Todd McGowan - Only A Joke Can Save Us

O N LY A J O K E C A N S AV E U S
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Series Editors
Slavoj Žižek
Adrian Johnston
Todd McGowan
diaeresis
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O N LY A J O K E
C A N S AV E U S
A Theory of Comedy
Todd McGowan
Northwestern University Press

Evanston, Illinois
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Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
Copyright © 2017 by Northwestern University Press.

Published 2017. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McGowan, Todd, author.

Title: Only a joke can save us : a theory of comedy / Todd McGowan. Other
titles: Diaeresis.
Description: Evanston, Ill. : Northwestern University Press, 2017. | Series:
Diaeresis | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017020357 | ISBN 9780810135819 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780810135802 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810135826 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Comic, The. | Comedy. | Comedy—Psychological aspects. |
Comedy films—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC BH301.C7 M383 2017 | DDC 700.417—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020357
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For Dashiell and Theo Neroni,
my favorite comedy team
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Similar and the Dissimilar 3
1 Lack and Excess 19
2 Theory and Opposition 49
3 Tragedy and Pathos 65
4 Philosophy and the Finite 85
5 Signification and Desire 111
6 Distance and Proximity 127
7 Outside and Inside 143
8 Ideology and Equality 161
Conclusion: Speculation and Levity 179
Notes 183
Index 209
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Acknowledgments
This book began with a course on the theory of comedy, and several of
the students from that class contributed ideas and jokes that appear in
what follows. The funniest students from this class were Zach Alexander
and Adrienne Rosenberg.
Chapters 7 and 8 contain work revised from earlier publications.
Thanks to Quarterly Review of Film and Video for permission to publish
material that appeared as “The Location of Silent Comedy: Charlie Chap-
lin’s Outsider and Buster Keaton’s Insider,” Quarterly Review of Film and
Video 33, no. 7 (2016): 602–19. Thanks also to Crisis and Critique for per-
mission to publish material that appeared as “The Barriers to a Critical
Comedy,” Crisis and Critique 3 (2014): 201–21.
I appreciate the support of Henry Carrigan, Maggie Grossman,
Trevor Perri, and Nathan MacBrien at Northwestern University Press.
Without their diligent work, the book would not have appeared.
Thanks to my mother and brother. My mother, Sandi McGowan,
began joking with me before I was born, and my brother, Wyk McGowan,
has helped me to endure these jokes. My twin sons, Dashiell and Theo
Neroni, provided the requisite vulgarities for the book.
I am grateful to my film and English department colleagues at the
University of Vermont— Deb Ellis, Dave Jenemann, Hilary Neroni, Sarah
Nilsen, Hyon Joo Yoo, Sarah Alexander, Emily Bernard, and Andrew
Barnaby— who have encouraged me to work on this book rather than
waste time teaching or meeting with students. This has enabled me to
finish it quickly.
Thanks to the members of the theory reading group at the Univer-
sity of Vermont— Bea Bookchin, John Waldron, Joseph Acquisto, Hyon
Joo Yoo, and Hilary Neroni— for demanding that I read Hegel and Lacan
when I wanted to read Foucault and Deleuze.
Thanks to Jennifer Friedlander, Ken Reinhard, Quentin Martin,
Mari Ruti, Jean Wyatt, Jonathan Mulrooney, Frances Restuccia, Fabio
Vighi, Rob Rushing, Danny Cho, Louis-Paul Willis, Russell Sbriglia,
and Juan Pablo Lucchelli, who have reminded me to always keep them
laughing.
ix
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x
ACK NO WLE DGMENTS
I owe a debt of gratitude to Jill Delaney-Shal, who was the first to

find me comic rather than pathetic.
Thanks to Slavoj Žižek for refusing to tell me any jokes for this
project and forcing me to come up with my own.
Liz Fenton at the University of Vermont read part of the manuscript
and suggested ways to make it more lucid. I apologize to her for not tak-
ing any of her advice.
Simon Hajdini generously read through the entire book, though
he found it beyond repair.
I am grateful to Sheila Kunkle, who is the funniest theorist that I
know. I hope someday to tell a joke that prompts her to laugh rather than
just feel sorry for me.
Thanks to Jonathan Dickstein for eliminating my lesser logical er-
rors and allowing me to keep the major ones in the book.
I appreciate the contributions of Ryan Engley, who threatened to
write this book first, thus prompting me to write much more rapidly.
I owe Henry Krips an immense debt for his thorough reading of the
manuscript and for his suggestion that, in light of the jokes in the book,
I would be better suited to write on tragedy than comedy.
Many thanks to Anna Kornbluh for her detailed reading of the
entire book and her ability to be offended, which saved some readers
from a similar fate.
Thanks to Richard Boothby, who was the final reader of the manu-
script and pointed out that for a book on comedy, it wasn’t very funny.
Finally, thanks to the three who have made my life into one long
comedy— Walter Davis, Paul Eisenstein, and Hilary Neroni.
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Introduction
The Similar and the Dissimilar
Unlikely Couples
The experience of comedy doesn’t provoke reflection. This contrasts it

directly with other extreme experiences. When we confront tragedy, we
tend to think about the nature of tragedy. When lovers fall in love, they
often spend time pondering the nature of love itself. When we see death
firsthand, this can prompt us to consider our own finitude or the ques-
tion of death’s ultimate significance. Part of the enjoyment of comedy,
however, involves giving oneself over to the immediacy of the experi-
ence. While reflection on tragedy or love can intensify these experiences,
it dissolves the comic moment and transports us to another plane of
experience.
The deleterious effect of reflection on comedy manifests itself in
the delivery and reception of jokes. Jokes thrive on spontaneity and rapid
delivery. A joke that takes five minutes to recount loses its comic power
because listeners cannot sustain their comic engagement for that long.
When a joke goes on and on, we tend to laugh before the punch line,
to engage in “premature ejokulation.”1 Equally, any mediation of a joke
during its telling— an explanation of why the joke is funny, for instance—
usually completely ruins its effect. Those who require explanations for
every joke quickly gain a reputation for not having a sense of humor. A
sense of humor indicates an immersion in the immediacy of comedy, an
ability to abandon reflection and give oneself over to the moment. If one
thought too much about any good joke or humorous incident, one would
likely respond with offense or compassion rather than laughter.
The immediacy of comedy locates it in a specific space and time.
Unlike other aesthetic modes, comedy does not translate or age well.
What one society finds humorous often creates boredom or indifference
in another. The last skill that one acquires when learning a language is
the ability to understand or tell jokes in the new language. Even moving
into a new area where one’s own language is spoken requires some ad-
aptation in order to grasp the difference in comedy. The problem with
time is just as pronounced. For the most part, we don’t continue to recite
jokes from prior eras. Even the comic masterpieces of the past, like The
Clouds or The Frogs, do not have the same resonance today as ancient

4
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tragedies, such as Oedipus Tyrannus or Antigone.2 We can appreciate the

art of Aristophanes, but we cannot laugh at his plays as vigorously as his
contemporaries could. Even the greatest writers can only dent the imme-
diacy of comedy; they cannot overcome it completely.3
This is not the case with physical comedy, which transcends the bar-
riers of time and space much more successfully than verbal humor. Epi-
sodes such as the piano falling down the steps in Laurel and Hardy’s The
Music Box ( James Parrott, 1932) or Charlie Chaplin eating his shoelaces
in The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin, 1925) remain funny long after their
conception and performance. This is because physical comedy operates
with a sense of immediacy that language doesn’t allow. Physical comedy
endures because we usually experience it as immediate. Even though we
require mediation to understand the background that makes the pratfall
funny, we are not aware of this mediation while watching it. But the ap-
parent exception of physical comedy ultimately confirms Alain Badiou’s
claim that “comedy is always comedy of the present.”4 Comedy can en-
dure, but it endures only when we experience it as here and now.
The immediacy of comedy renders theorizing about it almost im-
possible. Theories of comedy appear bound to a specific time and place
in the same way that comedy itself is. It is easy to theorize why a particular
joke or humorous incident is funny, but the attempt to universalize the
theory creates difficulties, making it evident that the source of comedy
in one case is distinct from another. A universal theory ends up not ap-
plying to all comic instances or applying to instances completely lacking
in comedy.
The association of the comic with immediacy leads some to abjure
any universal theory and to content themselves with specific analyses. This
is the position of someone like Gerald Mast, who writes on comedy in the
cinema. As Mast points out, “the problem— briefly— with discussions of
the nature of comedy is that no single definition adequately includes
every work traditionally recognized as comic and excludes every work
traditionally recognized as noncomic.”5 Definitions of comedy inevitably
appear to be too wide or too narrow. Mast’s refusal to countenance a
“single definition” of comedy may seem judicious given the difficulties
that confront such a definition, but this position is untenable.
When one discusses comedy, one operates from a single definition,
even if it remains completely implicit. One always defines comedy in a
specific way whether one likes it or not. This is evident in Mast’s own
analyses of the cinema, as it is in every discussion of comedy. The defi-
nition resides in the choices about what comedies one will address and in
the manner that one addresses them. Definitions of comedy or any other
subject matter are not just a matter of choice but inhere in our approach

5
T HE S I MI LAR AND THE DISSIMILAR
to the world. We universalize— that is, we use definitions— in order to

interact with any subject matter whatsoever.6 Avoiding the issue of the
definition does not make it disappear. The place to start for a definition
of comedy involves considering what various theories have in common.
Almost every theory of comedy includes an acknowledgment of a
confrontation occurring between disparate elements. In a comedy, two
elements that seem unrelated to each other become necessarily con-
nected, and the unlikely nature of this connection produces the comic
effect. G. W. F. Hegel contends, for example, that comedy emerges with
the conjunction of nonsense and self-assurance. He states, “What is comi-
cal . . . is a personality or subject who makes his own actions contradic-
tory and so brings them to nothing, while remaining tranquil and self-
assured in the process.”7 The comic effect emerges out of the encounter
between an ordered personality and the chaos that this personality pro-
duces. Though other theorists place the emphasis elsewhere, they follow
Hegel in their understanding of the fundamental dynamic at work— the
act of connecting what appears to be disparate.
For his part, Henri Bergson locates comedy in the moment when
the living being becomes a machine, two structures that he believes es-
sentially oppose each other.8 According to Bergson, life is irreducible to
the machine, which is why we laugh when life takes on the automatism
of its antithesis. Bergson’s philosophical distance from Hegel doesn’t pre-
vent him from also seeing comedy as an encounter between dissimilar
phenomena. The same is true for Sigmund Freud, who gives voice to
the foundational idea of the comic that Hegel and Bergson formulate
before him. In his theory of the joke, Freud contends that jokes link
together ideas that we normally keep distinct and that this economiz-
ing produces an excess of psychic energy that we expel through laugh-
ter.9 We can examine every theory of comedy and find a similar line of
thought. It is difficult to even imagine a theory of comedy that doesn’t
acknowledge the role that uniting opposing ideas or terms has in produc-
ing the comic effect.
The connection between disparate elements cannot be common-
place, however; it must violate the normal workings of society and the
structure of everyday life. If the disparate elements came together in our
daily existence, they would cease to be disparate and thus no comedy
would arise from their connection. In this sense, comedy must be excep-
tional: if everything is funny, then nothing is.10 The person who makes
jokes all the time doesn’t become the life of the party, but a tedious fig-
ure whom everyone tries to avoid. Similarly, films that insist on creating
comedy at every moment of their running time inevitably create boredom
for the spectator instead.11 The comic doesn’t have to be rare, but it can’t

6
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become normalized. It occurs when a comic trigger alerts us to the con-

nection that we would otherwise miss.
Sometimes, we see comedy in the very occurrence of unlikely events.
The unlikely event typically conjoins disparate elements and highlights
their coexistence. Although not every unlikely event is comic— no one,
for instance, would laugh at a preschool teacher poisoning children—
unlikeliness is a necessary condition for comedy. Even when we watch a
film or hear a joke multiple times, we can still find humor in the event if
we continue to experience the elements brought together as internally
disparate. Once the connection becomes fully established, however, the
humor disappears. This is why even the best and most durable joke or
comic sketch can lose its ability to make us laugh once it becomes com-
monplace to us.12
The genius of The Hangover (Todd Phillips, 2009) and the failure
The Hangover Part II (Todd Phillips, 2011) are tied to the fact that comedy
necessarily breaks from probability. The conceit of each film relies on a
collective amnesia that occurs among three friends following a night of
debauchery. In the first film, the three main characters find themselves
in a Las Vegas hotel room with no memory of the prior evening due to
their inadvertently taking roofies (the common name for Rohypnal, also
known as the “date rape” drug). All three appear to have gone through
extreme experiences. One of the characters, Stu (Ed Helms), wakes up
with one of his teeth missing. Though the spectator (like Stu himself and
his friends) has no idea how or why the tooth was removed, its absence
nonetheless provides a comic moment in The Hangover, in large part be-
cause a disappearing tooth is not an everyday occurrence. That the con-
servative Stu is a dentist enhances the comic effect by creating even more
disjunction between what occurs and what we expect. The image of a
dentist without a tooth in the morning with no sign of physical struggle
forces us to connect the missing tooth with the risk-averse dentist. By the
end of the film, we learn that Stu has actually pulled the tooth himself to
demonstrate his dental prowess, which confirms our presentiment that
the tooth was lost in a truly comic event.
The sequel, The Hangover Part II, includes an almost identical scene
near the beginning in which Stu and his friends awaken with no mem-
ory of the night before. Again, we see that Stu has undergone a radical
change, one which also demands that we see a connection between dis-
parate elements. The sequel does not depict Stu again without a tooth,
which would have a lessened comic effect as a result of its normalization.
Instead, the film shows Stu with a large tattoo on his face. Despite the
variation, this second incident lacks the comic impact of the first for rea-
sons that bear directly on how comedy functions.

7
The absence of the tooth has a comic effect because we don’t ex-
pect the straitlaced Stu to lose a tooth, especially since he is a dentist
and thus knows the importance of teeth. It is not completely out of the
ordinary for someone to wake up missing a tooth after a night of drink-
ing and fighting, but the absence of signs of physical struggle makes the
missing tooth all the more extraordinary. It doesn’t seem to be the result
of a fight, and it is difficult for the spectator to conclude how it was lost.
The connection between the missing tooth and the straitlaced dentist
violates our usual way of thinking about both elements, which is why their
connection generates comedy. This connection of opposites is the sine
qua non of comedy, and the first Hangover film utilizes it often.
In the morning depicted in the sequel, Stu is not missing a tooth
but instead sports an exotic tattoo— the same tattoo that Mike Tyson, who
appears in both films, also has on his face. On the surface, one might
think that a strange tattoo offers a greater occasion for comedy than a
missing tooth, but the scene gives the lie to this assumption. The problem
begins with the direct repetition of the incident from the original film.
After a night that he can’t remember, Stu awakens having undergone a
dramatic physical change. Whereas the missing tooth in the first film is
unexpected, this earlier incident mitigates the shock that the spectator
experiences when seeing Stu’s tattoo in the sequel. In addition, obtain-
ing a tattoo during a night of debauchery, unlike losing a tooth, is not a
completely unexpected occurrence. This is a common excessive act that
results from a night of drunkenness— so common that it doesn’t really
count as excessive. In the contemporary world, obtaining a tattoo dur-
ing a wild night is an everyday act. The sequel fails to create comedy with
Stu’s tattoo because rather than creating an unlikely event, it creates an
expected one. Not only that, but the fact that the tattoo replicates the
famous tattoo of Mike Tyson makes it all the more expected. When we
can see the connection of the disparate elements coming in a comedy,
the comedy always falls flat.13
The relationship between the first Hangover film and the sequel
plays itself out in how we experience jokes. When we hear an original joke
that reveals an unconscious connection between disparate elements, we
find it funny. Terrible jokes, in contrast, connect elements that are not
all that disparate. A bad pun falls into this category. When someone asks,
“What’s black and white and red all over?” the response, “a newspaper,”
fails to elicit much laughter. The problem is that the distance between
the elements that the joke connects is not that far to begin with, and what
further detracts from the humor is the mundane nature of the joke. The
joke does not elucidate an unconscious connection but simply plays on
the homophones “red” and “read.” Any competent speaker of English

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has a long-standing familiarity with this homophone and is accustomed

to the association that the joke creates. The banality of the joke stems
from the banality of the connection that it makes.14 The connection is
too obvious, too commonplace, and too close to consciousness. Everyone
has heard this joke at some point during childhood. The first time that
one heard it, it may have earned a chuckle, but this type of joke quickly
loses its comic effect.
Repeating Funny Jokes
A great joke, in contrast to a bad one, will have some staying power. It
makes evident an unconscious connection that functions even after we
become aware of it. As long as the unconscious connection remains ac-
tive, the joke, despite numerous repetitions, will retain some of its humor.
The most memorable joke in Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Un-
conscious falls into this category.15 Freud relates the story of someone who
borrowed a kettle and returned it with a hole. The borrower’s defense
is threefold: “I never borrowed the kettle at all; the kettle had a hole
in it at the time that I borrowed it; and I returned it without a hole.”
As Freud points out, this threefold defense creates a self-contradiction
that is the source of the comedy. Even though many following in Freud’s
wake have repeated this joke, one can still laugh at it. The type of think-
ing evinced in the joke has even become the name for a specific form
of specious reasoning known as “kettle logic.” Because we so often use
multiple contradictory arguments without any conscious awareness, the
idea of kettle logic continues to surprise us when we encounter it. This is
why the joke itself still resonates. But even a great joke like this one will
eventually become stale through too much repetition.
Repetition reduces the distance between the disparate elements
of the joke until these elements cease to be disparate. We become tired
of jokes and other forms of comedy for a specific reason: they cease to
be funny at the moment they become part of the everyday. Repetition
eliminates the element of surprise that comedy requires. Surprise indi-
cates that we initially take the two elements as disparate and unrelated.
If we already recognize the relation between the two elements brought
together in comedy, we won’t experience comedy because we don’t ex-
perience the dissimilarity that comedy requires. It is in this sense that
surprise is necessary for comedy: it functions as the indication that the
initial dissimilarity exists.
We experience surprise at the moment when the link between the

9
two seemingly unconnected elements becomes apparent. This is the mo-

ment of the punch line of a joke or the climax of a comic scene. If we
anticipate a punch line completely or how a comic scene will conclude,
its effectiveness is lost. When we see someone trying too hard to be funny,
we pity or scorn them rather than laughing at them. Those spectators who
hate the comedy of Harold Lloyd or Jim Carrey detest the obvious effort
that each evinces to make himself funny. The obviousness of the effort
signals that we are expected to laugh, which eliminates the possibility of
comic surprise.16 This is not to say that we can’t laugh at a repeated joke
or view a comedy several times. In fact, for most people, the films that
they like to see over and over again are comedies, and they laugh heart-
ily despite the repeated viewings. Not only do babies laugh at the same
comic action that parents perform time after time, but even adults enjoy
retelling the jokes that they have heard. Sometimes it suffices to just recall
a comic scene mentally, without even seeing it again, in order to arouse
a chuckle to oneself. Our capacity for experiencing comedy repeatedly
seems to belie the role that surprise plays in comedy.
We are able to laugh when we watch a comic scene several times
because the elements that it connects remain disparate even after we see
them connected multiple times. The great comic moment endures and
prospers with repetition. This is the case with many of the statements
that George W. Bush made during his presidency. One can hear them
again and again without losing the capacity to laugh at his unintentional
comedy. One of the highlights of Bush’s comic career occurred during
a speech that he made in Nashville, Tennessee, on September 17, 2002.
In the midst of his speech, Bush attempted to appeal to the crowd by
reciting what he labeled “an old saying.” The actual adage that he was at-
tempting to say was: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame
on me.” But rather than quote the rather simple adage correctly, he said,
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee— I know it’s in Texas, probably in
Tennessee— that says, ‘Fool me once [pause] shame on [pause] shame
on you. But fool me— you can’t get fooled again.” The maladroit deliv-
ery compounds the comedy of distorting the “old saying,” but it isn’t the
only source of comedy here. Because of the wild disparities that this state-
ment brings together, its humor resonates through several repetitions.
One can watch a video of Bush making this statement ten times consecu-
tively without ceasing to laugh at what he says. The staying power of the
comedy resides in the speaker himself and his relation to what he says.
As president of the United States, Bush is a figure of excess, oc-
cupying the position with the most symbolic power in the world. But
his statement illustrates his inability to recount a simple saying in his
speech. He struggles first to locate the origin of the saying, and then he

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stammers in the midst of recounting it. Finally, he simply abandons the

adage midstream and instead alludes to the title of a popular rock song
from the 1970s. On the most basic level, Bush produces comedy here by
displaying the failure of the ultimate authority figure to recite a piece of
commonplace wisdom that most high school students know by heart. One
associates presidential authority with the capacity for speaking properly
and even eloquently. One expects presidents to know the allusions they
employ and to be able to recount old saws with no hesitation, let alone
with no errors. Bush not only mangles the saying, but the manner in
which he does so adds substantially to the humor.
He struggles with the first part of the saying but eventually articu-
lates it correctly. When it comes to the conclusion, however, Bush veers
completely off course. For those acquainted with Bush’s personality as
president, the point at which he deviates from the proper saying bespeaks
that personality perfectly. At the moment when he would have to indict
himself or admit to being responsible, Bush turns to the impossibility of
his being fooled by referring to the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” a
song that has no place at all in the saying that Bush is trying to recall.
For the spectator, Bush’s failure to recite the saying correctly connects
with his refusal to take responsibility for any of his errors, and the lasting
comedy of Bush’s verbal misstep derives from this connection.
The final disparate element in Bush’s attempt to repeat a familiar
saying is the theme song from his 2000 presidential campaign— none
other than “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Hence, we can read Bush’s at-
tempt to connect the saying about being fooled to his own campaign for
president, in which he promised to put an end to all trickery. His explicit
refusal to be the dupe or to be seen as the fool contrasts with how Bush
articulates the statement. It is clear that he is the fool who cannot even
remember the simplest saying while speaking in public, despite rhetorical
attempts to distance himself from this position. Comedy bears repeating
when it traverses the distances that Bush’s utterance does.
The repetition involved with comedy is not confined to multiple
viewings of the same video clip, however. It also includes people showing
their favorite comedies to friends, just as they repeat jokes that they’ve
heard to friends who haven’t heard them. By telling the joke to someone
who is not acquainted with it, the teller has an opportunity to experience
again the connection of the disparate elements that the joke produces
Even while one is recounting the joke, one identifies with the listener
and finds enjoyment in the listener’s enjoyment. As long as there is an
other (even an imagined one) who doesn’t know the joke, one can enjoy
it as thoroughly as the first time.17 This is why listeners often feign laugh-
ter at jokes that they don’t find funny. This response gives the teller a
chance to enjoy the joke again, even if the listeners do not.

11
Most people like to hear jokes. Many even pay for the privilege of
doing so by going to stand-up comedy acts, attending comic plays, or
buying tickets to film comedies. One can easily understand why people
would pay for comedy: it provides enjoyment that is not found in their
everyday existence. And yet, there are also those who want nothing to
do with comedy, who hate stand-up comedians of all stripes, who never
watch sitcoms, and who loathe seeing a colleague approach ready to tell
a new joke. Though there are just some people who appreciate comedy
and others who don’t, the existence of this disparity requires some expla-
nation, and it has to do with the nature of the connections that comedy
renders explicit.
Why We Don’t Bring Up Baby
Every comic moment is traumatic. The enjoyment that comedy offers is

inseparable from the trauma associated with making conscious an un-
conscious connection. Comedy forces us to confront, for instance, the
failings of those whom we suppose to embody flawless authority. This
authority secures the ground of our existence. Though we can laugh at
this ground trembling, it nonetheless also delivers a traumatic shock.
Or comedy makes explicit the connection between the act of eating and
the act of defecating, a connection that might make it harder to enjoy a
hamburger. Those who hate all forms of comedy and retreat from every
joker they see coming are in some sense right. They recognize the insepa-
rability of the enjoyment that comedy provides from its traumatic impact.
There is no comedy without a jolt that potentially shatters the ground of
our everyday lives.
We can see this shattering play itself out literally in the celebrated
Howard Hawks screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938). At the begin-
ning of the film, David (Cary Grant) is a noted paleontologist who has
almost completed the construction of an entire brontosaurus skeleton
in his laboratory. He is also on the verge of marrying his assistant, Alice
(Virginia Walker), who keeps his life in perfect order, when he meets
Susan (Katherine Hepburn) by chance before his wedding. After their
initial meeting, Susan leads David on a series of misadventures that thor-
oughly disrupt his everyday life. Through his involvement with Susan, he
offends the woman who was planning to give a million dollars to fund
his research, loses the final bone to the skeleton that had just been dis-
covered, confronts a deadly leopard, and winds up in jail. But each of
these disturbances is only temporary: because Susan is the niece of the
woman who was planning to give the money, she is able to change her

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aunt’s mind; she finds the intercostal clavicle bone that her dog had bur-
ied in the yard; the vicious leopard is apprehended; and the constable
frees David from jail after he receives an explanation from the lawyer of
Susan’s aunt. The film depicts the comic as a disruption of the everyday
but also as an interlude that enables its restoration.
Nonetheless, the end of the film reveals that this disruption en-
dures. After the chaotic events that Susan leads David through, he returns
to work at the university. An apologetic Susan comes to deliver the miss-
ing bone that will permit David to finish the construction of the bronto-
saurus skeleton. She climbs up the ladder to hand the bone to him, but
when she leans over, she causes the entire skeleton to collapse. David
reaches out and saves her from falling, and when he pulls her up on the
scaffolding, they profess their love for each other. Susan is the comic
character in the film. She creates comedy by shattering David’s most im-
portant achievement, in addition to his chance for a stable marriage with
Alice. Susan’s comedy puts her directly at odds with David’s everyday life.18
Comedy’s ability to bring disparate elements together— its oppo-
sition to everyday life— often leads to two opposed reactions. One re-
action sees comedy as a subversive form that forces the social order to
confront its contradictions, while the other sees it as an ideological form
that creates an imaginary synthesis in order to obscure those contradic-
tions. The fact that so many comedies mock figures of authority lends
credence to the first position, and the fact that so many comedies end in
marriage supports the second.
Until recently, the opponents of comedy seemed to have the upper
hand: most of those committed to political engagement avoided too
much jocularity. Even today, the most fervent political activists tend to
view comedy apprehensively. It is difficult, for instance, to picture Lenin
and Trotsky sitting around recounting jokes to each other. And yet, the
tide has clearly turned. Major contemporary leftist figures, like Alain
Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, make comedy a major part of their theoretical
program.
But this wide disparity of positions on comedy suggests that despite
the change in the tide, comedy can be both emancipatory and ideo-
logical. As a result, it’s not a matter of being for or against comedy as
such, but rather of understanding what occurs during the comic event
and what comedy allows us to see that we otherwise wouldn’t see. If we
examine the status of the disparate elements that comedy brings together,
the comic insight becomes evident. Though the connection of disparate
elements is a necessary condition for comedy, it is not a sufficient con-
dition, as the example of the preschool teacher who poisons children
demonstrates. Such a figure induces horror rather than laughter, and

13
even the most thoroughgoing satire would have a difficult time produc-
ing humor out of a scene of murdered children. But it’s not impossible
to imagine when one considers Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), in which Stanley Kubrick creates one
of the greatest film comedies by depicting the nuclear annihilation of
all humanity. Comedy occurs when we are surprised by a conjunction of
lack and excess. An excessive response to lack or the emergence of lack
occasioned by excess reveals how every lack is excessive and every excess
is lacking. When the coincidence of lack and excess surprises us, this is
the comic event.
This mechanism becomes clear if we contrast an unfunny scene in
which disparate elements come together with a funny one. In Jonathan
Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991), we see Hannibal Lecter (Anthony
Hopkins) eat the face of one of the nurses caring for him. Despite the
unexpectedness of this event, there is no humor in it. No one laughs at
the nurse or at the police officer whose face Lecter cuts off later in the
film. As Lecter’s victims, these characters are pitiable and vulnerable.
The spectator experiences them as lacking subjects confronting their
own finitude. But the loss of one’s face or other body part alone does not
eliminate the possibility of comedy.
There can certainly be funny scenes of death, as long as someone
responds to this literal lack with excess. This is what occurs during the
dismemberment of the Black Knight ( John Cleese) in Terry Gilliam’s
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). In this famous scene, the Black
Knight loses both his arms and his legs in a sword fight, and the scene
concludes with him left to die. And yet, his demise does nothing to de-
tract from the scene’s comedy. The gruesome dismemberment of the
Black Knight remains funny. Its humor, when we contrast it with Lecter
removing someone’s face, provides the key to grasping the sufficient con-
dition for comedy.
The difference between the Black Knight’s loss of limbs and the loss
of the character’s face in Silence of the Lambs resides in the attitude that
they produce in the subject watching them. If one simply saw the Black
Knight being mercilessly slain by a superior adversary, this event would
not be comic and would prompt the same response as Lecter’s violence
does. But the Black Knight does not simply lose. As he loses each of his
arms and legs, he continues to insist on his own inevitable victory in the
struggle. After the loss of the first arm, he proclaims, “T’is but a scratch.”
When he loses the other arm, he insists that it is only a “flesh wound.”
This defiance licenses the spectator to laugh at the Black Knight and re-
veals the sufficient condition of the comic. Even in the midst of a horrific
dismemberment, the Black Knight never deviates from his belief in his

14
I NT RODUCT I ON
own superiority or his devotion to continuing the fight. The more of his
body the Black Knight loses, the surer he is of his eventual victory and
the more he taunts his opponent with his own superiority. He thus em-
bodies lack and excess simultaneously. It is this disparate connection that
provides the key to grasping the comic. Comedy is the result of a specific
form of the connection of disparate elements— the intersection of lack
and excess. Comedy occurs when this connection takes us by surprise.
We cannot laugh at the severe facial damage inflicted twice in Si-
lence of the Lambs because the characters involved do not have the Black
Knight’s excessiveness. Demme presents Lecter’s victims as lacking, as
primarily vulnerable beings displaying no excesses, and only a perverse
spectator could find comedy in either episode. But the conclusion of
Silence of the Lambs does create humor in Hannibal’s violence precisely
because the status of the victim changes. While talking on the telephone
to FBI agent Clarice Starling ( Jodie Foster), he tells her, “I’m having an
old friend for dinner.” As he says this, the film cuts to a shot of his former
jailor and tormentor, Dr. Chilton (Anthony Heald), arriving by plane at
what seems like a tropical island where Lecter is hiding out. Lecter’s final
joke implies that he intends to eat Chilton. Spectators can find the com-
edy in this statement because they have seen Chilton’s arrogance, sexual
aggression toward Starling, and cruelty toward Lecter. In other words, the
film presents Chilton as a figure of excess, and this enables us to chuckle
(even if uncomfortably) at Lecter’s pun about eating him. Chilton’s de-
mise contrasts with that of the other characters in the film only insofar as
he is excessive. In this sense, he is the cousin of the Black Knight.
When we decry the injury or death of the characters in this situa-
tion, we view them as beings of pure lack and thus as figures of pathos. If
the Black Knight displayed pure valor and contempt for death, he would
become a figure of tragic excess. We would be as unable to laugh at him
as we are unable to laugh at Lecter’s victims (other than Chilton). But by
combining lack and excess, the Black Knight reveals himself as a comic
character. Through the figure of the Black Knight, Monty Python shows
us that though life might end with death, comedy does not. Monty Py-
thon’s Black Knight is the paradigm for comedy.
The Comic Structure of Subjectivity
The fundamental opposition that defines subjectivity is the opposition

between lack and excess. The speaking being becomes a speaking being
through a constitutive lack: language distances the subject from the world

15
of objects and eliminates any direct access to the object that would fulfill
the subject’s needs. The subject exists as a subject only insofar as it re-
mains incomplete and divided from itself. The subject desires as a result
of its incompletion, and this desire is identical with lack. Lack defines
how we relate to the world, impelling us to seek out what we are missing
in the world. The self-identical, non-lacking subject would no longer be
a subject and no longer be capable of speaking. Lack is subjectivity.
At the same time, the subject is a being of excess. It attaches itself
excessively to its objects and puts its survival at risk through these exces-
sive attachments. We strive for excessive wealth, love, and even experience
itself. Everyday existence separates lack from excess by isolating excess
in specific times and places— sexual encounters, religious revivals, wars,
cinemas, and so on. In most situations, excess remains invisible, and we
experience only lack: the dissatisfaction of the workday, the frustrating
interactions with our colleagues, and the grind of daily commuting. But
everyday life separates lack from excess in an even more pronounced way:
it places sites of lack at a distance from sites of excess. Bad neighborhoods
are far removed from good ones; homeless people are kept away from
nice homes; and the dying are quarantined in hospitals, away from those
enjoying their lives. These stark divisions constitute the logic of everyday
life and keep disturbances in everyday life to a minimum. But comedy
departs from the everyday by fomenting a sudden revelation of the inti-
mate relation between lack and excess.
Comedy violates the rules of everyday life with its connection of dis-
parate elements, but the connections that it establishes are very specific.
That is to say, we don’t just experience the connection between just any
disparate elements. Comedy reveals that lack and excess can coincide
and that this coincidence, though it isn’t visible in everyday existence, is
constitutive of our subjectivity. In this sense, subjectivity itself is inherently
comic, but subjects plunge themselves into everyday life and its separa-
tion of lack and excess in order to avoid confronting their traumatic
intersection. Comedy returns us to the trauma of our subjectivity.
The speaking subject emerges through a lack: it gives up animal life
and direct access to things in order to enter into a mediated relation with
the world. This sacrifice of animality creates the possibility for excesses
in which only the speaking being can partake. The enjoyment of excess
enables the subject to forget about its status as lacking: when rapt in the
excesses of religious ecstasy, I forget about my desire for a new BMW, and
when swept up in the ecstasy of owning a BMV, I avoid thinking about
the absence of any transcendent God in the world. But these experiences
of excess remain tied to the lack that makes them possible. Comedy ren-
ders this link tangible.

16
I NT RODUCT I ON
As speaking beings, we relate to our biological being rather than

simply living it. Humans cannot just exist within the natural world as
we imagine other animals can. We must exist constitutively, as beings
of language, in an alienated relation to our world. The subject of lan-
guage cannot simply realize its desire by finding a satisfying object. In his
Seminar V on the unconscious, Jacques Lacan takes note of this excessive
relation to desire that the subject of language experiences. He states,
“The subject does not simply satisfy a desire, it enjoys desiring, and this
is an essential dimension of its enjoyment.”19 Rather than finding satisfac-
tion in obtaining an object, the subject enjoys its desire— it enjoys what
it does not have— and thereby becomes a being of excess.
Every speaking being, even the most serious one, is inadvertently a
comic being. The lack that inheres in speech creates a desire for an object
that does not and cannot exist. This absence inaugurates the possibility of
an excessive attachment that the presence of an object does not. Subjects
can only devote themselves excessively to what they don’t have and can’t
have, never to what they can have. This is why we pursue objects that we
don’t have so fervently and treat them so dismissively once we have them.
Lack distorts the subject’s relation to the world and causes it to value an
object at the expense of all others. The lack of an object that could realize
its desire leads the subject to attach itself excessively to what it cannot
have. Excess is a function of the distortion that lack produces, and it is
the virtue of comedy to make this connection visible.
The ability to grasp what’s at stake in comedy can change the way
we relate to both lack and excess. Comedy encourages us to view them
as inseparable, which implies a change in how we relate to ourselves and
to others. Margaret Cho captures how excess actually produces lack with
her joke about living with her boyfriend. She says, “My boyfriend and I
live together, which means we don’t have sex— ever. Now that the milk
is free, we’ve both become lactose intolerant.” Cho’s joke illustrates how
our desire depends on lack and suffocates on excess, but it also enables
us to see the connection between them.
If we see lack and excess as inherently linked, as comedy encour-
ages us to do, our subjectivity ceases to be a struggle to escape from lack
into excess. This struggle defines the conscious life of most subjects, but
understanding how comedy works reveals the impossibility of just such
a struggle. It also leads us to consider our own excess in relation to the
lack of others, and vice versa: our wealth depends on the other’s poverty,
just as our poverty depends on the other’s wealth. Though comedy itself
has an ambivalent political valence, grasping its structure points us in the
direction of a traumatic equality.
The chapters that follow will develop a theory of comedy structured

17
around the intersection of lack and excess. The starting point in the
first chapter is an explanation of the theory itself. The second chapter
is an examination of how this theory of comedy relates to other promi-
nent theories. The contrast will not only further explicate the theory of
comedy as the intersection of lack and excess, but it will also reveal how
intimations of this theory have been articulated in earlier ways of think-
ing about the comic. After laying out this theory and its relation to other
theories of comedy, chapter 3 contrasts the form of comedy with tragedy
and pathos. Tragedy and pathos represent the two major formal alterna-
tive deployments of lack and excess in our experience. For this reason,
an analysis of their structure reveals the uniqueness of the structure at
work in comedy.
Once we recognize how comedy, tragedy, and pathos mobilize lack
and excess differently, we can consider the implications of these differ-
ences for how we philosophize. Chapter 4 investigates different philoso-
phies and philosophers in relation to the comic. The point is not simply
to judge who is a comic philosopher and who is not— though this is cer-
tainly one purpose— but also to understand why certain philosophers
have to be funny and others simply cannot be. Comedy in one’s philos-
ophy is not only a matter of the philosopher’s personality but is primarily
a result of the role that lack and excess (or the finite and the infinite)
play in the philosophy. We see clear evidence for the theory of comedy
as the intersection of lack and excess in what types of philosophers are
humorous and what types are more or less allergic to jokes.
But comedy is not just a result of the philosophy that one chooses.
Comedy has its basis in the existence of the speaking being. Language is
not only the site for comedy but is inherently comic in its form, and the
fifth chapter identifies the connection between the structure of language
and that of comedy. In its basic structure, language produces a lacking
being that relates excessively to an object that it doesn’t have, thereby
producing the model for the comic experience. Language distances the
subject from the objects it encounters. This distance creates the possibility
of comedy. But as chapter 6 details, comedy requires a precise distance
from the comic object. Too much distance ruins comedy as much as too
much proximity does. Comedy demands the proper perspective— some
distance but also some proximity— in order to achieve its effects.
When comedy is effective, it occupies one of two positions rela-
tive to the social order: either it brings together lack and excess that are
internal to this order, or it shows the intersection occurring in what the
social order excludes. These two possibilities occur in the practice of in-
numerable comedians, but the two heroes of silent film comedy make the
opposition fully apparent. Chapter 7 addresses the relationship between

18
I NT RODUCT I ON
the comedy of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin because they embody
the two different ways of envisioning the connection between lack and
excess. Keaton shows this connection happening within the social order,
while Chaplin demonstrates it occurring outside the social order, through
what society excludes. The opposition between them is not merely exem-
plary but revelatory. What results are two different ways of understanding
the politics of comedy.
The book then concludes with a chapter that dwells on the politics
of comedy, a subject on which theoretical views have undergone a com-
plete turnaround in the last few decades. Although it sees the political
possibilities inherent in comedy, the eighth chapter of this book positions
comedy in a politically ambivalent location, a location that depends on
how comedy relates to our sense of wholeness. Comedy has the potential
to act as a site for radical emancipatory politics, but it can just as easily
function in the most ideological fashion in the guise of radicality. By
thinking about comedy’s relationship to wholeness and division, we can
dissect its political valence.
Sometimes, in order to sustain their reading of the politics of com-
edy, many authors writing about it distinguish between comedy and
humor, comedy and jokes, or comedy and laughter. Others differentiate
between authentic comedy and a faked version. In Only a Joke Can Save Us,
I will not observe any of these distinctions but rather theorize the comic
effect as such in all its manifestations. My contention is that the source
of comedy, jokes, and humor has the same structure and that this struc-
ture transcends its multiple manifestations. If we attempt to create sub-
categories within the comic, we lose the thread that unites all these forms.
Comedy is a singular phenomenon. Attempts to distinguish between, for
instance, humor and buffoonery, inevitably have the effect of disguising
the fundamental ambiguity at the heart of the comedy and at the heart
of subjectivity itself.20 It is only by theorizing the comic as it underlies all
its forms that we can grasp its unchanging structure.
The comic reveals that our most opposed possibilities— the mo-
ment of absolute lack and of absolute excess— not only depend on each
other but share the same structure. It is as lacking subjects and through
our lack that we experience the excesses that give our existence its value.
When we laugh at comic moments, we enjoy the contradictory form of
our excess and implicitly grasp its connection to what we lack. The con-
tradictory nature of our subjectivity marks the birth of comedy.

1
Lack and Excess
The Exigencies of Social Coherence
It is psychoanalysis that is chiefly responsible for theorizing the concepts

of lack and excess, though they are implicit in the thought of many phi-
losophers. According to psychoanalytic theory, the subject is constituted
through its relation to a primordially lost object, but the subject can never
find the object and fill its lack. The subject exists as inherently lacking
and desiring, and this lack drives it to act in the world. But this lack also
produces an excess. Desire’s failure to realize itself through an ultimately
satisfying object produces an excessive desiring and an excessive attach-
ment to the object that one desires. The constant failure of desire in
relation to its object enhances desire’s power over the subject. Excessive
attachment results from constitutive lack.
The relationship between lack and excess extends beyond the indi-
vidual subject to the social order. The structure of this order depends
on a delicate balance of lack and excess. The individual’s entrance into
the social order and into language coincides with a lack that produces
the desiring subject. The subject’s incompleteness and failure of perfect
self-identity lead it to desire.1 If the subject didn’t lack a lost object, the
subject would not desire and hence would not invest itself in the demands
of the social order, which graft themselves onto this desire. In this sense,
the social order’s capture of individuals depends on their emergence as
speaking subjects, which is why we insist so strenuously that children learn
the language of the governing social order. The social order redoubles
the subject’s lack and forces the subject to see itself as a being of lack,
which prompts the subject to invest itself in this order. Lack in the subject
ensures its adherence to the social order, which presents itself as harbor-
ing the solution to that lack in the form of belonging or possibilities for
self-realization.
But if the subject experienced nothing but lack from its investment
in the social structure, it would reject the bargain as unfulfilling and leave
the society altogether (or at least disinvest itself psychically). As recom-
pense for the subject’s structural lack, every social order that survives of-
fers the subject limited experiences of excess. In exchange for giving up
on the lost object, we obtain the enjoyment that derives from excessive
19

20
CHAP T E R 1
group rituals, like hazing prospective fraternity and sorority members,

going out for drinks with coworkers, or shopping at overpriced boutiques.
In the world of perfect obedience envisioned by The Lego Movie (Phil Lord
and Christopher Miller, 2014), the characters live out an existence of pure
lack in which they commit themselves entirely to doing their duty. But
even in this world of pure lack, subjects can indulge in one moment of
excess— the purchase of overpriced coffee. This joke is one of the high-
lights of the film because it illustrates how obedience depends not solely
on the production of lacking subjects but also on granting them limited
access to excess. Most of us indulge in more excess than simply purchas-
ing overpriced coffee. For instance, we might get chills when watching
the national soccer team win the World Cup and partake in this way of the
excess that society offers those who invest themselves in it.2 Just as there is
no possible social order without lack, there is none without excess. If lack
ensures that no one breaks the social bond, excess ensures that everyone
has a libidinal investment in it.
It is as if lack and excess were two prizefighters, each confined to its
corner in order to avoid a traumatic collision in the middle of the ring.
Social cohesion is the referee that keeps each fighter in its respective
corner. But the referee is actually holding up an image of the fighters in
their corners so that we don’t see how they are inseparably battling out in
the middle of the ring all the time. Comedy strikes us with a momentary
insight into this structure by throwing out the referee.3
Comedy involves us in both of these elements of social cohesion.
The comic occurs at those moments when excess and lack collide. If we
do not experience lack and excess coming together, we will not be ca-
pable of comic laughter. Louis C.K. relates a joke that perfectly captures
the logic of comedy. He says, “My bank is worst. They are screwing me.
You know what they did to me? They’re charging me money for not hav-
ing enough money. Apparently, when you’re broke, that costs money.”
Here Louis C.K. reveals the comic aspect of bank fees by identifying the
logic that underlies them. The lack of money in the bank triggers an
excess, a fee, that those who don’t lack money do not have to pay. The
bank is not trying to tell a joke by charging a surplus fee for those who
lack enough money, but its action is nonetheless comic and shows how
widespread the potential for comedy is. Comedy occurs in the moment
when we become aware that lack and excess are nothing but different
forms of expression for the same structure, which is what happens during
the joke about bank fees.
The momentary quality of comedy is a key to its functioning. When
it brings lack and excess together, comedy must do so in a way that takes
us by surprise in order to work successfully. We require the trigger of sur-

21
LACK AND E X CE S S
prise or even shock before we can laugh at the connection. Once we be-
come inured to a comic connection, it ceases to be a connection of dispa-
rate phenomena. The connection loses its comedic power because it sinks
into the everyday— and the everyday is built on the denial of the comic.
Our everyday life is distinctively humorless because it sustains itself
by keeping excess and lack at a distance from each other. The machine
of society runs more smoothly thanks to this separation, but it is effec-
tively a denial of the fundamental connection between lack and excess.
We suffer lack when we work eight hours a day at a monotonous job, and
then we enjoy excess on the weekend when we watch football for hours
or participate in drunken orgies. Even if we engage in excessive activity
at work, this activity functions as an interruption of the workday. We can
never enjoy it as thoroughly as we would the same activity experienced
outside the workplace. But this division plays an important social role.
The social function of the division becomes much more evident if we
look at the distribution of wealth. The wealthy do not live in proximity
to the impoverished. Societies separate opulent houses from dilapidated
ones. This is not just because people with great wealth want to live close
to other people with great wealth but also because the juxtaposition of
the opulent and dilapidated houses would be jarring (and potentially
funny). Keeping wealth and poverty apart enables the wealthy to enjoy
their excess in good conscience and the impoverished to experience their
lack without envy.
The strict separation of lack and excess produces whatever stability
our social existence has. The disturbance of excess remains confined to a
separate domain where it doesn’t intrude on everyday existence. It might
be funny if one showed up at work after drinking ten shots of tequila, but
if everyone did it, the work world would cease to function efficiently. The
social order punishes those who bring excessive acts into the everyday
world by taking away their jobs, their friends, and ultimately even their
liberty to act excessively.4 Even if we live in an epoch that privileges the
enjoyment associated with extreme displays of excess, a social interdiction
continues to block the injection of this excessive activity into daily life.
The hard-and-fast barrier that everyday life establishes between
lack and excess belies their fundamental connection. The fact that we
most often experience lack and excess as distinct obscures the related-
ness that becomes evident if we examine the function they play in lan-
guage. Language is an evolutionary compensation for human lack. If the
human animal were as physiologically fit as other animals, the invention
of language would not have been necessary. But the moment language
emerges, it produces an excess that causes humanity to stick out from
the rest of the natural world. Rather than just providing an adequate

22
CHAP T E R 1
compensation for the lack that human animals suffer, language gives too
much. Humans cannot relate to the natural world as other animals do;
as beings of language, our relation to their world is comparatively alien-
ated. Though no being escapes alienation altogether— nature does not
constitute a harmonious whole for any beings— language has the effect
of multiplying it.
The speaking subject cannot simply realize its desire by finding a
satisfying object because, as a result of its alienation, this subject desires
an object that doesn’t exist. With the object lost by definition, all the
subject has is its desire. Rather than finding satisfaction in obtaining an
object, the subject enjoys the act of desiring for its own sake and thereby
becomes a being of excess. It is not a matter of embracing lack at the
expense of excess, or vice versa. One has no privilege over the other.
Instead, the point is seeing the intrinsic connection between them—
how lack functions as the condition of possibility for excess and itself
becomes excessive. We try to experience each in isolation from the other.
But there is also the possibility of experiencing them at the same time.
This is comedy. What comedy reveals is that although the experience of
lack and excess is distinct, the distinctness is misleading: ultimately, one
cannot have excess without lack or lack without excess. In the same way,
drunkenness requires sobriety, just as wealth requires poverty.
We can see the excesses of the speaking subject across the spectrum
of its modes of satisfaction when we contrast this satisfaction with that
of animal life. Human subjects don’t simply enjoy eating but enjoy eat-
ing excessively and beyond their physiological needs. They don’t simply
take pleasure in sexual activity, but often give sexual enjoyment more
value than life itself.5 These particular excesses threaten the subject’s
well-being and even its survival. Obesity and sex addiction are problems
among speaking subjects, not among tigers and lions. Rather than trying
to preserve their own lives in the most efficient way possible, speaking
subjects put their lives at risk unnecessarily by parachuting, riding mo-
torcycles, using drugs, driving drunk, and so on. Even those who commit
themselves entirely to the project of their bodily survival often do so ex-
cessively and thereby produce enjoyment from what other animals treat
as just the maintenance of life. Everyone knows those who have turned
their health into an excessive project.6 The subject cannot avoid the ex-
cess that derives from signification.7
The divide between the speaking subject and animal life is not hard
and fast. Obese cats are commonplace, and there are rats in experiments
that choose sugar over more nourishing food even when this imperils
their lives. These cases show that alienation is not confined to those who

23
LACK AND E X CE S S
actually speak. The obese cat and the sugar-loving rat are the product of
subjects infected by the signifier who are committed to spreading this
infection to other species. But this spreading is possible because every
being lacks in a way that the signifier can exploit. A perfectly adapted
animal would not begin to speak and would not become excessive due
to its speaking. But there is no perfectly adapted animal. It is this failure
that renders all animals vulnerable to the effect of alienation. Every being
is implicitly a subject through its lack, though signification makes this lack
explicit and thus excessive.
Signifiers don’t just represent objects in the world but redouble
them. This is the distinction between a sign and a signifier. It is the rea-
son why the subject of the signifier is constantly confronting excess. Signs
represent while leaving the object as it is. Signifiers create a double for
the object or activity that they represent. In the world of signification,
there is a divide between appearance and essence— or between the sig-
nifier and the signified. With the introduction of the signifier, nothing
is what it appears to be. This production of the hidden essence (or sig-
nified) is the site of the signifier’s excess. The opacity of the signifier
hides that it has nothing to hide, which causes subjects to seek the hid-
den feverishly. Subjects associate the hidden would-be essence of every
object with an enjoyment that transcends their world. They engage in
all sorts of pursuits to access this transcendent excess, even though it is
nothing but an illusion created by the act of signification. The signifier
is our mode of access to the world, but it also creates a split in the world.
The signifier produces the image of an ultimate enjoyment in the other
world that it hides.8
There would be no comedy at all if the subject could transcend its
lack or realize its desire. As soon as the subject obtains an object of de-
sire, it finds itself diverted to another object that appears potentially satis-
fying. This diversion from the object is an effect of the inherent lack that
animates the desiring subject. As a subject of desire, one unconsciously
strives not to obtain the truly satisfying object but to sustain the position
of oneself as lacking. The subject’s lack creates the very possibility for
any enjoyment— any experience of excess— that the subject might at-
tain. In his seminar on anxiety, Jacques Lacan lays out this relationship
in straightforward terms. He says, “To establish myself as desiring . . .
is to establish myself as lacking . . . and it is by this path that I open the
door to the enjoyment of my being.”9 Enjoyment, the subject’s capacity
for excess, comes into existence through lack and has no existence prior
to this lack. Lack is constitutive of excess, even though lack and excess
necessarily appear opposed to each other.

