Autumn - Winter 25/26
Anaesthesia of the Heart
Humour as artistic strategy
From autumn 2025, Goethe-Institut Brussels will be dedicating a transdisciplinary program to humour as a form of cultural expression.
In the history of ideas, humour is often ascribed a balancing or compensatory force. An examination of this multifaceted cultural technique can offer us a new perspective on the imbalance that prevails in the world, and on the crisis situation that often serves to trigger these strategies.
In a text on comedy from 1900, the French philosopher Henri Bergson describes laughter as a “momentary anaesthesia of the heart”*, as flexibility in the face of rigidity, and as something profoundly human.
Humour can act as a social bond – or break apart old rigidities: Far beyond satire, caricature or irony, humour often appears in contexts of artistic activism, as a strategy of resistance or civil disobedience. Queer or BIPoC artists, for example, show how humorous art can not only be an escape from a hopeless situation, but can also make people resilient and resistant, especially in illiberal contexts.
However, "humorous" statements can also have the opposite effect: they can exclude, harm and undermine. We are currently witnessing how new right-wing movements, in particular, are continuously undermining democratic processes with ostensibly amusing posts on the internet. As a form of cultural expression, humour therefore often entails major ambivalences. The program Anaesthesia of the Heart focuses on precisely these tensions:
Can humour help us live with the world's many contradictions? What does humour as a cultural strategy tell us about the current state of the world? Is there still room for humour in polarised societies? And if new technologies such as artificial intelligence make it harder to recognise humanity, should we pay more attention to humour as a deeply human form of communication?
From autumn 2025 to spring 2026, Goethe-Institut Brussels is inviting creative artists from the fields of art, theatre, illustration, literature, music, film, science and philosophy to investigate the paradoxes of humour.
Events
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Humour in contemporary theatre
Panel discussion | Bucket List
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Théâtre de Liège, Liège
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French
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Bucket List
Theater | Yael Ronen
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Théâtre de Liège, Liège
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Language: English and German, with French subtitles
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Bucket List
Theater | Yael Ronen
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Théâtre de Liège, Liège
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Language: English and German, with French subtitles
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