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Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation
A Time Must-Read Book of 2022
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022
Aster(ix) Journal's 12 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022
An invigorating, continuously surprising book about the serious nature of laughter.
Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, or self-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints. Taking laughter’s revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir’s experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of being present and embodied. Writing in a poetic, associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical, Alsadir ranges from her experience in clown school, Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction, Freud’s un-Freudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war brokers, to “Not Jokes,” Abu Ghraib, Frantz’s negrophobia, smut, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, and how poetry can wake us up. At the center of the book, however, is the author’s relationship with her daughters, who erupt into the text like sudden, unexpected laughter. These interventions―frank, tender, and always a challenge to the writer and her thinking―are like tiny revolutions, pointedly showing the dangers of being severed from one’s true self and hinting at ways one might be called back to it.
A bold and insatiably curious prose debut, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022
Aster(ix) Journal's 12 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022
An invigorating, continuously surprising book about the serious nature of laughter.
Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, or self-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints. Taking laughter’s revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir’s experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of being present and embodied. Writing in a poetic, associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical, Alsadir ranges from her experience in clown school, Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction, Freud’s un-Freudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war brokers, to “Not Jokes,” Abu Ghraib, Frantz’s negrophobia, smut, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, and how poetry can wake us up. At the center of the book, however, is the author’s relationship with her daughters, who erupt into the text like sudden, unexpected laughter. These interventions―frank, tender, and always a challenge to the writer and her thinking―are like tiny revolutions, pointedly showing the dangers of being severed from one’s true self and hinting at ways one might be called back to it.
A bold and insatiably curious prose debut, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.
320 pages, Paperback
First published August 16, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
April 6, 2024
Loved this so much - searing, brilliant, and full of life
July 16, 2022
My review for LIBER: https://www.liberreview.com/issue-1-3...
A POET AND a psychoanalyst walk into a bar. That sounds like the setup to a joke, but really, it’s a scene from Nuar Alsadir’s enthralling new book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, and, in this case, the poet and the psychoanalyst are one and the same: Alsadir herself.
In this expansive and erudite meditation on the relationship between laughter and basically everything else, Alsadir interweaves both of those strands of her identity—along with many more, including her experiences as the daughter of Iraqi immigrants and as the mother of two daughters—to explore what laughter can reveal about our deepest selves and the reality that surrounds us. On the very first page, she quotes George Orwell: “A thing is funny when—in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening—it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.”
From there, she lets the reader ride her waves of thought, considering the ways in which this revolutionary power can be manifested in environments as diverse as her studies in a clown class at Yale University to broader contexts of activism and resistance such as those described by John Lennon:
When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, and flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is nonviolence and humor.
Or, as Alsadir puts it shortly thereafter, “By behaving spontaneously, in line with our instincts, we have the potential to provoke ourselves—and others—into possibility, whether its personal, poetic, or political.”
In the associative style of Freudian talk therapy, Alsadir riffs to her audience on an astonishing array of people, topics, and theories—from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure to Primo Levi, from the Still Face Experiment to Audre Lorde, from the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings to Martin Heidegger, from Sarah Silverman to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—all in the service of examining how the human activity of laughter is inextricably connected to our conscious and unconscious minds, our physical bodies, and our body politic.
Although she deliberately avoids a clear plot, throughline, or thesis, Alsadir comes across as rhetorically persuasive on page after page. Proceeding by the method of unexpected leaps and pleasing juxtapositions, she makes the convincing case that humorous ruptures and the laughter that accompanies them stand—if they are honest—to divulge a great deal about who we are, how we live, and what we desire.
Over and over again, she shows that what makes us truly laugh also has the capacity to expose hypocrisies and falsehoods. Writing of Sascha Baron Cohen’s personae—including Borat, the supposed journalist from Kazakhstan—she notes how deftly these figures can draw “real people into fictional scenarios they believe to be nonfictional in order to reveal their genuine—perverse—feelings and beliefs.” In the summer of 2020, Baron Cohen infiltrated a conservative rally against Covid-19 restrictions in Washington State, leading them in a singalong designed to expose “the extent to which the ‘rights’ the protesters were defending were entangled with the infringement on the rights of others” (e.g., “Chinese people, what we gonna do? Nuke ’em up like in World War II,” and, “Journalists, what we gonna do? Chop ’em up like the Saudis do”), until one of the organizers recognized the prank and unplugged the sound system.
ALSADIR IS THE author of the poetry collections More Shadow Than Bird (Salt Publishing, 2012) and Fourth Person Singular (Pavilion Poetry LUP, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in England and Ireland. Just as her style resembles therapy, so too does it resemble poetry, utilizing repetition and surprise to advance her ruminations. She crafts her book from patterns and variations, though it is also intellectually rigorous: she tells stories and also quotes experts, calling back to them as the book progresses.