24
CHAP T E R 1
Addicted to Failure
When the speaking subject emerges through its lack, the relationship to
the object undergoes a radical change. The failure to obtain the object
leads the subject to inflate the object’s value. The object becomes the site
of an excessive attachment precisely because the subject cannot have it.
What we don’t have has more value that what we have because we do not
recognize the banality of what we don’t have. A sublime transcendence
thus attaches itself to what is absent that contrasts it with what is present.10
The subject no longer simply wants an object to fulfill an instinctual need,
but attaches itself to the object insofar as the object has an excessive value
that transcends any need.
Excess skews the subject’s approach to the world. The subject can
attach itself excessively to certain things in the world because it consti-
tutes the world through an act of investment. The world of significance
doesn’t simply exist for the subject, but acquires its significance as a result
of this act of investment. We can adopt an attitude of care about the world
only because we exist at a remove from the world that we care about. This
remove enables us not only to invest but also to overinvest, which is what
occurs in the subject’s devotion to a cause, like the nation or the team.
The excessiveness of the signifying order results in subjects who will sac-
rifice their lives for their nation or sacrifice their time for their favorite
sports team. In each case, subjects don’t simply care for an object in the
world but value this object more than the world itself. The capacity for
this type of valuation inheres in every speaking subject, but it reaches its
apogee in the form of the addict. Addiction lays bare the role that excess
plays in the subject’s enjoyment.11
The social opprobrium that greets addiction stems directly from
its relationship to enjoyment. The addict enjoys without the proper re-
straint. Whereas other subjects accept a reduced amount of enjoyment
for the sake of social acceptance (or locate their enjoyment in the act
of being accepted), the addict refuses this bargain and opts to enjoy ex-
cessively despite the social ostracism that results. This is not the addict’s
conscious decision, but the unconscious position implicit in the activity of
addiction. Though some addicts function in society, none fit in smoothly.
Even the most common addictions, like overeating or smoking,
entail some form of ostracism. Others whisper such words as “fat ass”
or “pig” behind the addict’s back, or regulations consign the addict to
practice the addiction in designated areas, where the social exclusion
becomes clearly visible. The public shame attached to cigarette addic-
tion today has reached unprecedented heights. Once, while walking to
a restaurant with a friend, he asked if he could stop to smoke before

25
LACK AND E X CE S S
entering (where of course smoking was not permitted). When doing so,
he apologized profusely and admitted that he experienced smoking in
public as an act akin to being caught masturbating.12 While this is clearly
an extreme interpretation of the exclusion of the cigarette smoker, it
does nicely capture the way in which the addict is acting excessively in
relation to social norms.
The problem is that addicts bring excess into the everyday, which is
why the social order must frown on addiction.13 Addicts refuse to abide
by the social constraints on excess and devote much of their time to
excess. Addicts seek the enjoyment that they locate in the first experi-
ence of the object: the first winning bet, the first ice cream cone, or the
first cigarette. The more the failure to replicate the original experience
mounts, the more the addict invests in the promise of this lost enjoyment.
Losses lead gambling addicts not to stop gambling, but to wager more
and more in the hope of recouping their losses and enjoying again. Put-
ting on an enormous amount of weight doesn’t provoke a diet for food
addicts, but rather leads to increased splurging. Excess doesn’t prompt
addicts to moderate their devotion to the object but to augment it. This
is why addiction is so difficult to break. Addiction is the attempt to enjoy
excess untrammeled by lack. But this hope is also the fundamental blind
spot of addicts and is the explanation for why addicts typically find them-
selves completely bereft of the enjoyment that they seek.
The addict remains an addict through the misrecognition of the
intrinsic relationship between excess and the lack that makes the excess
of addiction possible. One is an addict by virtue of forgetting the nature
of the first experience of the object. The first drink or the first cigarette
didn’t bring the ultimate enjoyment but rather highlighted the subject’s
lack of enjoyment. No one enjoyed their first drink or first cigarette but
rather endured a horrible experience of wanting to vomit or of coughing
uncontrollably. The case of gambling, crack cocaine, or heroin addiction
may appear, at first glance, to be different. Most often, these addictions
begin with incredible moments of ecstasy that the addict strives in vain
to recapture. And yet, even when the first experience is one of incredible
enjoyment, the thrill of this enjoyment is traumatic. The initial enjoy-
ment is tied to the sense of danger that surrounds the activity when one
first partakes in it— using heroin, for example— and this danger makes
the enjoyment possible. For the addict, this initial traumatic experience
brings a sense of loss and thus creates a sublime object that the addict will
seek out and never find in subsequent engagements with the addiction.
The trauma of the first time creates the object’s appeal, but the addict
separates the appeal from the trauma and views excess apart from lack.
The addict’s attempt to separate excess definitively from lack dis-

26
CHAP T E R 1
tinguishes addiction from comedy. Addiction, like comedy, results from

the subject’s relation to lack and excess, but the relation is different. Ad-
dicts are not funny. We can laugh at representations of addiction but only
when the representation highlights the coincidence of lack and excess in
the figure of the addict, a coincidence that addicts themselves cannot see.
In their excessiveness addicts miss the comic insight into the necessary re-
lationship between excess and lack. By seeking excess that surpasses lack
and that overcomes its connection with lack, addiction condemns itself
to failure. Ironically, the addict’s total commitment to excess produces a
figure of pure lack. Though the social order ostracizes addicts for their
excessiveness, a close examination of them reveals that their excessiveness
has produced overwhelming lack. This is why our most common response
to addiction is pity.
On a large scale, we can see how the attempt to have excess with-
out lack produces an excessive lack in the case of Las Vegas. Though Las
Vegas is the singular site of excessive enjoyment in the United States, the
destitution and depression of the city stand out even more than its pre-
sentation of excess. Spending even a few hours in Las Vegas reveals indis-
putably that the effort to obtain pure excess without lack necessarily back-
fires. The desperate gamblers losing their last dollar at the poker table
and the prostitutes standing on street corners are simply the product of
the city’s commitment to pure excess, just like the alcoholic’s hangover
or the sex addict’s sexually transmitted infection. The fact that Las Vegas
serves as a mecca for addicts of all stripes is not coincidental. As a city,
it commits exactly the same unconscious psychic blunder as the addict.
When we investigate drug addicts, we see that their failure to enjoy
stems directly from their separation of lack from excess. The more drug
that addicts use, the less they enjoy the drug, and the more they tumble
into destitution. One uses more and more in order to receive less and
less. In this sense, there is no difference in the basic assumptions of the
addict and everyday life: both begin with the postulate that the experi-
ence of lack and excess can occur separately from each other. But the
addict simply takes the logic of the everyday separation of lack and excess
to its endpoint. This is where comedy distinguishes itself. Comedy shares
addiction’s commitment to excess, but it does so by grasping that the en-
joyment of this excess requires the lack that makes it possible. Comedy
will often take excessive behavior as its subject matter, but it will always
locate this excess within lack.
This is apparent in every case of the comic drunk, such as the char-
acter created by W. C. Fields. Fields generates comedy by displaying an
addiction to alcohol and exhibits this addiction through displays of ex-
cess. Whenever he gets the opportunity in one of his films, Fields’s char-

27
LACK AND E X CE S S
acter finds a way to drink. In these films, the addiction itself is not the
source of humor. In fact, it marks his characters, like Egbert Sousè in
Edward F. Cline’s The Bank Dick (1940), as lacking rather than as exces-
sive. But the character becomes comic when this lack becomes the vehicle
for his apparent heroism, as it enables him to unwittingly capture a bank
robber and become the bank detective. The contrast between films about
alcohol addiction, like Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945) or Mike Fig-
gis’s Leaving Las Vegas (1995), and The Bank Dick is that while the former
do depict both excess and lack, they never show them coinciding. These
films are like the city of Las Vegas: lack and excess are side by side but
never coincide. They never confront the spectator with an unexpected
moment of lack producing excess or excess producing lack, which is what
occurs in comedy. In these serious films, the addict begins as a figure of
excess and ends up a figure of lack. We don’t see this lack producing a
heroic gesture, which is what Sousè accomplishes in The Bank Dick. The
comedy of his drunkenness exists in its capacity to serve as a site where
lack and excess come together. It is this connection that separates comedy
from addiction, despite the similarity between the two.14
By examining the precise point at which addiction (which is a phe-
nomenon that contemporary society takes very seriously) becomes funny,
we gain an insight into the structure of comedy. Obviously, addiction is
a genuine problem that creates a great deal of suffering and often has
physiological causes, but this doesn’t impede our ability to laugh at it.
We can find comedy in any act, no matter how horrible, as long as we see
lack and excess coming together in it. When they remain distinct, how-
ever, we can enjoy ourselves or we can feel pleasure, but we will not have
a comic experience.
Not Enough Signifiers in the World
The emergence of language makes the coincidence of lack and excess ap-
parent because language itself has a contradictory structure that involves
precisely the same coincidence. Language functions through the absence
of a final signifier that would allow a speaking subject to complete what
it says. One never knows exactly what a sentence signifies because every
sentence has a fundamental openness that necessitates further qualifi-
cation. This openness is language’s lack. The period at the end of a sen-
tence that concludes an utterance never does so definitively. One can
interpret the sentence in multiple ways without ever finding a decisive
interpretation. Every signifying utterance is incomplete and promises an

28
CHAP T E R 1
ultimate signifier that would definitively determine its significance. But

this promise is never fulfilled. The absence of a final word is essential to
the signifying system. This openness of language provides the basis for
speaking, but it also creates a proliferation of further signifying utter-
ances that attempt to compensate for the absence of closure.
This absence of closure is the lack that no language can avoid. One
might imagine that a dead language like Latin or an artificial language
like Esperanto could bypass the necessity of this absence, but even in
these cases, the moment that one formulates signifying utterances in the
language, the lack of a final signifier becomes evident. What one says
remains incomplete. The speakers of every language are in the same
situation and necessarily respond to the absence that they confront in
the same way.15 They create additional signifiers to compensate for the
lack of a final signifier. Languages develop too many words and too many
meanings for words because they lack the one word that would complete
their signification and provide a definitive conclusion.
The structure of language offers direct insight into how lack and
excess coincide with each other. The lack of a final signifier doesn’t cause
speaking subjects to remain content with this lack and accept it as the
limitation that constrains everyone subjected to language. Instead, they
respond by multiplying the number of signifiers and the meanings for
those signifiers. This process becomes especially visible when the lack of
an adequate signifier is most apparent— that is, in situations of extreme
emotion. When we want to register a signification that transcends the
signifying register, we often resort to inventing new words, new meanings
for words, or new combinations of words.
Most people have a few profane interjections that they use when a
misfortune befalls them. One’s favorite profanity offers an insight into
the subject’s specific form of excess. Someone forgets to open the garage
door before backing the car out and screams, “Fuck!” Someone else acci-
dentally cuts off a finger while dicing onions and cries out, “Holy shit!” A
teacher gives a surprise quiz, and a student mutters “Prick!” in response.
In each case, subjects transfer words that concern sex or excrement into
another context in order to convey what words like “unfortunate” or
“terrible” could not. The profanity itself is inherently excessive and at-
tempts to capture the excess inhering in the situation.16
In extreme cases, people have recourse to invention rather than just
the transfer of words into a new context. When I was young, my father
once became so angry with his golf game after a misplaced shot into
the woods that he merged two curses together, shouting “horse fucker”
rather than the more commonly used “horse shit” or “mother fucker.”
Even though his golf game didn’t necessarily merit this response, he came
up with words adequate to what he considered the excessiveness of his

29
LACK AND E X CE S S
failure.17 This type of act of linguistic invention is possible because there

is no proper word, no word that adequately responds to any situation.
The absence of a proper or a final word sparks the invention of too many
words and too many significations for each word. When we encounter
this excess of words or significations as simultaneously a failure of sig-
nification, comedy results. This is what occurs with puns and with plays
on words.
The pun is the primordial form of comedy. It always works through
the identity of lack and excess in signification. The signifier lacks a deci-
sive signification. This lack produces an excess of significations attached
to this single signifier. James Bond films use puns as a staple of their
humor, and the puns permit the franchise to imply sexual references
without making them directly and thereby losing the PG-13 rating.18 This
occurs most famously in Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1997).
The film shows Bond (Pierce Brosnan) having sex with a language tutor
when he receives a call from Moneypenny (Samantha Bond), his boss’s
secretary. He tells her, “I always enjoyed learning a new tongue.” Money-
penny immediately understands that Bond’s pun on the word “tongue”
implies a sexual conquest and retorts, “You always were a cunning lin-
guist, James.” Moneypenny’s pun on the word “cunnilingus” picks up on
the sexual innuendo in Bond’s statement and multiplies it. One can say
“cunning linguist” in a film for young teenagers, but one is not permit-
ted to say “cunnilingus.” In this scene, as elsewhere in Hollywood, the
censorship is integral to the humor.
Bond (Pierce Brosnan) himself resorts to a sexual pun in The World
Is Not Enough (Michael Apted, 1999), just after he has sex with Dr. Christ-
mas Jones (Denise Richards). He says to her, “I thought Christmas only
comes once a year.” Here Bond plays on the multiple meanings of the
word “come”— the common meaning of arriving and the sexual meaning
of orgasm. If the word “come” did not lack a definitive meaning, such
play with the excesses of language would not be possible. The absence of
a proper signification manifests itself in too much signification, and the
pun makes use of this coincidence between lack and excess.
Puns are not always funny. When a pun is too obvious— like “Nixon
is a real dick”— it generates no humor at all. This is because comedy re-
quires a departure from the everyday. The puns from the Bond films are
effective insofar as their marriage of excess and lack is not an everyday
phenomenon. Language itself makes these puns possible, but common
speech doesn’t suggest them. The pun shows that words can have op-
posed significations and nonetheless remain comprehensible.19 The pun
unites the lack of an unambiguous meaning of a word with its excess of
meanings. It surprises us with this connection, which is the recipe for
comedy.

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CHAP T E R 1
Living with Contradiction
The absence of a final signifier and the excess of signifiers compensat-

ing for this lack bespeak a contradiction at the heart of language. This
contradiction manifests itself whenever we try to say something about
everything, and it arrives in the form of Russell’s paradox or the barber’s
paradox, which indicates that the structure of language is a structure at
odds with itself. When we try to account for all the signifying possibili-
ties within language, we inevitably encounter paradoxes that we cannot
resolve but must just accept. If we reject the existence of these linguistic
paradoxes, we necessarily reject the signifying order itself.20
Russell’s paradox marks the fundamental stumbling block of the
signifying order because it reveals that language is irreducible to a logical
structure and necessarily relies on a point of contradiction. Bertrand Rus-
sell uncovered this paradox in 1901 and soon communicated it to Gottlob
Frege, who correctly saw it as a challenge to his logicism (an attempt to
establish a completely logical form of mathematics) that he develops in
the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Basic Laws of Arithmetic). Frege’s system, if
successfully completed, would have implications for the structure of lan-
guage as well. It would indicate that the structure of signification could
function smoothly without running aground on contradiction.
Frege believes that contradiction can be smoothly integrated into
the system of number that he develops earlier in The Foundations of Arith-
metic. He uses the concept of what is not identical with itself— a concept
of what is contradictory— to derive the number zero. There are, accord-
ing to Frege, zero entities that are not identical to themselves.21 This
conceptual derivation of zero then provides the ultimate linchpin for
his theory of number. There is contradiction in arithmetic for Frege, but
contradiction has its proper place and fails to disrupt the structure itself.22
Frege confines contradiction to a manageable point within the system.
Later, when Frege writes the Grundgesetze and attempts to formulate
a complete logicism, he operates from the premise of the earlier work
that contradiction does not infect the whole. The system is logical, operat-
ing free from the problem of contradiction. We can reduce all arithmetic
to its logical foundations. If Frege were right, failure in language would
not be inevitable but always rectifiable. But Russell’s discovery under-
mined this possibility, even though Russell himself attempted to minimize
the philosophical damage and sustain a logically coherent structure.23
In his letter to Frege, Russell brings up a problem that ultimately
concerns what happens when we consider classes composed of other
classes— specifically, the class of classes that don’t contain themselves.
When we encounter this class, we cannot decide logically where to place

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LACK AND E X CE S S
it. Does the class of classes that don’t contain themselves belong in the
class of classes that don’t contain themselves or doesn’t it? If we include
it, then the class of classes that don’t contain themselves contains itself.
But we can’t exclude it because it is a class of classes that don’t contain
themselves. No matter which option we choose, the choice will prove to
be the wrong one. This inevitable error reveals the contradiction that
necessarily manifests itself in every logical structure.
The problem inherent in Russell’s paradox becomes clearer if we
consider its popular version— the barber paradox. A male barber shaves
all those men in town who don’t shave themselves and only those men.
Does the barber shave himself? If we answer positively, the result is that
the barber shaves someone who shaves himself, which violates the condi-
tion. But if we answer negatively, this means that the barber doesn’t in
fact shave everyone who doesn’t shave himself. There is no answer that
does not lead us into error. This paradox is not just an arbitrary problem
invented as part of a game with logic but rather exposes the contradictory
status of the system of signification itself.
If we examine how language operates, the logical necessity of Rus-
sell’s paradox becomes evident. We cannot think through the structure
of language without running into a point at which there is no logical
solution to the paradox. As Jacques Lacan puts it in a discussion of the
signifier, the symbolic order “is not complete, is not identifiable with a
1, nor in any case with an all. On the whole, it is absolutely necessary to
feel it and to represent it as the set at the level of the paradox called the
set of all the sets that don’t contain themselves, a paradox concerning
which it is not for nothing that the logicians have formed it.”24 Lacan sees
that Russell’s paradox inheres within the signifying order. It is impossible
to imagine a version of signification not encumbered by this limitation.
Though we might consider Russell’s paradox to have no real place
in a discussion of comedy, if Russell’s paradox did not exist, we would be
incapable of comedy. Every joke that we tell has its basis in the problem
that Russell identifies in Frege’s attempt to perform a complete reduction
of mathematics to logic. The failure of this reduction bespeaks a neces-
sary illogic at work in all signification. All logic has a point of illogic within
its structure that provides the occasion for comedy. Frege himself didn’t
find Russell’s discovery funny because he saw in it only a contribution of
lack: it destroyed the perfection of his system. But Frege failed to see the
possibilities that Russell’s destruction revealed. It is in these possibilities—
the excessive responses to logical failure— that comedy resides.
The centrality of Russell’s paradox in the signifying system indi-
cates that every system of sense has a point where sense breaks down
that is integral to it. No amount of logical computation or deduction can

32
CHAP T E R 1
eliminate this point where there is no sense. All attempts to render it sen-
sible have failed (or have resorted to prohibitions on universalizing to by-
pass it and thereby produce the gap that it bespeaks in a different form).
This inevitable failure reveals that our system of sense cannot avoid lack.
But this lack is the source of excessive efforts to fill the lack. We create
excessive signifiers at the points where sense is lacking in order to com-
pensate for this lack.
The contradictory structure of signification ensures that lack and
excess coincide and in this way produce comic effects. The image of a
complete system of signification that functioned without the hitch of
Russell’s paradox is a vision of a non-lacking language that would have
no possibility for excess. The statement of Russell’s paradox itself is not
funny— dropping the line “the class of classes that don’t include them-
selves” won’t get laughs— but it is the structural foundation that leads
to the production of comedy. All great comedians have in fact made
Russell’s paradox the foundation of their routine, though none ever
mention it.
Too Many Wives or Too Many Lives
The connection between lack and excess in comedy is apparent in every

successful film comedy, but it becomes the central focus in the clas-
sic screwball comedy My Favorite Wife (Leo McCarey, 1940) and in the
modern romantic comedy Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993). In both
cases, lack produces and coincides with excess. My Favorite Wife begins
with Nick (Cary Grant) having his wife declared legally dead seven years
after she was lost at sea so that he can marry Bianca (Gail Patrick). But
just after the second marriage, Nick’s first wife Ellen (Irene Dunne) turns
up alive at their home and then tracks Nick on his honeymoon so that she
can interrupt the consummation of the second marriage. Nick quickly
moves from having no wife at all after the declaration of Ellen’s death to
having two when she appears alive again. At the hotel on the honeymoon,
Ellen shows herself to Nick, but Nick hides her appearance from Bianca.
Throughout most of the film’s running time, the existence of the two
wives forces Nick to enjoy neither of them. Instead, he must lie to one in
order to justify his actions with the other. The moments when the specta-
tor sees Nick’s excess of wives creating a lack in him are the moments of
comedy in the film.
The excess of romantic partners in not confined to My Favorite
Wife but is a feature of the screwball comedy as a genre. In each case,

33
LACK AND E X CE S S
the inadequacy of one partner leads the subject to seek out another one,
though typically this excess of partners prompts the subject to return to
the first one, which is what occurs in My Favorite Wife.25 The Awful Truth
(Leo McCarey, 1937) and His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) have a
similar structure. In The Awful Truth, Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) sus-
pects her husband, Jerry Warriner (Cary Grant), of infidelity after he
lies about a trip to Florida. In response, she becomes engaged to Daniel
Leeson (Ralph Bellamy) as she pursues a divorce from Jerry. Though
Lucy continues to love Jerry and finds Daniel too provincial, she gravi-
tates toward Daniel and almost marries him as a result of Jerry’s failures.
The absence of an adequate romantic partner leads her to have too
many of them. The same dynamic takes place in His Girl Friday, where
Walter Burns (Cary Grant) treats Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) like a
reporter rather than a spouse. Fed up with his mistreatment, Hildy plans
to divorce him and marry Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), who promises
her a more traditional life. In each case, the Ralph Bellamy character
functions as an excess who appears as a result of the failure of the Cary
Grant character. In both films, lack is identical with excess, which is the
source of the humor that the screwball comedy generates.26
Similarly, in My Favorite Wife, the initial lack of the object produces
a situation of excess when the lost object returns. But this excess of ob-
jects deprives the subject of the ability to have either of the objects. Nick
cannot have Ellen, his original love object, nor can he have Bianca, the
substitute that he has chosen to replace her. Ellen’s return reveals the in-
adequacy of the replacement— it is clear that the sympathies of the film
lie with Ellen rather than Bianca— but the presence of the replacement
renders direct access to the lost object impossible. This provides a perfect
schema for the desiring subject and for the comedy that results from the
structure of subjectivity. The subject lacks the lost object that constitutes
it as a subject, and every empirical object with which the subject would
replace the lost object is redoubled by the shadow of the original lost
object. The lost object thus leaves the subject in a position of simulta-
neous lack and excess.
Subjectivity is the necessary condition for comedy, but it isn’t neces-
sarily funny in itself. It becomes comic when the lacking subject confronts
an excessive object or an excess of objects that promise to fill its lack. No
object can simply fill the lack and provide a balanced satisfaction. Be-
cause lack constitutes the subject, the subject will experience every object
as providing not enough satisfaction or too much— never just the right
amount. When the subject encounters a potentially satisfying object, it
confronts the excessiveness of its lack. When this encounter takes us by
surprise, we enter the realm of comedy.

34
CHAP T E R 1
The comedy of this position becomes apparent when Nick attempts

to navigate between his two wives. This is most pronounced in the hotel
sequence after he sees Ellen alive for the first time and wants to return to
the hotel lobby to speak with her. He invents a series of reasons for leav-
ing the room, but each time the pretext falls apart. Bianca answers the
faked phone call, for instance, and discovers that there is no one on the
line. Finally, he claims that he must go to the barber for a shave, despite
the evidence of his smooth face. Once he frees himself from Bianca, he
calls her, trying to act as if he’s left the hotel and is on a plane, but when
he leaves the phone booth, he runs directly into Bianca herself, who had
taken the call in a nearby booth. With this incident, the comedy at the
hotel concludes because Bianca has caught Nick in a direct lie. The ef-
fectiveness of this initial comic sequence derives from Nick’s confronta-
tion with excess, which places him in an impossible position of lack. The
film constantly highlights how the excess of wives produces an absence
of wives and thus a lacking subject.
Groundhog Day stages the same relationship between lack and ex-
cess that we see in My Favorite Wife. An initial absence of satisfaction pro-
duces an equally unsatisfying excess. Rather than locating lack in human
finitude, Groundhog Day identifies lack with the infinite repetition of the
symbolic structure. Phil Connors (Bill Murray), a weather reporter from
Pittsburgh who travels to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, for the annual
Groundhog Day celebration, is stranded there by a blizzard. He wakes
up to relive February 2 again and again, despite his efforts to escape this
repetition.27 The repetition is especially depressing for Phil because he
hates the small town and the rituals surrounding the holiday. But the re-
curring situation depicts the role that the symbolic structure plays in con-
stituting the subject as lacking. Despite his desire to escape Punxsutawney
and the events of Groundhog Day, Phil finds himself perpetually trapped
in the same position, condemned to play out a symbolic role without ever
producing any lasting transformation. The repetition constitutes Phil as
a lacking subject, but it leads him to a series of excessive acts.28
The great insight of Groundhog Day’s conceit— that someone repeats
the same day with no end in sight— derives from its relationship to sub-
jectivity itself. Every subject exists in some form of this repetition, even
if each day is not precisely like the one before. Society functions on the
basis of repetition. It demands that subjects adjust themselves to this repe-
tition in order to acquire a symbolic identity. One takes the same route to
work day after day; one performs the same tasks at work, one engages in
the same types of conversation, one watches the same television programs
in the evening, and one has sex in the same way at night. Even those
who break from these patterns that define most people’s lives only ob-

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LACK AND E X CE S S
scure the repetition that governs their existence. By swapping television

shows or jobs or sexual partners, we can create the illusion of difference,
but the underlying repetition nonetheless continues unabated. Radical
change itself comes to take on the form of repetition when we put it into
practice.29 Repetition defines the subject. This is the premise with which
Groundhog Day begins.
After his initial horror at being trapped in a single day, Phil decides
to use his situation to access an enjoyment that would otherwise be im-
possible for him. The fact that he repeats the same day enables him to
live without any worries about the consequences of his actions. He can
eat and drink to excess in a way that disgusts his producer Rita (Andie
MacDowell), who accuses him of throwing “caution to the wind.” He
also gains knowledge about Nancy Taylor (Marita Geraghty) that makes
it possible for him to seduce her. His foreknowledge also allows him to
steal money from an armored car and thus to enjoy this one day without
any financial limitations. He eventually uses the knowledge that he gains
through repetition to attempt to seduce Rita, but his efforts continually
fail no matter how much knowledge about her he gains. This leads to a
different form of excess.
Desperate to break out of the repetitive trap, Phil tries several
methods of suicide, including driving off a cliff with the groundhog, tak-
ing a plugged-in toaster into the bath, and jumping from a building.
None of these suicides succeed, and after each, Phil wakes up the next
morning as if nothing had changed. The film cuts from the suicide or
from Phil’s body in the morgue to the repeated morning scene where we
hear the alarm clock sound again with the same song— Sonny and Cher’s
“I Got You Babe.” Ramis uses the editing of the film to link the excessive
acts of the night before to the lack evinced in the repetition. No matter
how excessively Phil acts, he cannot escape the repetition that constitutes
him as a lacking subject.
The great comic moments in Groundhog Day do not occur just dur-
ing the repetition. Hearing the same song on the alarm clock each morn-
ing quickly becomes tedious rather than funny.30 Watching Ned Ryerson
(Stephen Tobolowsky) mock Phil for stepping in a puddle over and over
again is painful for the spectator. Repetition installs Phil in a regime of
lack, and the regime of lack is a regime of boredom. But Phil doesn’t
remain within this regime. Phil’s excessive responses to the repetition
constitute the bulk of the film’s comedy. The film surprises us with the
various forms that his responses take. His seduction of Nancy Taylor,
his overeating, even his suicides— each of these events creates comedy
through their depiction of excess as the response to lack. Phil’s inability
to exist outside of February 2 leads him to resort to excessive acts within

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CHAP T E R 1
this day, such as allowing the groundhog to drive a truck as they flee the
police (and admonishing the groundhog, “Don’t drive angry”). But this
depiction of the unity of lack and excess does not continue uninterrupt-
edly. It comes to an end when Phil undergoes a conversion experience
with the help of Rita, who convinces him that he might be able to benefit
from repetition.
Phil learns to use his knowledge for the social good. He begins to
help people in distress, do favors for his coworkers, take piano lessons,
learn to speak French, and give speeches to lift the community spirit.
This transformation doesn’t make him less excessive, but it does show
him abandoning excess for its own sake and devoting it instead to the
social order. He becomes a hero of the community instead of an outcast.
In this way, Phil’s newfound relationship to excess transforms him back
into a typical subject. At the end of Groundhog Day, the repetition stops,
and the relationship between lack and excess comes to an end as well.
The great comedy of the film ends with Phil’s final transformation. The
comedy depends on the lack that the repetition produces and Phil’s ex-
cessive response to that lack. When the excess no longer sticks out from
and disturbs the social order, its connection to lack disappears.
Both My Favorite Wife and Groundhog Day conclude with a restora-
tion of the everyday separation between lack and excess. This doesn’t
necessarily imply that both films use comedy to reinforce the social order
rather than challenging it, but it does indicate that their endings mark
a departure from the structure that constitutes comedy. No one laughs
when Nick and Ellen return to normal married life at the conclusion of
My Favorite Wife or when Phil decides to abandon his excessive enjoyment
in Groundhog Day. These socially approved choices are not humorous
ones. Marriage may be the generic conclusion for comedies, but the con-
cluding marriage is itself seldom funny.31 Comedy continues only insofar
as lack and excess sustain an evident relation with each other. At the mo-
ment when they separate, the routine of the everyday returns with all its
force, and comedy comes to an end. The happy ending of the film com-
edy is the surrender of comedy to pathos. Spectators can find pleasure in
this type of ending, but they do stop laughing when it comes.
A Trip to the Grocery and the Golf Course
Oftentimes, comedy arises from a direct statement that identifies a lack

with an excess that disrupts our everyday existence. The moment of a
statement that identifies excess and lack is comic, but it often creates

37
LACK AND E X CE S S
discomfort as well. We aren’t prepared for such statements. They reveal

the underlying identity that everyday life obscures in order to continue
to function. These statements in which lack and excess converge expose
the contradiction that animates the signifying structure and that must
remain outside of our daily awareness. This type of comic statement
usually comes from children, who have just entered into signification
and thus have not yet fully understood the compulsion to separate lack
and excess.
When my twins were three years old, I took them to the grocery. We
had difficulty finding a place to park, as we often did. Eager to get inside,
they expressed displeasure that we couldn’t park in the handicapped
parking space close to the door reserved for those with disabilities. This
was a common lament, repeated on almost every trip to the grocery or
shopping center, but on this occasion they seemed especially irked and
unwilling to listen to my explanation for our exclusion from these special
parking spots. They viewed the handicapped parking space as a special
privilege, and they both expressed a desire to acquire some sort of handi-
cap for themselves. Though I pointed out that a handicap, by definition,
is not enviable, they remained unshakably convinced of the clear mate-
rial advantage that a handicap would bring and continued to desire one
of their own. After parking far from the entrance, I carted them into the
grocery and began to shop.
During our time in the grocery, the two mercifully moved on from
the benefits of being handicapped to other subjects of conversation that
were less likely to offend other shoppers. I figured that the injustice of not
being disabled had left their minds. But as we were leaving the grocery,
we passed a man in a wheelchair who was struggling to make his way to
the exit while holding two bags of groceries. Of course, he captured the
attention of the boys, who stared at him until I could coax them toward
the door. This encounter brought the earlier conversation about being
handicapped back to the fore of their thinking. After watching the man’s
struggles with his infirmities, one of the boys loudly remarked to me,
“We’re not handicapped, we’re Jewish.” Though some around us saw
only the inappropriateness of the comment, others began to chuckle,
even though they couldn’t have known the full extent of the comedy,
which derived not just from the identification of being Jewish with being
handicapped but also with the privileged parking space.
In this example, not being handicapped functioned as a clear lack:
it meant that we couldn’t park in the privileged space and gain easy access
to the store. In the minds of the boys, there was no evident disadvantage
to being disabled. One could park close to the store and ride in a wheel-
chair instead of walking. Being handicapped didn’t indicate a lack, as it

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would for most adults, but a special privilege, a privilege that they were
denied as non-disabled beings. The association of disability with lack is
not as self-evident as it appears, and thus this misinterpretation on the
part of the boys was not completely nonsensical. Lack has nothing to
do with physical or mental incapacity— which is why one can interpret
someone who is physically disabled as a being of excessive privilege— but
with a certain relationship to the structure of signification. Nonetheless,
it is clear that being handicapped indicates lack precisely because those
struggling for the social equality of people with handicaps are trying to
eliminate the term “handicap” from the popular lexicon. All speaking
subjects lack, but certain subjects have their lack foregrounded within
the signifying structure.32 This lack in itself is not the source of humor.
There would have been no comedy at all had the one twin simply
said, “We’re not handicapped, we’re normal, which is why we have to
park so far away.” This is the kind of statement that one might expect.
But the humor derives from the twin supplementing lack not with a
typical structural identity but with an excessive one— Jewishness. Rather
than filling in the lack with just enough signification, the boy added too
much. Excess didn’t simply fill the lack but overfilled it. This created a
comic moment. For the spectator of this scene, the statement equated
lack with excess, handicap with Jewishness, but for the boy himself, there
was nothing funny in what he said. He was simply articulating the paral-
lel between two different forms of excess. It is only from the position that
sees the intersection of lack and excess that the scene becomes comic.
But the comedy here goes even further: Jewishness does often serve
as a handicap of its own— even if there are mercifully no parking spots
reserved for Jews— and thus this signifier of excess also indicates lack. It is
as if the joke is redoubled because of the nature of the signifier “Jewish.”
If the twin had said, “We’re not handicapped, we’re Protestant,” the com-
edy would have been significantly diminished. He considered Jewishness
as his form of excess, a possibility for the privilege that he associated with
the handicapped man, but he was not aware at the time of the ostracism
that often accompanies being Jewish. This absence of awareness adds to
the comedy because it allows the child to produce connections of lack
and excess without encountering any psychic barriers to doing so.
One shouldn’t romanticize the insights of a child, but children tend
to say funnier things than their parents because they have yet to under-
stand fully the demands of everyday social existence. Everyday adult life
keeps lack and excess at a distance from each other, which is the pri-
mary factor of social existence that children don’t grasp. It is for this
reason that they are often funny. It is not that they endure less repression
than their adult counterparts; it is that they see the evident connection

39
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between lack and excess that their elders have become unaccustomed
to seeing. In this sense, for the adult, the joke functions like a return to
childhood.
Every successful joke confronts us with this link between lack and
excess that occurs during comedy. A nice joke about heaven reveals the
structural proximity between joking and childhood. According to this
joke, Jesus and Moses are playing golf in heaven, and they come to a
180-yard hole where one must hit the ball over a lake. For an average
player, such a hole requires a single shot to hit the ball in the vicinity of
the green, which is the target area. Moses takes out an appropriate club
for their skill level, a 5-iron, and hits the ball over the water to the green.
When Jesus’s turn comes, he opts for a different club, a 7-iron, which
cannot provide enough distance for a player of his moderate skill level.
Moses quickly chastises Jesus for his club choice and recommends that he
rethink it. Jesus defends the choice to Moses by claiming, “Tiger Woods
would hit a 7-iron here.” But unfortunately Jesus cannot hit the ball like
Tiger Woods, and his shot winds up in the lake. Instead of losing his ball,
however, because he is Jesus he simply walks across the lake to retrieve it.
When he returns, he again chooses the 7-iron and proclaims, “I
know for a fact that this is the club that Tiger Woods would use.” Moses
pleads with him to reconsider so that he might avoid another unpleasant
result. Jesus again hits the 7-iron, and the ball again goes into the water.
Jesus is forced again to walk across the lake to find his ball. As a result of
this delay in their play caused by multiple balls being hit into the lake,
two players in the next group catch up to Moses and Jesus. They arrive
at the tee area where Moses is standing and see Jesus walking on the lake
and reaching down for his ball. One of them says to Moses, “Who does
that guy think he is, Jesus Christ?” Moses responds, “No, he thinks he’s
Tiger Woods.” At the moment of the punch line, the collision between
lack and excess becomes evident.
Even though he is the Son of God, as a golfer, Jesus is a lacking sub-
ject. He cannot hit the golf ball like Tiger Woods. But he also has the ca-
pacity for acts that exceed all human capacity, like walking on water. The
exchange between Moses and the other golfer brings these two moments
together. In this case, we see that Jesus’s ability to perform an excessive
act depends on his lack. If he could hit the ball perfectly, he wouldn’t
need to walk on water to retrieve the ball. When we read about a Chris-
tian miracle, it appears as a pure excess, a moment when Jesus reveals the
presence of God in the quotidian world. But what we always fail to see is
how the miserable nature of the world makes the miracle necessary. This
is why we don’t recognize that miracles are actually funny. Jesus had to
perform his first miracle at the wedding at Cana because the hosts ran

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out of wine. The lack of wine necessitated the excess of the miracle.33
Jesus had to raise Lazarus from the dead because Lazarus was no longer
living. His act compensated for the failure of Lazarus’s body. And this is
the case with the miracle as such. The excessiveness of the miracle attests
to the lack in God, to God’s failure to create a world that wouldn’t require
miracles.34 This is what the joke about the golfing Jesus reveals: Jesus can
perform miracles, but he needs to do so only because of the inadequacy
of his golf game.
The scene at the grocery and the golf joke both attest to the neces-
sary and sufficient conditions for comedy. On their own, lack and excess
never produce humor. They may lead to pity or awe but not laughter. But
in fact, the subject is never purely lacking or purely excessive. For the
subject of the signifier, lack and excess necessarily coincide. It requires
comedy to bring this connection to the fore so that we can experience it
and laugh at the contradiction that defines us.
The Jewish Joke
We can find a final confirmation about the nature of comedy by turning

to religion, which is often fertile territory for jokes. One can imagine
ranking the religions of the world in terms of the comedy that they pro-
duce. If we were to ask people on the street where the various religions
stack up, the answer would be fairly easy to predict. Judaism would surely
come out on top. Not only do most Jews have a reservoir of Jewish jokes,
but there are multiple books dedicated to preserving and amplifying
the number of these jokes. Books on Jewish comedy definitely outnum-
ber those on Muslim comedy, and while there are works about Chris-
tian humor, these pale in comparison with their Jewish counterparts and
often fail to evince any comedy at all. One might expect good Buddhist,
Taoist, or Hindu comedy, given the lack of stock that these religions place
in the importance of everyday existence, but Judaism nonetheless seems
to hold a clear lead when it comes to the production of jokes, at least in
the public mind. Jews have even found a way to create humorous jokes
about what is perhaps the most horrific event in recent human history,
the Holocaust, whereas Christians haven’t even managed to assemble a
fair quantity of jokes about the Crucifixion, which occurred almost two
thousand years ago.
We create humor within a religion by associating the transcendence
of God with the finitude of humanity. When the transcendent reveals
itself as weak and finite, we find comedy. Such a gesture is possible with

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any religion: the Buddha can show himself in a drunken stupor, or the
Jewish God can forget how to open the Ark of the Covenant. No reli-
gion has a monopoly on instances of comedy that result from the very
nature of religion itself— the attempt to access a realm that transcends
the earthly one. Any religion can have funny or unfunny adherents, but
there is a clear reason for its abundance in Judaism. The status of Jews as
the great producers of comedy attests to the nature of comedy itself and
the way that Jewishness aligns with comedy.
Judaism has the comic capacity for embracing contradiction be-
cause contradiction has been a part of Judaism almost since its inception.
Jews as a people have historically endured marginalization, exclusion,
and even elimination. From their servitude in Egypt and the Babylonian
captivity to the Spanish expulsion and the Holocaust, the situation for
Jews has almost always been precarious in relation to the social order in
which they existed. Anti-Semitism has not simply been one form of ha-
tred among others but has served as a paradigmatic form of social ostra-
cism. In the mind of the anti-Semite, the figure of the Jew is the model
of the outcast responsible for the ills that plague society. This form has
not abated in the contemporary world, where many continue to see Jews
as the barrier to social harmony. But this ostracism is only one side of
the Jewish story.
While one side of Judaism is a history of exclusion and suffering, the
other side is one of near-total victory. The Jewish God, the God of a small
minority population in the world, has become the central deity across
the planet. Most of those who reject Judaism and display the most fervent
anti-Semitism accept the Jewish God. This is true for Muslims, Christians,
and other religious people who accept the idea of a single omnipotent
and omniscient God. The universality of the Jewish God provides a star-
tling counterpart to the ostracism that the Jews themselves suffered. As
Kojin Karatani points out, the Jews were the first people to retain their
God after the defeat of their empire.35 On the stage of world religion, Jews
are at once the great losers and the undisputed winners.
Not only does the Jewish God have worldwide hegemony, but
Judaism itself exhibits an exclusivity not found in any other major reli-
gion. Whereas other religions seek to expand their membership through
proselytizing or sending missionaries to foreign lands, Judaism actively
discourages conversion. Intermarriage is not a tool for expanding the
religious population but a threat to the integrity of the group. It is a reli-
gion of exclusivity constituted by the excluded. Jewish humor is a result
of this intersection of extreme exclusion and exclusivity, of oppression
and the dominance of the Jewish divinity.
Almost all specifically Jewish comedy takes as its point of departure

42
CHAP T E R 1
the suffering of the Jews in spite of the omnipotence of their God and
the exclusivity of the group. In this sense, the archetypal Jewish joke
mocks the paradoxical status of the Jewish people: “The rabbi tells his
despondent congregation at the onset of Nazi power, ‘We Jews are still
the chosen people.’ Someone responds, ‘Yes, but chosen for what?’” The
joke plays on the supposed privileged status of Jews and their constant
danger of total elimination as a people. Their excess intersects with their
lack: if the Jews were simply exclusive elites with a deity that dominated
the world, they would not be funny, but if they were just oppressed, they
would equally lack Jewish humor.
Many Jewish jokes display this connection by recounting excessive
complaints about lack among Jews. The excessive complaints are a way of
turning failure into victory in the same way that the Jewish people univer-
salized their God in the wake of defeat. For instance, a waiter comes to a
table of Jewish women who have just finished their lunch and asks, “Was
anything OK?” The question anticipates the tidal wave of complaints
that the stereotypical Jewish women would register, just like the joke in
which the Jewish woman complains about a restaurant by saying, “The
food here is terrible, and the portions are so small.” These jokes work be-
cause the excessive complaints in each occur in conjunction with a sense
of the inadequacy of our existence.
The best Jewish jokes rely on the failures and betrayals of the om-
nipotent deity. This dynamic becomes especially apparent in a joke about
a Jewish man who complains about his son to a rabbi. He tells the rabbi,
“I gave my son a Jewish education, a good bar mitzvah, and all the proper
religious instruction. But when he left home, he converted to Christian-
ity.” The rabbi responds, “Funny you should mention that. The same
thing happened with my son.” The man asks the rabbi how he handled
the situation. The rabbi says, “I went to God with the problem. I told
him that I gave my son a Jewish education, a good bar mitzvah, and all
the proper religious instruction. But when he left home, he converted
to Christianity.” The man asks the rabbi, “What was God’s answer?”
The rabbi says that God sighed and stated, “Funny you should mention
that . . .” The comedy of this joke depends on our knowledge of the re-
lationship between Judaism and Christianity. The joke is a Jewish lament
about Christianity’s appropriation of the Jewish God, an appropriation
that undermines the transcendent status of this God. Christianity’s his-
torical success with the Jewish God becomes comic when seen from the
perspective of Judaism: the emergence of Christianity reveals another
way in which the omnipotent Jewish God fails the Jews.
Given their position relative to God and to the social order, Jews
should contribute a disproportionate amount of jokes to the world’s res-
ervoir, and they have. Every subject is both lacking and excessive. But

43
LACK AND E X CE S S
Judaism highlights the intersection of lack and excess like no other struc-
ture in the world. Jews not only have jokes to tell, but the fact that they
are telling more of them than adherents of other religions offers a de-
finitive statement about the structure of comedy. If we understand com-
edy, we will see that every joke, no matter what its manifest content, is a
Jewish joke.
The Contradiction of Affectation
When the novelist and aspiring theorist of comedy Henry Fielding fa-
mously names affectation as the basis of the ridiculous, he mentions nei-
ther excess nor lack, but instead locates the source of affectation in vanity
and hypocrisy. With this claim, Fielding anticipates the idea that comedy
occurs when excess and lack come together. In the case of both vanity
and hypocrisy, the comic object clearly displays excess: vain persons take
an excessive pride in their achievements or appearance without merit-
ing it, while hypocrites excessively exhibit qualities that they don’t have.
The depiction of affectation reveals the difference between someone’s
self-presentation and this person’s actions, but it also illustrates the unity
of the contradictory self-presentation and actions. Affectation is funny
because it shows the intrinsic connection between what seems completely
disparate.36
The affected subject suffers from a lack. Someone who is vain misses
out on recognition, while the hypocrite acts in a way that also fails to
garner symbolic acclaim. Vanity and hypocrisy— Fielding’s two forms of
affectation— have the same root. One turns to vanity or hypocrisy or af-
fectation in general in response to an absence of recognition for what
one is or what one does. Vanity and hypocrisy are always a temptation
for the subject because there is no proper amount of recognition. No
recognition is ever enough, so the subject seeks more through the paths
of affectation. Whereas most subjects respond to a failure of recognition
with either acceptance or continued struggle, the vain and the hypocriti-
cal overreact and attempt to fill this lack with excessive activity. This ex-
cess is vanity or hypocrisy. When we see these forms of affectation, their
excessiveness is always clear, but excessiveness alone is not enough to
make them funny. The comedy requires a corresponding lack.
The contrast between vanity and arrogance illustrates this distinc-
tion. The efforts of the vain to make others aware of their accomplish-
ments testify to their own sense of lack— their desire for recognition that
they don’t have. Arrogance, in contrast, disdains recognition and thus
does not have any clear relation to lack. When Jean-Paul Sartre refused

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CHAP T E R 1
the Nobel Prize in 1964, this was an act of arrogance rather than vanity. A
vain writer would indulge in all sorts of machinations to gain the award,
perhaps writing a flattering letter to the committee members, while an
arrogant writer would refuse any such indication of lack. No one laughed
at Sartre’s refusal of the prize, despite the gesture’s excessiveness. Its ar-
rogance did not expose a lacking subject in the way that a vain response
would have.37 Vanity doesn’t simply involve the subjects who broadcast
their excesses, but those who do so in such a way that these excesses dis-
play the very lack that they are meant to obscure.
Affectation is the most common form of the intersection of lack and
excess. Even more than jokes or slips, affectation pops up throughout our
daily lives. But everyday life functions because we typically ignore affecta-
tion. We allow vanity and hypocrisy to pass without comment or with just
a chuckle. But focusing on affectation is, as Fielding suggests, one of the
privileged sources for comedy. Because affectation is the most common
form in which lack and excess coincide, it is the most prevalent subject
matter for comedy. No comedian can afford to ignore it, and some take
it as their home turf.
Many of the high points of Woody Allen’s filmic career focus on
mocking affectation.38 One takes place just after Isaac (Woody Allen)
meets Mary (Diane Keaton), his future love interest, in Manhattan (1979).
They meet in a museum where Isaac and his young girlfriend Tracy
(Mariel Hemingway) converse with Isaac’s friend Yale (Michael Murphy)
and Yale’s lover, Mary. During this conversation, Mary comically disagrees
with every judgment advanced by Isaac and Tracy, and her disagreements
suggest her affectation. She dismisses one artwork as “derivative” and
praises another for its “negative capability.” Mary uses these terms in a
way that suggests she doesn’t have any idea what she’s talking about. But
the extent of her affectation becomes clearer when the four walk down
the street after leaving the museum.
Allen shoots this walk with a long tracking shot that enables the
spectator to see the interactions of the four characters. This highlights
the extent of Mary’s affectation by allowing us to see the response it pro-
vokes in her interlocutors. We see the lack alongside the excess because
of Allen’s formal choice. The walk begins with a mention of the artist
Sol Lewitt, which prompts Yale and Mary to introduce to Isaac and Tracy
their concept of the “Academy of the Overrated.” They then explain the
concept through their interaction:
yale: Mary and I have invented the Academy of the Overrated for
such notables as Gustav Mahler.
mary: And Isak Dinesen and Carl Jung.
yale: Scott Fitzgerald.

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LACK AND E X CE S S
mary: And Lenny Bruce. Can’t forget Lenny Bruce now, can we?
yale: Lenny Bruce.
mary: And how about Norman Mailer and Walt Whitman and— ?
isaac: I think those people are all terrific. Everyone that you men-
tioned.
yale: You had a great one.
mary: No, no, I didn’t have it. It was yours. It was Heinrich Böll.
isaac: Overrated?
yale: Oh, God, we don’t want to leave off Heinrich Böll.
Yale and Mary’s invention of this academy provides humor not because
of their commentary on the artists and thinkers whom they place within
their academy, but because of how it exposes them as characters. Their
creation of an Academy of the Overrated demonstrates affectation. They
display their vanity by placing themselves in a position to condemn fig-
ures like Mahler and Fitzgerald who have produced undeniably great
works. Allen’s depiction of their description of this academy exposes their
lack of ground for making the judgments that they make. The joy they
have in recounting the members of this academy becomes the source of
comedy for the spectator, who sees its groundlessness. If Yale and Mary
were making a series of considered and thoughtful judgments about
which artists and thinkers were overrated, the scene would not be funny,
but the hollowness and simultaneous extremity of their judgments ren-
ders them comic. The comedy in this scene depends on their affectation
and how affectation brings together an elevated self-presentation with the
absence of any foundation for this self-presentation.
Affectation doesn’t usually go as far as the creation of an Academy
of the Overrated. It more often manifests itself in offhand allusions to
“when I was living in Cambridge during my early twenties” or “when I was
a starting quarterback for my college football team.” It even occurs with
an affected use of the word “fucking.” If we pay attention to someone say-
ing, “I fucking took the fucking ball and fucking threw it so fucking fast
that I fucking couldn’t fucking believe it, motherfucker,” we’ll certainly
laugh insofar as we can identify the lack motivating this display of excess.
Though excess can appear without lack, in affectation the two are always
present together, which is why we still can appreciate what Fielding says
about comedy in his preface to Joseph Andrews.
Though he never puts it this way, Henry Fielding identifies affecta-
tion as the foundation of the comic because it encapsulates the coinci-
dence of lack and excess. The affected person displays a lack through ex-
cessive attempts to obscure this lack. But the more excessive the affected
person acts, the more this person’s lack becomes evident. Though comedy
is not reducible to affectation, affectation is one of the most revelatory

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CHAP T E R 1
species of the comic genus because it is an excessive response to lack that

has the effect of highlighting lack rather than hiding it.
Radical Moments of Comedy
A great joke or comedy can often have the effect of confronting the listen-
ers or viewers with the coincidence of lack and excess in themselves and
not just in the comic object. The comedy that accomplishes this forces
the subject to confront explicitly its mode of enjoying itself. Most of the
time, comedy enables us to enjoy without calling our mode of enjoyment
into question. But when our inclusion in the structure of the joke or our
identification with the comic object becomes manifest, our enjoyment
loses its self-evident status and becomes visible for us. Every joke includes
the subject within it, and every comedy demands the identification of
the subject with the comic object, but this inclusion and identification
are typically unconscious. When the joke or the comedy foregrounds
it, however, the subject recognizes how it enjoys, and this recognition is
necessarily traumatic. To see oneself enjoying is always to see an excess
that testifies to a lack.
Laughing at a comedy club is not akin to participating in a world
revolution. But the revelatory power of comedy can have a transforma-
tive effect on the subject who laughs. Laughing can provide more insight
than any amount of self-reflection if the comedy is the kind that enables
subjects to grasp the structure of their own enjoyment. Most of the time,
we enjoy without any awareness of why we are enjoying. We associate
enjoyment with experiences, like accumulating a lot of things, that actu-
ally have a deleterious effect on our capacity to enjoy. But comedy has a
unique capacity for showing us that our enjoyment consists not in over-
coming lack or realizing our desire but in enjoying that lack.
This revelatory power of comedy becomes evident in Wanda Sykes’s
joke about the ultimate male fantasy, a joke that shows how overcoming
lack actually eliminates enjoyment rather than producing it. She says,
“The number one fantasy for most guys is a threesome. They want to have
two women at the same time. I think that’s a bit lofty. If you can’t satisfy
that one woman, why piss off another one? Why have two angry women
in the bedroom with you at the same time? And guys, think about it— you
know how much you hate to talk after sex. Imagine having two women
just nagging you to death.”39 The humor in Sykes’s joke stems from its
ability to explode the image of excess of women that predominates in
the typical male fantasy. Sykes illustrates that instead of overcoming lack,

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LACK AND E X CE S S
this excess has the effect of redoubling it. The joke shows male listeners
that they don’t desire what they fantasize about.
An effective antiracist or antisexist joke tries to include the sub-
jects who hear the joke within the joke, thereby exposing subjects to
their own racism or sexism. Racism and sexism are instances of excessive
enjoyment, points at which subjects enjoy the exclusion of the comic
object from the order to which the subjects themselves belong. This en-
joyment transgresses the official social structure. Even when this social
structure licenses the racism or sexism (with Jim Crow laws or any limita-
tion on civil rights), the enjoyment associated with these attitudes nec-
essarily has the status of a transgression. Racism and sexism continue
to provide enjoyment— and thus continue to proliferate— because they
adopt the guise of transgression. When I engage in racist banter, I can
imagine myself transgressing a social restriction even as I’m accepting the
underlying ideological fantasy. This image of transgressive enjoyment is
essential to the appeal of racism and sexism in the contemporary world.
This enjoyment is what the antiracist or antisexist joke targets. Antiracist
and antisexist jokes expose the listener’s enjoyment and make evident its
source in the subject’s own lack.
Oftentimes, these jokes are very simple, but their simplicity belies
the complex psychic operation that they perform. For example, the joke
that begins “What do you call a black man walking on the moon?” is de-
signed to provoke the subject to imagine a racist response, even though
the subject might identify this racism with the joke’s teller. The punch
line, “an astronaut,” gives the lie to this possible racist response. In doing
so, it brings the hearer’s racist excess to light. The racist answer that
comes to mind, whatever it might be, testifies to an excess and forces the
hearer to confront this excess as a lack, as a manifestation of the hearer’s
own racism. The ability to imagine a racist response signifies that one is a
lacking subject, dependent on signifiers of racism that speak through the
subject’s unconscious. Though not every subject of lack is a racist or a sex-
ist, these are shared forms in which a specific lack often manifests itself,
and this manifestation becomes tangible when one experiences an anti-
racist or antisexist joke. Jokes such as the one about the astronaut repre-
sent the radical edge of comedy because they reveal its ability to make
clear to subjects what they cannot otherwise know about themselves.
Oftentimes these jokes expose the link between a lacking social
structure for black Americans and an excessive one for whites. This is the
case with comedian Chris Rock’s antiracist joke about the differences in
shopping conditions according to race. He says, “Every town has the same
two malls: the one white people go to and the one white people used to
go to.” The listener expects Rock to differentiate simply between the mall

48
CHAP T E R 1
that white people frequent and the one where black people shop. The
surprise of “the one white people used to go to” triggers the comedy,
which occurs when he shows that whites have had both malls for them-
selves, whereas blacks have only the broken-down mall that whites have
abandoned. The structurally racist mall situation in America provides a
point at which white excess and black lack coincide. Rock’s joke makes
this coincidence clear.
Rock’s political jokes extend beyond antiracist jokes and into the
territory of the capitalist system as a whole. One of his most effective
political jokes focuses on the relationship between capitalism and trauma.
During a November 1, 2014, performance on the television program Sat-
urday Night Live, Rock launched into a joke concerning his own refusal
to enter the Freedom Tower, the building constructed on the site of the
former World Trade Center. He joked that the construction of another
tall edifice on the site of the terrorist attack was an invitation to a new
attack. And thus, the corporate sponsor for the new building should be
the discount store Target. Aware that any jokes about this terrorist attack
would bring opprobrium, Rock quickly pointed out that American capi-
talism itself would soon profane the date of the attack with “9/11 sales”
in which an advertisement would say, “Come on down to Red Lobster
where these shrimp are 9 dollars and 11 cents.” During this routine, Rock
begins by upsetting spectators by treading on apparently sacred ground
and then shows that it is capitalism itself that is the source of this offense.
This joke forces the capitalist subject who wants to guard the significance
of September 11 to recognize that any such sacredness is incompatible
with capitalism. Capitalism responds to every lack with an excess (usually
of advertisements), but this is what capitalist subjects avoid confronting,
despite their investment in the system. Anticapitalist jokes, like other
political jokes, work by arousing the offensive response in order to locate
it within the listener’s own unconscious.
The theoretical task is not as difficult as the comedian’s. Rather
than inventing new jokes, it involves apprehending the comic as such—
the coincidence of lack and excess. The pressure to separate them and
to conceive of them as separate stems from the trauma that their coinci-
dence reveals. The radical distinction between lack and excess that con-
stitutes everyday life hides this coincidence and thus tries to convince us
that the social order functions without a hitch. But if we cannot believe
in the separation of lack and excess, then we can’t believe in the social
stability deriving from this separation. Comedy has the ability to deprive
us of our safety net, and this is why recognizing what’s at stake in comedy
has the status of an ethical imperative.

