” Let me talk just a little bit more about humor, and how it gets short shrift from this mass culture, so that for example you don’t hear people saying that Billy Wilder is a director far greater than someone like Tarkovsky.  Nevertheless when I ask myself for my own opinion of “humor,” I confess than I find myself thinking of it as the rambunctious kid brother of the “serious.”  I remember when I was a little boy I liked Beaver Cleaver but I was in love with the older, more staid Wally—and although erotic signs have changed considerably in 50 years, Wally remains the ne plus ultra of a certain kind of fuckability, a glamor of seizure.  It’s the child, however, who sees through the pretensions of the adult, and that’s why I don’t care much for children no matter how cute.

I don’t want to waste a lot of time on examples of great poets whose work I find funny—because what one finds funny is a private thing.  I know some who are still laughing at Liza Minnelli’s hijinks in Arthur and Arthur part 2.  Going back to Freud’s model, I want to address the question of how we can wrest humor out of bleak circumstance.  Let’s take a historical view.  I can remember when Susan Sontag wrote her “Notes on Camp,” which, in the 60’s, was the most readily identifiable strain of gay humor available to her, or to most of us I guess.  Sontag’s definition of camp proscribed a certain narrowing of it to include the love of gay men for the things straight people despise—untalented stars, kitsch, false icons, trash.  Now that it’s 2014 I see camp as a product of a society in which love was valorized above all other possible forms of emotional action.  We were supposed to be meek then, all of us.  We would inherit the earth. ”