COMEDY

82 THE BODYOne idea that may help us understand the place of the body incomedy is the notion of ‘abjection’. This concept, developed in its mostfamiliar form in the psychoanalytic criticism of Julia Kristeva,contemplates those things which repulse or nauseate the subject butwhich do not utterly belong outside him or her. In his study of abjectionin stand-up comedy, John Limon describes it as ‘a psychic worrying ofthose aspects of oneself that one cannot be rid of, that seem, but are notquite, alienable—for example, blood, urine, feces, nails, and the corpse’(Limon, 2000:4). The abject is an ever-present site of horror andfascination that pollutes the self, because the self partly consists of it.This is most clearly characterized by the actual body, which willeventually die. As Kristeva writes:The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmostof abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is somethingrejected from which one does not part, from which one does notprotect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and realthreat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.(Kristeva, 1982:4)We see here that the abject is a physical reality that cannot bedefeated through the simple application of additional layers of culturalrefinement. In Limon’s terms, the abject ‘worries’ at us, refusing to besublimated, never entirely forgotten and implicated in one’s veryexistence. Abjection may explain why ‘sick’, morbid, or scatologicalhumour, or comedy that involves violence and pain, is so popular. Suchexamples go straight to the worry, addressing the inescapable bodily factsof existence that are elided by manners. We know that medievalBiblical drama often incorporated elements of farce and burlesque,styles that use violence, physical predicaments, and scatology in theircomedy, as if indicating a desire to raise the troubling issues of finitudein the presence of God. By foregrounding the functions of what Bakhtincalls the ‘lower bodily stratum’, the genitals, the anus, urine, excrement,and excrescences, and invoking the abject body as a risible concept tobe laughed at rather than feared, its power of horror may be lifted andour fear of decay and degeneration alleviated. But the comedy ofabjection is also a confirmation of the frail foundation of civility,locating subjectivity within material existence, acknowledging theweakness of the body and the omnipotence of filth, and raising themesthat are impermissible elsewhere.