Clowning Our Way to Freedom with Nuar Alsadir
Arcadia Molinas speaks to author, poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir, about her book Animal Joy, the revolutionary power of laughter and how to tap into what psychoanalyst Donald Winnicot called our “True Selves”.
INTERVIEW BY ARCADIA MOLINAS
PHOTOS BY GRACE YU & JOSEPH ROBERT KRAUSS
Once I finished reading Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir I noticed I was looking at the world around me with different eyes. The way I thought had shifted, the way I saw the world had slanted, how I saw myself and especially how I talked and listened to other people had altered.
Animal Joy is above all, a book about laughter. Throughout, Alsadir dissects ideas surrounding joy and spontaneous outbursts of laughter, and how they are connected to our inner child, animal tendencies, or, as psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott says, our “True Selves”. The stakes of being in touch with our “True Selves” are by no means minor – it can be an act of political resistance and embodied living in a world where political figures, institutions and figures of authority, twist reality and spin facts to fit a pre-established narrative. Being authentic, filterless, truthful is not encouraged by the forces that be in society–settling into the status quo is infinitely more so. Fitting in, adjusting yourself so you strive to live up to other people’s expectations of you, creating “avatars” of ourselves, like the curated selves we present on social media, is rewarded in a traditional sense, professionally, socially, it is ‘well looked on’ but this behaviour comes at the expense of the fleshiness of our messy, porous, erotic “True Selves”. Staying in touch with this authentic, spontaneous side of yourself can help you navigate a world mired in troubling, inauthentic discourse.
There is a quote from George Orwell on the first page, “A thing is funny, when–in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening–it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.” Departing from this reference, Alsadir reveals to us why laughter is a direct channel to our unconscious, and the many ways we can, and must, tap into its “revolutionary” power.
Arcadia Molinas: I came across this quote by Wittgenstein while I was reading your book Animal Joy, “a good and serious philosophical text could be written entirely out of jokes.” I wanted to start from here and ask you in what ways you think jokes can be philosophical?
Nuar Alsadir: I didn’t know that quotation, it's great. In Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, when he's talking about tendentious jokes–which are jokes that have a hostile or sexually aggressive message in them–he talks about how meaning gets placed inside of a joking envelope. He says it's like a watch, the way the watch’s mechanism is inside but gets delivered in a case that looks appealing, beautiful or interesting. Similarly, a joke has a message that is doing some kind of work inside of an aesthetic case. Maybe what Wittgenstein means is that a text could have an alternation between the aesthetic surface and the emotionally driven messages inside of their aesthetic cases.
Something else I did while reading your book was go on a very deep Sacha Baron Cohen rabbit hole.
That must have been fun.
It was. I had never seen anything of his before. I started with Borat and thought it was an absolute masterpiece. You write about Sacha Baron Cohen in the context of the ways laughter can threaten authority – the authority of others and also of the self. Why is laughter so threatening?
A spontaneous outburst of laughter, or Duchenne laughter, which is the full-bodied fit of laughter driven by the unconscious where you don't necessarily know why you're laughing, threatens authority because it lets all propriety fall to the floor. The body takes over and you are not in control: you're making noises you're not willing yourself to make, and you look different than you would necessarily want to look. Social laughter, which is metacommunicative, where you're signalling something, can be unpacked in a social context by the signs that people are receiving. So, the threat is that with Duchenne laughter, you're not putting the agreed upon social structure at the forefront. You're disrupting it. And it’s contagious, like a wildfire.
If other people see you laughing, it can carry over to them and they start laughing in the same way. And they won't know why they're laughing; they can't control themselves. It’s erotic, nonrational, up to the body.
That’s what I found so compelling about Borat and Cohen’s other characters. Through his disguises he manages to create a complicity between himself and the people he's interacting with, which often reveal upsetting truths.
He reveals in them what they aren't intending to reveal about themselves. That is threatening. They lose, without realising it, their facade.
I'd like to ask you about your experiences in clown school. You write that at the heart of clowning is the goal of finding your ‘inner clown.’ How would you describe someone’s inner clown?
I think it's similar to what Winnicott, the psychoanalyst, called the true self. Although, when he was talking about the true self, he wasn't talking about a character, the way the clown is a character. He was talking about a wellspring of creative forces, the energy at our core that gets revealed through spontaneous gestures. For an infant, for example, if a mother affirms its expression, the infant learns that it's okay to express itself freely. But if the mother corrects the behaviour, that leads to the birth of the false self because the infant learns that they need to give the mother what she wants to get love in return.
We all have a true self, and in order to participate in the social world we all have a false self. In clown school, we work on revealing our core energy, our true self–or inner clown–as well as the false self that clamps down on it.
What is your advice to people who want to tap into that inner clown or true self?
