even needle pressure both at record recording and playback. And so if we are playing with a sound that is both loud and discontinuous, it will be recognizable as such, even if the playback conditions are a bit crap. And I actually think that's very important. So there is something about laughter. It's a kind of self packaging commodity at this moment in time. And I think also it had very complicated. And this is something that people who work on the kind of media history of recorded laughter that it helped the phonograph because it's also kind of at the boundary of the human. It's bound up with the mechanical. And this is something that sort of preceded this moment. And so weirdly enough, putting this kind of humor but not quite human sound on the phonograph felt more familiar than, you know, it might be putting somebody. And there were lots of recordings of that kind to somebody weeping, for instance, you know, weirdly enough, precisely because of the kind of sound and the kind of association that laughter had a capped batter a sold better on the phonograph. And that to me is very, very interesting. And I also think that there is something there about reproduction and repeating and proliferation that makes something like laughter, which is Inherently a repetitive sound and also is known to generate laughter, like in a kind of mimetic sense. And weirdly enough, there is now a whole era of TikTok that's sort of based in the kind of, like, mimetic effect of listening to someone's laughter. So, you know, in a way, we're back there. I think that it's. It sort of worked in this way. So it's funny that you mentioned Marx, because I do think it's a kind of binding of capitalism and laughter and reproductive ideology and also all kinds of sort of, like, technical determinations to do with the sort of sound that would work well in a technical sense that allowed it. And I do think that sometimes these things snap into place almost by accident, you know, to sort of, like, emerge in the 1890s as what it became. And I think it's hard for us to imagine this because obviously we don't really care what was. Well, how. We don't care. We don't know what was viral in the 1890s, but it really was, you know, like, laughing songs were everywhere. And if I had, like a kind of broad research team to work with, I would do a kind of global laughing song project. And it would be amazing because even scratching the surface, there is a chapter. There is a footnote in chapter four, or is it in the main text? I kept trying to decide where it should go, where I list all the ones that I found so far. And I know that it's going to be people reading this book who know this stuff, but were like, I can think of another 10 off the top of my head, you know, and this is astonishing to me because we're talking about the 1890s. We weren't even in the 20th century proper. So this was something that phonograph exhibits. It's used as a way of marketing the phonograph. And it is something that I never really expected to find, but it is a very important part of the history of recorded sound. So, like, laughter, capitalism and sound recording technology met at this kind of node. And, you know, it was unbelievable. I think it was very powerful. And that's the thing that brought the sufficient, the necessary conditions into a state of sufficiency. So that. Yes, yeah, that's. That's what it is, you know, but it's like, now it seems like it could have only been that way, but really, when you recount them, it's. It's odd the way in which all these things bound together to create this thing, you know?
- [49:23]
D
Yeah, yeah. No, and like, with that, I mean, I guess just to like the, you know, I spent a lot of time reading all those annoying French people and you know, the white French dudes like Dolos and Derrida. But like what I really like, I. I think that there is an interesting parallel here. And something that I liked about it was like it's, you know, people if you know, for those, I'm sorry, listeners talking about. But you know, like Derek has this big book of grammatology and I. If you know one thing about it, you know that speech is seen as better than writing. And he goes, well, speech can only ever exist after writing, you know, and it's like this kind of like inversion thing, you know, whatever. And he has this long history going all the way back to, you know, Plato. There might be some pre Socratics in there, all the way up to his present moment. And that's part one of the book, you know, it's like the long history. And so I guess in a similar kind of parallel, part two is entirely about Rousseau, you know, which is an odd kind of like you're like, wait a second, if this is always a problem or like this is something that goes all the way back to Plato. What's so important about Rousseau? Like what, what event occurred here that you are also saying you're writing within? You know, so it's a similar type of like you have this larger issue of, of you know, these like larger issues of like the, the. There are things like the need to distinguish the human from the animal. They all these other types of like philosophical and political understandings, but also that you're talking about how there's this particular moment that has helped accentuate and articulate these two things in a meaningful way. In a way that like. So within the larger issue of like, like writing, speech, logos, all these types of things, you're like the reason why laughter becomes so important as like a particular type of non reasonable or questionably reasonable sound. And as opposed to music. In order to understand that, you have to understand its collision and this like constellation that emerges as you're saying, between capitalism, media, technology and I can't remember.
