"Animal Joy" is at once prose poem, manifesto, sociological study and therapy session. Poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir's first nonfiction book advocates the liberating power of spontaneity, curiosity, humor. The book practices what it preaches. The exposition jumps for intellectual joy, hopscotching from literary criticism to philosophy and psychology to political analysis.
Collectively, these parts amount to an inspiring endorsement of shredding the filters of propriety wherever they are applied — personally, socially, creatively. Encouraging readers to play, the text's discrete segments become a game of connect the dots. The completed picture shows how humor, like any instinctual act, is fundamentally subversive. If ever we needed a reminder of laughter's transformational ability to upend expectations and disappoint the status quo, now is the time.
It is our spontaneous expressions — gaffes, jokes, dreams and the candid insights of children — that are the most authentically human, Alsadir contends. These emanate from the True Self, a conception borrowed from psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who appears justifiably in these pages as something of a hero.
All manner of outburst act as conduits to our animal nature, that vibrant sensual essence unconstrained by social code and psychological defense. Creativity, too, arises from this primal place; the book is equally a paean to art, which "recovers the urgency of our basic drives ... intensifying life by way of corporeality."
Summoning considerations of poems, dreams and comedy, the author suggests that these are emblems of the same impulse. Namely, to approach the rich, or uncomfortable, complexities of the subconscious with symbolism's uncanny help: its ability to say more with less.
As Alsadir explains, the best poetry — like the best humor — is astonishingly concise. The mind magically traverses the unspoken stretch between concrete signposts in a split second. We feel a rush of pleasure (technically, dopamine) when we arrive at poetic closure or a punch line. The moment we "get it," she says, "the aha! becomes a ha!"
To explain how, she offers a taxonomy of the joke, including Sacha Baron Cohen's barbed "undercover character comedy" (which "draws real people into fictional scenarios they believe to be nonfictional in order to reveal their genuine — perverse — feelings and beliefs").
Along the way, she discusses the variety and uses of the laugh, as deflection, pressure valve, social glue. Laughter is perhaps the human animal's most diversified behavior: It can indicate discomfort or affection. It can be genuine and unprocessed or put on, sarcastic and offensive. Alsadir describes multiple examples of the latter, when, during former President Donald Trump's rallies, he derided various victims, frequently women, to shockingly uproarious laughter from the audience.