JOURNAL ARTICLE
“Humor Saves Steps”: Laughter and Humanity in Marianne Moore
Rachel Trousdale
Journal of Modern Literature
Vol. 35, No. 3 (Spring 2012), pp. 121-138 (18 pages)
Published by: Indiana University Press
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https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.35.3.121
In this essay, Rachel Trousdale argues that "Moore uses humor as a test of friendship" (121) and "[h]umor...is both an end in itself and a means to ever-greater things" (ibid). Trousdale obviously deviates from the negative track of the Superiority Theory and finds us a path that leads to the bonding, uniting, and befriending capacity of humor.
While commenting on "Play and Identiy in 'A Prize Bird' and 'The Wood-Weasel'" and "Humor in the 'Pangolin'" (the two sections that constitute the main body of this essay), Trousdale speaks of Henri Bergson, and relates Moore's use of laughter to Bergson's view on laughter:
While Moore and Bergson both use laughter to identify the boundary between "like me" and "unlike me," Moore reverses the direction of Bergson's judgment. His laughter demarcades alienating difference, while hers indicates an important sameness. (124)
Here we find that Bergson sees laughter as "difference-driven" while Moore sees humor as "similarity-driven." This similiary can be anything in common shared between humans, humans and objects, and humanity and poetry, as later interpreted by Trousdale. Trousdale later continues:
Moore's humor follows Bergson's model here [in "The Pangolin"] to the extent that it demands that we see similarity across difference, but it is profoundly anti-Bergsonian in its reliance on sympathy between observer and observed. [...] Where Bergson claims that humor depends on "indiffernce," Moore, as we shall see, suggests that our capacity to unite disparate objects within a single frame of refernce--whether into art or into the comic--is both what distinguishes humans from animals and what allows us to appreicate our common features. (130)
Trousdale develops this essay by comparing and contrasting Bergson and Moore for a theoretical interpretation of the poetic text. To conclude this essay, Trousdae recapitulates:
Humor's synthesis of different skills and ideas is an expression of the smae impulse which gives rise to poetry. Moore's description of humor as "saving steps" suggests that humor, like poetry, is a highly efficient and condensed means of [end of Page 136] communication and sympathy-creation, enfolding multiple layers of meaning, [...] Humor [...] is characteristic of the entire human species, at once distinguishing us from and linking us to the rest of creation. Our fellow humans, panglins and wasps all share characteristics which require a sense of humor--Moore's anti-Bergsonian humor, which has us laugh with pleasure when we reconginze ourselves in another--to understand. Our aburdity and our strength, Moore suggests, arise from the same source: our multifarious self-contradictions, which humor allows us to recognize and turn into tools. (136-137)
With Moore's poetry as a contrast to Bergson's thoery, Trousdale points to a new direction of humor studies: Humor can be non-Superiority, non-Relief, and non-Incongruity, but instead, similarity-based, commonality-powered, and alliance-driven; humor can be a means of bonding and a show of universal compassion.
