I’m a literary critics; I come into this project on digression as author of a book on standup comedy (which I treat by way of a literary critic’s close readings, with supplemental theory), but I know almost nothing about anthropology or ethnology. I will keep my comments on anthropology to a minimum, and no one should pay any attention to those comments.

I am interested in what Marianna says about digression in standup in terms of the general society surrounding the standup event and in terms of its specific audience. How can the fields of anthropology and standup be aligned or at least compared according to those two contexts? If the problem of our Digression Seminar is to find the affinities of standup and (potentially) anthropology in terms of their capacity for sometimes digressive—cognitively non-linear, intellectually non-teleological, interpersonally re-orientable—commentary on a culture, then what plays the part of the audience in the world of anthropology? Would it be the set of professional anthropologists? That is: anthropologists describe the culture for fellow anthropologists, and standups describe the culture for audiences?  (Sometimes standups have fellow practitioners in their audiences, but it isn’t a necessary feature of the standup setting; and their success or failure in describing the world in an original manner is judged by audiences, not fellow comedians, in the way that anthropologists are primarily judged by fellow anthropologists.)  It seems to me an oddity worth remarking that in the standup world, standup audiences are both insiders, like anthropologists to fellow anthropologists, and outsiders, like societies to anthropologists.Or no doubt (here I am close to absolutely ignorant) there is a form or school of anthropology that takes humans in other cultures both as objects of study and as fellow initiates, like audiences. If this is so, the parallel of standup and anthropology may begin to function.

(I should add that the comedy audience is unique in that insider/outsider role among all the arts—since the nature of humor is to foster an audible agreement between the comedian and his audience:  if a joke is not told, according to Freud, it is not a joke, nor is it a joke without a shared implicit viewpoint.  Yet the comedy audience must also take the role of the interior version of the exterior culture that is under examination in a standup routine.  Hence standup works along a spectrum of hostility and concord, though all standup must occupy multiple positions along it at once.)

My own work on standup begins with the informal form of standup material as a way of approaching the informal form of the standup setting.  Standup, unlike precursor modes of vaudeville or music hall or nightclub humor on stage, does not rely on the precise form of the isolated joke—or on jokes on a given short-lived theme (mothers-in-law, doctors, airlines) each of which has a punchline, and which demonstrate no particular narrative order.  Standup takes the form of irregular idiolectical bits rather than standardized jokes.  This means that standup performs its own informality—a person, often in come-as-you-are clothing, seems to be talking with the audience or sharing remarks with them rather than telling jokes to them. Comedy of the old-school comic may resemble a poem in heroic couplets (AA—BB—CC . . .): there is such a tight local order (setup punchline, setup punchline) that no overall order is likely to take shape.  But standup comedy develops and integrates themes to express the comic idiolect of the performer.

And this relaxing of the form of the joke means that the standup performance is free to perform its own informality. Moreover, in some cases, the standup performance is free actually to break its form—to improvise responses to audience remarks, either invited or uninvited. These two cases are of course quite different:   either the standup is artificially or actually digressive on stage. It may be that an anthropology that takes standup as a model will need to ascertain the relation between actual and artificial digressiveness. 

The term standup was first used, according to the OED, in 1966, the same year (in fact, the same month) as Lenny Bruce’s death.  But apparently the term was coined at some point in the 50s, when comedians like Bruce:   (1) stopped telling jokes as their form; (2) changed their material often in response to current political or social events; (3) began to give their performances the aura of improvisation; and (4) sometimes actually improvised on stage.   Why?  My thesis is that the abrogation of borders in standup (of the joke and its surrounding silence or seriousness; of the performer and his or her audience) stood for the suburbanization of Jews (Jews comprised 85% or so of nationally known standups in the 50s to early 60s in the United States):  laughing at the “black” or “dirty” humor of the “sick comedians” in a setting where the distance between performers and audiences partly collapsed was equal to dismissing the threat of Jewishness to the hygienic and white American suburb.  Perhaps the American outburst of Jewish standup in the 1950s to 1960s can be related to Mary Douglas’s analysis of laughter as occurring at the borders of power.  This may indicate how a formal analysis of standup or anthropology can illuminate the procedural relations of standups and anthropologists with their objects of study.

A New topic: Escapism

But I am not studying standup at the moment. My new topic is escapism, which also may (or may not) have its pertinence.  I suppose that escapism is more diversion or evasion than digression, but these are terms that need to be interrelated and carefully discriminated.

My first problem with defining into precise existence the heretofore indefinite insult of “escapism” was assembling the sample:  with any sample of escapist works that I chose, I could prove any point whatever.  There is no set of escapist works already established as a genre to be analyzed.  There are many ways to try to resolve this problem, but I will describe here the first one that came to me:  it turns out that when works of art from around the globe want to oppose their own realism (or naturalism—the depressive form of realism) to something, they always choose The Sound of Music.  This is the case in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark; in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.  Moreover, the film is a staple of gay film festivals.  Everyone knows that The Sound of Music is an escapist work of art, but what does everyone mean?

