Festival and the Laughter of Being

Overture

“Welcome to the entertaining time machine known as the 20th Annual Renaissance Festival,” proclaims the flyer handed to us as we pass through mock medieval gates. For $20, the price of admission, we are welcomed to “Fairhaven,” a “16th Century European Country Faire,” an experience in “endless merriment and mayhem” at the largest Renaissance soiree in the western United States. The Arizona Renaissance Festival and Artisan Marketplace springs to life on weekends in February and March each year, occupying 30 acres of Sonoran desert in the foothills of the dramatic Superstition Mountains. Over eight weekends, plus Presidents Day, Ren Fest (see the Arizona Renaissance Festival website: http://www.royalfaires.com/arizona) welcomes approximately 250,000 revelers.

Our performance in festival and laughter unfolds in three movements. In the first movement, we trace the emergence and proliferation of Renaissance “faires” in America and describe this rebirth as a spectacle, a pastiche that jumbles, romanticizes, and commodifies history. The spectacle speaks to nostalgia and escape as cultural elixirs manifest in a Rabelaisian landscape of pleasure and excess. In Movement II, we sketch the history of festival and wink to Ren Fest as a sanitized expression of the carnivalesque, remnants of transgression and subversion that marked premodern carnivals and festivals. This delivers us to the third and culminating movement: an eruption in festival laughter that reverberates and shakes high-minded seriousness to its bones, leaving in its dying echoes questions of self, other, and relational being and becoming. Ren Fest, then, is our catapult to that “little mystery” called laughter, as Henri Bergson (1900/1981, p. 157) calls it in Le Rire (Laughter), a conundrum that has simultaneously intrigued and repelled philosophers and cultural theorists (Bruns, 2000; Weber, 1987). Our entanglement in laughter moves in streams of cultural thought inspired, in particular, by Georges Bataille, the “impossible” thinker of overabundance and excess whose wild laughter smashes representational thought (Bataille, 1985, 1992; Borch-Jacobsen, 1987; Botting & Wilson, 1997, 1998; Gill, 1995; Hollier, 1989; Noys, 2000). We end the performance with a coda, sounding eruptions of laughter as moments of vitality, moments of communitas, moments of possibility (Dolan, 2005).

Movement I: The Spectacle

European medieval “faires” often make use of authentic settings in celebrating a particular time period or in reenacting a specific historic event. American Renaissance festivals, on the other hand, pay little heed to historical accuracy and place authenticity. A few seek to mimic a specific time period and place, but the vast majority of “faires” in the United States, including the Arizona Festival, are unfettered by constrictions of history and geography. Elizabethan England looms large in the American psyche, and this period, along with a fascination for medieval times, loosely frames Renaissance festivals, which offer a mélange of periods and characters (Grendler, 2006).

The first modern-day reincarnation of the Renaissance appeared in Southern California in 1963. The “Renaissance Pleasure Faire” was a one-weekend “non-profit hippie event” that undoubtedly appealed to the counterculture movement of the time (Ringel, 2002, p. 150). According to a website (http://www.forestfaire.com/origins/origins1.html) promoting a current “faire” as its direct descendent, “The first Faires partook of the rich lore and age-old customs of English springtime markets and ‘Maying’ customs.” Two additional “faires” began in California in the 1960s, and the idea caught on, stimulating the creation of a dozen modest “faires” around the country in the 1970s (Grendler, 2006).

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the flourishing of Renaissance festivals in America. Discovering that they held mass appeal, many were founded and operated as for-profit business ventures. Today, there are over 200 Renaissance festivals and “faires” operating in 40 states across the United States, including 20 “major league” events that run for a month or longer (J. Siegel, personal communication, March 11, 2007). A series of festivals are now owned by a publicly traded company, Renaissance Entertainment Corporation (http://www.renfair.com), including Southern California’s Renaissance Pleasure Faire, The Bristol Renaissance Faire of Illinois/Wisconsin, and The New York Renaissance Faire. Another large company, Mid-America Festivals, Inc. (http://www.renaissancefest.com/), operates “faires” in Minnesota, Michigan, Kansas City, and the San Francisco Bay Area. From humble beginnings in the 1960s, Renaissance festivals have multiplied in number; many have grown larger in size and scope, are longer in duration, and are now permanent features in the American landscape (Grendler, 2006).

