{"id":112248,"date":"2017-07-06T09:06:28","date_gmt":"2017-07-06T13:06:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=112248"},"modified":"2017-07-06T11:03:23","modified_gmt":"2017-07-06T15:03:23","slug":"i-started-a-joke-which-started-the-whole-world-crying-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/06\/i-started-a-joke-which-started-the-whole-world-crying-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"I Started a Joke Which Started the Whole World Crying, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_112249\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/pantagruel.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-112249\" class=\"wp-image-112249\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/pantagruel.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"510\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/pantagruel.jpg 1280w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/pantagruel-300x153.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/pantagruel-768x392.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/pantagruel-1024x522.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-112249\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">An illustration of Rabelais\u2019s grotesque <i>Pantagruel<\/i> by Gustave Dor\u00e9.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Oh, it feels good to laugh! Hot tip: try doing it when there\u2019s nothing to laugh about. Try it in a crowd of stone-faced strangers\u2014just toss your head back and grab your belly, spinning in circles as if you\u2019re dancing to\u00a0the weary tune of some wheezing\u00a0carnival organ. It\u2019s the key to fixing our\u00a0broken\u00a0society.\u00a0In a new essay, Robert D. Zaretsky argues that we\u2019ve lost sight of the grotesque\u2014and of the immense floodgates of laughter that it alone can open. Laughter that upends hierarchies and undoes centuries of moral self-seriousness, leaving no one unscathed as it washes over the masses. Looking at Rabelais\u2014whose novel <em>Gargantua and Pantagruel<\/em> loosed wave upon wave of grotesque laughter in sixteenth-century France\u2014and Mikhail Bakhtin\u2019s famous concept of the carnivalesque, Zaretsky wonders how we lost our way\u2014and why we can no longer mock ourselves along with those in power: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/the-grotesque-is-back-but-this-time-no-one-is-laughing\" target=\"_blank\">Grotesqueness was not an insult, but instead an insight into the human condition<\/a>. More than half a millennium later, in a world dominated by indignation and outrage, and largely abandoned by laughter, a dose of the grotesque might help to better digest events, if only by having a good\u2014and right kind of\u2014laugh \u2026 Laughter is no different than political systems, commercial relations or artistic practices: it evolves over time, the result and cause of material and social transformations. For medieval man, laughter was the great leveler. Preceding Martin Luther\u2019s priesthood of all believers was Rabelais\u2019s priesthood of all belly-laughers. Inclusive and communal, laughter left no one untouched; no less universal than faith, it was a bit more subversive. In fact, as Bakhtin notes, late-medieval laughter marked a victory, albeit temporary, not just over the sacred and even over death; it also signaled \u2018the defeat of power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that represses and restricts\u2019. For medieval man, laugh and the whole world laughs with you\u2014or else.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Share a grotesque chuckle with your barista this morning. Lean in close and whisper, You and I and this single-origin cold brew are helping to extinguish the last dying embers of a whole culture of diners and greasy spoons\u2014what a gas! As Adam Platt notes, diners are in decline, but those who mourn their demise are unlikely to support them: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.grubstreet.com\/2017\/06\/watching-and-lamenting-the-death-of-the-new-york-diner.html\" target=\"_blank\">Like most mass-extinction events, the Massive Diner, Coffee Shop, and Greasy Spoon Die-Off has been unfolding slowly around us for decades, in plain sight<\/a>. According to a much-fretted-over\u00a0<em>Crain\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0report from a couple of years back, the city\u2019s Department of Health lists around 400 restaurants with the words\u00a0<em>diner<\/em>\u00a0and <em>coffee<\/em>\u00a0in their name, a number that experts say is down from a thousand restaurants a generation ago. (Many nouveau coffee shops don\u2019t have <em>coffee<\/em> in the name.) Like the old Automats and cafeterias of the fifties and sixties, and a generation of classic Jewish delis before that, diners are in decline for many reasons: skyrocketing rents and land values; ever-rising food prices; the spread of a more expedient, highbrow and lowbrow coffee culture; the gentle, inexorable aging of a whole generation of neighborhood \u2018regulars\u2019; the difficulty of keeping an ancient, sprawling, ten-page menu in tune with the changing tastes of the times; and the challenges of passing on a family business to a new generation of proprietors, many of whom have the benefit of a college education, and might prefer frittering their days away in barista bars to breaking eggs over a hot stove.