2.2 Final.Indd
The Power of the Carnival Satirist: Taking Laughter Seriously David Charles Rollins College Spontaneous theatre forms, such as street theatre, short-form improvisation, and community-based performances, unmistakably share a common and pervasive audience response: laughter. As Jerry Palmer observes in Taking Humour Seriously, humor and laughter are key elements of most human communication to some degree. “[L]isten to any conversation and it is full of jokes, puns, humourous allusions, [and] word play for the sake of it,” he writes (1). Theatrical enterprises undoubtedly refl ect and magnify this all-too-human fondness for wit and whimsy, and yet many do not engage in the pursuit of laughter merely “for the sake of it.” Improvisational performance practices, in particular, historically heighten and exploit this innate communicative tendency to a serious end. Hidden beneath the frequently overt comedic façade often lurks a more politicized agenda predicated on a particular form of laughter—that of the carnival satirist. Russian literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, explicates the notion of this playful clown fi gure operating in the highly participatory world of the carnival, a world that “brings together, unifi es, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignifi cant, the wise with the stupid” (Problems 123). The carnivalesque, as a performance site and mode, offers a highly dialogic realm with its tireless satiric employment and redeployment of the symbols of the oppressor and oppressed alike. In Bakhtin’s paradigmatic carnival- inspired playground, messiness supplants order, playful laughter combats dogmatic seriousness, and spontaneous surprise undermines authoritative control.
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