It was in this milieu that the Arizona Renaissance Festival was born in 1989. Situated in the very un-England-like landscape of the Sonoran desert on the exurban fringe of Phoenix, this location provides access to visitors from Phoenix and Tucson. Over the past 20 years, the Festival has grown from 5 acres to its present 30, from three makeshift plywood stages to 12 performance venues, and from 32,000 to 250,000 visitors. In 1996, a jousting arena that seats 4,500 spectators was added, and the Festival was lengthened to its current 2-month winter season (Davis, 1998; Myers, 1996; The Lord Mayor, personal communication, March 19, 2007).

We experienced the Arizona Renaissance Festival on three occasions, twice in 2007 and once again in 2008, embracing the role of observing participants moving and laughing with the festive throng. We interviewed Jeffrey Siegel, founder, producer, and manager of Ren Fest, and we interviewed performers and cast members known by their “faire” persona, including The Lord Mayor, Zilch the Storyteller, Contessa Lucretia Noir Morte, Helena Handbasket, and Connie Ahrensdahl. We spoke, too, with shopkeepers and vendors, and in March 2007, we conducted an online survey of festival goers, receiving 51 (anonymous) posted responses, ranging from onetime fairgoers to devotees who participate every weekend during festival season.

According to its website, “The Arizona Renaissance Festival is a medieval amusement park, a 12-stage theater, a 30-acre circus, an arts and crafts fair, a jousting tournament and a feast—all rolled into one non-stop, day-long family adventure!” Jeffery Siegel (personal communication, March 11, 2007) describes Ren Fest as a mixture of “living history, fairy tale and fantasy, and a dose of a Monty Python movie come to life,” reveling in being everything that a Renaissance “faire” might be in the imagination. In short, Ren Fest is a simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994), a pastiche that appeals by jumbling time periods and imploding fact and fantasy under the playful ruse of a Renaissance-era marketplace. Zilch the Storyteller, a popular cast member, expresses the simulacrum in telling fashion: “The Festival has become its own time period” (personal communication, March 19, 2007).

The farcical Fairhaven is ruled by King Henry the Only. There are no strict rules in place for costuming cast members; it appears that most anything goes. At the “faire,” there are medievalists of various stripe, 17-century English and Flemish, royalty, jesters and courtier, Robin Hood types, Spaniards and Italians, gypsies, pirates, sorcerers, warlocks, and wizards (J. Siegel, personal communication, March 11, 2007). In our visits, we noted the popularity of pirates posing as Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) wannabes, testament to the popular reach of the Walt Disney Company. And Disney is surely apropos, for Umberto Eco’s (1986) description of Disneyland as hyperreal rings true for Ren Fest: It makes no claim to represent or authenticate, for “within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced” (p. 43).

This “sixteenth century Disneyland” (The Lord Mayor, personl communication, March 19, 2007) is indeed a simulacrum, fixated on sign value and consumption. The event is billed as an Artisan Marketplace. More than 200 shops line the fairgrounds laid out in a giant loop that encourages repeated round trips. Vendors pay a fee to the management company and build their own shops, giving rise to a fairytale-inspired architecture that genuflects whimsically to eclectic styles, such as Gothic, Bavarian, Tudor, and Tolkienian. A dizzying array of products is on offer for the strolling insouciant, ranging from Renaissance-themed bodily adornments to period weaponry. Shops with names such as Fairytale Fynery, Medieval Metal, Castle Creations, and The Perfumed Dragon feed the phantasm, inducing desire for souvenirs as mementos of the Ren Fest experience (Stewart, 1993).

For the hungry fairgoer, culinary delights abound, including roasted turkey legs of obscene proportion and other medieval fare. Dipsomaniacs quaff ale, beer, mead, or other libations (e.g., medieval margaritas, DaVinci coladas) at five pubs. For gluttons, the ultimate culinary and entertainment experience is the PLEASURE FEAST, a 2-hour dinner and show, promoted thus:

Be treated like Royalty while you savor six courses of fine food, ample drynk, and enjoy two hours of raucous Renaissance Entertainment at its best! Let the Feast Master’s boisterous serving wenches and tavern knaves dish up a roaring good time!