If the book can be said to have an overarching mission, it is arguably to help the reader regain awareness of what the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott refers to as the “True Self,” a self that manifests in the spontaneous gestures of human infants but that begins to transform by necessity into a False or “socialized” self as the baby grows up. Both Winnicott and Alsadir argue that one way to reaccess the True Self is through unrehearsed, impetuous play, play in which we don’t worry about other people failing to affirm or accept us but to which we can simply abandon ourselves. Early on, Alsadir puts forth the concept of “addressivity” as defined by the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, a phenomena in which, right before we speak, we project ourselves into our listener, envisioning how they’ll receive what we are about to say and then tailoring our communication to those expectations. Addressivity is the reason why “you can feel connected speaking with one person but talk about the same thing in the same way with someone else and feel like a fumbling bore.” Perhaps addressivity illuminates why I, as one particular reader, felt absorption and pleasure in the style and structure of Animal Joy. The book was a game that I wanted to play, a back-and-forth that felt invigorating and real. The addressee of which Alsadir appears to conceive is smart and curious, sophisticated and patient, quick-witted yet eager to slowly reflect—qualities that feel potentially true but also aspirational, as if she thinks her readers are going to bring their best selves to the task of reading her words, a belief which might, in turn, encourage those selves to be present.
At one point, she recounts how, during her time studying at Oxford University, she was so keen to get to know her fellow students that she came on too strong, peppering them with icebreaker-esque inquiries. Finally, one of them told her, “Here in Europe, when we try to get to know someone, we don’t ask questions. We enter into conversation and get to know a person by the way they think.” Alsadir admits she doesn’t know if this is, in fact, the European way, but that getting to see the movements of a person’s mind can be captivating. Watching the motion of her mind across her capacious subject matter is captivating as well, for we get to know her not by the questions we might want to ask (What do you do all day? Who do you love? Why did you write this book?) but by simply spending time with her as she thinks on the page.
The book is full of witty but subtle touches. For instance, she titles her bibliography not “Works Cited” but “A Shrewdness of Thinkers and Feelers.” And the thoughts and feelings she cites from them are indeed shrewd, as when she quotes Joseph Brodsky as saying that in a poem, “you should try to reduce the number of adjectives to a minimum. So if somebody covered your poem with a magic cloth that removes adjectives, the page would still be black enough because of nouns, adverbs and verbs. When that cloth is little, your best friends are nouns.” Because adjectives call up prefabricated judgments in the mind of the reader rather than letting them see things directly and decide for themselves, she concludes that, “Adjectives are the canned laughter of language.”
Alsadir draws her title from the opening epigraph from Chekhov: “The so-called pure, childlike joy of life is animal joy.” But perhaps the most powerful of her epigraphs is the one preceding the second section from Shirley Jackson: “I am the captain of my fate. Laughter is possible laughter is possible laughter is possible”—a necessary mantra in a world that can feel like absurdity all the way down.
A POET AND a psychoanalyst walk into a bar. That sounds like the setup to a joke, but really, it’s a scene from Nuar Alsadir’s enthralling new book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, and, in this case, the poet and the psychoanalyst are one and the same: Alsadir herself.
In this expansive and erudite meditation on the relationship between laughter and basically everything else, Alsadir interweaves both of those strands of her identity—along with many more, including her experiences as the daughter of Iraqi immigrants and as the mother of two daughters—to explore what laughter can reveal about our deepest selves and the reality that surrounds us. On the very first page, she quotes George Orwell: “A thing is funny when—in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening—it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.”
From there, she lets the reader ride her waves of thought, considering the ways in which this revolutionary power can be manifested in environments as diverse as her studies in a clown class at Yale University to broader contexts of activism and resistance such as those described by John Lennon:
When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, and flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is nonviolence and humor.
Or, as Alsadir puts it shortly thereafter, “By behaving spontaneously, in line with our instincts, we have the potential to provoke ourselves—and others—into possibility, whether its personal, poetic, or political.”
In the associative style of Freudian talk therapy, Alsadir riffs to her audience on an astonishing array of people, topics, and theories—from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure to Primo Levi, from the Still Face Experiment to Audre Lorde, from the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings to Martin Heidegger, from Sarah Silverman to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—all in the service of examining how the human activity of laughter is inextricably connected to our conscious and unconscious minds, our physical bodies, and our body politic.
Although she deliberately avoids a clear plot, throughline, or thesis, Alsadir comes across as rhetorically persuasive on page after page. Proceeding by the method of unexpected leaps and pleasing juxtapositions, she makes the convincing case that humorous ruptures and the laughter that accompanies them stand—if they are honest—to divulge a great deal about who we are, how we live, and what we desire.
Over and over again, she shows that what makes us truly laugh also has the capacity to expose hypocrisies and falsehoods. Writing of Sascha Baron Cohen’s personae—including Borat, the supposed journalist from Kazakhstan—she notes how deftly these figures can draw “real people into fictional scenarios they believe to be nonfictional in order to reveal their genuine—perverse—feelings and beliefs.” In the summer of 2020, Baron Cohen infiltrated a conservative rally against Covid-19 restrictions in Washington State, leading them in a singalong designed to expose “the extent to which the ‘rights’ the protesters were defending were entangled with the infringement on the rights of others” (e.g., “Chinese people, what we gonna do? Nuke ’em up like in World War II,” and, “Journalists, what we gonna do? Chop ’em up like the Saudis do”), until one of the organizers recognized the prank and unplugged the sound system.
ALSADIR IS THE author of the poetry collections More Shadow Than Bird (Salt Publishing, 2012) and Fourth Person Singular (Pavilion Poetry LUP, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in England and Ireland. Just as her style resembles therapy, so too does it resemble poetry, utilizing repetition and surprise to advance her ruminations. She crafts her book from patterns and variations, though it is also intellectually rigorous: she tells stories and also quotes experts, calling back to them as the book progresses.
