David Foster Wallace: Depression, Irony and Humor | Video Lecture Series (1/2)

David Foster Wallace: Depression, Irony and Humor.

In this installment of our video lecture series on David Foster Wallace, the author reflects on depression and the nature of humor.

Taken from an interview clip featuring the late Wallace, this video serves as an audiovisual supplement to the original.

An excerpt from the interview:

"In the U.S. there's a strange situation where in some respects, humor and irony are political responses and they're reductive. And in another sense, particularly in popular entertainment, irony and a kind of dark humor can become a way of - It's pretending to protest when it really isn't.

Someone once called irony the song of a bird that has come to love its cage. And even though it sings about not liking the cage, it really likes it in there. So that it can be both a wake-up call and an anesthetic. And the difference in the U.S. now is very tricky and very complicated, it seems to me.
I'm not often all that aware of stuff that's really funny in the book.

In the American version of "Infinite Jest", I set out to write a sad book. And when people liked it and told me the thing they liked about it was that it was so funny, it was just very surprising. It's the other strange thing about humor. I teach school and I teach literature and some of what I teach is Kafka. And there's a story about Kafka, that in some of Kafka's most horrific stories his neighbors would complain, because he would be laughing so hard late at night, as he wrote these stories.

He found them very very funny and there are things in them that are funny, but I don't know that many people would understand laughing so hard that your neighbors would complain. So there's something. It's probably difficult to talk to a writer about the humor or sadness or something in his or her own work, because our sense of it tends to be very different from readers.

Except, see, I don't know that much about music. People who do say that there is a purity with which the composer's emotional state can be felt by the listener that can't be approached by anything else either. Probably, most of kinds of art have this magical thing of, for a moment, there's a kind of reconciliation and communion between you and me that isn't possible in any other way.

Reading requires sitting alone by yourself in a quiet room and I have friends, intelligent friends, who don't like to read, because they get - it's not just bored - there's an almost dread that comes up, I think, here about having to be alone and having to be quiet. And you see that when you walk into most public spaces in America. It isn't quiet anymore.

They pipe music through. And the music is easy to make fun of, because it's usually horrible music, but it seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet ever anymore. And to me, I don't know that I could defend it, but that seems to me to have something to do with when you feel like the purpose of your life is to gratify yourself and get things for yourself and go all the time, there's this other part of you that's the same part that is almost hungry for silence and quiet and thinking really hard about the same thing for maybe half an hour instead of thirty seconds that doesn't get fed at all.

It makes itself felt in the body and a kind of dread in here. I don't know whether that makes a lot of sense, but I think it's true that here in the U.S., every year the culture gets more and more hostile. I don't mean hostile like angry. It becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read or to look at a piece of art for an hour or to listen to a piece of music that's complicated and that takes work to understand, because - well, there are a lot of reasons - but because, particularly now in computer and internet culture, everything is so fast.

And the faster things go, the more we feed that part of ourselves, but don't feed the part of ourselves that likes ... that likes quiet.

That can live in quiet. That can live without any kind of stimulation."


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