Mary Douglas describes both definitions of the joke, be it Bergson’s or Freud’s, as an attack on the formal by the informal—here, the only difference is the former’s preoccupation with the industrial age’s mechanized artifice and the latter’s long-historied fascination with the human libido. This dichotomous understanding of humour reminded me of a viral Internet clip from only a month ago, of Nikki Glaser’s opening monologue at the 82nd Golden Globes ceremony, which by all means is an occasion delineated by strict decorum.
Here, the insult comic reflects upon the year’s nominees with an acerbic honesty—admitting to sleeping through Dune 2 or describing Adrien Brody as a two-time survivor of the Holocaust. Although the second statement is true (Brody has portrayed versions of this experience in The Brutalist [2024] and the Pianist [2002]), it is the startling brevity of Glaser’s controversial punchline, as well as its insufficient logic in stringing its succinct words together, in which the comedy is born. What is a serious and sincere work-of-art is released from its context and inverted by Glaser’s undoing of the rhetoric that surrounds it. Her role is that of the joker, as outlined by Douglas: “a privileged person who can say certain things in a certain way which confers immunity. However, he merely expresses consensus.” I do believe that class and the socio-economic position that Glaser occupies in Hollywood’s hierarchy is pivotal to a joke’s successful landing, particularly given that she continually attempts to act as as the audience’s proxy to the bourgeois site of stardom.
Her willingness to act the fool, as evidenced by the featured clip in which she attempts to parody both Wicked (2024) and Conclave (2024), produces a distinct contrast with her larger-than-life physical appearance, adorned in sequinned fabric and self-tanner. Glaser may have failed to “neatly span the gulf between different ideas” in this contrived pitch for a sketch (and perhaps, purposely so), but she arrives in this moment at a striking limbo between the poor jester who laughs and the ruling-class who is laughed at.
Her purpose in this moment is to ease the tension of a significant and assumedly stressful ceremony, allowing the ridiculous subconscious to bubble up. When joking about Diddy and the allegations of sexual-assault levied against him, she is not making light of a tragedy—but finding lightness around it.