Animal Joy

Starred review from May 9, 2022
Psychoanalyst Alsadir (More Shadow Than Bird) investigates the power of laughter in this thoughtful tour of humans’ unconscious. True laughter, Alsadir suggests, rouses “wakefulness,” expresses one’s “True Self” and betrays the “False Self” constructed for social conformity and protection. The author offers resonant insight on the uses of laughter to redistribute power (liking to laugh or make others laugh are ways “of signaling a preferred position”), and finds an apt comparison for it in the musical term appoggiatura, a note that disrupts an anticipated melody and taps a deeper state of emotion. Alsadir moves confidently through the intellectual terrain of Freud, Donald Winnicott, and neurophysiologist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne, invoking Heidegger’s term aletheia, or “truth as unconcealment” as easily as she calls up pop cultural jokes about trauma or Anna Karenina. Most memorable are her personal asides, such as her account of attending clown school (she tried to drop out but “by staying, was provoked, unsettled, changed”) and the piquant remarks by her daughters—when asked “What does beautiful mean?”—that “beautiful means most self.” Gorgeously written and by turns hilarious and crushing, Alsadir’s examination of humanity’s “savage complexity” is not to be missed. Agent: Harriet Moore, David Higham Assoc.

June 1, 2022
An Arab American psychoanalyst and poet investigates the social and psychological dimensions of laughter. The book begins with Alsadir admitting to her fellow students at clown school that she is attending the course in order to research a book on laughter. From there, the author follows her thoughts and memories through a stream-of-consciousness series of observations on the roles that humor and laughter play in our lives. She remembers, for example, "corpsing," or "breaking into convulsive laughter," at a panel discussion during which a microphone glitch unexpectedly amplified the author saying the word ejaculation. As she describes it, "the sudden surge of my voice came at me through the speakers as a kind of horror vox, a disconcerting eruption of my interior into the external world." In trying to understand her reaction, Alsadir ruminates on the roles that society asks us to play and what happens when we refuse to inhabit those roles. Over the course of a wide-ranging, sometimes scattered narrative, the author explores a host of topics: the relationship between joke structure and Donald Trump's penchant for belittling others ("When we treat another being as inferior--try to disappear them--our underlying goal is to evacuate a threat to our boundaries of self that destabilizes the story we tell ourselves and others"), Sacha Baron Cohen's discovery of "undercover comedy," the effect of the superego on laughter, and the differences among candid camera shows around the world. Throughout, she weaves in personal stories about her family as well as concepts, quotes, and theories developed by Freud, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Barthes, Schopenhauer, Lacan, and many other philosophers and thinkers. At its best, the book is vulnerable, lyrical, and refreshingly incisive. At times, the author's expansive, meandering style makes the prose feel more like a series of interesting anecdotes than a cohesive argument, but Alsadir's quiet wit and depth of knowledge lead to unique insights and profound self-reflection. A sprawling, poetic meditation on humor in all its forms.

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