Very funny (or not)
On Thursday, I spent about an hour talking to our graduate writing seminar (before coming home and promptly falling ill--I don't think the two are related), and one of the questions the students asked me was about humor. They had read an article I wrote on neo-victorianism and Dracula pastiches (accepted for a collection which is doing the out-and-about thing), and noticed that it was often "playful." So what role did I think humor had in academic prose? Not least because I had originally floated some of the ideas on this blog, where I have been known to be funny, and then recast them as a conference paper, where being funny can help keep the audience awake. The academic paper, by contrast, has its moments, but is predominantly "serious." What, then, is going on?
As my readers may have observed on more than one occasion, I frequently write about novels that have at least one aesthetic quality in common--they're terrible. Now, that being said, it is possible for something to be at once terrible and interesting. Or, to put it differently, to be terrible on its own, yet become an interesting object of analysis once understood in a particular context. For a literary historian, many books that cause great pain and suffering during the initial research process may nevertheless be "energized" during the act of writing about them.
From a purely rhetorical point of view, I tend to moderate my snark in formal academic prose because I want the reader to focus not on how bad the book is (why must this character "explode" each time she has sex? Isn't that rather messy? Do we need cleanup on aisle three?) but, instead, on how it works and what it can tell us. When I'm blogging, I'm usually recording initial, or at least early, impressions of my research, and the snark helps keep me on an even keel after I've read the umpteenth novel about an angelic child who converts hardened sinners/someone of a different religion/her family/etc. But in formal academic mode, I want the reader to grasp that said angelic child represents a significant phenomenon in nineteenth-century culture; while I may occasionally wax playful and/or irate (it is difficult to be polite about the kid in Charlotte Elizabeth's Judah's Lion, who keeps calling the protagonist "Mr. Jew"), I'd prefer that the reader pay more attention to the cultural phenomenon and less to my exasperation with any given text.