Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Global History

Writers have long considered laughter subversive, shocking, undermining, disturbing, agitating, and even demonic. While Henri Bergson considered laughter to emanate from the sight of a falling man, Baudelaire regarded laughter as a sign of the perpetually fallen state of humankind. Laughter’s medium of expression navigates the verbal, visual, literary, performative, and theatrical. Humans have invoked it for the purposes of entertainment, critique, social bonding, therapy, protest, and navigating repressive regimes. Laughter, therefore, assumes a communal quality whereby it connects an individual to a group, an audience, and a crowd. Bergson famously declared: “Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.” In this course, we will take an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenon and affect of laughter. We will examine laughter’s history and historicity and the genres it has produced through its incorporation into the public sphere, thus shaping the history of the modern world. The course covers the ribaldry of the Fool’s Literature during the Protestant Reformation, the zaniness of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Gaganendranath Tagore’s political cartoons, the films of Charlie Chaplin and Marx Brothers, writings of Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Mikhail Bakhtin, and John Morreall, Larry David’s television sitcom, Curb Your Enthusiasm leading up to contemporary internet memes. Course assignments will focus on developing writing skills through weekly blog posts on the class Instagram page, two short close-reading assignments, a midterm essay, and a final paper.