As with psychoanalysis, which, in trying to get at the unconscious, often begins with the defences that protect it, the process of tapping into one’s inner clown can begin with recognising the false as well as the true self. We may begin by spotlighting our armour or methods of hiding before we come to see what it is we need to learn how to set free or stop repressing. In clown school we were all given clown names. For example, one person's given clown name was Little Tiny Regret. That wasn’t the true self’s energy but the false self’s that was being spotlighted. What that person needed to work on was not doing things that would lead to regret. The name identified what was clamping down on their energy and preventing it from being set free.
What I would suggest for people who aren't going to go to clown school would be to do anything that helps them access their interior and because I’m a psychoanalyst, I would say what helps them access their unconscious, so pay attention to dreams, even daydreams, which are in many ways waking dreams, reveries.
If you follow where your mind goes, when it's creating the narrative of a daydream, you can read it or analyse it as you would a dream. I can't say that everyone is necessarily in touch with this right away, but you can find your way towards listening to your mind when it thinks without your willing it to think, tune into the thoughts that are spoken inside of your mind when you're walking, or in twilight moments–when you're in between waking and sleeping–that's often a time when your mind starts to turn up the volume on the thoughts that are often turned down when you’re focused or working on something.
Lately I feel like I dream of really boring things like doing laundry. And since reading your book, I’ve been trying to sit with my dreams and tune into what they’re revealing to me. But I find it hard to listen to my laundry dreams, I feel like there isn’t much there for me to unpack.
If you really paid attention to the details, I'm sure there would be something in those dreams. Where were you doing the laundry? What were the circumstances? Was there a snag? Something getting in the way?
I used to wait tables and when I got really good at the job and I didn't have to think about it, I could just move from table to table, take an order, go to the kitchen, and clear what needed to be cleared, I would be able to write poems on my order pad. During my shifts, my conscious mind was pushed down, and my unconscious came to the fore. And at those moments, my dreams would be of mundane conscious tasks, like taking orders. I would have a dream in which I would take an order, Okay, mozzarella sandwich. What would you like on the side? Corn relish. And then I would have another dream, and another dream. And then, a few dreams later, I would think, I forgot the corn relish! and go back to the previous dream as if I were actually working in the kitchen.
During that period, I had inverted my conscious and unconscious minds, and maybe that’s what's happening to you also.
Yeah, I think I reached a similar conclusion where I realised that just before going to bed I was preparing intensely for the day ahead, projecting and regulating my emotions in advance. I was doing a lot of work with my conscious mind and then my unconscious just had to deal with the list of more menial chores that I had to do.
One thing that I would like to talk to you about, which I’ve been thinking a lot since reading your book, is the role of laughter between lovers. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the paparazzi pictures of Ana de Armas laughing next to Ben Affleck or Zoe Kravitz next to Channing Tatum. I have the pictures if you want to see them.
I do want to see them.
They went viral at the time, and in my own case, I noticed that I often get hiccups when I'm very comfortable with my lovers. I wanted to ask you why this happens, why lovers bring out this bodily, Duchenne laughter out of us.
In both photographs, the person laughing has their mouth open, which is an act of vulnerability. In some cultures, people cover their mouths when they laugh, and it's even considered obscene to open your mouth or to show your teeth or laugh in front of other people.
The only part of our skeleton we reveal to others is our teeth. When we laugh, it's like flashing our interior at others.
And that is obviously very intimate and vulnerable, to show your skeleton to someone else. If you feel like you're safe to let your guard down, then you don't have to worry about what you're revealing or how you look.
Also, in both photographs, it's the woman who's laughing. So, we're not only seeing a woman who's free, letting their body take over, but a woman who is fully occupying her subject position, which goes against the cultural codes of what girls are taught or trained to do through social media. Women are culturally trained to transform themselves from subjects into objects all the time.
I was talking with my mom earlier today and I was telling her about the part in the book when you write about how doctors who interviewed victims of sexual assault would report that those who laughed during the session were more ‘well-adjusted’ than those who spoke straight-faced. You suggest the opposite. You suggest that the role of laughter in such situations has a soothing function for our conversational counterparts, and by extension reflect the role that femininity has, of often comforting a male subject in a non-threatening, reassuring way.
Yeah. There was an article in the New York Times that was talking about laughter, and it was mixing up, without realising it, Duchenne laughter, which is the body driven spontaneous outburst of laughter, with non-Duchenne, which is social laughter, which uses laughter to communicate something to other people about the relationship to manage or manipulate the dynamic.
What I was suggesting was it's possible that those women, having been victims of sexual abuse or assault, might have been managing the male interviewer by using non-Duchenne laughter that the scientist misinterpreted as Duchenne. I connected what I saw happening to a tweet that said, “Are You Actually Funny or So Creepy That Women Laugh Nervously at Your Comments for Their Own Safety?”
Basically it's a question of: do women laugh because the man is funny or are they laughing because the man is creepy and they want to protect themselves?