- [51:51]
A
What the third thing was some recording. But I actually as I. No, I was thinking as you were speaking that actually I really. I should be more upfront also about the fact that race and racialization is huge in this constellation. And I have downplayed it but actually is very important throughout the book as, because as people. So if in the Renaissance people start sort of grappling with the idea of what is human and what is not human. And that thought is evidently influenced by colonial ways of knowing. You know, the laughing songs of the 1890s were almost always issued from a kind of racialized person that would have been read as racialized both in the context of origin, but also where they were going, you know, where their voice was going. So someone like Johnson, Joyce Washington Johnson, you know, he recorded this laughing song. It was very much part of a repertoire that was bound up with African American entertainment at the time. And the kind of performance of this kind of jolly and kind of bumbling or not entirely articulate black person. And he plays with that in very complicated and self conscious ways in a laughing song. And then the laughing song goes somewhere where they don't. They might not understand the English like Naples, like. I mean, sure. And those people, they listen to it and they know two things. One, that the song is recorded by a black person and two, that there is laughter in it. And they run with that. But the racialization aspect, you know, continues. But of course it's received in a context where, you know, being black signifies something different than it would have. So it's a racializing effect where. And it works because laughing is. Is this sort of thing that is human, but not properly you human. And people who laugh a lot are considered, I mean, all the way back to like Aristotle, as being less than articulate, less than human. And so when that balance together with racializing effects and mass production, this is a way of introducing to other people a form of humanity that's sort of like palatable. But it also has to do with the kind of mass marketing of minorities and expropriation of. Of labor. And of course people then started re recording these songs with white artists. So, you know, it's not. But in the original moment, the racializing sort of effect of laughter was very central. It was central to the way also it was being marketed. You know, it was one of the two things together with the fact that this was laughter and it was on a phonograph that sort of held across different contexts. And then when people started re recording it in their home and making versions of it at home, like the Neapolitan one, the racializing effect held right. So the people who would record it were in some way performing being part of a minority or a racialized minority, whatever that meant at home. So this is very interesting. And then a crucial part of the history of phonographic laughter is this kind of like marketing racializing effect that happens.
- [55:06]
D
Through the phonograph and, and If I can like, I, I love the. Yes, thank you for articulating that because it is absolutely a. Like one of. If there are a couple like central braids in this, in this hollow we're making here, that is definitely one of those strands. And like one thing that I, I want to jump off of what you were talking about right at this point about like it's trends, it's being picked up within Italy or I, I don't know if it's actually it, whatever the, the boot, in the boot, Naples, you know, it gets, it gets picked up. But that is refracted throughout kind of the mid century orientalist lens to such that it starts being the product of the like. Whether it's like, you know, I guess you can kind of see this in a certain extent and even in things like. Or it, it picks up from things like in Carmen, for instance, where the Roma people are seen as being kind of Moorish in the sense of like, you know, they're Arab in some sense because they're from, you know, North Africa, which really over to India. You know, it's, it gets caught up in this like larger fold in which they're simultaneously in excess but also kept at a distance. And so, so that's like the, I guess kind of the orientalizing and racializing aspect that you're seeing this play out. But the other part of it that I thought was really like interesting and I'm just curious if you could say more about was that chapter is actually called Contagion and you're pulling out this interesting thing where there's simultaneously contagious laughter. There is like an actual outbreak of like contagion of like an actual like infection that's going on. And also you're talking about like contagion as the spread of colonialism and, and I guess kind of like a, the, the opening throes of like the globalization and global ambitions of capital and imperialism. So it's like the, the spread that is both a positive thing. It can be like laughter can help you, you know, and whether it's reproductive rights, which is the subject of a. Or not rights technologies, which is the subject of a different chapter. But so there's a positive valence to the contagion. It's pleasurable for some, you know, it's, it embodies a certain approach of global capitalism and imperialism, but it also has the negative side of being about the other and the process of creating the other, you know, so you have, you're tying together like a biological thread or like you Know, biophysical of like there is disease spreading. There's colonialism and it. And capitalism in there. And then also this disc, that. Not disc, sorry, cylinder that is circulating and has this contagious thing in it. Do you have any. Like. I mean, I'm just kind of like grabbing at random things from that chapter. I just thought it was really interesting how all of it's not like there is that negative aspect, but what I think really brings out. And it's based in this racial. Racialization. But what you bring out really effectively in that text is that it's simultaneously also being heralded at the same time. It's both like the contagious spread of imperialism and capitalism, but also the danger of being too close to the things that. That brings about, like colonialism. I don't know if I. That's not quite it, you know.
- [59:07]
A
No, no, this.
- [59:09]
D
Yeah. To turn it into a question, I.
- [59:11]
A
It's just that that was. Yeah. I think.
- [59:16]
D
I mean, those. For the record, those were not my. I. I don't believe those are my thoughts. Those are like you're. You're tying these things together in a very tight way in the text. I want to make sure that I'm not. I'm not trying to take credit for that conjunction. I'm just curious, like what. But.