2
Theory and Opposition
The Preference for Tragedy
The problem with any theory of comedy is that the role which surprise
plays in comedy seems to vitiate any theorization. Comedy has to involve
a moment that disturbs our prior reckoning, which includes the theory
that would explain comedy. It seems as if the attempt to theorize comedy
violates the essence of the comic disturbance with an everyday explana-
tion. Theory explains, and comedy makes it its business to defy explana-
tion. In this sense, the comic act would always undermine the successful
theory of comedy. Comedy appears to slip through the theoretical grasp
just as it escapes from the clutches of everyday life. In his Comic Relief,
philosopher of comedy John Morreall takes up just this point as he re-
counts the history of the various theories of comedy and illustrates the
failure of each theory. He identifies three basic theoretical approaches:
the superiority theory contends that comedy creates an attitude of supe-
riority over the comic object; the incongruity theory argues that comedy
stems from thwarted expectations; and the relief theory claims that com-
edy releases otherwise repressed energies or desires.1 Each theory suffers
in the end from the plasticity of the comic act. Thus, it seems that we
must conclude that the failure to be adequate to its object is the destiny
of every theory of comedy.
But what stands out when we look more closely at the various theo-
ries of comedy is the lack of theorizing that has occurred. In most cases,
the proponents of these theories don’t devote much time to their de-
velopment. The disruptive force of comedy hasn’t prevented its theoriza-
tion, but it has made thinkers wary of thinking too much about the comic.
This is apparent if we look at Morreall’s own examples of the various
theories. When Plato attacks laughter in The Republic, this critique occurs
briefly within a description of what constitutes the proper character of
a city’s rulers. If he is a proponent of the superiority theory, he doesn’t
explore this theory at any length. Similarly, Kant’s version of the incon-
gruity theory takes place in a short section of the Critique of the Faculty of
Judgment. Though Kant discusses the adverse relationship between com-
edy and the understanding, comedy does not play a significant role in
49

50
CHAP T E R 2
his theory of art or in the faculty of judgment, which are the central
concerns of this work.2 There is no extended investigation of the incon-
gruity theory anywhere in Kant’s philosophy. With the relief theory, the
situation changes. Freud wrote an entire book, Jokes and Their Relation to
the Unconscious, ostensibly propounding this theory. But when one exam-
ines this work closely, Freud neither foregrounds relief nor explores how
comedy produces respite for the psyche. His focus is much more on the
hidden connections that come to light with jokes. If Morreall is correct
and these are the three dominant theories of comedy, they are theories
left radically undeveloped. Comedy is a neglected theoretical terrain.
This neglect stands out much more than comedy’s inherent resistance
to theorization.
The neglect contrasts comedy with tragedy. Though tragedy is much
less widespread than comedy, it nonetheless opens itself up to philos-
ophy in a way that comedy does not. Tragedy even provides the basis
for certain theoretical approaches to the world, like those developed
by Nietzsche and Freud.3 Even though both thinkers value comedy, it
cannot provide the foundation for their theories that tragedy can. Aris-
totle analyzes tragedy extensively in the Poetics but famously includes only
a brief discussion of comedy. He labels it “an imitation of men worse
than the average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of
fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the ridiculous, which is a
species of the ugly.”4 The absence of any developed theory of comedy in
the Poetics leads Umberto Eco to fantasize that Aristotle’s lost treatise on
comedy disappeared in a fire triggered by the Inquisition.5
In the last hundred years or so, however, theorists have advanced
three formidable theories of comedy. The first two theories emerged
at almost precisely the same time. In 1900 Henri Bergson formulated a
theory of comedy in Laughter, and in 1905 Freud followed with a vastly
different explanation in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. The
next significant theoretical development occurred more than a century
later, but it involved a look backward in time. In The Odd One In (2007),
Alenka Zupančič turned to Hegel for the philosophical grounding of her
understanding of comedy.6
Each of these theories has much to recommend it. By examin-
ing what binds them together, we can see how they already hint at the
theory of comedy being developed here. Although none claim that com-
edy is the coincidence of lack and excess, the fundamental idea of the
short-circuit— a link between disparate elements— appears in each of the
theories. This idea becomes fully explicit in Zupančič’s work (which ap-
pears, appropriately, in a book series entitled “Short Circuits”). Zupančič
conceives of comedy as the result of a specific short-circuit, as does Berg-

51
T HE ORY AND OP P OSITION
son. For Freud, the comedy in a joke derives from an unexpected connec-
tion between disparate ideas— the short-circuit as such. The conception
of the comic short-circuit begins, however, in Bergson’s thought.
The Human Machine
Bergson contends that comedy derives from the short-circuit between the
human being and a mechanical thing. Initially, the human and the ma-
chine are completely distinct. Humanity, for Bergson, involves unantici-
pated movements and actions. Nothing can account for what the human
being will do in the next instant. This unaccountability is the essence of
human freedom. The machine stands in stark contrast: we always know
what the machine will do. The future doesn’t change its possibilities.
We radically separate the human from the machine, but comedy erupts
when this distinction collapses. Bergson says, “The comic is that side
of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human
events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of
pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life.”7 Though the
comic makes evident a connection that genuinely exists— the connec-
tion between life and inelasticity— Bergson views this link as a nefarious
one. His philosophy aims at freeing life from its entanglement in reifying
mechanisms. The laughter with which we respond to the comic is part of
this freeing effort.
Bergson’s theory of comedy is inextricable from the centrality
of time in his overall philosophy. Time, for Bergson, is the source of
human freedom. Because our existence unfolds in time, there is always
the possibility for the new to arise.8 At any moment in time, we can do
what we have never done before and break from our clichéd existence.
Although cliché dominates our daily life, time offers potential respite
from the mechanistic structure of cliché. We betray the freedom inher-
ent in our temporality when we pursue our activities absentmindedly or
permit them to become mechanistic. One succumbs easily to mechanism
because it enables us to live out our lives without confronting the total
openness of each moment. We are constantly free to act differently than
we have acted our entire lives, but this freedom is a heavy burden to bear.
The mechanical performance of routines comes along to save us from
this freedom. When we act mechanically, we can ignore that we are free
and avoid the burden of freedom. Comedy is part of the struggle against
this betrayal insofar as it makes us aware of the hidden absence of life
where we expect to see life.9

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CHAP T E R 2
Just after the birth of the talkie in cinema, two filmmakers come
close to creating a visual representation of Bergson’s theory. René Clair’s
À nous la liberté (1931) focuses on the mechanization that occurs during
mass production. One of the film’s heroes, Louis (Raymond Cordy), de-
velops a factory for the manufacture of record players, while the film’s
other hero, Louis’s friend Émile (Henri Marchand), works on the as-
sembly line at the factory. As Émile performs his small part in the as-
sembly of the device, we see him strain to adapt his bodily capacities to
the demands of mass production. The film’s comedy derives from Émile’s
body transforming itself into a machine. By showing the disjointed fit
between the human being and mechanical production, Clair makes clear
that there is a contradiction within this conjunction. This is an idea that
Charlie Chaplin would develop even further in his Modern Times (1936).
The similarity between Clair’s comedy and Chaplin’s led to a lawsuit
against Chaplin by Clair’s production company (despite Clair’s own re-
fusal to be a part of the suit). Chaplin takes the assembly line scene from
À nous la liberté and multiplies the comedy by multiplying the mechani-
zation to which the unnamed factory worker (Chaplin) submits himself.
In Chaplin’s film, the worker doesn’t just madly attempt to keep up with
the mechanistic process, but he becomes an automaton himself. When
he leaves the assembly line, he continues to make the mechanical twisting
movement with his wrenches that he performed while working. In one
of the film’s great comic moments, he chases a woman down the street
in an effort to twist the buttons on her breasts as if he were still at work
on the assembly line. He becomes so fully a machine that his bodily mo-
tions cease to be recognizably human. While watching Modern Times, it
appears as if Bergson’s theory of comedy is irrefutable.10 But when one
looks elsewhere, the narrowness of the theory reveals itself.
The problem with Bergson’s theory of comedy is that while mecha-
nization is often funny, there are many occasions when it isn’t comic
at all. There are times when mechanization can provoke horror rather
than humor. The Jews who see Nazi troops goose-stepping toward them
like a machine will break out not in laughter but in flight. The fans who
watch a football team execute a perfectly orchestrated play by following
the plan mechanically will cheer without seeing any humor in the play.
These instances— and one could come up with countless others— show
that mechanization may be a necessary condition for comedy, but it can-
not be a sufficient condition. And if we consider the screwball comedies
from classical Hollywood, even the contention that the mechanization of
life is a necessary condition for comedy loses its apparently self- evident
character.
In the screwball comedy, the humor derives from characters who

53
refuse to live absentmindedly and thus deviate from expectations. Jerry

Warriner (Cary Grant) and Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) stop acting
the parts of proper husband and wife in The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey,
1937), and in this way they generate the film’s comedy. From the begin-
ning of the film, we see Jerry faking a trip to Florida and Lucy spending
a suspicious evening at an inn with another man because of a car break-
down. Subsequently, the couple’s impending divorce generates humor
by violating our expectations. For instance, Lucy pretends to be Jerry’s
sister in order to ruin his budding relationship with a young heiress. Mc-
Carey creates humor not by depicting life becoming mechanical, but by
showing precisely the free and non-clichéd act that Bergson identifies
with time. This type of humor predominates in screwball comedies. The
relative rigidity of the genre ironically produces comedy that has nothing
to do with mechanization.
In fact, it is difficult to think of a screwball comedy in which the
humor derives from mechanization rather than from its disruption. The
genre depends most often on women who refuse to live out in an au-
tomatic way their role as wife. We see this not only with Lucy Warriner
in The Awful Truth but in almost every film of the genre. George Cu-
kor’s Adam’s Rib (1949) makes the freedom of the woman— her ability to
act however she wishes without regard for the conventions that govern
her existence— the main focus of the film. Adam (Spencer Tracy) and
Amanda (Katherine Hepburn) are lawyers who take opposite sides in a
case of a wronged wife who shoots and wounds her husband. As the pros-
ecutor of the case, Adam wants Amanda to refuse to defend the woman,
but Amanda not only takes the case but transforms it into a media extrav-
aganza. The disruptiveness of the case almost ends Adam and Amanda’s
marriage, but in the end he comes to accept her refusal to act like a
domesticated wife. At every point, the comedy in the film derives from
the disruption of mechanization, not from life becoming mechanized.
Although we can think of many examples in which the mechanization of
life is funny, there are at least an equal number in which the disruption
of mechanization provides the comedy.11
But this is not to say that Bergson has nothing to offer to a theory
of comedy. If mechanization itself is not sufficient for the creation of
comedy, it is nonetheless clear that Bergson does identify some key as-
pects of the comic. The problem that hampers his theory is the vitalist
philosophy out of which it emerges. According to this vitalism, life itself
is infinitely productive and generative of novelty. Bergson identifies hu-
manity with the openness and freedom of temporality (in which novelty
can occur). As a result, any mechanization functions as a betrayal of that
freedom and as a brake on novelty. This theory cannot conceptualize

54
CHAP T E R 2
mechanization as anything but a turn away from freedom and thus fails
to see how mechanization doesn’t just eliminate novelty but also renders
it visible. It is the rigidity of mechanized being that highlights the con-
trast with the freedom that Bergson associates with the openness of time.
If we knew only this openness, we would have no awareness of it. In this
sense, mechanization must be as integral to subjectivity as temporality
is to it.12
Rather than identifying subjectivity and its opposite as he believes
he’s doing, Bergson actually identifies two poles of this subjectivity. The
freedom of the temporal subject contrasts with the rigidity of the spa-
tial subject, but both aspects of the subject depend on each other. Time
becomes visible as time only through the spatialization that reifies it.
Bergson’s philosophical inability to see this leads to a one-sided theory of
comedy, but it is also this philosophical oversight that enables him to see
the coincidence of opposites in comedy. The failure in Bergson’s theo-
rizing is at once the source of its greatest insight.
Comedy depends on a transformation in which we see identity
remain the same even as it transforms into its opposite. For Bergson, the
human beings who become machine-like are comic because they don’t
cease to be free human beings when they act like machines. Though
Bergson himself doesn’t see it, this doesn’t occur only in moments of ex-
treme mechanization; it takes place equally when machines begin to act
human. The most comic moment in the opening sequence from Modern
Times occurs not when the factory worker begins to act robotically but
when the machine used to feed him begins to go haywire and reveal its
own humanity.
In an attempt to improve assembly line efficiency, a salesperson
brings an automated feeding machine to the factory for a demonstra-
tion. When Chaplin’s character submits to the machine, he can initially
eat well while keeping his hands free for work. But after a few minutes,
the machine begins to malfunction— first, it moves a corncob so fast that
he can’t eat it; then, after the demonstrators tinker with the machine, it
starts dumping soup on the worker and smashing his face with a clean-
ing sponge. The machine ceases to behave like a machine and displays
the faults that we associate with humanity. At this point, the comedy de-
rives, contra Bergson, not from the process of mechanization but from
its reversal, when a machine fails to function like a machine. We see that
excessive mechanization designed to produce perfect efficiency produces
a complete lack of efficiency. This type of transition, suggested but not
developed in Bergson’s theory, is essential to the comic effect.
Bergson’s great contribution thus consists not in his association of
comedy with mechanization but in his insight that the transition from

55
one state to another state— for him, from human to machine— is comic.
This transition is comic because it brings together difference and same-
ness. We see that an object is both itself and its opposite, and this type
of identity in difference is one of the foundations of comedy. Comedy
necessarily involves contradiction because its object is never self-identical.
The Familiar Millionaire
Freud wrote Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious just a few years
after Bergson’s Laughter, though his theory of the joke betrays no influ-
ence from Bergson.13 Though Freud distinguishes sharply between the
joke and comedy, I will treat his theory as a theory of comedy. The dif-
ference between the joke and comedy, for Freud, derives from the rela-
tional structure in which each form exists. The comic exists between two
persons or between a person and a funny thing: the subject finds the
other comic and laughs. The joke, in contrast, requires three people: the
subject telling the joke, the object of the joke, and the third person to
whom the subject relates the joke. This tripartite structure indicates the
essentially social nature of jokes that is missing in comedy. Freud insists
that an implicit demand that we tell it to others accompanies every joke,
whereas we are perfectly able to enjoy comedy by ourselves, just through
the encounter with the object of the comedy.
Freud’s attempt to distinguish the joke from comedy doesn’t hold
up to close scrutiny. His sense that the power of a joke requires that we
relate it to a third party is certainly correct, but he fails to see that this
third party is equally operative for all comedy. When we laugh at a comic
object, we are always laughing with others, even when they aren’t present.
Though a joke requires a third party in flesh and blood, comedy demands
an implicit third party with whom we can share the humor. We are never
laughing alone when we confront a comic object. We laugh more heart-
ily at a comic film when we watch it in a group with others who are also
laughing, and even when we see it alone, we are eager to share the ex-
perience with others. We tell others about it and will even watch it again
to experience the comedy again. Freud theorizes that we tell and retell
jokes for the same reason: each time that we recount the joke to a new
third party, the novelty of the joke’s effect returns, and we can laugh at it
anew. The joke’s evident dependence on a third party parallels a similar
dependence in the comic that renders Freud’s hard-and-fast distinction
untenable.14
Freud’s theory of comedy represents a decisive advance on Bergson’s.

56
CHAP T E R 2
The difference in their insights into comedy stems from the difference in
the theoretical foundations from which they formulate their ideas. Berg-
son’s vitalism limits his ability to recognize the various forms that comedy
assumes. Freud, on the other hand, models his theory of the comic on
his understanding of dreams, which enables him to emphasize the for-
mal process at work in comedy. Comedy doesn’t just reveal the identity
of the disparate or the transformation of something into its opposite but
involves a psychic economization resulting from the act of abbreviating.
We laugh, according to Freud, because we have saved psychic energy
through lessening the distance that this energy typically must travel. This
occurs, as Bergson already understood, through a connection of what ap-
pears to be disparate, like the human and the machine. But by adding the
notion of economy, Freud suggests a new possibility for why we laugh at
the connection. We aren’t laughing at the human becoming mechanical.
Laughter, according to Freud, bespeaks a psychic excess that comes into
existence through the economizing that occurs in comedy. Thus, comedy
permits what Freud calls a short-circuit.
Freud’s theory of comedy has its foundation in the structure of the
play on words, which is the model for the short-circuit. The play on words
brings together two or more different meanings in a single word. Freud
returns again and again to his privileged example of the comic in Jokes
and Their Relation to the Unconscious, which is Heinrich Heine’s neologism
famillionär, which unites the German words familiär (familiar) and Mil-
lionär (millionaire). In Heine’s Reisebilder, the character Hirsch-Hyacinth
uses this term to describe his treatment at the hands of the wealthy Baron
Rothschild. Millionär describes Baron Rothschild’s economic status, while
familiär expresses the condescending attitude that Rothschild adopts
toward Hirsch-Hyacinth. By combining the two words into a new word
that he coins, Hirsch-Hyacinth is able to articulate his displeasure toward
Rothschild’s attitude without directly stating it and openly criticizing him.
Comedy, like the dream, enables the subject to express an otherwise in-
expressible desire in a disguised form. This form, as Freud sees it, holds
the key to the comic effect.15 We laugh at the formal transformation that
comedy accomplishes. For Freud, the necessity of this transformation
derives from the source of all comedy, which is obscenity or smut.
Freud contends that the original material of all comedy is pure ob-
scenity. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, he notes that enjoy-
ment among the lower class comes with “the uttering of an undisguised
indecency.”16 The problem is that “undisguised indecency” or smut has
no place in polite society. Rather than creating enjoyment and laughter,
it would produce embarrassment and ostracism. But comedy and the joke
come to the rescue. Freud continues, “Only when we rise to a society of

57
a more refined education do the formal conditions for jokes play a part.
The smut becomes a joke and is only tolerated when it has the character
of a joke.”17 Polite society demands jokes in the place of smut, but this
repressive demand, contrary to what Freud himself suggests here, is the
source of all comedy.
There is no pure enjoyment of obscenity or smut. This enjoyment
always occurs as a violation of the norms of polite society, which serve as
an implicit limit that can be transgressed. But when we try to articulate
smut within polite society, we must resort to what Freud calls the joke-
work, which functions in parallel with the dream-work. Just as the dream-
work distorts a latent content by transforming it into a manifest content,
the joke-work transforms smut into comedy. In each case, we must locate
the subject’s satisfaction not in the original latent content but in the for-
mal distortion that occurs as this latent content manifests itself in a dream
or in comedy. The joke-work forces lowly smut into the form of a joke
acceptable in polite society. We laugh not directly at the smut itself but
at the identification of this smut with an acceptable expression.
Freud’s discussion of the joke-work, like his discussion of the dream-
work, demonstrates that the satisfaction which a joke delivers resides not
in its implicitly smutty content but in the formal transformation that the
joke-work accomplishes. The joke is an aesthetic form that can accommo-
date any content. One can joke equally about the most intellectual sub-
ject and about the most bodily, about metaphysics and about sex. In each
case, the formal mechanism is the same and produces laughter in the
same way. Woody Allen moves from one to the other while demonstrating
this formal similarity. In Love and Death (1975), he jokes at God’s expense
by saying, “If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil.
The worst you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.”18
This joke transforms the ultimate power in the universe into the equiva-
lent of an inadequate human being. He resorts to the same structure with
a joke about his own sexual prowess in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989),
when his character Clifford Stern says, “the last time when I was inside a
woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty.” While the first joke low-
ers God to the level of an unsuccessful human, the second lowers Clifford
by claiming that the only woman available to him is a monument rather
than a flesh-and-blood person. In both instances, a formal transformation
occurs through which we connect elevated ideas with lowly ones. This
transformation produces the enjoyment that we receive when we hear a
joke or witness a comic scene.
There is nothing funny about someone standing on a street cor-
ner screaming lewd comments at passersby. Rather than laughing at
such a person, we would most likely run away. But someone capable of

58
CHAP T E R 2
transforming these lewd comments into jokes becomes funny. Doing so

reveals the identity between the seemingly contradictory lewd comments
and polite expressions, an identity that is the source of our laughter. We
don’t laugh at one or the other— at the lewd comments or at the polite
expressions— but we do laugh at moments when we recognize their es-
sential identity. Comedy expresses the inexpressible obscenity. Through
this process, it bridges the gap between obscenity and polite society. This
is apparent in Sarah Silverman’s joke about one of her sexual experi-
ences. She says, “I was licking jelly off of my boyfriend’s penis, and all
of a sudden I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother.’”
The joke forces us to connect the figure of the mother, a central figure
of polite society, not just with sexuality but with the act of licking jelly off
a penis. Jokes reveal that polite society is always smutty, and, what is per-
haps even more disturbing, that smut is always polite.
In Luis Buñuel’s Le Fantôme de la liberté (The Phantom of Liberty, 1974),
the relationship between smut and polite society becomes especially evi-
dent in one of the film’s most disturbing and yet ultimately funny scenes.
Early in the film, a man shows a series of postcards to children playing
at a park. Crucially, Buñuel doesn’t show the postcards to the spectator
but merely implies their content. The scene suggests that the middle-
aged man is seducing the children with sexual images, but the scene
concludes without any act of seduction except for the man leaving the
cards with the children. When they return home and show the cards to
their parents, the parents are both titillated and scandalized. Eventually
they even fire the nanny who had been watching the children in the park.
The spectator expects that the cause of this outrage is pornography.
But at this point, Buñuel reveals the postcards to the spectator: instead
of sexual images, they consist of a series of architectural landmarks. The
film is not insisting, of course, that architecture is inherently perverse,
but rather that in polite society even the most acceptable images can take
on the form of smut if shown in an improper manner. Smut is a form
rather than content.19 Buñuel finds comedy in eviscerating the distance
between wholly acceptable images and the most unacceptable activity we
can imagine— the sexual seduction of children by an adult.
In contemporary society, racism has become more obscene than
any sexual perversion. One would sooner admit to being a necrophil-
iac than a racist in polite society because the accusation that one is a
racist is far more damning than the accusation that one is a necrophiliac.
One can imagine laughing off the latter but not the former. And yet,
racism, in contrast to necrophilia, persists unabated in almost everyone’s
psyche. In Spike Lee’s Original Kings of Comedy (2000), stand-up come-
dian D. L. Hughley employs a joke in order to make clear the connection

59
between obscene racism and the demand of polite society that everyone
express their antiracism. Hughley begins by mockingly pleading with
white people to avow their racism rather than hiding it. He claims that
he has no problem with honest and open racism, but he laments the need
of whites to profess their nonracism while indulging freely in racism at
the same time. This point leads him to the highlight of his routine.
Hughley says that one of the common defenses of white people
accused of racism is to claim that they can’t be racist because they have
had three black people in their house. He then points out that if one is
counting, that’s probably a sign that the accusation is true. Hughley’s joke
connects the polite defense against the charge of racism— “I’ve had three
black people in my house”— with the bald statement of the obscenity— “I
don’t want to associate with black people.” Only a few on the margins of
society would openly make the latter statement, but we can envision many
whites uttering the former. By displaying the connection between the two,
Hughley enables us to laugh at the identity in difference. The statements
are contradictory, but both are true.
Freud’s theory of comedy enables us to see the role that the joke-
work plays in revealing this form of identity. Comedy depends on an
identity that the joke-work makes evident across psychic distances. The
result of such connections, for Freud, is an economy of psychic energy.
Laughter is the product of the excess of psychic energy that this economy
produces. Comedy economizes by allowing the psyche to move from one
idea to another without taking a circuitous path. It is a short-circuit that
shows identity where we expect difference. But when he turns from ex-
plaining jokes to theorizing the comic in the latter part of Jokes and Their
Relation to the Unconscious, the limitations of Freud’s understanding of
comedy show through.
On the question of jokes, Freud links laughter to the economizing
that takes place when the joke creates a psychic short-circuit and con-
nects ideas that would otherwise remain distant from each other. When
he takes up the larger problem of comedy, Freud extends this line of
thought. He associates the experience of comedy with an implicit com-
parison that the subject makes between the energy that the subject itself
would expend performing an act and the energy that the subject sees
expended by the object. Thus, a clown’s pratfall involves an excessive ex-
penditure in relation to the subject’s own imagined expenditure, which
creates the opportunity for laughter.
The problem arises when Freud considers comic events that require
more expenditure than those of the comic object. The subject laughs,
Freud believes, at the difference between the expected psychic expen-
diture of energy and what actually occurs, not purely as a result of the

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CHAP T E R 2
economizing that takes place. The object uses less energy than the subject
would have used, so economizing cannot be the source of the comedy.
The idea of economizing as the essence of comedy comes to a breaking
point in Freud’s own explanation. In this sense, Freud’s theory of comedy
betrays his theory of the joke and the cogent logic that informs it, but in
the process, he comes closer to a theory that manages to pay equal atten-
tion to lack and excess.
World Spirit on Horseback
If the comic derives from the difference between the psychic energy that
we expect an action to cost and the actual energy expended, then comedy
is the result of the relationship between lack and excess. One side lacks in
relation to the excess on the other side. When we experience the comic,
according to Freud, this difference is always the source of our laughter.
But what Freud does not yet theorize is the capacity for lack and excess
to coincide with each other in the comic object. For Freud, the object
either exceeds the expenditure that the subject attributes to itself or it
comes up short, but it never brings together lack and excess in itself. It
falls to Alenka Zupančič to move the theory of comedy further in this
direction and to articulate, in spite of the insights found in the theories
of Bergson and Freud, the most convincing theory of comedy that anyone
has yet advanced.
Though Freud contends that a short-circuit is essential to the func-
tioning of the joke and comedy, he does not theorize the short-circuit
as the essential comic operation. Taking Hegel’s discussion of comedy
in the Phenomenology of Spirit as her point of departure, Zupančič claims
that a specific short-circuit defines comedy as such: comedy occurs with
the universal becoming concrete. In our initial or typical confrontation
with universality, it remains above individuality in a pure state. Universals
such as hypocrisy or avarice exist as abstractions. Concrete individuals
partake in these universals while retaining an individuality apart from
them. Distance remains between the universal and its appearance in the
individual. For instance, Jonas may be hypocritical and Tina may be ava-
ricious, but Jonas doesn’t embody hypocrisy and Tina does not embody
avarice. Serious drama, in contrast to comedy, stresses that some distance
always remains between the universal and the individual who exhibits
characteristics of the universal. But as Zupančič views it, this accounts for
the greater radicality of comedy relative to serious drama.
In its typical mode of appearance as a pure abstraction, universality

61
is not comic and does not elicit laughter. Nor do we laugh at concrete
individuals existing apart from universality. But when abstract universality
appears concrete in an individual, it becomes comic. This concretization
is a necessary operation for universality. According to Zupančič, as long
as it remains in its abstract form, universality is too pure and, ironically,
not universal enough. It is only when universality becomes embodied or
enacted within a physical being that it actually becomes universality. Uni-
versals do not exist in a separate transcendent realm, but come into being
only through their actualization. As we see the universal concretizing
itself, we experience the comic: we laugh at the distance that we imagine
between the universal and the concrete disappearing.
Zupančič is careful to distinguish her approach from the standard
picture of comedy that locates it in the belittling of the universal or the
diminution of apparent transcendence. Comedy is not the revenge of the
particular on the universal, but the expression of the universal’s internal
contraction that appears when the universal takes on a concrete form.
“Comedy,” as Zupančič puts it, “is not the undermining of the universal,
but its (own) reversal into the concrete; it is not an objection to the uni-
versal, but a concrete labor or work of the universal itself. Or, to put it in
a single slogan: comedy is the universal at work.”20 The abstract form of the
universal— the typical way of conceiving universality— fails to capture
universality as such. It is only when we see the universal at work or in a
concrete form that we see the universal for what it is. At this point, we
recognize that universality is, when properly conceived, comic.
The character of Socrates in Aristophanes’s The Clouds illustrates
this conception of universality. In the play, Aristophanes presents Socrates
not as the actual historical figure but as an incarnation of the philosopher
as a universal category. Rather than being the enemy of the sophists, as he
is in the Platonic dialogues, Socrates is the exemplary sophist. Through
this ironic characterization, Aristophanes shows that all idealist philos-
ophy necessarily involves an element of sophistry.21 The plot of the play
focuses on Socrates teaching his philosophy to an old man who comes to
him in order to learn a manner of argumentation that will enable him
to elude his creditors. Unable to convince his son to attend the school
of Socrates and learn the sophistic method, Strepsiades decides to visit
Socrates himself. From the moment of their first encounter, Aristophanes
makes it clear that the idealist philosopher in action is a buffoon.
A disciple of Socrates introduces Strepsiades to his master when
Socrates is hanging in a basket in the air. This entrance on the scene
evokes nicely the comedy of the universal at work. As an idealist phi-
losopher, Socrates speculates on celestial matters. In order to do so, he
claims, he must distance himself from the ground. The image of Socrates

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CHAP T E R 2
hanging in a basket from a tree renders the philosopher ridiculous. It

shows that Socrates himself takes his own description of the philosophical
task— speculating on celestial matters— too literally. What’s more, the
few feet that Socrates elevates himself off the ground in this scene do not
bring him significantly closer to the object of his speculation. He imag-
ines that he removes himself far from the ground in order to speculate
without its interference while he remains proximate to it.
The comedy plays on this error in Socrates’s thinking and his inabil-
ity to recognize that philosophy elevates itself mentally rather than physi-
cally. But the scene would not be funny if it did not correctly apprehend
the universality of the idealist philosopher. Although no idealist philoso-
phers hang in baskets to bring themselves closer to the objects of their
speculation, they do nonetheless assume that they can translate freely
from materiality into ideas, which is what the comedy in The Clouds brings
to light. In the figure of Socrates, Aristophanes reveals what Zupančič
calls “the universal at work.” In doing so, his play strips away the abstrac-
tion of the universal, forcing the spectator to confront the universal in
its concrete incarnation. The result is not liberation from the universal
and an end to idealist philosophy but a new way of relating to the univer-
sal, a diminution of the idealist philosopher as an abstract authority that
operates invisibly.
This emphasis on the role that the universal plays in comedy leads
to a strict idea of how comedy plays itself out. Zupančič sees comedy as
always moving in one direction and does not believe in the possibility
that comedy can move the opposite way. According to Zupančič, comedy
necessarily travels from the abstract universal to the concrete through a
depiction of the incarnation of the universal. It shows the universal be-
coming concretized, which produces the comic effect. Tragedy, in con-
trast, begins with a concrete individual who adopts a universal position
and clings to it despite the fact that this association leads to the tragic
hero’s death or ostracism. This is why, Zupančič claims, tragedies have
proper names for their titles (like Antigone, Athalie, or Hamlet), while com-
edies most often have universal titles (like The Frogs, Le Misanthrope, or
All’s Well That Ends Well ). Even if there are exceptions to this rule (such
as Tartuffe), it does generally hold, and it is possible to explain away the
exceptions in just the way that Zupančič herself does.
Because Zupančič focuses her theory of comedy on universality and
its incarnation, she views comedy as essentially radical. Though she ad-
mits the possibility of conservative comedies and jokes, she classifies these
as inauthentic or unrealized comedy. A comedy is conservative only inso-
far as it doesn’t go far enough in the process of incarnating the universal
and thus leaves the universal and the individual separable. This occurs,

63
for instance, when George W. Bush mocks his own malapropisms. This
is funny, but it is not truly comic because Bush sustains an image of his
own individuality apart from the universal when he himself articulates the
mockery. In this failed comedy, the universal and the incarnation do not
fully become identical as they do in genuine comedy. As Zupančič con-
ceives it, there are no successful conservative jokes because conservative
jokes interrupt the comic operation midstream and thus limit its effect.
But this dismissal of conservative comedy sidesteps one of the most
prominent and fecund sources of jokes— racism, sexism, anti-Semitism,
homophobia, and so on. For Zupančič, jokes based on these sources
would simply not qualify as comedy, which is why she doesn’t discuss
them, and yet they elicit laughter from exponentially more people than
do the comedies of Aristophanes or Molière. The problem with an anti-
Semitic joke, for example, is that it doesn’t rely on the mechanism of in-
carnating the universal. This is why Zupančič would deny it the status of
the comic. Such a joke functions by taking two disparate ideas associated
with Jews and bringing them together in a particular way.
An anti-Semitic Holocaust joke is perhaps the most offensive joke
we can imagine. Not only does such a joke violate the sense that anti-
Semitism is immoral, but it also finds comedy in one of the singular hor-
rors of human history. If such a joke can nonetheless be funny, this forces
us to reconsider the argument that conservative comedy is interrupted
comedy. In one of this type of jokes, a speaker asks, “Why did the Jews
go so willingly to Auschwitz?” The response is: “Because they heard that
entrance was free.” It is of course possible not to laugh at this joke and
simply to find it offensive, but it is also the case that it is nonetheless an
effective joke that many people would find funny even though it works
to exacerbate a stereotype about Jews and to minimize the horror of
the Holocaust.22 What’s more, one can find the joke politically and eth-
ically reprehensible and nonetheless recognize the comedy. The joke
doesn’t incarnate the universal in the way that Zupančič theorizes, but it
does perform a comic short-circuit. Two otherwise extremely disparate
events— saving money and going to a gas chamber— come to coexist, and
this is the source of the joke’s effectiveness.
Zupančič comes closest to identifying the comic correctly when she
describes what takes place in a comic encounter. As she sees it, comedy
accomplishes the impossible and brings together two realities that can-
not coexist. The social order functions by obscuring the contradictions
that both make this order possible and threaten to destroy it. But comedy
brings these contradictions to the fore and enables opposing realities
to coexist despite their contradictory status. Zupančič tells the story of
a man who returns home and finds his wife in bed. When a cell phone

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CHAP T E R 2
rings, a naked man comes out of the closet and answers the phone that is
in his pants on the floor. The comedy occurs when he answers the phone
and then has a normal telephone conversation despite being caught
with another man’s wife. In this comic scene, a short-circuit between two
disparate situations occurs that enables the incompatible situations to
coexist. When Zupančič stresses the short-circuit and the act of bring-
ing together what ordinarily can’t coincide, she broadens her theory of
comedy beyond the concretization of the universal, but this latter idea
remains its basis.
The result of Zupančič’s speculation about comedy is a theory that,
as far as it goes, is impossible to refute. She identifies the structure at
work in moments of comedy and comedy’s role in producing a contra-
dictory encounter. But this theory, like Freud’s and Bergson’s theories,
remains too narrow in its application. Even if every concretization of
the universal is comic, there are comedies that do not involve the con-
cretization of the universal. Although Zupančič takes Freud’s idea of the
comic short-circuit further than Freud himself does, she doesn’t yet take
it far enough. The notion of the short-circuit— as Bergson, Freud, and
Zupančič all grasp— is essential to the comic. But comedy requires a spe-
cific short-circuit. The comic emerges not through a short-circuit between
ideas or between the abstract universal and its concrete manifestation,
but through the connection between lack and excess. The comic event
is the moment when lack and excess come together. Comedy shows us
that lack and excess, despite their apparent opposition, are two forms of
the same structure.
We can see this at work in a misogynist joke that evinces this struc-
ture exactly. In this joke, one man asks another, “What’s the difference
between a golf ball and a G-spot?” When the other doesn’t know, the
man says, “I’ll spend five minutes looking for a golf ball.”23 The humor
stems from connecting the man’s total disregard for women’s sexual plea-
sure with the excessive attention that he gives to the game of golf. The
man professes a lack in what is a privileged activity and an excess in a
trivial one. The joke brings these two moments together, revealing that
men often play golf to avoid having to concern themselves with women’s
pleasure. In the contours of this joke, we see the demand for a theory
of comedy that pays attention to what comes together in the comic mo-
ment. Comedy allows us to see that the man searching for his golf ball is
not just searching for his ball but is finding a way to have the satisfaction
of sex while bypassing the trauma of it.

3
Tragedy and Pathos
Proximate Genres
If we understand comedy in terms of the intersection of lack and ex-

cess, we can make sense of forms of experience by the way they deploy
these two states. The contrast is clearest in the case of tragedy and pa-
thos. While comedy occurs with the intersection of lack and excess and
everyday life simply keeps them apart, tragedy and pathos stem from an
insistence on one or the other. The tragic experience is one of excess, in
which the tragic subject disdains the limits of the finite world in order to
adhere to a transcendent value. The experience of pathos, in contrast,
frames every event through the prism of lack. Since both tragedy and
pathos each take one side in the fundamental opposition that animates
comedy, they shed light on how comedy works.
At first glance, however, it is not readily apparent that the struc-
tures of comedy and of tragedy are opposed. The significant achievement
of Umberto Eco’s theory of comedy involves his insight into the nearly
identical structure of tragedy and comedy. In his essays on comedy, he
points out that both tragedy and comedy necessitate the violation of a
rule (or what we might call a law). The difference does not lie, as one
might think, in the status of the rule, where the rule that the tragic hero
violates is universal and the rule that the comic hero violates is merely
particular. While the tragic Oedipus breaks the prohibition of incest,
Socrates in The Clouds merely disobeys the conventions of Greek society.
For Eco, this is not the decisive difference between the two structures.
Eco claims that comedy simply treats the rule differently than tragedy
does. Whereas tragedy delves into the intricacies and justifications for
the rule, comedy demands that the rule remain unstated— known by the
audience but never directly articulated in the comic work. According to
Eco, “comic effect is achieved . . . if the rule is not cited but assumed as
implicit.”1 The difference between tragedy and comedy is very slight in
Eco’s view, but this difference accounts for the widely varied emotional
responses that each engender.
These extremely different responses lead us to consider, in contrast
to Eco, whether tragedy and comedy are really so similar. The nature of
tragedy seems directly opposed to that of comedy. If we look at the role
65

66
CHAP T E R 3
that life and death play in each, this opposition seems self-evident. At
the conclusion of a tragedy like Hamlet, everyone dies, while at the con-
clusion of a comedy like As You Like It, everyone gets married or at least
couples up. In fact, the great quantity of coupling leads the cynical Jaques
to say: “There is sure another flood toward, and these couples are com-
ing to the ark.”2 Though marriage is the convention, some comedies,
such as Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, conclude with death. But even in this
case, death is not serious in the way that it is in a tragedy. The tragic and
the comic worlds feel completely different. But the proximity of the two
worlds becomes evident not just if we listen to Eco but if we also look at
how easy it is to transform a tragedy into a comedy simply by changing
the perspective.
The great example of the transformation of a tragedy into a comedy
occurs when Tom Stoppard takes the story of Hamlet and tells it from the
perspective of the minor characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Stop-
pard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead follows the plotline of Shake-
speare’s tragedy, but in the later play we see Hamlet through the eyes of
these comic characters. In this light, he ceases to be a tragic figure, just
as the play itself loses its tragic essence. Tragedy occurs when a character
transcends or exceeds the finite world. The character regards the finite
world with indifference and thus scorns death, an event that ordinary
subjects fear and arrange their existence to avoid or delay. Stoppard’s play
eliminates the transcendent perspective of Hamlet and views this tran-
scendence through the eyes of characters enmeshed in finitude or lack.
Typically, we think of comedy as the genre that involves a disregard
for death. If someone dies in a comedy, we know that this death is not
serious and would not be surprised to discover the person alive again
at some point. But if comic characters in some sense cannot really die,
tragic characters act while knowing that the consequence of their act will
probably be their own death. This is the case with Antigone from the very
beginning of Sophocles’s play. She regards her own death as meaning-
less in relation to her duty to bury her brother. In the same way, Hamlet
views confronting the problems of justice and existence as much more
important than his own death, which will most likely be the result of his
quest. Though tragic heroes don’t always die— Oedipus is alive at the end
of Oedipus Tyrannus, for instance— they transcend the realm of finitude
through their capacity for viewing their lives sub specie aeternitatis and
treating their own death as an insignificant offshoot of the devotion to a
duty. Oedipus cares more about discovering the truth of who killed his
father than he does about the deleterious effect that this discovery will
have on his own well-being. Tragic heroes place an infinite duty above
concern for their own finite existence.

67
T RAGE DY AND PAT HOS
Tragedy disappears almost completely from the modern world as

life becomes more important than duty. Tragedy depends not so much on
nobility as on a conception of duty that gives it more importance than life
itself. If there is a transcendent realm impervious to the fluctuations of
temporality, duty has a solid anchor. When modernity destroys this tran-
scendence and creates an immanent world, duty loses its clear support,
and survival eclipses duty in importance. Though it is possible to sustain
the idea that duty counts more than life itself, such a position becomes
less tenable in the modern world. There remain individuals in modernity
who still sacrifice themselves in devotion to duty, but these individuals
become increasingly rare or even appear delusional rather than heroic.
This is the case with Don Quixote, one of modernity’s inaugural figures.
Tragedy evanesces with the disappearance of genuine transcendence. It
is genuine transcendence—the unwritten laws of the gods, in the case
of Antigone— that provides the basis for the tragic hero’s acceptance
of death.
The fundamental change with modernity is the reversal of duty
and survival that results from its elimination of transcendence. Without
transcendence, survival threatens to become the only value. Various fun-
damentalisms arise in response to modernity’s evisceration of transcen-
dent value, but they have been unable to reverse the path of modernity.
Biological survival becomes the modern subject’s chief way of thinking
about value. Without a value other than survival, we find tragedy in short
supply.
But modernity does not render tragedy absolutely impossible. The
modern world eliminates genuine transcendence, but it preserves the
space for transcendence within immanence. This transcendence enables
subjects to act against their self-interest and to place duty ahead of sur-
vival. The great thinker of this idea is J. G. Fichte. In his elaboration of
the moral law that Immanuel Kant discovers, Fichte states again and again
that one’s life has no significance at all in relation to doing one’s duty.
He exists in modernity, and yet because the moral law introduces tran-
scendence into the modern world of immanence, Fichte can value duty
over life. He says at one point, “I am not permitted, for the sake of life,
to do anything that violates duty; for life itself is an end only for the sake
of duty, and the final end is fulfilling one’s duty.”3 There are many in-
stances where we can envision life and duty coming into conflict, but for
Fichte there is never a moment’s hesitation in opting for duty over life
because it is duty that gives life whatever value it has.
Without duty, human life would not be worth preserving, and yet
duty does not derive from any transcendent authority. This conception of
duty and its significance is apparent in the figure of Hamlet, who cannot

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CHAP T E R 3
simply live out his life while neglecting his duty nor accept duty directly
from a figure of transcendent authority (his father, in this case). Hamlet
conceives of his own form of transcendence within his world and sacri-
fices himself for this duty that he himself conceives. As Hamlet shows,
transcendence continues to occur, but it no longer exists as a domain
wholly separated from the finite world. In modernity, one must forge tran-
scendence oneself without relying on any authority at all, which makes
tragedy much rarer and much more difficult.
The tragic hero encounters the finite world but adopts a transcen-
dent position relative to this world. In this sense, tragedy is the chronicle
of subjects’ triumph over their finitude. Heroes often die at the end of
a tragedy, but for the tragic heroes themselves, this death has no signifi-
cance in relation to the infinite duty that they must perform. Tragedy
shows us that subjects are capable of transcending their finitude, and
the tragic hero’s death provides the opportunity for exhibiting this tran-
scendence. Both tragedy and comedy require transcendence. A comic
character cannot simply be a character of pure finitude. But in the case
of comedy, transcendence and finitude— or excess and lack— coincide,
whereas tragedy depicts their absolute separation. What makes one comic
rather than tragic is holding fast to finitude even at the moment of its
transcendence. Unlike tragic heroes, comic characters don’t completely
disdain their finite being.
The distinction between comedy and pathos operates in the other
direction. Whereas tragedy takes place when a character completely aban-
dons any investment in the realm of finitude while nonetheless continu-
ing to exist within it, we experience pathos when someone becomes im-
mersed in finitude without any transcendence. The pathetic figure is
a figure of pure lack. Even if no subject can actually become a figure
of pure lack and abandon its transcendence altogether, it is possible to
view others through the lens of an unrelenting finitude. This is the per-
spective of pathos. A theory of comedy has to distinguish comedy from
tragedy, but even more significantly, it must distinguish comedy from
pathos, which is even closer to it than tragedy. Comedy and pathos seem
to share almost exactly the same structure.
The Pathetic Martin Heidegger
Though we don’t consider pathos a genre in the way that we do tragedy

and comedy, it has the same status as an approach to figures in the world
and in texts. Today, pathos has become the predominant mode of relat-

69
ing to others. In a pathetic world, every being is finite and thus merits our
care. We relate to others and ourselves as beings who can be damaged,
not as beings capable of acts that can change the world. The vulnerability
of the subject has become our chief concern, a concern that expresses
itself philosophically in the twentieth century.
Philosophies of finitude— philosophies that rejected any recourse
to transcendence or the infinite— marked the twentieth century and con-
tinue to give voice to how we conceive others theoretically. Martin Hei-
degger is the chief spokesperson of this philosophical turn, but it includes
theorists like Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler.4 In
Being and Time, Heidegger identifies care as the fundamental mode of
Dasein’s being-in-the-world, and he links care to Dasein’s finitude. For
Heidegger, only a finite being relates to itself and others through care.
Though the analysis of care as the essential mode of Dasein pre-
cedes the discussion of Dasein’s finitude in Being and Time, the discussion
of finitude actually provides the basis for the former. When Heidegger
contends that primordial temporality is finite, he rejects the idea—
propagated by both the metaphysical tradition and common sense— of
time as infinite. According to Heidegger, we derive the concept of infinite
time from an original experience of finite temporality. Our conceptions
of the infinity of time have their basis in the confrontation with death,
which highlights our own finitude. The fact that we are finite beings, be-
ings that can grasp our finitude, constitutes us as beings of care. After he
identifies temporality with finitude, Heidegger claims that it is “a modal-
ity of temporality, by which, after all, care as such is made possible.”5 As
finite beings, we approach ourselves and others through care. Infinite
beings don’t require care and can be indifferent to the world in which
they exist. Finite beings, in contrast, are inseparable from their world and
never cease to be its victims.6
The wholly finite world that Heidegger conceives in Being and Time
is a world of pathos. Though one can attain an authentic being-toward-
death and thereby exceed the everyday avoidance of death that consti-
tutes the fallen world, there is no possible access to the infinite for Da-
sein. It is consigned rather to a heroism of finitude. Even Heidegger’s
hero cannot rise to the dignity of the tragic hero who transcends finitude
in the way that Antigone does. This elimination of the infinite in Hei-
degger’s thought and in much of the philosophy of the twentieth century
creates a conceptual world in which tragedy and comedy cannot exist.
Heidegger plays a central role in the philosophical elevation of pathos
into the fundamental principle of modernity. Though he presents himself
as an antimodern philosopher who disdains technology and the other
trappings of modernity, Heidegger ensconces himself in the fundamental

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CHAP T E R 3
mode of being that modernity adopts, a mode that sees victims proliferat-
ing everywhere.7
There are instances, like Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Are Dead, where tragedy becomes comedy, but much more often com-
edy slips into pathos and vice versa. Comedy becomes pathos very easily
because both forms utilize finitude. Comedy often depicts an excessive
character (such as a figure of authority) succumbing to the exigencies of
lack and the finite world. But for this reason, the clear contrast between
comedy and pathos is instructive. If we can discern what constitutes the
difference between these two related forms, we can go a long way toward
understanding the structure of comedy.
The example of the public fart illustrates the contrast between
pathos and comedy. We find some public farts funny and others not at all.
This difference depends on the status of the farter. When students hear a
well-dressed teacher fart in the class, it is comic. But if a homeless woman
on the street farts as we walk by, few would find any humor in this. What
is the difference? In both cases, a woman’s body acts out of her control
and disturbs the public world in which the woman exists.
In the case of the well-dressed teacher, the clothes and the posi-
tion of authority bespeak excess, while the fart expresses the finitude
underlying that excess. The homeless woman is already ensconced in
finitude. The fart underlines her lack and the absence of transcendence.
The bodily sound in the first case is comic, while it leads to a feeling of
pathos in the second. Though one can imagine different reactions in
each instance, these reactions would be determined by the relationship
between the viewer and the subject involved. If a student already experi-
enced the teacher as wholly finite and lacking, the fart would be pathetic
rather than funny. The student would pity the teacher. And if someone
saw the homeless woman as excessive, the fart could be comic and not
pathetic.
That said, we can easily imagine a group of cruel teenagers laugh-
ing hysterically at the farting homeless woman. It seems self-evident that
those who laugh in this situation are treating the woman worse than
those who either politely ignore the noise or have pity for the woman.
But thinking in terms of the relationship between comedy and pathos,
this way of seeing things loses its self-evident character. The cruelty of this
laughter bespeaks a refusal to view the woman as a pathetic creature who
is nothing but a purely finite being. Sympathetic onlookers who treat the
woman with pity reveal a contempt for her that actually outweighs that
of the cruel teenagers who respect the woman enough to see her as ca-
pable of the dignity of comedy. One would always rather be the object of
comedy rather than the victim of pathos. Nonetheless, the dividing line
between comedy and pathos is clear, as is their proximity to each other.

71
Today, we exist in a world defined by its finitude. In this sense, Hei-

degger, even for those who have never read him or claim to hate him, is
the philosopher of the age. The world is not only marked by an absence
of tragedy but also by an absence of comedy. Comedy requires transcen-
dence every bit as much as tragedy, and this transcendence is difficult
to come across. We tend to treat everyone as if she were the homeless
woman farting on the street. If we laugh today, we constantly encounter
the danger that our laughter is inappropriate, that we are laughing when
we should be helping out or at least crying.8 In a wholly finite world, there
are only pitiable beings without anyone worth laughing at.
Nowhere is this world of pity more visible than in the direct con-
frontation with death— the arguments about the death penalty. It is self-
evident that opponents of the death penalty view the criminal as a pa-
thetic figure who must be spared. What is less apparent but nonetheless
equally the case is that the arguments in favor of this form of punishment
apply the same pathetic approach to the question while changing the
object of their pathos. Proponents claim that concern for the victim and
the victimized family demands the execution of the criminal. What one
never hears is the argument for execution on the basis of the criminal’s
transcendence or infinitude. For thinkers like Kant and Hegel, it is re-
spect for the criminal as a figure of transcendence that requires the death
penalty, not concern for the victim of the crime.9 This type of attitude has
disappeared in the wake of a ubiquitous finitude. In Heidegger’s world
and that of those struggling over the death penalty, it is only a question
of the type of victim with which we will align ourselves.
From Tragedy to Pathos
Tragedy depends on the possibility that duty counts for more than self-
interest or survival. In these terms, the modern destroyer of the tragic
outlook does not appear to be Martin Heidegger (who, though he con-
demns us to finitude, preserves the notion of duty as authentic being-
toward-death) as much as Sigmund Freud. If we examine Freud’s fa-
mous reading of Hamlet, for instance, it is clear that he does not accept
Hamlet’s proclamations about his duty to his slain father as anything
more than deformations of an unconscious desire to kill his father just
as his uncle has done. Hamlet ceases to be a heroic exception and be-
comes an exemplar of the modern version of the Oedipus complex. His
tragic status devolves into pathos through a proper interpretation of the
causes that lead him to act and not to act. According to Freud, Hamlet’s
delay— the great problem of the play that centuries of interpretation have

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tried to resolve— provides the key to understanding him as the product

of unconscious desires that construct his destiny.
Instead of a transcendent figure who defies his epoch and refuses
to capitulate to the injustice that others blithely accept, Hamlet becomes
a thoroughgoing victim of psychic processes over which he has absolutely
no control. While Freud consigns his interpretation of Hamlet to a couple
of paragraphs in the Interpretation of Dreams, Ernest Jones expands Freud’s
understanding to a book-length treatment.10 In this analysis, Jones clearly
eliminates Hamlet’s tragic exceptionality. Hamlet delays not because he
transcends his finite condition but because this condition fully deter-
mines him. He suffers from a paralysis that afflicts all finite subjects and
stems from an inability to confront the trauma of our unconscious deter-
minants. According to Jones, “this paralysis arises . . . not from physical
or moral cowardice, but from that intellectual cowardice, that reluctance
to dare the exploration of his inmost soul, which Hamlet shares with the
rest of the human race.”11 Hamlet’s tragic grandeur disappears under
this analysis that condemns him for cowardice while at the same time ex-
culpating him by identifying his cowardice with the entire human race.
Psychoanalysis, as we see it practiced here, plays a crucial role in the trans-
formation from a tragic epoch to a pathetic one.
The psychoanalytic interpretation of Hamlet is exemplary, but it is
not isolated. The psychoanalytic method seems structured around the
evisceration of transcendent duty as a possibility that might elevate tragic
heroes above the concerns of their finitude. Freud appears to condemn
subjects to their finitude without any recourse even to authentic being-
toward-death, leaving us worse off than Heidegger does. Just as psycho-
analysis reveals desires beneath our ideals, it also reveals immanence
lurking beneath proclamations of transcendence. And yet Freud wrote
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious early on in 1905 and displayed
a lifelong concern with tragedy that didn’t always involve its diminution
into pathos.
Freud’s rebellion against a pathetic vision of the subject begins with
his rejection of the seduction theory in the late 1890s, a theory that identi-
fies the emergence of sexuality with an experience of utter victimization.12
Sexuality in Freud’s more mature thought does not simply function as
an index of human finitude and animality; rather, its deformation of the
subject indicates that the subject never fully belongs in the confines of
its situation. If sexuality determines the subject, it does so by lifting the
subject out of its finitude. Psychoanalysis is not a discipline that reduces
the infinite to the finite but rather one that finds the infinite protrud-
ing out of the world of finitude. This is why psychoanalysis is only pos-
sible in modernity but never fits comfortably in the modern world. The

73
modern world of finitude is populated, according to psychoanalysis, with

infinite subjects who transcend this world without thereby ascending to
the heavens.
If we return to the joke about the man who will search for five min-
utes for his golf ball but not for the G-spot to provide pleasure for his
sexual partner, we can see how psychoanalysis would make sense of the
subject of this joke. The man transforms golf into a sublime pursuit while
reducing sex to a mundane chore. For psychoanalysis, the infinitude of
the subject lies in its sexual desire, but this desire has an infinite status
due to its essential plasticity. There is nothing that is inherently sexual for
the speaking subject, but there is also nothing that cannot become sexual-
ized. This excessive nature of the subject’s sexuality is the key to the joke’s
humor when it accompanies the portrait of sex itself as thoroughly unsexy
and finite. The joke highlights the fundamental difference between the
subject’s sexuality and animal reproduction.
Freud’s sense that the subject exceeds its animal being comes to a
head in 1920, when his thought undergoes a revolutionary shift. In Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, Freud recognizes that the pleasure principle is not
the last word in the psyche and that what he calls the death drive has pri-
ority over it. The death drive is Freud’s name for the subject’s tendency
to pursue its desire past the point at which desire brings pleasure. After
this point, Freud grasps that desire counts for more than pleasure.13 This
new train of thought serves to reintroduce a theoretical justification for
tragedy (and thus comedy) amid a world of pathos. It is only long after
his reading of Hamlet that Freud offers a way of understanding how the
tragic figure can exist in modernity. According to Freud’s thought after
1920, subjects no longer subsist as victims of a psychic drama that struc-
tures their desire. Instead, they intervene in this drama by repeating it
and deriving enjoyment from this repetition. With the introduction of
repetition that occurs beyond pleasure, Freud clearly removes the subject
from its position of being an absolute victim.14
Through the discovery of desire that defies pleasure, Freud creates
a new ground for ethical acts. Whereas tragic dignity disappears beneath
the veneer of the Oedipus complex in the case of Hamlet, it returns with
a vengeance in Freud’s later thought. This return to tragedy leads Freud
to reconsider the possibility for ethical acts. Although he continues to
insist that our motivations are not moral in the way that we believe them
to be, he also comes to realize that our desire creates the possibility for
a moral act that we fail to consider moral. This is the sense in which we
should understand the famous line from The Ego and the Id on the sub-
ject’s relationship to its own morality. In this post-1920 work, he states that
“the normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also

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far more moral than he knows.”15 The subject’s morality doesn’t derive
from the superego or the ego ideal but from the repetition of a trauma
that has the effect of enabling the subject to transcend its situation. We
are “far more moral” for precisely the same reason that we are “far more
immoral.” Our desire renders us capable of moral excess, just as it leads
us toward acts of diabolical evil. Desire beyond pleasure represents psy-
choanalysis’s full reintroduction of transcendence. It thus creates the
possibility of moving beyond a psychoanalytic pathos to a point of seeing
the possibility for both tragedy and comedy in the modern world.
The later psychoanalytic thinker who places the desire that defies
pleasure at the center of his thought, Jacques Lacan, departs from the psy-
choanalytic reduction of tragic heroes to their formative psychic drama.
He conceives of the ethics of psychoanalysis on the basis of the tragic
hero’s transcendence. In his Seminar VII, titled The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
Lacan takes Antigone as the model for an ethical stance. Antigone be-
comes ethical not because, as she herself claims in Sophocles’s play, she
devotes herself to the unwritten laws of the gods that Creon flaunts, but
because she adheres to her desire without flagging. In her relationship
to the repetition of her desire, Antigone separates herself from the other
characters in the play who opt for the security of the symbolic law over
the traumatic enjoyment of desire.
Through the figure of Antigone, Lacan reenvisions the transcen-
dence of finitude. Sophocles presents her as a character not bound by
any concern for self-interest. Lacan takes this position seriously as the
basis for his understanding of tragedy. He says, “from Antigone’s point
of view life can only be approached, can only be lived or thought about,
from the place of that limit where her life is already lost, where she is al-
ready on the other side. But from that place she can see it and live it in
the form of something already lost.”16 Attaining the position where “life
is already lost,” the position of the desiring subject who disdains pleasure,
replaces duty as the vehicle for transcendence and enables Lacan to coun-
ter the psychoanalytic tendency to reduce tragic heroes to a determining
psychic drama. The modern tragic hero no longer has a foundation in
the transcendence of the gods. Instead, this hero’s transcendence must
be derived from the hero’s own subjectivity. Even in a world of finitude, it
is possible to value one’s own desire more than one’s survival. This choice
produces tragedy. The demands of finitude come up against the exigency
of the subject’s desire, and the tragic hero refuses to make allowances for
finitude. But the psychic structure of desire beyond pleasure is not only
the basis for tragedy. It also creates the possibility for comedy by introduc-
ing excess into a lacking subjectivity.
No one laughs when Antigone finds herself left to die or when

75
Oedipus gouges out his eyes. These characters fail to elicit humor be-
cause they display a complete disdain for their bodily existence. They
continue to exist within the finite realm, but their commitment to their
desire leaves this realm without significance for them. In this way, they
oppose themselves to people who will do anything, including betraying
their friends or their deeply held values, in order to survive. The tragic
hero and the pathetic character exist on opposite ends of the spectrum.
But the comic brings these two positions together, uniting an infinite
desire with the demands of finitude. The comic character finds a way
to exist with the drive without falling into the total isolation that besets
Antigone and Oedipus.
Hamlet on the Bar Stool
If Hamlet is Shakespeare’s greatest tragic character, Sir John Falstaff is

his greatest comic creation. Falstaff ’s appearance in Henry IV Part 1 and
Henry IV Part 2 marks the high point of Shakespeare’s comedy, even
though these are history plays and not comedies.17 Falstaff and Hamlet
share a devotion to their desire, which is why they transcend the level of
pathos. What distinguishes them is not the object of their desire— justice
for Hamlet and drinking for Falstaff — but Falstaff ’s embrace of his status
as a lacking subject through his commitment to survival.
One of the distinguishing traits of comic characters is their surviv-
ability. This survivability appears tied to indestructibility: characters in a
comedy can typically endure all sorts of would-be mortal wounds without
actually dying. In this sense, Wile E. Coyote from the Road Runner car-
toons is the exemplary comic character. Bombs blow up in his hands, he
falls from hundreds of feet, and avalanches crush him. But none of these
deadly circumstances proves fatal for him. He always lives to plot against
the Road Runner again. Death is never serious for the comic character,
and this creates the impression that comedy partakes of the infinite, that
it allows for the transcendence of human finitude.
But the case of Jack Falstaff radically calls into question this iden-
tification of the comic character with the transcendence of finitude. In
contrast to a tragic hero like Hamlet or Hotspur in Henry IV Part 1, Falstaff
survives not by transcending his finitude but by his constant awareness of
it, which contrasts him with the brave characters Prince Hal and Hotspur.
After meeting death in battle with Prince Hal, Hotspur becomes, in Hal’s
words, “food for worms.” But Hotspur openly defies death and refuses
to enslave himself to it through fear. Before the battle that ends with his

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demise, he proclaims, “Come let us take a muster speedily / Doomsday

is near, die all, die merrily.”18 Hotspur’s open embrace of death frightens
his colleagues, and it indicates his status as the tragic hero of the play.
Falstaff, on the other hand, disdains honor if it entails the risk of death.
In the most famous speech that Falstaff gives, he expressly rejects
the idea that anything is more important than survival. Toward the end
of Henry IV Part 1, Falstaff finds himself alone on the battlefield, where
he begins to speculate about the death that surrounds him and the idea
of honor that produces it. He says, “What is honor? A word. What is in
that word honor? What is that honor? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath
it? He that died a’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No.
’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will’t not live with the living?
No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it, honor is
a mere scutcheon. And so ends my confession.”19 Falstaff ’s speech rings
true to contemporary listeners who recognize that the dead really do
have no experience of honor whatsoever. Today, we see only folly in ideas
like dying for the sake of honor. The idea of an honor killing arouses
opprobrium from the modern subject. But if this mindset is victorious,
it represents the end of tragedy. Tragedy depends on investing oneself
in a principle that counts more than survival. Falstaff ’s sense of his own
finitude makes such a step impossible for him, He thus demonstrates that
the survival of the comic character has nothing to do with this character’s
infinitude or transcendence.
The immersion in finitude and vigilance in the face of mortal
threats would seem to create a sense of pathos around Falstaff. He avoids
pathos, however, through the commitment to his desire beyond plea-
sure that he shares with Shakespeare’s tragic heroes.20 Unlike Hamlet,
who pursues justice, Falstaff elevates thievery and drinking into a prin-
ciple to which he dedicates his entire existence, a principle that he never
betrays (even though fidelity to it requires betraying his friends). In an
early scene from Henry IV Part 1, Falstaff defends his recourse to thiev-
ery. After Falstaff blames Prince Hal for his fall from sainthood into
wickedness, Hal mockingly upbraids Falstaff for this turn to criminality.
Falstaff responds by calling purse snatching his “vocation.” In Henry IV
Part 2, he elevates drinking to the same status. Falstaff explains the prin-
ciple that guides his existence and that he would communicate it to what-
ever sons he had. This principle contrasts with Hotspur’s devotion to
honor in Henry IV Part 1, but it is nonetheless a principle. Falstaff claims,
“If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them
should be, to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.”21
What separates Falstaff from the tragic hero is not the nature of his
principle— thievery and drinking as opposed to honor and justice— but
rather his ability to reconcile his principle with his own survival.

