Noel’s Reviews > Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments > Status Update
Noel
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Fun is a medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe. It makes laughter the instrument for cheating happiness. To moments of happiness, laughter is foreign; only operettas, and now films, present sex amid peals of merriment. But Baudelaire is as humorless as Hölderlin. In wrong society laughter is a sickness infecting happiness and drawing it into society’s worthless totality.
— Mar 17, 2026 11:02AM
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Noel’s Previous Updates
Noel
is on page 106 of 282
The pernicious love of the common people for the harm done to them outstrips even the cunning of the authorities. … It calls for Mickey Rooney rather than the tragic Garbo, Donald Duck rather than Betty Boop.
— Mar 17, 2026 10:46AM
Noel
is on page 45 of 282
The superiority of nature in the competitive struggle is repeatedly confirmed by the very mind which has mastered nature. All bourgeois enlightenment is agreed in its demand for sobriety, respect for facts, a correct appraisal of relative strength. Wishful thinking is banned. The reason, however, is that all power in class society is beset by the gnawing consciousness of its powerlessness in face of…
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— Mar 04, 2026 08:00PM
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Someone told me someday about the difference between transgression and subversion. I cannot help thinking about it now on a daily basis, especially on account of the sorry state of the political comedy scene in France for instance... I miss the likes of George Carlin!
Haha, what’s the difference between them?
Transgression acknowledges the dominant order and values, it is something like a performative breaking of the law and/or values for cheap thrills, exposure and entertainment, whereas subversion aims to undermine them, to damage their ideological foundations and call into question their recognized status into jeopardy :)
Wait, Baudelaire was extremely funny, Noel. He laughed at a whole century and the hokum of progress.
Thanks, Julio. Unfortunately, I haven’t read Baudelaire yet. Maybe I’ll pick up his Flowers of Evil next…
By the way, Julio, Adorno and Horkheimer also criticize Bergson’s essay on laughter: “Laughter about something is always laughter at it, and the vital force which, according to Bergson, bursts through rigidity in laughter is, in truth, the irruption of barbarity, the self-assertion which, in convivial settings, dares to celebrate its liberation from scruple.”
"Laughter is the attempt by the human mind to break the fetters of language".---Lacan
At least Adorno likes Chaplin and the Marx brothers. Also, this chapter is utterly fascinating—it’s a veritable kaleidoscope of wartime life in the 1940s US.