18 February 2008: "The State of Bro Comedy in 2k9"

This post is about humor as a form of ideological discipline. As Carles notes, "The ’stuff u find funnie’ is just as important as the mp3s on your iPod" -- in other words, it is just as integral to intersubjectivity and the reflexive comprehension of situated identity in the personal sense.

After pointing out with a deceptive blandness, "We are all searching for media that ‘makes us laugh’ without having to think about ‘why we are laughing at it,’" Carles asks, rhetorically: "Is there something inside of alts that feel the need to 'fit in' and find this humor 'funnie'?" But this is a trick question, the answer is that there is something outside of us -- the prerogatives of the culture industry -- that we imagine comes from the inside because it becomes bound up with a spontaneous, natural-seeming physiological process: breaking into laughter.

But is this merely the laughter of the Medusa? For as Carles points out, this specific form of "bro" humor, so prevalent in our contemporary spatio-socio-historical formation, is integral to male homosocial bonding, "fitting in." And the form it takes -- "‘poop+curse+reference from the past+extreme sexual innuendo’" employs a volatile admixture of nostalgia, the pornographic, the scopophilic, the scatological, and the coprophilic, entirely appropriate for staving off the feminist interrogation of repressive patriarchal codes of masculinity, which has found itself in crisis. Men are laughing, but they don't know why -- perhaps it is a reaction-formation of fear pushing down the emerging conscious intimations that their masculinist humor is a repressed expression of homosexual love. Carles is explicit about this, coining a neologism to taxonomize this particular comedic form: "BRO MAINSTREAMER BUTT BUDDY FGGT COMEDY."

As Cixous has so trenchantly pointed out, "the phallogocentric sublation is with us, and it's militant, regenerating the old patterns, anchored in the dogma of castration." Comedian Weird Al's nose job, as Carles suggests, is just a figuration of this castration, a self-defeating effort to transform cultural neutering at the hands of patriarchal rigidity into humor.

How this inscribes itself on contemporay culture, Carles hints, is through an enforced "zaniness," as joyless as the rote laughter it extorts from anxious male audiences, who want to subject "’sad, dumb people’" to rites of exclusion (laughing at them) in order to safeguard their own precarious sense of fixture in the given cultural matrix -- "to realize that life is precious in a meaningless way." These anxious bodies, molded through the culture industry into a demographic, then purchase comedy records whose sale has sparked Carles' ruminations:

Do you plan on listening to this album for the rest of your life? Or will you just put it on when you feel like having a laugh? Or is there something inside of you that wants to create bro-humor + be an alphaBro who makes the ppl laugh?

Again, the subtle reference to "inside," to the depth psychology so essential to this given construct of masculinity. And continuing laughing they must, lest they hear the abject maternal snickering back at them. "You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and laughing...."