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Q&A: Author Ralph Lerner explores how thinkers use humor to change society
In his soon-to-be released Playing the Fool: Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times
Why use humor to convey a message?
"Speakers and authors with something to say find it easier to catch an audience than to keep it. Advertisers know this well enough; those peddling unsettling thoughts even more so. It is no trick to preach to the choir. But getting a public to the point where it is willing to suspend its certainties is a formidable challenge."
How does the strategy work?
"Often, it turns out, an indirect approach is the easier path. People resist being hectored and lectured. But they are less resistant to a message wrapped in a joke or an engaging story. Nor do they object to being led to discover absurdity in others. So authors intent on being heard for more than a fleeting moment have devised various strategies for surprising and engaging their readers, inducing them to linger and ultimately ponder thoughts that at first glance would unsettle or repulse them."
How can playing the fool transform society?
"It is not prudent to count on major transformations in habits and self-understanding. [American humorists] Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Will Rogers and the comics on Comedy Central may try, but I suspect that ultimately social change in assumptions and behavior occur individual by individual until a critical mass is reached—and then the change may take hold as a new unexamined opinion."
That doesn’t sound very funny.
"But at least the thought leaves us free, as individuals, to try to be more thoughtful and fair-minded."
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