If the book can be said to have an overarching mission, it is arguably to help the reader regain awareness of what the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott refers to as the “True Self,” a self that manifests in the spontaneous gestures of human infants but that begins to transform by necessity into a False or “socialized” self as the baby grows up. Both Winnicott and Alsadir argue that one way to reaccess the True Self is through unrehearsed, impetuous play, play in which we don’t worry about other people failing to affirm or accept us but to which we can simply abandon ourselves. Early on, Alsadir puts forth the concept of “addressivity” as defined by the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, a phenomena in which, right before we speak, we project ourselves into our listener, envisioning how they’ll receive what we are about to say and then tailoring our communication to those expectations. Addressivity is the reason why “you can feel connected speaking with one person but talk about the same thing in the same way with someone else and feel like a fumbling bore.” Perhaps addressivity illuminates why I, as one particular reader, felt absorption and pleasure in the style and structure of Animal Joy. The book was a game that I wanted to play, a back-and-forth that felt invigorating and real. The addressee of which Alsadir appears to conceive is smart and curious, sophisticated and patient, quick-witted yet eager to slowly reflect—qualities that feel potentially true but also aspirational, as if she thinks her readers are going to bring their best selves to the task of reading her words, a belief which might, in turn, encourage those selves to be present.
At one point, she recounts how, during her time studying at Oxford University, she was so keen to get to know her fellow students that she came on too strong, peppering them with icebreaker-esque inquiries. Finally, one of them told her, “Here in Europe, when we try to get to know someone, we don’t ask questions. We enter into conversation and get to know a person by the way they think.” Alsadir admits she doesn’t know if this is, in fact, the European way, but that getting to see the movements of a person’s mind can be captivating. Watching the motion of her mind across her capacious subject matter is captivating as well, for we get to know her not by the questions we might want to ask (What do you do all day? Who do you love? Why did you write this book?) but by simply spending time with her as she thinks on the page.
The book is full of witty but subtle touches. For instance, she titles her bibliography not “Works Cited” but “A Shrewdness of Thinkers and Feelers.” And the thoughts and feelings she cites from them are indeed shrewd, as when she quotes Joseph Brodsky as saying that in a poem, “you should try to reduce the number of adjectives to a minimum. So if somebody covered your poem with a magic cloth that removes adjectives, the page would still be black enough because of nouns, adverbs and verbs. When that cloth is little, your best friends are nouns.” Because adjectives call up prefabricated judgments in the mind of the reader rather than letting them see things directly and decide for themselves, she concludes that, “Adjectives are the canned laughter of language.”
Alsadir draws her title from the opening epigraph from Chekhov: “The so-called pure, childlike joy of life is animal joy.” But perhaps the most powerful of her epigraphs is the one preceding the second section from Shirley Jackson: “I am the captain of my fate. Laughter is possible laughter is possible laughter is possible”—a necessary mantra in a world that can feel like absurdity all the way down.
January 17, 2023
Doesn't really do what it says on the tin. There's very little joy found in these pages, but a lot of effort. You can feel Alsadir straining to create connections, to structure webs of callbacks, to say something, in short, to write meaningfully. At times it's quite lovely, but there are plenty of duds along the way.
The book is loosely organized into short essayistic sections that scoop up a handful of quotes and anecdotes then labor to lace them together. Alsadir references all kinds of interesting thinkers, mostly from the worlds of literature, philosophy, and psychology, with Freudian psychoanalysis providing the conceptual scaffolding. The best anecdotes are always the ones she tells about her kids. Those feel the most authentic, which is a welcome respite from the many, many passages where Alsadir painfully, awkwardly tries to telegraph her social station to the reader. She'll never pass up an opportunity to tell you where she summers (Cape Cod), what she studied in college (neuroscience, briefly), or where she and all the other important people live (New York, darling, and don't you forget it). For a book so beset by anxieties about authenticity, the False Self deserves at least a coauthoring credit.
It's an unfortunate and sour tic that mars an otherwise pleasant read. Alsadir's prose is decent and she has an eye for curating passages from other thinkers. It's not as insightful as she'd like it to be, but there are beautiful moments. She's trying to pin down a moving target, so oblique approaches are inevitable when trying to capture ineffable jouissance. A certain amount of repetition is a poetic necessity for the task. However, it does feel a touch excessive. She could have lost at least 30-50 pages and retained a tighter, more powerful text.
Despite that, I found much to enjoy here, even if I chafed at the Procrustean bed of Freudianism Alsadir forces upon everything. Don't read this if you're looking for a complete theory of laughter or joy, but it's a good choice if you like reading memoirs about the latent anxieties of certain kinds of urban intellectuals. She tells you a lot about herself inadvertently while trying to tell you other things about herself.
The book is loosely organized into short essayistic sections that scoop up a handful of quotes and anecdotes then labor to lace them together. Alsadir references all kinds of interesting thinkers, mostly from the worlds of literature, philosophy, and psychology, with Freudian psychoanalysis providing the conceptual scaffolding. The best anecdotes are always the ones she tells about her kids. Those feel the most authentic, which is a welcome respite from the many, many passages where Alsadir painfully, awkwardly tries to telegraph her social station to the reader. She'll never pass up an opportunity to tell you where she summers (Cape Cod), what she studied in college (neuroscience, briefly), or where she and all the other important people live (New York, darling, and don't you forget it). For a book so beset by anxieties about authenticity, the False Self deserves at least a coauthoring credit.