77
Falstaff ’s most politically charged moments of comedy take place

when he enacts the rhetorical device of antimetabole, in which one re-
peats a statement but reverses the order of the terms. In a series of ex-
changes with the Lord Chief Justice, Falstaff inverts the official’s state-
ments, which has the effect of undermining the official’s authority (and
authority as such). The exchange concludes with the Chief Justice ex-
pressing his exasperation with Falstaff ’s lack of respect: “Well, God send
the Prince a better companion!” Falstaff replies: “God send the com-
panion a better prince!”22 With this reversal, Falstaff shows us that the
transcendent figure of authority, Prince Hal, is actually a figure of lack
and that Falstaff himself, the one accused of debasing this authority, is
the real figure of transcendence burdened by the prince’s lack. Falstaff ’s
capacity for desire exposes authority as lacking, which gives the play its
radical edge.
It is the lack in comic characters that enables them to survive, but
it is their ability to marry lack with the excess of desire that renders them
comic. While one might think that survival indicates a triumph over lack
and that death marks the victory of lack, the situation is exactly the re-
verse. Tragic heroes refuse to accept their status as a finite lacking being,
and the result is an insistence on a desire that leads to death. Comic
heroes, in contrast, remain constantly aware of their status as lacking
subjects and approach their desire through this awareness.
The comic character finds a way to negotiate the potential destruc-
tiveness of desire with the vulnerability that accompanies lacking subjec-
tivity. The lack in comic characters leads Robert Pfaller to insist that “suc-
cess is the principle of comedy.”23 Pfaller contrasts tragedy with comedy in
its relation to success. He claims that “failure in tragedy indicates great-
ness.”24 The tragic heroes who commit themselves wholly to the excesses
of their desire lose touch with the exigencies of existence and thus almost
always die. But this death, this failure, indicates an absence of the lack or
finitude that defines other subjects. Hamlet’s death results from a refusal
to register the importance of his own finitude. Falstaff ’s comic survival is
rooted in his finitude, even if his enjoyment evinces its transcendence.
The Status of the Body
Without bodies, there would be no comedy. But the body itself, the re-
minder of the subject’s finitude, is fundamentally pathetic. Though we
tend to associate the body with comedy and bodily functions with laugh-
ter, there is nothing inherently funny about our corporeality. When con-
fronted with a decaying or withering body, we do not laugh but rather

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feel pity. The difference between the pathetic body and the comic body
stems from the subjectivity exhibited in the body. When there is no sub-
ject visible, the body is just pathetic. But when we recognize the subject
acting through the body, the valence of bodily functions changes, and
what would be pathetic becomes comic.
Everyone can remember laughing at the public display of bodily
functions, especially when they become evident where we don’t expect
to encounter them. The grotesque nature of the body can be a source of
horror, but it is just as often a source of comedy. But what is important is
whether or not the finitude of the body appears in conjunction with the
subject’s excess. Evidence of bodily functions reveals the lack of control
that people have over their own bodies. With the sound of gastric juices
or the pressing need to urinate, the body takes revenge on the mind’s
attempt to render it docile and under control. The body is the source
of pathos, but when we see the subject acting in the body, the comic
emerges out of the pathetic.
Typically, stories about various disabilities immerse us in the pathos
of the debilitated body. Even when we see the victim transcend the dis-
ability, the pathos of the experience is often what attracts an audience.
The great merit of Intouchables (Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, 2011)
is that it completely avoids placing the quadriplegic Philippe (François
Cluzet) or the African immigrant Driss (Omar Sy) in the position of the
victim. The setup of the film promises a racist narrative, but it is the film’s
refusal of the pathos that ordinarily haunts such films that saves it from
this fate. The film recounts Philippe hiring a new caretaker and Driss
taking on the position despite not really wanting it. The lack of pity that
Driss shows for him appeals to Philippe. It also forms the basis of the
film’s comedy.
After the film establishes the relationship between the two char-
acters in which neither evinces pity for the other, Driss leaves Philippe
to return to his family, and Philippe begins to view himself as a figure
of pathos. The mark of this pathos is the scraggly beard that Philippe
grows. When Driss comes to visit him and finds him in a depressed state,
Driss takes Philippe for a drive and then decides to shave off the unat-
tractive beard. When he does so, the film shows a montage of different
comic looks that Driss creates in the process of shaving, including French
politician José Bové, an orthodox priest, and, finally, Adolf Hitler, when
he leaves just a small moustache under Philippe’s nose. Unable to move
himself, Philippe can only verbally object to these incarnations, and
he objects strongly to the final one. But Driss pushes it further, parting
Philippe’s hair from the side to increase the resemblance to Hitler. In
this scene, the spectator can freely laugh at the paralyzed Philippe, who

79
is unable to move and forced to look like Hitler, because the film doesn’t
characterize Philippe as a victim worthy of our pathos. All of the jokes
that Driss concocts at Philippe’s expense contrast with the politeness that
other characters display toward Philippe’s handicap, but this politeness
is the expression of pathos that Philippe disdains. He befriends Driss
because Driss respects him enough to make fun of him. The object of
comedy has a transcendence that the object of pity necessarily lacks.
The distance between comedy and pity is clearly evident in the dif-
ference between a film like Intouchables and those such as Simon Birch
(Mark Steven Johnson, 1998) and I Am Sam ( Jessie Nelson, 2001). Intouch-
ables licenses us to laugh at the disabled character, which would seem to
indicate its failure relative to films that evoke our sympathy for the suf-
fering that accompanies a disability. But the problem with a focus on the
suffering of the disabled body is that it reduces the subject to its finitude.
The care that Simon Birch and I Am Sam demand is a care for beings who
cannot transcend their finite condition. Though we may viscerally recoil
from the idea, laughing at someone is always more respectful than feeling
sorry for someone. The object of pity is just a material body. The object
of comedy is a subject.
Excessive Otherness
The claim that comedy emerges wherever there is a coincidence of the

finite and the infinite or of lack and excess seems to run into a stumbling
block when we consider the experience of horror. Horror is distinct from
pathos insofar as it confronts the lacking subject with a terrifying excess,
often in the form of an alien or monster. But the fundamental distinction
between horror and comedy consists in how the confrontation between
lack and excess occurs. In comedy, the lacking being is also the excessive
being, while in horror the lacking being confronts excess as an other.
The proximity of horror and comedy can lead to horror quickly falling
into comedy or vice versa. Many spectators go to horror films not to ex-
perience fear but to find humor in them. This humor occurs when the
monster reveals itself to be lacking or when the victims show themselves
to be the source of the excess that they confront. Sometimes, horror can
change into comedy, depending on whom one focuses on within the
narrative. If one emphasizes the victim, then one experiences horror, but
shifting the focus to the monster can transform the horror into comedy.
The various spoofs of the horror film suggest the proximity of these
forms. It takes only a slight adjustment to move from Halloween ( John

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Carpenter, 1978) to Scream (Wes Craven, 1996), a film that mocks the hor-
ror conventions that the earlier film fully embraces. But any genre can
lend itself to satire, as Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974) shows with the
western and Airplane! ( Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker,
1980) shows with the disaster film. The link between horror and comedy
is structural in a way that the link between the western or the disaster film
and comedy is not. One satirizes the western from the outside, while the
satirical horror film requires only a slight shift of perspective.
Horror becomes comedy when the work of art indicates that the
lacking subject is responsible for the excess that the subject encounters.
The victim becomes the killer’s target by having sex, as is often the case
in horror films. The comic horror film merely brings this connection to
light, thereby making it evident that the lacking victim and the excessive
punishment of this victim intersect in the victim’s act. Even though pre-
marital sex doesn’t merit the death penalty, comedy illustrates the con-
nection between these two events and eliminates the externality of the
connection requisite in horror.
Horror depends on lack and excess connecting externally rather
than internally. Horror becomes comedy when the work reveals that the
external is actually internal. This is clearly the case with David Lynch’s
Blue Velvet (1986), where Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) functions as a
monstrous figure of horror at times and as a source of great comedy at
other times. Frank becomes comic at those moments when we see his
excesses functioning as the expression of a lack. This happens on mul-
tiple occasions— when, for example, he proclaims his preference for low-
quality beer over higher-quality brands. In response to the request for
a Heineken, he states, “Heineken? Fuck that shit. Pabst Blue Ribbon.”
Frank’s excessive embrace of the inferior beer is inherently comic, and it
mirrors his sexual performance.
Throughout Blue Velvet, Frank Booth is a frightening villain. He
threatens Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle McLaughlin) and Dorothy Vallens (Isa-
bella Rossellini) on multiple occasions. But the proximity between horror
and comedy becomes fully evident in one of the film’s most troubling
scenes. Frank comes to Dorothy’s apartment to sexually assault her, and
he does so. But the assault straddles the line between horror and comedy.
As he places himself on top of her and abuses her both physically and
verbally, Frank performs what appears to be a sexual act— and yet it is a
failed sexual act.25 Frank’s sexual assault on Dorothy is excessive, but it
shows that he cannot perform sexually. He is at once excessive and lack-
ing, which is why, for all of its horror, there could be a potentially comic
element to this scene in the film. But Blue Velvet never becomes a comedy,
despite its comic leanings, because it leaves Frank in the position of the

81
other. Horror can become comic so easily because it too places lack and
excess in proximity. But horror never goes as far as comedy. By locat-
ing excess in the monstrous other, horror lets the subject off the hook.
Though many spectators shy away from horror films, it is comedies that
should really terrify them. Comedy takes a step beyond horror and reveals
that the monster is identical with the victimized subject itself.
The Ego and Its Own Lack
Comedy occurs not just when one reveals the material basis of an ideal
but when one shows the identity of the material and the ideal— how the
ideal is inextricably involved in its material basis and how the material
basis produces an ideal that transcends it.26 This becomes clear in the
most comic work that either Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels produced.
This work, The German Ideology, seems to support comedy’s status as a
purely material form and as a rejection of idealism. Comedy seems to
have an indubitable link to material reality, a link that challenges the
independent existence of ideals. It would confront our ideals with their
material base and thereby confound their authority. There is evidence
for comedy as a materialist critique of idealism in The German Ideology,
but if we examine the book closely, we will see why comedy is not just a
materialist undermining of ideals.
In this early work, which they never published, Marx and Engels
lampoon certain followers of Hegel— Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer,
and Max Stirner. The first section, devoted to the materialist Feuerbach, is
the most serious and most widely cited. Here Marx and Engels offer their
definition of ideology as a camera obscura and provide an early version of
historical materialism.27 They give some of their most celebrated formu-
lations of their project, such as, “it is not consciousness that determines
life, but life that determines consciousness.”28 In the Feuerbach section
of The German Ideology, Marx and Engels embark on a serious explanation
of how historical materialism differs from Feuerbach’s materialism and
how it constitutes an original contribution to philosophical and political
thought. Though the critique of Feuerbach is pointed, it lacks the com-
edy that appears in the brief discussion of Bruno Bauer and the lengthy
attack on Max Stirner. There are a few satirical comments about Feuer-
bach, but they are very limited, both in quantity and in their sharpness.
Though Feuerbach’s philosophy may be crucially mistaken, he is none-
theless a fellow materialist, and thus the critique of him will be serious
rather than comic.

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In the subsequent sections, however, the tone of the book under-

goes a complete reversal. It becomes a work of comedy.29 Marx and Engels
resort to parody with Bauer and Stirner because those philosophers are
idealists, in contrast to Feuerbach, and their idealism demands comedy in
order to expose its material roots. In the discussion of Stirner, the comic
assault reaches its apogee. Marx and Engels refer to Stirner in the title
of the chapter as “Saint Max” and then use a variety of satirical appella-
tions to describe him. He becomes “Jacques le bonhomme,” “Sancho,”
and “good citizen ‘Stirner.’” Marx and Engels find humor in Stirner’s
material actions and in their failure to remain at the level of his idealism.
This is clearly the case with his drinking habits. They write, “Virtuous
Berlin youth! The beer-drinking ritual of the students’ association was
for [Stirner] only a ‘symbol’ and only for the sake of the ‘symbol’ was
he after a drinking bout many a time found under the table, where he
probably also wished to ‘discover spirit!’”30 There are funny moments like
this sprinkled throughout the Stirner section of The German Ideology, but
the duration of the parody utterly dissolves its effectiveness. After hun-
dreds of pages of references to the material foundation of the idealism
of Sancho or Saint Max, even the most enthusiastic reader ceases to find
humor in the materialist satire that Marx and Engels author. The comedy
loses steam as Stirner becomes a figure of pity rather than continuing to
be a champion of ideals.
As long as transcendent ideals remain transcendent, exposing their
identity with a material basis is comic. The joke becomes tired not be-
cause it is repeated— as children constantly prove, repetition is not neces-
sarily a barrier to laughter— but because the sustained assault on Stirner
strips him of his ideal status. He becomes nothing more than his mate-
rial being, and his pretensions to idealism evaporate very quickly in the
section devoted to him. The extreme tediousness of this lengthy section
shows that comedy requires the ideal to remain an ideal while its iden-
tification with a material foundation becomes evident. Total immersion
in materiality is just as unfunny as complete transcendence of the body.
The dividing line between comedy and pathos, like that between
comedy and tragedy, is never ultimately secure. If Marx and Engels re-
peat the comic attack on Stirner too often, he becomes a pathetic figure
rather than a comic one. If Tom Stoppard views the story of Hamlet from
the perspective of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the most famous trag-
edy in English becomes a comedy. When we contrast comedy and its two
close relatives, the essence of comedy becomes clearer. Removing excess
renders comedy pathetic, while removing lack turns comedy into tragedy.
It is only through revealing the intersection of the contrasting positions

83
that comedy is achieved. The tenuousness of comedy stems from the im-
possibility of prolonging this intersection.
The extremely limited duration of comedy stands out when we com-
pare it with tragedy and pathos. Both tragedy and pathos endure quite
well. Tragic heroes can adhere to their duty at the risk of their lives, and
there is no intrinsic barrier to this devotion. Tragedy has staying power.
This is also the case with pathos. We can view others uninterruptedly
through the lens of their finitude. There is no reason to abandon the re-
duction of the subject to its body. But the situation with comedy is much
more delicate. Comedy has a limited life span that is evident wherever
comedy appears. Jokes are rarely as funny when we hear them a tenth
time; comic films and plays rarely age well; and timing is the most im-
portant quality for any comedian. The difficulty with comedy is that the
intersection of excess and lack cannot be sustained. Comedy depends on
a precise moment when transcendence and finitude coincide, and such
moments are necessarily fleeting.
The fleeting quality of comedy seems to render it antithetical to
philosophy, which attempts to construct a durable conception of our exis-
tence or of being itself. Comedy resists philosophizing. And yet, comedy
is speculative in its structure. In a similar fashion to the systems of many
philosophers, comedy brings together the disparate. Despite initial ap-
pearances, the structure of comedy is inherently philosophical. This kin-
ship between comedy and philosophy is revelatory for the understanding
of comedy. Thus, a look at the comedy of philosophy sheds light on the
philosophy of comedy.

4
Philosophy and the Finite
Finitude and Transcendence
Philosophers are not known for being great comedians. One might
even make the argument that there is an inverse relation between the
humor that a philosopher generates and the quality of that philosopher’s
thought. Voltaire’s mockery of Leibniz in Candide is undoubtedly funnier
than anything Leibniz himself ever wrote, but even those who contend
that Voltaire won the battle with Leibniz over the idea of the best of all
possible worlds would readily admit that he lost the war— that is, that
Leibniz is the far greater thinker.1 Voltaire’s ability to be funny seems to
come at the expense of philosophical insight. His Candide pales in com-
parison with Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics or Monadology in terms of
philosophical worth. If one had a team of philosophers, no one would
trade Leibniz straight up for Voltaire. This is just one example of how
philosophical originality does not readily translate into comic ability. One
can be a great philosopher without ever successfully telling a joke or even
laughing at one. And yet there is actually a link between the act of phi-
losophizing and comedy.
Both the philosopher and the comedian call the social order as it is
into question. Both figures remove themselves from productive activities
in society and receive compensation (in the form of salaries, book sales,
ticket purchases, and so on) for their critical reflections on how their
society reproduces itself. Though philosophers tend to educate while
comedians entertain, their non-productivity and their critical eye place
them in proximity, away from other social positions. One would thus
expect more overlap between the two, but philosophers generally avoid
too much humor in order to remain respectable philosophers. Comedi-
ans, for their part, rarely write philosophical treatises. Even though they
are performing a related operation, they are performing it differently.
The comedian must please a large portion of society in order to keep
working, while the philosopher can philosophize while alienating almost
everyone. Philosophers tend not to be funny because they don’t have to
be, but comedians are often philosophical because comedy itself leads
them in this direction.
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Comedy is a form of philosophy. We often turn to comedy for philo-

sophical insight into existential questions that have no clear solution.
Of course, not everyone who tells a joke or laughs at a comic scene is a
philosopher, but comedy articulates its own ontology through its act of
bringing together lack and excess. This becomes evident when we think
of lack and excess as the categories of finitude and transcendence. Finite
beings are lacking, while transcendent beings, at least in relation to the
finite world, are excessive. Animals are finite; the gods are transcendent.
But the speaking subject is both finite and transcendent: it is a finite
being that transcends itself through its emergence as a subject. The sub-
ject doesn’t become a god, but it does find a way to transcend its finitude
and experience the infinite. The subject is capable of comedy because
its structure unites an essential finitude with a capacity for the infinite.
Philosophy’s relationship to comedy can’t tell us which philosopher
to believe. The funniest philosopher isn’t necessarily the one that is the
most convincing. But a certain kind of philosophy— a philosophy that
posits the possibility of the intersection between finitude and the infi-
nite— is conducive to comedy. Though there are philosophers whose
comedy is just a personal proclivity that doesn’t have theoretical rele-
vance, most often comedy in philosophy does signify. By examining which
philosophers bring together the finite and infinite in their thought, we
should not only see which philosophers are funny but also uncover the
philosophical insight that comedy offers into the possible relationship
between the finite and the infinite. That said, most philosophers don’t
deal with this relationship at all. Instead, they focus on one side of the
divide or the other.
Historically, philosophy occupies itself with transcendence. The
ideal forms of Plato, the final causes of Aristotle, and the one of Plotinus
are all modes of transcendence that manifest themselves in premodern
philosophy. Though their conceptions may differ widely, each of these
thinkers aims at conceiving transcendence. This lack of concern for fini-
tude leaves them completely incapable of a comic philosophy. Though
Plato’s Socrates uses irony to make his philosophical arguments, he is
not a comic ironist. It is only when Aristophanes gets ahold of him that
Socrates becomes funny. The works of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus are
more or less free from jokes, which is indicative of their commitment to
the realm of transcendence.
In their wake, medieval Arab and Scholastic philosophy focuses
even more doggedly on transcendence as it foregrounds theological ques-
tions to the exclusion of terrestrial ones, and these philosophers evince
even less of a tendency toward comedy than their classical forebears.
The beginning of modern philosophy doesn’t fundamentally call this

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P HI LOS O P HY AND THE FINITE
concern with transcendence into question. Even though René Descartes

takes the finite doubting subject as his starting point, he ends up af-
firming the unqualified priority of transcendence. For the early modern
thinkers, finitude is a pathway to transcendence or the infinite, a refusal
of the shortcut that the Scholastics take but not a rejection of their ulti-
mate aim. Philosophy remains committed to theorizing transcendence.
As a result, it remains unfunny.
But with the rise of empiricism, the finite takes revenge on transcen-
dence in philosophy. After Thomas Hobbes and John Locke proclaim
that the senses are the only avenue for knowing, David Hume asserts that
transcendence— even in the form of the immutable law of causality—
does not exist except as an illusory representation in thought. For Hume,
there is only finite custom rather than transcendent law, though we mis-
interpret our customs as laws.2 The rejection of transcendence leaves
philosophy just as bereft of comedy as the indifference to finitude. But
Hume’s insistence on finitude and his specific challenge to transcen-
dence set the stage for the attempt to think the finite together with tran-
scendence that would occur in German idealism and that would reach its
high point with Hegel’s philosophy, a philosophy that envisions a specula-
tive identity between finitude and the infinite. The fact that comedy plays
a central role in Hegel’s thought is not coincidental but indicative of its
fundamental speculative project. German idealism is not just a philo-
sophical high point. It also marks the emergence of a genuinely comedic
philosophy, a philosophy that shares the structure of comedy.
Prior to Hegel, it is Immanuel Kant who first unites Hume’s in-
sistence on finitude with philosophy’s traditional concern for transcen-
dence. Kant famously credits Hume for stimulating his turn away from a
dogmatic focus on transcendence to the exclusion of the finite world. In
his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant states, “I freely admit that
the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago
first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different
direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.”3 Kant
is the first modern philosopher to theorize both transcendence and the
finite equally, a coupling that marks the philosophical basis for comedy.
Kant refuses to confine his thinking to the empirical world in the way that
Hume does, but he also rejects the metaphysical speculation about the
transcendent infinite world that modern rationalist thought engages in.
By incorporating both transcendence and finitude into his philosophy,
Kant creates an opening for comedy in philosophy. But there is a limit to
Kant’s philosophical marriage of transcendence and finitude, and this in
turn limits just how comic he can be as a philosopher.
In Kant’s thought, we can know the finite or phenomenal world of

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empirical experience, and we can know the immutable laws (like that
of causality) that govern this world. But Kant separates the noumenal
world of God, the soul, and the world from this phenomenal world. We
can know about the finite, but we can’t know about the transcendent
because the transcendent doesn’t make itself felt within the finite. It is
as if Kant marries finitude and transcendence but confines each to sepa-
rate beds without allowing them to consummate their relationship. As
a result, comedy emerges in Kant’s philosophy, but it occurs only in a
circumscribed fashion.
Jocular moments are possible because Kant theorizes the coexis-
tence of transcendence with finitude, but their constitutive separation
limits Kant’s ability to integrate comedy into his thought. Despite his
(largely false) reputation as the most punctual and orderly philosopher
who ever lived, Kant does evince comic aptitude on occasion. It appears
briefly in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, for instance. As he discusses
laughter “as a counterweight to the many burdens of life,” Kant relates a
few jokes.4 Though the jokes are not altogether successful, they nonethe-
less show a comic leaning within Kant’s philosophy.
The weakest joke comes at the expense of an Indian— and thus re-
flects Kant’s own racism— who is amazed at how an Englishman managed
to put beer into a bottle. But the two jokes that follow are much better.
Kant describes someone who wants to produce distraught mourners for
a funeral but finds “the more money I give my mourners to look sad,
the merrier they look.”5 Finally, he concludes his short series of jokes
with one about a merchant who had to throw his cargo overboard in a
storm and became so aggrieved that his wig turned gray. Each of Kant’s
jokes concerns what someone experiences as a miracle, a moment when
the empirical world ceases to follow the laws that govern that world and
thus reveals the intrusion of the noumenal world into its functioning.
These jokes rely on a break within Kant’s own system— wigs cannot really
turn gray when someone worries— that he cannot theoretically allow
for, which is why they make up such a small part of his work. Kant leads
us to a comic philosophy by theorizing both transcendence and finitude,
but he cannot enter the promised land because he keeps them apart in
their togetherness. It falls to Kant’s inheritor Hegel to act as the Joshua
of philosophical comedy.
Whereas Kant breaks off the connection between the infinite world
of transcendent ideas (like God) and the finite world of experience,
Hegel views them as constantly overlapping. Transcendence, for Hegel,
is not a separate realm from the finite but reveals itself through fini-
tude. The moments when transcendence reveals itself are necessarily
comic moments. When transcendence appears in the finite world, this

89
is the intersection of excess and lack that provides the basis for comedy.
Though Hegel never claims to be inventing a theory of comedy, his
philosophy— and its humor— manifests just such a theory. The philo-
sophical foundation of comedy is the subject’s capacity for experienc-
ing transcendence within a clearly finite existence. Hegel devotes the
entirety of his thought to this intersection. As a consequence, he is the
great comic philosopher.
What is revelatory about the comedy in Hegel’s philosophy is that
Hegel himself does not appear to have been an inherently funny guy, but
almost the opposite. Even among his friends and devoted students, he
came across as a serious figure. As early as his years at the seminary, fellow
students described him as the “old man” due to his inability to abandon
a sense of weightiness and adopt the gaiety of youth. Accounts of Hegel’s
lectures emphasize the ponderousness of his speaking style and his mal-
adroit delivery. And yet his philosophy is replete with comedy. The fact
that Hegel’s comedy goes against his proclivities as a person testifies to its
origins in the form of his thought. Hegel’s philosophy of the dialectical
relation between the finite and the infinite is comedic. It is as if Hegel’s
philosophy drove him to be funny, and the variegations of his personality
were powerless to resist this drive.
After Hegel, however, the philosophical focus on the intersection
between transcendence and finitude largely disappears. Modern philos-
ophy becomes devoted to the project of conceiving the finite without the
baggage of transcendence. As a result, philosophy becomes less comic.
But the emergence of German idealism provides us with a philosophical
matrix for comedy as the intersection of transcendence and finitude.
By examining the role that comedy plays in the work of specific philoso-
phers, we can see how this matrix plays itself out. Discovering which phi-
losophers are funny and which are not helps to clarify the philosophical
basis of comedy.
Comparing Contradiction with Being-in-the-World
The difference between philosophical comedy and philosophical seri-

ousness becomes evident if we examine the contrast between one of the
funniest philosophers in the history of philosophy and the least funny—
that is, the contrast between Hegel and Martin Heidegger. The struggle
between Hegel and Heidegger is not just a philosophical one but one that
reveals the essence of comedy. Hegel must be funny because he theorizes
the intersection of transcendence and finitude. Heidegger’s profound

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CHAP T E R 4
seriousness— it is difficult to find anything approximating comedy in his

thousands of pages of work, even in his many lectures— testifies to the
deleterious effect on comedy of conceptualizing pure finitude.6 The phi-
losopher committed to the finite cannot be funny, except incidentally,
whereas the philosopher who envisions finitude and transcendence in-
tersecting finds multiple occasions for comedy.
Most of those with just a passing acquaintance with philosophy
probably do not consider either Hegel or Heidegger to be uproariously
funny, but I will argue that Hegel is the great comedian among philoso-
phers and that Heidegger is the foremost anti-comedian. This is a point
about Hegel that Mladen Dolar makes, though he cites Bertolt Brecht
as the original exponent of this position. As Dolar puts it, “Hegel was
one of the greatest comedians and humorists of all times. The idea that
the supersensible, the transcendent, is just the gap in the appearance,
something which twinkles and glimmers between two appearances, is no
doubt of such stuff comedies are made of.”7 Dolar doesn’t quite hit on
the precise source of Hegel’s comedy, but he is close to it.
Hegel is the philosopher of contradiction. His philosophy shows
at every turn how lack is identical to excess and how excess is identical
to lack. For Hegel, transcendence exists but depends on finitude. The
overlapping of finitude and transcendence spurs the dialectical move-
ment that defines Hegel’s thought. No philosopher can be funny without
being dialectical (even if unintentionally), though the funny moments
in Hegel’s thought occur only when the dialectical connection catches
us by surprise.8 For instance, an identity of independence proves to be
dependent, or an identity of dependence proves to be independent. This
occurs most famously in Hegel’s account of the struggle of the master and
the servant. The joke in this case is on the master: at the moment the
master achieves a position of total mastery over the servant, the depen-
dence of this mastery on recognition from the unworthy servant becomes
evident. Hegel laughs on the side of the servant when he displays the lack
or dependence that necessarily accompanies the master’s transcendence
of the servant in the struggle for recognition. The comedy occurs when
we see the winner losing through the act of winning and thus witness
the contradiction within all identity. But the comedy in Hegel’s funniest
work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, comes to a head during his discussion
of phrenology.9
Though every section of the Phenomenology of Spirit contains some
nod, however oblique, toward comedy, Hegel’s comic genius shines
brightest when he turns to a discussion of phrenology, the pseudo-
science whose very mention leaves the reader wondering what Hegel is
thinking by including it. Is he possibly invested in phrenology? Could

91
Hegel possibly think that phrenology is worthy of a serious philosophical

analysis? He does, but he also sees in it the opportunity for a comic inter-
lude. It is tempting to believe that Hegel included it just for the comic
opportunities that it provides.
While he acts out the argument of the phrenologist, Hegel imagines
telling subjects that their essential reality is just their skull bone. This is
the phrenologist’s philosophical position, which has the merit of captur-
ing the dependence of subject on its material substratum. This is why the
inclusion of phrenology in the Phenomenology is not simply a comic diver-
sion, as we might assume, but serves a genuine philosophical function.
Nonetheless, when Hegel considers how one might refute the phrenolo-
gist’s claim that the skull bone constitutes the essence of subjectivity, his
comic proclivities erupt.
His rebuttal is not a counterargument or dialectical unmasking, like
we see in many other sections of the book. Instead, Hegel claims, “the
retort here would, strictly speaking, have to go the length of beating in
the skull of anyone making such a judgement, in order to demonstrate in
a manner just as palpable as his wisdom, that for a man, a bone is nothing
in itself, much less his true reality.”10 The phrenologist identifies the sub-
ject’s transcendence, its spirit, with its natural finitude. In this way, phre-
nology denies the possibility of transcendence. The subject of phrenology
exists in a purely finite world. In order to make clear the error, Hegel
sees, one must make evident that spirit genuinely exceeds this natural
reality. Doing so would require smashing the skull of the phrenologist.
At the moment of receiving the skull fracture, the pummeled phrenolo-
gist would recognize that spirit is not simply its material substratum and
that the damage to the skull pales in comparison with the possible loss of
the thinking spirit. One fears a cracked skull only insofar as it houses the
spirit that transcends it, not insofar as the skull is spirit.
Hegel’s imagined response to the phrenologist is one of the great
comic moments in the history of philosophy. Part of the comedy derives
from the target. The phrenologist often uses pseudoscience to justify in-
tellectual superiority, usually seeing this superiority in racist terms. But
Hegel sees that phrenologists don’t really believe the philosophy that they
advance. There is a point of lack in the phrenologist’s argument, which
is the investment in spirit despite the purported reduction of spirit to its
skull bone. Hegel’s comedy comes from the excessive response to the
precise point of lack in the phrenologist’s argument. By advocating that
one smash in the heads of phrenologists rather than argue with them,
Hegel clearly exaggerates the proper reaction, but he calls for the re-
action that phrenologists themselves clearly precipitate by holding the
position that they hold. (As far as we know, Hegel never crushed the skull

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CHAP T E R 4
of a phrenologist interlocutor.) But this exaggeration is not just funny in

itself. It becomes funny as a response to lack, when its excess coincides
with the lack in the opposing position.
At the conclusion of his discussion, Hegel points out that phrenol-
ogy accurately conceives the contradiction of being itself or the “con-
junction of the high and the low.” This provides another opportunity
for him to continue his comedy, though this time it doesn’t occur at
the expense of phrenology but by taking up the truth of this position.
Hegel finds an instance of the conjunction between the high and low in
the genital organ, which serves for both reproduction and urination. He
notes, “Nature naively . . . combines the organ of its highest fulfilment,
the organ of generation, with the organ of urination.”11 The fact that
Hegel would bring up the philosophical value of urination is itself comic
because it brings together speculative thought with the demands of finite
existence. But the way that Hegel discusses urination further ensconces
it in the comic realm. The idea of the high and the low coming together
in genitalia is comic because it shows how excess emerges out of lack in
the very structure of our being. Human sexuality is excessive— it is not
simply part of the reproduction of life— but it is situated with the organ
of lack. Sexuality is the basis of a transcendent enjoyment, but it depends
on the organ that clearly ties us to the finite world.
Though the Phenomenology is Hegel’s most comic book, there are
moments of humor strewn throughout all of his works, especially when he
discusses other philosophers. In the second volume of his History of Phi-
losophy, Hegel notes the absence of writings that have survived from the
originators of Stoicism. This is especially true in the case of Chrysippus,
one of Stoicism’s founding figures. Hegel points out that we have access
only to fragments of his thought. While explaining this, he claims, “While
it is to be regretted that some of his best works have not come down to
us, it is, perhaps, a good thing that not all have been preserved; if we
had to choose between having all or none, the decision would be a hard
one.”12 Hegel mocks the tedium of the arguments for stoicism through
this comic evaluation. Though Hegel also attacks Stoicism through ar-
gumentation, one of his principal methods of critique is comedy. He
employs this same method for one of his other primary antagonists,
Isaac Newton.
Despite Newton’s acclaim in the history of mathematics and science,
Hegel never misses an opportunity to undermine his accomplishments.
In the Science of Logic and in the third volume of the Encyclopedia, he claims
that Newton receives credit for discoveries in physics that should rightly
have been bestowed on Kepler. He also gives Leibniz full credit as a co-

93
founder of calculus and attacks Newton for withholding this credit and
slandering Leibniz. For Hegel, Newton embodies the overrated thinker,
the thinker who gains popular esteem while stealing the credit for the
greater accomplishments of others.
Each attack on Newton has a touch of comedy to it, but the comic
barbs reach their most biting in the History of Philosophy. In the third vol-
ume of this work, he compares Newton with an English country bump-
kin. Hegel writes, “Newton is so complete a barbarian as regards his con-
ceptions that his case is like that of another of his countrymen who was
surprised and rejoiced to learn that he had talked prose all his life, not
having had any idea that he was so accomplished.”13 For Hegel, Newton
serves as comic fodder because he esteems himself above the common
rung of thinkers for discoveries that have already been made or that don’t
require extraordinary intellectual power. While he gives credit to Newton,
Hegel cannot help but find comedy in the intersection of excess praise
and lack of accomplishment equal to this praise that he finds in Newton.
Hegel sustains his comic spirit throughout his intellectual career
and even, purportedly, to the end of his life. On his deathbed, Hegel
is said to have told those around him, “Only one man has understood
me . . . and even he did not understand me.”14 Though we can’t say with
any certainty whether Hegel actually said this or not, our vision of the
comic Hegel indicates that he must have said something comic on his
deathbed. This statement bespeaks the contradictory logic of speculative
identity and, at the same time, reveals the inherent humor in this philo-
sophical position. Though it can be difficult to sustain comedy to the end
without drifting into pathos, Hegel accomplishes this. His final words
show the coincidence of possibility and impossibility, of his own finitude
and the infinitude reached by thought.
Christ as Comedian
Hegel’s comedy stems from his philosophical allegiance to the structure

of Christianity. Though most don’t consider Hegel as an orthodox Chris-
tian philosopher, he is the thinker who integrates the event of Christianity
in its full radicality into the foundation of his thought. The dialectic does
not come from Christianity, but Christianity gives the dialectic the form
that it takes on in Hegel’s thought: the self-division of being produces
our finite subjectivity, or the infinite God the Father does not remain
aloof but manifests himself in the finite world as Christ. This movement

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is the movement of the modern dialectic. Hegel’s status as a dialectician

is inseparable from his unique insight into the philosophical character
of the Christian event.
Hegel is funny because Christianity, despite the absence of comic
priests, is a philosophically comic religion. It emerges through the unity
of the infinite and the finite, and it is this insistence on the infinite be-
coming finite that renders Christ a ridiculous figure. His ridiculousness
is inextricable from his status as the transcendent made lacking. The
absolute seriousness of so many Christians about the faith is often an at-
tempt to protect themselves against its comedy. In reality, proper Chris-
tians should spend much of their time laughing at Christ if they want to
avoid blasphemy. This is Hegel’s great insight, one that he shares with the
filmmaker Luis Buñuel.
Though neither the apostles nor the priests are known for their
sense of humor, they are the guardians of a religion based on the most
comic event in human history— the incarnation of God in human form
and his subsequent death on the cross. According to the published re-
ports, Christ didn’t joke during his ministry or while he was on the cross,
but his entire earthly existence bespeaks comedy because comedy occurs
when the transcendent appears in the finite. The inaugural act of Christi-
anity marks the most profound intersection of the infinite with the finite.
At the moment of the incarnation, God abandons the transcendent world
beyond the earthly realm and fully embodies the figure of Christ. When
Christ dies on the cross, God, as an infinite being incapable of death, also
dies. This contradiction is the basis of comedy and is exclusive to Chris-
tianity. The result of this structure is that Christianity is a comic religion.
Though Christians aren’t regularly laughing at worship, if they thought
about what they believed, they would be.
Most Christians avoid contemplating the comedy of the Christian
story by simply banishing any thoughts of Christ as a human being. They
would find it blasphemous to discuss Christ’s engaging in typical human
activities, even those that we don’t consider vulgar. The idea of Christ
imagining sex and marriage proved so offensive to Christians that it oc-
casioned massive protests against Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation
of Christ (1988). Though Scorsese showed Christ rejecting this possibility,
even depicting Christ contemplating sexual activity threatened the faith
of many believers.
But one need not go this far to disrupt the refusal to grant Christ
the humanity that the Christian religion itself accords him. This is what
Hegel insists on. As Jean Wahl puts it in his remarkable little book on
Hegel entitled Le Malheur de la conscience dans le philosophie de Hegel, “At
the same time that the immutable takes form in Christianity, it also ceases

95
to be properly speaking the immutable. Such is the outcome of the Phe-

nomenology in its entirety.”15 In contrast to Hegel, the faithful Christian
pictures Christ walking slowly while surrounded by eager listeners who
witness his preaching and miracles. Any other activities humanize him
and violate his image as the incarnation of God. But if Christ is really God
made flesh, he must engage in other ordinary human activities.
One can imagine a comedy about Christ that completely avoids blas-
phemy but nonetheless shows Christ engaged in everyday life. We might
see him working hard to cut down a tree, throwing up due to a stomach
virus, finding his clothing soaked when caught in a sudden rainstorm, or
even— and this would be the most controversial moment— squatting in
the woods to defecate and wiping himself with some stray leaves. Such
a scene would upset most Christians because they fail to recognize the
comedy inherent in a divine being becoming finite. We should be able to
imagine Christ in the most extreme human activities. This follows directly
from the Christian idea that God becomes fully human while retaining
divinity in the figure of Christ.
Luis Buñuel does not go so far as to show Christ vomiting or defe-
cating in La Voie lactée (The Milky Way, 1974), but the film does include
brief interludes in which Christ is engaged in human activities. These
interludes reveal the comic structure of Christianity in a fully Hegelian
way. The comedy in this film does not depend on blasphemy (as do the
infamous Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad) but instead follows
from doctrinaire Christianity. Buñuel concludes the film with a note pro-
claiming (accurately) that all of the citations from Christ come from ac-
tual scripture, which is undoubtedly why a friend of Buñuel who saw the
film contended that the Vatican had probably financed it. Buñuel does
explore blasphemy in what is probably his masterpiece, Le Fantôme de la
liberté (The Phantom of Liberty, 1974), when he depicts, in the beginning of
the film, a soldier sacking a cathedral and eating the host because he feels
hungry. But this type of overt blasphemy has no place in La Voie lactée. It
is funny because it takes Christianity literally by showing Christ involved
in actual human activities.
La Voie lactée recounts the pilgrimage of two drifters, Pierre (Paul
Frankeur) and Jean (Laurent Terzieff), who are traveling from France to
Santiago de Compostela to see the remains of Saint James. The principal
joke of the film is that they travel far to view Saint James only to discover
that his remains are no longer there and it isn’t clear where they are. Like
the diners in Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the
Bourgeoisie, 1974) who can’t manage to eat a meal together, the pilgrims
in La Voie lactée never see the remains of Saint James, which is the goal
that inspires the journey that occupies the entire film. But during the

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journey, we do see several stunning scenes of Christ interpolated in the

adventures of Pierre and Jean.
The first of these constitutes one of the film’s key scenes. Here,
Pierre recounts to Jean his mother advising him not to shave his beard
as a youth. But instead of cutting to a younger version of Pierre, the film
shows Jesus (Bernard Verley) at home as he prepares to shave. We see
him lathering up a brush of shaving cream and readying a bowl of water.
Before he starts to shave, however, the Virgin Mary (Edith Scob) advises
against it, saying, “Mon fils, ne te rase pas. Tu es beaucoup mieux avec ta
barbe.” (“Don’t shave, my son. You look much better with your beard”).
Buñuel cuts to Jesus, who says nothing, though he puts down the bowl of
shaving cream with the brush and proceeds to empty the bowl of water.
Christ preserves his beard by following the advice of his mother, even
though he was on the verge of shaving it.
The comedy of this incident derives directly from the structure of
Christianity itself. Of course, if Christ was actually human, he would have
had to weigh shaving his beard, cutting his hair, and all of the other
grooming decisions that humans make on a daily basis. But these deci-
sions seem incongruous with divinity. God can’t be concerned with shav-
ing or with whether he looks better bearded or clean-shaven. If these
questions occupied even a moment of God’s time, that would cast doubt
on the divinity of God. And yet, if God genuinely took on a human form,
these questions would necessarily figure in his thinking. Buñuel’s film
is an attempt to bring the contradictory status of Christ to the fore and
reveal its comic essence.
A second scene further displays Christ’s intrinsic comedy, and
Buñuel leads into it with a character saying, “Après tout, il devait marcher
comme tout le monde” (“After all, he had to walk like everyone else”).
Though the servant in this scene isn’t speaking about Christ, Buñuel
quickly cuts to a shot of Christ running to catch up to his disciples in
order to show that he does have to walk or run like everyone else. But
what most stands out about this shot is Christ running rather than sol-
emnly walking, as we imagine that he did. After reaching his disciples
by running, he asks about the time and worries that they are late. See-
ing Christ running and showing concern about being late expresses his
finitude and the contradiction of the identity of infinitude and finitude
that he embodies.
Perhaps the best example of this comedy occurs right after this
scene, when Buñuel depicts Christ’s first miracle as recounted in the
Gospel of John— the transformation of water into wine at Cana. Unlike
in the earlier scene, Buñuel here strictly follows a biblical story. Except for
the Virgin Mary’s expression of admiration for her son to a companion,

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the lines spoken during this scene adhere closely to the sacred version.
Nonetheless, Buñuel manages to inject humor into the scene through the
way that he depicts Christ recounting the parable of the steward before
he performs the miracle. In fact, it is what occurs during his recounting of
the parable that indirectly plays a role in the transformation of water into
wine. When Christ comes to the point where the steward realizes what he
must do to win back the master’s good graces, he pauses for a prolonged
break. One of the wedding guests interrupts this pause with a natural
question, “Et alors?” (“So what next?”). The reason for the interruption
is Christ taking a drink of wine. The film cuts from the questioner, who
cannot brook the delay, back to Christ, who finishes drinking his cup of
wine and then turns it over to ensure that there is none left. He laughs
at the absence of wine and concludes the parable, which wins him thun-
derous applause.
After his mother Mary informs him that there is no more wine,
Christ initially refuses to intervene but finally instructs the servants to fill
the vases with water that will miraculously become wine. Though Buñuel
sticks to the letter of the scripture, the visuals of this scene provide the
comedy that stems from Christ’s humanity. Rather than just recounting
the parable, he pauses in order to drink and laughs to himself when
he finds that he has no more wine. This break and the question about
the conclusion that it provokes are funny because they interject Christ’s
finite humanity into his godliness. Even at the moment when Christ is
communicating his divine message, he drinks in a way that interrupts the
delivery of the message.
After this scene, Buñuel cuts to a modern scene in which a man and
a woman are talking about someone. The first lines that we hear make a
clear reference back to Christ in the previous scene. The man says, “C’est
un homme commes les autres. Il n’y a pas de doute” (“He’s a man like any
other. There is no doubt”). Though the man isn’t talking about Christ,
Buñuel’s cut and the rapidity with which the line follows the cut indicate
that it is Christ who is “a man like any other.” For Buñuel, Christ is God
but is also human, and the emphasis on his humanity provides a constant
resource for the comedy that inheres in Christianity itself. La Voie lactée
is a far more effective comedy about Christianity than Le Fantôme de la li-
berté, despite its lack of sacrilege. The former film shows that Christianity
is funny in itself, even without adding any mockery. This distinguishes it
as a religion and testifies to the nature of comedy.
Buñuel’s Christ is also Hegel’s. One could even claim that Hegel
should be credited as the source material for La Voie lactée. When Buñuel
shows Christ as a finite being while remaining Christ, he exemplifies the
essence of Hegel’s thought. Gilles Deleuze calls Buñuel one of the great

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naturalists of the cinema, but it is more correct to call him one of the
cinema’s great Hegelians. An emphasis on the finitude of Christ is not
sacrilege but proper appreciation of the Christian idea. Hegel is the most
comic philosopher because he is the one who brings this idea into phi-
losophy and makes it the basis for his thought. Though Hegel himself
doesn’t theorize the role that comedy plays in this identity of transcen-
dence and finitude, he exhibits it every bit as much as Buñuel does.16
Why We Don’t Laugh at Being and Time
As the example of Christianity illustrates, Hegel’s comedy is inextricable

from his system of philosophy. He did not just happen to be a jovial or
fun-loving guy (though he is one of the few major figures in the history
of Western philosophy before the twentieth century to father a child out
of wedlock). Hegel’s philosophy of contradiction is inherently a philos-
ophy of comedy.17 His philosophical approach demands an awareness of
the inseparability of excess and lack or of finitude and transcendence.
The Scholastics were humorless because they devoted themselves entirely
to the realm of transcendence. The existentialist and phenomenological
philosophers who followed Hegel were humorless because they confined
their thought to the realm of finitude.18 If Hegel is the representative fig-
ure of philosophical comedy, Heidegger is his opposite, the philosopher
who never once stains his writing with a joke.
Unlike Hegel’s speculative philosophy that highlights the subject’s
encounter with the infinite, Heidegger’s thought bars any access to the
infinite. Infinitude and transcendence are, for Heidegger, relics of a re-
ligious conception of existence that hides the truth of our being in the
world. As beings in the world, we are necessarily— and not just acciden-
tally or temporarily— finite. In the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,
Heidegger makes this clear from early on in the lecture series. He states,
“Finitude is not some property that is merely attached to us, but is our
fundamental way of being. If we wish to become what we are, we cannot
abandon this finitude or deceive ourselves about it, but must safeguard
it.”19 Even the act of grasping our finitude does not enable us to transcend
it. The only possibility, as Heidegger sees it, lies in taking up an authentic
attitude toward finitude, an attitude that involves safeguarding it.
The position that Heidegger famously advocates in Being and Time
is an authentic being-toward-death. Death plays the central role in Hei-
degger’s early thought because it is the emblem of our finitude. Our own
death assures us that we are finite, and this death remains an ultimate

99
barrier for all of us. The fact that no one can die on behalf of another
person testifies to the impossibility of exceeding finitude. No matter how
much we know or how much power we accumulate, we will remain within
the clutches of finitude and subject to death. We can’t exist apart from the
world in which we exist. This world includes us as irrevocably finite be-
ings. Not only can we not transcend death, but neither can we transcend
the world, even when we gain some purchase on it through knowledge.
Knowledge doesn’t exceed finitude.
According to Heidegger, the world is coextensive with us and with
our existence. We cannot think of ourselves outside the world. Our finite
existence within the world isn’t a barrier that we can imagine transcend-
ing but rather is constitutive of our very being. Nothing we do can permit
us to exceed the realm of finitude. While previous philosophers imag-
ined the subject outside the world or viewed the world as a limitation,
Heidegger grants it a constitutive status for us. As he puts it in Being and
Time, “Ontologically, ‘world’ is not a way of characterizing those enti-
ties which Dasein essentially is not; it is rather a characteristic of Dasein
itself.”20 Dasein’s immanence in the world renders any encounter with
excess impossible.
Heidegger’s abandonment of the term “subject” for “Dasein”
(being-there) begins his trek away from the infinite. The subject is al-
ready implicated in transcendence, and we must abandon the term if we
are to avoid any hint of a realm beyond finitude. In this sense, Heidegger
goes further than existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus
(both of whom retain the term “subject”) in his thought. This leads him
to create an even more serious philosophy than these fellow travelers.
Whereas Sartre and Camus occasionally recount a situation that has hu-
morous implications (like Sisyphus rolling a boulder eternally up a hill),
Heidegger refrains from any such anecdotes as religiously as he refrains
from straightforward comedy.
In direct contrast to Hegel, Heidegger tends to avoid examples in
his philosophy. When he does have recourse to an example in the Fun-
damental Concepts of Metaphysics, it is, appropriately, an example of bore-
dom. Heidegger describes waiting for a train at the station with nothing
to do. The example is telling because Heidegger provides a boring in-
stance of boredom. One could imagine boredom as a comic experience
(and several films depict even the boring wait for a train in a comic fash-
ion), but Heidegger produces a scene completely bereft of comedy. For
him, boredom expresses a mode of our finitude and not our capacity for
exceeding the context in which we find ourselves. Comic depictions of
boredom show that the bored subject exceeds the situation but remains
bound by the necessity of waiting for the train. Lack and excess intersect,

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enabling us to laugh. But Heidegger’s boredom fails to rise to the gran-

deur of this typical boredom.
The contrast between Hegel and Heidegger is stark. The one is a
comic philosopher, and the other is perhaps the most grave in the history
of philosophy. We should not chalk up Heidegger’s absence of humor as
a defect that led to his Nazism. There were, contrary to what some phi-
losophers of comedy might claim, plenty of funny Nazis. Seriousness is
not fascistic, and comedy is not inherently revolutionary. But the extreme
differences between Hegel and Heidegger do inform us about the nature
of comedy. Perhaps Heidegger is correct that finitude constitutes our ulti-
mate horizon. But if Heidegger’s philosophy is accurate, then all comedy
is an error. It constitutes an illusory retreat from the seriousness of care
and from our own being-toward-death. Though death inspires countless
jokes, in a wholly finite world death ceases to be a joking matter. Comedy,
from Heidegger’s perspective, must be inauthentic.
The bare existence of comedy does not in itself prove the truth of
Hegel’s philosophy of contradiction. It is possible that comedy is just ide-
ology, that it masks the seriousness of our finite condition. But Hegel’s
thought has an ability to explain comedy in a way that Heidegger’s can-
not. For Heidegger, comedy can only be an indication of our fallenness.
Hegel sees it as an outgrowth of our status as subjects and thus can inter-
pret it without diminishing its significance. We laugh often because we
constantly encounter forms of speculative identity, moments when excess
and lack emerge out of each other. Hegel’s philosophy holds a key to
comedy’s condition of possibility.
The comic structure of Hegel’s thought doesn’t just create moments
in which Hegel himself can tell a joke by suddenly revealing this struc-
ture; it also makes Hegel himself the perfect target for philosophical
jokes. These can be simple, like the one recounted to me by a friend
during a meeting in which we were discussing Hegel. He warned, “Spend
your life reading Hegel only to realize that you Kant.”21 One could sub-
stitute Heidegger for Hegel in this joke, but it would lose much of its ef-
fectiveness because Heidegger’s philosophy is itself less comic.
The comic structure of Hegel’s philosophy even provides an open-
ing for those who would like to destroy it. Hegel’s great philosophical
enemy, Bertrand Russell, often uses Hegel as a site for derisive comedy.
His best Hegel joke occurs in “On Denoting,” in which Russell describes
how one might avoid the problem of denoting phrases that denote what
doesn’t actually exist (like the “present King of France”). This leads
quickly to a joke at Hegel’s expense. Russell states, “By the law of the ex-
cluded middle, either ‘A is B’ or ‘A is not B’ must be true. Hence either
‘the present King of France is bald’ or ‘the present King of France is not

101
bald’ must be true. Yet if we enumerated the things that are bald, and
then the things that are not bald, we should not find the present King of
France in either list. Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably con-
clude that he wears a wig.”22 Even though Russell resorts to a misleading
association of Hegelian philosophy with synthesis, he nevertheless tells
a good joke, one that depends on the connection that it draws between
lack and excess. At the point where logic produces the empty set (the fact
that France has no king), Hegelian philosophy introduces an additional
and unnecessary object (a wig on the head of the king who doesn’t exist).
Russell creates comedy at Hegel’s expense, but he does so in a thoroughly
Hegelian manner. When he turns to comedy, he unknowingly moves onto
Hegel’s home turf.
This turf is inherently comic because, for Hegel, the finite emerges
out of infinitude, just as Christ brings the transcendent God down to
earth. As Hegel recognizes, neither the infinite nor the finite can sepa-
rate itself from the other. When one reveals their coincidence, comedy
erupts. One need not accept Hegel’s thought as always true, but one
must nonetheless reckon with the implications of his ability to make phi-
losophy funny. But philosophical comedy is not confined to Hegel. The
relationship that subsequent philosophers have to comedy offers further
confirmation of what Hegel’s philosophy reveals about comedy.
Trying to Laugh at Existentialism
We often think of comedy as absurdity. We laugh at what is nonsensical.

