The Object of Comedy: Philosophies and Performances (Performance Philosophy)

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.

Jamila M. H. Mascat is Lecturer in Gender and Postcolonial Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is the author of Hegel in Jena: The Critique of Abstraction (in Italian, 2011) and currently preparing a book on partisanship and political engagement. 

Gregor Moder is Assistant Professor at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he teaches philosophy of art. He is the author of Comic Love: Shakespeare, Hegel, Lacan (in Slovene, 2016) and of Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (2017).