Nietzche saw in Christianity's denial of laughter a great flaw, a great suppression of the true human spirit. As he wrote of Jesus in his classic rant Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
What has been the greatest sin here on earth? Was it not the saying of him who said: 'Woe to those who laugh!' Did he himself find on earth no reason for laughter? If so he sought badly. Even a child could find reasons. He — did not love sufficiently: otherwise he would also have loved us, the laughers! But he hated and jeered at us, he promised us wailing and gnashing
of teeth..."
Like dancing, laughter is a common feature of Nietzche's idea figure, the heroic "overman". Nietzsche considers laughter to be the activity of someone looking down on someone or something else. It is the laughter of superiority. The overman has risen above everything and everybody, so there is nothing, including himself, that he does not laugh at.
This denial of laughter, that Nietzche spotted in the Christian tradition and so deeply loathed, is to our contemporaries not loathsome but baffling. We do not live in an age of restraint; rather we embrace indulgence. We value feeling above thinking, spontaneity over planning. Our Only sacred cow is that there are no sacred cows. There is an anti-authority, subversive spirit about.
After all, how many right-wing comedians are there?
Friday, 6 March 2009
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4 comments:
Swift?
In the current battle over the soul of the Republican Party in the US, one of the lines has been to deprecate Rush Limbaugh as "an entertainer" rather than a proper political actor. But I'm not sure that he's been called a comedian.
Yes. Swift... very wise. There is a kind of conservative misanthropy that is very very funny.
P.J. O'Rourke and Mark Steyn spring to mind, though they are both anti-authoritarian in their way.
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