But the relationship that existentialist philosophers have to comedy re-
veals that absurdity itself is not funny. Absurdity is finitude that provides
us with nothing to laugh at. In his discussion of philosophy and com-
edy, John Morreall finds it strange that existentialist philosophers lack
a proper appreciation of humor. Of all philosophical movements, exis-
tentialism seems closest to what Morreall defines as the comic outlook
because it grasps the absurdity of life, the absence of any sufficient reason
for our suffering or for any of the events that occur in the world. Morreall
claims that “one group of philosophers that seem as if they would have
had to have a rich sense of humor is the existentialists.”23 The parallel,
as Morreall sees it, lies in their appreciation for the capacity of human
finitude to undermine all pretensions of transcendence. Though he
finds a strong sense of humor in the precursors of the existentialists like
Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, the existentialists themselves,
especially Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, evince a total failure to

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appreciate the philosophical fecundity of the comic. Sartre and Camus, to

their detriment, are philosophers of seriousness. And yet, given Morreall’s
understanding of comedy as the embrace of the absurdity of human exis-
tence, they should count among the great philosophical comedians.
Morreall does not attempt to unravel this mystery. We might as-
sume that the comic failings of Sartre and Camus are, to his mind, simply
personal.24 This might be a case in which the philosopher’s personal-
ity is inadequate to the implications of the philosophy itself. But rather
than follow Morreall down this path of excusing the comic inadequacy of
Sartre and Camus, we should examine the contrast between the thought
of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on the one hand and Sartre and Camus
on the other. Despite the profound differences between Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche and between Sartre and Camus, each pair shares a fundamen-
tal structure of thought that distinguishes them from the other pair and
holds the secret to their comic success and failure.
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are the clear parent figures of existen-
tialism. Both highlight their break from German idealism that ultimately
led to the formation of existentialist philosophy. For Kierkegaard, the
enemy is almost always Hegel, while for Nietzsche it is most often Kant.
Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche abandon the transcendentalism of Ger-
man idealism, its insistence on thinking through the conditions of possi-
bility that lay the ground rules for our experience. In this sense, Kierke-
gaard and Nietzsche carve out the first territory for existentialism and its
thoroughgoing rejection of the transcendental perspective. But at the
same time, they do not abandon transcendence when they abandon the
transcendental perspective proffered by German idealism. This has cru-
cial comic implications. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche do not fully commit
themselves to finitude, and this enables them to be comic philosophers.
Although they do not live in the rarefied comic air of Hegel, they are not
far from it.
If Kierkegaard did not have God as his transcendent reference point
and if Nietzsche did not have the Übermensch as a figure who transcends
the all-too-human world, they would be incapable of comedy. They would
be, in other words, Sartre and Camus. But instead, their insistence on
the lacking and debased subject always has as its counterpart the point
of transcendence that exceeds the finite world. Even Nietzsche, despite
disclaiming all idols, retains the possibility of complete transcendence,
a possibility that informs every funny line that he utters. He never finds
himself simply immersed in the misery of finitude but is always at the
same time in a transcendent relation to it thanks to the Übermensch.
Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche establish comedy as an integral
part of their philosophy. Kierkegaard’s first book, The Concept of Irony, is

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a study of Socratic irony that places irony at the foundation of subjectiv-

ity.25 As Kierkegaard sees it, irony frees us from the social constraints and
contexts that keep us in place and prevent the emergence of subjectiv-
ity. When Socrates adopts an ironic attitude, he takes up the perspective
of the infinite in order to confront the finitude of the sophists. Though
Kierkegaard sees the irony of Socrates as wholly negative and unattached
to any positive philosophical program, he nonetheless celebrates its ca-
pacity to negate the influence of others and to isolate Socrates.
Throughout his philosophical career, Kierkegaard plays with irony
himself, so that it is never clear whether or not we should take what he
says seriously. Furthermore, he uses various pseudonyms in his writings.
This practice reaches its comic apex in Either/Or, in which Kierkegaard
uses the name “Victor Eremita” as the supposed discoverer of the manu-
script; “A” to designate the author of the first part; “Johannes” to indi-
cate the writer of the famous “Diary of a Seducer” within the first part;
and “Judge Vilhelm” as the name of the respondent in the second part.
Though Kierkegaard aims to formulate a serious philosophy in Either/Or,
he creates a complex web of pseudonyms to root his philosophy in com-
edy. The primary joke in Kierkegaard’s thought is that one never knows
where his actual position lies.26
A similar comedy exists in the philosophy of Nietzsche. Rather than
relying primarily on irony, however, Nietzsche grounds his thought in
comic hyperbole. He uses exaggerated attacks on privileged ideals to
shock readers into questioning their devotion to these ideals. Nowhere is
this more the case than with Christianity, Nietzsche’s most common target
for vilification. In Anti-Christ, he claims that “Christianity has been the
worst thing to happen to humanity so far.”27 Elsewhere, he heaps scorn
on Paul and on priests, even recommending jail time for them, because
of their defiance of nature and rejection of the body. Nietzsche does
not engage in a logical critique of Christianity but employs hyperbole
because he sees comedy as intrinsic to his philosophical position. As he
sees it, Christianity demands seriousness and restraint. Nietzsche’s formal
extravagance thus provides a philosophical riposte.
Christianity also demands humility. Nietzsche refuses Christian hu-
mility at every turn, but especially through the comic self- descriptions
that populate his last work, Ecce Homo. In this book, he titles the chapters
with extravagant assertions of his own greatness, like “Why I Am So Wise”
and “Why I Write Such Good Books.” Undoubtedly, Nietzsche, like every
philosopher, believes himself to be wise and to be a writer of good books,
but most thinkers believe that they must exhibit humility by not proclaim-
ing this belief in their works. The violation of this accepted standard
strikes every reader as comic, even if one believes that Nietzsche is serious

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in his self-evaluation. By including the overstated chapter titles, he makes

clear his rejection of Christian humility and at the same time exposes
what all other philosophers think without saying it. Comedy enables a
thinker to say something that violates accepted standards. Nietzsche un-
derstands this, which is why he grants comedy such a central role in the
structure of his philosophy. We are supposed to laugh, but at the same
time, we are supposed to take him seriously.
The philosophical importance of the comic unites the thought of
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Though Kierkegaard is the great Christian
thinker of the nineteenth century and Nietzsche is that century’s great
atheist, their shared appreciation of comedy reveals their philosophical
proximity. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche provide the groundwork for exis-
tentialism by focusing their thought on the priority of the problem of
existence. Before we confront epistemological or ontological difficulties,
we first struggle with existing, and, as they both see it, our epistemologi-
cal constructions derive from this struggle with existence. For instance,
if we claim that we can understand the world and its history as a rational
structure, we do so in order to escape the horror of our individual sub-
jectivity and its absence of significance. If we believe that God orders the
world according to a plan, we do so in order to avoid the responsibility
that stems from our existential isolation. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, de-
spite their differences concerning the existence of God, adopt a similar
attitude toward the situation of the individual subject and the existential
bind in which individuals find themselves.
But what separates Kierkegaard and Nietzsche from later existen-
tialists is that while they attack traditional notions of transcendence and
locate the subject in its immanence, they nonetheless retain the possi-
bility of a new form of transcendence. In each case, their existentialism
includes the infinite and refuses to confine itself to finitude. For Kierke-
gaard, the subject encounters the infinite in the form of the possibility of
a leap of faith that would transform the coordinates of the subject’s finite
existence. Kierkegaard formulates what he calls “the sickness unto death”
as a problem of human infinitude rather than a problem of human fini-
tude.28 We are finite creatures who must take stock of the infinite. As he
puts it, “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of
the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a syn-
thesis.”29 Kierkegaard’s existentialism doesn’t condemn us to our finitude,
nor does it postpone our infinitude until after our death. Instead, we are
constantly infinite because we are constantly struggling with faith.
No such possibility of a leap of faith exists for Nietzsche, but he also
grants a role for the infinite, even if he doesn’t locate it in God. According
to Nietzsche, we can transcend our finite existence through an embrace

105
of the eternal return, through what he calls amor fati. The subject who
accomplishes this becomes an Übermensch, someone who continues to
exist in the finite world but at the same time transcends this world. Both
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche pave the way for existentialist philosophies of
finitude, but they are not themselves philosophers of finitude. This is why
comedy plays such a central role in their thought. Comedy requires the
intersection of finitude and transcendence. When transcendence drops
out, as in the case of Sartre and Camus, existentialist philosophy ceases
to be funny.
Sartre’s existentialism begins with the notion that he takes over
from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: existence precedes essence, an essence
that the subject’s activity produces. But Sartre rejects both the possibility
of Kierkegaard’s leap of faith and Nietzsche’s act of self-overcoming.
There is constant transcendence in Sartre’s philosophy, but this tran-
scendence remains confined to the realm of finitude and occurs when the
subject transcends itself through its acts. The subject’s self-transcendence
never permits it to escape the confines of its world because, as Sartre
says, “the world is human.”30 In contrast to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche,
Sartre sees no possible avenue for escaping the condition of finitude.
Any recourse to the infinite is simply an instance of bad faith, a refusal
to confront the limitations of finitude and the freedom that the subject
has within its finitude.
Though Sartre and Camus had a famous break over Camus’s philo-
sophical and political turn toward moderation in The Rebel, this break
does not diminish their shared investment in finitude. In this sense, they
are the fellow travelers of Heidegger in the domain of comedy, despite
their political opposition to him. Throughout his philosophical career,
Camus insists that the transcendence that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
long for remains impossible. This is why we must content ourselves, like
Sisyphus, with rolling the rock up the hill while knowing it will always roll
back down, and why we must commit ourselves to revolt rather than revo-
lution. Revolution implies the belief in the possibility of transcending and
overturning our historical context, while revolt accepts this context as an
unsurpassable limit.31 The intensity and violence of the dispute between
Sartre and Camus hides their fundamental kinship on the question of the
infinite. For both of them, we dwell within finitude and can only imagine
the infinite.
It is this insistence on the subject’s finitude and rejection of tran-
scendence that separates Sartre and Camus from their precursors, Kierke-
gaard and Nietzsche. It is also the source of the absence of humor in their
works. Both Sartre and Camus were novelists in addition to being philoso-
phers. They count among the better writers in the history of philosophy.

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Sartre typically enlivens his philosophical texts with detailed examples,

like the garçon de café in Being and Nothingness, who illustrates bad faith by
completely identifying himself with his social role. Camus, for his part,
often has recourse to literary examples to make his philosophical point.
But in both cases, their lively prose style does not include comedy. This
is even more surprising given the focus of existentialism as a philosophy.
Because existentialism engages with the absurdity of existence, one would
expect some jokes about the encounter with the absurd. But Camus, for
whom the absurd functions as the key term, treats it as a deadly serious
concept. For Camus, the absurdity of existence doesn’t facilitate laughter
but makes it impossible to laugh.
The turn from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Sartre and Camus
in the development of existentialism demonstrates the conditions for
the development of comedy. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche grasp the absur-
dity of existence and the finitude of the subject, but they also recognize
that this finitude is not the end of the story. The subject is not just a fi-
nite being but also an infinite one. Even if one rejects God as Nietzsche
does, one can still envision the possibility of escaping finitude through a
transformative self-overcoming. Through such an act, one experiences
the infinite in a similar way to Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, who takes
the absurd leap and decides to believe. In contrast to Sartre and Camus,
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche see how finitude and infinitude intersect in
the subject. This is the source of the comedy that populates their thought.
The absence of comedy in the philosophy of Sartre and Camus is not the
result of a personal failure. Philosophers of finitude cannot be funny.
“The Deadly Jester”
In the twentieth century, the philosophy of finitude won the day. Even
philosophers who rejected both Heidegger and existentialism tended to
embrace some form of finitude and abjure the possibility of transcen-
dence.32 It is not coincidental that the contemporary philosopher who is
known as much for his jokes as for his thought identifies himself entirely
with Hegel. More than anyone else, Slavoj Žižek has given Hegel’s philos-
ophy a contemporary relevance. From his first book in English, The Sub-
lime Object of Ideology, to his thousand-page magnum opus, Less Than Noth-
ing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Žižek has foregrounded
Hegel’s importance for his own theorizing. In an interview called “Lib-
eration Hurts,” Žižek leaves no doubt about his relationship to Hegel.
He says, “ultimately, if I am to choose just one thinker, it’s Hegel. He’s

107
the one for me. And here I’m totally and unabashedly naïve. He may be
a white, dead, man or whatever the wrong positions are today, but that’s
where I stand.”33 Hegel plays an outsized role in Žižek’s thought because
Hegel’s dialectic of the infinite and the finite allows Žižek to envision
how the impossible happens and occasions revolutionary change. Hegel
provides the basis for Žižek’s political philosophy of accomplishing the
impossible through the radical act, but he also functions as the hidden
source for Žižek’s humor.
Though Žižek has many detractors, no one questions that comedy
plays a central part in his philosophy. No other contemporary philoso-
pher, for instance, has a book devoted solely to recounting his or her
jokes. Though all of Žižek’s books include several jokes and comic de-
scriptions, Žižek’s Jokes focuses solely on his comedy to the exclusion of the
rest of his thought.34 Žižek’s reliance on comedy undoubtedly stems from
his particular personality, but it is also inextricable from his Hegelianism.
Žižek doesn’t borrow Hegel’s own jokes, but his jokes all reside in the
spirit of Hegel. The jokes most often show the infinite intruding on the
finite world in ways that subjects do not expect and that thus trip them
up. Contradictions of the finite world become the source for Žižek’s com-
edy because they mark the site where seemingly impossible events take
place. Events occur even though they are contradictory, and this is not
only comic but also a manifestation of the infinite within the finite world.
Perhaps the joke that Žižek repeats more than any other in his
books, essays, and talks is one that deals with the physicist Niels Bohr.35
Žižek returns to this joke so often because it has a fundamental Hegelian
resonance. According to Žižek, a visiting scientist comes to Bohr’s country
house and sees a horseshoe nailed to the front door. The scientist can’t
understand why Bohr would have this emblem of superstition on the
door and asks, “Surely, you don’t believe that the horseshoe will bring
good luck?” Bohr replies, “No, of course not, but I’ve heard that it works
even if you don’t believe in it.” Bohr rejects superstition, but he nonethe-
less continues to harbor a fantasy that superstition might be true. The
humor in the joke stems from the way that it brings together Bohr’s own
transcendence (his scientific knowledge that trumps all superstition) and
his finitude (his reliance on the superstition that he doesn’t believe in).
But it also shows his own lack that requires the excess of the supernatural
intervention in his life.
Lack and excess coincide in different ways in this example, which
multiplies the comedy and its theoretical applicability. This is undoubt-
edly why Žižek repeats it as much as he does. The joke’s Hegelian flavor
stems from the unimportance that subjective belief has in the events re-
counted. Even though Bohr doesn’t have any subjective belief, his actions

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objectify the belief that he doesn’t experience. In this sense, the tran-
scendent world that Bohr rejects as a scientist returns in his actions. Un-
like Kant, Bohr cannot keep the two worlds apart, despite his scientific
certainty that only the finite world exists. Žižek tells this joke again and
again in order to emphasize that we cannot confine ourselves to finitude
no matter how diligently we try. The infinite returns in our acts, which is
why we are funny beings.
Žižek uses a joke about a patient in psychoanalysis to show in an-
other way how our beliefs transcend us. The patient goes to analysis with
a fear of chickens that stems from his belief that he is a piece of grain that
chickens will eat. Eventually, the analyst convinces the man that he is not
a mere piece of grain, and the therapy concludes. But the man returns
the next week with the old terror of chickens intact. The analyst reassures
him that he is not a piece of grain. The patient responds, “I know, but
does the chicken know?” As with the horseshoe joke, the comedy here
occurs because the patient cannot exist as a purely finite subject. The
joke reveals the transcendent status of belief, which implicitly concerns a
world beyond the subject itself. The subject cannot believe in a world of
pure lack or finitude, and the joke forces us to confront this inability at
precisely the moment that the patient would accept his finitude.
Žižek’s significance as a contemporary philosopher has its basis in
his effort to counter the philosophy of finitude that dominated the twen-
tieth century. He offers comic respite from the seriousness of the many
philosophers of finitude who followed in Heidegger’s wake— Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spi-
vak, and so on. His comedy has both brought adherents to his Hegelian
philosophy and given ammunition to opponents who can dismiss him as
unserious. Others see it as a disguise through which he can smuggle dan-
gerous ideas into the minds of unsuspecting listeners. This paranoid in-
terpretation of Žižek’s comedy is, in a sense, the proper reaction because
its comic ridiculousness matches Žižek’s own foregrounding of comedy.
Comedy is not the royal road to all philosophy, but it is the mani-
festation of a certain type of philosophy. The type of philosophy that is
comic reveals the philosophy of comedy. Hegel’s speculative identity of
the infinite and the finite— an identity that finds its funniest incarnation
in the figure of Christ— makes evident the theory of comedy. Though
philosophers of finitude might tell an isolated joke, their philosophy itself
is not comic. By identifying what makes a philosophy comic, we can gain
a better grasp on the slippery structure of comedy.
If we are secretly philosophizing when we engage in comedy, we
are also implicitly theorizing about comedy when we philosophize. Žižek
himself claims that he uses humor to grease the rails leading to Hege-

109
lian theory. But perhaps we should reverse this analysis: Hegelian theory
exists to lead unsuspecting students into the trauma of the joke. Jokes are
never simply a way to seduce would-be followers or to break the ice with
an audience. They also tell us more about a philosophy than the philos-
ophy intends. The comedy of philosophy shows that we cannot escape
the infinite by immersing ourselves in the immanence of our finitude.
But this comedy is not reserved just for speculative thinkers. It emerges
with language itself.

5
Signification and Desire
The Absence of a Language Instinct
Not everyone who speaks is funny. If everyone were funny, comedy would
die out since it depends on its exceptionality. And yet the structure of lan-
guage itself is inherently comic. Animals that cannot speak are certainly
capable of playfulness, but they are not capable of comedy. Comedy de-
pends on and inheres in language. Language provides the basic recipe
for all comedy because the emergence of language reveals the marriage
of lack and excess integral to the comic. But we must understand the
emergence of language in all its radicality, a radicality that many of the
most popular theories of language elide.
For instance, most evolutionary psychologists adhere to a distinctly
noncomic understanding of language. For the doctrinaire evolutionary
psychologist, language is another tool of adaptation. Those humans who
could speak survived and prospered because language enabled them to
adapt to their environment in ways that nonspeakers could not. Accord-
ing to these theorists, the very existence of language attests to its produc-
tivity for speakers. If speaking did not carry with it evolutionary benefits,
it would either never have developed or would have died out. It might
be the case that language has outlived its usefulness and still lingers on
(which is one view of evolutionary psychology concerning religion), but
it must have been, at least in its incipience, more useful to humans than
keeping silent or relying solely on grunts and gestures.
The evolutionary conception of language does not leave any room
for its inherent comedy and thus has to theorize comedy as simply the
further development of animal play.1 By identifying language as a tool
for adaptation, the evolutionary explanation correctly takes cognizance
of the lack out of which language emerges. Beings that begin to speak
do so because they do not have other tools that survival requires. Speak-
ing allows human beings to communicate and act as a group in order to
defeat predators, find or grow food, and erect shelter. But in addition
to bare survival, language also provides for a multitude of pleasures—
sexual seduction, complex desserts, works of poetry, and so on— that
would be unthinkable without it. From an evolutionary perspective, such
111

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CHAP T E R 5
advantages are unequivocal. If language didn’t provide clear advantages,

speaking would not have developed, and the language instinct would
have died out. Language is a capacity that compensates for humanity’s
lack of strength and speed. Whatever drawbacks it has or nonsense it pro-
duces can’t compare with its evolutionary virtues. But insisting on these
virtues leaves us unable to gauge the central role that the comic plays in
the structure of language.
This inability to theorize the centrality of the comic in language
weighs down even the most celebrated evolutionary theorizations of lan-
guage. Steven Pinker offers a famous account of language as an evolu-
tionary product in The Language Instinct, where he takes pains to separate
language from culture and to locate it in biology. By doing so, he hopes
to demystify the common understanding of language as a cultural attain-
ment that categorically distinguishes humans from other animals. This
demystification also redeems everyday language and everyday users of
language from the torrents of abuse heaped on them by philosophers
and critics. According to Pinker, the structure of language is not a cha-
otic comedy but an order developed through the process of adaptation.
This focus on adaptation misses the problems that language pro-
duces alongside its evolutionary solutions. As a result, Pinker’s approach
renders language humorless. In the opening of The Language Instinct,
Pinker admits openly that distancing language from the comic is one
of the goals of the book. After informing readers that their cherished
ideas about language are mere illusions, he points out the ultimate idea
that his work will tear down. He says, “Since language is the product of
a well-engineered biological instinct, we shall see that it is not the nutty
barrel of monkeys that entertainer-columnists make it out to be. I will
try to restore some dignity to the English vernacular, and will even have
some nice things to say about its spelling system.”2 Here Pinker specifi-
cally lays out a plan to make clear that language isn’t funny. What we see
as its inherent comedy— the seemingly illogical spelling, grammar, and
vocabulary— is actually a coherent structure that develops from strict bio-
logical imperatives.3
In order to adapt to and prosper in its environment, the lacking
human animal requires speech. But speech doesn’t simply enable this
being to adapt in the way that other qualities, like opposable thumbs
or an upright posture, might. Instead, at the same time that it permits
human animals to gain a much greater degree of mastery over their en-
vironment, it also transforms them from animals into beings of excess. In
other words, speech fills a lack for the human animal, but it fills this lack
excessively (while also reproducing lack in a new form, that of desire).
Through the acquisition of language and the act of speech, lack and ex-

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S I GNI FI CAT I ON AN D DESIRE
cess coincide as the human animal becomes a subject. This coincidence

is the source of the comic. Comedy is the result of language’s overabun-
dance, its inability to provide what speaking animals were lacking before
acquiring it.
Language is itself inherently comic. At the same time, it provides
the paradigm for all comedy that develops within it.4 Though nonverbal
comedy undoubtedly exists, even this form of comedy relies on the struc-
ture of language in order to succeed. Comedy occurs only at the moment
when lack and excess coincide: when we are simply within lack or excess,
there is no comedy. But it is language that installs the possibility of their
overlap, which is why only speaking beings can be comic, even if other
animals can play and laugh.
From Needs to Desires
The key to understanding the comedy of language lies in grasping the

change that language effects in the animal that begins to speak. When the
human (or any other) animal starts to speak, it undergoes a radical defor-
mation caused by signification. This transformation leaves the speaking
being or subject unable simply to meet its needs. Because of the signi-
fier’s impact on the speaking being, needs that can be fulfilled become
desires that can’t be. An apple can satisfy an animal’s need to eat, but no
piece of fruit can satisfy the desire for food. At the moment one eats the
apple, the need disappears, but the desire always remains and remains
dissatisfied through any realization. No apple is ever good enough to sat-
isfy a desire, even though almost any apple will suffice for satisfying the
need to eat. The engine for need is biological, but with the acquisition of
language, this biological need encounters the mediation of the signifier
and becomes desire.
The desiring subject is not just another animal. Language derails
this subject and distorts its animality, so that it can no longer experience
animal needs in the same way that other animals do. Language creates a
foundational alienation in the being who begins to speak, and this alien-
ation completely transforms the being’s natural needs. In “The Significa-
tion of the Phallus,” Jacques Lacan describes this alienation as the result
of the demand made on the subject through language. He writes, “to the
extent that [one’s] needs are subjected to demand, they come back to
[one] in an alienated form.”5 The alienated form that needs take on is
desire. When a need manifests itself through a desire, the role that satis-
faction plays undergoes a complete transformation. The desiring subject,

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CHAP T E R 5
in contrast to the needful animal, has no possible object that might fulfill
its desire.6
Rather than needing to satiate an instinct, the subject of desire re-
lates to its instincts through the mediation of language. This is why no
object ever proves ultimately satisfying. In addition to helping animals
adapt to their environment and survive, language introduces a slew of
problems into the lives of these animals. With language, satisfying one’s
needs is no longer enough. I can have enough to eat, shelter to keep me
warm, and even a mate with whom to reproduce, and yet I can still expe-
rience a depression so severe that I kill myself. The excesses of language
lead to human excesses like suicide. Language fills a biological lack and
allows humans to prosper in ways that would have been impossible with-
out it, but the excess that it produces simultaneously places their survival
in question. Language is comical because it responds to lack with excess
and thus marks the first moment of their coincidence, a coincidence that
every comic moment reproduces.
When children first speak, they quickly spot the comedy of the sig-
nifier and exploit it. Though young children don’t often tell jokes, they
do enjoy playing with the signifier and mocking the impasse of significa-
tion. At these moments, children find humor by producing failure out
of the signifier’s excess. Quite a few years ago, I interacted with a child
who exploited the signifier in this way more than any other I have since
witnessed. The four-year-old son of a close friend would delight in telling
jokes while modifying the punch line in order to transform them into
nonsense.7 Recalling a joke he had heard many times, he once asked his
parents, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” Even though they knew
the traditional answer “To get to the other side,” the parents, because
they weren’t overly cruel parents, acted as if they had no idea what the
appropriate response might be. They said, “We don’t know Kerry, why?”
Confounding their expectations, the little boy proclaimed, “Because it
wasn’t a tomato.” Unlike the actual punch line of the joke, this version
produced genuine laughs. Though we tried for a few minutes to decipher
its logic, we quickly concluded that the humor for the boy was rooted in
the signifier itself and its capacity for producing nonsense at the precise
point where we expect sense.
Signification is a register of sense that allows us to enjoy nonsense.
The structure of signification enables a speaking being to link a chicken’s
motivation for crossing the road to its difference from a tomato, even if
this equation doesn’t correspond to the rules of sense. The ability to re-
spond to a question with an answer that doesn’t make sense exhibits the
excessiveness of language corresponding with its failure. The nonsensi-
cal response makes clear that language offers opportunities for failure,

115
points where meaning breaks down. But this type of failure also bespeaks
the excessiveness of language. Its structure exceeds its capacity for mean-
ing. The boy’s piece of nonsense was not simply nonsense, not simply
a moment of pure lack. Instead, it also demonstrated his understand-
ing that the structure of language could accommodate a meaningless
response. Even if his audience didn’t understand the signification of what
he was communicating, they did understand how he was using signifiers
because he used a familiar form while adding a nonsensical content.
The nonsensical joke of this young boy is not exceptional. Though not
everyone develops such jokes, nearly all children do learn to disrupt the
signifier and to immerse themselves in the inherent comedy of language.
Signified Incongruence
Children can play with the signifier because there is no direct connection
between words and things. The child creates comedy by exploiting the
distance that separates the world of words and the world of things. We
expect words to correspond to things and most often act as if they do,
but language itself doesn’t ensure this correspondence. In fact, the world
of language establishes itself at a distance from the world of things. This
is a situation that occupies much of Gottlob Frege’s speculation on logic
and language. In the essay “On Sinn and Bedeutung,” Frege distinguishes
between the sense (Sinn) of a sentence and its meaning (Bedeutung). The
meaning, as Frege understands it, concerns the reference of the sentence
to the world of objects, its truth-value (Wahrheitswert) relative to what it
describes.8
Frege readily admits that certain sentences, like those in a fictional
work, can have a clear sense and no meaning at all since there is no world
to which they refer. But outside of the act of reading novels, we cannot
simply content ourselves with sense and forget about meaning. We seek
to move from sense to the meaning located beyond sense. According
to Frege, “it is the striving for the truth that drives us always to advance
from the sense to the Bedeutung.”9 Frege believes that it is impossible for
a subject to accept sense without concerning itself with meaning (or with
the world of reference). The problem is that these two levels of signifi-
cation never align. The path from sense to meaning is not just tortuous
but barred. On the side of sense, there is a world of signifiers that has
no necessary relation to the world of objects. This absence of relation,
which Frege hopes to overcome, is the basis for the comedy that inheres
in all signification.10

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CHAP T E R 5
As a result of the absolute breach between sense and meaning or

between the signifier and things, every language has simultaneously not
enough and too many words.11 When one tries to identify a particular
object or feeling, the word that one chooses is never particular enough.
This is especially evident in the case of color. Though most languages
have many words for the various shades of every color, these words do
not come close to capturing the multiplicity of shades that exist. When
we argue about where to place a certain color that we see— wondering if
it is aqua or turquoise, for instance— we inadvertently testify to the pau-
city of words, even in a language like English that has, according to some
studies, more than a million words. This paucity of words makes itself felt
even more strongly when we discuss feelings rather than colors.
Even if, like Ludwig Wittgenstein, we don’t believe that private feel-
ings have a coherent existence outside of the act of naming them, the
words for feelings nonetheless have gaps within them that testify to lan-
guage’s failure.12 Words fail not because my feelings are too deep or too
particular but because they often lack precision. For instance, I can say
that I’m elated or melancholic, but there is no precise word for feeling
elated and melancholic at the same time. And yet, this combination is
not inconceivable. The apparent abundance of words fails to convey pre-
cise gradations of feeling. It’s not at all clear how we should rank feeling
elated, super, magnificent, excellent, and top-notch. Many of us would
undoubtedly rank the words in very different orders, though no one
could say which order was the correct one. Even where there are enough
words, these words can never be precise enough and always create the
sense that language lacks an avenue for expression that it ought to have.
The lack of enough words in language is apparent when one takes
up the task of translating. It is often difficult to find an equivalent word in
the new language to communicate effectively the impression that an im-
portant word in the original makes.13 As a result, translators often choose
one of two equally unacceptable options: either they leave the word un-
translated, or they make up a word in the target language that approxi-
mates the word in the original. English translators of Jacques Lacan have
chosen the former path for his key term “jouissance,” refusing the more
narrow English term “enjoyment.” Translators of Martin Heidegger have
also refused to translate “Dasein” as “being-there” or “existence” and
have preferred to retain the German original even in translation. Other
translators have chosen the opposite path, like the first translators of Hei-
degger’s key text from the 1930s, Contributions to Philosophy. They invented
English terms, most infamously “enowning” for Ereignis, to correspond
with Heidegger’s twisting of the meaning of German words. Many Hei-
degger scholars viewed this translation as a disaster, which prompted the

117
Indiana University Press to violate almost all precedent and issue, within
only a few years, a new translation to replace the version that the press
itself had published.14
Though translations of Lacan and Heidegger testify to a lack of
enough words in English, this lack becomes clearest when one examines
the effort to translate the key term in Hegel’s philosophy—Aufhebung. It
is not an uncommon or difficult word in German. Hegel is not inventing
a term or cobbling one together in the way that Heidegger often does.15
The problem lies in the capaciousness of Aufhebung and the absence of
any English equivalent with a similar breadth. The German word has (at
least) a triple signification that is central to Hegel’s thought: an annul-
ling, a capturing or preserving, and a lifting up or transcending. Though
most translators have chosen the obscure English word “sublation” as an
equivalent, it has only begun to acquire the signification of the German
word because translators tell readers the word that it stands in for. On its
own, “sublation” is not an adequate substitute for Aufhebung. The use of
“sublation” bespeaks the inadequacy of English to capture the key term
in Hegel’s thought. It demonstrates how the problem of translation high-
lights how the lack of words haunts even the most promiscuous language.
But language’s excess of words is even more pronounced than its
lack of them. Even languages that have far fewer words than English often
have many words that have an identical signification. For instance, Ger-
man has three words (one masculine, one feminine, and one neuter) for
the unremarkable term “bookstore.” In English, there is only this single
word to signify a place where one can buy books. In German, it is most
commonly eine Buchhandlung, but it is also ein Buchladen and ein Buchge-
schäft. In French, one can use many different words to signify a scarf, for
which, again, there is only one word in English. It can be un foulard, une
écharpe, un cache-col, or un fichu.16 One could perform a similar operation
with many words in every language. There are certainly times when only
one word fits a situation, but more often than not, we can choose from
among the excessive number of words that each language offers.
The lack of enough words and simultaneous excess of words ren-
ders language inherently comic. Many jokes create humor by surprising
us with this coincidence in language. This is evident in the brief joke:
“What is the difference between a snowman and a snowwoman? Snow-
balls.” The humor in the joke derives from the coincidence of the lack of
a word or concise phrase to differentiate a snowman from a snowwoman
and the excessive response. The word “snowballs” introduces an excess
because here it signifies two separate things simultaneously: it refers at
once to testicles made out of snow and to the tightly packed sphere of
snow that one throws at one’s friends. The joke also profits from the

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fact that we don’t typically think of snowballs in relation to testicles. As a

result, the joke catches us by surprise with the excess of the punch line.
“Snowballs” doesn’t seem like an excessive word, but the point is that
every word in language has an excessive dimension. Nowhere is this more
visible than in the terminology that surrounds male sexuality.
The Multiple Phallic Signifiers
The phallus has a special status within language, a status that both psycho-
analysis and feminism— sometimes working in concert— have worked
to expose.17 For psychoanalysis, the phallus is not a sexual organ but a
signifier. It is not simply one signifier among many others, but the spe-
cial signifier that stands apart and hides the absence of a ground for the
system of signification. In this sense, the privilege of the phallus stems
from its imposture: it is the one signifier that appears to have an anchor-
ing power that it lacks. While all other signifiers gain their significance
through their relation to other signifiers, the phallic signifier refers only
to itself. It is the basis for all other signification, but it can only play this
role as a signifier lacking sense.
The system of signifiers functions through an absence that keeps
signification open. There is no final word that would put an end to the
process of signification. As a result, we can always say more. But the other
result is that meaning is necessarily provisional and tenuous, vulnerable
at any time to fall into non-meaning. The phallic signifier covers the ab-
sence within the system of signification and creates the illusion of mean-
ing. As Jacques Lacan points out in Seminar VIII, “the privileged value of
this signifier” results from the fact that it is “the signifier for the point
where the signifier is missing.”18 Unlike the other signifiers, there is no
signified for the phallic signifier. It does not signify “penis” but rather
the act of signification as such. The phallus, as Lacan argues, is a signifier
without a signified, a signifier that means nothing but appears to mean
everything. There is an inherent comedy in the phallic signifier: it lacks a
signified and simultaneously it signifies all signification. This comic struc-
ture of the phallus is why we spend so much time repeating the seemingly
endless variations of this signifier.
There are multiple words for the phallic signifier. These various
terms don’t typically indicate any difference in signification. One can re-
fer to the phallus as a “cock,” “dick,” “member,” “wiener,” “dong,” “tool,”
“bone,” “pole,” “pud,” “pecker,” “prick,” “rod,” “tallywhacker,” “widdler,”

119
or “johnson,” and none of these different signifiers signify differently.

Even though a speaker might refer to a “prick” instead of a “dick,” no
listener would understand that the speaker was trying to make a point
through this word choice. The multiple words for phallus allow speaking
beings to vary their profanities, but this quantity of words doesn’t serve
any signifying purpose within language. It has the status of a genuine
excess that indicates the excessiveness of language itself. English has too
many words for the phallus, just as it has too many words on the whole,
and this specific excess stands in for the excess of language as such. We
have more terms for “phallus” than for “table” because the phallic signi-
fier is itself inherently excessive in a way that the signifier for an eating
surface is not.
There is also an enjoyment attached to the use and invention of
phallic signifiers that doesn’t occur with the signifier for a table. We have
an apparently endless capacity for inventing new versions of the phallic
signifier, a capacity that will result in the above list becoming completely
out of date in a hundred years. The enjoyment of using and inventing
phallic signifiers derives from the intersection of lack and excess in these
signifiers. These signifiers signify an absence within the system of signifi-
cation, and when we repeat them, we fill this absence excessively.
We find ways to introduce a reference to the phallic signifier when
situations give us a slight opening. Many jokes begin with the ability of
so many different words to stand in for the phallic signifier, such as the
classic, “Is that a pencil in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”
The joke operates by confusing the pencil and the penis, but this confu-
sion has its basis in “pencil” as another version of the phallic signifier.
This is also why we can find humor in references to a topic being “hard,”
such as “it’s hard to talk about masturbation.” There is almost no barrier
to the reach of jokes involving the phallic signifier. It encompasses many
common adjectives (“stiff,” “hard,” “rigid,” “erect,” “tall,” and so on) and
many nouns (“member,” “pole,” “pencil,” “stick,” “branch,” and so on).
When one sees the wide reach of the phallic signifier, it becomes difficult
to avoid telling jokes about it.
The special status of the phallic signifier as the signifier that covers
a missing signifier distinguishes it from the signifier for female genitalia.
There are far more jokes in circulation about the phallus than about the
vagina. The disproportion also holds for the number of words that signify
each organ. Though the terms for both male and female genitalia trans-
gress the rules of polite discourse and thus carry with them a certain in-
herent enjoyment, the versions of the phallic signifier are far more widely
used and multiple than those for the female genitalia. If one made a list

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of the common English terms for each, the words for the male genitalia
would outnumber those for the female genitalia by at least a three-to-one
ratio (and English is not anomalous in this).
In addition, even though the versions of the phallic signifier are
profane, they are nonetheless more acceptable than their female coun-
terparts. One can say “dick” in an office or a classroom without being
fired or sent to the principal’s office, but the use of the term “cunt” would
have much more dire consequences.19 But we can take this contrast even
further. The most obscene word for the male sexual organ is less offensive
than the least obscene word for the female genitalia. One can say “prick”
or “cock” in public with less repercussions than the relatively innocuous
“box.” This vast difference is not just the index of a sexist society (though
it is that as well), but also the indication that the phallic signifier signifies
nothing. In contrast, the signifier for the female genitalia is a signifier
with a signified and is thus patently more obscene.
Because the phallus is an imposture— a signifier that has no signi-
fied— it has an implicitly comic status. When this imposture collapses,
the subject’s excessive attempt to hide the lacking signifier come to light,
and comedy ensures. As Jennifer Friedlander puts it in The Feminine Look,
“imposture is a precarious strategy that carries high stakes— the claim to
possession is complete— but if it goes awry (and there are endless ways
that it can and does), everything is lost.”20 At the moment when “every-
thing is lost” for the one purporting to bear the phallus, grand comedy
ensues, as is evinced by Friedlander’s ingenious example of imposture—
the toupee. The man wearing a well-made toupee can successfully hide
his baldness (or, in psychoanalytic terms, his castration, the absence of
a phallic signified), but at any point when the toupee falls even slightly
out of alignment, not only does the man’s baldness become obvious to
all observers, but so does his embarrassing attempt to cover it up. As with
many political scandals, in the case of baldness the cover-up is worse than
the crime itself. The cover-up exposes the man as a lacking subject who
has responded to his lack with an excessive imposture. The man with a
toupee ajar never fails to provoke laughs, while we just ignore the bald
man who accepts his baldness.21
The phallic signifier exceeds the system of signification. It stands
out from all other signifiers that have a clear signified attached to them.
But this excess stems from its association with the absence that structures
every system of signification. The comedy of language thus finds itself
crystallized in the phallic signifier. We laugh at someone articulating a
version of the phallic signifier or even exposing the penis because these
instances of excessive phallicism reveal the phallus as a signifier of lack.
The phallus is nothing but the explicit form of the signifier as such.22

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Trouble in Signification
The relationship that language effects between lack and excess is exem-
plified in the middle of Ernst Lubitsch’s comedy Trouble in Paradise (1932).
Lubitsch creates comedy by showing an excessive response to lack, which
is precisely the nature of language’s response to the human animal’s lack.
The film depicts the romance of two thieves, Gaston Monescu (Herbert
Marshall) and Lily Vautier (Miriam Hopkins), who meet in Venice while
trying to rob each other. Moving on to Paris, the two decide to swindle a
wealthy perfume-manufacturing executive, Mariette Colet (Kay Francis),
and Gaston gains her confidence and affection when he becomes her
secretary. Acting as her secretary, however, places Gaston in a position of
vulnerability. He is not only the most wanted thief in Europe (and thus
potentially identifiable among the worldly company that Colet keeps),
but in Venice he had encountered one of Colet’s current suitors, François
Filiba (Edward Everett Horton). Gaston posed as a doctor before knock-
ing Filiba unconscious and robbing him. If Filiba identifies him as the
thief from Venice, Gaston would be arrested on the spot, and as one of
Colet’s suitors, Filiba will certainly see Gaston again.
At a party, Filiba does see Gaston, but Gaston is posing as Colet’s
secretary, Monsieur Lavalle. After Colet introduces the two men to each
other, Lubitsch cuts from Filiba looking at Gaston to Gaston looking
askance at Filiba noticing him. When Gaston realizes that Filiba is on the
verge of recognizing him and thereby landing him in prison, he does
not do what we would expect and hide from Filiba’s scrutiny or discreetly
sneak away from the party. Instead, Lubitsch shows Gaston approach
Filiba and say to him, “Pardon me, monsieur, but I have the feeling that
we’ve met somewhere before.” The act of presuming to know the man
who is about to remember him completely changes the situation. Filiba
replies, “Sorry, I don’t seem to recall the occasion. I’m afraid . . .” Gaston
cuts him off and admits to being mistaken. After this exchange, Filiba
becomes increasingly sure that they have never met. Filiba tells his com-
panion, “That man never met me, and he knows it. Trying to make social
connections.” Gaston’s excessive response to Filiba works to great comic
effect and at the same time successfully hides his identity.23
Moments later in the film, Gaston displays a similar type of response
when Adolf Giron (C. Aubrey Smith), Colet’s longtime accountant, in-
quires about his family connections. Giron knows other members of the
Lavalle family from Marseille (where Gaston claims to be from), and he
wants to ensure that Lavalle is who he says he is. Gaston must evade the
questions, but he does so in a way that turns the tables on Giron, much
as he did with Filiba. In the middle of the interrogation, Gaston, who is

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examining the company books, accuses Giron of bringing up the subject

of Gaston’s family relations in order to distract him from this examina-
tion. Instead of remaining the object of Giron’s suspicion, Gaston implies
that he suspects Giron. Giron asks threateningly, “Are you insinuating
that this is not an honest report?” Gaston responds, “I am only insinuat-
ing that you are nervous.” The question of the truthfulness of Giron’s
report comes to take precedence over that of Gaston’s relation to the
Lavalle family in Marseille. In his interaction with both Filiba and Giron,
Gaston overreacts to disguise his own vulnerability to their questions con-
cerning his identity. He confronts his own lack with an excessive response
that refocuses attention away from this lack.
During these interactions, Gaston acts just like language itself. He
does not attempt directly to compensate for his vulnerability, to adapt
to his dangerous environment. In short, his response doesn’t follow the
adaptive evolutionary model. Gaston’s excessive response to vulnerability
entails great risk: he exposes himself fully to Filiba’s inspection and even
encourages it, and by accusing Giron of theft, he turns him into a suspi-
cious enemy rather than a potential friend. In the same way, language,
unlike the development of sharp fangs or a third ear through natural
selection, creates new dangers at the same time that it allows potential
speaking beings to avoid old ones. The excess of language, like Gaston’s
excess, is a perilous path, but it is also a funny path. We laugh at Gaston
for the same reason that the child amuses itself with the variegations
of language.
The Ability to Say the Wrong Thing
Language is an excess that emerges out of lack, but its effect on the
animal that begins to speak also marries lack and excess. The speaking
being is burdened by desire or lack but equally by enjoyment or excess.
No one who experienced only desire or lack would go on living, and no
one could survive constantly awash in enjoyment or excess. But fortu-
nately subjects almost never experience either desire or enjoyment in an
unadulterated form. Most of the time, we find enjoyment in our desire
(even though we’re lacking), and we continue to desire while we enjoy
ourselves (even as we’re in the midst of excess). Though only a being of
excess can kill itself, we kill ourselves— or contemplate it— when we feel
bereft of enjoyment and can no longer enjoy desiring. The subject who
becomes a subject of pure lack is a good candidate for suicide. But times
of extreme depression and times of pure elation are rare. As beings of

123
language, we spend almost all our time not just between lack and excess
but experiencing both at the same time.
We respond excessively to lack, and excess has the effect of pro-
ducing lack. This paradox is the product of language and testifies to the
comic status of the signifier. Though every signifier does not strike us
as immediately hilarious, every signifier does have the basic structure of
comedy insofar as it unites lack and excess. Meaning hides this structure
because it suggests that signifiers exist just to serve our need to com-
municate. It creates the impression that the signifier helps us to adapt
to our environment, that it is an evolutionary tool and not the derailing
of the human animal. But the meaning of a signifier is always secondary
to the satisfaction that it produces. When subjects employ signifiers, the
enjoyment that these signifiers provide counts for more than the message
they communicate. This is where the inherent comedy of the signifier
becomes most visible.
We laugh at every instance where the subject speaks too much and
thereby reveals the excessiveness of the signifier. For example, when Po-
lonius gives parting advice to his son Laertes in Hamlet, it is clear that
Laertes wants to leave quickly, but Polonius continues to bombard Laertes
with fatherly advice that has become renowned for its inanity. He tells
him: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be, / For loan oft loses both itself
and friend, / And borrowing dulleth th’ edge of husbandry. / This above
all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, /
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”24 In most performances of
the play, we see Laertes and his sister indicating to the audience, inaud-
ibly, their exasperation with their father’s excess. Shakespeare uses these
lines to mock Polonius and derives humor from his words. Even though
Shakespeare captures the sublimity of language, he depicts the comedy
of language through characters, like Polonius, who simply say too much.
The excess of language is also evident when subjects use a more or-
nate language than is necessary. Rather than employing too many words,
they speak too eloquently for the situation in which they find themselves.
This is the case with the various pedantic characters in Shakespeare’s
plays, like Polonius in Hamlet and Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The
attempt to display learning has the effect of exposing an absence of
learning, a failure to understand the situation and the language that
the situation demands. Shakespeare’s pedants use language to excess.
In doing so, they reveal the excessive nature of language. They are not
trying to communicate information but to impress those with a higher
social rank. They speak excessively in order to see their own social status
rise, though the effort always, in Shakespeare’s plays, backfires and leads
to their comic undoing.

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In addition to those who speak too eloquently, others, in an at-

tempt to do so, use words that they don’t understand. This is the humor
displayed by Dogberry in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, by Mrs.
Slipslop in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, and by Mrs. Malaprop in Rich-
ard Sheridan’s The Rivals. In each case, the characters try to say what
they lack the vocabulary to say. The result is the comedy of the signi-
fier’s excess— a malapropism. The instances of malapropism reveal that
subjects aren’t using language to communicate but to gain satisfaction
through the recognition that it will accord them. We use words that we
don’t understand in the hope of impressing our interlocutors with our
facility with language, even though the result is often the opposite.
We see this in the case of Mrs. Slipslop, the maid of Lady Booby
in Joseph Andrews. In almost every sentence that she utters, Slipslop in-
cludes a malapropism. Fielding makes clear that the other characters
have trouble even understanding what she’s trying to say. In an early
exchange with Joseph Andrews, she objects when he agrees with one of
her absurd statements, and she interprets this agreement as an insult.
She says, “Do you intend to result my passion? Is it not enough, ungrate-
ful as you are, to make no return to all the favours I have done you: but
you must treat me with ironing? Barbarous monster! how have I deserved
that my passion should be resulted and treated with ironing?”25 On two
occasions in this outburst, Slipslop replaces “insult” with “result” and
“irony” with “ironing.” These errors of vocabulary mark a point at which
language is excessive. When we choose the words that we employ, we
believe that we do so in order to communicate an idea, but Slipslop’s
incessant malapropisms show her desire to make an impression on the
listener, even at the expense of being understood.
Slipslop has an acquaintance with words that she doesn’t know. Her
acquaintance with words exceeds her lacking knowledge. She does know,
however, that she wants to impress her interlocutors. When she speaks,
she reveals that language is not a tool of communication but a system
for evoking a response in the other, not a medium for information but
a means of enjoyment. Most of us who speak without recourse to mala-
propisms manage to hide the nature of language from ourselves and from
those with whom we are speaking. Communication functions as a fetish
to obscure the desire to impress our listeners with our speech. Though
most language users do not use malapropisms as often as Slipslop does,
we share her desire when we speak. Our sophistication as speakers masks
what Slipslop lays bare. There is linguistic excess not just in Slipslop’s ab-
surdities but in even the most grammatically correct sentence.
The comedy of language derives from the subject’s relationship to
signification, a relationship made explicit by Mrs. Slipslop and her fellow

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champions of the malapropism. The speaking subject enters into lan-

guage confronted with a demand from a social authority. This demand
produces a desire in the speaking subject, a desire to figure out what
desire of the social authority lurks behind the stated demand. This con-
frontation with the social authority’s demand produces a lacking subject
that seeks the solution to its lack in its very source, in the system of signi-
fication. The subject’s excessive engagement with signification— through
finding the right job, rooting for the proper sports team, wearing the
correct clothes, or, most importantly, saying the apt words— bespeaks an
attempt to fill its lack by appealing successfully to the desire of the social
authority. The difference between wearing a New York Yankees baseball
cap and employing a malapropism is quantitative rather than qualitative.
Both gestures evince the subject’s excessive response to the lack produced
by the individual’s subjection to the signifier. The subject does too much
to fit in because it can never escape its exclusion.
Linguistic Maladaptation
We attain the capacity for comedy from the moment that we enter the
realm of signification. Though people can laugh at the antics of animals,
animals, insofar as they exist outside language, are incapable of comedy.
Videos of humorous animals now provide entertainment and seem to sug-
gest that comedy can exist outside of the realm of language. But it is the
people who frame their activities who are the real source of the comedy
that seems to emanate from the animals themselves. Without the signifier,
we don’t have access to the comic as such.
Even though the emergence of language produces lacking subjects
who can never overcome this lack, it is also the source of an excess that
compensates for a lifetime of lack and even sometimes renders that lack
enjoyable. But the key to language lies in how it aligns lack with excess.
This alignment occurs momentarily, but these moments reveal the nature
of language: it is lacking and excessive at the same time, and this is what
makes it essentially comic.
One can think about lack and excess in language in relation to
description and performance. Language provides an inadequate de-
scription of the world, but it excessively performs this description, which
allows us to understand what it says. This is clear from the joke: “Exag-
geration is a million times worse than understatement.” The comedy here
arises because the sentence purports to comment on the relationship
between exaggeration and understatement but then performs what it

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describes. Here we see lack and excess come together in an exemplary

way. Language cannot fully describe a phenomenon— it cannot tell us
precisely about the relationship between exaggeration and understate-
ment, for instance— and it compensates for this by excessively perform-
ing what it fails to describe completely. One laughs at the joke when one
recognizes that it indicates the relationship between exaggeration and
understatement through performance rather than through description,
though the joke does this in the guise of description. The performative
quality of our utterances is part of the excess of language, but language
performs while it appears to be simply describing, which gives its perfor-
mativity an excessive quality.
In response to Steven Pinker’s attempt to demystify the comedy of
language and restore its dignity, we should emphasize its comic absence
of dignity, its capacity for producing a sentence like “Colorless green
ideas sleep furiously.”26 Though this is a syntactically correct sentence, it
has, to put it in Frege’s terms, neither a sense nor a meaning. Frege be-
lieves that we use sense to produce a meaning but fails to see that what we
enjoy about language lies neither in its sense nor in its meaning. Subjects
enjoy the moment when sense meets the nonsense of signification, the
point where the form of the signifier outstrips the content. We have no
immediate access to this nonsense. One must enter into signification and
the world of sense in order to discover the nonsense that holds the key to
comedy. The supposed dignity of the signifier is nothing but an excuse
for the discovery of its fundamental comedy. But perceiving this comedy
requires a precise relationship to its source. Too much proximity or too
much distance destroys the comic effect.