- [59:31]
A
But you know, that conjunction isn't really only just mine anyway. You know, I think one text that was very important to kind of like bringing that chapter together was Anjuli Raza Kolb's work. And she. I now, of course, I never remember the title, but it's something about epidemics and contagion and. And racializing effects. It's much more beautiful than that. And. But, you know, and so what she talks about is the idea that, you know, at the. You know, especially in sort of like late 19th century colonial settings. And I think she really begins with the kind of British colonialism. Race became this kind of like sticky, like, dangerous thing that sort of surpass individual bodies. And I mean, she's not the only one who thinks about it in this way. And that is this kind of like super individual thing. This. This matter that can be kind of caught, you know, and. And that a bit of it is. Is fine. It's even desirable and a lot of it isn't. So really, I think I. I saw her work is. Is about cholera and sort of as a. As a cipher of. Of precisely this. And you know, she. She. It's. It's a kind of way of looking at colonial settings in a way also. As to kind of strip the intentionality from things like massive revolts like the 1857 Mutiny in India and so on. But I think the question then is how this is bound up with capitalism. So it's like the positive thing, because capitalism loves a contagious commodity. I mean, but now we talk about. And in fact, it was a very important graduate conference that I was not part of, but was sort of important to me at Berkeley about virality. And it was about this thing, you know, how can something be both desirable and scary? And what are the kind of ways in which we distinguish the levels of intensity in which we may want to participate in a contagion? And not. This is. There is no answer to this. It's just that the idea of contagion is central to capitalism and it's also central to the way we look at any kind of subaltern.
- [62:27]
D
Yeah, I believe the. Just. I think I found the. The citation. It's epidemic empire.
- [62:34]
A
That's it.
- [62:34]
D
Yeah. Colonization, Sorry. Colonialism, Contagion and Terror, 1817-2020.
- [62:42]
A
Yeah, it's. It's amazing. And I honestly really think as I speak now, I should go back to read it. And I hope I did it justice. But. So it's sort of this idea that kind of like exposure and immunity to contagion is even more desirable than separation. This is very interesting. Right, because you're not going to get very far when talking about questions of, you know, the fear of racial mixing and stuff if you talk about, like, sort of strict boundaries because they were never observed, nor really was there in anybody's political interest that they were observed, you know, because there were all kinds of reasons. I was reading the other day, weirdly, right now I'm sort of interested in the history of sexology, you know, and the monitoring of sort of like, sexual relationships between colonizers and colonial subjects in India. And it's not, you know, it was like, a little bit is fine. You know, taking a mistress is fine. It will bind people here. It will make, you know. So the question is to what extent and under what circumstances can you be exposed to a kind of subaltern other? And I think. Think the fantasy of laughter is that it could. And. And now I'm saying it very plainly. It could make you a little bit black. Yes. Without. Without totally, totally turning you. It was a way also of experiencing a kind of proximity to the voice of, you know, a racialized other without actually having them in your face. And I think all of this was extremely, extremely important. And so one this record, when the version of the Laughing Song, the counterfact of the Laughing Song came out in Naples, it was very much coded as a kind of choleric laughter, but also secure to choleric laughter and cholera. You know, in the Italy, and especially in the Naples of post unification, which many people, you know, many people have written about the south of Italy post the unification under the Savoy monarchy as a post colonial moment, because they were literally treated as the dirty colony that needed to be. Be punished, they needed to be controlled. They sort of built a bunch of crap there that didn't go with the architecture. And you, you really do see it when you go down there. Like the Galleria Vittorio Emanuel in Naples is very much like they plopped this thing, this kind of northern Milanese thing in the middle of, of the city and they were like, hey, modernity. And like. But around it, you know, were slums and places where people contracted cholera. And this song has been. Was created in this moment of, of turning and the, the choleric. The fact that of the city's most badly affected by cholera was a way of sort of symptomatizing them as being racially other, as being insubordinate, as being criminal, as being, you know, the kind of like dirty guts of Italy that needed to be sort of brought under control. So a laughing Song in which somebody says, I'm convulsing all the time, and I just don't know why at the time would have signified, oh my God, you know, Naples. And this also bear in mind by the 1890s, at the first colonial expeditions of Italy, like Naples is black, but it's not that black. And you know, you can enjoy this. And you know, the singer who sang it was, was, you know, he wasn't like a working class singer, you know, they were literary network. But, you know, it was a way of activating this kind of desire for proximity and distance, of sort of like taking in the thing that is frightening and then sort of separating yourself from it, you know, almost like a, A, like a medicine. And in fact, I think in one of the versions of the Laughing Song, he's like, oh, I can't. I can't stop laughing. I should take this tonic for my, for my stomach, you know. And it's, you know, it's that the tonic is that kind of, you know, like quinine in, in the colonies, you know, is the thing that you do to steady your stomach, you know, when you feel like you might become choleric, you know. And so there is a Kind of continuity effect with that. But I think if we forget that contagion is a fundamental aspect of marketing and capitalism, we risk sort of like reducing and feeling like it doesn't really have anything to do with us anymore. Because obviously the vision of a kind of. I mean, maybe not so much in Naples, but this idea of the fear of catching something from poor, racialized people is something that we don't want to identify ourselves with. Right. We want to believe ourselves to be, like, way beyond that, you know, that we wouldn't. But there is something about our desire to consume the laughing commodity that says you want some of it and a part of you is afraid. And capital knows this. I mean, I think one of the big things that I land on in my fifth chapter is that, and this is now building off the work of someone like Xian Yai, is that you really should never assume that you're smarter than capitalism. It knows your desire, and it knows your desire to think of yourself as being beyond capitalism first and foremost. And so we are being sold these effects of proximity, of safe proximity to something that is deemed dangerous and repulsive. And we are buying them. And we are buying them probably in good conscience. And that's the world that we live in. And laughter is very much part of that world. That's cheery thought, but that's. That. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [68:15]