Like some other Ren Fest entertainment, PLEASURE FEAST is labeled adult humor—parental guidance suggested (see the Arizona Renaissance Festival website).

More than three dozen performers and troupes create all-day, nonstop action across 12 stages of entertainment. The day at the Festival comes to a fitting conclusion with “A Joust to the Death” in the Tournament Arena. Spectators are welcomed into a sports stadium–like atmosphere by a pep band playing contemporary arena hits such as “Tequila” and “Mony Mony.” The King and Queen of Fairhaven make their grand entrance via horse-drawn cart and preside over the contest. This final joust is the conclusion of a three-act affair chronicling escalating rivalries among several knights. This “theatrical joust extravaganza” incorporates dramatic dehorsements, sword fighting, and fake blood, everything one might hope to see at a joust, if not at a World Wrestling Entertainment event.

The spectacle that is Ren Fest speaks to nostalgia and its twin, escape, as potent cultural strains. Three decades ago, David Lowenthal (1975) offered these words: “Today, nostalgia threatens to engulf all of past time and much of the present landscape” (p. 3). Burgeoning industries riding on heritage and memory in many guises lend credence to Lowenthal’s prescient remark. Lowenthal draws on the California Renaissance Faire in articulating estrangement and escape as bedfellows with nostalgia:

What nostalgia requires is a sense of estrangement; the object of the quest must be anachronistic. Like Renaissance devotion to the classical world, the remoteness of the past is for us part of its charm. “We want to relive those thrilling days of yesteryear,” says a critic, “but only because we are absolutely assured those days are out of reach.” The return to the past is usually fleeting, as at California’s “Pleasure Faire,” a sixteenth-century recreation where hippie craftsman quaff mead and “hot elixir.” “Most of us identify more with Renaissance times than with the present,” explained a young potter. “This is our annual escape into a better world.” (p. 4)

Similar to the young California potter, an online participant in our study commented that “the Renaissance is the time period that I wish I had grown up in,” a wish expressed precisely because it cannot be fulfilled. Nostalgia thrives on the fact that the past as past is beyond our grasp. What is desirable and attainable is re-creating or recasting an imagined past in the present, as nostalgia breeds fantasy and the desire to escape the doldrums of daily life. Fantasy and escape are expressed by (anonymous) contributors to our online Ren Fest posting, evidenced here by four examples:

It is the chance to be someone else and experience a day or two away from reality.

The atmosphere is one of fun and enchantment. It’s a place to forget your troubles and escape for a day.

I enjoy being able to participate in an earlier time when life seems so easy.

It’s a bit like stepping into a fantasy novel for a day.

Escape to the fantasy world of Ren Fest is described as temporary. In his book Escapism, Yi-Fu Tuan (1998) argues that escape finds expression across cultures, and that “there is nothing wrong with escape as such . . . so long as it remains a passing mood, a brief mental experiment with possibility” (p. xvi). “Fantasy that is shut off too long from external reality,” intones Tuan, “risks degenerating into a self-deluding hell” (p. xvi). This begs the question as to a presumed or normatively assayed distinction between fantasy and reality, a binary imploded in Baudrillard’s (1994) Simulacra and Simulation: “Disneyland [or in this case, Ren Fest] is presented as imaginary to make us believe the rest is real . . .” (p. 12). We pause and reflect on “make us believe the rest is real.” Consider the following scenario. At the end of a long Ren Fest day, exhausted revelers mount their SUVs and gallop home to gated, amenity-saturated, master-planned sanctuaries perched astride mountain preserves in a sizzling desert metropolis of 3.8 million consuming souls. “In an extreme environment where plants use body armor and chemical warfare to survive aridity and scorching temperatures, Phoenix is an impossible city wild with possibility” (Kitson, 2007, p. 3), a spectacular place, a phantasm conjured from the vapors of capitalist will, political acumen, and engineering marvel. Spectacle trumps spectacle.

