“Stay, Stay, Stay,” may well be the Red album’s most underrated song. When it first debuted, critics derided the catchy country-pop tune as saccharine and juvenile, and the song barely cracked the Billboard Hot 100 while the rest of the album soared to the top of the charts. But, while most write off “Stay, Stay, Stay” as the dregs of Swift’s otherwise flawless album, it’s no second rate song. Swift’s prosaic language disguises the song’s brilliant caricature of romantic relationships and its testament to the importance of laughter.
The song is a satire of the explosive fights common in Swift songs and modern romantic narratives. “I’m pretty sure we almost broke up last night/ I threw my phone across the room at you,” the song begins, poking fun at the intensity of the dispute. The caricature continues: “This morning I said we should talk about it/ Because I read you should never leave a fight unresolved/ That’s when you walked in wearing a football helmet/ And said, ‘Okay, let’s talk.’”And as the final notes fade away, Swift breaks the fourth wall, laughing and saying “That’s so fun.” A self-conscious parody that exaggerates Swift’s fights with her boyfriend, the song uses humor to highlight how absurd these fights are.
By taking this approach-- tapping comedy rather than anger, despair, or frustration-- Swift articulates that humor is an appropriate way to respond to and make sense of events like romantic fights that would otherwise cause pain.
T.S. Eliot would applaud Swift’s decision to poke fun at what most view as serious. His early poem “Preludes” argues that, in the face of immense and unexplainable suffering, laughter is the best response. The poem details moments that showcase “some infinitely gentle/ Infinitely suffering thing” with each stanza outlining moments of agony. For example, in one stanza, a woman watches the night “revealing/ The thousand sordid images/ Of which your soul was constituted.” But despite the picture of overwhelming sorrow Eliot paints in each stanza, he doesn’t tell us to try to reduce or understand that suffering. Instead, he ends the poem with the command “Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh.” And that is exactly what Swift’s “Stay, Stay, Stay” does. In the face of a romantic dispute that could have tormented her, Swift chose to parody the intensity of the fight instead, laughing at the painful like Eliot recommends.
While laughing at serious and heartbreaking events-- as Swift and Eliot do --is a great way to cope with tragedy and enjoy life when it seems unbearable otherwise, critic G.K. Chesterton also believed that humor did more than just make suffering manageable; He thought that comedy cultivated the virtue of humility. As he argued, “There is therefore in humor, or at least in the origins of humor, something of this idea of the eccentric caught in the act of eccentricity and brazening it out; something of one surprised in disarray and become conscious of the chaos within… [Therefore] Humor corresponds to the human virtue of humility.” Because comedy allows us to point out how absurd our decisions and actions can be, it makes us a little more humble, so that Chesterton believed laughing at ourselves was a good way to keep from becoming too proud. Thus, in caricaturing the intensity of relationship drama, Swift-- according to Chesterton-- is a paragon of virtue.
Although these modern approaches to humor highlight the benefits that comedy offers, Plato contended that comedy dismantled the fabric of a stable society. For Plato-- who thought moderation above all was key to good leadership and stability-- laughter represented an excess of emotion, so that comedy made us unwise and turbulent. “No should our citizens be given to excess of laughter—‘Such violent delights’ are followed by a violent re-action,” he lampooned laughter in his ideal republic. After all, leaders and citizens who were too quick to laugh would be too quick to seek transient pleasure and would stray from the even-keeled temperament needed for effective governance. Because she laughs at herself, Plato would view Taylor Swift as a volatile politician.
Other early thinkers noted that comedy was often used to hurt others, so that satires like “Stay, Stay, Stay” had no place in a moral society. As much as laughing at ourselves-- the serious fights and painful realities we face-- cultivates humility, when directed towards other comedy can denigrate, as anyone who’s been the target of a joke-gone-too-far knows.That’s why archbishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom, echoing the admonitions of anti-bullying speakers today, complained that “laughter often gives birth to foul discourse.” When we poke fun at people, we’re more likely to criticize and insult, so we should not make a habit of creating caricatures, of ourselves or of others, he argued.
Swift doesn’t heed these warnings. Rather than treating romantic fights seriously, as a leader of Plato’s ideal republic would have, Swift taps Eliot’s advice that she should laugh in response to the painful.