It's an unfortunate and sour tic that mars an otherwise pleasant read. Alsadir's prose is decent and she has an eye for curating passages from other thinkers. It's not as insightful as she'd like it to be, but there are beautiful moments. She's trying to pin down a moving target, so oblique approaches are inevitable when trying to capture ineffable jouissance. A certain amount of repetition is a poetic necessity for the task. However, it does feel a touch excessive. She could have lost at least 30-50 pages and retained a tighter, more powerful text.
Despite that, I found much to enjoy here, even if I chafed at the Procrustean bed of Freudianism Alsadir forces upon everything. Don't read this if you're looking for a complete theory of laughter or joy, but it's a good choice if you like reading memoirs about the latent anxieties of certain kinds of urban intellectuals. She tells you a lot about herself inadvertently while trying to tell you other things about herself.
August 14, 2022
I was a little disappointed to find that this book is not funny nor is it really about laughter? There are parts about laughter and it runs through as a theme but I would say this book is about psychoanalysis more generally. It’s quite academic but doesn’t fit squarely in that zone but neither would I describe it as poetic as some are. Most interesting to me was the discussion of racist subjects and the psychological splitting involved to maintain that outlook which in turns motivates behaviour that is fundamentally irrational as the unconscious exerts its influence.
January 10, 2023
Exquisite. I will be returning to passages in this book for the rest of my life.
March 29, 2024
surprisingly dense: clowning, non-Duchenne laughter, psychoanalysis, lots of Freud. Good, but slightly scattered and I wish each essay was more clearly distinguished as I lost train of thought, but overall impression was that Alsadir knows what she is talking about and knows how to deliver it.
Read
June 13, 2023ah i'm quite torn. I really really loved Alsadir's poetry collection, Fourth Person Singular, which was a beautiful marriage of her psychoanalytic background with a fresh, exquisitely 21st century, lyric theory. I was good with Animal Joy, Alsadir's a good writer & I was surprised to find myself rly enjoying the anecdotes and psychoanalytic examples via her daughters.
I don't know how much laughter-theory is published these days but it's a nice case of it, I would! recommend if that's your zone. Maybe I'm just HMMing because my expectations were set so astronomically high by Fourth Person Singular ... maybe I wanted More clown content. maybe I'm wondering if it needed all of those tangents,,, but who's complaining!
I don't know how much laughter-theory is published these days but it's a nice case of it, I would! recommend if that's your zone. Maybe I'm just HMMing because my expectations were set so astronomically high by Fourth Person Singular ... maybe I wanted More clown content. maybe I'm wondering if it needed all of those tangents,,, but who's complaining!
Read
October 14, 2022Part psychological treatise, part philosophical review, part memoir, part political and social study, Nuar Alsadir discusses so much in this volume. Clowning, jokes, laughter and its social function, and all the threads you can pull from why we laugh, types of humor, laughter as a means to power. There’s a lot to further my understanding of others and myself.
Alsadir is at her best when she uses experiences from her own life, as a homeowner, a neighbor, and especially, a parent, to highlight the aspect of the human condition she is discussing at the moment.
Sometimes, she seems to stretch the material to fit: If she has rats living in her kitchen, I don’t think she has a phobia of rats, but, seriously, a rat problem. There was a short piece about an analysand with a perfect partner and then, a link to a realdoll website that I didn’t understand and was hesitant to explore online for further edification.
Animal Joy abounds with literary references, contemporary politics, and examples from TV and popular song. All this makes it very engaging.
There isn’t one reference to Moby Dick, though. (Bartleby The Scrivener gets some time. However, Melville is not included in the list of ���Thinkers and Feelers” at the back of the book.)
Alsadir is at her best when she uses experiences from her own life, as a homeowner, a neighbor, and especially, a parent, to highlight the aspect of the human condition she is discussing at the moment.
Sometimes, she seems to stretch the material to fit: If she has rats living in her kitchen, I don’t think she has a phobia of rats, but, seriously, a rat problem. There was a short piece about an analysand with a perfect partner and then, a link to a realdoll website that I didn’t understand and was hesitant to explore online for further edification.
Animal Joy abounds with literary references, contemporary politics, and examples from TV and popular song. All this makes it very engaging.
There isn’t one reference to Moby Dick, though. (Bartleby The Scrivener gets some time. However, Melville is not included in the list of ���Thinkers and Feelers” at the back of the book.)
April 5, 2023
Animal Joy. Überraschung. In diesem Buch geht es nicht um Freude, bzw wird das nur ganz kurz angerissen. Leider war es auch das was mich enttäuscht hat weil meine Erwartungshaltung eine andere war thematisch.
October 27, 2022
Needs to be a lot tighter, but maybe that would work against the central argument - found myself checking how much more I had to read quite often, but was buoyed along by a fascinating insight or argument. If I had to summarise, this is about getting to the True Self (a Winnicott term) and the way that it becomes ‘plugged’ by convention or defences. It’s a call for the true connection that can only happen when we’re honest about our feelings, with laughter - Duchenne and non-Duchenne - representing the opposing True and False Selves (this is a simplification, obvs!)
There are a lot of situations in which we’re not supposed to laugh but if we did it would probably break something open for the good. There are also many more situations in which we laugh as a defence (a ‘plug’). Doing a disservice to the book…I already know that I’ll be going back to the highlights and drawing on their wisdom.
