Cultural studies as comic relief

First: this is a study of cultural studies not a diatribe against it. "Comic relief" is not pejorative.

My specific claim is that "comic relief" entails two things: 1) a specific form of (comic/comedic) pleasure and 2) a break (relief) from tragic narrative. And that this describes cultural studies when it is doing a good job.

I was thinking about Murray in Delillo's White Noise and the purpose his character serves. The best explanation I can come up with is that he is comic relief. My favorite line is when Gladney is at the supermarket and he runs into Murray, who breathlessly tells him about the recent death of a colleague. After registering Gladney's stunned silence he says something like "I know. I came straight here." Murray is also the character working to emulate Gladney's Hitler Studies program with a comparable academic monument to Elvis. He compounds the absurdity of the extant academic situation with an even more absurd project. Murray personifies all that is systemically funny in White Noise with the addition that because he is a character he can also speak absurdity, whereas the situation can only be absurd (perhaps an unnecessary distinction but relevant to the written form).

Cultural studies as I see it aims to be a counter history of globalization or global capitalism. If capitalism effects deterritorializations, decentering, border-blurring--etc etc--those are also the kind of descriptions that fit with certain anti-capitalist politics. Rather than surrender those accomplishments to a purely capitalist rendering of history, cultural studies works to call attention to whatever victories or counter-capital processes are at work. Hence it is a "relief" from the master narrative of capitalism and, in a twist of meaning, takes as its political purpose to relieve the suffering of those whom capitalism abuses or neglects.

Shakespeare is arguably the inventor of comic relief, specifically in his tragedies and histories when the flow of meaning is oppressively unidirectional. As Gladney postulates in White Noise all plots--narrative, conspiratorial--tend toward death. If this is not formally necessary, it is at least a heavy inheritance for tragedy, particularly for English language lit with the place its history has given to Shakespeare. (Why are plots not geared toward birth? Damn patriarchy, damn carnophallogocentrism).

There is also a pleasure in the serious deathward plot, which I would identify with the kind of system building we find in Das Kapital or The Modern World System. But the more fully articulated the system and the pleasure of its knowing, the closer death comes to the individual. Cultural studies does not (should not?) disprove or even disapprove of such system building, but it does punctuate that kind of pleasure with one that is shorter in duration and scope. Again, I don't see this as a bad thing, but some (within cultural studies) might see this characterization as negative, just as critics from Dr. Johnson to the present have seen comic relief as stupid.


"I am having a good time."