What’s in a Joke? On Norm, Bob, and Humor as Artistic Emancipation
Like lying, when we joke we don’t mean what we say, so what distinguishes a joke from a lie?
Hello everyone! It’s been a while. I’ve actually had the following essay prepared since my last newsletter, but back when I originally planned to share it a public complaint was filed in New York State summoning Dylan to answer to accusations of sexual misconduct dating back to the 60’s, which he denies. Then, on the eve of my second attempt at publishing the essay Norm Macdonald unexpectedly passed away due to cancer. Then, I lost my will to write. This essay explores the “joke” model of artistic appreciation by drawing connections between Dylan and Macdonald (and funnily enough, after Norm’s passing a mere conjecture I made in the original essay was confirmed!). Though I find great fulfillment from writing about my personal passions, it is also difficult to discern what is valuable because I love it and what might be valuable for other people. So, hopefully I have some combination of that here. Thanks to those of you who signed up after reading my first essay and I hope future work won’t face such delays.
In my first piece I argued that debates surrounding artistic originality and appropriation often presuppose a model of art as a method of testimony: as reflecting or referring to what an artist or author really believes, feels, or intends. On this model, art is valuable to the extent that the artist successfully communicates what is true. The “testimony” model of artistic appreciation helps explain why instances of non-obvious appropriation are judged by audiences as a type of artistic deception, or a lie (the opposite of testimony). Artists are blameworthy when they present work as if it is original, or reflects their true perspective and/or experiences. However, audiences would be hard-pressed to find a work of art that does not draw in some way on other works, and many highly praised artists have drawn on other images and reproductive technologies in constructing their “masterpieces.” Thus, originality is an epistemic, rather than aesthetic, value. I proposed that appropriation should be understood on the model of a joke, which shares many similarities with lies but is importantly a matter of mutual trust, rather than the truth. This second essay continues exploring the similarities and differences between lying and joking, with a focus on Dylan’s “written” forms of appropriation: his 2004 memoir Chronicles and 2017 speech for the Nobel prize for literature.
In this essay I’m going to expand further on the claim that appropriation art is a joke and that the successfulness of a joke is not merely a matter of its veracity. Instead, successful humor is ultimately a product of trust. I hope to convince you that the artistic model of a joke is a richer model for thinking and talking about artistic value in contexts where originality - or accuracy - present themselves as pressing. We need not tell the truth in order to make others laugh - but we can still be held accountable for our sense of humor. So, what distinguishes a joke from a lie?
Lying is a way we use language to manipulate others, to get them to do or believe what we want without their consent - a form of social control. Kant famously condemned lying as universally prohibited because the liar treats other human beings as mere means for their own ends. Further, lying is illogical because it involves the manipulation of the very conditions that make communication possible in the first place: trust and charity. Liars take advantage of the trust afforded to them by their audience: the assumption that people mean what they say which makes us vulnerable to their lying. The assumption that others’ utterances reflect what they think, feel, or plan operate as the “default” social conditions that allow communication to “get off the ground” in the first place. Lying exploits these default conditions, the symmetry in vulnerability at the heart of successful communication, because one person acts as if they are saying what they believe in order to convince the other person to form false beliefs based on that false information - in the words of Nancy Baier: the liar seeks to exploit our goodwill. We feel betrayed when we discover we have been lied to because we have made ourselves vulnerable in the expectation the other person is doing so as well - that we and our interlocutors are committed to the things we say and claim, can be held accountable to them and liable to be challenged - the game gets going because everyone has something to lose.
We feel anger, resentment, hostility, and betrayal towards people that have taken advantage of our trust and goodwill: taking advantage of our vulnerability, while preserving their own vulnerability in return. Likewise, artists that are revealed to have borrowed or used material from other works without making it obvious offend us in their refusal to be aesthetically vulnerable - the conditions that underly our judgements of authenticity, and perhaps even effort. Art is risky and true artists take risks. If you have nothing to lose, where’s the risk?
Much of my thinking in regards to art and trust has been informed by C. Thi Nguyen’s work. Nguyen argues that, in the aesthetic domain, trust serves as a background that helps explain why we are motivated to learn more about an artist, to give an artist more of our time and effort in the attempt to better understand their work - to accurately judge and evaluate it. Aesthetic trust, unlike general interpersonal trust, is such that we do not acknowledge artists or their artworks as responsible to us, as individuals. Instead, we trust them to be responsible to themselves and to aesthetic value (rather than monetary value, popularity, or sheer controversy). Nguyen understands aesthetic trust as sensitivity to what he calls aesthetic “sincerity” which is their commitment to act from evaluations of aesthetic value - what would be best, aesthetically speaking. Further, sincerity - like authenticity - demands that one be responsible to their own “individual” aesthetic sensibilities too, rather than merely doing what the fans, the marketing strategies, or the media tells them to do.
