In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• The Perfect Joke: Autopathography and Humor in Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House
• Jeffrey M. Brown (bio)

An Aesthetics of Anesthetics: The Problem of Humor in Medicine

In spite of that old adage—"laughter is the best medicine"—it is hard to overcome the feeling that illness and humor are fundamentally incompatible. Indeed, this basic assumption is often used as the source of comedy itself: the incongruous intersection of laughter and suffering highlights the ways in which the former might somehow trump the latter by way of an ironic "deadening" or desensitization. In a literature review for the Southern Medical Journalin 2003, physician Howard J. Bennett finds little support in published studies for the idea that laughter meaningfully promotes health or healing, despite popular beliefs; the only direct medical benefits he substantiates concern pain management through a kind of comic anesthesia. "In one well-controlled study," Bennett reports, "humorous movies reduced the need for postoperative analgesia in orthopedic patients." ¹If comedy does work upon the body, it seems to do so exclusively by placing pressure on one end of a kind of Cartesian lever, prying apart the humorous experience of pleasure from the physical reality of disease and illness.

Such insights might come as no surprise for theories of humor— and, indeed, of aesthetic experience more broadly. But they also define a distinct tradition in modern and contemporary drama that often uses the incompatibility of laughter and illness as a vector for multivalent critique, registering both social conventions about what might define an [End Page 151]appropriate ethic of care as well as how those conventions substantiate ongoing cultural hypocrisies. For example: Halley Feiffer's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City(2016) opens on just such a display of torturous incongruence. Karla, a standup comedian in her early thirties, is sitting in a shared hospital room next to her unconscious mother, who is recovering from a hysterectomy after receiving a diagnosis of endometrial cancer. Because of the privacy curtain dividing the space, Karla is unaware that the other unconscious cancer patient in the room has also received a visitor: the middle-aged Don, who is silently watching over his own mother. When Karla begins to workshop a series of vulgar jokes aloud, Don makes his presence known—and the ensuing argument climaxes in a challenging inversion of comic wit. Don:

(Pulling out all the stops in a vicious cross-fire)

NO, what the – F – is wrong with YOUand your self-obsessed hipster ME GENERATION?! Your mom is in the hospital with cancer. Things are not looking good. Things are looking, in fact, pretty grim.

(Building to a whisper-scream)

So GIVE UP THE COMEDY FOR A HOT SECOND. LET IT GO. PUT IT ON THE BACK BURNER. Oh, and here'sa radical idea: drop the VIBRATOR JOKES and FOCUS ON YOUR MOM!!!

Karla:

(Whisper-screaming, too.)

I AMFOCUSING ON MY MOM. And she fucking LIKESVIBRATOR JOKES!!!

Don:

(Darkly sardonic.)

Yeah. Seems like they're really killingover there. ²

What makes this moment so effective is the way that Feiffer's caustic dialogue uses the ironic terms of humor to indicate a potent intersection between social norms, individual subjectivity, and interpersonal connection. Don's objection to Karla's standup routine points to an assumed gap in empathy: Karla's jokes, he asserts, are indicative of her generational "self-obsession" that is ignorant of and insensitive to her mother's needs as a cancer patient. On the other hand, Karla's rejoinder challenges Don's assumption—i.e., that humor indicates a disavowal of illness, and that illness itself is a uniform experience (" all your mom is now is cancer," he declares a bit later ³)—by asserting that there is no universal [End Page 152]standard of interpersonal care: vibrator jokes areappropriate for their particular relationship. Yet Don once again fires back, appropriating the jargon of professional comedy—to "kill" is to succeed with an audience— both to underscore the failure of Karla's routine (no one is laughing) and to indicate that humor does not mitigate...

中文翻译：

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完美的笑话：莎拉·鲁尔的《干净的房子》中的自述和幽默

以下是内容的简短摘录，以代替摘要：

• 完美的笑话：莎拉·鲁尔的《干净的房子》中的自述和幽默
• 杰弗里·M·布朗（简介）

麻醉美学：医学中的幽默问题

尽管有句古老的格言——“笑是最好的良药”——但很难克服疾病和幽默从根本上不相容的感觉。事实上，这个基本假设经常被用作喜剧本身的来源：笑声和痛苦的不协调交叉凸显了前者可能通过讽刺性的“消音”或脱敏来以某种方式胜过后者。在 2003 年《南方医学杂志》的一篇文献综述中，医生霍华德·J·贝内特 (Howard J. Bennett) 发现，尽管人们普遍认为笑能有效促进健康或治愈，但已发表的研究几乎没有支持这一观点。他证实的唯一直接的医疗益处是通过一种滑稽的麻醉来控制疼痛。“在一项对照良好的研究中，”贝内特报告说，“幽默电影减少了骨科患者术后镇痛的需要。” ¹如果喜剧确实对身体起作用，那么它似乎只是通过对一种笛卡尔杠杆的一端施加压力，将幽默的快乐体验与疾病的身体现实分开。

对于幽默理论以及更广泛的审美体验理论来说，这样的见解可能并不令人意外。但他们也在现代和当代戏剧中定义了一个独特的传统，经常使用笑声和疾病的不相容性作为多价批评的载体，记录了关于什么可以定义[结束第151页]适当的护理道德以及如何定义的社会惯例。这些公约证实了持续存在的文化虚伪。例如：哈雷·费弗 (Halley Feiffer) 的《在去纽约市纪念斯隆·凯特琳癌症中心妇科肿瘤科途中发生的一件有趣的事情》 (2016) 就是以这种令人痛苦的不一致开场。卡拉是一位三十出头的单口喜剧演员，她坐在共用病房里，旁边是她昏迷不醒的母亲，母亲在被诊断出患有子宫内膜癌后正在接受子宫切除术的康复中。由于空间的隔断，卡拉不知道房间里另一个昏迷不醒的癌症患者也接待了访客：中年唐，他正在默默地守护着自己的母亲。当卡拉开始大声讲一系列粗俗笑话时，唐让大家知道了他的存在，随后的争论在喜剧智慧的富有挑战性的反转中达到了高潮。 大学教师：

（在恶性交火中使出浑身解数）

不，你和你那自恋的时髦“ME一代”到底出了什么问题？！你妈妈因癌症住院了。事情看起来不太好。事实上，事情看起来相当严峻。

（低声尖叫）

所以暂时放弃喜剧吧。放手吧。把它放在次要位置。哦，这是一个激进的想法：放弃振动器笑话，专注于你的妈妈！

卡拉：

（也有低声尖叫。）

我专注于我的妈妈。她他妈的喜欢振动器笑话！

大学教师：

（暗暗讽刺。）

是的。看来他们那边真的是在杀人啊。²

使这一时刻如此有效的原因是费弗的尖刻对话使用讽刺性的幽默术语来表明社会规范、个人主观性和人际联系之间的有效交叉。唐对卡拉的单口喜剧例行公事的反对指出了一种假定的同理心差距：他断言，卡拉的笑话表明了她这一代人的“自我痴迷”，这种自我迷恋对她母亲作为癌症患者的需求无知且麻木不仁。另一方面，卡拉的反驳挑战了唐的假设——即幽默表明对疾病的否认，而疾病本身是一种统一的经历（“你妈妈现在的一切都是癌症，”他稍后宣称³）——通过断言人际关怀没有通用的[完第152页]标准：振动器笑话适合他们的特定关系。然而，唐再次反击，借用了专业喜剧的行话——“杀死”就是为了赢得观众的青睐——既强调了卡拉常规的失败（没有人笑），也表明幽默并不能缓解……