Miriam Katz is an art curator who has taken on the task of bringing comedy into the serious and overly academic artworld. On March 19th 2011, she was the curator of a “showcase of experimental comedy” at MOMA P.S. 1. As Martha Schwender of the The Village Voice points out in an article entitled “Have you Heard the One About the Art Scene Embracing Comedians?” Katz included comic performers such as Jon Glaser, David Hill, Jenny Slate, Reggie Watts, Maeve Higgins, and Rory Scovel in her art show.
Echoing Miriam Katz, Martha Schwender demurs on what happens when “comedians are being presented as artists?” Will there be a collision?
What I found interesting about her article’s presentation of Katz’s project was its insistence on the link between trauma, comedy, and thoughtful reflection.
Schwender, citing Katz, notes that “comedy is much less safe than art.” Literally and figuratively. Apparently, there are more starving comedians than starving artists. Art has become too smug with itself and now “comedy is a model for artists who feel art has become to academic or safe.” The world of comedy is a dangerous space and those who live in it take more risks that are typical of those who dwell in the artworld.
But here is the problem. Comedy is unreflective and forgetful. Citing Katz, Schwender writes: “Laugher obliterates the memory of what took place, so people don’t sit down and write a response, aside from ‘Check it out, its so awesome!”
This, Katz argues, is problematic. Comedians are “hungry for critical feedback.”
In other words, comedians want us to think about comedy and share our thoughts with them.
At the end of this piece, Schwender, echoing Katz, gives her own reflection on comedy. She notes that when comedians do well on stage they say that they “kill.” This, I would add, is similar to the Borscht Belt expression of ‘knocking them dead.” Or “blowing them away.”
What do they mean by such language? Does the comedian have a violent and antagonistic relationship with her audience?
Schwender doesn’t give a direct answer. Instead, she demonstrates that comedy is not all lightness and fun; death and mortality are themes in contemporary comedy: “(Andy) Kaufman talked about faking his own death…Zadie Smith..uses her own hapless father as an example of comedy triumphing over mortality: Her father “missed his own death” because he died in mid-sentence, “joking with his nurse.”
But does comedy really triumph over reality? Is comedy redemptive? Schwender seems to suggest as much here. It takes us through the darkness and leads us to light.
Schwender ends the piece with a suggestion of hope; namely, a new era of art. What Dada was to WWII, Katz’s new efforts will be to our current post-traumatic situation: “Our own art-comedy moment feels rooted in a similarly apocalyptic soil: wars, natural disasters, and nasty elections. Four years ago, skulls were the leitmotifs in art, clustered in paintings or crushed with diamonds. Now, laughter is taking over.”
But what does this mean? Is Miriam Katz awakening us to a messianic-kind of Dadaist comic-epoch which has found its birth in 2011, in Manhattan? And how do we “reflect” on this post-traumatic comic moment? Do we find redemption in it? Does comedy, dark comedy of the Andy Kaufmann variety, offer redemption or catharsis?
In search of an answer, I went to hear from Katz herself. I found an interview with Katz in BOMBLOG. The interview took place recently and focuses on her new podcast project. Since her exhibition, Katz created a website with monthly podcasts of comedians reflecting on their work: http://www.breakdownshow.com/about/
The website is called Breakdowns. The name is apropos as it hints at an emotional breakdown and a reflective breakdown of the (comic) breakdown. But, and here is the question, is reflection on comedic-slash-traumatic comedy redemptive? Must all comedy, worth anything, be thought of in this way?
In her interview with Sam Korman in BOMBLOG, we get a better picture of her understanding of the relationship of comedy-slash-trauma and reflection.
http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/7063
Blogging on February 15th, Korman leads the way to the question of comedy and redemption when he associates Katz’s art project (and his own interview) with going into the depths of darkness by way of the comedian but, in the end, finding “our way back…redeemed.” He suggests that his interview and her comic-art project are a mythic type of journey into and out of darkness.
When first asked why “comedy is so important,” Katz gives an answer that speaks to trauma and reflection. She notes that comedy gives people relief, is critical and fun, and allows for “difficult truths to emerge.”
Her challenge to the artworld is to be critical “in a joyous way” instead of being too serious and academic. And comedy makes this joyous type of criticism possible (which sounds much like what Friedrich Nietzsche called “Gay Science”).
But, toward the middle and end of the interview, Katz shifts and gives us a picture of comedy that is not redemptive. First of all, she notes the position of the comedian to the audience is not a mutual catharsis. Rather, “structurally we (the audience) are arbitrary. The comic just wants the sounds coming from our bodies.” All she wants is the audience to have a “bit more agency or influence.” The little freedom she wants for “us” inheres in our “critical” response to comedy. The act itself, however, harbors no agency. Its just bodies responding in space to humor.
Korman is not satisfied with this kind of answer, so, later in the interview, he tries to bring in another philosophical angle. He demurs that when one laughs at oneself, one becomes a listener. This relation would be redemptive.
In response, Katz notes that this would be equivalent to standing outside of oneself and looking at oneself from a birds-eye-view: “That’s so weird and cool: making yourself laugh. It forces you to ask, who’s that?”
For Katz, this seems to be a moment of ambivalence and self-alienation; not a moment of self-recognition. It is traumatic.
What’s of more interest to her, it seems, is the relationship between the audience and the comedian: not what it means, but what happens.
(As Walter Benjamin once wrote in his Kafka essay, “attention is the silent prayer of the soul.” This attention, I would add, is to what happens-as-it-happens.)
Katz ends the interview with a paradoxical reflection. When you laugh there is relief (and I would add that this is cathartic and redemptive); however, she contradicts this when she says: “there’s also no escape. It forces you to admit things about your limitations and about what you really want.”
The fact that we cannot “escape” ourselves and that we are forced to admit things about ourselves and our desires is a shameful moment. On the contrary, there is no relief.
Comedy, in other words, forces us to be uncomfortable. It exposes us to our mortality and our desires (whether frustrated, failed, sick, or what have you).
But this isn’t the comedy we see on The Daily Show, Jimmy Fallon, David Letterman, or Saturday Night Live; no, it’s the disturbing kind of comedy we find in comedians like Andy Kaufmann and Lenny Bruce. The comedy she is talking about is the variety that makes us chuckle while feeling uneasy in our skins.
And this is what we see in this Andy Kaufmann video, which I posted in yesterday’s blog:
Bringing a critical understanding of comedy can help us to understand what comedy does to us, but it can’t redeem us. Nonetheless, it can spur us to act. The schlemiel faces us, in a Levinasian sense (which I mentioned in the previous blog entry) with the “demand of the hour.” Our choice to act, to decide, follows in the wake of our comic exposure to ourselves, the other, and to the hour (our situation).
This, I would argue, is the agency that Miriam Katz is trying to find for her comic audience. Our freedom follows the comic breakdown.
Freedom and critical reflection are in the wake of the schlemiel’s oblique prophesy.
Schlemiel Theory 