D
No, I mean, with that, like, that's, you know, I was like. I was also like. You were speaking. I was like, oh, man, this. I am now seeing more connections or more threads that kind of pull that chapter on contagion into the chapter on canned laughter. Because you have this thing where, like, you're talking about this, like, proximity, like the close enough, but not too close, which we. Well, at least in America, which, you know, obviously goes to the, you know, the chapter on the actual. The actual, you know, like, minstrel infrastructure of the laughing song in its original or quote unquote productions. The. The idea of, like, I mean, that was kind of the. The appeal of blackface, you know, was the simultaneous, like. Like, I want to be a little bit close to black people, but not too close, you know, and so like a. Like an Irish person with grease paint on their face was. Or, you know, a Jewish American, like in the Jazz Singer.
- [69:17]
A
Yeah.
- [69:17]
D
Wearing that. That was close enough to blackness that I could laugh at it, but not so close that I was afraid of it. And so. And I thought that was, you know, that idea of, like, there's a productive, like, like, tension that is made there with when you Transition over to canned laughter, though, when you're talking about in the 50s, part of it is also the. It's kind of the. It's shifted, I guess. I don't know, almost like a level of, like, detachment up where it's not just like, yeah, I don't know why I like this, but I really do, you know, and then people are like, oh, well, it's because you're. You know, you're kind of being, like, half interested in blackness, but don't want to be attacked in your white liberal subjectivity. So then you get like, I guess, kind of like a second level where it's like, I know that this is just an Irishman in black face, you know, which would. That would be the argument then. And so, like, I know this isn't real, so, like, I'm not even going to dignify it. But, yes, to transition that into the 50s, it's. I know this is fake laughter in my. In my sitcoms. Um, and so I think that I'm being better than this structure, this dynamic, the field in which I'm operating. But as you're. As you just noted that, you know, it's at that moment that, like, no, capitalism knows that, like. Like, maybe. Maybe, you know, the canned laughter is supposed to sound canned, you know, partially to, you know, either people would just buy into it, but also. So spreading this idea of being able to tell the real thing, real laughter from fake laughter is itself. Product might not be the right word, but.
- [71:05]
A
Product placement. You are going to see a product.
- [71:07]
D
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, do you want to. I know that we're coming to the end of the time. Do you want to speak a little bit about the. The camera bit? Because, I mean that I.
- [71:19]
A
It's very interesting. I just want to say the stuff that you said about Minstrelsy and the kind of complicated. I mean, you know, the old book. Well, it's not that old, you know, but, like, there's a reason why Eric Lott titled. Yes. What do you think? Love and Theft. Right. It's like, because there has to be. But of course, now we have Matthew Morrison's Black Sound, which is another way of reflecting on these facts. And that was, you know, I think that was being sort of written at the same time as my book. And I think. I'm just saying that it's a really interesting thought. I think I could have gone even deeper into it, but I think these people do. But going to the canned laughter chapter. Yeah, this one is very. It's also very like fold, like, because I start from the fact that. From really that kind of genre of YouTube clips where they show you you clips of comedies with laugh tracks, especially things from the 90s like friends and they take away the laugh track and it's sort of. It's supposed to have this thing where it be like, oh my God, when you take away the laughter, they're actually saying these unbelievably misogynistic, racist things. And we've been sort of duped into believing that, and we are better than that now because we watch, you know, Parks and Recreation and all the curb your enthusiasm and so on. And so it's a much more self conscious kind of interpolating you as a kind of intelligent, kind of sarcastic person. And I was really struck by that. And I was thinking that a lot of the literature that I read on Laugh Track seemed to sort of want to replicate this feeling of disgust and distaste, you know, as if it sort of. They came from. It's almost adorning, you know, in a way it's sort of being like, this is, this is it, you know, this is the moment of, of duping. This is the moment where we are being kind of like taken out of our manipulated. Exactly where our sense of sort of like intellectual and political self determination is being taken away from us. And I thought, I wonder where that feeling comes from. And I wonder if people were saying this at the time and what the history is of really laughter as becoming a kind of media commodity and so on. And it turns out that people were really worried about, about canned laughter at the time. And there were a lot of like cri de coeur from comedians being like, oh, this is terrible or I did it and I now I'm sorry about it or we should not do it and it's killing the art form. But what was most interesting is that there was a whole kind of McCarthyist paranoia building around whether canned laughter was being used to enhance like TV shows. And it's sort of like now, I mean, it's very similar to now, I think, both in terms of like trying to be able to tell if something is AI generated or not, which is becoming increasingly harder. Like every time I watch something now, like on, on YouTube or Instagram, I go in the comments to see if somebody said this is AI, you know, because I don't know sometimes. And. And the other thing that is similar is, oh my God, I've totally forgotten what I was.