Comedy the same way. Superiority and vulnerability.
I don’t see much distinction in appealing to sincerity versus vulnerability, as it seems like being responsible to oneself, rather than the market analysis, also involves taking on a higher degree of responsibility for the aesthetic content of the work, and its subsequent success or failure. So, sincerity just is another form of vulnerability - which is why irony is the haven for the superficially invulnerable. That being said, jokes are not typically seen as a method for sincere communication, and a joke interpreted in sincerity can surely offend. To defend what we said as, “only a joke” just is to reinforce that we’re not being sincere, but sincerity isn’t necessary anyway. A joke can have elements of sincerity, of course, and there is something about a comedian’s “sincerity” that aides in our trusting them - though what that involves is not as easy to articulate as it is to discern.
A jokester also manipulates their audience’s trust and thus the conditions that support communication. But what distinguishes a lie from a joke, or a magic trick, is the audience’s trust and expectation that there is a point to the “deception” on that they can both recognize and appreciate. Everyone benefits from the supposedly selfish act. Mark Twain argued that lies were not only permissible, but necessary for creatures like us. We lie when we smile at a stranger, but the worse lies are lies to ourselves, including lying about the naturalness of lying itself. As Ted Cohen notes in his brilliant book Jokes, the function of joking is one of intimacy and bonding - it is a wholly social phenomenon. A successful joke increases trust between a jokester and the audience, rather than undermines it. I think particularly skillful comedians such as Richard Pryor, are so in part because they demonstrate vulnerability (sincerely?) and thus trustworthiness - we can trust Pryor when we makes a joke about “hillbillies” that he is not doing so from a position of moral or absolute superiority - as a way to belittle or mock them, because he has already made insulting jokes about himself. Pryor demonstrates a vulnerability that audiences then afford him a higher degree of trust, which then allows him to “violate” otherwise entrenched norms or conventions, including what sorts of language is appropriate for mainstream, predominantly white audiences.
Pryor’s ability to quickly and efficiently convey his trustworthiness establishes him as a successful comedian - audiences let him get away with more, and because of that he transformed the very rules of comedy, particularly racially-themed comedy intended for mixed audiences. Pryor could speak in a way that was generally reserved for members of his community, and in using that language he doesn’t aim to alienate the audience, but to convey that he treats his audience like a close friend. The joke model reveals that skilled comedians can say or use phrases that are otherwise prohibited because they successfully convey that the joke is not meant to mock or belittle, that it is meant to cause shame rather than laughter. This is a point related to my “theory” of humor, that I will write an essay about at some point as well.
not really into this guy, but i hear the kids are
In order for us to joke with other people, we have to trust that they will understand or “get” that we are joking (if we say something possibly offensive) and the joke itself (that they have the relevant background experiences). For me to make a silly face in order to get you to laugh presupposes that I know that you know such faces are not appropriate, at the same time I trust that you can come to appreciate how my being “inappropriate” is harmless, enjoyable, or funny - it is for your benefit as well. Jokes that offend work best when the point of the joke is to laugh with its target, not merely at (and a Kantian insight shows up yet again). The audiences must trust that the jokester is not demonstrating lack of respect or understanding of the relevant expectations in saying something inappropriate or misleading. Pryor isn’t using racial slurs in order to cause white audience to feel uncomfortable and alienated, it is to make them feel like they are familiar with him, that there is already a sense of kinship. Joking is a matter of mutual trust and it is this that enables the jokester (like the appropriator) to get away with more than we would otherwise allow. This trust is essential in art’s ability to transcend and thus revolutionize our appreciative and social practices.
Importantly, focusing on trust as the transformative feature that makes an otherwise offensive phrase or expression permissible or funny changes the conversation about the ethical dimensions of jokes from questions about intention, consequences, or the “meaning” of the words. Instead, it is about what matters for establishing trust and accountability, how our trust is influenced in a myriad of subtle and overt ways. As Nguyen has shown, trust is a matter of familiarity and often chronology - we are more likely to trust whatever we are most familiar with, whatever we were exposed to earlier. And familiarity or chronology has no bearing on the truth or their actual trustworthiness.