6
Distance and Proximity
The Fortunate Fall
One of the chief difficulties in defining comedy is the breadth of the

category itself. Comedy is subjective: what leads one person to laugh will
lead another to cringe and yet another to cry. When one tries to list the
great films in different genres, comedies will always garner the most dis-
agreement. Some people find the Marx Brothers hilarious, while others
find them tedious. Some love the gross-out comedy of Peter and Bobby
Farrelly, and others dismiss it as crass stupidity. There are few comedians
who earn universal cheers— even Charlie Chaplin has his detractors—
while general acclaim greets dramatic actors like Julianne Moore and
Denzel Washington. This disparity of reactions to comedy is not just the
result of a wide variety of personal taste. In that case, the same dispar-
ity would exist in the consideration of drama as well. The vast subjective
differences concerning comedy are not the product of taste but of the
specific structure of comedy itself.
Because comedy relies on the overlap between excess and lack or
between transcendence and finitude, the spectator must relate to the
comic object in a way that makes this overlap evident. The perspective
that one has on the comic object changes how one classifies this object.
If the spectator views the comic object as purely excessive or purely lack-
ing, the spectator will not be able to see the comedy where others do.
We cannot laugh at gods, nor can we laugh at ants, unless a work of art
undertakes to personify them.1 Gods exceed us and have nothing to do
with finitude, while we never see ants transcend their finite condition.
Comedy requires spectators to be located in just the right position, where
they can view excess and lack intersect in the comic object. Comedy fails
so often not because comedians aren’t funny but because spectators don’t
view them from the proper place. The subjective status of comedy testifies
to the tenuousness of its structure.
Much of the failure to laugh at female stand-up comics stems from
the inability of spectators, especially male spectators, to confront women
as beings of excess. When Amy Schumer jokes freely about her sexuality,
some categorize these jokes as being in poor taste because of precisely
this inability. In one of her routines, she says, “I have an excuse, actually,
127

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why I’ve been drinking so much. I haven’t said this out loud yet. This
is exciting. I’m drinking for two. . . . I mean, just for now. Somebody’s
being evicted.” Schumer’s joke violates several taboos. She mocks the
pregnant woman who says that she is eating for two by replacing eating
with drinking, which violates the absolute prohibition on drinking for
pregnant women. But then she concludes the joke by linking the fetus to
an unwanted tenant and abortion to the tenant’s eviction. Throughout
this joke, Schumer emphasizes her own excesses, which is what makes her
unfunny for those who consider women, especially pregnant women, as
beings of pathos.
When we say that someone lacks a sense of humor and cannot ap-
preciate comedy, we see in this person a particular relationship to lack
and excess. Those who lack a sense of humor occupy one of two opposed
positions. Either they see everyone as pathetic, as worthy of pity rather
than as an object for comedy, or they experience no connection to others
at all. In the one case, they identify themselves fully with the potential
object of comedy, and this total identification renders humor impossible.
Someone who identifies with the suffering of a person who falls cannot
laugh at the fall, even if the fall is intended to generate comedy. In the
other case, they don’t identify at all with the comic object, and thus it has
no power to move them. The comic object seems like an alien presence
that has no relation to the subject. Those who lack a sense of humor suf-
fer from this lack because they are either too connected or not connected
enough to others. Even those who have a sense of humor at times enter
into one of these two positions in relation to the comic object. There is
no way to maintain constantly the proper distance that enables comedy
to emerge.
Often, even a person with a good sense of humor will fail to see the
comic element in an event that garners laughter from others because of
the specific relationship that this person has with the participant in the
comic event. This occurred with me one day at home when I slipped on
the top step and fell down the stairs. Though the fall was painful for me
personally, it also offered a nice insight into the dynamics of comedy that
I could see while lying at the bottom of the stairs. What gave this event an
exemplary status concerning the problem of subjectivity in comedy were
the responses of my eight-year-old twins and my spouse, who watched the
event together.
Despite seeing the fall from roughly the same physical perspective,
the young boys and their mother had completely opposed reactions. Both
boys burst out laughing, while my spouse yelled in horror and came run-
ning to check on my condition, certain that I was badly injured. One
could provide a wild psychoanalysis of each reaction. Perhaps the chil-

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DI S TANCE AND P ROXIMITY
dren were ecstatic that the source of prohibition in their lives might be
toppling to his death. Maybe my spouse came running to ensure that I
was really dead and not simply injured. But assuming that none of the
parties involved wished for my demise, the explanation for their contrast-
ing reactions stems from the different position that I occupied relative to
each. Even though everyone involved watched the same person fall, the
person occupied a different psychic relationship to each viewer.
For the twins, the fall was funny because I was a figure of excess.
If not an excessively tyrannical paternal authority, I was nonetheless an
authority— and thus endowed with excess relative to them. I determined
many aspects of their lives, such as bedtime or eating regimen, and al-
lowed for no serious debate. In fact, for children, all adults hold this posi-
tion of excess through the control that they are able to have over their
own lives (preparing their own meals, driving cars, going out when they
desire, and so on), an authority that comes with age. At the moment of the
fall, the excess embodied by my authority intersected with a lack of con-
trol over my own body. They laughed at the sudden coincidence of au-
thoritative excess and the authority’s lack. They saw the event from the
proper distance and thus could laugh.
The response of my spouse equally bespeaks her relationship to
me. Clearly, for her I am not a figure of authority or a being of excess.
As she watched me tumbling down the stairs, she experienced only pa-
thos. In her mind, I was a finite creature risking serious injury or death,
not a being capable of transcending itself. Her concern for my health
depended on a conception of me as a completely lacking being, as a vul-
nerable body. Her conception was not completely unfounded, since I had
fallen down the stairs a few years before and had suffered a broken toe.
But this view functioned as an absolute barrier to laughter. No one can
laugh at those we deem pathetic. In this case, my spouse lacked the sense
of humor that the twins exhibited, but this lack was the direct result of
her position relative to the comic object. She was too close to find any-
thing funny in the fall.
It is tempting to chalk up the contrasting responses to the callous-
ness of youth and the love of someone for a romantic partner. But the
structure of the relationships betrays this happy analysis. The laughter
of the young boys actually evinces the high regard that they had for me
at the time, while the horror that their mother displayed reflected her
image of me as a being of lack who was in constant danger of injury or
death. In this sense, laughing at someone’s folly can function as an indica-
tion of respect, and evincing concern can be the sign of its absence. We
laugh at those whom we consider excessive or capable of excess. We pity
those whom we deem fully ensconced in lack.2

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Popular kids laughing at the nerdy kid who trips over his own shoe-
laces seems to belie this analysis. They experience a comic event involv-
ing someone whom they see as completely lacking. In other words, the
popular kids appear to be far away from the stumbling nerd. But this is
not the case. Though the popular kids may believe that they see the nerd
from a distance, their laughter indicates that they don’t know what they
believe. They unconsciously recognize their proximity to the nerd, who
must be, for them, a figure of excess and lack like themselves. The nerd
achieves a type of transcendence through his very ostracism that those
ensconced in the strictures of popularity lack. That is to say, the nerd is
the opposite of a wounded kitten for the subjects laughing at him. They
can only laugh at someone with whom they identify and simultaneously
view from a distance. We laugh when we are both close enough and far
enough away.
There is a third position— in addition to the comic and the
proximate— that we can occupy relative to the comic object. We might
view this object as beneath our concern, meriting neither laughter nor
pity. Sometimes we feel contempt for the helplessness of this object, but
most often we don’t think of it at all. We remain at such a distance from
the object that we are able to disinvest ourselves from it and its fate. The
laughing spectator brings together distance and proximity, and the com-
passionate spectator enters into a psychic bond with the object through
identification. The disinvested spectator regards the object from a dis-
tance. The lack of any identification makes compassion impossible, but
it also proves a barrier to comedy.
The position of disinvestment is rare in works of art— if a work of
art generated disinvestment, no one would want to see or hear it— but it
is much more common than comedy or pathos in everyday life. We spend
most of our time disinvested in the lives of those who exist around us. We
don’t notice the quiet suffering of the person sitting next to us on the
subway or the troubled expression of someone that we pass on the street.
Disinvestment enables us to conduct our everyday lives.3 Without it, we
would spend all our time either weeping for those we encounter during
the day or laughing at them. Disinvestment is necessarily the predomi-
nant mode of interaction with others.
Comedy exists between compassion and disinvestment, but it is not
a compromise position between the two. Instead, it results from the sub-
ject’s capacity for simultaneously identifying with an object and remain-
ing at a distance from it. Without this ability, the comic experience would
be impossible. But the comic experience is always tenuous, always ready
to fall into either compassion on the one hand or disinvestment on the
other. Though we often associate comedy with distance, it is equally im-

131
portant to associate it with proximity and identification. Comedy cannot

survive the absence of either.
Envisioning the End of the World
To see the opposition between the three subjective positions, it suffices to

examine three different films that depict the destruction or impending
destruction of the Earth. Only one of these films is a comedy— Stanley
Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb (1964). The film recounts a renegade American commander who
orders his bombers to drop their nuclear weapons on targets inside the
Soviet Union. Though the military manages to recall or help the Soviets
shoot down the planes, one plane is only crippled and delivers its pay-
load. The danger of this bomb is heightened for the spectator when the
Soviet ambassador explains that his country has constructed a doomsday
machine that will destroy the world in the event of a nuclear attack.4
But when the American plane drops a nuclear bomb that triggers the
Soviet doomsday machine at the end of the film, no spectator would be
brought to tears. Kubrick presents the total destruction as a comic event
occasioned by the stupidity of the military leaders and the societies that
developed weapons capable of this devastation. The comedy does not,
however, reside solely in the tone of the film. Kubrick positions spectators
so that they are close enough to the characters in the film that they can
see their failings but far enough away so that they can see the excesses of
these characters.
This is clearly the case with President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sel-
lers). For instance, when we watch Muffley struggle in his telephone call
with the Soviet leader, we at once identify with his difficulties and main-
tain a distance from them. Muffley calls the Soviet premier, Dmitri Kissov,
to warn him about the incoming plane and the danger that it represents,
but at the moment of the call, Dmitri is drunk and at the residence of his
mistress. The condition of Dmitri creates the proper relationship between
identification and distance required to generate comedy. Spectators can
identify with the difficulties of talking with a drunken interlocutor on the
phone, while at the same time finding themselves at a distance from a
discussion about the potential end of the world. Throughout the conver-
sation, the film plays with distance and proximity, as the two characters
move from serious discussions about how to stop the renegade plane to
arguments about who feels sorry about the situation.5
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CHAP T E R 6
proximity. It creates identification with the events that occur while at the
same time enabling spectators to view them as if they were happening
to someone at a distance from them. The destruction of the Earth is not
completely insignificant for the spectator, but neither does it reduce the
spectator to tears. The final image of the Earth’s destruction is the ulti-
mate excessive event that the failings of the characters produce. We see
the perfect coincidence of excess and lack.6
Most often, the destruction of the Earth is not the vehicle for com-
edy. In Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (2009), for instance, billions of people
die as a result of a massive warming of the Earth’s core that has cataclys-
mic effects on the Earth’s surface, rendering it uninhabitable. Though
most members of the small group of characters that the film follows sur-
vive this disaster, the film also focuses on the destruction of the planet,
which it does not present as a humorous event. It is not Dr. Strangelove;
the tone of the two films is radically different. Despite its exaggerated
story, 2012 extols its seriousness. The reason for its lack of humor does
not reside in its serious tone, however. Instead, 2012 cannot be funny be-
cause it positions the spectator within the finite world of the characters.
One experiences the destruction of the planet as an imminent threat
from which one can gain no distance. Like the characters depicted in the
film, one imagines oneself struggling to survive and senses the difficul-
ties of this struggle. The distance that Dr. Strangelove offers the spectator
does not exist in 2012.
The beginning of Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges, 1980) depicts the im-
pending destruction of the Earth from the opposite perspective. Though
the film does show people struggling with the threat to the planet posed
by Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow), it also illustrates Ming’s own per-
spective on the destruction of the Earth, a perspective largely absent from
any other filmic representation of a similar event. Usually, the destruction
of our planet creates pathos or, in the case of Dr. Strangelove, comedy, but
it almost never coincides with disinvestment. But this is what occurs with
Ming. He wants to destroy Earth not because of its significance for him
but because of its insignificance. Like a young child burning an ant with
a magnifying glass, Ming unleashes horrors on the Earth despite his lack
of concern for it and its inhabitants. Though there are moments of great
humor in Flash Gordon, the potential destruction of the Earth is not one
of them. Earth arouses no pathos for Ming, just an absence of concern
that fuels his satisfaction in destroying it.
When we imagine Earth’s eventual destruction, we typically do not
do so from a distance, but rather identify fully with the event and those
who will suffer it. We view this catastrophe from the perspective of pathos.
But as the films Dr. Strangelove and Flash Gordon illustrate, there is nothing

133
necessarily pathetic about any specific event. The status of the event—
comic, pathetic, or insignificant— depends on the position that the ob-
serving subject occupies. We can laugh or remain indifferent to anything,
no matter how much suffering the event might entail. It is this capacity
for psychic distance that is always at work in the structure of comedy.
Laughing from a Distance
Comedy often— perhaps almost always— focuses on horrible events, but

it rarely does so from the midst of these events. In what is unarguably
his finest film, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Woody Allen offers one
of the great definitions of comedy. Through the buffoonish character of
television sitcom producer Lester (Alan Alda), Allen relates comedy to
tragedy through the category of distance— primarily spatial but also tem-
poral. Lester argues that distance is the essence of all comedy, quoting
without attribution Steve Allen’s recitation of an old theater adage that
“comedy is tragedy plus time.” This adage receives its most humorous
expression in Woody Allen’s film.
During the filming of a documentary about his work in television,
Lester pontificates about his own theory of comedy. He claims:
What makes New York such a funny place is that there’s so much ten-
sion and pain and craziness and misery here. They got— that’s the first
part of comedy. But you see you’ve got to get some distance from it, you
know what I mean. The thing to remember about comedy is: if it bends,
it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not funny. So you’ve got to get back from the
pain, you see what I mean. They asked me up in Harvard, a bunch of
kids asked me, “What’s comedy?” So I said— and this is part of what I’m
trying to say about getting back from it— I said, “Comedy is tragedy plus
time. Tragedy plus time.” See, when, the night Lincoln was shot, you
couldn’t joke about it. You couldn’t joke about that; you just couldn’t
do it. Now, time has gone by, and now it’s fair game. See what I mean:
it’s tragedy plus time.7
Though the film undermines the character of Lester through and

through— his documentarian Cliff (Woody Allen) juxtaposes clips of Les-
ter and Mussolini— what he says here nonetheless has resonance. This
idea that comedy, unlike tragedy, requires distance is deeply rooted in
our usual ways of thinking about comedy.8
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our first instinct is to assess the physical state of the person. It is only later,
with some spatial and temporal distance, that we can think back on the
fall and laugh. Even the person who falls, with the aid of this distance, can
find some humor in it. But caught up in the risk of the moment, it seems
as if comedy is impossible to find unless one has some distance from the
event that befalls one. The object of comedy doesn’t matter to the person
laughing: the events that capture our interest and psychic investment are
not amusing.9
The centrality of disinvestment in comedy leads Henri Bergson to
claim that amusement is not an emotion at all. It involves instead an
absence of emotion. According to Bergson, emotion constitutes a bar-
rier to laughter. As he points out in his book on laughter, emotion leads
to sadness and seriousness rather than laughter. Bergson notes, “highly
emotional souls, in tune and in unison with life, in whom every event
would be sentimentally prolonged and re- echoed, would neither know
nor understand laughter. Try, for a moment, to become interested in
everything that is being said and done; act, in imagination, with those
who act, and feel with those who feel; in a word, give your sympathy its
widest expansion: as though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the
flimsiest of objects assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over
everything.”10 Bergson subtracts humor from the emotions because he
associates it with an activity rather than with a response to events. Amuse-
ment, for Bergson and many other theorists, is the prolongation of play
and the attitude that predominates in times of play, an attitude that de-
values or doesn’t take seriously the objects with which one interacts.
If we think of comedy as an extension of play, it seems that the idea
of distance becomes intrinsic to all comedy. Play can include any activity,
even the most destructive. The computer in War Games ( John Badham,
1983) plays global thermonuclear war as a game that is no different from
chess, except that its outcome is less in doubt. Children play at fighting
and at serious occupations like doctor and nurse. Activities transform into
play at the moment one ceases to take them seriously. Rather than invest-
ing oneself fully in the activity, one adopts a different mode in which prac-
tical concerns, especially concerns about utility, no longer count. During
a playful fight, for instance, we know that the result of the fight will not
be serious injury or death. And if at any point serious injury seems likely
(or occurs), the play instantly stops, and another attitude supervenes.
Play depends on psychic removal from practical consequences or utility.
If play doesn’t serve any ultimate purpose, this confirms its status as play
rather than impugning it. During play, we disinvest and recognize that
the game we’re playing has no importance in the world.
And yet, people spend a great deal of their time involved with play-
ing and with comedy. Even if play isn’t serious, many of us take it seri-

135
ously. There are many people who care more about the result of the
Super Bowl than about the fate of their marriage or their job. There are
others who slide into a depression because they lose a game of chess.
What distinguishes play is not its lack of seriousness but the break from
social utility that occurs when we play. We don’t play to accomplish social
goals but to find respite from the pursuit of these goals. Throughout our
everyday (and non-playful) life, we operate according to a principle of
utility. Most conspicuously, we go to work in order to earn money and
earn money in order to have food and shelter. But during play, the role
of utility loses priority. The game becomes an end in itself. Play occurs
for its own sake, not for its social utility, and it provides relief from the
constant pressure of social utility. It would thus be incorrect to describe
our attitude toward play as one of distance and disengagement. We are
often more engaged when we play than when we participate in the seri-
ous activities of daily life.11
The necessity for engagement rather than distance holds for com-
edy as well. Like play, comedy requires that we disengage from the prob-
lem of social utility (which is why some theorists ascribe an inherently
radical or at least antisocial quality to comedy). Distance from everyday
concerns is exigent for comedy. Comedy can concern itself with the
everyday, but it must look on the everyday from a distanced perspective.
People sitting in their cars in a traffic jam can become funny only if we
examine this everyday situation from some remove. From the perspec-
tive of the situation itself, it is frustrating rather than comic. If we invest
ourselves in the goal of arriving at our destination, the traffic jam will
remain an annoyance rather than a source of humor. But by turning our
attention to the traffic jam as an end in itself, the annoyance becomes
potentially funny.
Rather than just thinking about the traffic jam in practical terms, we
can make a joke about it. We might say, “traffic has become so bad that I
have to leave work before I get there to get home on time.” Though this
isn’t a particularly good joke, it does lift the traffic jam from the terrain of
an impediment to arriving at my destination and considers it for its own
sake.12 My failure to arrive home on time leads to the excessive response
of leaving work without ever going. This coincidence is the source of the
joke’s humor. Even though the joke draws on the frustration of being
detained from a practical objective, one must set this objective aside in
order to find the humor in it.
Comedy necessitates a disinvestment from the utility of the event
taking place, but it also requires an investment in the event itself. This is
exactly what occurs when we experience comedy in novels, plays, films,
television shows, and sketches. It is always easier to find the humor in the
comic representation than in the would-be comic events that befall us in

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the course of our lives. The representation creates the combination of

disinvestment from the event’s utility and investment in the event that
comedy requires. Representation of any stripe is the most fertile ground
for comedy because the fact of representation itself produces the require-
ment for comedy— proper distance and the necessary proximity. We are
much less likely to encounter this combination outside the terrain of
comic representation, where we constantly experience disinvestment.
Distance or disinvestment does not alone produce comedy. They
lead to a lack of interest and an inability to find any humor in the object
of the comedy. If I tell a joke about an event that is too temporally or
spatially distant, people will not laugh because they will not be able to in-
vest themselves in the event. Though we don’t typically associate psychic
proximity with humor, it is just as necessary as distance. This leaves us in
a paradoxical situation when we want to tell a joke.
One of the common responses to a joke that targets a current event
is that one has told it “too soon.” We say “too soon” out of an awareness
that comedy depends on distance or else it intrudes on the domain of
pathos and fails to elicit laughs. A joke about the September 11, 2001, at-
tack on the World Trade Center might be funny now, but immediately
after the event comedians avoided all humor that touched on it. They
understood that the absence of the temporal distance requisite for com-
edy would result in no one finding their jokes funny. Spatial distance
seems equally necessary. Telling 9/11 jokes at the site of the attack might
provoke a stern critique even today, many years after the event. Tempo-
ral and spatial distance— and the disinvestment that accompanies this
distance— enable people to joke without intruding on the life-and-death
stakes of everyday existence.
The Possibility of Offense
Just as some jokes come “too soon,” others come too late. We need an
addition to the vocabulary of joke responses in order to accommodate
this opposite problem. To recount a joke too late is far worse than re-
counting it too soon. The joke told too late fails to activate the comic
register at all, while the joke told too soon misjudges where this register
lies, but it does nonetheless produce some comedy. The very response,
“too soon,” provides a tacit acknowledgment that the joke has partially
hit the mark, or else it would lack the capacity to offend. The joke that
comes too late, like a joke mocking Julius Caesar, offends no one because
no one cares anymore about its object.

137
Everyone, even Caesar’s contemporary admirers, have so much psy-

chic distance from him that they would be unable to laugh at a joke mak-
ing fun of him. A joke about Julius Caesar can’t offend anyone and thus
can’t be really funny. We don’t find it funny to say, “Caesar was looking
for a new job because he wanted to get away from all the office politics
and back-stabbing,” even though this is about the best Julius Caesar joke
around. In order to make a Caesar joke funny, one must lessen the dis-
tance. This occurs with the following joke: “You can turn any salad into
a Caesar salad if you stab it enough.” Here the humor derives not just
from Caesar himself as a historical figure, but also from the fact that the
eponymous salad has become dissociated from him as a historical figure,
so that connecting them in the joke produces comedy.
Not all historical figures are as distant from us as Caesar, however.
The persistence of a psychic investment in someone like the Virgin Mary
or Muhammad enables Muhammad or Virgin Mary jokes to remain pos-
sible and even allows them to proliferate. Jokes about Muhammad or the
Virgin Mary offend many believers. This is the index of their potential
humor. Possible offensiveness is not a sufficient condition for comedy, but
it is a necessary one. Though some statements are just offensive and not
comic, no comedy can avoid offensiveness altogether and remain funny.
Jokes that come too late, like jokes about Caesar, suffer from the
same malady that befalls the modern version of Christianity, according
to the diagnosis of Søren Kierkegaard. When Kierkegaard attacks Chris-
tendom in the name of an authentic Christianity, he criticizes a religious
institution that has lost its contemporaneousness with Christ. Authen-
tic Christians must experience the encounter with Christ not as an en-
counter with a figure from the ancient past who has an established and
unimpeachable symbolic position. This is the way that Christendom en-
counters Christ, and Christendom deprives potential Christians of the
most important element of the Christian experience— the possibility of
offense. Just like the joke that might come too soon and offend its hear-
ers, Christianity must risk offending those who encounter it. Without this
risk, Christianity loses the kernel of its appeal. Christendom is Christianity
that has come too late.13
In Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard offers a detailed argument
for the central role that the possibility of offense must occupy in the
believer’s experience. This possibility gives Christianity the power to in-
troduce value into an otherwise valueless existence. The possibility of of-
fense provides the basis for Kierkegaard’s conception of Christian faith.
He claims, “The possibility of offense is the crossroad, or it is like standing
at the crossroad. From the possibility of offense, one turns either to of-
fense or to faith, but one never comes to faith except from the possibility

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of offense.”14 Without the possibility of offense, the decision to become

a Christian would carry no weight, and everyone would opt for Christi-
anity. The central role that this possibility plays in Christianity marks a
parallel between the structure of Christianity and that of the joke. The
joke that lacks the possibility of offense doesn’t offend anyone, but it also
fails to amuse anyone. The possibility of offense in both Christianity and
comedy attests to the timeliness of both. If either loses this possibility,
they lose what is most essential about them and thereby lose all potential
adherents.
If an absence of distance hinders comedy and too much distance
destroys it, the comedian appears to be stuck searching for just the proper
distance— not too close and not too far, both temporally and spatially. In
one sense, this is correct: a good witticism or joke depends on the timing
of the person delivering it. If one makes the witty remark too soon, the au-
dience cannot understand the relationship between the remark and the
context. The result will be confusion rather than laughter. But if one waits
too long to deliver the line, the audience will expect it and thus meet it
with groans and not smiles. Timing is essential for comedy, which sug-
gests that comic ability derives from knowing how to avoid being either
too soon or too late.
But good timing alone cannot resolve the paradox of distance in
comedy. We cannot just introduce spatial or temporal distance from hor-
rific events and thereby render them funny. Too much distance destroys
comedy even more thoroughly than too much proximity. It was, in other
words, easier to laugh at Lincoln’s assassination on the very night that it
occurred than it will be in 10,000 years. This is the obvious shortcoming
of Lester’s reformulation of Steve Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanors. We
cannot reduce comedy to “tragedy plus time” but must instead rethink
our usual ideas of comedy’s relationship to distance. In order to appreci-
ate comedy, one must identify with the comic object and have distance
from it at the same time. When one experiences comedy, one identifies
with the comic object and also keeps one’s distance. Without this dual
operation of excessive identification and thorough distancing, no one
would find a comic object funny. Our laughter is the measure of proxim-
ity overlapping with distance. It is only in moments of this type of overlap
that comedy becomes possible.
A Freudian Slip
This overlap can occur even when we are in the midst of a terrible event.
During the trauma, we can simultaneously distance ourselves enough to

139
laugh. This is because we never experience a trauma immediately in a

manner purely immanent to the traumatic event. Trauma is only trauma
through the mediation that surrounds it and that it interrupts. This me-
diation is at once a distancing that functions as the condition of possi-
bility for trauma while removing the subject from it as it occurs. We don’t
experience a traumatic event outside of what mediates it but through
this mediation. In other words, in order to experience a trauma, we have
to identify with ourselves. We are removed from the event before we are
close to it, no matter how immediate it seems to us during the experi-
ence. This is why even the most traumatic event can be comic for the
subject. There is nothing in the object itself that rules comedy out entirely
or that produces it unfailingly. In order to experience comedy even in
trauma, we must experience the trauma from a distance and simultane-
ously identify ourselves with the traumatized subject.
This precise situation occurred with me personally during one of
the most physically painful events that I have ever endured— another fall,
but one that produced considerably more damage than the fall down the
stairs. Toward the end of winter in Vermont one year, the snow and ice
had largely melted from the streets, but isolated patches remained. I went
running with lessened alertness for the ice because the patches were so
small and clearly visible. But as I turned the final corner near my home,
I slipped on a bit of hidden ice and fell to the ground. Because the ice
caught me completely unaware, I didn’t even have time to extend my
hands to break the fall (and perhaps my wrists in the process). Instead,
the first parts of my body to strike the pavement were my two front teeth,
both of which shattered into tiny fragments. Even as I experienced waves
of horrible pain, I began to chuckle to myself at the image of my dramatic
fall and the image of the broken teeth. Though the many trips to the den-
tist afterward were less humorous, the fall itself, despite its physical and
psychic trauma, was a source of comedy. I could laugh from within the
terrible event itself. My distance from myself even during the fall enabled
the traumatic event to become comic. I was experiencing the event, but I
was also witnessing the event occur as an observer. I identified with myself,
but I also kept myself at a distance.15
Clearly, the comedy in this act required distance from intense pain
that I felt, but it also necessitated distance from my social position as a fit
runner and as a person with front teeth intact. During the fall, my inabil-
ity to control my own body became clear, and after the fall, the fragments
that were my front teeth created an odd appearance that we almost never
encounter. As I lay on the ground, I almost instantly imagined both the
comedy of the fall itself and the comedy of my new look. Insofar as I re-
mained invested in my self-image (either as a runner or as a person with
front teeth), I wouldn’t be able to laugh. Distance from my self-image

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was requisite. But at the same time, I had to identify with the dramatic
fall and the resulting disfigurement of my face. I had to identify, in other
words, with the point where I exceeded myself and yet remained myself.
Comedy and the Structure of Subjectivity
The coincidence of identification and distance seems impossible. Usually,

we either identify with others or distance ourselves from them. But this
dual operation is possible because of the structure of subjectivity itself.
The subject is not whole and thus can take up a divided relationship to
others. Comedy emerges out of the split within subjectivity that makes
this divided relationship possible. The signifier divides every subject, so
that the subject cannot ever attain perfect self-reflection but must always
relate to itself from a distance. As a result of its emergence through the
structure of signification and initial alienation in the signifier, the subject
is not simply identical to itself but must identify with itself. Each subject
can have multiple symbolic identities because it has no real identity.
The division within the subject manifests itself most clearly in the
act of speaking. When I utter a statement such as “I know how to count
to three,” a division exists between the I who utters the statement and
the I within the statement. Even though this second I refers to the person
speaking, the two forms of I do not coincide. According to Jacques Lacan,
this becomes clearest when speakers repeat the fact that they are articu-
lating a claim. In his Seminar VI on desire, Lacan claims that “a discourse
that formulates ‘I say that,’ and that adds, ‘and I repeat,’ does not say in
this ‘I repeat’ something useless, because it is said to distinguish the two
‘I’s’ that are in question, ‘the one that said that,’ and the one that adheres
to what that one has said.”16 When the subject notes that it is repeating
what it has already said, the necessity for the subject to identify with itself
reveals itself. But this effort at identification never succeeds and always
leaves a gap, the gap of the unconscious.
It is not coincidental that Freud dedicated one of his early books
to the question of jokes and what makes jokes funny. Freud’s great
discovery— the unconscious— is a necessary condition for comedy. With-
out the unconscious, human animals would never have invented comedy
and would never have invested themselves so seriously in humor. The un-
conscious is the point at which the subject exceeds itself, when it knows
more than it thinks that it knows and says more than it means to say. Be-
cause we exceed ourselves when we speak, psychoanalysis centers around
the act of speaking without regard for meaning. Free association— the

141
only rule of psychoanalysis— hopes to uncover the unconscious by en-

couraging subjects to speak the excess that they withhold in everyday
conversation. Even if no one can achieve genuine free association with-
out holding certain ideas back from the analyst, the existence of this rule
creates a place removed from everyday life and from the constraints on
excess in speech that govern the everyday. It is as if the subject in analysis
receives the license to remove itself from the rules concerning identifica-
tion and distance that govern everyday existence.
During our everyday existence, we work to distance ourselves from
the unconscious and identify with our symbolic position within society.
Through the act of symbolic identification, we try to convince ourselves
and others that we really are the position that we occupy, that we really
are parents or dentists or athletes. Symbolic identification is an attempt
to deny the existence of the gap that separates us from who we are. But
the problem is that this process of identification never succeeds fully. A
remainder persists. This remainder is the unconscious.
Like the psychoanalytic session, comedy reverses the relationship
between distance and identification that predominates in everyday exis-
tence. Within the structure of comedy, we identify with the unconscious
and distance ourselves from our symbolic identity. This is why we experi-
ence comedy as a moment of liberation. Even conservative comedies free
us from the regime of symbolic identification and grant us distance from
the demands that allow society to function. To attend a comic play or
laugh at a joke is to escape momentarily into excess, but this escape can
never endure. If it did, the excess would transform itself into a normal-
ized symbolic identity and the comic effect would disappear. The struc-
ture of identification and distance in comedy condemns comedy to a
region of exceptionality. But at the same time, this exceptional structure
contains within it a radical power to disturb our usual ways of identifying.
To make this clear, I’ll conclude with a typical joke that targets a
common comic object. In the joke, God decides to put an end to the
world and start again with a small group of people. God recruits a nun,
a rabbi, and a priest to decide what group should be saved and repopu-
late the earth. God asks the three to offer suggestions. The nun begins.
She says, “We should save the children.” This sentimentality outrages the
rabbi, who responds, “Fuck the children.” The priest, who had hitherto
remained uncertain, quickly interjects, “Do you think they would let us
do that?”17 This joke is only funny in the wake of the sex scandals that
have beset the priesthood. Outside of these scandals, the idea of a priest
who would want to “fuck the children” might strike us as excessive, but
it wouldn’t be genuinely comic. Now, we know that many priests not only
have this desire but have often acted on it.

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Clearly, the priest who targets children for sex is the object of the
joke, but what is instructive about the figure of the priest is the relation-
ship that the listener takes up to him. One cannot completely identify
with the priest and find this joke funny, but as we have seen, such com-
plete identification, even with oneself, is impossible. There is always some
distance involved between the subject and the object with which it iden-
tifies. In order to laugh at the joke, one must distance oneself from the
symbolic identity of the priest, the social role that the priest occupies and
that provides him with recognition from the society. It is this identity that
the joke undermines and associates with pedophilia. But if one distances
oneself fully from the figure of the priest, the joke will lose its effect and
leave one straight-faced. Hence, one must identify with the excessiveness
of the priest, the point at which the priest exceeds his symbolic identity.
Listeners have the ability to laugh at the joke only through this identifi-
cation, which aligns them with the excessive and disturbing dimension
of the priest.
There is nothing radical, of course, with the act of identifying with
a priest. But we typically identify with priests in their symbolic role as
representatives of the church. This joke forces the listener to identify
with the excess rather than the symbolic role, and in this way, it reshapes
the subject’s relationship to the authority of the priest. Certainly, many
people could listen to this joke and retain their former respect for priests.
But some listeners would find themselves transformed and unable to look
at priests in the same light again. This slight disruption of the process of
identification is where the disruptive potential of comedy resides. Most
comic experiences enable us to return to our proper symbolic identifica-
tions with a renewed acceptance of them, as if comedy merely greases the
wheels of the symbolic structure. But another way of relating to comedy
is possible.

7
Outside and Inside
The Impossibility of Comparisons
There are two fundamentally different forms in which lack and excess
can come together to form comedy. Both forms can work toward either
ideological or emancipatory ends, but how they function politically is dis-
tinct. By looking at these different forms, we gain a better sense of what’s
at stake in the intersection of lack and excess, at what this intersection
can reveal to us. But in order to get a handle on the two different comic
forms, we must look at them in action.
These two forms appear in the two great comedians in the history
of cinema, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Despite their contempo-
raneousness, Chaplin and Keaton produce opposing forms of comedy.
They show how comedy can emerge through exclusion from the social
order or through that order’s internal contradictions. Chaplin embod-
ies exclusion, while Keaton exposes the coincidence of lack and excess
within society. Together they demonstrate the possibilities for the location
of the comic object.
Chaplin and Keaton have two competing ideas of where excess and
lack coincide. For Chaplin, they unite at the point of exclusion from the
social order. Figures of exclusion lack— they lack belonging— but func-
tion as an excess for the social order that excludes them. For Keaton, the
terrain on which lack and excess overlap is internal to society. It is pre-
cisely by fitting in that one finds oneself lacking. The opposition between
Chaplin and Keaton is necessary rather than contingent. Though of
course one or both might not have been born, the form of comedy that
each develops had to find a figure to become its representative.
The competing comic styles of Chaplin and Keaton— and the fact
that their careers overlap— invites a comparison of the two. Chaplin is
certainly the more famous, and most critics and popular observers agree
that he is the greater comic genius. Film historian Gerald Mast goes so
far as to compare him as an artist with Shakespeare. Mast writes, “Charles
Chaplin is the greatest film artist in motion-picture history. He is to the
movies what Shakespeare is to drama.”1 Even if we consider this descrip-
tion to be hyperbolic, it does capture Chaplin’s lasting popularity, a popu-
larity that transcends cinema itself. Just as Shakespeare resonates for
143

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CHAP T E R 7
people who have no particular interest in the theater, Chaplin appeals to

those who don’t love the cinema. His comedy, like Shakespeare’s tragedy,
captures the foundation of subjectivity— or at least the subject’s relation
to society— and this creates a widespread appreciation that far outstrips
that which Keaton garners.
In one sense, it seems completely arbitrary to compare Keaton and
Chaplin. One could just as easily talk about Chaplin and Harold Lloyd
or Keaton and the Marx Brothers. What’s more, such comparisons are
usually just a matter of personal taste: some spectators prefer Chaplin’s
emphasis on the development of a comic persona, while others have
more appreciation for Keaton’s more cinematic form of comedy. There
could be as many reasons for these preferences as there are people who
hold them. As a result, the preferences have no theoretical weight at
all. But the difference between the two transcends the question of taste
and of personal preference. It concerns the status that we accord to the
comic object in a way that the comparison between Chaplin and Lloyd
or Keaton and the Marx Brothers does not. In this sense, Dan Callahan’s
claim that “there is no pressing reason to choose between them, any
more than there is a reason to choose between Fred Astaire and Gene
Kelly” is not quite accurate.2 Comparing Chaplin and Keaton uniquely
raises the question of the theory of comedy and what’s at stake in the
creation of a comic object.
For Chaplin, the comic object is what society produces and yet can-
not incorporate within its structure. His films depict society’s struggles
with this excess that it can never fully integrate. Spectators might identify
with Chaplin’s character, but in doing so, they identify with what doesn’t
fit within their own social order. He is comic insofar as he is excluded.
Chaplin’s own status as an exile from the United States for the last de-
cades of his life for political and sexual reasons functions as a metaphor
for his form of comedy. Even if he could return to the United States in
1972 to receive a belated Oscar, he remained an excess that American
society could not integrate. In his films, Chaplin functions precisely as
he does offscreen, as he takes up a position that the social order cannot
accommodate.
Though Keaton’s career precipitously declined after the silent era
in a way that Chaplin’s did not, he never endured the opprobrium that
Chaplin did for his political views and sexual proclivities. Keaton’s drunk-
enness, which corresponded to his fall from cinematic popularity, did not
produce the contempt that Chaplin’s leftist political views or marriages
with young women garnered. Keaton failed in a socially acceptable way
while Chaplin continued to succeed in an unacceptable way.3 Their per-
sonal trajectories mirror the contrasting relation that their comedy has to

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OUT S I DE AND I NS IDE
the social order. While Chaplin highlights the comic object as an excess
that cannot exist within society, Keaton displays it as an internal excess,
as a point within the social order that reveals the order’s failure and ab-
sence of self-identity.
Chaplin conceives the intersection of lack and excess necessarily
occupying a position outside the social order, whereas Keaton shows that
this intersection can take place in society and disrupt it from within.
This is the essence of the distinction between the two comedians and
the source of Keaton’s greater social critique. Though Keaton does not
veer as far to the left politically as Chaplin, he creates film comedies that
articulate a more radical critique of the injustice of the social order and
the ideology that make this injustice possible. Both capture the source
of comedy, and both recognize how comedy has the potential to disrupt
the functioning of everyday life. But Chaplin confines comedy to exclu-
sion. As the Little Tramp, he always exists on the margins of society and
reveals what society produces but cannot include. In the case of Keaton,
the figure who combines lack and excess exists in the midst of the social
order and represents its internal contradictions. Though evaluative state-
ments about comedians are typically subjective and impossible to justify,
we should debate the relative merits of Chaplin and Keaton because this
argument bears directly on the relationship between comedy and the
social order.
Where the Little Tramp Belongs
Chaplin created the figure of the Little Tramp for the first time in his
second film, Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914). The figure of the Little Tramp
represents the perfect embodiment of the comic idea: it combines lack
and excess, social ostracism and the guise of class status. If the Chaplin
character were a rich man wearing a tuxedo and a bowler, he would
lose his comic aspect, just as he would if he were a street person dressed
in rags. But because Chaplin brings together the lower-class absence of
wealth with the upper-class attire, he produces a comic effect. His appear-
ance alone as the Little Tramp is funny. The class status prevents us from
respecting the tuxedo, while the tuxedo prevents us from simply feeling
sorry for the downtrodden Little Tramp. Chaplin’s excessive dress elimi-
nates the possibility of pathos, the response that typically overtakes us
when we confront those in his social position. One doesn’t want to throw
the Little Tramp one’s spare change but to laugh at him.4
The Little Tramp shows us the social leftover, what society cannot

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use and what has no place in society— and yet what stands out excessively.
He is the ultimate figure of lack: he typically doesn’t have a home or a
job, and he often doesn’t have enough to eat. If he does have a job, it is
usually illegitimate. For instance, in The Kid (1921), he earns his living
by replacing the windows that his young assistant breaks. He exists on
the margin of society, but he does not exist there in the way that other
marginal people do. He is not an unobtrusive homeless man on the side
of the street asking for change. Instead, he manages to end up as an ex-
cessive disturbance of the social order that exiles him. This position is
apparent at the beginning of City Lights (1931).
The opening sequence of City Lights involves the unveiling of a
monument dedicated to “Peace and Prosperity.” As the civic leaders lift
the cover from the new monument, the Little Tramp appears asleep on
the monument. The initial minutes of the film depict the authorities
trying to remove the Little Tramp from the monument and him trying
to extricate himself. His presence on the monument reveals that despite
the new monument the city has not actually attained peace and prosperity
for all. The Little Tramp is the stain in the unveiling of the monument, a
stain that gives the lie to what the monument proclaims.
In this scene, the Little Tramp is a clear figure of lack. Unlike the
city officials and upper-class citizens who are looking at the monument,
he is penniless and has no place of his own to sleep. But at the same time,
he is the only figure in this scene with a clear identity. His excessiveness
sticks out and separates him from the others. He disturbs the scene be-
cause everyone cannot help but notice him. This combination of lack
and excess defines the Little Tramp and holds the key to the comedy
that he creates.
The times when the Little Tramp does become successful appear
to defy this description of his comedy. But his success never completely
eliminates his status as fundamentally lacking. For instance, even when
he finally becomes rich at the end of Gold Rush (1925), he is easily mis-
taken for a stowaway aboard a ship and almost arrested. While being
photographed for his success, he falls over a ledge and immediately loses
the status that he had only moments earlier. Ship officials again take him
for a stowaway. Though this film concludes with his financial success and
the reestablishment of his proper identity, the ending demonstrates that
his social position is never secure because he remains a figure of excess.
This insecurity also manifests itself throughout the course of City Lights,
as the millionaire whose life the Little Tramp saves forgets (after sobering
up) that he has befriended the Little Tramp and thus leaves him back
on the street. At every moment the Little Tramp’s excess ensures that he
cannot but be an exile from the social order.

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The Little Tramp is a stand-in for the homeless person or even

the enemy combatant without social status. He has no social standing,
but he usually wins the favor of a woman who first pities him and then
comes to love him. In this way, Chaplin shows how we might embrace the
social leftover, which is what occurs at the end of City Lights. This ending
shows the formerly blind girl (Virgina Cherrill) who recognizes the Little
Tramp as the benefactor who has given her the money for the operation
to heal her eyes. She expects to see a millionaire, someone at the height
of the social ladder, and instead sees a social leftover. Because the film
concludes with a close-up of the Little Tramp and not the girl’s reaction
to him, the spectator cannot be sure about her reaction. We don’t know
whether she accepts him or rejects him. The face of the Little Tramp does
not reveal her final act with any certainty. In some sense, each of Chap-
lin’s films featuring the Little Tramp places the spectator in the position
of the blind girl— confronted with the excess of the social remainder. His
films are all about giving us the ethical task of embracing what we as a
society cast aside, seeing the detritus as worthy of our love.
At the best moments of his cinema, Chaplin illustrates the impos-
sibility of integrating this detritus within the social order and thereby
forces the spectator to occupy this position as well. This occurs not just
at the end of City Lights but also throughout The Kid (Charlie Chaplin,
1921), where Chaplin exists outside proper society with a child whom
he has found on the street and reluctantly taken in.5 It is also present
in the concluding shot of The Circus (Charlie Chaplin, 1928), where the
Little Tramp’s exclusion enables the romantic couple to form, and in the
opening sequence from Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936), in which
the Little Tramp cannot keep pace with the exigencies of industrial
production.
But the zenith of the exposition of the Little Tramp as the mani-
festation of the comic coincidence of lack and excess occurs in his most
famous scene— the shoe-eating scene from Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin,
1925). This scene shows the Little Tramp in one of the most desperate
positions imaginable. He is stuck in frigid Alaska with a fellow prospector,
Big Jim (Mack Swain), and they have had nothing to eat for days. Unable
to endure their hunger and with big Jim on the verge of eating him, the
Little Tramp decides to cook his shoe for dinner.
The humor in this scene reveals perfectly the coincidence between
lack and excess that accompanies the position of exclusion. Because the
Little Tramp is excluded from society, he has nothing to eat and must re-
sort to eating his footwear. But even though his shoe has no taste and no
nutritional value, the Little Tramp cooks and eats it as if engaged in fine
dining. He carefully boils the shoe over the stove, and when eating it, he

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twirls the laces around his fork as if he was rolling spaghetti, while cutting
the shoe itself as if it were a quality steak. The exaggerated performance
of cooking and eating a wholly inadequate object perfectly manifests the
comedy of the Little Tramp.
At times, the emphasis on exclusion can produce a damning indict-
ment not just of the social order as a whole (which individuals can easily
deflect from themselves), but of the most precious ideological fantasies
that society produces. This is what takes place at the end of The Circus,
when the Little Tramp sacrifices his own happiness in order to make
possible the romantic union between Rex (Harry Crocker) and Merna
(Merna Kennedy). He defends Merna at the cost of his own position at
the circus and then arranges her marriage with Rex, despite his love for
her. We see that their successful romantic union is only made possible
through the exclusion of the Little Tramp, which has the effect of under-
mining the pleasure that we can find in this union. The excluded figure
of the Little Tramp signifies all exclusions necessary for the experience
of belonging and thus indicts belonging as such, even in the form of the
romantic union.
Chaplin’s final American film, Limelight (1952), though it doesn’t
feature the figure of the Little Tramp, shows the impossibility of this fig-
ure entering completely into the social order.6 The film depicts an old
comedian named Calvero (Charlie Chaplin) who saves the life of the
young ballet dancer Thereza (Claire Bloom) in the opening sequence.
Suffering from depression about her failed career, Thereza attempts to
kill herself. Even though he is returning home from a night of drunken-
ness, Calvero has the awareness to smell the gas coming from her apart-
ment and to drag her into the safety of the hallway. He then allows her
to convalesce in his apartment. When she returns to the ballet and even-
tually becomes a star, she ensures that he will be able to perform with
her. This arrangement functions for a time until Calvero learns that the
producer is not satisfied with his performance and that it is only charity
that keeps him employed.
Calvero leaves Thereza as well and begins to perform on the street.
When she finally discovers where he is, she helps to arrange a benefit
in which he can again perform for a large audience. As the star of this
benefit staged on his behalf, Calvero will occupy a position that the Little
Tramp never did: he will not only belong to the social order but will
reside at the center of it. He performs two successful routines— a flea
circus and singing “O for the Life of a Sardine”— that meet with uproari-
ous laughter from the audience. Despite running over his allotted time,
the wild approval demands an encore. In response, Chaplin performs a
sketch of musical comedy with Buster Keaton. This marks the only time

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that the two appeared in a film together. While it isn’t the highest comic
point for either one, it isn’t an abject failure. The routine, however, in-
volves Chaplin entering into Keaton’s terrain.
Calvero plays the violin while his unnamed partner (Buster Keaton)
plays the piano. Initially, we see them unable even to manage to tune
their instruments. Calvero breaks strings while just plucking the violin,
and his partner breaks a string in the piano while at the same time being
unable to keep the sheets of music from continually falling from the
stand. Their collective failure ends with the partner stepping on the violin
and Calvero pulling large knots of piano strings from the piano, which
suggests that the performance will end in comic failure. But this failure
is not the actual source of the comedy.
After the removal of the strings from the piano, the partner sits
down again to play. Calvero pulls a new violin from the back of his pants.
In spite of the ineptitude they have displayed for the previous few min-
utes, they begin to play perfectly. It is this perfection that becomes the ul-
timate source of the comedy in the scene. Chaplin shows how failure can
instantly transform itself into success and thus break down the distinction
between them.7 But with this scene, Chaplin brings together failure and
success— or lack and excess— in a way that he hasn’t during his appear-
ances as the Little Tramp. In this sense, Limelight should have been Chap-
lin’s last film (as he purportedly intended it to be). It is fully appropriate
that Keaton is present at this moment because it is a moment at which
Chaplin begins to act like Keaton and thus announce his own demise.
Keaton’s comedy places him within the social structure and thus
relies on inclusion. Inclusion marks the end of Chaplin, and just after
the success of this routine, Chaplin jumps off the stage into a bass drum
in the orchestra pit. The fall leads to the recurrence of a heart attack,
which ends up soon killing Calvero. But this is much more the death of
the comedy associated with the Little Tramp. His comedy depends on
exclusion. The moment that Limelight reveals his complete acceptance by
the crowd, he dies.
The Excluded Inside
Though the Little Tramp is the most famous manifestation of Chaplin’s

comedy, this figure impinges on the comic possibilities through its unre-
lenting emphasis on exclusion. Limelight does show the end of this type of
comedy, but this film is not, for the most part, a comedy. It is more a film
about the end of comedy. Chaplin made his greatest film after the Little

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Tramp retires at the end of Modern Times (1936) and before he chronicles
his demise in Limelight (1952). This success of The Great Dictator (Charlie
Chaplin, 1940) depends on Chaplin showing that even the figure at the
center of society shares in the exclusion that befalls the Little Tramp. The
effectiveness of this comedy can be measured by the controversy that it
aroused after its release and that it continues to arouse.
In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, critics accused Chap-
lin’s The Great Dictator of letting Hitler off much too easily. Rather than
appearing as one of the most murderous regimes in human history, Na-
zism comes off as a rule of buffoons. Adenoid Hynkel (Charlie Chaplin),
the stand-in for Hitler in the film, gives nonsensical speeches in mock-
German, orders the invasion of neighboring Osterlich on a whim, dances
privately with a globe balloon, and ends up being mistaken for a Jewish
barber and imprisoned.
The mockery of Hitler’s anti-Semitism and the comparison between
the dictator Hynkel and the Jewish barber don’t seem to go far enough in
their critique. Even Chaplin himself admitted that, had he known what
would unfold, he would not have made the film. By identifying the in-
sufficiency of a satirical portrait in the face of Nazi atrocities, Theodor
Adorno authors the definitive critique of the film. In his essay on engaged
art, he notes, “The Great Dictator loses all satirical force and becomes ob-
scene when a Jewish girl can hit a line of storm-troopers on the head with
a pan without being torn to pieces. For the sake of political commitment,
political reality is trivialized: which then reduces the political effect.”8 But
if Adorno is correct and The Great Dictator fails in terms of political com-
mitment, it does not fail as a comedy. It represents the height of Chaplin’s
comic genius, and it does so to the extent that it departs from the logic
associated with the Little Tramp.
The great humor in The Great Dictator derives from Chaplin’s abil-
ity to connect the ultimate insider, Hynkel (the representative of Hitler),
with the complete outsider, the Jewish barber who ends up in a concen-
tration camp. The excessiveness of the critique— in addition to Hynkel
himself, other Nazi and fascist leaders become completely absurd, like
Joseph Goebbels appearing as Herr Garbitsch (Henry Daniell)— creates
the comedy. One could only mock Hitler through the extreme excess that
Chaplin employs. But when he also shows Hitler to be interchangeable
with the Jewish barber, the film’s comedy reaches its apex. No one can
tell the difference between the leader of Tomainia and its excluded part.
Excess and lack overlap through this confusion of identity.
Though The Great Dictator represents the height of Chaplin’s comic
achievement through its identification of the figure of symbolic authority
with the excluded excess, it also includes one of the two most egregious

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lapses in Chaplin’s cinema. The danger associated with Chaplin’s focus

on the comic object as excluded from the social order is that this situa-
tion of total exclusion tempts him with the image of total inclusion as a
remedy. The political problem with this remedy is that it is precisely the
dream of universal inclusion that necessitates exclusion. A society can
only construct the illusion of wholeness through a figure of exception
not included within the whole.9 In this sense, Chaplin’s solution for the
Little Tramp’s exclusion not only fails but goes so far as to highlight the
necessity of this exclusion. The problem isn’t just that Chaplin turns from
comedy to sentimentality, but that his version of sentimentality vitiates
the critique that his comedy so forcefully makes. Preaching inclusion
represents a failure to recognize that inclusion always depends on some
sort of exclusion, whether it is overtly stated or not.
In the speeches that Chaplin’s character gives at the end of The
Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux (1947), he gives in to the temptation
that accompanies comic exclusion and preaches the politics of including
the excluded. The solution to social exclusion is not as simple as includ-
ing the excluded. It entails rather the identification with the excluded,
the recognition that everyone is excluded. In his speech impersonating
Hynkel in The Great Dictator, the Jewish barber gives a long proclamation
about the need for peace and freedom, as well as the importance of strug-
gling against brutality and dictatorship. He concludes, “Let us fight to
free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed,
with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason where science
and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers, in the name of de-
mocracy, let us all unite!” This call for an end to national barriers and to
all other forms of separation is a fantasy of total inclusion.10 This fantasy
ironically tends toward the creation of fascism as a way of realizing it. This
is the specific danger that accompanies Chaplin’s comedy of exclusion,
and it is a danger that Keaton’s comedy avoids altogether. Though we
see Keaton wealthy and successful at times in his films, we never see him
propagating the idea of total inclusion as a political solution.
Keaton as the Included Exclusion
Keaton never succumbs to the idea of universal inclusion like Chaplin

does because he never conceives of the comic object as completely ex-
cluded from the social order. Instead, his comedy reveals an exclusion
internal to the social order. Keaton’s character fits in, but his manner of
fitting in exposes how the social order exceeds itself.11 His excess is thus

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inseparable from the social order, in contrast to that of the Little Tramp,
who exists apart from society and can never be integrated into it. Keaton
belongs, but his belonging shows that no one really belongs. Belonging
always leads to a failure to belong, and ironically, it is the failure to belong
that always leads to belonging.
This structure is apparent in the most famous sequence in all of
Keaton’s cinema— his entrance into the movie screen in Sherlock, Jr.
(Buster Keaton, 1924). When the projectionist (Buster Keaton) falls
asleep while showing a film, his dream self leaves the projection booth
and walks to the theater screen where he interacts with the scene. Even
though this is only a dream, the projectionist has the excessive ability to
enter into the film being screened. But this excess immediately produces
a lack. Each time that Keaton adjusts to his setting, a cut produces a new
setting that renders his action inappropriate. For instance, he dives into
the sea off a rock, and a cut to a snowy landscape results in Keaton being
stuck headfirst in a mound of snow. He endures mishap after mishap be-
cause of the constant cuts, and he is never able to find his bearings in the
setting before it shifts. He can enter the scenes of the projected film, but
this wish fulfillment leaves him unable to act without ending up almost
eaten by lions or run over by an oncoming train as the setting changes.
His inability to act is funny because it is the result of the power his dream
state gives him.
The sequence from Sherlock, Jr. highlights a formal difference
between Chaplin and Keaton that bespeaks their theoretical difference.
Chaplin’s comedy focuses on himself as the figure of exclusion, and his
films emphasize his individual performance. Consequently, they seem
as if they could be stage performances without much alteration. This
is impossible to imagine with any of Keaton’s films. He is a filmic film-
maker. His comedy derives from editing (as in Sherlock, Jr.) and from his
incredible stunts, most of which require the vast canvass of film. Chaplin
introduces a foreign element— namely, himself— into the film in order
to create comedy. Keaton distorts the form of the film so that the comedy
functions as an internal excess. Keaton’s editing and stunts are excessive,
but they remain part of what they exceed. The formal contrast between
Chaplin and Keaton derives from their different approaches to comedy.
All comedy involves excess, but Keaton’s excess is that of someone on
the inside.
The film usually considered Keaton’s masterpiece, The General
(Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton, 1926), develops this logic to its
fullest extent. At first glance, it seems as if this is a Chaplin film about
exclusion. Johnnie Gray (Buster Keaton) endures a type of exclusion
throughout the film. He cannot enlist in the Confederate Army and thus

