Mardi 25 novembre 2025 18h Salle 126 STC1
Séminaire de Lynn Blin (MCF Honoraire EMMA) sur le sujet Satire and the various types of laughter.
Satire is today the most prominent form of humor, pervading every nook and cranny of the screen and digital media (Caron, 2020). Dating back to Greek and Roman times, in its preliterary form and to this day, satire’s prime raison d’être has been to ridicule power in an aim to correct corruption. Today, however, in the smorgasbord of available comedy, where basically anyone can create their own prime time comedy special at the click of a link, what has traditionally been classified in the category “satire” has been stretched well beyond what it was when Aristophanes wrote “The Birds” or Swift was suggesting that the Irish eat their children to stave off hunger. It is not in its viciousness- the ingredient which is part and parcel of the satirical genre that this change is noticeable. Nor is it to be found in its four core ingredients: play, judgement, aggression and laughter. The challenge today stems from the fact that satire is no longer solely a literary genre. The cues to play, the background needed to nourish reasoned judgement, the forms of aggression available, and the all-time complexity of the how, what and when of laughter have been substantially modified by social media. To examine the question of the specificity of satiric laughter, I will first present a broad view of satire and how it is analysed in other disciplines (Skalicky, 2025) and continue with an examination of the mechanics of laughter (Provine, 1996). Working with the theories of Test (1991), Condren (2022) and Simpson (2003), my aim is to pick up where Caron (2020) left off in exposing the theoretical and ethical difficulty of comic laughter in general and satiric laughter in particular. Caron speaks of the “shaping presence” of satire and specifies that presence is a “deranged form” and registers as an absence (2020 174). Indeed, satire’s humorous surface can obscure or dilute its critical intent, particularly in high-stakes contexts (Skalicky, 2025). It is in the complex, precarious, and culturally loaded reception of satire that this “absence” registers most clearly and intensifies the difficulty of any aim satire might have to correct corruption.
Lien ZOOM : https://univ-montp3-fr.zoom.us/j/94894956359?pwd=7IQe1fz5qMISK4HnsvimiLLjWT62On.1