Our trust is mediated by our social and material environments, by signifiers of social status, including age, class, and institutional affiliation. Social practices of marking trustworthy sources reveals that we take trust to be a sort of distributive good: we have to mark certain people or social roles as more or less trustworthy or else individuals would spend too much time trying to evaluate various equally trustworthy sources. So, academic degrees and professional certifications establish someone as more trustworthy in a given domain, to signal that others are thereby less trustworthy. Professional comedians might get an extra “dose” of trust almost by default, by the very fact that they are performing on stage in the context of the comedy show. Context does matter, but as a side-effect of our practices of giving and withholding trust - something that informs who and how much we trust.
Our degrees of trust toward others can be determined by factors like their (and ours) social status, history, familiarity, cultural background, reputation, or affiliation with a public institution or entity. If we think that an artist has successfully used appropriation to further meaningful ends, then we are more likely to trust (and expect) that future works will as well. The same is true on the side of the Courts: if someone has a reputation or standing as a parody or appropriation artist, then they are more likely to withstand potential lawsuits. Further, our expectations and understandings of artistic responsibility are informed by the artistic genre or category in which we take the artistic or work to belong. But as Nathan Fielder has shown, this also causes us to be easily exploited and misled. Importantly, I think artistic categories or genres also function to calibrate our expectations and thus how we approach an artwork and how or whether we trust a particular artist, or art kind.
Consider the literary genre of the memoir, a book written as a straightforward retelling of the author’s experiences and history. A memoir is a canonical example of a work of nonfiction, where the assumption is that its contents reflect historical events and operate like testimony from or about its subject matter, which in conventional models is explained by the fact that the contents of the work are true. One reads a memoir in order to form true beliefs about the subject matter, typically from the subject’s own perspective (rather than how they feel about those events or how other people interpret them).
Bob Dylan’s 2004 memoir Chronicles, Vol. I was a New York Times bestseller praised for its lyrical prose and expressive quality. The book was eagerly anticipated as it promised to provide a “first hand account” of important times in Dylan’s career, including his notorious rise in New York City during the peak of the 60’s social revolution, his experience in and out of the folk scene, and, of course, his personal life. However, some fans and bibliographers quickly took issue with various details in the book, which ranged from seemingly inaccurate timeframes to what could only be classified as either poor memory or straight fiction.
In 2006, historian and blogger Ed Cook published a series of blog posts purporting to have discovered various textual “borrowings” in Chronicles, including phrases from Mark Twain and Marcel Proust. Since then he has teamed up with “New Mexico DJ” Scott Warmuth to extensively identify and annotate Dylan’s sources for Chronicles and they have discovered that a rather large and ever-growing percentage of Chronicles is composed of lines and phrases drawn from other places. Dylan has paradoxically written a personal narrative composed of other people’s sentiments.
What makes Dylan’s work of creative fiction marketed as a memoir different than James Frey’s publicly-maligned A Million Little Pieces which was likewise marketed as a memoir only for it to be revealed that he “lifted” whole passages and scenarios from other sources? Frey’s book is now touted as “semi-fictional” while Dylan’s is ranked among the 100 greatest rock memoirs of all time. Is the difference merely one of celebrity or clout?
Warmuth is an invaluable source on the identity and extent of Dylan’s appropriation in all of Dylans works, going back as far as 2008. Warmuth, like me, does this not do this as a way to condemn Dylan’s works or “prove” that his genius is merely stolen, but as a way to enrich the “Bob Dylan artistic universe” so to speak. Warmuth has suggested that Dylan’s heavy appropriation is not a lie, but a “puzzle” that he wants audiences to discover and solve. For Warmuth, there is a “code” or deeper significance to Dylan’s patterns of appropriation, which allows Warmuth to discern when certain passages are likely borrowed. Warmuth’s Pinterest and Twitter pages contain a continuously updated catalog of sources from Chronicles, as well as images for Dylan’s paintings, his interviews, and even the script for Dylan’s 2003 film, Masked and Anonymous. Warmuth suggests that Dylan is often conveying images of a certain slice of American life and a nostalgic experience, one that is culturally mediated and so not always or universally recognizable. I am not interested in whether Dylan’s appropriation is a puzzle that we are supposed to solve, though I do agree that it is not supposed to be an absolute secret.
