[text in red is from writing by Bishop Bishop]
The joke-like delivery can be a powerful bait and switch, hiding deadly earnest ideas. A playful delivery can make a serious idea “pop.” Some of it is that the surprise, the novelty, of the joke opens us up. Comedian and teacher Greg Dean tells us, “In order to work, a joke has to surprise you.”
Some of it is that my generation (Generation X) and following generations, for better and worse, is disposed to prefer irony. Some of it is that the stark contrast between a comedic style of delivery and serious content helps us see things more clearly.
I suppose I should not expect a well rounded definition of the erotic from the author of Story of the Eye a freak fest of disturbing porn. Bad boys like Bataille really are romantics at heart. Instead of romanticizing flowers and chocolates and communion and warm fuzzy feelings, they romanticize shit and death and pain and isolation and deviance. I may have mentioned it before, but I’m suspicious of romantics- whether they are the happy-happy-joy-joy kind or the wallow-in-their-own-excrement kind.
In Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, Paolo Virno tells us that a “joke is an action that undermines and contradicts the prevalent belief-system of a community (endoxa), thus revealing the transformability of the contemporary form of life.”
I playfully, gleefully race back and forth across the boundaries between the comedic and the non-comedic because it seems a way to underscore one of the central tenets of Bishop Bishop’s Mission, which is to not put our faith in fixed meanings but to learn how commit just enough to get something done but not so much that we shatter as our understandings of what those things ought to be shift (and shake).
In a piece like Cant of Can’t, small bits of humor- the punning title, an unsubtle emphasis on “the Not So Good Words” of “the Good (and Not So Good Words),” the sarcastic recasting of Nike’s slogan and the oblique wink at how popular understandings of religion overemphasize the power of “positive thinking”- leads not to a laugh but to what some of my audience said was a powerful and useful confrontation with the limits of our lives.
