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.
COBISS.SI-ID: 71223650
This chapter acknowledges that comedy is a genre of repetition, but argues that comic repetition is not merely a reiteration of an original process, form or person. Rather, a comic repetition always includes an element of what is typical for performance art: what is repeated is actually only produced in the act of repetition which manifests it. The chapter looks at the examples of such performative repetition in three seemingly unrelated examples of the popular comic art of the 1990’s: in a clown routine in Vyacheslav Polunin’s Slava’s Snow Show and in the television sit-coms Coupling and 3rd Rock from the Sun. The chapter concludes by recalling J. L. Austin’s formulation of performative utterances and argues that they are to be regarded as constituting parts of legal or moral ceremonies, inscribed in what Louis Althusser described as ideological apparatuses. Both comedy and ideology proceed as performance in the described sense – though this does not imply that comedy is necessarily ideological.
COBISS.SI-ID: 71224930
This monograph is a collection of author's writings dealing with the central problem of 'staging concepts', as the title suggests, which is to say, with the theatricality as an innner dimension of the immanent development of the concept. Majority of texts directly engage with theater, however, even in other texts theatricality in its wider meaning is analyzed both as a topic of its own as well as a key component of analyzing power. These texts were mostly assembled in the past decade and consitute the theoretical background of our project; some, however, are new and directly emanate from our project.
COBISS.SI-ID: 300621568