When reading a memoir, we assume - or more accurately - trust that the author is relaying the relevant and important information to the best of their ability. In doing this we treat the content of a memoir like a form of testimony, something we use as the basis of beliefs about events and items that we do not have first-hand experience of or acquaintance with. This trust is a necessary part of the implicit contract that makes a given work a memoir rather than a creative exercise, it informs how we interpret and treat its contents. The author, in committing to writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, understands themselves to be accountable to their audience on the basis of their accuracy, how well they abide by the rules of the game of writing a memoir. The (often implicit) trust that what we are being presented with can function as testimony is what marks something as nonfiction. This is why the revelation that a memoir is not an accurate retelling of the author’s experiences causes audiences and critics to be offended and often leads to public retractions, clarifications, or even professional repercussions.
If Chronicles had been classified as a lyrical memoir, loosely based on Dylan’s experiences in the Sixties and beyond, would audiences be less likely to balk at its heavy use of appropriation? What if it contained extensive footnotes noting and citing every source? Perhaps the book is better understood as conveying moods and experiences, rather than describing them - the latter of which functions as testimony when we use it to form beliefs about “what things were really like.” Obviously, Dylan didn’t fully inform his editor or publishers that the work contained lines from other sources, but perhaps he didn’t think he needed to. Is this a failure of his duties as an author, his publisher’s editorial staff, or our expectations as appreciators?
My roommate was reading Norm Macdonald’s 2016 memoir, Based on a True Story: A Memoir, which as it turns out is not so much a factual description or retelling of Macdonald’s life, but a book-length collection of jokes, loosely based around actual events in his life, such as his audition for Saturday Night Live. Reviews of Norm’s book are largely positive, though they make sure to note that the book is only a memoir in name, and audiences are not offered a sincere peek behind the curtain, or insight into Macdonald’s private thoughts. Macdonald, of course, has a long-standing reputation as a comedian and so the discovery that his memoir is in fact a series of jokes is immediately apparent, even if we originally expected the book to be historical testimony.
The literary form of the memoir seems to trade on the expectation that audiences will get a private access to never-before-discussed topics and experiences. Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis famously described losing his virginity to a prostitute at his father’s behest. Monica Lewinsky was finally given the platform to share her side of the story. Presidents are expected to write memoirs, and they seem to have a stronger duty to report events as they happened, as their memoirs do function as historical record. Does any public figure with a large enough following incur the duties of a government official or academic researcher? Lay audiences often judge Dylan as a shining example of the innovation of the 60’s counter-culture, a wholly-original American artist, worthy of cross-generational fame and success, ideals that are very serious indeed and thus treated as antithetical to such extensive appropriation. Joking, on the other hand, naturally brings with it a degree of unreality and un-seriousness. If Macdonald were to do a comedic performance composed entirely of other people’s jokes, we’d interpret it as a joke about jokes. What if Dylan is not the genius of originality, nor the cryptic puzzle maker, but the perineal joker, failing to take anything, even his own reputation or the duties of a Nobel Prize ceremony, seriously?
In fact, I think the similarities between appropriation and joking run deeper than these two memoirs. Consider Dylan’s recent collaboration with Martin Scorsese on the 2019 Netflix “documentary” Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. Note that the title of the film specifies it as a “Bob Dylan story” and in retrospect the title functions as a wink to the film’s content. The subject matter of the film is Dylan’s famous 1976’s US Tour composed of a traveling group of artists including other musicians such as Joan Baez, T Booker William, as well as artists like Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, and violinist Scarlett Rivera. Dubbed “The Rolling Thunder Revue” Dylan intended for the tour to resemble a 19th century touring revue company. Fans “in the know” are aware that the tour was also documented by famed documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, who filmed the documentary Don’t Look Back and whose notable absence, or more specifically recasting as David Lynch-type character Van Dorp, was at least my first major clue that everything wasn’t as I expected. Within 20 minutes of the film I realized something fishy was gong on - most of the well-known and in some cases well-documented elements of the tour were either misrepresented or completely absent.
General audiences were shocked to find out that most of the contemporary interviews, characters, and events in the film were for the most part, completely fictional. Further, Dylan himself is in the film providing interviews and false information backed with actual historical film footage in which he is the central figure. Sharon Stone even makes an appearance as herself claiming that her and Dylan met and hung out during the tour, at a time when she would have been a teenager. The film turned out to be a mockumentary disguised as nonfiction: a work in the tradition of Rob Reiner’s film This is Spinal Tap assumed to be following in the steps of Dylan and Scorsese’s last encounter, the 2005 nonfiction documentary No Direction Home.
