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Nuar Alsadir's Animal Joy came at a relevant moment for me; a new friend had suggested that I drop both my careers to become a stand-up comedian. My response to this was, “But I hate comedy.” Similarly, when I learned Alsadir, a psychoanalyst, had gone to clown school, I was skeptical. My immediate assumption was that anyone who would go to clown school, anyone who needed to learn to be funny, was probably not funny, and probably not an author I was interested in reading. And more so, my associations with clowns are scary (John Wayne Gacy, Jr!), not amusing.
But upon embarking on Animal Joy, I relearned what psychoanalysts must repeatedly remind ourselves: not to make assumptions. Lucky for me, the content of the book is serious. Alsadir went to clown school not to become a clown, but as research. In line with Freud's notion that it is not more truthful to be serious, a crucial point for Alsadir is that what makes an audience laugh is honesty and authenticity. Laughter marks the recognition of something that rings true; of something we are
too afraid, ashamed, or repressed to think, or feel, or utter ourselves. Yet those utterances are not always funny. Alsadir moves beyond the audience and explores the various meanings, connotations, and origins of laughter. She weaves the reader in and out of examples where laughter can be a psychotic spasm, a way to please others, or to hide our feelings. Laughter and jokes can be cruel and manipulative, they can protect women against male threat, they can be reaction-formations, a way out of trauma, into trauma, and breakthroughs in interpersonal impasses. Perhaps most importantly, laughter is an expression of something real. Truth and laughter are intertwined and speak through the unconscious.
Alsadir's work reminded me of an NPR snippet that I heard a few months ago. It was a debate between two comedians about whether the political correctness of our current zeitgeist has ruined comedy. Much of Animal Joy is about race and rac