On Marriage

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What hysterical times are these? History, once again, is repeating as farce and anyone who’s anyone is funny, especially online. But if the key to good comedy is a great sense of timing, then who exactly is laughing now? Using historical as well as topical examples, this talk will examine the relationship between politics, history and joking. Other chapters explore the difference between morality and neurosis, a Jewish mother and a Jewish mother-in-law, a king and a beggar, life and death, and comedy and theology. DB. It turns out that they’re not. That’s what I found out over the last few years since claiming that they were. But that’s just their opinion. Can we talk about your mother? The result is The New Man – executive produced by David Baddiel whose 2010 film Infidel Josh directed – which opens in cinemas from 21 November. In the film, Devorah humours Josh, telling her friends she’s agreed to be filmed because it’s good for her husband, that making this film is giving him the space to explore his worries and anxieties about impending parenthood. Josh canvasses his male friends who are already fathers, naming those deep-seated concerns that all dads-to-be have, but few articulate (and certainly not on film). “Did you feel you were being usurped? Or fear being usurped … that you were redundant, you didn’t have a role? That’s it: you gave the sperm, now Mummy has her little boy? Oedipal complex?”

For me it was because I found myself doing something I never imagined myself doing: marriage. I always knew marriage doesn’t work – just look at my parents.Josh sees me at my least made-up, my least attractive, and yet he’s the one who needs to feel attracted to me. And we’re both quite slovenly people. So one thing couples often do is have ‘date nights’ when they go out into the world together. And in that outing the eye of the world acts as a third character in their relationship: a character that’s intrinsic to the sexuality of their relationship. So yes, the element of exhibitionism can probably add a kind of interest.

While I, patronisingly, secretly thought we were only playing at making a film, not really making one. But also, at some level, in case we were actually making one, I was adamant about co-directing it at every stage so that I could determine what sort of film it would be.She also took a “front seat” in the editing of the film: “Because it had me in it, I was determined to decide what went in and what went out.” She eliminated material that was just too painful, or that she wouldn’t want the surviving twin to see: “The film is partly for him. I want him to know about his brother. I want him to know how much he was wanted and loved, but that after he was born we weren’t OK.”

Rules of public speech are undergoing an important transformation as our sensibility for injury and hurt augments. Where does this leave comedy, and particularly stand-up comedy? Freud held that all tendentious jokes – which means most of the jokes – rely on either sexuality or aggression. So where does this leave joking as social and socializing practice? These and similar question will be discussed, also in reference to some concrete examples and cases, such as the “case” of Louis C.K.

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There is a part of my head that coldly sees all experience as material. Maybe it’s a survival tactic to put a frame around things, or to participate in them at all, or to get some distance from them over and above the turmoil of life. I’m not always making something, but when I am, no matter what else happens, there’s a part of me that’s at work. I am currently completing a long piece of research, a book entitled On Marriage. A work that crosses serious scholarship with more creative elements, the book is an enquiry into the idea and practice of marriage that combines philosophy, cultural criticism, psychoanalysis and memoir.

And a certain privilege is no doubt necessary to engage in the kind of exploration of marriage that is Baum’s comparative advantage. If a parent is struggling to maintain the means to support a child, she is less likely to take pleasure in considering, as Baum does in a chapter titled “Creative Accounting,” the contradictory manner in which a child at once confirms a couple’s identity “by naturalizing their relation and proving its profitability according to the accumulative logic of capital” and “subtracts from the unity of the whole by adding its own difference.” At the same time, Kearney’s bloodless analysis can invite subversion of the sort that Baum might encourage. If, as Kearney argues, two parents are demonstrably better than one at maximizing outputs in the form of successful children, does it not follow that adding yet more parental figures into the mix—a stepparent here, a queer known donor there—might lead to still more impressive results? There is much for the scholar to enjoy in Baum’s erudite but lightly sketched analysis of how humour helps us to deal with ageing, dislocation, impossible families and sexual confusion. Alternatively, you could just read it for the gags.DB. You were there because we did an event together. You and I were on that scary panel with Julie Burchill. That night I tried to tell a joke and nobody laughed at all. It was so painful. Then I was asked what my thoughts were about the contemporary political moment. I feel as though we are living in a time where what happens in your dreams at night might well take place the next day. And I’ve had this dream — and then this literally happened to me — a big audience of people, I’d just told a joke, and nobody laughed. Then somebody asked, ‘What are your thoughts about the future of politics?’ and I said, ‘I have no ideas, only my fears’. That happens in my dreams. I go in front of a big group of people, and then that’s all I have: my fears, nothing else. What’s more, this is only one of the two books of huge Jewish interest that Baum had published within a week of each other. Her debut Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone) examines emotions commonly associated with Jewish people, drawing on texts from Portnoy’s Complaint to Jane Eyre. Put it this way, if you’re looking for Chanukah presents for intelligent, introspective, cultured Jews, with a sense of humour, you’ve found them. At once universal and highly subjective, comedy points the way to our modes of navigating – and perhaps subverting – the social Other in all its incongruity.