Laugh it Up

What better to do on a Saturday night than maybe wax a little philosophical? Well - admittedly being out doing something raucous might be good too, but given I have a corker of a flu and neat shot of Bushmills to tame it with, a brief philosophical meander seems like just the thing.

I just got in from seeing Hotel Rwanda with my friend Mitch and, besides its truly moving portrait of one man's courage in the face of peril, impossible odds and the Western world's general indifference, it also got me to thinking about something else - the relationship between hatred and humor.

While that might seem trite on the surface, bear with me for a few and maybe we can all sort this one out together.

One thing that both the film and any number of books (not the least of which is Philip Gourevitch's terribly beautiful "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families") point out is that the ethnologic and cultural differences between a Tutsi and a Hutu is (or maybe more accurately WAS) so small as to be irrelevant. Then enter those sexy, beer-brewing, colonialism-loving Belgians and suddenly you had a country whose social and political lines were defined by 'ethnic' distinctions.

These ethnic distinctions had risen in the 19th century when ethnographers, with a zeal for measuring things like the width of a nose or the ratio of cheek to jowl, had sought to prove that Tutsis were members of a lost Christian tribe. Naturally a colonial government would glom on to this as an organizing principle and, well, the results of it all were, all at once writ large in consequence and shamefully small in news coverage and international action when it all came to a head in 1994.

800,000 Tutsis were killed and yet, somehow, the world kept turning on its axis.

A similar thing had happened not too many years before in Yugoslavia when Serbs and Croats had bent their ploughshares into swords and, with varying degrees of success, decided to do away with one another. Here, again, two groups who had shared the same land and were (essentially) homogeneous - though I'm sure that any nationalist-minded Serb or Croat reading this will be happy to kick my ass for saying so.

And that's where I begin my slow turn towards where comedy and hatred meet - and I don't mean amateur night at Caroline's! (ha!)

It all comes down to how we define ourselves.

As an amateur who has spent the last ten years studying humor and what it means I've come across a few things that suggest that the very same things that make us able to laugh at one another (perhaps force us to) are the very same things that make us able to kill one another in such droves.

Freud talked about "The narcissism of minor difference" - the notion that the smaller the difference is between two people (or peoples) the larger that difference would loom in their imagination; in short "what makes me ME is the thing that makes me not YOU". The width of my nose, my accent, my favorite band, my urbane sensibility versus your hayseed love of country music.

While distinctions like these are seemingly minor they are the thin edge of the wedge for both brutal ethnic conflicts and what is generally known as humor of 'the other' - and we all traffic in it. They are distinctions that give rise, equally, to a (harmless?) Polish or Farmer joke and a Serb's certainty that to be more Serbian I must define what about me is NOT Croatian or a Hutu's ability to methodically kill Tutsis from dusk until dawn.

The thing that both manifestations - the humorous and the hateful - have in common is that in defining the 'other' they also reinforce the sense of belonging in one's own group. The problem is that the former is generally dispensed with over a drink and the latter leads to war, murder, rape and ethnic cleansing.

I guess some people just don't know when they've taken a joke too far.

Comments

[FLUTE]

While not addressing the subject at hand ... hatred and humor ... which I certainly feel is extraordinarily fertile ground for thought and writing, but rather the subject of trend towards global genocide (Rwanda and the Balkans in particular) of the past 20 some years, may I suggest that you read the following extraordinarily powerful, moving, and courage book:

"A Problem from Hell"
America and the Age of Genocide

by Samantha Power
(she has long been associated with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard)

[Biz]

Wait...you went out with Mitch when you could have been with me?

[Mitch]

Wait...who's Biz?

[FLUTE]

now, now ... no catfights ... i'm sure that there is more than enough of our man N to go around ... and around ...