[ecrea] CFP: ASA 2015: The (Re)production of Misery and the Ways of Resistance

Not Funny, Not Fun: Unlaughter, Anti-Jokes, and the Empire’s Others



Let us think about contemporary subjects who do not laugh and refuse to 
have fun according to popular culture: feminists (really, women in 
general), the devout (but Muslims specifically), and career activists 
(especially activists of color). In classical comedy, the non-laughing 
subject, often a braggart or a pedant with his excess of bile, was an 
essential foil for the fun-loving civil subjects who would triumph in 
love and fortune at the end. Daniel Wickberg has tracked the rise of 
“sense of humor" as a quality required of the newly flexible bourgeois 
subject in the late capitalist West. This rise has inevitably depended 
on the creation of various others with undesirable communicative 
performances, marked by unlaughter, and an unwillingness to make or take 
a joke. While laughter and jokes have been studied in depth in various 
fields, most notably Folklore, unlaughter – not simply the absence of 
laughter but a definite response on its own right, according to Moira 
Smith – deserves more scrutiny.


This proposed panel seeks to explore how ideas about lack of humor have 
functioned and continue to operate in transnational context as a 
resource for the construction of normative American identities. It also 
asks how various subgenres of anti-humor, unlaughter, and anti-joking 
can mark moments of resistance or operate as resignations to the order, 
locally and globally.


Please submit paper abstracts (250 words) and brief C.V. to Perin Gurel 
((pgurel /at/ nd.edu)) by January 22, 2015.


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Perin Gurel, Ph.D
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Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN
Yale Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religions



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