- [74:41]
D
I mean, if I can like, let me a white American critique my own government here. It's also all of the liberals coming out and saying, like, people are upset about genocide because of Iranian and Qatari money influencing the media and showing them dead babies. Like, it's a similar type of thing where it's just like you're activating this anxiety over, or cynically activating the anxiety over the possibility of manipulation.
- [75:14]
A
Yeah.
- [75:15]
D
You know, and like stoking that paranoia.
- [75:17]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think, yeah, so always sort of assuming that the other. That there is a duped other side. And you know, and it's of course the, the problem is not like pointing out like the fact that there may be broad geol. Geopolitical things that play. The problem is assuming that the other is brainwashed and you're not. Exactly. And, and putting it like that. And so what is interesting about this kind of McCarthy's discourse about canned laughter is. Oh yeah, the other thing that it's like is when now you put ad or sponsored on something that is being pushed by your algorithm. And I think it's very similar to that now with the canned laughter. Do we're like, are we being sort of made artificially entertained here? And if so, I want to be told, told that this is happening. I don't want to be. So there was a sort of lot of worry about brainwashing, being brainwashed and being possibly brainwashed by the communists, like whoever they were, and that somehow canned laughter was part of this sort of ploy of taking away intellectual sort of political subjectivity in America and destroying democracy. So all of this is very good.
- [76:31]
D
So.
- [76:31]
A
Well, yeah, yeah, because, you know, like a witch hunt against the enemies of democracy is always a good idea and like, really how democracy keeps going. And so this is actually one of the sort of least scary aspects, of course, of McCarthyism. There's a lot worse, but it's a little corner of it and it doesn't rep now. I'm just saying, you know, because it seems, if you look at it from this point of view, it seems very innocuous because really in the end and nothing happened and everything sort of went back to the way it was before because they couldn't be bothered. But I seemed really interesting that people wanted to be reassured that they could tell a fake or pre recorded laughter from a real one. And there's a very interesting labor history behind it because people came to expect a laughter, whether live studio laughter or otherwise as part of their shows. And in order to meet that demand, they needed to ask, you know, studio audiences to attend recordings. And that Was sort of. I mean, I don't know if they were paid for listening to these shows, but, I mean, it's actually quite crazy because some of this stuff was sort of single camera. So, you know, they. They were making more and more tv. And they were asking audiences to sit and watch the same joke being told over and over and over again. So sometimes for four or five hours, by which time they wouldn't have been inclined to laugh. So there is a sense in which laughter becomes a form of labor or almost becomes a form of labor. And mind you, you know, the moment in which canned laughter sort of becomes commonplace in American television is on the heels of some of the largest strikes in the history of American labor.
- [78:12]
D
I mean, now I think about recording.