There are a lot of situations in which we’re not supposed to laugh but if we did it would probably break something open for the good. There are also many more situations in which we laugh as a defence (a ‘plug’). Doing a disservice to the book…I already know that I’ll be going back to the highlights and drawing on their wisdom.
May 27, 2023
From the blurb:
Taking laughter's revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir's experience as a poet and psychoanalyist, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of feeling alive and embodied.
Maybe it's just my fault for not knowing what that sentence really meant before buying. No, the book about laughter and why people laugh is not funny. Nor can I really say I gained any particular insight to the nature of laughter. I have now understood that whenever someone, in writing, 'draws on their experience as a poet,' this really means, 'writes synopses of Radiolab podcasts' and 'likes to signal that they studied at Oxford'. When a book 'seeks to recover the sensation of feeling alive and embodied', it will tell the reader, through reverse psychology, to put itself down, go outside, get a bit of exercise.
I used to have a special interest in psychoanalysis, and I'm still somewhat fond of Freud and friends, even as all the evidence mounts that psychoanalysis, as a practice, is just a meandering probing of the nebulous thoughts of the wealthy, and as a literary form, gives us insights like
'Recently, I noticed the moth in the word mother, a tendency towards light.'
Without all the repeated allusions to Alsadir's upper-middle class credentials and lifestyle, I never would've realised statements like these were meant to be profound and not utterly insipid. So I'm thankful.
This is a particularly terrible book because Alsadir is a competent writer and is often, in between moments such as above, mildly interesting. If I wasn't frequently dumbfounded by how stupid this book was, I might've thought it had a lot to say.
Taking laughter's revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir's experience as a poet and psychoanalyist, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of feeling alive and embodied.
Maybe it's just my fault for not knowing what that sentence really meant before buying. No, the book about laughter and why people laugh is not funny. Nor can I really say I gained any particular insight to the nature of laughter. I have now understood that whenever someone, in writing, 'draws on their experience as a poet,' this really means, 'writes synopses of Radiolab podcasts' and 'likes to signal that they studied at Oxford'. When a book 'seeks to recover the sensation of feeling alive and embodied', it will tell the reader, through reverse psychology, to put itself down, go outside, get a bit of exercise.
I used to have a special interest in psychoanalysis, and I'm still somewhat fond of Freud and friends, even as all the evidence mounts that psychoanalysis, as a practice, is just a meandering probing of the nebulous thoughts of the wealthy, and as a literary form, gives us insights like
'Recently, I noticed the moth in the word mother, a tendency towards light.'
Without all the repeated allusions to Alsadir's upper-middle class credentials and lifestyle, I never would've realised statements like these were meant to be profound and not utterly insipid. So I'm thankful.
This is a particularly terrible book because Alsadir is a competent writer and is often, in between moments such as above, mildly interesting. If I wasn't frequently dumbfounded by how stupid this book was, I might've thought it had a lot to say.
March 10, 2023
What does our laughter say about us? What hidden parts of ourselves do we reveal when we laugh? Why do we feel the urge to laugh at inappropriate times? What is the connection between laughter and orgasm, or laughter and violence? Psychoanalyst and poet Nuar Alsadir dissects these questions meticulously in “Animal joy” while giving us some humourous anecdotes from her life here and there.
Don’t assume that this book is all lighthearted, though. Alsadir also discusses politics, racism, and violence. CONTENT WARNING: There is a particularly difficult section about rape. If you have trauma in your past, there are some parts of the book that may be uncomfortable for you.
Sometimes funny, sometimes dry, and sometimes both, “Animal joy” is overall an interesting read.
Don’t assume that this book is all lighthearted, though. Alsadir also discusses politics, racism, and violence. CONTENT WARNING: There is a particularly difficult section about rape. If you have trauma in your past, there are some parts of the book that may be uncomfortable for you.
Sometimes funny, sometimes dry, and sometimes both, “Animal joy” is overall an interesting read.
January 16, 2023
Amazing! So joyful!
February 4, 2024
Not what I expected. We learn types of laughter, and interesting connections to the uncanny, impropriety and defiance, but I hoped for something a bit more ecstatic and possibly even funny. The anecdotes from literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy, current events and motherhood are interesting, but I felt the book lost momentum by the end.
August 10, 2023
What a weird book. Not at all what I was expecting but still enjoyable. One of those random books you just happen to read at the perfect time.
February 24, 2024
ok wow yes.
I feel a change in the way I think/see the world/myself/how I talk to other people/how I LISTEN to other people
more soon on worms mag dot com
I feel a change in the way I think/see the world/myself/how I talk to other people/how I LISTEN to other people
more soon on worms mag dot com
December 27, 2022
The blurbs on this librarian-recommended book encouraged me to read it. Ross Gay and Claudia Rankine like it! And it is good because it's about a lot of important things: authenticity under totalitarianism; one's True Self when so much selfhood is projection, curation, etc.; racism; Western reactions to being Middle Eastern/Muslim; American imperialism; Eddie Murphy. The list goes on, but all subjects I'm more than happy to turn over and look at from as many sides as the author is happy to do. And she does turn these and more subjects around. It's a promenade through a coherent, responsive, thoughtful, deep, poet/psychoanalyst/mother's mind. So why'd I drop a star? Because this book reminded me that this echelon of intellectual inquiry is beyond me, now. I'm horning in on 15 years out of college and while I read a lot of popular science, natural history, and political economy books, I rarely read philosophy or psychology that's not firmly tethered to a readily understandable point/polemics/position/policy. So this was a stretch for me, and while I'm pretty sure I "got it," I also got a mildly annoyed taste in my mouth for not belonging to a class of people who can say, without rolling their eyes, stuff like "The nonrational, incalculable spirit that connects us to the aliveness in the world and others is transmitted by way of unconscious communication..." I'm not dissing the author so much as showing my slight envy at belonging to that world and my subsequent disdain for it. No biggie!