Movement II: The Wink

Renaissance Festival as commodified spectacle displays similarities with festival marketplaces and theme parks in America (Goss, 1999, Klugman, Kuenz, Waldrep, & Willis, 1995), yet the ambience and vibe feel different. Happenings and events such as Ren Fest wink to the past, carrying vestiges and remnants of premodern carnivals and festivals that served as sites of celebration and transgress. In his iconic work, Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) elaborates the history of the “second world” of folk culture that existed outside, yet parallel with, officialdom. The drudgery of daily life in premodern European societies, rigidly hierarchical and religious, was punctuated by a calendar of carnivals and celebrations taking place several times per annum. These ritualized inversions of the social order celebrated a second world in which all participated and laughter prevailed. Carnival provided a place and time for folly and laughter, for mocking established authority, for curses to be uttered, for comic references to the “lower stratum” of the body that conveyed the leitmotif of regeneration and renewal (Bakhtin, 1984).

Carnivals and feasts in the Middle Ages and Renaissance have been interpreted by some as complicit in the maintenance of authority and everyday life, a safety valve, a release of pent-up energies, anxieties, and frustrations (Cresswell, 1996; Jackson, 1989). One example, cited by Bakhtin (1984), is an apology for “feasts of fools,” expressed in a 1444 circular of the Paris School of Theology, which suggested that such feasts were necessary as a diversion:

So that foolishness which is our second nature and seems to be inherent in man might freely spend itself at least once a year. Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air. All of us men are barrels poorly put together, which would burst from the wine of wisdom, if this wine remains in a state of constant fermentation of piousness and fear of God. We must give it air in order to not let it spoil. This is why we permit folly on certain days so that we may later return with greater zeal to the service of God. (p. 75)

Feasts, festivals, and mockery of rituals were limited temporally, with life returning to “normal” once the festive period was over. Yet such a containment interpretation is oversimplified, as carnival merriment sometimes engendered, unpredictably, riots and upheaval. Cresswell (1996) discusses this debate about carnival as conservative or revolutionary and concludes that this should not be generalized; it is necessary to examine “specific histories and instances of carnivals in the places they occur” (p. 130).

As European societies modernized, ritual calendars of feasts, many religious and connected with seasonal cycles, gave way to a more regimented industrial work schedule. The bourgeoisie and emerging middle class urbanized and distanced themselves from the “lower” culture practiced by rural peasants. The occurrence of festivity became increasingly circumscribed, for such celebrations “encoded all that which the proper bourgeois must strive not to be in order to preserve a stable and ‘correct’ sense of self” (Stallybrass & White, 1999, p. 387). Festivals were restricted in number and suffered spatial exile. In England, fairs “had once taken over the whole of the town,” but during the 17th and 18th centuries, they were banished from wealthier neighborhoods (Stallybrass & White, 1999, p. 387). By the end of the 19th century, festivals had been driven away from the city to the outskirts, such that London found itself surrounded by country fairs, and many festivities were moved into the private arena of the home (Bakhtin, 1984; Stallybrass & White, 1999).

Roger Caillois, writing in 1940, ¹ articulates critical aspects of festival in terms of expenditure, the sacred, and societal regeneration, and ends the essay by arguing that in modern societies vacation is the vapid successor of festival:

The values are completely reversed because in one instance each one goes off on his own [vacation], and in the other [festival] everyone comes together in the same place. Vacation (its name alone is indicative), seems to be an empty space . . . incapable of overjoying an individual. . . . The happiness it brings is primarily a result of a distraction and distancing from worries. . . . Rather than communication with the group in a moment of exuberance and jubilation, it is further isolation. Consequently vacation, unlike festival, constitutes not the flood stage of collective existence, but rather its low-water mark. From this point of view vacations are characteristic of an extremely dissipated society in which no mediation remains between the passions of an individual and the State apparatus. . . . Is a society with no festivals not a society condemned to death? (Caillois, 1940/1988, p. 302)

In The Poetics and Politics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White (1986) present a riveting discussion of the repression and displacement of carnival with the rise of bourgeois society. They argue that despite being suppressed culturally and confined spatially “carnival did not simply disappear” (p. 178). Through processes of fragmentation, marginalization, sublimation, and repression, carnival has been displaced and transformed, erupting in myriad forms in modern societies. Elements of the carnivalesque can be found everywhere in the “aesthetics of modernism,” in Freud’s studies in hysteria, in art, literature, theater, and popular culture (p. 177). Stallybrass and White conclude,