- [78:14]
A
About recording, yeah. But musicians were like, it's taking our job. So it's very similar to AI now, right? It's like it's the same. Is exactly the same problem. And, you know, they take this recorded laughter and there's this sort of madman. This sort of. Was really just this sound engineer who hooks up a typewriter to a bunch of taping loops and creates a machine that was kept under the most intense kind of, like, industry secret because they didn't want people to steal it. And this sort of was a great shortcut to like, the kind of difficulty of having live people laughing. So there is a whole history here about abbreviated labor, about the risk of striking or, you know, people recognizing what they were doing as labor. Which I feel like if you were forced to laugh at something for four hours, you absolutely would just like someone like George Washington Johnson recording that laughing song for four or five hours. It was like, yeah, this is definitely, definitely. Yeah, some people should be paid more for. I'm. It's not sure. It's not clear to me that the audiences of, you know, taped shows in 1950s America were paid aid at all. And so as laughter becomes something that can be identified as a form of labor, it sort of becomes a really interesting ideological object. And, you know, this kind of. People want to know, once recorded laughter is used, that they can see it as the sign for what it is. An abbreviated form of labor, you know, that sort of allows to make more entertainment for children cheap, that can then be sort of sold to audiences. And the truth is, you can't tell. Yeah, the other thing, I mean, it's like. I mean, it's. I know it seems obvious, but really, I think even now people are like, well, I can tell, you know, and even now there is discourses like, I can Tell if a laughter is genuine or not. You know, and Even in the 16th century there were people writing obviously not about canned laughter, but they were like, this is how you know if somebody's laughing for real or not for real. And it's all that stuff about like the. The eyes and whatever and stuff. Yeah, okay. But it's not a binary, obviously. And so the thing that's most interesting there is the idea that there is a binary between real and fake laughter and that we are putting so much political stock by it, such that what is being sold is not the laughter, but the knowledge that, you know, whether it's real or not. Like that you are in fact immune to brainwashing and that you can tell right away if something is AI or not AI, if something is geopolitical, wide scale plot or, you know, if your feelings are real or somebody put them there. Right. All things that are very real to us right now, like that is the most priced commodity. And I think that's one of the reasons why, you know, people who feel anxious about that, including me, look at sort of broad scale geopolitics. It's like I'm being made to feel all these things and I do feel them genuinely, but it's like, why, you know, and what effect does that have in the world? And I think the lot, the candle after thing is exactly that. It's like I am, am, you know, I feel pleasure. But is that right? You know, where is that leading me? And if I decide that instead of pleasure I feel disgust, is that better? You know, is that more politically? I mean, of course, all of this comes within a culture that is very scared of pleasure. Right. As a form of political knowledge. So I think the fact that laughing is so pleasurable makes it instantly suspect.
- [81:37]
D
And that's. Yeah, I mean, like, sorry, that just reminded me of something of like, when's the last time I've seen something as an adult had and heard someone try to defend it as being more honest and trying to fight like a McCarthyism thing. And it's the fact that every time, because I hate myself. And so I subject myself to X, the Everything app, which is an utter hole. But you know, what I see every day now is an ad ad by the official Israeli Twitter or its foreign ministry or something, and they are paying for ads to say there was no genocide. Oh yeah, you know, like, which we don't need to go into that. It's just like this is that exact thing of like. And then you go, yeah, isn't this kind of up that you're like paying for content to be in my private feed, not on like the public side, you know, like, like I'm not supposed to see anything from you because I'm not following you, but you're paying for me to see it. And then the response is at least we're open about it, unlike Qatar and Iran who just are manipulating the algorithm, you know what I mean? And it's just fucking back and sorry, that just like drives me insane. But that, that is an interesting thing where it's like, like as much as like, I don't know, like, it is so hard and to like leave that particular crisis of like me just like waiting for like a, a newspaper to just call out and say, hey, you know, the Trump, the, the President, he's not a good faith actor, you know, which is a weird type of like, I don't know, like, do you see like a possibility for like, although you can't tell, you know, And I, I do agree with that. And you reach a point where like, for instance, like common law or like the law system that we have presupposes and kind of foundationally presuppose, presupposes good faith actors. And that's like a constitutive aspect of it. And in a similar way to like, oh, you want, want, you know, like capitalism is trying to like play with this type of like duplicitousness and the desire to know when someone's telling the truth or to know when it's a real laugh. And like, yeah, like the Trump administration isn't even like trying to hide the fact. Like they're literally winking when they're being, they're like, are you being a bad faith actor? Like, if they were on the stand, you know, are you a bad faith act actor? Is your testimony not good? And they would sit there with their fingers crossed, winking and go, no, I'm telling the truth. You know what I mean? It's this weird thing. It's like you, you know, and it's like they're using one code of legibility, the official one, while openly proudly signaling on the less official or you know, not as actionable things that they're obviously lost. Lying. Yeah, like, like it, it's. He's like, we're not white supremacist. And then the Department of Homeland Security tweets like ant, like racist anti Semitic garbage where they're like, why? Which way American man? You must protect the homeland. Which is just, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know so like, I.
- [85:14]
A
Guess, you know, I want to say something. This is very, I mean, I don't, I mean, I think think in case it's not obvious I am here vastly exiting my area of expertise. But I think. No, I, I think it's really interesting because I think we are in an era where, where this reality is so very painful as people are clearly. And I think I felt this very much with the, you know, with. Well, I feel this very much with the Palestinian genocide is that it's obvious that people are lying to, to us. And at the same time though we are very. Right now we have a lot of powerful counter discourse that we can act.
- [85:58]
D
Yeah.