July 1, 2023
Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir Review.
I didn’t know the author or this book, until I was at this bookstore, which had a simple sticky note over the book - basically saying the reader would enjoy it if they like Maggie Nelson (who is my favorite author). That caught my attention - as I have been wanting books like Maggie’s On Freedom. I’ll get this out of the way - it more than lived up to the expectations- but also, I found Nuar a lot more focused on one topic - Laughter and what it means to be your true self - which allowed this whole book to feel like a steady stream of thoughts - start to finish.
The book is feverish - it’s not for before bedtime read. I realized I enjoyed it the most in early morning, when my mind is more fresh and relaxed. It’s a heady book - deeply referential and just so vividly inside Nuar’s mind - it feels like a dream, and along the way, punches that shake you out in reality and not doze off. The book had great gifts throughout - you just have to be patient and sometimes reread paragraphs to grapple with what Nuar is getting at.
The book’s primary focus remains on what happens when we collectively lose our sense of self, in favour of what it means to pledge allegiance to those around us, without critically thinking about it. How it can run so far out of you, that even you have disconnected with your self and don’t realize the gap / the nasty hole that’s been created. Laughter is just one those mediums that can allow us to break out of this vicious cycle - if driven from unconsciousness state of mind, or pure joy, vs. forcing yourself to laugh - the latter driven by curation and not actual feelings of joy and laughter.
Nuars landscape is massive - using analysts like Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, and many more, to guide us through the analyst and its patients relationship (Nuar uses such anecdotes to ground ourselves in what she is searching for), Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction, Trump, Iraq war, and many more, thus allows us to jump in many different years over our recent history, and see how cutting ties with one’s true self, can show up in ways - that even we are surprised by - if we just took a step back and asked ourselves - what’s our false self? What’s our true self?
Perhaps the biggest draw within such a wildly imaginative ecosystem - is her own relationship with her daughters, from the very start. They give backdrop to what feels like, certain shaking up from going to nap / sleep for Nuar as she writes this book - and jolts us all with curiosity and questions, that bring Nuar and us, as readers, back to reality, and not be overwhelmed with the dream like sensations that Nuar’s writing can evoke. I think it’s telling then, the books ultimate goal - her relationship with her daughters - as she asks one of the two if she is a good mother in the last two pages of the book - the daughter merely complying and saying “yes” only to carry on the conversation with a friend on the phone.
I would love to read this book again, what a masterpiece. Thank you.
I didn’t know the author or this book, until I was at this bookstore, which had a simple sticky note over the book - basically saying the reader would enjoy it if they like Maggie Nelson (who is my favorite author). That caught my attention - as I have been wanting books like Maggie’s On Freedom. I’ll get this out of the way - it more than lived up to the expectations- but also, I found Nuar a lot more focused on one topic - Laughter and what it means to be your true self - which allowed this whole book to feel like a steady stream of thoughts - start to finish.
The book is feverish - it’s not for before bedtime read. I realized I enjoyed it the most in early morning, when my mind is more fresh and relaxed. It’s a heady book - deeply referential and just so vividly inside Nuar’s mind - it feels like a dream, and along the way, punches that shake you out in reality and not doze off. The book had great gifts throughout - you just have to be patient and sometimes reread paragraphs to grapple with what Nuar is getting at.
The book’s primary focus remains on what happens when we collectively lose our sense of self, in favour of what it means to pledge allegiance to those around us, without critically thinking about it. How it can run so far out of you, that even you have disconnected with your self and don’t realize the gap / the nasty hole that’s been created. Laughter is just one those mediums that can allow us to break out of this vicious cycle - if driven from unconsciousness state of mind, or pure joy, vs. forcing yourself to laugh - the latter driven by curation and not actual feelings of joy and laughter.
Nuars landscape is massive - using analysts like Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, and many more, to guide us through the analyst and its patients relationship (Nuar uses such anecdotes to ground ourselves in what she is searching for), Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction, Trump, Iraq war, and many more, thus allows us to jump in many different years over our recent history, and see how cutting ties with one’s true self, can show up in ways - that even we are surprised by - if we just took a step back and asked ourselves - what’s our false self? What’s our true self?
Perhaps the biggest draw within such a wildly imaginative ecosystem - is her own relationship with her daughters, from the very start. They give backdrop to what feels like, certain shaking up from going to nap / sleep for Nuar as she writes this book - and jolts us all with curiosity and questions, that bring Nuar and us, as readers, back to reality, and not be overwhelmed with the dream like sensations that Nuar’s writing can evoke. I think it’s telling then, the books ultimate goal - her relationship with her daughters - as she asks one of the two if she is a good mother in the last two pages of the book - the daughter merely complying and saying “yes” only to carry on the conversation with a friend on the phone.
I would love to read this book again, what a masterpiece. Thank you.
