«The trouble with Nietzsche, he says, which is also the trouble with Benjamin, is that deep down they are so very German».
Moo Pak, Gabriel Josipovici.
Jack Toledano excuses himself right away with a disclaimer: «I can say that, he says, because my favourite artists are German, or nearly all». It’s always risky to go after a generalization like that. It’s a dangerous game to play. The more risk you take, the higher the stakes. Specially when you are ready to digg deep into other peoples cultures, which is always complex if you have not made the effort to understand them to some degree. What I’m trying to say is that for one person to take that road, they either have an alaby, a hidden as under the sleeve, that allow those very words to be spoken without sparking a big battle. Nationalisms are fire crackers with a bunch of teenage matches trying to proove themselves in the fulfillment of the mass.
Jack Toledano, and Josipovici himself, are well read and knowledgable about which authors and artist from the German culture they would like to take a laugh with. And explicitely mentiones that what makes them so German is their lack of humour. Or the lack of putting themselves in the center of the joke, to be joked about by the rest of the gang. The sense of cultural formality, that each of us brings from our own personal experience, from home, schooling, and our own consumption of our very own little culture, and nothing else. That’s the raw cultural element of self-fullfiled individual. My culture is all I need. And the rest, well…
But it’s not the case here. Some names a dropped: Klee, while Swiss, he’s from the German culture. However, he’s been excused himself, not for being Swiss, which made be as well classified in the same «dullness», but rather because he’s said to have a lightness of touch, a sense of humour, and the ability to see his own absurdity. This was not the case of Nietzsche nor Benjamin, and even less of Goethe or Thomas Mann.
So you see: in order to take a chance of categorizing other culture, you must at least require to understand how to catalogue the expressions of art and culture from his own representative voices. This means to have read them. Probably, if you truly would like your joke to slip by as an insider’s wise crack, you need to speak and read the language. Of course, you may intend to mimick those who have such cultura leverage to address their own wittiness, but that would be a fool’s choice as you would be rapidly disarmed and bare naked in front of mob of people taking a poke at your very own national hero’s, in the best case scenario, intelectually, and in the worst one, with some masculine physicality and the same sort of arrogance your initial pulse helped to set lamest kind of mood.
But at the end, we’re somehow condemened by our own cultura biases. And we have not all drank from the same fountains.
Moo Pak considers the characters to bring to the table a little bit of the witty sense of humour that still represents the English vis a vis it’s American cousins. And this trait represent a difference with Germans, or even the Spaniards. And all of them could be linked with the sort of moral structure derived from the religion. Our cultura heritage. Our own personal cross.
«Today the English still pride themselves on their sense of humour, he says, but in truth there are now few more humourless and sentimental people than the English. Their Puritan legacy weighs heavily upon them, he says, as the Protestant legacy lays heavily on the Germans and thier Catholic legacy weighs heavily on the Austrians and the Spaniards».
The legacy of Puratanism and Protestants as central common legacy to the American Colonies NEW culture, as compared to the Catholic legacy in NEW spain, back in the day, as an instrument embeded into the colonialist expansions of these cultures in the XV-XX centuries. It’s there, and it’s also there in terms that go beyond the sense of humour, or lack of it of. It’s complicated, we know. But this expression of cultural segmentation brings us to the capacity to analyse ourselves taking into consideration our own personal and collective limitations. «By and large, he says, peoples are a disaster and only individuals are worth thingking about».
That’s the thing. Not just the prejudice and judgment of peoples will always lead us into slipery soil, but it will always reconstruct some sort of stereotypical face of our collectives that might reflect something about our legacy, but that does not represent entirely who we are. This individual disparities and peculiarities are the liberating stories on how we’ve come to read Socrates, nowadays, as if by a sort of miracle, and that each of these cultural legacies have provided some literature that has been able to represent the teaching that through books, stories, narratives, are able to express the global interconection among people, among cultures, among our selves.
From here or there, I reading and understanding of cultural references as: in the Protestant team, Goethe, Milton, Kant, Hegel, George Eliot, and van Gogh. Catholics, such Dante, Langlands, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark. Sophocles, Aristophanes or Socrates. Donne, Stevens.
Still we find the notion of what’s behind these voices in the capacity to find the common link from their human perspective, as close to what we have intended to liver our lives. And this where humour plays a role. We want to laugh with people that we can walk with, and expand the joke to the best possible scenario for an everlasting laugh. This to me is what we are driven towards.
Humour, and laughter. As a choice. As an instinct. As cultural legacy. It’s still there to shine through. It remains a trait for the future. A holy grail to chase. Just because you may also go by life a little lighter if you may squeeze a giggle here and there.