The first thing to notice is that it is a global escapist work of art:  wherever you are (Junot Díaz in the United States writing about the Dominican Republic and the United States; Lars von Trier in Denmark conceiving the United States; Arundhati Roy in India conceiving the relation of India to England), The Sound of Music is your paradigm of escapism.  That in itself is a puzzle:  insofar as globalization means the inescapability of American popular culture, escapism is its mode.  Is escapism really about inescapability?

Moreover, it should seem more peculiar than it does that the type of all escapism concerns the Anschluss of Austria. Of course, the paradox dissolves if one simply asserts that the relative ease of escape from Nazi-occupied Austria constitutes the film’s escapism:  it is escapist, perhaps, to believe in easy escapes.  Yet that escape, though a necessary condition for the escapism of the film, is not a sufficient condition. 

The paradox of a Nazi theme in an escapist film reasserts itself when we begin to wonder what precisely, according to the film, is being escaped from, and what is being escaped to.  All we see at the end of the film is the von Trapp’s arrival at the top of a rather unimpressive (and still green) mountain, and then a bit of a descent to the other side.  We presume that the von Trapps have reached the Swiss border.  Yet there are still icy, snowy mountains in the distance. There is no visual evidence that they have escaped one place and safely arrived in a different place.

Moreover, we have no interest whatever in neutral Switzerland:  we know that the von Trapps eventually arrived at Vermont and became the Von Trapp Family Singers, which is why we are interested in their peculiarly happy fate. However, we don’t see their arrival at Vermont, let alone their arrival at a quite lucrative global fame.

We do, however, witness that international fame at its inception on the inside of Austria, not its outside.  It is the Nazis who in effect cause Captain von Trapp to give up his strictures against public performance, because the family’s first public performance is a ruse to trick the Nazis into thinking they are not escaping.  The von Trapps win their first public singing competition by appealing to the post-Anschluss Austrian crowd in front of rather discomfited Nazis.  None of this perhaps would seem truly paradoxical except that they discomfit the Nazis by singing Edelweiss, as if the Rodgers and Hammerstein song were an Austrian anthem.  And the point about Edelweiss is that it embodies the pure spiritual and natural whiteness of the Austrian homeland.  This is the anti-Nazi position?

It would be convenient to say that the reversal is the interesting phenomenon:  that if Austrian nationalism is clean and white, then Nazis are its stain, in effect its Jews, the alien outsiders who are trying to pretend to be ethnic insiders. Still, one does not want to use Nazi binaries and ideology even to annoy and befuddle Nazis.   One explanation is that Rodgers and Hammerstein saw the necessity of defending the whiteness of the United States in the face of the monstrous ideology of Nazi purity: there needed to be a good and a bad whiteness.

I’d put it differently:  that it’s not that the whiteness of America can be separated out from Germany’s; it’s that the international, global culture of America can locate its home anywhere, on a stage in post-Anschluss Austria as successfully as on a Broadway stage or a Hollywood or Bollywood soundstage. The goal would be the equal whitening of the world by way of the globalization of American culture. Thus the von Trapp success story does not need to be represented by its arrival in the United States, because it’s already been represented, of all places, in the country that putatively needed to be fled. That’s where we actually see it in its perfected form, prior to their escape.

In any case, the general form of the argument is this:  escapism is about inescapability; it does not escape from danger so much as evade or divert us from the dangerousness of the world, thus obviating the necessity of actual impossible escape from the inescapable; it does so by declaring the world to be culturally one place, equally susceptible (in the current triumphal form of escapism) to American popular culture (the supposed Austrian anthem is written by the greatest creative team in a distinctly American musical art form); escapism thus becomes the aesthetic emblem of the cultural form of globalization. It is the opposite of Utopianism, according to which there is someplace strange to go, in space or in conception.

What does that do to the theme of digression? Insofar as escapism is accurate, it is accurate because it causes its own truth:  by traveling everywhere in the world, an escapist work causes its globalized vision to be realized.  The universalization of the Von Trapp Family Singers is underwritten by the universalization of The Sound of Music. All the world’s a stage according to the cultural form of globalization, and the cultural form of globalization disseminates everywhere to prove it. Yet this is the insider account of globalization.  In fact, the world is not one continuous borderless stage.  The goal of digression with respect to globalization would be to find a way out of global unification—to locate possibilities for digression that are not diversions. To return to the topic of standup: the first requirement would be to resist seeing standup as a new global phenomenon while transporting it everywhere on the globe.