November 23, 2022
This book is not for everybody. A writer of sorts myself, I often had to look up words and reread sentences and paragraphs to understand what Ms. Alsadir was saying. I am not an intellectual, so it was work to read it. Joy was hard to come by. Because it was such slow going – especially the first half – I “wore out” quickly and put the book down for long spells. I paid the price for that because of the author’s frequent references to earlier anecdotes and sources, some of which I remembered later and some of which I didn’t.
Laughter was a recurring but not dominant theme. Octogenarian and perhaps too sensitive veteran that I am, I found myself repeatedly jolted by the author’s frequent use of “bad” words in references to scatological or sexual functions and profanity, when a euphemism would have often served the purpose. She also seemed to take every opportunity to disparage Donald Trump. That’s consistent with her promotion of free spirit and listening to one’s inner self, citing Friedrich Schiller’s arguments about being “moored to Reason” in the process.
“We elude being known even by ourselves,” she writes. I’ll buy that and appreciated many of the other observations and personal sharing of this very intelligent, thoughtful, and articulate writer and good mother. But generally speaking, I don’t think old fuddy-duddies like me (and many conservatives) are going to enjoy the book or come away with life-changing perspectives after reading it.
To me, the most enjoyable lines in the book were in the author’s account of when Congressman Jim Jordan was questioning acting ambassador to the Ukraine William Taylor during Trump’s 2019 impeachment hearings:
“Taylor’s laughter was likely a reflexive method of disassociating from the role he had been placed into, the dishonest person he was made out to be, like a metaphysical sneeze that helped him return to a state of psychological homeostasis.”
That may give you an idea of what you should be ready for if you read this book, one that my county library (gulp) obligingly bought at my request because of a favorable review I read.
This is just one man’s opinion, of course – and unlike that of most other reviewers. OK, but having had it drilled into me in eighth grade that Shakespeare said “This above all: to thine own self be true,” I’m still trying to do that (to the extent I know myself). (Insert eye-rolling emoticon here.)
Laughter was a recurring but not dominant theme. Octogenarian and perhaps too sensitive veteran that I am, I found myself repeatedly jolted by the author’s frequent use of “bad” words in references to scatological or sexual functions and profanity, when a euphemism would have often served the purpose. She also seemed to take every opportunity to disparage Donald Trump. That’s consistent with her promotion of free spirit and listening to one’s inner self, citing Friedrich Schiller’s arguments about being “moored to Reason” in the process.
“We elude being known even by ourselves,” she writes. I’ll buy that and appreciated many of the other observations and personal sharing of this very intelligent, thoughtful, and articulate writer and good mother. But generally speaking, I don’t think old fuddy-duddies like me (and many conservatives) are going to enjoy the book or come away with life-changing perspectives after reading it.
To me, the most enjoyable lines in the book were in the author’s account of when Congressman Jim Jordan was questioning acting ambassador to the Ukraine William Taylor during Trump’s 2019 impeachment hearings:
“Taylor’s laughter was likely a reflexive method of disassociating from the role he had been placed into, the dishonest person he was made out to be, like a metaphysical sneeze that helped him return to a state of psychological homeostasis.”
That may give you an idea of what you should be ready for if you read this book, one that my county library (gulp) obligingly bought at my request because of a favorable review I read.
This is just one man’s opinion, of course – and unlike that of most other reviewers. OK, but having had it drilled into me in eighth grade that Shakespeare said “This above all: to thine own self be true,” I’m still trying to do that (to the extent I know myself). (Insert eye-rolling emoticon here.)
December 3, 2022
This has a lot of good stuff in it - profound at times, but it meanders and is repetitive.
January 29, 2024
Like others have noted, this is not a book about humor, rather Alsadir uses the concept as a means of entering into a psychoanalytic discussion about libidinal gestures, hidden meanings and true selves. The scope is vast running the gamut from technical treatises on psychology to masterworks of classic literature to viral moments from the 2016 election. While the wide range of source material keeps things interesting it also makes the thread of Alsadir's thesis difficult to follow. There are page breaks and chapter headings and quote-delineated sections, but I couldn't make heads or tails of how any of it contributed to the essay's organizational flow. But still, you get the gist by book's end, especially because so much time is spent calling back to and retracing certain examples, some of which have more legs than others. I found things really picked up during the final quarter when Alsadir switches her subject from comedy to poetry, about which she has both more and more interesting things to say. The passages were rich with a deep knowledge of the craft and attached themselves much more readily to the book's psychoanalytic themes. My speculation is that writing about poetry directly was perhaps cutting too close to the bone for Alsadir, who is a poet herself. Which is another curious quality of the book, that in spite of the author's studied familiarity with its topics of societal masks and emotional ids, she comes across as being not very free in her prose. The writing is pretty but stiff and spends a great deal of time trying to make sure it's being understood rather than simply finding and forging its own path. Overall I enjoyed this book, but it was a struggle to get through at times, I recommend it to anyone who likes writing and/or spends too much time in their head.
June 18, 2023
"Each of us faces the danger of becoming a fake poem."
The "Joy" of the title is not misleading. This book was a great joy to read, and though it's been a month or so since I've read it, I keep thinking about it and looking back at some of the many pages I marked. Alsadir weaves many seemingly disparate things together into a very funny, very intelligent, free flowing rumination on laughter, our animal natures and connecting with our real selves instead of the contrived selves we tend to present to the world. I was struck by many of her observations and insights, a particular favorite being her criticism of a trend in poetry in which the last line lands like the punchline of a joke, instead of allowing for some dissonance. Her two young daughters appear throughout the book, delightful reminders of how children can keep us honest, leading us to reflect on why we behave as we do.