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>John le Carr\u00e9 believes you ought to learn German, and he\u2019s prepared to make a strong case for it: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/education\/2017\/jul\/02\/why-we-should-learn-german-john-le-carre\" target=\"_blank\">The decision to learn a foreign language is to me an act of friendship<\/a>. It is indeed a holding out of the hand. It\u2019s not just a route to negotiation. It\u2019s also to get to know you better, to draw closer to you and your culture, your social manners and your way of thinking. And the decision to teach a foreign language is an act of commitment, generosity and mediation \u2026 The very business of reconciling these two souls at any serious level requires considerable mental agility. It compels us to be precise, to confront meaning, to think rationally and creatively and never to be satisfied until we\u2019ve hit the equivalent word, or\u2014which also happens\u2014until we\u2019ve recognized that there isn\u2019t one, so hunt for a phrase or circumlocution that does the job. No wonder then that the most conscientious editors of my novels are not those for whom English is their first language, but the foreign translators who bring their relentless eye to the tautological phrase or factual inaccuracy\u2014of which there are far too many. My German translator is particularly infuriating.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Dwight Garner is reading Harry Crews\u2019s 1978 memoir <em>A Childhood: The Biography of a Place<\/em>, which includes, among other horrors, an episode in which the young Crews is hurled into a boiler of water meant to scald pigs during their slaughter. The book is full of insights about the themes and motifs that animate Crews\u2019s novels: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/06\/29\/books\/review-harry-crews-a-childhood-memoir.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Famerican-beauties&amp;action=click&amp;contentCollection=books&amp;region=stream&amp;module=stream_unit&amp;version=latest&amp;contentPlacement=1&amp;pgtype=collection\" target=\"_blank\">Crews sought solace in an unusual place: the pages of the Sears, Roebuck catalog<\/a>. It was the only reading material in his house other than the Bible. He gravitated toward it because the faces in it were perfect, without the scars and blemishes of everyone he knew. \u2018The people in the catalog had no such hurts,\u2019 he writes. \u2018They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and toes and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful. Their legs were straight and their heads were never bald and on their faces were looks of happiness, even joy, looks that I never saw much of in the faces of the people around me.\u2019 He became a writer in part, he suggests, because of the pleasure he found in making up stories about the people in the catalog.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Famous, beautiful white women\u2014they\u2019re so bankable! At least, they used to be. Anne-Helen Petersen wonders if celebrity culture has tired of white women, growing leery of the politics behind their once boundless sex appeal: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.buzzfeed.com\/annehelenpetersen\/the-great-white-celebrity-vacuum?utm_term=.mxO6Dqww8#.qwk60XooL\" target=\"_blank\">Within the industry of celebrity, white women have long been the primary currency<\/a>. But in our current political and cultural climate, investing in them feels increasingly ill-advised \u2026 Image rebrands from Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry have flopped. Scarlett Johansson\u2019s last two movies have either flopped (<em>Ghost in the Shell<\/em>) or underperformed (<em>Rough Night<\/em>). After the disappointment of <em>Passengers,\u00a0<\/em>Jennifer Lawrence has also gone MIA. Angelina Jolie hasn\u2019t starred in a movie since 2015, when\u00a0<em>By the Sea<\/em>\u00a0failed to break $500,000 at the box office\u2014and, apart from the announcement of her separation from Brad Pitt, she has kept out of the press \u2026 It\u2019s increasingly hard for many women\u2014women of color, but also white women\u2014to trust or idealize white women. White women in our everyday lives, white women as voters, white women on juries, and, by extension, white female celebrities, who have repeatedly fumbled or ignored the conversations of race, class, and gender that, in this hyperpoliticized moment, seem most vital and urgent.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: we\u2019ve lost sight of the value of hideous, Rabelaisian, grotesque laughter; also, greasy-spoon diners are dying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[29427,6461,15220,21825,12776,1273,29429,29428,7253,3983,10589,410,28577,10368,11231,29426,17303,17954,20355],"class_list":["post-112248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-carnivalesque","tag-celebrity","tag-coffee-shops","tag-diners","tag-fame","tag-german","tag-greasy-spoons","tag-grotesques","tag-harry-crews","tag-john-le-carre","tag-languages","tag-laughter","tag-medieval-literature","tag-memoirs","tag-mikhail-bakhtin","tag-rabelais","tag-race","tag-the-grotesque","tag-white-women"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>It\u2019s Time to Get in Touch with Your Inner Grotesque<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In today\u2019s arts and culture news: we\u2019ve lost sight of the value of hideous, Rabelaisian, grotesque laughter; also, greasy-spoon diners are dying. 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