Comical Modernity by Heidi Hakkarainen

Author:Heidi Hakkarainen [Hakkarainen, Heidi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Austria & Hungary, Modern, 19th Century, Social Science, Popular Culture
ISBN: 9781789202748
Google: b32MDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2019-07-11T22:16:12+00:00

Figure 4.2 Kikeriki, 8 May 1873. Source: Austrian National Library.

Figure 4.3 Der Floh, 23 September 1877. Source: Austrian National Library.

Figure 4.4 Der Floh, 24 November 1878. Source: Austrian National Library.

Figure 4.5 Kikeriki, 6 February 1879. Source: Austrian National Library.

Since Koestler, the relationship between humour and knowledge has been scrutinized in a number of studies on humour and laughter. For example, in her study on satirical magazines in Wilhelmine Germany, Ann Taylor Allen approached humour as a symbolic form of communication and an imaginative model used in order to interpret unfamiliar conditions and create new meanings in an age of cultural crisis.44 The folklorist Seppo Knuuttila, on the other hand, has suggested in his research on Finnish jests that humour involves an epistemological interest: it is one way of testing and producing knowledge.45

In late nineteenth-century Vienna, the question of knowledge was central, due not only to the transformation of the material environment, but also to shifts in the ways of understanding the relationship between the mind and reality. As Coen has noted, not only the city itself, but also the scientific conception of the world was far from stable. Humour was borne out and operated in this state of instability. Looking at the city through the lens of humour was a special way of approaching the changing urban environment through the defamiliarization of the familiar and looking at it from unexpected perspectives.46 Normal, reliable experience was turned into something unexpected and surprising. The puzzle of the city temporarily made sense, not through serious judgement, but through comic insight.

I would therefore suggest that the significance of the physical, material space was essential for understanding this comic insight and ‘getting the joke’. The lived experience of the city was the very base of jokes and cartoons which transformed experiences of material spaces into representations that were, in turn, read in the physical city space. The humorous magazines continuously played with this ongoing reciprocity between perception and representation. In order to understand this circle, one has to look at the city space itself.

Jokes and cartoons did not only rely on cultural meanings and values associated with specific places in Vienna, but the lens of humour also enabled a challenge of the traditional cultural hierarchies embedded in the urban space. To give an example, in 1882 Figaro published a cartoon of a statue ‘sketched in situ by a short-sighted person’ (Figure 4.6). This cartoon was published in a section set aside for ‘dilettantes’, which indicates that it had been sent in by a reader, an amateur humourist.47 The statue in question here is probably the equestrian statue of Archduke Karl (1771–1847) on the Heldenplatz, erected in 1860 (Figure 4.7).48

Here the established visual hierarchy is challenged through a humorous perspective from below, which subverts the cultural and political authority of the statue of a national hero (Held; hence Heldenplatz). Traditionally, the perspective from an elevated point of view has been seen as the perspective of power and control, described in such terms as ‘panoptic gaze’ and ‘celestial eye’.

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