I. Theoretical Context

With some notable exceptions (Chaplin, Twain, the Marx Brothers), Adorno was often suspicious of laughter. The critique of its abuse runs like an Ariadne's thread through the most varied topics. In the section on mass culture from Dialektics of Enlightenment, “false laughter” is sharply attacked: “Laughing about something is always laughing at it. … The collective of laughers parodies humanity. … The devilish aspect of false laughter lies precisely therein … that it parodies the best thing of all, reconciliation, in compulsive manner.” In the Philosophy of New Music, too, the stravinsky of Petrushka is accused of the same barbarity; unsurprisingly, this barbaric humor finds its ancestor in Wagner. Yet even Karl Kraus is not immune to Adorno's principled suspicion of humor. Mahler's humor, however, is exceptional, precisely because it does not lead to laughter. Humor is only possible for Adorno if it contains a moment of subjective reflexivity; in this respect, he remains true to the inheritance of romantic aesthetics. Just as Stravinsky or Wagner pursue barbaric desublimation, so the antisublimatory energy of jokes is “on the side of the stronger.” In contrast, romantic humor can still sublimate such aggression. It thus comes as something of a surprise to read near the end of Composing for Film: “that all film music has in principle something of the joke about it, and falls victim to bad naivete as soon as it literally takes itself for that which it claims to be.”