The difference, as I see it, is that audiences approach Reiner’s film knowing it is a mockumentary, whereas Scorsese’s film exploited its audience’s expectations in order to blur the line between the two cinematic traditions, and thus the fiction/nonfiction divide itself. Documentaries are of course canonical examples of nonfiction - typically treated as historical documents and thus a form of testimony. But, of course, documentary films incorporate varying degrees of fictionality - from editing techniques to choices in who and what they depict, not to mention documentaries that attempt to pass off as spontaneous capture what is in fact scripted performance. Philosophers working in the philosophy of documentary have spent decades trying to outline what criteria or properties mark a film as genuine nonfiction while acknowledging the varying ways in which documentary films incorporate fictional elements. I think the joke model shows how the entire debate is misguided.
I watched RTR with the expectation that there would be heavy use of material from Dylan’s famous but unpublished 4-hour surrealist film Renaldo and Clara. That film is also part dramatic narrative, part concert footage, and part “fake” documentary of various backstage affairs, starring Dylan, Joan Baez, and Dylan’s then-wife all playing “versions” of themselves. The film was only publicly shown once, in France, but as a pathological Dylan fan of course I’ve seen it. The film is the reason why there is so much video footage from the ’76 tour, footage that Scorsese’s film appropriates into a wholly new and confounding narrative. Soon after I realized that the film would not be a straightforward retelling, however, I began finding it incredibly funny and enjoyable: I just let it wash over me. Dylan is making fun of himself, having fun with his own history, and giving us an insight into who he is - on his own terms and with some kick-ass concert footage along the way. Again, the appropriation is a joke, and the joke is on the rules and responsibilities of the artform: like memoirs, documentaries are meant to be historical retellings, able to be treated as testimony, liable to be used as evidence in court (consider that Robert Hurst HBO documentary).
via Rolling Stone
Naturally, people felt duped and confused, articles were written, and many fans in the Dylan fan forum thought that the fictive elements detracted from the value of the documented footage as a historical record of the time period. Audiences were once again promised a special insight into a mythical and mysterious public figure and once again they were denied, an artistic slap in the face where audiences found themselves to be butt of the joke rather than the ones laughing.
Did Dylan and Scorsese (or Netflix) willfully deceive us? Why not say straight out that the film is more fiction than fact? Well, where’s the fun in that? To promote the film as a fictional mockumentary would have spoiled the punchline and revealed the magic trick. The first scene of the film is a man performing a magic trick, followed by the phrase “conjuring” the Rolling Thunder Revue. Magic, like humor, is a means of willful deception, and its success is a matter of trust - audiences allow the artist to bend or violate the natural and social laws because they trust that they do so for a point or purpose that (ideally, at least) vindicates the deception. The film invites us to engage in willful deception with the trust that, like a magic trick, the payoff will be worth it. It also provides multiple experiences - offering something different if one dares to watch it again. If what audiences care about are the salacious details about backstage affairs and disputes, they will have to read the unauthorized biographies. If they want to understand the essence of the organic entity that was this mystical turned mythical tour, then this is what the film provides, if only a peek.
Again, the difference between Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder and a film like Best in Show is found in the audience: we have the right background information to readily recognize they are scripted bits masquerading as nonfiction documentaries. Art is a matter of historical tradition - art is always referencing other art. The historical nature of art helps explain why the film needed to operate in disguise. Someone transported from 1957 and wholly unfamiliar with Christopher Guest’s works or the genre of fake-documentary would easily mistake Waiting For Guffman or The Office for nonfiction, and might feel offended or upset when or if they discovered it what they were show was in fact scripted performances. They might also fail to “get it” if you explained to them that the works are employing the techniques of a documentary in order to be funny - they might ask, echoing critics of Dylan’s film: well, what’s the point in doing that?
Given that funniness is a matter of familiarity and understanding, jokes are also notoriously subjective and culturally-relative. An explicit disclaimer at the start of Rolling Thunder Revue clarifying that the events depicted are largely fictional would detract from the significance of its magic trick as a marker of a particular moment in our art-historical traditions, that it is an inside joke, funny to those who know enough about the tour and trust that the misdirection has some further point to it beyond mere deception. Scorsese’s film also reveals that Dylan’s appropriation is without limits: so ravenous as to become cannibalistic, not even his own words and images are immune. Isn’t Dylan allowed to be playful with his own image? What do we care about more - historical testimony or aesthetic authenticity?
In the next/final part of this essay, I consider the relationship between an artist’s public role and their private convictions, and examine in more detail the history of appropriation.