153
cannot win the love of Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack), who will only com-
mit herself to someone who has enlisted. But Johnnie, as a train engineer,
nonetheless plays an integral role in the Confederate Army’s struggle.
In fact, it is the vocation of engineer that leads the army to reject John-
nie’s attempted enlistment. He is too valuable to the Confederacy as an
engineer to be employed as a soldier. Johnnie works within the Con-
federacy but can’t fully belong to its official military structure. Like the
Little Tramp in City Lights, he doesn’t belong, but in his case, the failure
to belong does not entail complete exclusion.
Johnnie’s attempted enlistment provides the first major comic scene
of the film. Johnnie goes to the enlistment office certain that he will win
the love of Annabelle. But just as he is about to enlist, an authority in-
forms the enlistment officer that the train engineer cannot become a sol-
dier. After being rejected because of his value as a train engineer, Johnnie
tries to adopt a series of different identities in order to fool the enlistment
officer. Each comic attempt is thwarted, and Johnnie remains part of the
Confederate struggle but not a proper member of the Confederate Army.
But this holds no weight at all with Annabelle, who believes him to be a
coward. He is lacking precisely because he is excessively valuable to the
cause. The ending of the film corrects this lack, but it does so excessively
and thus produces another one.
One of the great comic endings in the history of cinema takes place
as Johnnie finally attains a role in the Confederate Army. When Johnnie
uses his train to block a Union offensive, the Confederate Army rewards
him not just with enlistment but with officer status. This new status im-
presses Annabelle and ends their estrangement, though at the moment
that Johnnie would kiss Annabelle to cement their relationship, his rank
becomes a barrier to their renewed connection.
As the new officer prepares to kiss Annabelle, a series of soldiers
walk past him and salute because of his rank. Instead of kissing Annabelle
for the first time, Johnnie must salute each soldier. He belongs, and it is
his belonging that prompts Annabelle to accept his proposal. But it is also
his belonging to the army that acts as a barrier to kissing her. Inclusion
doesn’t eliminate lack but excessively reproduces it in the case of Keaton.
Whereas Chaplin finds excess outside the social structure, Keaton finds it
within, where it acts as an obstacle for him. He is only able to surmount
this obstacle when he decides to kiss Annabelle while continuing to salute
without even looking at the passing soldiers. This image of Johnnie kiss-
ing and saluting at the same time provides the perfect comic conclusion
for Keaton’s masterpiece. At this moment, he acts excessively— kissing
and saluting— because his inclusion leaves him lacking.12
Keaton always succeeds at inclusion even when it seems, as with

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The General or Battling Butler (Buster Keaton, 1926), that he won’t. In the
latter film, his excessive wealth leads to his initial exclusion: even though
he is wealthy, the father and brothers of the Mountain Girl (Sally O’Neil)
whom Alfred Butler (Buster Keaton) is attempting to woo find him too
weak and unmanly to be a suitable mate and member of their family.
Butler’s solution, proposed by his valet (Snitz Edwards), is to pose as the
famous prizefighter who shares his name, Alfred Battling Butler (Francis
McDonald). The former Butler’s excess wealth cannot help him through
the training regime that he must endure, a regime that comically reveals
his failures as an athlete. Eventually, as he does in The General, Keaton suc-
ceeds in Battling Butler, defeating the great boxing champion in a fight.
The initial excess in both cases produces a lack, but then the lack leads
to a final excess.
But one of the reasons why The General is Keaton’s masterpiece and
Battling Butler is an almost forgotten film is the final comic twist that The
General adds. The end of Battling Butler ceases to be comic when Alfred
Butler defeats the boxer who shares his name and wins the affection of
the Mountain Girl. His romantic union with the Mountain Girl marks
the film’s turn away from comedy and produces no laughter. But at the
conclusion of The General when we see Johnnie forced to kiss Annabelle
while saluting at the same time, it is apparent that the excess of his suc-
cess produces the very lack that it promises to eliminate, which enables
the comedy to continue. At the moment Keaton belongs, he finds himself
bereft of the benefits that come with belonging.13 As a result, one laughs
at The General right until the film ends.
Keaton’s focus on the excess of belonging contrasts with Chap-
lin’s focus on the excess of exclusion, but both forms of excess produce
lack and thus result in great comedy. One need not choose, but it is at
the same important to distinguish the political valence of each form of
comedy. Despite Chaplin’s more radical politics, Keaton creates a more
radical comedy because it illustrates how the social order subverts itself
rather than trying to subvert it from the outside. This is the high point
of comedy.
Keaton’s Danger
Keaton’s form of comedy does carry risks with it. While he never lapses
into the sentimental vision of total inclusion that Chaplin succumbs to at
the end of The Great Dictator, he commits an equally traditional political
misstep. When his films show that the insider is at once an outsider, that

155
belonging also entails a failure to belong, they sometimes have recourse

to racist images in order to convey the outside. He fails to see that the
racialized outsider is different from the insider, that there is a distinction
between the insider’s failure to belong and the situation of the outsider.
That is to say, not everyone fails to belong in the same way, and Keaton
creates racist images because his version of comedy doesn’t allow him to
see this fact. Though the majority of Keaton’s films avoid such imagery, it
does appear in a few of his films, including two of his features.
Perhaps the most egregious racism in Keaton’s cinema occurs in The
Navigator (Donald Crisp and Buster Keaton, 1924) where Rollo (Buster
Keaton) and Betsy (Kathryn McGuire) sail alone aboard the large ship
Navigator and encounter a group of black characters depicted as sav-
ages who attack the ship and threaten them. The black characters have
a stereotypical look and act buffoonish throughout the encounter. Here
Keaton employs a standard Hollywood racist image without any irony.
The point of the exchange between Rollo and Betsy and the black
characters is to illustrate the similarity between the two camps. Neither
side is able to attack the other successfully without creating mayhem for
itself, and in this way, Keaton avoids the typical denouement of the racist
imagery. For him, there is no significant difference between the figures of
high society (Rollo and Betsy) and the outsiders who are attacking them.
The problem is that Keaton turns to racist imagery to illustrate this idea,
which marks an important limitation of his cinematic project.
In addition to the depiction of the black characters in The Naviga-
tor, Keaton resorted to the use of blackface in his films. He had used it
in his vaudeville routine, and then he turned to it in two shorts and one
feature— Neighbors (Edward Cline and Buster Keaton, 1920), The Playhouse
(Edward Cline and Buster Keaton, 1921), and College ( James Horne and
Buster Keaton, 1927).14 In each case (and especially in College), Keaton
uses blackface to mock his own character, to show how he is a figure of
lack who requires the excess of blackface in order to fit in. But what the
act of putting on blackface fails to see is that it inherently mocks those
who are genuinely excluded.15
Keaton fails to pay attention to genuine exclusion in the way that
Chaplin does because he focuses on the inside excluding itself, not on
those who necessarily remain on the outside. His lapses into racism are
not simply personal political errors divorced from his filmmaking project
but errors that germinate within the project itself. Just as sentimental total
inclusion is the risk that Chaplin runs, blackface or wild black savages is
the risk that Keaton runs.
The contrast with Chaplin on the question of racism is sharp. Chap-
lin himself never appears in blackface in any of his films, which is quite

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remarkable given the era in which he worked and given his start in vaude-
ville where blackface was rampant.16 There is also an absence of racist ste-
reotypes in Chaplin’s films. Though the casts are almost uniformly white,
Chaplin doesn’t use nonwhite characters to create humor in the way that
Keaton does in The Navigator.
Certainly one is free to dismiss Keaton altogether for his forays into
blackface or to accept them through the prism of historicist thinking, see-
ing them as the errors of a particular epoch. But this is to miss the eluci-
dative value that Keaton’s racism has for us. It is a specific form of racism,
not that of the Klan or even the contemporary opponent of affirmative
action who retreats from any challenge to the ideology of color blind-
ness. Instead, it is a racism that fails to consider the difference between
society’s self-exclusion and those whom it excludes.
Society’s self-exclusion ensures that no one really belongs, which
is what Keaton’s comedy emphasizes and gives the comedy its radicality.
But in order to obscure this universal failure of belonging, societies have
recourse to racism, xenophobia, and other form of exclusion. They ex-
clude in order to hide the fact that everyone is always already excluded.
Certain groups must embody non-belonging so that others can believe
that they belong. By focusing on the non-belonging of everyone, Keaton
overlooks this distinction. It is one that Chaplin’s form of comedy, in con-
trast, almost never misses. There are times when Keaton requires Chaplin
to come rushing to his aid philosophically, as he did materially when he
gave the down-and-out Keaton a part in Limelight.
Human versus Machine
The contrast between Chaplin and Keaton becomes most visible in their
respective attitudes toward technology. While Chaplin finds comedy in
showing the mechanization of the human being in Modern Times, Keaton
depicts machines functioning like human beings. In the famous opening
sequence of Modern Times, Chaplin shows the machine transforming the
human’s lack into an excess. As a worker on an assembly line, Chaplin’s
task is one of tightening two bolts on a series of parts that rapidly move
past him. With a wrench in each hand, Chaplin manages to keep pace,
even though he falls behind on occasion.
When the plant manager orders the speed of the line increased,
Chaplin loses the ability to keep pace. Intent on tightening every bolt,
he follows the parts into the large machine where the conveyor belt takes
them. We see Chaplin himself moving within the machine in one of the

157
film’s lasting images. Here Chaplin’s lack as a worker on the assembly line
produces him as an excess within the machine. The film is not simply
making an elementary point about the reifying force of the machine.
Instead, it is showing how industrial production creates a human excess
that cannot be integrated into the manufacturing process.
Keaton’s much more sanguine position on technology often focuses
on the train or the ship, most famously in The General but also in Our
Hospitality ( John Blystone and Buster Keaton, 1923) and Steamboat Bill,
Jr. (Charles Reisner and Buster Keaton, 1928). The train or the ship or
whatever type of technological device in a Keaton film is never simply a
machine under human control. It is always a machine that seems to have
a subjectivity of its own. The machine is funny because, like the subject,
it is both lacking and excessive.
The most comic machine sequence in Keaton’s cinema occurs
in Our Hospitality, when Willie McKay (Buster Keaton) travels south to
visit his birthplace and claim the inheritance from his recently deceased
father. During the train ride, Willie unknowingly sits next to Virginia
(Natalie Talmadge), a member of the Canfield family, with whom Willie’s
family is engaged in a longtime feud. Though Willie’s timid interaction
with Virginia is comic, the primary humor during the train ride derives
from the train itself and its relationship to its environment.
The train carries the appellation “Rocket,” but its speed never ex-
ceeds the pace at which a person might run. In fact, recurrent shots of
the train in motion depict a dog running along beneath one of the cars,
and he runs along throughout almost the entire journey. At one point,
he even demonstrates that he can outrun the train. Early in the trip, an
exposed stowaway expresses his displeasure by holding the train back
with his hand, revealing that the machine is not decisively stronger than
a human. The weakness of the train is further evident when the film
shows the track on which the train travels. It appears crooked and hap-
hazardly placed, and it must traverse natural obstacles, like a fallen tree
that the track awkwardly runs across. As the train passes over sections of
the track, the track moves up and down in order to indicate its instability.
When a donkey refuses to move for the train, the engineer and conduc-
tor are able to move the track around the donkey so that the train can
pass. This comic event reveals the pliability or humanity of the machine.
Though the machine promises regular functioning, in Our Hospitality and
throughout Keaton’s films it displays the same foibles as a human being.
These foibles continue throughout the journey. The back of the
train breaks off and sends the sleeping conductor plummeting to the
ground. When it goes through a tunnel, the absence of any exhaust
mechanism leaves all the passengers covered in soot. But the primary

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comedy comes at the end of the journey. Because of a boy’s prank at a

switching site, the back of the train decouples from the front and travels
down a parallel track. It soon outraces the engine and ends up arriving at
the station prior to the front of the train. The sequence concludes with
the front of the train crashing into the back at the destination.
The contrast between Keaton’s depiction of technology and Chap-
lin’s is extreme. While Chaplin shows the machine failing like Keaton
does, his emphasis is much more on the machine’s effect on the human
being subjected to it. The human working with a machine becomes auto-
mated and machine-like. One might imagine Bergson going to a screen-
ing of Modern Times late in his life and finding absolute confirmation of
the thesis of Laughter. He would not have the same reaction to Our Hos-
pitality. In Keaton’s film, the machine behaves more like a human than
the human beings themselves do. For Keaton, the train itself is a lacking
subject.17
The different positions that Chaplin and Keaton take up relative
to the machine fit within their approach to comedy. The machine ex-
cludes Chaplin. The comedy derives from this exclusion and from Chap-
lin’s struggle with the machine. The machine exposes the worker’s lack
through its excessive demands. In the case of Keaton, the machine is one
of us, and we aren’t at war with it. Like any subject, its own lack creates an
excess, in the way that the instability of the train track enables two people
to move it around a recalcitrant donkey. One could say that Keaton is
more sanguine about technology, but this is only because he sees its fail-
ures more clearly.
It is around their relationship to the machine that Gilles Deleuze
locates a central difference between Chaplin and Keaton in his Cinema 1.18
Deleuze recognizes Chaplin’s hostility to the machine, while he sees in
Keaton’s films an attempt to show the machine not as a whole but as a
series of parts. In other words, the machine in Keaton’s vision is one of us.
This leads Deleuze to proffer a vision of the contrast between the two as
a contrast between two forms of communism. He writes, “We cannot be
certain that Keaton lacks a political vision that is, on the contrary, pres-
ent in Chaplin. There are rather two very different ‘socialist’ visions, the
one communist-humanist in Chaplin, the other anarchistic-machinic in
Keaton.”19 The role of the machine in Keaton’s political vision is undeni-
able, but it doesn’t derive from any investment in the machine as such.
He is not a believer in salvation through machines or technology. Instead,
he turns to the machine to reveal that even automation doesn’t work
properly. As Keaton demonstrates, we don’t have to look to exclusion for
comedy. The contradiction that produces comedy exists in the midst of
the machine of the social order itself.

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Necessity versus Contingency
The relationship that Chaplin and Keaton have to the machine seems to
belie that relationship that they have to necessity and contingency. We
typically associate the machine with necessity: unless it breaks down, it
operates according to necessary rules and has no room for contingency.
But in addition to his investment in the machine, Keaton is also a film-
maker of contingency. This emphasis reveals the contingency at work in
the apparent necessity of the machine. The role of necessity and con-
tingency in the films of Chaplin and Keaton speaks to where they locate
their comedy.
Chaplin is the necessary excess that the social order must expel in
order to create the appearance of functioning smoothly. The necessity
associated with Chaplin is the necessity of exclusion. He can repeat the
same character in multiple films— the Little Tramp— because the charac-
ter is socially necessary. Chaplin’s comedy calls for us to change our rela-
tionship to what is excluded, but it grasps the necessity of exclusion itself.
Keaton is the contingent excess that internally troubles every social
order. His comedy reveals that social success depends on contingency. In
this way he destroys all myths of proper social hierarchy, whether earned
through birth, through merit, or through hard work. Keaton succeeds in
his films not because he is nobler, more skilled, or more hard-working
but because he benefits from contingency.20 It is the central role of con-
tingency in all of his triumphs that lies at the heart of Keaton’s comedy.
Despite his status as a lacking subject, he can perform incredible feats
through the aid of pure contingency.
In every one of Keaton’s films, contingency is the vehicle for his suc-
cess. It allows him to rescue his family from financial ruin in The Saphead
(Herbert Blaché and Winchell Smith, 1920), to resolve the family feud
in Our Hospitality, and to corral the stampeding cattle in Go West (Buster
Keaton, 1925). Success never simply occurs in a Keaton film. Contingency
always plays a decisive role in it, and this reveals the tenuousness of all
success. Lack makes success possible. Keaton’s comedy takes this debt on
the part of success as its point of departure.
Contingency often enables Keaton to survive what appears to be
certainly a fatal event. This is what occurs during the horrible storm at
the end of Steamboat Bill, Jr. A building collapses just before Keaton enters
it, and subsequently he survives a house falling on top of him because
he happens to be standing at the precise point where an open window
on the house hits the ground.21 After a series of other close encounters
with death, finally a tree that he is holding becomes uprooted and deliv-
ers him to safety. Contingency is the excess that rescues the endangered

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subject. All of Keaton’s films show that society could not go on without
contingency playing a central part.
Necessity and contingency can both play a role in comedy, but they
occur at opposite ends of the comic spectrum. Necessity produces the
comedy of exclusion. Contingency creates the comic disruption within
the social order. Chaplin’s failures are comic because they are necessary,
while Keaton’s successes are comic because they are contingent. But in
each case, a lack leads to an excess, or an excess leads to a lack. And this
comic intersection is what both Chaplin and Keaton have in common.
Chaplin shows that failure can be a mode of success. In this way, he
provides a direction for how to comport ourselves as subjects. We must
identify with the excluded excess. Keaton, on the other hand, shows that
success always fails. This doesn’t so much tell us how to act but how to
structure the social order. Society must foreground the inevitability of
failure even in the midst of the greatest triumphs. It must begin with the
failure of anyone to belong. This is what Keaton’s form of comedy con-
stantly emphasizes.
Chaplin and Keaton represent supplementary forms within the
comic experience. Both are required. Chaplin’s comedy is the more stan-
dard form, but Keaton’s is more far-reaching in its implications. Though
the dangers of Keaton’s comedy are greater— racism is graver than sen-
timentality— so are the rewards. Keaton emphasizes that every success
occurs simultaneously with a failure that undermines the success. Laugh-
ing at Keaton’s comedy means wrestling with the inevitability of failure.
This represents comedy at its political apex, but deciphering the politics
of comedy is never a straightforward affair.

8
Ideology and Equality
Class Struggle at the Carnival
Comedy feels subversive. It disrupts the flow of everyday life and often
calls social authority into question. If comedy didn’t upset our usual way
of thinking, it would fail to be funny. When I tell an unfunny joke, the
lack of humor coincides perfectly with the degree to which it fits within
accepted conceptions of the world. The comedian who asks, “Why can’t
you write with a broken pencil?” and responds, “Because you can’t handle
it properly,” will have a short career as a comedian because this joke isn’t
a joke at all. It simply recounts the accepted answer that coincides with
our conceptions about pencils and writing. In order to be funny, com-
edy must entail some challenge to accepted thoughts and associations
of thought. The comedian who asks, “Why can’t you write with a broken
pencil?” and answers, “Because it is pointless,” may not have a longer
career than the first comedian, though this one at least stands a chance.
The pun on the word “point” will not lead to world revolution, but it does
encourage the listener to reflect on why one writes rather than simply
accepting the givens of the situation. This is why so many theorists of
comedy attribute an inherently egalitarian quality to it.1 Even in its most
banal form, comedy is freedom from hierarchy.
Comedy liberates us from the constraints that govern our everyday
life. Even if we don’t view it as radically egalitarian, we nonetheless as-
sociate it with a form of freedom. In comedy and jokes, we can say what
would otherwise be impermissible in polite society. As long as we do so
in the form of a joke, we can tell our bosses how we really feel about
them and openly undermine their authority. Comic films can provide a
thoroughgoing critique of American foreign policy even during wartime.
Stanley Kubrick was able to make Dr. Strangelove during the middle of the
Cold War, despite its explicit critique of American leadership at the time.
Stand-up comedy routines can offer a scathing political commentary that
otherwise exists only in extremely marginalized venues. When we hear
this mockery of political leaders or satire of cultural icons, the associa-
tion of comedy with subversion and critique appears almost self-evident.
The tone of comedy, in contrast to tragic seriousness, doesn’t permit the
solemnity of entrenched power figures to remain undisturbed. Those in
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power fear irruptions of comedy as challenges to their authority. Comedy

seems to be class warfare by indirect means.
The image of comedy as class warfare finds its most vehement
spokesperson in the figure of Mikhail Bakhtin, who sees this conception
of comedy articulated in the writing of Rabelais. In his works, Rabelais fo-
cuses on the carnival, a time of comedy in which festival and laughter dis-
place everyday life. The comedy of the carnival derives from the inversion
of social relations that occurs during this time. Those in power become
the equals of the lowest members of society as a temporary suspension
of social hierarchy ensues. Usual life transpires through firm distinctions
between different classes and rules that sustain these distinctions. But
comedy reveals these distinctions to be illusory and permeable.
Bakhtin understands that carnival is only a temporary suspension
of societal hierarchy and that this hierarchy returns after the carnival,
but nonetheless the comedy that takes place during the carnival has an
inherent radicality to it. Bakhtin goes so far as to claim that the forces of
oppression can never mobilize comedy and laughter on their side. Laugh-
ing creates a sense of equality between those who are laughing and those
who are being laughed at. Bakhtin writes, “laughter could never become
an instrument to oppress and blind the people. It always remained a free
weapon in their hands.”2 According to this conception of the comic and
its effect, authority requires seriousness and is actually identified with se-
riousness. When authorities engage in comedy, they are implicitly under-
mining their own authority and taking the side of the people, even if they
aren’t aware of this. Authority operates through fear, but comedy liberates
us from fear. When we see the comic underside of authority figures and
experience them being mocked, we cease to fear them. Whatever the ter-
ror that authorities would inflict on us, if we respond with laughter, we
undermine its power to oppress.
The problem with Bakhtin and his conception of laughter is that
he never had the chance to see Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976).3 In this
film about the revenge of a high school outcast on her fellow classmates,
we see clearly how laughter and comedy aren’t straightforwardly associ-
ated with emancipation. Carrie (Sissy Spacek) is the subject of mockery
throughout the film. This mockery comes to a head at the high school
prom, where popular students find great amusement in dumping pig’s
blood on her from a pail hanging in the rafters. Their laughter in this
scene is an index of Carrie’s humiliation and oppression. There is
nothing liberating about it, and it does not disturb their authority at
the school. Even the unpopular students join in the mockery of Carrie.
Laughter, after all, can serve as “an instrument to oppress and blind the
people.” Carrie soon avenges herself on them, but the comedy that they

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find in the act of dumping blood on her stands apart from this vengeance
(which is itself not at all comic).
The treatment that Carrie receives in De Palma’s film is familiar
to anyone who has witnessed racist, sexist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic
jokes. Comedy can function as an instrument of oppression. Oppressive
jokes emanate from a position of social authority and work to enhance
the authority embodied by those at the top of the social hierarchy. They
offer the enjoyment that comes from the act of excluding rather than
the mockery of authority. When we see figures of authority derisively
mocking and laughing at the downtrodden or the excluded we can have
no doubt that the valence of laughter and comedy is not as clear-cut as
Bakhtin imagines it to be.
Even when authorities mock themselves or allow themselves to be
mocked, it is not always evident that this mockery subverts their authority.
Pretensions of comic subversion often fail to subvert at all. Comedy can
assist the authorities in cementing their authority just as easily as it can
undermine that authority. There is, in short, no inherent political valence
to the comic act. Sometimes comedy can function in an egalitarian way,
but it can just as easily function ideologically. The question is how we can
determine what makes particular forms of comedy egalitarian and what
makes other forms ideological.
Our tendency is to look for the political valence of comedy in either
who creates the comedy or who is its object. If the source of the comedy
is a figure of authority, we assume that the comedy functions ideologi-
cally because authorities don’t intentionally undermine themselves and
remain authorities. Jokes constructed by social outcasts, on the other
hand, seems ipso facto egalitarian. On the side of the comic object, the
political situation is reversed. If the object of the comedy is someone
already excluded from the social order, we believe that the comedy is
ideological insofar as it preserves the exclusions that constitute the social
order as it is constituted. No one believes, for instance, that the racist joke
or the comic sketch about the homeless challenges existing social rela-
tions. And when a joke targets a political or economic leader, it seems
inherently egalitarian.
Oftentimes, the type of subject and the type of object coincide:
either the figure of authority finds comedy in mockery of the excluded,
or one of the excluded tells a joke undermining symbolic authority. One
can easily imagine a business leader recounting a racist or a sexist joke
or laughing at satirical depictions of the excluded, just as one can also
imagine a group of servants laughing at the foibles of the upper-class
families that they serve. In both cases, the political bearing of the subject
and object of comedy line up exactly.

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But this method for evaluating the politics of comedy doesn’t hold
up under close scrutiny. Complications quickly ensue. The marginalized
can tell jokes at their own expense, as we see with many Jewish jokes. The
joke which says that the definition of “genius” is a C student with a Jewish
mother has a Jewish source and a Jewish target. Equally, authority figures
can tell jokes that genuinely challenge their own authority. This occurred
when President Obama, asked why he had stopped smoking, joked that
he was afraid of his spouse. In these cases, the source and the target are
the same, which makes it difficult to judge these jokes politically in terms
of the source and the target.
There are, however, even more significant problems with this type
of evaluation. The trouble is that the group of servants laughing at the
foibles of the families that they serve doesn’t necessarily undermine their
libidinal investment in the authority of these families. It can easily aug-
ment the investment. In a similar way, the temporary toppling of social
hierarchy can ultimately reinforce this hierarchy.4 This is why we must
look elsewhere for a way of judging the politics of comedy.
Since seemingly egalitarian comedy can have an ideological effect,
the evaluation of comedy must examine not only its source or object
but take into account its effects. We can identify the difference between
egalitarian comedy and ideological comedy through the effect that the
comedy produces on both its source and its object. The radical potential
of comedy lies in the specific way that it disrupts our everyday lives and
our everyday understanding. The everyday persists through the sense of
wholeness that undergirds it. Events follow one after another without
disjunction, and subjects relate to each other without contradiction. But
comedy has the ability to reveal division or splitting where we perceive
wholeness. When it sustains this revelation, it functions successfully as
egalitarian comedy. Egalitarian comedy exposes the contradictions of the
social order and of the subject who exists within this order. In egalitar-
ian comedy, both the source of the comedy and its target appear divided
internally. It is the emergence of this internal division that enables us to
laugh while also facilitating critique.5
One can see an exemplary case of this in one of comedian Dave
Chappelle’s routines. Chappelle recounts a flight that he had been on
being taken hostage by a terrorist. While all the white passengers on the
plane reacted with fear, Chappelle notes that he and the only other black
passenger looked at each other and gave a thumbs-up sign. Why? They
knew, according to Chappelle, that “terrorists don’t take black hostages”
because all terrorists realize that “black people are bad bargaining chips.”
Chappelle’s comedy is critical and egalitarian because it reveals the self-
division in both the source of the comedy and its target.

165
As a black man, Chappelle paints himself as the victim of racism,

but he simultaneously shows himself procuring an advantage from racism
at the same time. This coincidence of lack (victim of racism) and excess
(beneficiary of racism) creates the humor in the joke. His own delight
at not being a valuable hostage stems from a life spent in a racist society.
The targets of the joke are the white people who fear terrorists. The
joke reveals that one’s status as a potential victim of terrorism is already
an index of one’s privileged position. Neither Chappelle nor the white
object of the joke escapes self-division, which makes this a clear case of
egalitarian comedy.
But egalitarian comedy is not the dominant manifestation of com-
edy. When comedy subtends a sense of wholeness in either the subject
or the social order, it functions ideologically and helps to entrench a be-
lief in the intractability of social authority. The difficulty with analyzing
comedy is that even comic moments that seem to disrupt social authority
often play the role of stealthily supporting rather than undermining its
power. It is not enough to look for authority being mocked. Ideological
comedy is far more prevalent than the egalitarian version.
The Comedy of Social Exclusion
Most comedy buttresses social authority by sustaining the exclusions that

make it possible. It creates the image of a social whole that acquires its
wholeness through the exclusion of an excess. Wholeness is not inimi-
cal to exclusion but depends on it because the exclusion provides the
external point of reference that enables the structure to define itself as a
whole. There is no wholeness without an exclusion, and the task of con-
servative comedy is one of constituting the wholeness by way of the exclu-
sion. It draws attention to the excluded element and derives humor from
its excesses. A large portion of American entertainment is rife with images
of black comic excess created for the purpose of creating the image of
American society from which this blackness is excluded.
In Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, Donald Bogle identi-
fies what he calls the coon figure as the primary figure of racist comedy
in American society. Though there is just as much racism in uncle toms
or mammies (two other figures that he identifies), it is the coon figure
who exists for the sake of laughter and who, for that reason, proliferates
more than the other racist figures.6 According to Bogle’s description,
“Before its death, the coon developed into the most blatantly degrading
of all black stereotypes. The pure coons emerged as no-account niggers,

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those unreliable, crazy, lazy, subhuman creatures good for nothing more
than eating watermelons, stealing chickens, shooting crap, or butcher-
ing the English language.”7 Bogle’s description implies a sanguine view
of this figure’s demise, but an examination of the history of recent Holly-
wood films reveals that he spoke too soon, that the comedy of the coon
figure lives on, even if its manifestation is not so blatant as the depiction
of a lazy buffoon in the silent film How Rastus Gets His Turkey (Theodore
Wharton, 1910). In early films such as this one, the coon figure is the sole
focus, and this is what has changed in more contemporary appearances
of this figure.
The coon figure is often now the sidekick to a white hero and pro-
vides comic relief from the central drama. This is the case in a series of
action films from the 1980s onward. For instance, in John McTiernan’s
Die Hard (1988), New York police officer John McClane (Bruce Willis)
finds himself isolated in a Los Angeles skyscraper battling criminals who
have taken hostages and are robbing the building. The overweight local
officer Al Powell (Reginald Veljohnson) receives the call to investigate.
When we see him receive the dispatcher’s call, he is in the process of
buying multiple packages of Twinkies at a convenience store. Instead
of eating watermelon like the traditional coon figure, he eats Twinkies,
but the effect is the same. The film mocks Powell for his excessive weight
and eating habits. After he arrives at the skyscraper, his status as a coon
figure becomes even more evident. McClane drops the body of one of
the criminals from a high floor in order to alert the unknowing Powell
to the criminal presence in the building. When the body strikes Powell’s
car, the criminals begin shooting at Powell as well, and he drives his car
wildly in reverse while screaming until he ends up in a ditch. This image
of Powell in the careening car confirms the coon figure status that the
introduction to him buying Twinkies first suggests.
The Lethal Weapon series of films often places Roger Murtaugh
(Danny Glover) in the coon role (though it also gives him a serious role in
the drama as well). The comic focus on the coon figure reaches its apex
in the opening scene from Lethal Weapon 4 (Richard Donner, 1998), in
which Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Murtaugh face a heavily armed
shooter in the middle of a city street. Riggs convinces Murtaugh to strip
down to his underwear and flap his arms like a chicken in order to dis-
tract the criminal while Riggs shoots him. Murtaugh doesn’t steal chick-
ens like classic coon figures but instead acts like a chicken. And after
Murtaugh engages in the comic display, Riggs informs him that he had
Murtaugh do this only for his own amusement (and that of the spectator)
rather than for the stated intention of distracting the criminal. Riggs’s ad-
mission is important for the spectator’s comic pleasure because it reveals

167
the inutility of Murtaugh’s buffoonery. The coon figure performs simply

to humor the spectator, not to accomplish any aims within the narrative.
This type of comedy doesn’t die out by the 1990s but continues in
the 2000s and 2010s with Rush Hour 3 (Brett Ratner, 2007) and Ride Along
(Tim Story, 2014). In all of these films, the coon figure is a police officer,
which is not coincidental though it seems contradictory. If the coon fig-
ure marks social exclusion, the cop is, in contrast, an insider. But the coon
figure as police officer is humorous because it shows that even when this
figure is fully ensconced in the social structure, he never really belongs,
and his exclusion constitutes the social structure as a whole.
Laughing at the excluded outsider in order to produce a sense of
wholeness is the primal form of comedy. It persists not due to a lack of
knowledge or progress but because it enables spectators to believe in
society as a substantial entity without any cracks. The excluded coon fig-
ure obscures the social order’s traumatic incompleteness. When we laugh
at the coon figure, we assure ourselves that it is possible to belong to the
social order, even if we ourselves do not.8
Faking Critique
While it is easy to identify the conservative function of the coon figure

and comedy that targets the excluded, it is more difficult to see this same
process at work in comedy that targets the authorities. Nonetheless, the
comedy of the carnival falls directly into this same category. Forcing the
king to walk naked down the street while wearing a clown mask during
the carnival seems to undermine the king’s authority by showing a lack of
authority within the appearance of authority. But this performance can
easily buttress the king’s authority. This type of comedy renders the king
comic, but it does so by demonstrating to spectators that even this comic
spectacle cannot disrupt the authority of the king. The king shows that
he has the ability to appear as a lacking subject in order to prove that he
isn’t. In this sense, there is no political difference between laughing at
the king in the carnival and laughing at the coon figure on the screen.
Egalitarian comedy might arise if the scene goes too far and begins to
slip beyond what the king had authorized. But medieval carnival, for the
most part, sustains the wholeness of the figure of authority, and this gives
it an ideological function.
One modern equivalent of the ideological comedy of the medieval
carnival is the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a banquet where
authority openly mocks itself. This annual event requires the president to

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speak before the White House correspondents and other invited guests,
and the speech always involves a series of jokes at the president’s own ex-
pense. The comic object is authority itself and its failures. For instance,
after the invasion of Iraq on the pretext that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction, George W. Bush feigned a search for the never- discovered
weapons in front of the audience, looking under the podium and all
around him. This joke undercut the very basis for the Iraq War and used
comedy to confirm critiques that he had launched the war under false
pretenses. It was a genuinely funny joke. We can’t simply dismiss it as fail-
ing to achieve the status of comedy. And yet, this self-mockery did not
undermine Bush’s authority because it positioned him, as the teller of
the joke, as a substantial authority. The White House Correspondents’
Dinner is an authorized space, like the medieval carnival. The jokes that
emerge from it remain within that space unless they manage to disturb
its fabric by violating the conventions that sustain the space. One laughs
at the excessive war fought over what didn’t exist, but while laughing, one
remains within the symbolic structure that justified the war and made it
possible. Laughing at Bush’s self-mockery is just an extension of writing
columns defending the decision to go to war in the first place.
But even when the comedy doesn’t come from the president him-
self, it can still serve the very authority that it mocks. In addition to top-
pling the power of authority, comedy can provide a site for this necessary
disobedience without threatening the structure of authority. It suffices
to look at Robert Altman’s classic film MASH (1970) to see how comic
subversion actually enables a social structure to function more effectively
than seriousness. The film contrasts comic figures Hawkeye Pierce (Don-
ald Sutherland) and Trapper John McIntyre (Eliot Gould) with serious
officers Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) and Major Margaret Houli-
han (Sally Kellerman). Burns and Houlihan exhibit devotion to the army
and its authority, while Pierce and McIntyre use comic acts and state-
ments to undermine this authority. They disdain rank, steal military prop-
erty, make gin in their tent, devise various pranks, and joke throughout
their surgeries. This earns them the enmity of Burns and Houlihan, who
attempt to have them punished for their antics. But in the end, Altman
shows Burns, irate after Pierce and McIntyre have broadcast his nighttime
tryst with Houlihan over the camp loudspeaker, taken away by the military
police in a straitjacket. In the film, the comedy of Pierce and McIntyre
triumphs over the seriousness of Burns and Houlihan.
Altman clearly intends his film as a critique of military authority
and a celebration of the subversiveness that Pierce and McIntyre exhibit.
Their comedy challenges military authority as it manifests itself in Burns,
Houlihan, and other high-ranking officers. In addition to their comic

169
struggle with this authority, Altman shows the banality and ineptness of
this authority. The commander of the hospital, Colonel Henry Blake
(Roger Bowen), shows more interest in fishing than in the war. General
Hammond (George Wood) is concerned about organizing and wager-
ing on a football game, not about furthering the war effort.9 As Altman
reveals throughout the film, military authority does not operate as a seri-
ous source of disciplinary power but consistently proves ineffectual and
distracted.
The problem with this attack on military authority lies in the rela-
tionship between the comic subversion and the war itself. The humor
that Pierce and McIntyre generate does not hasten the end of the war
or spur broader challenges to the war’s objectives. Pierce and McIntyre
actually help their unit to work efficiently. The strict obedience of Burns
actually disrupts the functioning of the military hospital far more than
the antics of Pierce and McIntyre. The latter enable the other members
of the hospital staff to work amid horrible conditions and inconceivable
trauma while still maintaining a psychic equilibrium, which is why the au-
thorities tolerate their behavior. Just as a sports coach tolerates and even
tacitly encourages locker room hazing, the military leaders turn a blind
but knowing eye to the comic subversion perpetuated by Pierce and Mc-
Intyre. The seriousness of Burns would thwart the hospital’s functioning,
while the comedy of Pierce and McIntyre make this functioning possible.
Pierce and McIntyre do not align themselves with military author-
ity, and the film also eschews any such alignment for the spectator. But
at the same time, we see that the effect of their comedy does not change
attitudes toward the war or hinder the ability of anyone to serve in the
military. They evince a dislike for the war and the carnage that it entails,
but their comedy provides but an interlude that creates a coping mecha-
nism for the carnage. In this sense, Pierce and McIntyre exhibit precisely
the defects of Bakhtin’s carnival as a political strategy. Their humor, even
when it targets military authority, does not disturb that authority. By pub-
licly broadcasting the tryst of Houlihan and Burns that they listen to via
a hidden microphone, they create a situation that results in Burns being
sent away and Houlihan losing her hard edge, but in the end, they play
along with authority and organize a football game with General Ham-
mond’s team. Though they recruit a former professional player who helps
them to upset the General’s team, this defeat doesn’t create any realign-
ment of the authority structure, nor does it interrupt the war effort. The
film counts among Altman’s failures because its comedy never success-
fully hits the target at which it aims.10 But this type of comic failure is not
unusual. It is even more common than the blatant ideological comedy
that employs the coon figure.

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CHAP T E R 8
Egalitarian Comedy
It is tempting to claim that conservative comedy is not really comedy,

that the failure of comedy to challenge the ruling order indicates an ab-
sence of authentic comedy. This is the position of Alain Badiou, among
others.11 He insists that comedy “tells of the other side of signification,
it inflicts wounds for which there is no cure.” In light of this definition,
Badiou concludes, “What is clear is that for the moment there exists no
modern comedy,” though he does not rule out the existence of the oc-
casional “funny play.”12 By differentiating comedy from the mere “funny
play” and thereby preserving the inherent critical status of comedy, Ba-
diou effectively lets comedy off the hook. The act of defining ideological
comedy as an absence of comedy doesn’t solve the problem of comedy’s
political bearing. It merely transposes this question into a different do-
main and requires that we pose it in a new form. The question becomes,
“What differentiates comedy from the funny work?” But this remains the
same question.
Badiou’s response is that genuine comedy exposes and undermines
figures of authority. He cites as examples the priest, François Mittérrand,
and John Paul II. He understands that comedy must offend, but he always
envisions it offending figures of power (like the three named) rather than
the excluded. This becomes, for Badiou, the definition of comedy. The
vehicle for this subversion is a character that Badiou calls “diagonal.” The
diagonal character reveals that the identity of figures of power is a purely
discursive identity, a symbolic fiction in which we have invested ourselves
and from which we might disinvest. The diagonal character is, for Badiou,
the sine qua non of comedy and the key to its subversive power.13 But the
diagonal character is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for
egalitarian comedy. As the example of MASH illustrates, ideological com-
edy can easily employ the subversion of those in power. At the same time,
egalitarian comedy can target those who are excluded.
A genuinely egalitarian comedy must reveal that the social authority
itself is not simply a discursive entity but necessarily lacking. It must show
the social order and the subject as at odds with themselves. The problem
with most comedy is that it hides a secret investment in the wholeness of
the authority that it mocks or in the position excluded from this author-
ity. The comedian wants to preserve the idea of a substantial existence, to
preserve some ground for identity. Egalitarian comedy adopts a position
of enunciation without any such ground.
It is possible for authority figures to do this and thus subvert their
own authority, but it is much more difficult than for others. The difficulty
lies in the authority figure’s refusal to abandon the symbolic identity that

171
authority confers. Authority grants the figure of authority status within

the symbolic structure and confers wholeness on this authority. As an
authority, one matters, and everyone within the symbolic structure offers
recognition to the figure of authority. By abandoning the authoritative
position of enunciation, one also abandons this recognition and joins
the mass of the excluded. In doing so, one incurs ostracism, vilification,
and even condemnation. One is divided against oneself. This is why so
few in authority are able to take this step in the direction of a genuinely
egalitarian comedy. Egalitarian comedy, authored by an authority figure,
costs this figure its authority.
The trajectory of comedy relative to the authorities that it mocks
is directly parallel to the trajectory of Hegel’s philosophy in the Phenom-
enology of Spirit. Hegel’s gambit in this work is that critical analysis will
demonstrate that whatever appears as a substance (or a self-sustaining
independent whole) suffers from the same division that the speaking
subject endures. This is why he claims in the preface to the Phenomenol-
ogy that “everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only
as Substance, but equally as Subject.”14 By grasping that substance is always
subject, Hegel doesn’t abolish authority as such, but he shows that there
is no substantial authority, which means that the power of authority is
always tenuous. Like Hegel, comedy enables us to confront the division
within authority and gain purchase on it. This is the critical function of
comedy in its relationship to authority.
Vice President Dick Cheney was a figure of great authority during
the presidency of George Bush. Though Bush often played the clown,
Cheney was always the serious leader, the one willing to endorse torture
in pursuit of enemies and to evince authoritativeness. One of the great
comic instances of the early 2000s centered around him precisely because
of his serious demeanor and sense of imperturbable authority. On Feb-
ruary 11, 2006, Cheney went quail hunting with an acquaintance, Harry
Whittington, a 78-year-old man. While aiming for a bird, Cheney acciden-
tally (and nonlethally) shot Whittington in the face and neck region. The
comedy of this event stems from the position in which it places Cheney.
Rather than being a figure of rigorous authority, he instantly becomes a
bumbling fool who shot a fellow hunter instead of the proper target. Even
the most solid authority figure can reveal himself as a divided subject who
can’t shoot straight. The incident received expansive coverage and come-
dians devoted much attention to it because it disrupted the authority of
an authority figure.
But we can’t simply confine the target of egalitarian comedy to fig-
ures of authority. There is also an egalitarian comedy that mocks the mar-
ginalized and oppressed. Though it seems hard to stomach, such comedy

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CHAP T E R 8
can be just as critical and perhaps even more so than the comedy that
mocks authority. This is what Charlie Chaplin accomplishes in his films,
and through mockery of the marginalized Little Tramp, he calls the sys-
tem that marginalizes the Little Tramp into question. One doesn’t laugh
with the Little Tramp against the social order when he is unable to keep
up with the speed of the assembly line in Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin,
1936); one laughs at him. But by showing the split within the excluded
figure, Chaplin eliminates any possible idealization of the excluded, an
idealization that has the effect of sustaining the exclusion.
Why Duck Soup Is Funnier Than Monkey Business
The importance of authority for comedy seems to reside in the opportu-

nity that the law provides for transgression. If we didn’t have authority, we
wouldn’t have comic incidents that involve defying social authority, such
as the moments in Animal House ( John Landis, 1978) when the Delta Tau
Chi fraternity defies the college authority represented by Dean Wormer
( John Vernon). The wild activities of the fraternity have a comic effect
because the authority exists for the fraternity to transgress. The toga par-
ties, the drunkenness, the sexual openness, and open defiance of Dean
Wormer constitute the comedy of the film. The fraternity is comic be-
cause it thwarts the efforts of the law to control it. This defiance is the
source of the film’s comedy. Dean Wormer’s authority is the background
against which this defiance operates. As Animal House illustrates, social
authority establishes the order that comedians can subsequently under-
mine. But the comic importance of authority actually extends further
than its establishment of the rule that comedy disturbs.
Authority itself is more comical than its transgression because the
authority’s self-division is the condition of possibility for its transgression
and thus is logically privileged relative to transgression. Many slapstick
comedies focus on those outside social authority who find themselves
constantly besieged by the authority’s excesses. This is the case with films
like Animal House. Of course, one can achieve sublime comedy outside
social authority, but even Animal House relies on the internal splitting of
the authority itself. Without this splitting, the transgression of the law
would not have any comic potential. The comic priority of social author-
ity relative to its transgression becomes evident if we contrast two of the
early Marx Brothers comedies made at Paramount, before the departure
of Zeppo from the group and before the move of the other three broth-
ers to MGM.15

173
Monkey Business (Norman McLeod, 1931) is the third Marx Brothers

film and the first to be made directly for the screen (that is, not trans-
formed from a stage version).16 Most of the film takes place on a ship
where the brothers are stowaways. In an opening sequence, they sing in
the barrels where they are hiding in the cargo hold. Much of the film’s
running time involves them hiding from the ship’s authorities and sub-
verting the ship’s captain. Like the Delta Tau Chi fraternity in Animal
House, the brothers occupy a position outside social authority during the
entire film. They generate comedy in the film through their defiance of
this authority, which begins with them hiding in barrels and continues
with them running throughout the ship, creating havoc while avoiding
the crew members chasing them.
One of the highlights of the film involves the brothers trying to pass
through customs. Because they are stowaways on the ship, they lack the
proper documentation for entering the United States. Each brother tries
to use the passport of Maurice Chevalier, but the customs officer, as one
might expect, refuses to accept this false identification. This refusal oc-
casions a physical defiance of this authority figure, and he ends up with
custom stamps on his bald head. At every point in the film, the brothers
are on the outside of the law, and their victims are the legal authorities
who try to rein them in. Their defiance shows that the authority doesn’t
have authority over them.
While there are funny moments in Monkey Business, the film as a
whole fails to sustain its comedy in the way that the other films of the
Marx Brothers do. There are only a limited number of ways to flout au-
thority on board a ship. Because all the comedy lies in authority’s trans-
gression, the film never exploits the potential comedy of the authority
itself. The captain and the customs officer are simply foils for the jokes
of the brothers. They never themselves become humorous. The comedy
of disobedience that Monkey Business employs leads to the repetition of
the same types of gags. This repetition renders the film the weakest of
the Paramount films.
The position of the Marx Brothers in Monkey Business is atypical. In
each of their other Paramount films, at least one of the brothers himself
occupies a position of authority. In The Cocoanuts (Robert Flory, 1929), Mr.
Hammer (Groucho Marx) is a hotel owner, and Jamison (Zeppo Marx)
works as his assistant, while in Animal Crackers (Victor Heerman, 1930), all
four brothers occupy established social positions, with Groucho playing
the famous explorer Captain Spaulding. Horse Feathers (Norman McLeod,
1932) follows this dynamic, as Groucho plays a newly appointed college
president, Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff.
In Animal Crackers and Horse Feathers, the figure of authority reveals

174
CHAP T E R 8
its self-division. The former depicts Captain Spaulding (Groucho Marx)

insulting the wealthy Mrs. Rittenhouse (Margaret Dumont) in almost
every one of his interactions with her, despite the attention and hospital-
ity that she lavishes on him. At one point, he tells her, “Why you’re one of
the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, and that’s not saying much for
you.” Minutes later, he offers her an insurance policy that will provide for
her, he says, “in her old age, which will be here in a couple of weeks now,
if I’m any judge of horse flesh.” In these representative lines, Spaulding
compliments Rittenhouse but immediately transforms the compliment
into an insult. Despite her wealth and status, Rittenhouse endures these
types of insults throughout the film. They have the effect of revealing
authority, in the figures of Spaulding and Rittenhouse, at odds with itself.
Horse Feathers begins with Quincy Adams Wagstaff being named
the new president of Huxley University. At the ceremony, Wagstaff ap-
pears with his professorial gown open while smoking a cigar. His opening
speech to the faculty and students shows disdain for the usual trappings
of academic authority. Though he is the new university president, he
openly admits to privileging football success over academic success, and
he unleashes a kidnapping plot to ensure a victory over the rival univer-
sity.17 Wagstaff shows that the university president doesn’t have the sub-
stantial authority that we would ordinarily attribute to this figure.
It is not coincidental that in the final and most successful Para-
mount film, Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933), Groucho not only plays a
figure of authority but the ultimate authority— the ruler of Freedonia,
Rufus T. Firefly.18 The contrast between Monkey Business and Duck Soup is
extreme. The comedy in Monkey Business derives from excessively defying
authority, while Duck Soup produces comedy through embodying author-
ity. The status of Duck Soup as the masterpiece of the Marx Brothers is now
secure, and it depends largely on the role that Firefly plays relative to his
own authority.19 As the newly appointed leader of Freedonia, he reveals
this authority as excessive and at the same time as lacking. This coinci-
dence is apparent from the moment of his first appearance. When the pa-
triotic “Hail Freedonia” plays for him to be introduced as the new leader,
he doesn’t initially show up at all. The song repeats in order to prompt
him to appear, though again he is absent. Here the film creates comedy
through the excessiveness of the introduction— its booming sound and
its repetition— and the absence of any figure to embody the authority.
After the repetition of the anthem, the film cuts to Firefly still in
bed, and we see him quickly dress. When he does finally make an appear-
ance in the great hall, he doesn’t enter in his assigned place. Instead, he
slides down a fire pole and stands next to a soldier. As “Hail Freedonia”
repeats once more, he is in line to greet the leader instead of being in

175
the position of the entering leader. When Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Du-
mont) finally locates him, rather than acting like an authority, he begins
with the comedy routine, telling her to pick a card from the deck that he
has. He then proceeds to assault Teasdale with a series of insults about
her weight, her relationship to her deceased husband, and her position
relative to himself. For instance, after he finds out that her husband has
died, he asks her, “Will you marry me? Did he leave you any money? An-
swer the second question first.” Though this joke and the others that he
tells are funny on their own, the comedy of Firefly in this scene becomes
multiplied on the basis of his status as the new ruler of Freedonia. His
position as an authority reveals the self-division of that authority.
When Firefly doesn’t act like a figure of legal authority despite oc-
cupying this position, he acts both as a lacking subject and as an excessive
one. His absence from his own introduction reveals that he doesn’t fully
identify with his position as a social authority, but his behavior with Teas-
dale shows him acting excessively within this position. Authority is funnier
than its transgressions because it necessarily brings these two positions
together. The genius of Duck Soup is placing a figure who clearly doesn’t
fit within the law as the authority. The disjunction between Firefly’s ac-
tions and his symbolic position is nothing but the disjunction of social
authority itself. But making this disjunction comically evident is always
difficult because comedy relies on the social bond for its effectiveness.
The Fundamental Barrier
No one laughs alone. Even if one watches a funny television show at home
without anyone else present and manages to laugh, the laughter implies
the presence of others who join in. When we appear to be laughing alone,
we secretly imagine others who would also see humor in the events that
we witness. Without this social dimension, it would be impossible to enjoy
comedy. The social dimension of comedy is evident in the contagiousness
of laughter. When we see others laughing at some unknown incident or
joke, we often spontaneously laugh ourselves, even though we have no
idea about the source of the humor. This contagiousness and our in-
ability to laugh alone reveal that comedy exceeds us as subjects or forces
us to exceed ourselves. When we laugh, we laugh beyond ourselves and
amid others. This is why those who praise laughter and comedy focus on
their inclusionary quality. Laughing subjects want others to join in their
laughter. In the experience of comedy, the cliché “the more, the mer-
rier” holds true.

176
CHAP T E R 8
The function of canned laughter is to assure us that others are

laughing along with us, to let us know that we are members of a commu-
nity.20 In this sense, canned laughter is an attempt to diffuse the traumatic
anxiety that accompanies our own experience of the comic. According
to Richard Boothby, laughter represents “the only moment when we can
enjoy anxiety.”21 But the solidarity of the laughter limits this experience
of anxiety and gives even the most radical comedy an ideological hue that
it must constantly struggle against. The fact that we can never laugh alone
even when we are laughing alone indicates comedy’s tendency toward
compromise.
Comedy is inherently social and brings people together, while trag-
edy isolates the individual’s opposition to the social order. Even those who
reject social convention in a comedy, like the women in Aristophanes’s
Lysistrata who withhold sex from their husbands, do so for the sake of
social betterment (putting an end to a costly war). Those who don’t act
for the sake of the society, like Socrates who spends his time ensconced
in idle philosophizing in Aristophanes’s The Clouds, are revealed as fools
by the comedy. Comedy lifts the subject out of itself and engages it in
the social world, even when the subject experiences this comedy alone.
In his discussion of comedy and laughter, Henri Bergson goes so
far as to view laughter as the revenge of society on the individual who
steps out of line and disobeys the unwritten rules of the game. Comedy,
as Bergson sees it, is the antithesis of revolt. It recoups those who stray by
offering them humiliation as the recompense for their attempts to sepa-
rate from the society. He says, “it is the business of laughter to repress
any separatist tendency. Its function is to convert rigidity into plasticity,
to readapt the individual to the whole, in short, to round off the corners
wherever they are met with.”22 Bergson adopts a relatively sanguine atti-
tude toward this social repression of separatism, but he does characterize
laughter as a process in which “society avenges itself for the liberties taken
with it.”23 The social dimension of comedy leads to inclusion, but this in-
clusion has, as Bergson’s description suggests, a superegoic quality to it.
A laughing group puts an intense pressure on others to join in with the
laughter.24 It is precisely this tendency that aligns comedy with the power
of the social order as such and the image of its total authority. We laugh
together because comedy punishes individual transgressions.
The inherently social nature of comedy blunts its critical edge.
Though it can criticize the pretensions of individuals who locate them-
selves outside of the social order or in a transcendent position relative to
this order, it most often does so in the name of the substantiality of the
social order. When laughing, one feels as if one belongs. This sense of
belonging to a whole is the antithesis of critique. This wholeness depends

177
on exclusion, and this exclusion manifests itself just as much as the socia-
bility of the comic.
If no one truly laughs alone, then it is also the case that there is no
joke at which everyone can laugh. Comedy demands not only inclusion
but also exclusion. Though comedy can include the object of the joke
within the comic sphere, there must be someone excluded from that
sphere, someone who doesn’t get the joke or whom the joke necessarily
marginalizes. If the joke did not exclude anyone, it would not be funny.
This is the fate that all attempts to create an inoffensive humor neces-
sarily suffer. Comedy that doesn’t offend someone ceases to be comedy.
But the fundamental stumbling block to egalitarian comedy is not
that it must exclude. It is instead the illusion of wholeness that derives
from comedy’s specific amalgam of inclusion and exclusion. Egalitarian
comedy cannot allow any entity to escape unscathed. Neither the source
of the comedy nor its target nor a third party can retain the illusion of
wholeness. Comedy brings together the disparate, but if it is to be genu-
inely egalitarian, it must do so in order to show that all wholeness finds
itself constantly beset by the disparate. If we laugh together, we must at
the same time recognize that we are already apart.