The "Joy" of the title is not misleading. This book was a great joy to read, and though it's been a month or so since I've read it, I keep thinking about it and looking back at some of the many pages I marked. Alsadir weaves many seemingly disparate things together into a very funny, very intelligent, free flowing rumination on laughter, our animal natures and connecting with our real selves instead of the contrived selves we tend to present to the world. I was struck by many of her observations and insights, a particular favorite being her criticism of a trend in poetry in which the last line lands like the punchline of a joke, instead of allowing for some dissonance. Her two young daughters appear throughout the book, delightful reminders of how children can keep us honest, leading us to reflect on why we behave as we do.
December 28, 2022
Reminded of how laughter and frogs are the same, each exists until you dissect it. This book dissects laughter and other intersecting topics to their peril. The author goes to great lengths to state that poetry, clowning, and art is not in the form but in the effect, the impact on others, and also spends much effort in endorsing poetry, clowning, and art as self exploration that releases itself from the chains of socialization. It takes it shots at politicians in a one-sided way unnecessarily. Quotes from Sartre, Anna Karenina, Freud, etc. are plentiful. In the end, it is this cerebral attempt that felt unoriginal and like a friend from an elite school expounding and waxing without realizing the effect is against that which they were speaking. There are thoughts to be found within the book though joy and resuscitation from putting it down.
March 22, 2023
It's the kind of book where your expectations are what make you like it or dislike it.
This is an "opinion piece" book. It's a poem. It's a book trying to communicate the unspeakable and as such, tries to name it and to narrow it down, but fails.
It's beautiful, intelligent and (obviously) nothing you can absorb and accept as immutable truth. The citations the author uses are evocative, but not exhaustive. The quotes and citations are there to support her argument, not to illuminate the theory from all sides, showing both its flaws and its strong points.
As such, it is not a good book if you want something more insightful and close to the science of things. If you are, however, looking for the poetry of things, look no further.
This is an "opinion piece" book. It's a poem. It's a book trying to communicate the unspeakable and as such, tries to name it and to narrow it down, but fails.
It's beautiful, intelligent and (obviously) nothing you can absorb and accept as immutable truth. The citations the author uses are evocative, but not exhaustive. The quotes and citations are there to support her argument, not to illuminate the theory from all sides, showing both its flaws and its strong points.
As such, it is not a good book if you want something more insightful and close to the science of things. If you are, however, looking for the poetry of things, look no further.
May 5, 2023
About 20% of this book is the bones of a great memoir, and the remaining 80% pads it out, classic contemporary CNF-style, with not uninteresting but only loosely organised quotes from various cool thinkers and philosophers and poets. There’s some reflections on those quotes and how they echo and express each other but I don’t know if an overriding thread or thesis really arises beyond the naturally interesting content and face value of each short episode collected together in this book, so it has a lot of theory flavour without sustained argumentation and a lot of flashes of parenthood memoir without a narrative one could really follow.
January 10, 2023
I really enjoyed the poetry analysis/analysis of laughter but this became quite repetitive and reeeaaalllly dragged, plus I don’t really like Freudian psychoanalysis as a theoretical basis + there wasn’t enough critique of taken for granted concepts (ie. non-duchenne v duchenne laughter) but I guess that makes sense since author is a psychoanalyst. I also just don’t think it was culturally informed enough - ideas of true versus false selves are not universal/essential
First half was definitely more enjoyable
First half was definitely more enjoyable
April 20, 2023
finally finally finished…. absolute banger of a beginning and then becomes a victim of its own repetition and impulse to wade into questions of society…. many of those ultimately unsatisfying because they’re all a little #feminism and kind of straight/not very creative in thinking deeply about the social world. but boy did the clown part hit! and i fully think about duchenne and non-duchenne laughter every day now. but honestly who cares about the quality of the book itself, its meaning lies in having been gifted it and getting to use a very special note as the bookmark
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January 17, 2024I appreciate the gist of this book: the more we are ourselves, the healthier and saner and more creative and humane we will be; have more chance of being. Yes to Winnicott and Jung and all them. Yes, children can teach us a lot about animal joy. I'm grateful Duchenne laughter is part of my life. (But if someone isn't a "Duchenner" they likely have other joys.) (It doesn't seem like people develop a sense of humor; they either have one, or they don't.) I started skimming because it felt repetitive. Maybe if Anna K had had more of a sense of humor she wouldn't have jumped.
September 22, 2022
Consistently surprising, delightful, humane. She zooms in and out from her most intimate relationships to literature to the political scene, acknowledging painful irreconcile truths while making associative leaps that connect you playfully to the world at large. Laughter can be defensive and restorative, cruel, connecting, and impulsive. Her language washed over me. Reading it was fun, provocative and therapeutic. I love this book and will be sharing it widely.
December 14, 2022
I read to the end, though I considered stopping, but I’m still not sure what the author’s main point was. I also locked in my discomfort with Freudian psychoanalysis (though I’m sure that analysts could use that discomfort to uncover some pretty disturbing things about me). I’m sure this book will hit home to some readers, and it’s truly an impressively written text. But the heavy Freudian theory and the author’s disjointed writing style kept me from connecting.
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