Zizek's Jokes by Slavoj Žižek, Audun Mortensen Read Free Book Online Page A

list” of excuses has a low motivation—the covering-up of an act of neglect—but its attenuation, inventiveness, ingenuity, and illogicality begin to amuse and refresh us, like a Cubist painting of the situation that may not add up to anything like “the truth,” but begins to dazzle us with a sense of sheer possibility, or like a clever child’s answers to a psychologist’s Uses of Objects test. We begin to see, alongside the merely legitimate, or the merely correct, the possibility of a cornucopia.
    Because we live in a society that massively prefers control to creativity, telling the truth has been vastly overrated. “Every lie creates the parallel world in which it is true.” This is the aphorism that guides my Book of Scotlands , a series of scenarios imagining, deliriously, alternative futures for my northern British motherland. Lies can be generative, they can help us brainstorm our way out of stale, dead-end ways of thinking. Jokes have the same capacity; by overturning the logic of clichés based on what are undoubtedly true and correct ways of understanding the world, jokes give us a tingling and vertiginous sense of alternative possibilities. Political pundits have a term called the Overton Window. It describes the sort of centrist agenda a politician may embrace without any danger of being called a crank or an extremist, and the ways he may shift that window of acceptability a few degrees to the left or right. The dogged pursuit of consensus and compromise based, precisely, on a lack of any fresh or original thinking may be crucial for a career politician, but it spells death to anyone who’s mentally alive. The “mentally alive”—and in this category good writers are found—will surely prefer the logic of jokes, which by their very nature stray outside the Overton Window, transgress against common sense and accepted morality, and breach taboos.
    Let’s say that the world divides into those who want to be right, and those who want to be interesting. The Right usually have an eye on instrumental power over man and over nature. Their rightness is a means to that power. The Interesting wish to charm, beguile, teach, astound, influence, outrage, confuse. What power they possess is predicated on a renunciation of actual, instrumental power.
    I would not want the captain of my jet to be interesting; I would prefer him to be right. But I would like the in-flight movie to be as interesting as possible. In contrast to events in the cockpit, whatever happens in the movie, the plane will not crash. In my own (real) family, my brother, an academic, is the Right one and I am the Interesting one. I first heard of Žižek through my brother, who described him to me as “crazy, a hothead.” Interesting, perhaps, but untrustworthy. Not a solid chap, but an interestingly unreliable narrator of history, a wearer of clown motley, a Shakespearean Fool. My brother must have known that, based on this sketch, I would become a fan.
    Å½ižek’s unreliability is underlined by the fact that he re-tells the same jokes in different forms. As if enacting in his texts a kind of synthetic version of the oral folk culture from which jokes originate, he rings the same joke through a series of changes, reporting different origins, outcomes and moral applications each time.
    Å½ižek risks giving the appearance of a slightly absent-minded old uncle at a wedding, who doesn’t remember that he told us the same joke at another family gathering recently, or perhaps does remember but finds the joke so funny and so effective that he can’t help tell it again, but with its attributions, pedigree, wording, length and degree of obscenity tailored (suspiciously, we might say) to the new context.
    And so the fiancée joke (“my fiancée is never late for an appointment, because the moment she is late, she is no longer my fiancée”) makes an appearance in