The bourgeoisie . . . is perpetually rediscovering the carnivalesque as a radical source of transcendence. Indeed that act of rediscovery itself, in which the middle classes excitedly discover their own pleasures and desires under the sign of the Other, in the realm of the Other, is constitutive of the very formation of middleclass identity. . . . As we have seen, the carnivalesque was marked out as an intensely powerful semiotic realm precisely because bourgeois culture constructed its self-identity by rejecting it. The “poetics” of transgression reveals the disgust, fear and desire which inform the dramatic self-representation of that culture through the “scene of its low Other.” (pp. 201-202)

The Arizona Renaissance Festival is an example of the carnivalesque in contemporary society, restrained and sanitized, dampened by conventions of acceptable public behavior. Within these bounds, it is a place where the “out of place” (Cresswell, 1996; Goldstein, 2003) is playfully encouraged. A central part of the Festival experience for enthusiasts is the opportunity to dress in period “garb” and play “make believe.” Festival cast members adopt a persona, conferring on themselves an appropriate name, title, life span, and, of course, costume. Renaissance festivals have bred a subculture in the United States, complete with lexicon, semimonthly magazine, Renaissance, and “faire”-centered websites and discussion boards. A sizable portion of the entertainers and cast members of the Arizona Festival are “Rennies,” people who enjoy the “unorthodox” lifestyle of traveling “faire”-to-“faire” throughout the year. In addition, craftspeople practicing the medieval system of apprenticeship follow “faires,” peddling their wares. This transitiveness draws a notable “New Age” element to the Festival, described humorously by one “faire” performer as “people who are never completely out of costume.”

Some “faire” patrons who are neither Rennies nor official cast members come to the Festival dressed in period attire. These folk, termed playtrons in Ren Fest parlance, point to Festival as a welcoming stage for acting out fantasies, be it lady, lord, knight, jester, peasant, pirate, bar wench, or dungeon master. Flocks of “faire” attendees dressed in everyday street clothes are referred to as “mundanes” in Ren lexicon. As a mundane, it can be difficult to distinguish between playtrons and official cast members—part of the participatory charm of Ren Fest—as cast members and playtrons wander about the Festival grounds delivering greetings, posing for pictures, offering quips and barbs, singing and reveling, and acting out impromptu comic performances.

One may discern in contemporary Renaissance festivals tamed remnants of social inversion and transgression that characterized carnivals of old (Shields, 1991; Stallybrass & White, 1986). Coming to such judgment about commodified and sanitized spectacles, like Ren Fest, may itself be farcical and, thus, ironically, in keeping with carnival spirit. To jest, treatment of contemporary festival as farcical parody of carnival smacks of paltry pleasures in postmodern decoding. Surely, you (dear reader) know the (knowing) wink, “the joy and the bursting forth of consumption, and the mocking of it at the same time” (Nancy, 1987, p. 727).

Movement III: The Catapult

Apart from any discernment or deconstruction we (observing participants) may muster, our viscera certainly registered their “story” of Ren Fest, which is the story of festival: laughter. Through an eruption of laughter, we are catapulted, flung through the air like rag dolls, and land in a heap. THUD. Returning to our senses (where did we go?), what can we make of laughter, this elusive, jumbled emote? Or more to the point, what does it make of us? We find ourselves launched into terrain of bewildering affective contours that sculpt being, belonging, becomings.

To begin, we are intrigued by Bakhtin’s (1984) argument that we moderns can scarcely grasp the communal quality of laughter. Carnival laughter in premodern times, writes Bakhtin, was the laughter of all the people, not individual reactions to antics and comic events. Laughter was simultaneously triumphant and mocking, a temporary suspension of hierarchic distinctions, norms, and prohibitions. In modern times the bourgeois ego reigns, such that parody and satire are now directed at individuals, carrying an air of superiority whereby the satirist places himself or herself above the “object” of mockery (Bakhtin, 1984; Stallybrass & White, 1986). Language and gesticulations in reference to the body and bodily life, for example, are now individualized and negative, not the bawdy, grotesque realism of the premodern in which laughter is linked with the lower bodily stratum of regeneration and renewal: earth, birth, growth, and flesh (Bakhtin, 1984).

