COMEDY

LAUGHTER 137convenient for them? Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, intruth, that women aren’t castrated, that they only have to stoplistening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history tochange its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straighton to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful, and she’slaughing.(Cixous, 1976:855)As Frances Gray has written, ‘for Cixous, the laughter of the Medusadestroys all hierarchies by rendering nonsensical the aggression betweenfather and son that is their basis; in destroying hierarchy it will removeall difference between margin and centre. Women will not be outsiders,because the concept of the “outside” or “inside” will becomemeaningless’ (Gray, 1994:37). This is laughter as a radical commentarythat refuses to work inside the significatory system established by theoppressor, busy about the work of dismantling patriarchal structures ofknowledge.The Marxist critics Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, writing in1944, held a radically different view of the uses of laughter. For them,‘Fun is a medicinal bath’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2001:140). Whilepoststructuralism treats laughter as a trope with some allegoricalsignificance, Adorno and Horkheimer see it only as an empty reminderof a previously satisfying experience. The ‘culture industry’, theyargue, referring to mainstream art and media under capitalism,manipulates laughter and uses it as a placebo which it feeds to thepopulation of the ‘false society’ through television and film in order todivert them from reflecting on their inauthentic existence. The cultureindustry’s massmarket debasement of art, they argue, reduces content toprudish titillation, and, having dispensed with aesthetic challenges,mass-market culture resorts to humour as a means of obscuring thevacuity it peddles at the expense of critical thought. The laughter of theculture industry is therefore a kind of infantilized false consciousness,attached to images in films that allude to the gratification of desires,such as kissing or the possibility of sexual intercourse. By framing thesescenes as risible, vicarious thrills, the culture industry substitutesgenuine pleasure and experience for a humorous alternative so that‘jovial denial takes the place of the pain found in ecstasy and inasceticism’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2001:141).Laughter is offered instead of satisfaction; it is a means of rendering alldesires and ambition beyond those provided by capitalism as a ludicrousand stupid propositions, as ‘The supreme law is that they shall not