Tickled think

Humour, with its bent for surprise and dark revelation, is explored with a poet’s ear in this freewheeling, enlightening study

An outburst of laughter, Freud maintained, is an eruption from the unconscious. It’s a belief that American psychoanalyst and poet Nuar Alsadir sets about unpacking in Animal Joy, her ruminative interrogation into the might and meaning of this vital mode of human communication. Understanding it better, she suggests, can open us up to a less constrained, more spontaneous experience of the world around us.

Splicing sometimes dense academic theory with provocations drawn from the fraught years of the Trump presidency as well as from her personal and professional life, Alsadir covers topics as diverse as the equalising properties of a New York subway car, the Brett Kavanaugh supreme court confirmation hearings, and computer viruses as “a form of art and a form of prophecy”.

An early portion of the book draws on an episode she mined in a Granta essay, describing her initially bruising time at clown school, where she was eventually given the pointed stage name “Next!”. Later, she recalls a laughter yoga class with an instructor who was a hugger (the author is not), and describes corpsing during a panel debate when her microphone played up, booming her voice into the room just as she uttered “ejaculation”. Though unguarded, Alsadir brings to these personal vignettes the same precision she applies to her descriptions of concepts such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s “addressivity”, or the unexpected overlap between Lady Gaga’s worries about sex and Plato’s warnings about laughter.

Throughout, a cohort of comedians including Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Murphy and Sarah Silverman rubs shoulders with Lacan and Žižek as Alsadir probes the ways humour can convey the emotionally troubling, how it can be a force of resistance, and express healthy forms of aggression that protect against “the wilder kinds”. Of course, it can also be a conduit for malevolence: Iago’s machinations in Othello, she notes, have something in common with “not-jokes” – as in: “You’re pretty – not.”

As a poet, Alsadir has been shortlisted for the Forward prize, and her attention to language and literature is a rich pleasure. It allows her to draw impish meaning from typos and erroneous autocorrections, and yields some wonderfully startling sentences and images. “The only part of our skeleton that we reveal to others is our teeth,” she writes at one point.

Though not svelte, Animal Joy takes the form of an extended essay. It moves with the associative fluidity of a talking-cure session, even as it directs the gaze to the wordless nether regions of the mind. It provides section breaks and recurring motifs but none of the familiar, reassuring rhythms and resolutions of chapters. At one point, a quote from Nietzsche floats alone on a page: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

At its best, this freeform structure feels profoundly playful, evoking Helen Keller’s response – referred to more than once by Alsadir – to learning what jumping is: “How like thought!” At other times, Alsadir’s clinical training, always there in the background, obstructs the flow. Anarchic interruptions come from her