M/C - Media and Culture Home

Who's Online

There are currently, 74 guest(s) and 3 member(s) that are online.

You are Anonymous user. You can register for free by clicking here

User's Login

Nickname

Password

Security Code: Security Code
Type Security Code

Don't have an account yet? You can create one. As a registered user you have some advantages like theme manager, comments configuration and post comments with your name.

Total Hits

We have received
9754461
page views since September 2002

Syndication

'words'

Cultural Studies: The Odd One In: On Comedy by Alenka Zupančič

Posted on Sunday, May 18 @ 23:00:00 EST by tim milfull
squarefoot writes:
On Comedy_1.jpgReviewed by Adam Atkinson





Alenka Zupančič poses an important question early in her The Odd One In: “What is the use of ‘philosophizing comedy’?” (10). She doesn’t answer in quite so many words, but if I were to hazard a response—cue drum roll—it would be: “to get to the other side.” . . . Ok, that was cheap, I know, but let me explain.


According to Zupančič, not all comedy is good, or true comedy. True comedy is, in fact, incredibly rare and obscured by what might be called conservative, or even false, comedy. She arrives at this distinction by working through the dialectical movement from the epic through tragedy to comedy in Hegel’s discussion of the “spiritual work of art” in the Phenomenology (§727–47). Condensing Hegel’s and Zupančič’s arguments considerably, true comedy does not undermine the universal, but is the universal at work in the concrete, or the Absolute incarnated as subject (so Christ becomes the comic figure par excellence). Where this irruption fails to occur in a given comic situation, I encounter conservative comedy. Conservative comedy asks me to laugh at human finitude, to laugh at my weaknesses and limits in the face of, or in opposition to, the universal. I laugh at comic characters who are just like me.

In conservative comedy nothing changes, the status quo is maintained — this is a comedy of consensus. George W. Bush, for example, who appears often in The Odd One In, exemplifies conservative comedy in his media strategy of mocking his bumbling imperfections in order to appear as the fallible “guy next door” president (33). Bush’s stupidity is tolerated because he appears aware of his limits and can laugh at them: he’s only human.

Conservative comedy might also be suspected of maintaining what Zupančič calls—in a tangential but excellent insight that should have been pursued further—the contemporary ideology of happiness or bio-morality, which follows the line that someone feels good because they are good; if an individual feels bad it is because they are a bad person (5; see also Alain Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, in which he argues against a similar bio-ethics and against finitude. He also names (true) comedy as the proper form of resistance to this ideology in Handbook of Inaesthetics, Rhapsodie pour le théâtre). Contemporary comedy tends to hold happiness as a master-signifier, and thus supports the ideology Zupančič describes. True comedy, however, is completely indifferent to our happiness, to anything we may be feeling.

True comedy—where the universal works in the concrete—reveals a “surplus” in finitude—something in the comic subject, say, that is more than the subject. This surplus is something like the “other side” of a Möbius strip: strictly speaking, a Möbius strip has only one side, and yet if I were to walk along such a strip, I would still be aware of another side I have yet traverse (54; see Lacan’s Séminaire X). This other side is not reducible to the finitude of the Möbius strip, and yet still belongs to it. In the same way, the irruption of the universal in the comic—stumbling over the “other side”—cannot be reduced to the concrete, but nevertheless belongs to the situation it ruptures: it is what allows there to be a comic situation at all.

And so we reach the punch line. The comic irruption of the “other side” in a given situation leaves that situation irrevocably changed, and Zupančič seems to be moving towards something like Badiou’s ethics of fidelity to the event. But she doesn’t go quite so far. Indeed, I found myself wondering, yes, this all makes sense—it’s certainly convincing—but what can I do with this theorisation of comedy? Is there an ethics emerging here? Implications for politics? These possibilities, and others, are all opened, but in the end, The Odd One In feels a little like a field guide for identifying true instances of comedy, almost like a checklist.
As a kind of guide, then, The Odd One In encounters the difficulty any theorisation of comedy must deal with: that is, recalling Hegel, The Odd One In is forced to represent or narrate comedy when (true) comedy itself is never had in representation—representation belongs properly to tragedy in Hegel’s schema—but is the working of the universal in the concrete, of the Infinite in the finite. Zupančič is forced, in representing comedy, to distance herself from it: her examples lose their comic impact as they are recounted, and her writing itself loses some of the subversive edge that she describes in comedy. (And at a second remove, my own review has next to nothing of true comedy!) The “other side” I have been describing all but vanishes as soon as it is named. Perhaps, then, a faithful theorisation of comedy can only be had in performance?

I am not discounting Zupančič’s work at all by raising these difficulties and describing The Odd One In as something of a field guide for spotting true comedy. On the contrary. For its insight into our contemporary climate of happiness and bio-morality and for Zupančič’s elegant, if unfunny, Lacanian readings of some of the greatest comedies (yes, the Phenomenology is a comedy), The Odd One In stands on its own. Zupančič may not answer every line of thought opened in The Odd One In, but therein lies the value of Zupančič’s work for me: it prompted me to think about more than just comedy. That, I think, makes Zupančič a true comedian after all.


The Odd One In: On Comedy
(2008)

by Alenka Zupančič
The MIT Press
ISBN: 0-262-74031-1
240pp US$19.95

Bookmark this article:

Article Rating

Average Score: 0
Votes: 0

Please take a second and vote for this article:

Excellent
Very Good
Good
Regular
Bad

Options