- [85:59]
A
So we can document ourselves and, and of course people are going to say, oh, that is ideologically charged to. You're receiving propaganda from this place and this place and stuff. Yeah, I, I mean my very. And this is, you know, a very unheroic way of dealing with the problem. But I think the moment that you are worried whether what you feel and you think is ideologically pure. We're already screwing yourself over for sure matter. The question is like who we. We have all the data to know who is being screwed over here and who is the powerful person. And that doesn't really require a degree in political science to know. Yeah. So I think that is, that is one part of it, but it's very, very difficult. Right. I mean I think one of the, and I was, I, I don't know if you know, this book called Hip Hypnocracy is by. You might be interested in. It's. It's funny. And now marketing a book that isn't my own and it's by this Chinese philosopher, but it's not really a philosopher. It's a collective identity that is made up of both humans and AI and English. Collective name that I always forget and I'm going to tell you about it.
- [87:21]
D
Zhang Wei Xun, maybe.
- [87:24]
A
Yes, that's it.
- [87:25]
D
I don't, I don't know how to pronounce that.
- [87:26]
A
But that's, yeah, no, that's, that's, that's it. And it's basically saying, you know, it's the kind of feeling that's sort of generated by this reality is one of of state basis because you know you're being lied to but you can't do anything about it. And you know, when, and, and so, and then whenever you express something, people say, well, yeah, but you're only saying that because you're being brainwashed by this, this and the other.
- [87:55]
D
Yeah.
- [87:55]
A
Right. And I Think what I really like about this is that, you know, just the fact of being a sort of conscious and feeling person who's questioning it. And at the same time, and I really do think this is the very basic thing. Who is oppressing whom is always very easy to say. Look at the person or the state or the. That has the most resources. It's very, very simple, you know, like, you know, and so, you know, you can say that it's all Iranian propaganda all you want, but the Palestinians don't have any way of defending themselves or whatever the hell that even, you know.
- [88:31]
D
The ICE raids here. It's like we're simultaneously hearing like, oh, white people are oppressed. I'm like, I don't know. When I open up the news, I. Black and brown people.
- [88:39]
A
Yeah.
- [88:40]
D
And children, zip tied, like, show me one white. And I'm sorry, you know, this is like America. But it's just like, it's that type of like idea of like this, like. I mean, I think this isn't about like ideology here. It's just like it's. Come on.
- [88:56]
A
Yeah, yeah. Who is getting screwed here? And it's very possible that there are many white people who are being. And then now we're going into the sort of. Bernie, the thing is that the negative neglect of a wide sector of white people who are poor.
- [89:09]
D
Yeah.
- [89:10]
A
And are end up being. Thing. And then, and then, you know, we can't. And that's, that's very important. Right. Solidarity across the board is very important. But I also think, you know, distribution of resources is the best sure fire way of knowing who you should be standing with. But it's very, very difficult not to get caught up with this feeling that whatever it is that you're feeling and stuff, it's because you're being brainwashed and that people are trying to brainwash you all the time. And that is, I don't think is ever going to go away. And creates this feeling of, you know, and I think this is what the hypocrisy book says is creates this feeling of the kind of trauma response of being frozen, inability to act because you cannot see any correspondence between the reality you see out there and what is being said to you. And this creates a cognitive dissonance so profound that you won't, you know, go in the streets, organize. I mean, not that. I mean, I'm not saying this as a profoundly activist person. I am. No, no, not like I, I'm not. There's no. I cannot claim any moral high ground in this. I feel Very implicated by the fro. The freeze response. And I think is. Is the most important thing is to try and stay unfrozen, even if it hurts. And. And I. That's all I can say, you know, But I do think that, like, when people unfreeze and when there is mass action is. Is, you know, it's deeply moving and unbelievably powerful. And I think that, like, when you go to a march or something, it's not because you already know, it's because you know that something is wrong. And I think it's very important. That is enough. Right. Like, knowing that something is wrong is enough. Don't. Like, if we get sucked up in the idea of being like, am I a logical pure. Am I in. Am I sufficiently well informed? Are my. Am I looking at Al Jazeera enough and stuff? It's like, I mean, all of those things are important. They're absolutely. But at the end of the day, you know, in order to have solidarity, you don't need, I think any of these things. You just need to look at, like, what is happening to people's. I mean, this is. This is just the way I navigate it. So what I. And I. Okay, so to go back to the laughter book and. Yeah, I have to go. I'm supposed to be somewhere in five minutes.
- [91:22]
D
Oh, I'm so sorry.
- [91:23]
A
No, no, I love this conversation. I'm also so sorry because it's going to be interesting to add it. I. I think. I mean, I don't know where. It seems quite long. I don't know if your listeners want to listen to all of this because it sort of becomes quite unhinged by the end. But I think the thing with the candid, the not. But I actually love it. And so the canned laughter thing speaks to the fact that these are of course, not new feelings.
