On Marriage

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And I’ve also known how to access joy, how to access feelings of awe and humility – through the religion.

With Josh Appignanesi she is co-director, producer and performer of the films The New Man and Husband , which investigate the intimate dynamics of the filmmakers' own marriage. Because in comedy you can only get away with it by virtue of the fact that everybody thinks you’re ‘only joking’. In my public events for the book, I’ve been talking quite a bit about envy because I consider it to be the feeling that is hardest to admit, hardest to share – it’s the most scandalous and the most morally disapproved of. AH: Also, making fun of yourself… At the conference “Contemporary British-Jewish Cultures” at Bangor University this month (March 2018) many speakers described this idea as something inherently Jewish, too.EV: I think it’s really interesting, this idea of feeling different, but also belonging, in a way, this double-bind.

Pretty much all the positions I’ve encountered on the subject seem to me to have a great deal of validity. At this seminar we welcome authors Lisa Appignanesi and Devorah Baum to talk about loss and grief, love and laughter, and being Jewish. And, actually, during a period in British politics – when the word ‘Jew’ is trending on Twitter and people are googling the word ‘Jew’ and looking probably in all sorts of insalubrious places to find out what Jews are up to –, you have a very strong wish and desire to speak to other people going through the same thing, in a somewhat contained and close setting. Marriage is unknowable to anyone outside it’: Devorah Baum and husband Josh Appignanesi with their children in 2016. Because marriage doesn't always bring out the best in us, it makes us wonder what the best in us might be.

Lisa Appignanesi OBE FRSL has written many books, fiction and non-fiction, including the memoirs Losing the Dead and Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘Marriage is unknowable to anyone outside it’: Devorah Baum and husband Josh Appignanesi with their children in 2016. Unlike her films, On Marriage turns away from the personal in pursuit of a more far-reaching understanding of marriage as a philosophical, cultural and political phenomenon. She pushes at the boundaries of marriage as a framework for conceiving of ourselves in relation to others . So, the notion – that we had 27 other countries we could go to, and now we don’t – feels absolutely existential for many Jews in this country.

Particularly when it becomes tyrannical, when you really can’t afford not to be witty – then we know something must be up, right?

But at the end of all her analysis, a definitive understanding remains elusive: “Having thought so much about marriage, the truth is that I still don’t know what I think about it.

She has been Chair of the Freud Museum London, President of English Pen, and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature.AH: It’s so funny, because what you just said, I was thinking about my generation, and it seems to be quite the opposite, they see all these stand-up comedians – Bill Burr, Louis C. I think there’s a tendency, when you use words like ‘resentment’, to adopt a severely moral, judgemental tone. Joking, then, is a form of common language that can also offer its speakers a degree of privacy, by creating a kind of outsider discourse within the dominant discourse, one that speaks for the jokers’ own lack of definition or certainty.