Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
What is the object of comedy? What makes us laugh and why? Is comedy subversive, restorative or reparative? What is at stake politically, socially and metaphysically when it comes to comedic performances? This book investigates not only the object of comedy but also its objectives - both its deliberate goals and its unintended side effects.
In researching the object of comedy, the contributions gathered here encounter comedy as a philosophical object: instead of approaching comedy as a genre, the book engages with it as a language, a medium, an artifice, a weapon, a puzzle or a trouble, a vocation and a repetition. Thus philosophy meets comedy at the intersection of various fields (e.g. psychoanalysis, film studies, cultural studies, and performance studies); regions that comical practices and theories in fact already traverse.
Synopsis
A Head or a Cannonball? An Introduction to the Object of Comedy - Jamila M. H. Mascat and Gregor ModerSection 1 - Comic PhilosophyChapter 1. The uncanny and the comic. Freud avec Lubitsch - Mladen DolarChapter 2. How They Fought - Sandra LaugierChapter 3. Hegel and the Misadventures of Consciousness. On Comedy and Revolutionary Partisanship - Jamila M. H. MascatChapter 4. The Aborted Object of Comedy & the Birth of the Subject. Socrates and Aristophanes' Alliance - Rachel Aumiller
Section 2 - Comic PsychoanalysisChapter 5. The Three Moments of Comedy - Robert PfallerChapter 6. From Objects of Desire to Objects of Comedy in Chaplin's Modern Times - Alfie BownChapter 7. Where Does Dirt Come From? - Alenka Zupančič
Section 3 - Screening ComedyChapter 8. Seriously Funny: Comedy and Authority in The Boss of it All - Benjamin NoysChapter 9. Stoicism, Causality, Divine Providence and Comedy in Buster Keaton's The General - Lisa TrahairChapter 10. Bad Cops - Todd McGowan
Section 4 - Performing ComedyChapter 11. Richard Pryor, the Conedian - Alexi KukuljevicChapter 12. Comedy as Performance - Gregor ModerChapter 13. After Death Comes Humour. On the Poetics of Alexander Vvedensky - Keti ChukhrovChapter 14. Asking for It. An exchange - Cassandra Seltman and Vanessa Place Chapter 15. Of Organic Comedies. Interview with Romeo Castellucci - Jamila M.H. Mascat
Notes on ContributorsAbstractsIndex