- [91:51]
D
Yeah.
- [91:52]
A
And that, you know, there is. I find a lot of comfort in the idea that. That, you know, we should escape the presentist bias, you know, that we are the most. The most, you know, screwed up, the most gaslit the most. And, you know, before people didn't know and stuff, it's like, no, no, like people knew. You know, we can have a solidarity with the people around us, but also with the historical actor before us. You know, we are not the sophisticated. And I actually find that it's sort of like a version of. I mean, it's weird, you know, I feel like, especially with the 20th century, there's still such a pressure to have a kind of, you know, a kind of Progress narrative, you know, that we are the most whatever. And I, I mean no historian would ever really say that that's true, you know, and I think having. Removing that kind of bias, you know, towards earlier historical actor being less self aware than we are is a sort of complementary effort to also not assuming that because somebody is, you know, from a more rural state than you or has think that they are in some way like more stupid than you or less sophisticated, or that they need, you know, your insight, you know, in order to sort of like become actualized beings. I think that is very, very important to lose that arrogance. And I think one of the ways of doing that is, yes, let's reflect on the present moment, but let's also not assume that we're the first people to suffer it.
- [93:25]
D
Oh, for sure, right. Which we were talking about earlier with. I mean, that's part of what my research has been on in, In America, this like a similar type of dynamic. But you're right. Yeah, it's the trying to, you know, it's like. Oh yeah, I. So I guess my original introduction here was that like, maybe in a certain sense the way I framed the transition from the laughing song and minstrelsy up into what changed around, you know, with the canned laughter was kind of an implicit version of what you just said where I was like, well, maybe people were duped back then, but here's how even, you know, even in when people, you know, woke up, you know, were woke, they were all, you know, and I was kind of already implicitly playing into that kind of like dial or that dynamic, which again I should say that was my rhetoric, that was more of a rhetorical turn because you don't, you do not do that, that double. That double work in the text, nor would I write that either, but like as a rhetorical bit. So like it's interesting that like, even in my, like trying to make that bridge, I was already kind of doing the like. Yeah, I don't know that that kind of turn.
- [94:40]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a. It's a kind of never ending turn, you know, like, it's not something that you do once and then you're done. It's a kind of, It's a very dialectical thing actually to bring back a very old term, you know, and get away from it. No, no, I think you should, you shouldn't. The problem is wanting to get yourself.
- [95:01]
D
Out of it is that it's the escape. It's the escape from achieving the telos of the dialectic that I Think.
- [95:07]
A
Yeah, exactly. And to be like, I am now done. I am now fully, fully awake and now fully. And it's, it's, you know, of course that's, that's not true. We're all in the map and we, you know, we have to help each other now. Now comes the sort of more sentimentalist part of, of the thing. But I, I, I think, I think it's quite striking, it was quite striking to me to see how much, much I think quite genuine suffering was sort of articulated in relationship to this canned laughter.
- [95:44]
D
Yeah.
- [95:45]
A
And it's a good thing to remember when we now sort of like rush to say is this, couldn't this, that is this distasteful, awful brainwashing sound. Because I feel like the people who were involved in it at the time felt it way more keenly than read it. And I actually kind of love that. You know, that's a, that's a, that's a better, I mean that's, that's, that's a good use of history. Yes.
- [96:14]
D
Yeah.
- [96:15]
A
And which, you know, in, in that moment kind of touches the kind of anthropological. Right. It's like, are these people as human as we are? And the assumption is always no, you know, like without even the best, best of intentions. But, or what I, or I should say really is that they are just as much human and just this little human as we are. And laughter is kind of the history of that. Right. It's this inhuman within the human is as real than as it is real now, you know, so none of us succeed in being human and a lot of us are fascinated by the inhuman. And being inhuman is the most human thing that you can do in some ways. And the history of laughter is a great kind of conduit into that particular, it's not the only one for, for sure and it might not even be the best one, but it's a very good conduit into that particular orientation.
- [97:06]
D
Yeah. Well, I wanna, I want to allow you to go to your next engagement, but thank you for being here in the, in the muck with me.
- [97:15]
A
Anytime.
- [97:16]
D
This was great with like, you know what I said earlier about like mid century Italian whatever, and I was like all like, yeah, I want to read it now just because I want to be able to talk to you again and, and rant and learn. So thank you so much for you.
- [97:32]
A
Send me your stuff on corn. I send the stuff on mid century stuff and we'll have a grand old party.
- [97:39]
D
We'll have Gavin mediate our discussion.
- [97:42]
A
Yeah, he'll come in with his Welsh minor stuff. It'll be great. It's a party.
- [97:47]
D
Thank you.
- [97:48]
A
Thank you so much. Nathan.
- [97:55]
D
Sam.