Ah, April Fools’ Day! It’s the one day of the year on which many of us fully embrace our inner court jester, proudly embodying it for the rest of the world to experience and, hopefully, enjoy. A day filled with pranks and tricks, laughter and mirth, carnivalesque tomfoolery, and above all, humor. When most of us think of “The Funny,” we likely hold it up as the antithesis of “The Serious.” The first mode of being is one to be shared with family, friends, and maybe that one cool coworker or Teaching Fellow; the latter is characterized by formality and strictness. But the line between “The Funny” and “The Serious” is much more blurry than it might seem at first glance. The Independent spoke to three Harvard professors who are exploring the boundaries of this dichotomy to discover the importance of humor and how the serious and the satirical often interact with and depend upon each other.
Dr. Katherine Leach teaches in Harvard’s Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures where she studies medieval and early modern healing practices. While her research is not directly focused on humor, she often encounters humorous remedies and charms while poring over antique manuscripts. “Having a sense of humor is not a new thing,” emphasizes Leach. “Some of these charms were probably copied down because they’re amusing and because they’re funny.” In true April Fools’ fashion, she mentions that she sometimes encounters scatological prank spells such as, “a recipe for making a candle so that you can make someone fart when they light a candle. Or like a candle that can’t be extinguished, not even by the strongest fart. So that kind of stuff is funny.”
Part of Leach’s work is exploring the often fluid boundaries between science, magic, and religion. This involves taking seriously things that might today be considered absurd or illogical; some charms, she says, “are funny and it feels like maybe they were meant to be funny. Some of them are funny to us, but were meant to be taken seriously back then.” One example she cites is a cure for snakebites and other wounds, which “instructs users to pluck the feathers from around the anus of a chicken … and then put the rooster’s freshly-plucked anus on the wound, and it was thought to be able to suck out the poison.” Though seemingly far-fetched, the efficacy of this remedy is currently being studied by a researcher in Europe. In fact, some similarly strange remedies, such as a “magical” salve for eye styes, have been tested and proven to be effective in the past.
In addition to encountering humorous charms and remedies in her studies, Leach has also been experimenting with humor as a pedagogical method, primarily on TikTok. Prior to using TikTok, Leach made “edutainment”-style YouTube videos for her class “Magic and Faith in Medieval Medicine,” which aimed to educate viewers in a way that was simultaneously informative and entertaining. Explaining her shift to TikTok, Leach says, “over the break I was thinking about how much fun I had [with YouTube], but also how much work it took, and it wasn’t something that was sustainable. At the same time I went down a very deep TikTok hole, I think as we all probably have been doing, and I thought it would be fun to just do some TikToks and just see what happened with it. And it’s been really fun!”
Leach made her first post in February, and has since made a range of TikTok videos with titles like, “Icelandic folklore: Coins in your scrotum!” “Chicken butts to cure wounds!” and “Some gross ingredients in medieval love potions.” Leach sees TikTok as offering “an interesting way to escape” from the worries of the pandemic. “It’s relevant to today, but it’s so far in the past and detached enough that it’s not too much. It’s not too real, but it’s also applicable.”
Dr. Leach finds that using humor can be a helpful way to pique students’ interest in topics and areas of study that they might not otherwise encounter, and she isn’t alone in this sentiment. Dr. Saul Zaritt, professor of Yiddish literature in Harvard’s Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Departments, uses humor to explore conceptions of Jewish modernity. “Before I started here in 2016,” Zaritt explains, “I went to the chair of one of my departments and they asked me, ‘Which courses might you teach with higher enrollments?’ My chair suggested either a class on the Holocaust or on Jewish humor.’ I decided on Jewish humor, whether that was a good choice or not I can’t say.”
Zaritt’s course “Jews, Humor, and the Politics of Laughter” uses what he describes as “the Myth of Jewish Humor” to think through Jewish modernity. “For me, it’s a way of pulling the rug out in some way from students that come to take the course,” says Zaritt. “Many come in thinking they have an idea of what Jewish humor is or how it works or what its mechanisms are. One of the goals of the course is not just to expose it as a myth, but to think about why Jews would be associated with humor, or what humor does in particular in the 20th and 21st centuries.” Much of the work in this class is an investigation of humor as both a form of protest or critique and as something that contributes to and supports certain hierarchies.
Humor, in Zaritt’s eyes, is important in a number of ways. It has the capacity to open up new avenues of socialization and invites us to participate in almost “conspiratorial” relationships with people with whom we might not otherwise associate. Additionally, it allows for “a kind of emotional, psychological, or even intellectual experience that you wouldn’t be allowed otherwise,” says Zaritt. But perhaps most importantly, “Humor allows you to articulate something that you wouldn’t be able to say clearly. Freud says it has a similar logic to the dream. It has an economy to it. A joke short-circuits certain modes of explanation that would slow your thinking down and allow for rejection or reframing. A joke gets you right where the thing itself is, or allows you to approach the thing itself, to the core which is usually traumatic.”