Bakhtin (1984) paints an idyllic portrait of premodern carnival laughter and seemingly downplays the potency and communal qualities of laughter in modern times, themes that we elaborate below. We must say at the outset that in championing laughter, Bakhtin is exceptional. ² The history of Western philosophy and thought is marked by a diminution, if not repression and dismissal, of laughter. On this score, Samuel Weber (1987) cites Socrates’s mistrust of laughter in Book III of Plato’s Republic. Laughter is frowned upon as frivolous. Lacking in high-minded seriousness, “laughter, like tears, is a ‘waste of wisdom,’ an emission . . .” (p. 693). Beyond frivolity and wasted emission, laughter is problematic because it is a rupture and, hence, potentially uncontrollable and threatening to the state, as expressed by Socrates: “Again, [our young men] must not be prone to laughter. For ordinarily when one abandons himself to violent laughter his condition provokes a violent reaction” (p. 692). For Socrates, laughter is not a reasoned act of the will; it is self-abandonment that might overpower and be directed against others (Weber, 1987, p. 693). This speaks to suspicions of laughter as mischievous, disruptive of rules and decorum, a quality identified in the accusatory question: “What are you laughing at?” (The preposition “at” is decisive here.) Mischievous laughter is often exploited to great effect, including by the aptly named Ren Fest entertainer Danny Lord of Mischief. Beyond “harmless” entertainment (can entertainment be harmless?), there are apprehensions about laughter as contagious dis-ease, swirling energies that may coalesce, unpredictably, and spiral out of control.

That laughter eludes studied reflection and reason is brought to the fore in comments made by Georges Bataille about the philosopher, Henri Bergson, who published Le Rire (Laughter) in 1900. Abhorrent to Bataille are normative dimensions implicit in Bergson’s “functional” view of laughter as a societal corrective aimed to rectify maladapted individuals, laughter in the service of reinforcing bourgeois life (Zwart, 1996, p. 60). Borch-Jacobsen (1987) draws on Bataille’s cutting remarks about Bergson in relaying that one cannot “philosophize” laughter:

This prudent little man [Bergson], this philosopher—this little man who spoke of the “little problem,” the “little mystery” of laughter. How would he have seen in it the final enigma of being? A prudent man (as have been all philosophers since Aristotle), he persisted in making of it the object of his reflection, instead of letting himself be overcome by laughter . . . Too wise, the philosopher does not laugh, not even—and especially not—when he theorizes about laughter, and thus he cannot sense all of its gravity, all of its tragedy. For in this way he separates himself from laughter (represents it, as a spectacle), never undergoing it after the fashion of this “experience” which Bataille termed “interior”—interior because non-objective, and non-objective because . . . communicative. (pp. 741-742)

Here we arrive at the confluence of two coursing streams, the communicative quality of laughter and its non-representational register. Laughter is spontaneous, bursting forth such that we come to find ourselves already engulfed in laughter. Bataille expresses it thusly: “Seeing laughter, hearing laughter, I participate from within in the emotion of the [other] one who laughs. It is this emotion experienced from within which, communicating itself to me, laughs within me” (cited in Borch-Jacobsen, 1987, p. 742). In similar vein, Jean-Luc Nancy (1987) writes of laughter as coming and presence, a decidedly antirepresentational posture:

Laughter bursts out without presenting or representing its reasons or its meaning. . . . Laughter comes, and it is laughing (joy, pleasure, and mockery, all at the same time) about this very coming, which comes out of nowhere and does not go anywhere. Laughter is presence enjoying “being” (or coming as) presence . . . (p. 730)

