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i know folk who dress up as various characters when they teach--i do not really understand the motivation myself, and would never do it.
but there are folk who think large hats help get points across.
and there is a sense in which, for better or worse, university is a form of entertainment. the assumption is institutionalized, to an extent, in that budget allocations are made on the number of majors/brand-loyal consumers, a criterion that pushes departments to engage as many students as possible on the widest possible range of grounds. entertainment is one of them. i guess.
it can also be so for students, who are often in university at 18 operating under the absurd assumption that they are figuring out what they want to do with their lives and are acquiring the tools to carry out this plan. most i encounter have no idea what they want to do and are only just figuring out possibilities while being in school. this puts you in a funny place--drifting a bit thorugh classes while under pressure to decide something from parents--lots of anxiety when the situation gets confronted head on--given that, students seem to enjoy being entertained and do not see in that any trade off. it becomes an end in itself. which is of course the whole logic of reality-as-entertainment in a nutshell.
this is a history prof---so for me this cuts a bit close to home....there are folk who understand the goal of history to be telling a nice story. this usually links to a disciplinary politics that sees history as a kind of vast continuum the function of which is to reassure little bourgeois students (and themselves, too often) about the solidity of the present by making a nice narrative of the past in which actors are reduced to characters and sequences of events to chain reactions---one thing follows on another....nothing to be done.....everything works out according to a Big Design...so watch tv....you might as well....its not like you trade away any political agency by reverting to entertainment......
if you look the past as something which (like the present) human beings have made and as a space open to contingency, then it (history) can work to corrode certainty about the present. this way of working pushes students to think about what the other approach takes for granted. if you work from anything like this latter perspective, you would probably not be inclined to dress up and act out swordfights.
needless to say, people who work from each of these general positions do not generally get along so well as professional actors--people from the first see the second as challenging their professional identities, while people from the latter tend to see the others as reactionaries.
so to the question of whether it is ok to laugh in such a situation: sure, you are expected to, it is part of the game.
you are powerless.
ha ha ha.
you might as well enjoy it.
ha ha ha.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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