I wanted to read a short quote from the Audre Lorde essay, ‘The Uses of the Erotic’, which you discuss at length, “In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of [bodily] power within the culture of the oppressed.” I was wondering if we could speak a bit more on this. In what ways is bodily knowledge corrupted or distorted by different oppressions?
There are so many ways I could answer this. Especially where the world is now.
What I’ll say is, propaganda is based on having talking points that manage the way people understand what's happening: they are repeated so many times, continuously and predictably, that there isn't the opportunity for a genuine response to what has been said.
For example, if you just look at the White House spokesperson in interviews with the press, the spokesperson will go for the same talking points, no matter what the question is. They will repeat the same points so that there is no room for error (the error here being answering genuinely and not in line with the administrations’ agenda).
Why don't we find this funny? Shouldn't it be funny? Why do they do this? Someone asks you a question and you don't answer it, but repeat a talking point. If that happened in real life, it would seem funny because it's so bizarre. Press conferences should be funny. Right? But maybe the stakes are too high for us to find them humorous.
It’s also funny when someone takes themselves too seriously, which is what is happening in these procedures. It's like an inherent belief in this ridiculous system overrides our perception of the moment, right? Maybe what’s happening is not taking oneself seriously. To take yourself seriously, you would stay true and aware to what you were experiencing in your body and your mind–what Lorde calls nonrational knowledge–and insist on it. To override what's going on inside of you–the interiority that is the very hallmark of your humanity–with talking points that have been fed to you from the machinery of the system, is not to take yourself seriously, but to be a cog or an actor. What’s happening in these instances is political theatre.
Political theatre, that's good.
But if it were real theatre, who would the character who just repeated a line, no matter what was being asked, be? Who is that character who does the same thing over and over, no matter the context or consequences? We laugh at the character who’s inelastic. Inelasticity is humorous. But in politics, inelasticity signals someone who's serious? How is that?
In reference to Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism you write, “power in politics, as in jokes, hinges on the politician’s ability to reframe or pervert reality.” Our current moment, as you just said, is quite bleak and politicians’ narratives are very perverted. How can we insist on our bodily knowledge and not override it?
We use the words ‘pervert’ and ‘perversion’ all the time in a colloquial way, but, in the book, I'm using it in the psychoanalytic sense.
Essentially, if a healthy person has an idea in their mind and they're presented with evidence from the world that contradicts it, they'll change their idea, adjust it to integrate the evidence they see in the world. Someone with perverse thinking who has an idea in their mind and is presented with evidence from the world that contradicts it, on the other hand, won’t change their mind or idea. Rather, they'll keep their idea intact and twist the evidence so that the part that contradicts it is out of view. In other words, their idea remains the same, but the evidence gets changed. That's what we see happening right now in the world. The evidence is contorted so the part that contradicts the ideas or talking points get edited out or twisted somehow so that we can't see it anymore.
The thing to do to not pervert reality, is to take in the evidence of the world, see what you see, hear what you hear–witness–and then be open to adjusting your ideas according to what you take in with your perceptive abilities, which include all sorts of faculties, not just the intellect, but your senses too – your body.
Perverting reality relies on a willingness to override what you witness, what you take in with your senses, with an idea that you already have in your mind so that everything before you always matches up – the hammer hits the nail no matter where it falls. That is not only a way of not perceiving reality but it's also a way of ensuring that the oppressed remain oppressed.
Thank you for that. I found all these reflections really moving in your book and I hope more people tune in to what you’re saying.
When people, as so many of us do, feel powerless, something we can do is witness, really witness what's happening and take it in with our bodies and our minds and take it in as we perceive it. To be a witness using all our selves is to be human.
In your own experience, how have you translated your psychoanalytic practice beyond the office? How can we use psychoanalysis for protest?
It's so huge. I tell this anecdote in the book from Oliver Sacks, who was a neuroscientist, about working in a hospital while patients with aphasia, which diminishes a person’s ability to understand verbal communications,were watching a speech being given by Ronald Reagan on television. They understood the linguistic level of what he was saying, but they took in all the emissions from his body, the emotional communication, and burst into laughter. What they were picking up on was his insincerity and it was funny to them.
Sometimes you can, and I’ve done this recently, watch politicians on mute and pick up on what they're emitting from their bodies – from their facial expressions to how they're holding themselves. It reveals a lot.
What artists do you turn to when you need a glimpse of someone's true self or someone's inner clown?
There’s a poem that I memorised many years ago that I've been thinking about a lot lately. It's Nazim Hikmet's poem ‘On Living’.
I would love to recite it.
Please, I would love to hear it.
Arcadia Molinas is the online editor of Worms.
Nuar Alsadir is an American poet and psychoanalyst. She was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Forward Prize for Poetry. Animal Joy, her nonfiction debut, was a TIME Magazine Must-Read Book of 2022 and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022.