The issue of representation is, again, central in a Freudian view. Laughter, according to Freud, is free discharge of psychic energy relating to cathexis, the attachment of psychic energy to one or more representations, attachment that entails an inhibitory force necessary in stabilizing and anchoring meaning (Weber, 1987). Laughter, then, is the temporary lifting of this inhibitory force, a suspension of cathexis itself (representation), experienced as an explosive movement that overwhelms. This is why true laughter cannot be sustained. No sooner do we come to realize that we are laughing than it passes (Weber, 1987). We come to our senses; the weight of reality returns. Francois Roustang (1987) tells us that laughter is a detachment, if only briefly, from the “very substance of humanity, from suffering: not from suffering as a fleeting feeling, but from the suffering which comes with the weight of destiny” (p. 710). In lyrical prose, he elaborates laughter as rupture and detachment:

It is this suffering, thicker than night, denser than iron, deafer than stone, truer than necessity, which laughter must rupture. Laughter is the smallest conceivable unit of detachment, of difference, of removal; it is the quantum unit of distance. (p. 711)

Rupture is taken to the limits of being by Georges Bataille, the “impossible” thinker who ascends the vertiginous summit and, in a burst of trembling laughter, collapses the pyramid, falling into the abyss of nothingness. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s (1987) essay, “The Laughter of Being,” on Bataille’s ascent and tumble is a paroxysm that shakes the reader. ³ Perhaps more than any other writer Bataille expresses ecstatic and communicative qualities of laughter.

Called the emotive intellectual (Besnier, 1995), Bataille writes with a passion that is furiously Nietzschean (Lotringer, 1992). He believed that modern subjectivity and rationality cover over, and mask, deep experiences of existence, vitalist spiritual and sexual energies (Botting & Wilson, 1997, 1998). That he draws on laughter as “excess” is in keeping with his conviction that the overabundance of life cannot be explained or accounted for in systems of representation and meaning (Bataille, 1985; Rose, 2002). In Bataille’s atheology, the sovereign and the sacred do not reside in God; rather “man is divine in the experience of his limits” (Borch-Jacobsen, 1987, p. 751). What is divine is the fall of man, not exalted superiority. When we see someone stumble, when we witness foibles, we laugh not only at the other but more profoundly with the other. We laugh at ourselves and, in so doing, move beyond ourselves, a “suspended instant in which we are at once ourselves and the other” (Borch-Jacobsen, 1987, p. 758). It is this (re)uniting experience that charges Nietzsche’s aphorism, cited by Bataille: “To see tragic figures founder and to be able to laugh at the spectacle, despite the profound understanding, the emotion and the sympathy that one feels, that is divine” (in Borch-Jacobsen, 1987, p. 750).

In celebrating Day of the Dead, Mexicans mock mortality and laugh in the face of death (Paz, 1961), at Ren Fest crowds cheer and cajole combatant knights in the spectacle “A Joust to the Death,” at a wake mourners commemorate the beloved who has fallen and comfort the living through a mixture of tears and laughter, ⁴ in viewing Steven Spielberg’s emotionally gripping film about the Holocaust, Schindler’s List, high school students in Oakland, California, burst into laughter, a poignant example of laughter rupturing (solemn) inhibition (Bruns, 2000). ⁵ It is in the finitude of being, death, that laughter registers the ultimate limit. Borch-Jacobsen’s (1987) essay on Bataille and laughter crescendos in breathtaking finale:

Being (that is to say death) is given to us, and it is given to us in the laughter that seizes us before the fall or the death of our fellow-man. . . . We do not laugh, in other words, because we are not dead. We laugh, very much to the contrary, because we are dead, because we are, laughing, ourselves the dead man—namely no one who constitutes an ipse, a “oneself.” Admittedly, it is the other who falls, who dies, and not ourselves. But this other, precisely, does not die himself, of his own death, and that is what enraptures us, beyond all measure and all limit. Contaminated by what he is not, communicating ecstatically with the ‘beyond of all beings,’ the dead man communicates to us communication, ‘being in relation’ . . . Foundering beyond himself, the dead man drags us with him into a vertigo where we are finally—other: being and at the same time not being, laughing and at the same time being dead, laughing at already being dead. Laughing at being.

