Saturday I saw a young woman in a Chiquita banana lady costume, fruited headpiece and all, hanging out the window of a moving SUV at 2 a.m., pirates and fairies carousing the streets, confusion as to who was a real cop and who was just in a cop costume and a mime embracing a sexually suggestive waffle.
Halloween weekend was a sharp contrast to that which is cold, dry and serious – traits that seem more and more to define the world humanity now inhabits. People work so they can make money, so they can … keep a roof over their heads? Or they simply want to buy a new model of cell phone. Do people work for the sake of money, for the sake of things, for the sake of something to leave behind after they die? My question is: Where’s the party at? Where in society is this “life” that we all supposedly value?
An interesting fact about Medieval culture is that communities often devoted an average of three months out of the year to celebratory carnivals. Though the Middle Ages are commonly defined as a dead-end deluge of dark and dreary days, it turns out that folk festivals were as important to their culture as they were to the mid-20th century, Grateful Dead/Woodstock era.
People in the Middle Ages knew how to throw a party that everyone was invited to. Scholars, clergymen, beggars on the street, everyone was there, and everyone was feeling festive. During a carnival, the piety of life was kind of put on hold.
Mikhail Bakhtin was a modern philosopher who studied, among other aspects of the social world, humor. According to Bakhtin, the Medieval carnival was an event defined by laughter, playfulness and a departure from norms and prohibition. The carnivalesque is that which breaks from seriousness and finds joy rather than concern in images of the grotesque. Defecation, sexuality, profanity – all of these elements are integrated into the carnivalesque environment to be appreciated and laughed with.
Bakhtin would probably comment that the carnivalesque is the definition of laughing with rather than laughing at. Humor in the modern age is usually satirical, cynical laughter, whereas the folk humor of the carnivalesque means that the people laughing do not place themselves above the item that is funny.
The carnivalesque is not about making dry, intelligent, witty political criticism. The carnivalesque is about dressing up as the politician you despise, spilling wine all over yourself whilst dancing around a fire and rejoicing in the base degradation that now defines you both.
Folk humor and the carnival encompass an all-inclusive laughter; people can’t laugh without becoming the object of humor themselves. Equality is key to the carnivalesque; hierarchies are meaningless.
Saturday night, we were all Medieval clowns laughing in camaraderie and jubilation with passing strangers at the grotesqueness of our dress, our bodies, our outrageous voices and action. Our hair was mangled, our legs stumbling out from under us, yet the laughter roared on; degradation and debasement were means enough for celebration.
In the carnivalesque nature of the Halloween festivities, there were no such things as insecurity, embarrassment, or awkwardness. Instead, all of these uncomfortable traits were reveled in. Sluttishness didn’t exist because we were all jovial in our sexuality. Homophobia didn’t exist. Masculinity didn’t exist because even the men were wearing short â?” shorts and spandex. They were heartily lauded for their costume choices.
Mikhail Bakhtin would say that the joy of the Halloween celebration is in letting go of repressive reality and discovering a carnivalesque realism. The campus carnival on Saturday was disruptive, distasteful and deviant. Yet, the real deviance from day-to-day reality seemed to come in a societal state wherein everyone, even the police, understood that this was a time for fun. Pedestrians let go of their need to look both ways, but drivers let go of their need to be polite. All were shouting, but the anger and the joy seemed to mix together into a state wherein negative feelings could be experienced, then freely shed.
Bakhtin writes that only by embracing the profane will it ever become ambivalent; i.e., not a threat. It’s like the way that you can use abusive swear words toward your best friend, and find nothing but joy in their act of returning the dirty insulting speech. According to Bakhtin, laughter and the carnivalesque provide an atmosphere wherein fears, profanities and abuse lose their status as objects of harm. Indeed, as long as everyone in the carnival is truly laughing from an inner state of jollification, individual and global problems are literally nonexistent.
So, now that we have evaluated the nature of the carnival, the grotesque and the holiday, what can we say that this nature teaches? It teaches us to take the world seriously, if sheer seriousness is what you’re seriously seeing.

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