This view of humor as a way of broaching the traumatic has led Zaritt to reject the myth of humor as therapy. He says, “what it should do is make you feel deeply uncomfortable. So if the thing itself is already deeply discomforting, like the pandemic, and you’re already helpless in front of it, there’s very little that humor can do.”
For Zaritt, this idea that humor should be discomforting rather than therapeutic is especially pertinent when thinking through “the Myth of Jewish Humor.” There is an “idea that Jews have used humor to cope with the trials of their constant and eternal suffering,” he explains, “and often these kinds of jokes are interpreted as a sort of wellspring of Jewish tradition or seen as a kind of asset of the Jewish people. If it’s indeed an asset, it’s not a particularly comforting or effective one. It’s about articulating and rearticulating the conditions of Jewish Modernity rather than announcing an easy and neat solution of some kind.”
Dr. J. Christian Greer, a visiting scholar of esotericism at Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions, also rejects the notion of humor as therapeutic, though the reasoning behind this rejection differs from Zaritt’s. In his studies, Greer has found that “humor runs like a red thread through the esoteric spiritualities that emerged in the postwar North America counter-culture, and that their insistence on taking humor seriously has delegitimated them in the eyes of scholars.” For Greer, viewing humor as a form of therapy or as a coping mechanism is “looking in the wrong end of the telescope.” In his perspective, humans are “the animal that laughs. We begin as homo ludens, the laughing ape, and so play is our natural function. Humor and laughter is our, I believe, earliest mode of communication along with crying. So I refuse this hierarchy that would put seriousness above humor. In fact, I think it’s the interplay of both that makes us human.”
Much of Greer’s work is focused on promoting humor as an important and even revolutionary aspect of religious experience and broader human socialization. Greer was introduced to the revolutionary potential of humor at a young age after reading Burton Raffel’s translation of Don Quixote. He describes the novel as deeply influential, providing him with an absurdist viewpoint of the world. “By being saturated in this particular text, I was never able to take myself or anyone else too serious,” explains Greer, “I think not taking yourself too serious allows for a deeper form of sincerity, because you realize that everyone else is just as human as you are […] I think it really is the antidote to a culture that wants to take itself too seriously.”
Many of the countercultural groups that Greer studies staunchly defended the power of humor and absurdity. He points to the “pranks” and avant-garde performances of groups such as the Merry Pranksters and the Yippies. For these groups, humor existed outside of traditionally hierarchical power structures, and consequently, it could be used to disrupt the status quo. Revolution, then, was not about violence or political militancy, but about the promotion of humor and joy. Their belief was that, “a new world, a more spiritually evolved world, would be born out of spontaneous eruptions of laughter and mirth and joy and peace and love,” Greers shares. “That would be the cauldron out of which a new world would be born and not a revolution.”
While each of these scholars approaches humor in their own way, they all believe that humor is something to be taken seriously. Humor is not something limited to April Fools’-style pranks, nor is it something that necessarily stands in opposition to the serious. Rather, humor and the serious are influencing each other constantly. Leach finds humor to be a helpful pedagogical tool and a way to provide an escape in difficult times. For Zaritt, “Humor is asking a deep question, but not asking for your permission.” It is not something we control but something that, like modernity itself, is “happening to us in a way that’s similar to how laughter works.” And Greer cites the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote in the opening of his book Rabelais and His World: ‘Laughter is the least studied human phenomenon.’ “That’s precisely the problem with humanity,” Greer concludes. As he suggests, the power and potential of laughter cannot be overlooked: “I think the moment that we begin to take laughter seriously is the moment that we’ll find ourselves on the path to a better world.”
For those interested in learning more about the topics in this article:
Dr. Katherine Leach (@edu_kated on TikTok) suggests that readers “keep an eye on Folklore and Mythology in the course catalog. We run a witchcraft class that’s really fun, and next year I might be teaching “Magic and Faith in Medieval Medicine” and GenEd 1097.”
Dr. Saul Zaritt will be on leave in the next academic year, but he will be teaching “Jews, Humor, and the Politics of Laughter” in the fall of 2022 or the spring of 2023.
Dr. J. Christian Greer (@angelheadedhipstersarchive on Instagram) is teaching “Visions of the Occult: Introduction to Western Esotericism” online through the University of Amsterdam in the summer of 2021.
Cade Williams ’23 (cadewilliams@college.harvard.edu) is the Associate Editor of the Independent.