Being was thus NOWHERE. It was neither in me nor in the other. It was—“was,” for already it is no more—in our brief passage one into the other. (p. 759)

In the “‘fusion’ of laughter,” writes Bataille, “life slips from one into the other, in a magical sensation of subversion” (cited in Borch-Jacobsen, 1987, p. 759). This is stirring expression of relational being, calling to mind Jean-Luc Nancy’s (2000) Being Singular Plural: “Being cannot be anything but being-with-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence” (p. 3).

Coda: Moments of Possibility

The Bataille-induced whirling in our heads subsides, and we return to (re)consider festival laughter. For a long time now, something has disturbed us, an ill-defined unease. Even as we move merrily with the festive throng, are we not all onlookers, members of the lonely crowd? Might this be the source of unease? Stallybrass and White (1986) express it thusly:

There is no more easily recognizable scene of bourgeois pathos than the lonely crowd in which individual identity is achieved over against all the others, through the sad realization of not-belonging. That moment, in which the subject is made the outsider to the crowd, an onlooker, compensating for exclusion through the deployment of the discriminating gaze, is at the very heart of bourgeois sensibility. (p. 187)

In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (1994) tells us: “The reigning economic system . . . strives to reinforce the isolation of ‘the lonely crowd’” (p. 22), and that “society eliminates geographical distance only to reap distance internally in the form of spectacular separation” (p. 120). In this vein, Ren Fest is a spectacle that David Harvey (2000) would call a “degenerate utopia,” for like Disneyland it “perpetuates the fetish of commodity culture,” offering “no critique of the existing states of affairs on the outside” (p. 167, citing Marin, 1984). Surely, the ripple of unease we feel in laughter at Ren Fest is an expression of bourgeois sensibilities: alienation and spectacular separation in commodity culture.

Yet there is some thing more at play in the throes of laughter: In an exhilarating rush, the laughter of Bataille smashes bourgeois sensibilities and the authority of high-minded seriousness, moving beyond societal critique. Bataille’s wild laughter—exuberant, laced with ambivalence, saturated with absurdity and tragedy—communicates that, paradoxically, we beings called human are united in “senseless” detachment and sovereign in the willful affirmation of nothing (Borch-Jacobsen, 1987). ⁶ This is the disturbance that reverberates in laughter. Laughter is disorienting, exemplar of Massumi’s (2002) autonomy of affect, excess that escapes capture in systems of representation and meaning. Moments when we are “beside ourselves” are moments of the unexpected, moments of vitality, moments of possibility.

Ecstatic and communicative qualities in laughter accentuated here show affinity with Jill Dolan’s (2005) “utopian” moments in theatrical performance. Dolan painstakingly distances her utopian performatives from utopia as a vision entailing a fixed image, structure, or spatial form, as the latter, ultimately, prove rigidifying and stultifying (Harvey, 2000, Marin, 1984). She is referring to fleeting moments of affect and emotion that arise spontaneously in performance, uniting performers and audience as communitas, lifting us to another place, offering “intimations of a better world” (Dolan, 2005, p. 2). Dolan writes eloquently about the fragility of utopian moments in performance, that the “intensity of feeling is politics enough,” that effectiveness of utopian performatives cannot be gauged like a “piece of legislation, or a demonstration, or a political campaign” (p. 20). It is her belief that “the experience of performance, and the intellectual, spiritual, and affective traces it leaves behind, can provide new frames of reference for how we see a better future extending out from our more ordinary lives” (p. 20). “The politics lie, says Dolan, “in the desire to feel the potential elsewhere” (p. 20).

Can we say the same of festival laughter? Are there registers and sensibilities in festival laughter that linger beyond the commodity spectacle of the fairgrounds? What of laughter within the contours of everyday life? Affect and emotional geographies are receiving much attention (e.g., B. Anderson, 2009; B. Anderson & Harrison, 2010; K. Anderson & Smith, 2001; Davidson, Bondi, & Smith, 2005; McCormack, 2003, 2010; Pile, 2010; Thrift, 2004, 2008; Woodward & Lea, 2010); laughter has received scant treatment within this rich and expanding literature. ⁷ Laughter is ripe for exploring affective and emotional topographies, laughter reverberating through the nooks and crannies of daily living, registering tonalities of joy, delight, surprise, anxiety, fear, frustration, suffering, mockery, madness, helplessness, and hope.