Conclusion
Speculation and Levity
The chief danger associated with comedy is not that we will use it to make
fun of outsiders and thereby entrench ourselves more firmly within our
social order while cementing the exclusion of the outsiders. Though this
relationship to comedy is common, it is not the predominant one. There
is another danger that is far more prevalent. Most of the time, we view
comedy as a kind of moral holiday, a time-out that releases us from the
seriousness that governs everyday life. It has a palliative role that enables
us to overlook or at least tolerate the contradictions of everyday life.
The failure to take comedy seriously is the most damaging attitude
to take toward it, and yet this attitude is almost ubiquitous. Though Aris-
totle associates catharsis with tragedy rather than comedy, we tend to see
comedy in similar terms: it provides an arena where we can permit our-
selves to hear what we ordinarily wouldn’t dare hear and think. After a
bout with comedy, we return to our everyday life, refreshed and prepared
for what’s really important. Because comedy is not serious, what we hear
and think during the experience of comedy has no bearing on the rest
of our lives. If we adopt this dismissive attitude toward comedy, it marks a
failure to see that the experience of comedy is not an interlude between
moments of everyday life; rather, everyday life is an interlude between
moments of comedy. Whether it is conservative or egalitarian comedy,
experiencing comedy is always an existential act that forces us to confront
the basic structure of our subjectivity. Comedy is not always radical, but
it is always speculative.
Most of us do not have the leisure time necessary for philosophy.
Even if we had the time, we might not have the inclination to philoso-
phize. It seems to be a mode of being for a few rather than for everyone.
At the same time, almost no one— probably not even Martin Heidegger,
though we have no documentation— goes through life without either tell-
ing a joke or laughing at one. Our widespread engagement with comedy
bespeaks our desire to philosophize without actually becoming philoso-
phers. Comedy embarks on the same project as philosophy, but it does
so in a way that almost everyone eagerly partakes in. Each comic experi-
ence necessarily excludes, but no one is excluded from comedy as such.
Whereas philosophy requires some degree of learning, one need not even
be literate to participate in the speculative enterprise of comedy. Though
179

180
CONCLUS I ON
philosophy speculates more directly, comedy offers a more accessible ver-

sion of speculative thought.
Comedy is speculative because it forces us to confront the finitude
and the transcendence of our subjectivity. In every comic experience, the
subject must navigate the variegations of subjectivity itself. In this way,
comedy’s project is not at all light or unserious. Instead, it undermines
our pretensions of escaping the body and finitude, while rendering it im-
possible to view ourselves solely through the lens of finite concerns like
well-being and survival. In the comic experience, the subject is both tran-
scendent and finite at the same time. When we understand it properly,
comedy places us directly within the central contradiction of subjectivity.
It is not a release from our burdens but a doubling down on them.
Nonetheless, subjects heed the call of comics, rush to view film and
television comedies, and enthusiastically tell each other jokes. If comedy
forces subjects to experience the trauma of subjectivity, they don’t put
up much resistance to this experience. It is not just that comedy gives us
some pleasure to enable us to tolerate the trauma. Instead, the trauma
of comedy is at the same time the source of our enjoyment. In no other
form of experience does the status of trauma as enjoyable come to the
fore as it does in comedy. Comedy makes clear that enjoyment is inher-
ently traumatic. It enjoins us to think of enjoyment and trauma as indis-
solubly linked.
Comedy brings together lack and excess in order to show that we
cannot have one without the other, as the well-known joke about two men
encountering a bear demonstrates: “A bear appears fifty feet in front
of two men hiking in the woods. As the bear walks toward them, one
opens his backpack and hurriedly puts on his running shoes. The other
says to him, ‘Don’t be silly, you can’t outrun a bear, even with your running
shoes.’ The first man replies, ‘I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have
to outrun you.’” The danger of the bear creates a clear lack in the two
men— they are on the precipice of death— and the running shoes func-
tion as an excessive response to this lack that produces a comic moment.
But the response of the man to the threat embodied by the bear also
leaves the listener in a disturbing position. Rather than responding com-
munally to the shared threat, he highlights the divide between the other
man and himself. While one might cheer his ingenuity and be relieved
that at least he survives, one also registers that his survival depends on the
death of the other man, which complicates one’s enjoyment. The man
survives excessively, but the listener cannot avoid the lack— the part-
ner’s death— that haunts this excess. This bear joke embodies the philo-
sophical achievement of comedy. Even more than the greatest work of
philosophy, the simplest experience of comedy reveals that our most

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S P E CULAT I O N AND LEVITY
excessive enjoyment is existentially connected to our most traumatic lack.

Comedy shows that we cannot opt for one without the other. In this sense,
the experience of comedy offers a counterargument to theories that at-
tempt to separate enjoyment from trauma or transcendence from fini-
tude. We are infinite subjects in comedy, but we are simultaneously tied
to our finitude. No one escapes the comic destiny.
Because everyday life demands that we consider lack and excess as
opposites that do not overlap, comedy, properly understood, challenges
the reign of the everyday. It enables us to see the connection between
insiders and outsiders. If we recognize comedy’s marriage of lack and
excess, we also recognize our inability to escape either one. The comic
moment is the only moment in which we are able to enjoy our anxiety,
which gives comedy its fundamental ethical and political importance.
A sense of humor is not democratically distributed. The possession
of a sense of humor does not bespeak any existential superiority. But
when we grasp what’s at stake in the comic experience, its fundamen-
tal significance becomes clear. We dismiss comedy as a break from life
in order to avoid confronting the speculation that occurs during every
comic experience. And yet, confronting comedy’s speculative structure
is the only way to do justice to the experience and to understand its ubiq-
uity. Comedy is not just a pleasant interruption that provides relief from
the seriousness of existence. Comedy is an encounter with the fundamen-
tal contradiction of our subjectivity.

Notes
Introduction
1. I owe this term to Ryan Engley (University of Rhode Island).

2. In a hundred years, for example, no one will be able to understand why
YouTube videos of pets functioned as a principal form of comedy in the United
States during the 2010s. Unless I’m wrong, in which case the joke will be on me.
3. Shakespeare seems like an exception, since companies still stage his
comedies and audiences remain receptive to them. But it is the greatness of
Shakespeare’s tragedies that keeps his comedies alive. If he hadn’t written Hamlet
or King Lear, there would be far fewer performances of Comedy of Errors or The
Taming of the Shrew.
4. Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire— Images du temps présent: 2001–2004 (Paris:
Fayard, 2014), 19.
5. Gerald Mast, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, 2nd ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1979), 3. Mladen Dolar makes a similar claim,
though he does so only in order to qualify his definition of the comic rather
than to avoid defining it as Mast does. He writes that “it is in the nature of com-
edy to escape the clues, that it is irreducible to formulas which pretend to spell
out its secret and that it always has the last laugh over the philosophical endeav-
ours to bring it to the concept.” Mladen Dolar, “Comedy and Its Double,” in Stop
That Comedy! On the Subtle Hegemony of the Tragic in Our Culture, ed. Robert Pfaller
(Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2005), 209.
6. In the “Sense Certainty” section of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel
demonstrates the impossibility of addressing particularity through language
without having recourse to the universal. Using the example of the attempt to
discuss a particular piece of paper, he writes, “They mean ‘this’ bit of paper on
which I am writing— or rather have written— ‘this’; but what they mean is not
what they say. If they actually wanted to say ‘this’ bit of paper which they mean,
if they wanted to say it, then this is impossible, because the sensuous This that is
meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e. to that
which is inherently universal.” G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V.
Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 66. Our inability to reach the
particular comic element without invoking the universal dooms the project of
examining comedy without theorizing it.
7. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1975), 2:1220.
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NOT E S T O PAGE S 5–12
8. See Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans.
Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956).
9. See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans.
James Strachey, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 8 (Lon-
don: Hogarth, 1960).
10. Simon Critchley makes a related point in On Humour when he insists
that humor must violate our expectations. He notes, “Jokes tear holes in our
usual predictions about the empirical world. We might say that humour is pro-
duced by a disjunction between the way things are and the way they are repre-
sented in the joke, between expectation and actuality. Humour defeats our ex-
pectations by producing a novel actuality, by changing the situation in which we
find ourselves.” Simon Critchley, On Humour (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1.
11. The insistence on creating nonstop comedy is the principal weakness
of the Marx Brothers films, despite their moments of hilarity. The Marx Brothers
often disdain any narrative convention for the sake of producing comic situa-
tions, but they fail to see how comedy relies on the narrative that it transgresses.
Even stand-up comics, whom we associate with nonstop comedy, include serious
moments in their routines that make the comic bits possible.
12. Comedy has a limited life span because it loses its power through nor-
malization, a process that occurs with the passing of time. Just as old horror films
often lose their power to scare us, old comedies can lose the power to make us
laugh when we become habituated to the connections that they depict.
13. The Hangover, Part III (Todd Phillips, 2013) should, like its immediate
predecessor, be counted as a failure. But it doesn’t fail as badly as the first sequel
because it deviates from the formula in a way that the first sequel does not.
14. One can turn it into an effective joke by introducing the unexpected
answer and thus creating distance between the elements being connected. For
instance, if one responds to “What’s black and white and red all over?” with “a
wounded nun,” there is some comic effect. I am indebted to Elizabeth Fenton
(University of Vermont) for this response.
15. Freud himself questions whether this is really a joke or not. He calls it
QU: Edit un-
“a piece of sophistry which has been much laughed over, but whose right to be
clear, is this as
called a joke might be doubted.” Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, intended? See
62. Freud takes a restrictive view of what constitutes a joke. Because this story de- also p. 197.
rives its humor only from an obvious error in logic, it does not qualify as a joke.
16. Carrey’s visible effort to be funny becomes itself the source of great
humor in the outtakes from Liar Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997). Instead of respond-
ing with her proper line to one of Carrey’s madcap outbursts, a fellow actor
simply proclaims, “Overactor.” The comic effect of this insult derives from its
capacity for making evident the effort that underlies Carrey’s comedy, a connec-
tion that every comedian tries to hide in order to remain an effective comedian.
17. I am indebted to Simon Hajdini (University of Ljubljana) for this point.
18. The importance of the screwball comedies of Howard Hawks stems
from his refusal to allow a return to everyday stability after the comic interlude.
In this sense, the ending of Bringing Up Baby is consistent with his other films.

185
Even though his screwball comedies end with the romantic union of the couple,
the disruptiveness of the comic figure, like Susan or Sugarpuss (Barbara Stan-
wyck) in Ball of Fire (1941), remains in full force. The hero of Hawks’s screwball
comedy is not permitted to return to the everyday, and this constitutes Hawks’s
radicality as a filmmaker even when he operates in a typically ideological genre
like that of the screwball comedy (which works to reconcile sexual antagonism
through the production of the romantic couple). One measure of Hawks’s radi-
cality is the absence of almost any notice at all by the Academy Awards, despite
his having made mainstream Hollywood films that most historians consider
among the finest that the studio system produced.
19. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, 1957–
1958, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 313.
20. Simon Critchley sees a political divide between the subversiveness of
humor on the one hand and the ideological function of buffoonery on the other.
See Simon Critchley, On Humour.
Chapter 1
1. The subject doesn’t desire to remedy its incompleteness but to sustain it,
though this underlying truth of desire remains hidden from our consciousness.
We pursue objects of desire that promise completion or self-identity without rec-
ognizing that this pursuit functions unconsciously as a way of perpetuating in-
completeness.
2. This nationalistic excess is one that few, even the most aware, can avoid.
I was once talking with a committed leftist friend who admitted that he couldn’t
help but feel shivers down his spine when his national soccer team achieved a
miraculous upset victory during the World Cup. The shivers startled him, and
according to his recounting of the incident, he even went so far as to try con-
sciously (though unsuccessfully) to quiet them.
3. I am indebted to Richard Boothby (Loyola University Maryland) for this
metaphor.
4. Contemporary companies like Google attempt to break down the bar-
rier between lack and excess that constitutes everyday life. Such companies
encourage excessive activity amid the lack of the workday, but they transform
this excess into economic productivity. This has the effect of eviscerating the
excessiveness of the excess and creating a subject incapable of genuine excess,
which is why these companies must constantly bring in young replacements who
remain capable of genuine excess. They feed on the excessiveness of the young
and then cast aside those whose excessiveness has exhausted itself.
5. For speaking beings, thinking about reproduction can have a deflating
effect on sexual desire because reproduction often appears as a punishment for
the enjoyment of the act. The divide between sex and reproduction is fully evi-
dent in the very approach that subjects take toward sex.
6. In my own case, instead of cocaine I pursued the project of health
through excessive running, which produced a series of pneumonias and lasting

186
lung damage. Despite its seriousness in terms of the body’s survival, this is none-
theless a comic turn of events.
7. The contrast here is not between human and animal but between the
subject of the signifier and the animal. If an animal other than a human spoke,
then it would be just as capable of excess. Conversely, if a human lacked any
interaction with the signifier and grew up as a feral being, such a being would
have the same lack of relationship to excess that other animals have.
8. We enter into language in response to social demands, but our very ca-
pacity to respond to these demands— instead of just finding them superfluous—
testifies to the lack that constitutes the basis for the development of language.
9. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre X: L’angoisse, 1962–1963, ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 210.
10. When what we have is at risk, it regains the possibilities that were lost
with its acquisition. Though we think of insurance as guarding against loss, its
psychic purpose is the opposite. It creates the idea that the insured object is
at risk and thereby reestablishes the object’s self-transcendence, which we lost
when we obtained it. The insurance salesperson peddles the possibility of loss in
order to disrupt the inanity of secure possession.
11. Though there are instances of addiction in the animal world, signifi-
cation and its excessiveness are required for addiction to proliferate. The possi-
bility of an excessive attachment that can manifest itself as addiction emerges
with the signifier and the form of enjoyment that it produces.
12. It was Brian Wall (SUNY Binghamton) who made this telling observation.
13. Contemporary capitalist society functions through the command to
enjoy rather than through the traditional prohibition of enjoyment. As a result,
addiction plays a double role. On the one hand, we are required to be addicted
to something (shopping, chocolate, and so on), but on the other hand, the
social order ostracizes those who evince their excessive enjoyment too exces-
sively in the form of severe addictions. This is because the addict is the subject
who takes the contemporary social demand at its word and thereby threatens to
expose the emptiness of the enjoyment at the heart of this demand. To keep this
threat from transpiring, we must erect a violent prohibition against all forms of
addiction.
14. Fields still has some admirers, but it is difficult to find his comedy en-
joyable today. In contrast with the comedy of Charlie Chaplin or the Marx Broth-
ers, it hasn’t aged well because Fields relies on a comic device, drunkenness,
which has become hackneyed. Nothing destroys the comic effect more than nor-
malization.
15. Even though Esperanto shares the same absence of a final signifier with
a language like German, one might hazard the hypothesis that the artificial lan-
guage failed to catch on because it was not conducive to the excess of signifiers
that enables subjects to enjoy the act of speaking. One of the sources of enjoy-
ment for subjects of the signifier is the creation of new and unnecessary signifi-
ers. Enjoyment is inseparable from inutility, even in the domain of signification.
16. Someone who curses constantly, in even the most mundane situations,
normalizes the profane words, but this never works completely. One nonetheless

187
experiences the string of profanities as an indication of the person’s excessive-

ness, as if the person suffers from an addiction.
17. I always saw the comedy in my father’s profane inventions, but I also
knew that any laughter would trigger an outburst of rage that I would rather
avoid. So I would spend several minutes stifling laughter and feigning a cough
in order to express— without fully expressing it— my appreciation of the high
comedy.
18. In order to garner the maximum possible audience, Bond films have
always avoided an R rating, but even after the introduction of the PG-13 rating
in 1984, they managed to avoid the new category and retain the tamer PG rat-
ing. PG-13 became the standard rating for Bond films only with the introduction
of Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye (Martin Campbell, 1995), and every subsequent
Bond film has been rated PG-13. The benefit of this rating is that it forces the
film’s writers to resort to puns instead of direct profane expressions.
19. Freud also sees the pun as the model for the joke, but for different
reasons. For him, it is the economizing nature of puns that renders them para-
digmatic for all other types of joke.
20. Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory attempts to produce a logical structure
that avoids the possibility of Russell’s paradox. It does so by axiomatically rul-
ing out the universalization of all sets that don’t include themselves. According
to this theory, one can only build sets that can be articulated (or derived from
articulated sets). While this tack successfully avoids Russell’s paradox, it does so
through an excessive prohibition designed to make it impossible. Thus, this de-
velopment in set theory still bears the mark of the contradiction that it excludes.
21. As Frege puts it, “0 is the Number which belongs to the concept ‘not
identical with itself.’” Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Aus-
tin (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1980), 87. Frege believes that
zero, unlike other numbers, must be derived because we have no empirical ex-
perience of it. No one has ever seen zero apples.
22. I am indebted to Jonathan Dickstein for this point and for his contribu-
tions to this entire discussion.
23. Russell believed that he solved his own paradox with a theory of types,
a theory that disallowed the creation of classes such as the class of classes that
don’t include themselves. According to Russell’s later argument, the creation of
this class represents a category error in which we locate a type or class where it
doesn’t belong. The problem with this solution is that language inherently re-
fuses such arbitrary restrictions that attempt to rein in its excessiveness.
24. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XVI: D’un autre à l’autre, 1968–1969,
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 311–12.
25. Robert Pfaller points out that love in comedy is shown “by always
achieving ‘too much’ of it.” Robert Pfaller, “Was ist so lustig an multipler Liebe?:
Der polygame Lubitsch-Touch,” Neue Rundschau 124, no. 4 (2013): 88.
26. The fact that Ralph Bellamy served as the figure of excessive romantic
partners in both films becomes a site for additional comedy in His Girl Friday.
When Walter Burns sends someone to get rid of Bruce (who is waiting outside
the newspaper office), he says, “He looks like that fellow in the movies— Ralph

188
Bellamy.” The success of this joke testifies to Bellamy’s excessively playing the
role of an excess.
27. The film never offers a diegetic explanation for why February 2 repeats
itself for Phil. This absence helps to establish Phil as a lacking subject during the
repetition. If we knew why he endured the repetition, we would not view it as a
referendum on his subjectivity in the way that we do.
28. Deborah Landau (New York University) once told me that in order to
redouble the joke of the film, she and her spouse rewatch Groundhog Day every
few months. Like Phil Connors, they respond to the lack that the film creates
with excess.
29. The defining idea of romanticism— that we must constitute ourselves
through a break from the tedium of repetition— runs aground on the necessity
of the repetition in the form of breaks. If we attempt to reject any repetition, as
did Henry David Thoreau by walking a different path every day, we transform the
interruption of repetition into a different form of repetition.
30. I have spoken with many lovers of Groundhog Day who detest “I Got You
Babe” as a result of the many times they hear it during the film. Though Ramis
admirably minimizes the full repetition of the morning scene, he must include
the repetition of the song in order to indicate that the same day repeats itself.
One of the film’s final jokes occurs when Phil finally awakens to a new day, Febru-
ary 3, and the radio nonetheless plays the same song. It is only the commentary
of the radio personalities, the presence of Rita, and the changes outside that
confirm that it is no longer February 2.
31. The great exceptions to this maxim about the humorlessness of con-
cluding marriages occur in the films of Buster Keaton. Marriage rarely just works
out for Keaton. As a result, his films not only remain funny through to the end
but often come to a comic climax with their conclusion. This effect is central to
what elevates him above almost every other film comedian.
32. Because the subject is the subject of the signifier, it has the capacity to
transform any lack into an excess. Disabled subjects can wear their disability like
a badge of honor, and this reversal can be socially effective.
33. The Gospel of John nicely recounts the encounter with lack that occurs
when Jesus performs his first miracle. His mother tells him of the lack of wine,
and he is frustrated at being asked to perform a miracle before his proper time
has come. It is clear that Jesus didn’t anticipate this particular lack as the mo-
ment for his excessiveness to show itself.
34. Spinoza’s absolute rejection of miracles stems from his correct under-
standing of what the existence of miracles implies about God as a creator. If mir-
acles are necessary in the world, then God has failed at some point in the creative
process. As Spinoza sees it, the miracle would be the reason for abandoning the
idea of God rather than adhering to it.
35. See Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Produc-
tion to Modes of Exchange, trans. Michael K. Bourdaghs (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2014).
36. See Henry Fielding, preface to Joseph Andrews (New York: Penguin,
1977), 25–31.

189
37. Sartre’s claim that he couldn’t imagine anyone humble enough to ac-
cept an award like the Nobel Prize exhibits his understanding of how vanity func-
tions. To accept recognition, for Sartre, is always to risk vanity. It places one in
the position of an openly desiring subject. The prizewinner on stage is the ulti-
mate figure of lack.
38. Many of the great comic scenes in Allen’s films take affectation as their
point of departure. For instance, when someone is offering an affected pro-
nouncement on the thought of Marshall McLuhan while standing in line for a
movie in Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977), Allen has McLuhan himself enter the
scene and explain to the man that he doesn’t understand McLuhan’s thought at
all. The comedy in this scene comes not only from McLuhan’s excessive presence
but from exposing the lack that drives the vain excessiveness. One could count
hundreds of formally similar examples in Allen’s films.
39. Wanda Sykes, Yeah, I Said It (New York: Atria Books, 2004), 196–97. For
more on the association of enjoyment with lack, see Todd McGowan, Enjoying
What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2013).
Chapter 2
1. See John Morreall, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor

(Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
2. Kant consigns the comic and laughter to mere gratification, which can-
not be universal. It is the dependence of the comic on the nonsensical that, ac-
cording to Kant, leads to its inability to be universal. He notes, “In everything
that is to provoke a lively, uproarious laughter, there must be something non-
sensical (in which, therefore, the understanding can take no satisfaction).” Im-
manuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Mat-
thews, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 209. The
minimal treatment that Kant gives to comedy stems from his belief that it in-
herently resists understanding because it involves an encounter with nonsense.
What he fails to see is that one understands comedy— and all other utterances—
not in spite of this kernel of nonsense but because of it. All sense must involve
nonsense, and comedy simply brings this to the fore.
3. It is not coincidental that The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche’s first book and
sets the stage for his philosophy. Despite the humorous quality of his writing, he
develops a tragic philosophy in which the aim involves thinking our subjectiv-
ity in the most tragic condition possible— that of the eternal return. For Freud,
Greek and Shakespearean tragedy plays the key role in the origin of psychoanal-
ysis, and tragedy shapes his conception of the psychoanalytic cure. The best that
the patient can hope for is tragic recognition in failure, not success.
4. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. R. Kassel, in Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed.
Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2319.
5. This occurs in Eco’s murder mystery set in a medieval Italian abbey. See
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harvest, 1994).

190
6. There have been, of course, other theorists of comedy, most notably

Umberto Eco. Eco contends that comedy relies on the transgression of an im-
plicit law, whereas tragedy involves the transgression of an explicit law. Eco de-
velops this theory over a series of essays, but despite its merits, it confines itself
to a structural analysis of comedy and doesn’t go as far as Bergson, Freud, and
Zupančič in theorizing the comic as such. See especially Umberto Eco, “The
Frames of Comic ‘Freedom,’” in Umberto Eco, V. V. Ivanov, and Monica Rector,
Carnival! ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), 1–9.
7. Bergson, Laughter, 117.
8. According to Bergson, we lose our freedom, our capacity to act differ-
ently, when we conceive of ourselves as spatial rather than temporal beings. For
the sake of our freedom, we must abandon spatiality for temporality. As he puts
it in Time and Free Will, “our life unfolds in space rather than in time; we live for
the external world rather than for ourselves; we speak rather than think; we ‘are
acted’ rather than act ourselves. To act freely is to recover possession of oneself,
and to get back into pure duration.” Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay
on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover,
2001), 231–32. When we spatialize the temporality of our being, we forsake the
freedom inherent in this temporality.
9. Bergson’s war against the cliché provides the crucial link between his
philosophy and Gilles Deleuze’s meditations on cinema, meditations that include
commentaries on Bergson and his importance for the cinema. Even though De-
leuze takes a much more sanguine view of the machine than Bergson, he shares
Bergson’s vitriol for the cliché, seeing it as the principal danger to cinematic art.
10. Both Clair’s and Chaplin’s films link Bergson’s theory of comedy to the
emergence of the mass production practices characteristic of Fordism. Though
Bergson never makes the connection between his theory of comedy and a cri-
tique of capitalism, the possibility for this critique becomes clear in both films.
11. Ironically, the points where Adam’s Rib becomes too mechanical, when
Amanda’s provocations of Adam seem too automated and too doctrinaire, are
the moments when the film ceases to be funny. In this sense, the film provides a
perfect rebuttal to Bergson’s theory.
12. Alain Badiou’s theory of dance nicely shows how mechanization is itself
a disruption of our natural movement and not simply, as Bergson would have it, a
constraint on our inherent freedom. In order to be free, we need the mechanical
disruption to break the dominance of our physiology. “Dance,” Badiou argues,
“is in no way the liberated bodily impulse, the wild energy of the body. On the
contrary, it is the bodily manifestation of the disobedience to an impulse.” Alain
Badiou, “Dance as a Metaphor for Thought,” in Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Al-
berto Toscano (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 60. In the same
way, mechanization is first and foremost the shattering of our inherent bodily
impulses and thus paves the way for the possibility of freedom.
13. Despite the lack of influence, Freud is clearly acquainted with Berg-
son’s work and makes multiple references to it during the development of his
own theory of comedy.

191
14. Freud’s insistence on the distinction between the comic and the joke
is the result of a conceptual lacuna on his part. He identifies the third party as a
necessary ingredient for the joke and can’t see a similar figure in the case of the
comic because the comic often involves just the subject and the comic object. If
Freud had developed Jacques Lacan’s notion of the big Other as an invisible and
yet omnipresent social authority, he would have recognized it as the requisite
third party in every comic moment. While the big Other is embodied in the case
of the joke, it nonetheless always operates in the case of the comic as well. A joke
is comedy when the big Other is made visible.
15. The analogy between the dream and the joke is almost total. The sig-
nificant difference is that jokes are public and dreams are private, which grants
dreams much more latitude to express the unconscious. It is not at all surprising
that Freud returned several times to revise The Interpretation of Dreams and never
once to Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Jokes may relate to the uncon-
scious, but they don’t constitute the “royal road” to it as dreams do.
16. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 100.
17. Ibid.
18. The greatest philosophical moments can become subject to jokes just
as easily as the most ribald instances of bodily excess. One day after a discussion
of Descartes’s Meditations in class, a student came up to me and said, “Descartes
is drinking in a bar, and the bartender asks him if he’d like another. When he
responds, ‘I think not,’ he disappears.”
19. Buñuel is not showing the relativity of smut in this scene. That is, the
point is not that anything can be smutty given different cultural norms. Instead,
he shows that smut is located at a certain place within the social order. Whatever
occupies that place— whatever postcards a man gives to children in a park— will
be smutty. In the same film, Buñuel shows people openly defecating around a
table and shamefully sneaking into a private room to eat dinner. Here again,
rather than indicating cultural relativism, he reveals that disgust concerns form
rather than content.
20. Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2008), 27.
21. The characterization of Socrates is so unfair that if one keeps in mind
the figure of Socrates while watching the play the injustice of the portrayal inevi-
tably detracts from one’s pleasure. But Aristophanes is using Socrates as the em-
bodiment of the universal philosopher, not as the particular philosopher Socrates.
As Zupančič points out, comedy almost never concerns itself with particulars.
When it does, it focuses on some universal quality evinced by the particularity.
22. The Holocaust joke as such may be inherently offensive, but it isn’t
inherently anti-Semitic. One can easily imagine a version of such a joke that is
neither anti-Semitic nor a critique of the anti-Semitism that produced the Holo-
caust. The following Holocaust joke has just such a status: One Holocaust sur-
vivor asks another why he never uses soap when he showers, and the other re-
sponds, “Because I never know who’s in it.” It is difficult to know how to respond
to such a joke. On the one hand, it seems to trivialize the horror of the Holocaust,

192
but on the other, it indicates just how far into ordinary activities this horror ex-
tends. One might have the same ambivalent reaction to Sarah Silverman’s Holo-
caust joke: “Summer camp: the second worst camp for Jews.”
23. One could easily imagine transforming this misogynist joke into a femi-
nist one with a slight modification. By changing the teller to a woman recounting
a joke about men, we would have: “What’s the difference between a golf ball and
a G-spot?” “Men will spend five minutes looking for a golf ball.” As our point
of identification changes, so does the political valence of the joke. Such jokes
about male inattentiveness to female sexual pleasure are staples in the routines
of many female comedians, such as Amy Schumer. Schumer points out that no
woman thinks about sex with men in the following way: “Oh no, it’s cool. I’m
just honored to be witnessing your process. No, I don’t want to feel the one good
thing we’re allowed as humans.”
Chapter 3
1. Umberto Eco, “The Comic and the Rule,” in Travels in Hyperreality, trans.
William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 274.
2. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed.,
ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 5.4.35–36.
3. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The System of Ethics, trans. Daniel Breazeale
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 258.
4. Though there are clear differences between these thinkers, they do all
accept Heidegger’s contention that care is fundamental. When they part from
Heidegger, it is to insist that he doesn’t instill care fundamentally enough in
our being. Levinas, for example, insists, contra Heidegger, that ethical concerns
trump all ontological concerns.
5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), 375.
6. Heidegger insists again and again on the identification of Dasein with
its world, not just in Being and Time but wherever he talks about Dasein. For
instance, in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, he claims that “so far as the Da-
sein is, it is in a world. It ‘is’ not in some way without and before its being-in-the-
world, because it is just this latter that constitutes its being. To exist means to be
in a world.” Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert
Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 169. This reduction
of existence to worldliness makes it impossible for Heidegger to see a tragic hero
like Hamlet as genuinely transcending his world and accessing the infinite.
7. Given Heidegger’s complicity with Nazism and subsequent refusal to
speak about the victims of the Holocaust, it might seem perverse to call him a
philosopher who sees only victims in the world. He seems instead blind to real
victims. But it is precisely Heidegger’s sense of the German Volk as a victim and of
authentic Dasein as a victim of modernity that led him to Nazism. A philosophy
that posits victims everywhere tends to produce even more of them.
8. The problem with many comic films is that they attempt to create com-

193
edy out of wholly pathetic characters. This is the weakness of a film like Napoleon
Dynamite (Jared Hess, 2004). The pathetic status of Napoleon ( Jon Heder) in-
hibits the spectator’s ability to laugh at him without feeling pity.
9. Hegel argues that viewing criminals as victims and not executing them
for this reason is an insult not to the murder victim but to the criminals them-
selves. He states, “to make momentary blindness, the excitement of passion,
intoxication, or in general what is described as the strength of sensuous mo-
tives . . . into grounds for attributing responsibility or determining [the nature
of the] crime itself and its culpability, and to consider such circumstances as taking
away the criminal’s guilt, is once again . . . to deny the criminal the right and dig-
nity of a human being [and] . . . failing to treat the criminal in accordance with
the right and honour due to him as a man.” G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right,
trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 160.
10. For Freud’s discussion of Hamlet, see Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of
Dreams, pt. 1, trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho-
logical Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1953), 4:264–66.
11. Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (New York: Norton, 1976), 91.
12. For someone like Jean Laplanche, who attacks Freud for abandoning
the seduction theory, Freud’s greatness derives from his conception of the sub-
ject as a victim who lacks the capacity for what Laplanche calls“self-begetting.”
Laplanche identifies Freud’s radicality at the point where he isolates human
pathos. He writes, “In psychoanalysis, everything, essentially, is produced by
a single man— simultaneously: the discovery, affirmed at a very early stage, and
which is conjointly (and for me indissociably) that of the unconscious and that
of seduction— and the going-astray, the wrong path taken each time there was
a return to a theory of self-centering, or even self-begetting.” Jean Laplanche,
“The Unfinished Copernican Revolution,” trans. Luke Thurston, in Essays on
Otherness (New York: Routledge, 1999), 60. Contra Laplanche, I will insist that
Freud’s great discovery consists in seeing the formation of the unconscious as the
possibility for renewed transcendence. Even if seduction is always the source for
the emergence of sexuality, the subject has the capacity to make this seduction its
own. Rather than marking the moment that Freud goes astray, this is when Freud
introduces the tragic into psychoanalysis.
13. Though many insist on a radical break between desire and what Freud
calls the death drive, they share the same fundamental structure. Desire appears
to move from object to object, seeking a satisfaction that it can never find, but
it actually follows the repetitive path of the drive as it continually misses the lost
object. The death drive is nothing but the recognition of what’s at work in desire.
14. Perhaps Freud removing the subject from the position of victim is what
led so many of his followers to reject his move from the pleasure principle to
the death drive. Even those who accepted the death drive and integrated it into
their thought, like Melanie Klein, deformed it in such a way that they were able
to preserve the image of the subject as the victim of the psychic drama that de-
termines it.
15. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. James Strachey, in The Standard

194
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth,

1961), 19:52.
16. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 280.
Lacan associates this position beyond the pleasure principle not just with An-
tigone but with all of the tragic heroes in the plays of Sophocles. He points out:
“If there is a distinguishing characteristic to everything we ascribe to Sophocles,
with the exception of Oedipus Rex, it is that for all his heroes the race is run. They
are at a limit that is not accounted for by their solitude relative to others. There
is something more; they are characters who find themselves right away in a limit
zone, find themselves between life and death” Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII, 272.
What Lacan labels here a “limit zone” is actually a zone beyond the limit of fini-
tude, a zone that he calls the position “between two deaths.”
17. When Falstaff appears in an actual comedy—The Merry Wives of Wind-
sor— he ceases to be a source of humor. In this play he becomes nothing but an
object of mockery for the other characters, a figure of pathos rather than com-
edy. Shakespeare strips Falstaff of his transcendence, which clearly illustrates how
necessary transcendence is for comedy. Falstaff ’s transformation from the great
comic figure in Henry IV Part I and Henry IV Part 2 to a tedious buffoon is all the
more stunning insofar as most textual scholars believe that Shakespeare wrote
The Merry Wives of Windsor between the composition of the two Henry IV plays.
It seems not to be the case of a writer returning to an old favorite character in a
later work having lost the sense of what made the character effective.
18. William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd
ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 4.1.133–34.
19. Ibid., 4.1.133–41.
20. One can see the kinship between Falstaff and Shakespeare’s tragic
heroes in Orson Welles’s remarkable Chimes at Midnight (1965), a film that as-
sembles parts of the different plays in which Falstaff appears (though with only
a couple of lines from The Merry Wives of Windsor). When Falstaff (Orson Welles)
proclaims to Robert Shallow (Alan Webb) at the beginning of the film, “We have
heard the chimes at midnight, Master Robert Shallow,” his capacity for tran-
scending in the midst of the finite world is clear. Welles portrays and films him as
a figure of grandeur. This enables him to be a great source of comedy.
21. William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd
ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 4.3.122–25.
22. Ibid., 1.2.200–201.
23. Robert Pfaller, “Deal with the Real: How to Do It and What For,” in
Real Deceptions: The Inaugural Eckstein Symposium in Media Studies, April 26, 2013.
24. Ibid.
25. Because it is not at all clear from the film that Frank actually rapes
Dorothy, there is a hint of comedy in the scene. If Lynch had portrayed Dorothy
as the victim of a violent rape, it would be impossible to laugh at Frank, whatever
his displays of lack. Concern for the victim would outweigh the coincidence of
lack and excess in the aggressor. But Lynch avoids making Dorothy a pure victim
in order to suggest the comic dimension of the monster.

195
26. Like many others, Robert Pfaller argues that comedy is straightfor-
wardly materialist. As he puts it, “What makes comedy interesting for philoso-
phers is the fact that it takes a philosophical position. There is a philosophical
position that comedy takes: Comedy is materialist.” Robert Pfaller, “Comedy and
Materialism,” in Stop That Comedy! 251. While this conception of comedy has an
undeniable appeal, it does make it impossible to distinguish between comedy
and pathos because pathos is materialist as well.
27. The theoretical importance of the Feuerbach section relative to the
later parts of the book has led some publishers to reproduce it alone as a selec-
tion from The German Ideology. For some time, this abridged edition was the only
one available in English. The correct assumption is that this section contains
everything from the book that has a lasting value for the Marxist project.
28. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Prog-
ress Publishers, 1976), 42.
29. Jacques Derrida notices that the vicious satire in the critique of Stirner
is completely out of proportion with what one would expect from the first sec-
tion of The German Ideology. Derrida’s claim is that this incessant parody stems
from Marx’s sense that Stirner haunts him, that Stirner is a specter for Marx.
That is to say, Stirner is too proximate to Marx, and the extended sardonic as-
sault is an attempt to create some philosophical distance. Derrida writes: “Why
does he harass Stirner with such irresistible irony? One has the impression, since
the critique appears so insistent and redundant, both brilliant and ponderous,
that Marx could go on forever launching his barbs and wounding to death. He
could never leave his victim.” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt,
the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 139. Though Marx often resorts to sarcasm throughout his
career in works like The Holy Family, The Poverty of Philosophy, and even in Capital,
at no point does it go on as long as it does when he and Engels discuss Stirner in
The German Ideology.
30. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 133.
Chapter 4
1. This is the judgment about Voltaire and Leibniz that Giorgio Agamben,
for example, renders. He writes, “Even the most beautiful minds have zones of
opacity in which they get lost to the point that a much weaker mind can ridicule
them. This is what occurred to Leibniz with Voltaire’s caricature of his position
in Candide.” Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Geneal-
ogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (with Matteo Mandarini)
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011), 271. It seems self-evident to
Agamben that Voltaire has “a much weaker mind” than that of Leibniz, and most
historians of philosophy would agree.
2. As Hume puts it, “all our reasonings concerning cause and effect are
deriv’d from nothing but custom.” David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 123.

196
3. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Gary Hat-

field, in Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57.
4. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 210.
5. Ibid., 209.
6. Though the recently released Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) have re-
vealed Heidegger’s hidden anti-Semitism, they do not bring any jokes to light.
But we should resist the temptation to see the presence of anti-Semitism as the
result of the absence of jokes. There are, unfortunately, funny anti-Semites.
7. Dolar, “Comedy and Its Double,” 185.
8. The necessary link between dialectics and philosophical comedy shows
that Deleuze cannot be correct when he attempts to distance Nietzsche from dia-
lectics, as he does when he says, “A commentator on Nietzsche must, above all,
avoid any kind of pretext for dialectising his thought.” Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche
and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983), 10. Deleuze wants to preserve a rigid distinction between Nietzsche and
Hegel, but both thinkers derive their humor from the same source. Precisely
because he is funny, one must count— at least at times— Nietzsche among the
dialecticians in the history of thought.
9. The competitor with the Phenomenology of Spirit for Hegel’s funniest work
is his Aesthetics. There Hegel articulates some of his most clever comedy. For in-
stance, he famously solves the mystery of Egyptian riddles by seeing the riddles as
their own solution. He says, “Egypt is the country of symbols, the country which
sets itself the spiritual task of the self-deciphering of the spirit, without actually
attaining to the decipherment. The problems remain unsolved, and the solu-
tion which we can provide consists therefore only in interpreting the riddles of
Egyptian art and its symbolic works as a problem remaining undeciphered by the
Egyptians themselves.” G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 1:354. The
point of the Egyptians’ riddles is the form of a mystery, not some solution lying
underneath this form.
10. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 205.
11. Ibid., 210.
12. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Plato and the Pla-
tonists, vol. 2, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1995), 241.
13. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Medieval and Modern
Philosophy, vol. 3, trans. E. S. Haldane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1995), 323. Hegel borrows this insult from Molière. See Molière, Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme (Paris: Flammarion, 2016).
14. Quoted in Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany: A Frag-
ment, 2nd ed., trans. John Snodgrass (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 123.
15. Jean Wahl, Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, 2nd ed.
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), 92.
16. Jacques Derrida doesn’t see Hegel as a comedian, though he does
see comedy lurking unconsciously in the dialectic. For Derrida, Hegel suffers
from an inability to see the comedy at work whenever the dialectic is unleashed.

197
Though it is unclear whether he is speaking for himself or for Georges Bataille,

Derrida claims that Hegel fails to see that laughter cannot be reduced to the dia-
lectic and that he is “indifferent to the comedy of the Aufhebung.” Jacques Der-
rida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,”
in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978), 257.
17. While it seems that Voltaire in Candide is funnier than Hegel in any
of his works, one must separate Voltaire the comedian from Voltaire the phi-
losopher. When Voltaire is philosophizing, he never approaches Hegel’s comic
heights, even if one is ready to admit to laughing more at Candide than at the Phi-
losophy of Right (but even in this case, Voltaire’s victory is not decisive).
18. Hegel’s comic critique of Scholastic philosophy comes through in the
second volume of the History of Philosophy, where he compares the chaste monk
to a parasite. In his discussion of monks, he notes, “A set of melancholy speci-
mens such as these could never form a nation, any more than lice or parasitic
plants could exist for themselves, or otherwise than on an organic body. If such
men were to constitute a nation, there would have to be an end of this lamb-like
gentleness, this vanity which occupies exclusively with its own individual self,
which pets and pampers itself, and ever has the image and consciousness of its
own excellence before its eyes. For life in the universal and for the universal de-
mands, not that lame and cowardly gentleness, but gentleness combined with
a like measure of energy, and which is not occupied with itself and with its own
sins, but with the universal and what it to be done for it.” Hegel, Lectures on the
History of Philosophy: Plato and the Platonists, 2:94. Hegel’s contempt for monks
doesn’t stem from a belief that they lack the gentleness that they profess (which
would be Nietzsche’s critique) but that they are really gentle. That’s the prob-
lem with them: existence demands a certain level of violence that impoverished
monks cannot achieve. They are objects of comedy, for Hegel, because they be-
lieve in their transcendence while being incapable of simply surviving without
the society from which they parasitically gain their living.
19. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Fini-
tude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), 6.
20. Heidegger, Being and Time, 92.
21. The teller of this joke was John Waldron (University of Vermont).
22. Bertrand Russell, “On Denoting,” Mind 14, no. 56 (1905): 485.
23. Morreall, Comic Relief, 130.
24. Morreall should have seen the glaring exception of the comedy-free
existentialists as a refutation of his theoretical position. The seriousness of Sartre
and Camus should have convinced him that absurdity is not at all the same as
comedy. As the existentialists show, absurdity can drive us to make ourselves
serious.
25. It is possible, of course, to argue that irony is not only distinct from
comedy but its opposite. This is the claim of Alenka Zupančič and others. While
this distinction has clear merits in its focus on the position of the comic enun-
ciation, what it fails to see is that irony, like comedy, does not simply elevate

198
ironists. Rather, it exposes ironists to the very position that they are distancing
themselves from. Ironic distance is always simultaneously, if inadvertently, ironic
proximity.
26. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard articulates his esteem
for comedy by associating it with the privileged existential position. He argues
that “an existing humorist is the closest approximation to the religious person.”
Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to “Philosophical Fragments,”
vol. 1, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1992), 447.
27. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twi-
light of the Idols and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman, ed. Aaron Ridley and
Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 55.
28. For Kierkegaard, “the sickness unto death” is not a problem that con-
cerns the consciousness of our death that other animals lack. Instead, it is the
awareness that death will not bring an end to our problems. This, for Kierke-
gaard, is the real trauma of existence. If we could simply die, he thinks, we would
ironically avoid the sickness unto death and the anxiety that accompanies it.
29. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Ex-
position for Upbuilding and Awakening, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13.
30. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New
York: Washington Square, 1956), 297.
31. In The Rebel, Camus equates rebellion with the refusal to transgress
limits, with the absolute rejection of any transcendence. He writes, “If . . . rebel-
lion could found a philosophy it would be a philosophy of limits, of calculated
ignorance, and of risk.” Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans.
Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1991), 289.
32. It is not enough to reject lack or finitude in order to be comic, as the
case of Spinoza (and his follower Gilles Deleuze) attests to. Even though Spinoza
and Deleuze reject lack and negation entirely, their philosophy of immanence,
because it denies all transcendence, leaves them incapable of comedy. In the Eth-
ics, Spinoza famously claims: “A free man thinks of death least of all things, and
his wisdom is a mediation of life, not of death.” Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, trans.
Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1992), 192. Spinoza believes that
the elimination of death from our thinking is the key to joy, but comedy requires
the absolute opposition of death, not its philosophical banishment.
33. Qtd. in Eric Dean Rasmussen, “Liberation Hurts: An Interview with
Slavoj Žižek,” Electronic Book Review ( July 1, 2004), http://www.electronicbook
review.com/thread/endconstruction/desublimation.
34. See Slavoj Žižek, Žižek’s Jokes: Did You Hear the One about Hegel and Nega-
tion? ed. Audun Mortensen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014).
35. Žižek repeated this joke so often that he began to apologize for repeat-
ing the joke before telling it again. The apology had the effect of compounding
the joke rather than limiting it.

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Chapter 5
1. Though the standard evolutionary understanding of language doesn’t

account for its inherent comedy, there are many evolutionary theories of the
emergence of comedy and humor among human animals. The most prominent
of these see a sense of humor as important for sexual selection or for grasping
mistakes in reasoning that would impair survival chances.
2. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
(New York: Harper, 2007), 6.
3. Those evolutionary psychologists who locate the origin of comedy in
sexual selection, like Geoffrey Miller, recognize more readily than Pinker the
comedy of language, but they nonetheless share Pinker’s reduction of language
and comedy to sense and advantage. Language becomes comic when one sex
judges the appeal of members of the other on the basis of their level of jocular-
ity. Here comedy parallels exactly the peacock’s tail in Darwin’s The Descent of
Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. As Miller straightforwardly puts it, “Humor
is attractive, and that is why it evolved.” Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How
Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Random House,
2000), 416.
4. Alenka Zupančič makes the point about the relation of language and
comedy perfectly: “Comedy is a way of generating pleasure by infinitely repeat-
ing (and varying in all imaginable and non-imaginable ways) the event of the
incidence of the signifier. Comedies keep constructing, or better even: they keep
reconstructing the event of the incidence of the signifier.” Alenka Zupančič, “Re-
constructing Comedy,” in Stop That Comedy! 299.
5. Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Écrits: The First
Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 579.
6. In another one of his Écrits, Lacan specifically links the emergence of
the signifier to the disappearance of the things that would satisfy a need. The
signifier eliminates things and replaces them with “things,” which is why Lacan
equates the emergence of signification with the act of murder. He notes that “the
symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in
the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire.” Jacques Lacan, “The Field and
Function of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, 262. The removal
of the thing that would fulfill desire is the event that gives birth to desire. Desire
is born out of its own impossibility.
7. The name of the boy was Kerry Martin. He since became a student
where I teach and took up writing comic sketches in the university’s alternative
newspaper. During the intervening time, his humor became more sophisticated
but thankfully retained its connection to nonsense.
8. Though Frege’s distinction between sense and meaning appears to be
similar to Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between the signifier and the sig-
nified, the difference is fundamental. While the signified is a meaning (or Bedeu-
tung) for Saussure, it does not belong to the world of reference. Meaning is an
image rather than a reference. Saussure’s theory of language necessarily renders
the question of reference impossible, whereas for Frege it is inevitable.

200
9. Gottlob Frege, “On Sinn and Bedeutung,” trans. Max Black, in The Frege
Reader, ed. Michael Beany (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 157.
10. The limitation of Frege’s speculation about the relation between sense
and meaning is that he doesn’t see the bar between the two as absolute. He can’t
abandon the possibility of getting beyond the signifier in order to interact with
the world of reference. But once one enters signification, the world of reference
is gone for good, precisely because it emerges as a distinct world of reference op-
posed to the world of sense.
11. The paucity and excess of signifiers lead Lorenzo Chiesa to claim that
“the Symbolic as Symbolic is inherently prevented from fully symbolizing itself.”
Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 122.
12. One of Wittgenstein’s most straightforward statements concerning the
relationship between private feelings and linguistic expression occurs in The Blue
Book. There he writes, “I have been trying in all this to remove the temptation
to think that there ‘must be’ what is called a mental process of thinking, hoping,
wishing, believing, etc., independent of the process of expressing a thought, a
hope, a wish, etc.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, in The Blue and Brown Books
(New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 41.
13. In “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin claims that the trans-
lator can never find a word in another language with an equivalent signification.
The proper way to go about translation, according to Benjamin, thus involves
searching for a word that produces the same effect on the reader that the word
in the original produces. Whereas literal translation is impossible, creating a
similar effect is not.
14. The new translation opts to replace the coinage “enowning” with the
standard word “event” in order to indicate Heidegger’s term Ereignis. Though
Heidegger gives Ereignis a special sense in his philosophy, the word does none-
theless exist in German before Heidegger’s use of it, which justifies the new
translators’ decision to replace “enowning.” For the new translation, see Martin
Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewica and
Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).
15. Even though it involves extreme generalizations, one could justifiably
claim that the entire difference between Hegel’s and Heidegger’s philosophy
is captured in their approach to language. Hegel never invents terms; rather,
he plays on the often contradictory significations that existing words have. Hei-
degger, however, creates his own vocabulary by using the resources of German
to generate new terms. For Hegel, philosophy shows what we are already doing
without being aware of it; for Heidegger, philosophy can open up an untapped
reserve within being.
16. A character in James Ivory’s otherwise unremarkable Le Divorce (2003)
points out that the number of terms for “scarf” in French is especially notable
given the impoverished vocabulary of the language in comparison with English.
17. Though certain feminists have accused psychoanalysis of sustaining the
privilege of the phallus, the fundamental psychoanalytic gesture involves identi-
fying the privilege of the phallus with imposture rather than with potency. Even

201
when Freud falls into the error of identifying femininity with the wish for a phal-
lus, he categorically refuses to associate the phallus with activity rather than pas-
sivity.
18. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre VIII: Le transfert, 1960–1961, ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 277.
19. The contrast in the offensiveness of terms for the male and female
genitalia is clear in the way that parents instruct their children what not to say.
One can tell children not to say “dick” or “prick,” but the prohibition on words
like “cunt” and “twat” is so strict that one cannot even state that they must be
avoided.
20. Jennifer Friedlander, Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 64.
21. Another possible response to baldness is the act of shaving one’s head.
By doing so, one lies (that is, claims not to be bald) by telling the truth (that is, by
displaying oneself as bald). Every bald man who shaves his head relishes the day
when he hears someone say: “You’re not bald. You just shave your head.” This
marks the success of the ruse. But even when the ruse fails and others recognize
one’s baldness, there is no risk akin to the one associated with the toupee. Shav-
ing one’s head is not an excessive response to lack but an attempt to hide lack
by doubling down on it. Unfortunately, this limits the comedy of a shaven head
relative to a toupee or comb-over.
22. Lacan makes this point about the phallic signifier clear in his Seminar
XIX, where he claims: “the phallus is signification, is that by which language signi-
fies. There is but one Bedeutung, and it is the phallus.” Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire,
livre XIX: . . . ou pire, 1971–1972, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2011), 70.
23. Gaston adopts the practice of hiding in plain sight made most famous
in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” in which the possessor of the titular
letter hides it from the police by leaving it out in the open.
24. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed.
G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1.3.75–80.
25. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (New York: Penguin, 1977), 52.
26. Noam Chomsky uses this sentence as an example of a grammatically
correct sentence that is nonetheless meaningless. According to Chomsky, it dem-
onstrates that correct syntax has no bearing on the creation of meaning.
Chapter 6
1. The film Antz (Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson, 1998), for instance, is
funny because the society of ants has enough similarity to human society that the
film can raise the question of the relationship between lack and excess.
2. This is why constructivist philosophy represents a retreat from comedy.
Constructivism understands individual identity as the result of the social forces
that work together to generate it. If one knows the social environment that pro-
duces a subject, one knows how and why the subject acts as it does. According
to the constructivist thesis, the idea of a subject free from its social background

202
is nonsensical. The constructed subject is always the product of its situation and
never transcends the conditions that create it. Constructivism views every subject
as pitiable and as inherently unworthy of our laughter.
3. Disinvestment in what we see and hear constitutes the everyday in the
same way as the separation of lack and excess. Investment in a specific object or
event removes us from the everyday and enables us to reach a form of transcen-
dence.
4. Kubrick decided to make a film about the dangers of nuclear war, and
it was only after beginning to work on the project that he decided that comedy
was the only possible form for this idea. A straightforward drama about nuclear
conflict would inevitably devolve into a humanistic morality, which is a position
that all of Kubrick’s films strive to avoid. Proof of this fate is evident in another
film about exactly the same subject (unplanned nuclear attack) released in the
same year as Kubrick’s— Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe (1964). The humanism of Fail
Safe cuts into its critical power as a film.
5. In other scenes in Dr. Strangelove, the contrast between distance and
identification operates in the spectator’s relation to different characters. This is
especially the case in the plane that drops the bomb that ends the world. Kubrick
contrasts the excesses of Major Kong (Slim Pickens) with the seriousness of the
crew, with whom we can identify. This is a point that Thomas Allen Nelson makes
in his account of Kubrick’s films, where he writes, “the satiric exaggeration of
Kong’s character turns realism toward the fantastic, as Kong acts out a private
drama in an Old West showdown with civilization, while his crew, drawn in more
naturalistic terms, suppress forces from within as they act in harmony with the
plane.” Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2000), 90.
6. We should be infinitely grateful to Kubrick that he opted to end the film
in this way after originally considering a concluding pie fight. He decided against
the pie fight because he felt that watching others having fun was not funny. In
contrast to the destruction of the Earth, a pie fight highlights excess but largely
downplays lack.
7. Lester’s conception of tragedy here is not fully worked out. He uses it
to mean simply unfortunate events, not tragedy in the proper sense of the term.
If we understand tragedy as the insistence on transcendence or excess, then his
definition makes no sense at all.
8. It is not at all clear what position Crimes and Misdemeanors ultimately
takes up on Lester’s theory of comedy. Despite his unattractiveness as a charac-
ter, the film never refutes this conception or attempts to poke holes in it.
9. The belief that comedy requires distance is widespread, and it results
from the damage that comedy often does to the comic object. If we cared about
this object, so the thinking goes, we wouldn’t be able to laugh. But this position
assumes that our enjoyment is completely distinct from suffering, when in fact
enjoyment depends on some suffering. Obviously, the depressive on the verge of
suicide is not rapt by enjoyment, but at the same time, the saying that we “laugh
until it hurts” resonates because laughter always brings some form of suffering.
10. Bergson, Laughter, 63. John Morreall echoes Bergson on this point. As

203
he points out in Comic Relief, the emotions, like fear and love, create a certain
attitude toward the object, like repulsion or attraction. The same is not the case
with humor. He says, “We often have a disinterested attitude toward things that
we laugh about. But you can’t have a disinterested attitude toward the object of
one of your emotions. It matters to you; you care about it.” Morreall, Comic Relief,
31. While Morreall is certainly correct that an emotional response involves some
sort of investment, his contention that laughter involves disinterest is much more
questionable.
11. Though both play and comedy involve engagement and disinvestment,
they are in other ways radically distinct. The attempt to discover a through-line
from animal play to comedy, which is common today among theorists of comedy,
fails to account for the fundamental transformation that occurs with the signi-
fier, a transformation that is the condition of possibility for comedy.
12. Possibly the best traffic joke ever told comes from George Carlin, who
asks, “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and
anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” This joke evinces the logic of comedy
perfectly because either claim on its own is not funny. Noting that people call
those who drive slower than them “idiots” has no comic value until Carlin juxta-
poses it with the excessive contrary fact that people label those who drive faster
than them “maniacs.” The juxtaposition shows us that these accusations do not
exist in isolation and thus reveal more about the subjects articulating them than
about the other drivers.
13. In Kierkegaard’s accounting, Christendom is akin to the bad comedian
who tells jokes that neither offend nor bring laughter.
14. Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, trans. Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 81.
15. Often films will show characters smile at the moment when they know
that they will die from an imminent bomb explosion or some other calamity. This
smile perhaps indicates a comic moment, a moment when the characters are able
to both experience their demise and reflect from a distance at the same time.
16. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre VI: Le désir et son interprétation, 1958–
1959, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 2013), 45.
17. For this joke, I am indebted to Evan Provost (University of Vermont).
There is a parallel joke that also plays on the excesses of the molesting priest
figure where the rabbi plays the straight man. In this joke, a priest asks his rabbi
friend to fill in for him in the confessional while he’s on vacation. He leaves the
rabbi with a cheat sheet concerning the proper penances: two Hail Marys for a
lie, three Our Fathers for taking the Lord’s name in vain, four Hail Marys and
three Our Fathers for adultery, and so on. The rabbi handles the first few peni-
tents by adhering to the chart that the priest left. But then someone enters the
confessional and asks for forgiveness for giving a blow job. Unable to find “blow
job” on the chart, the rabbi quickly asks an altar boy, “How much does the priest
typically give for a blow job?” The altar boy responds, “Usually ten dollars.” As
with the other pedophile priest joke, the humor here depends on not completely
distancing ourselves from the figure of the priest. If we do so, we cannot laugh.
(I owe this joke to Mark Stein from Burlington, Vermont.)

204
Chapter 7
1. Mast, The Comic Mind, 62.

2. Dan Callahan, “Buster Keaton,” Senses of Cinema (October 2002), http://
sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/keaton/.
3. Chaplin lived out his life in prosperity, while Keaton’s career basically
ended with the failure of What— No Beer? (Edward Sedgwick) in 1933. After this
time, he struggled with drunkenness and barely eked out a living. Thanks to the
largess of Chaplin who gave him a role performing with him in 1952, Keaton’s
career underwent a moderate revival until his death in 1966, as he obtained roles
in films such as Pajama Party (Don Weis, 1964) and How To Stuff a Wild Bikini (Wil-
liam Asher, 1965).
4. Chaplin’s genius consists in constructing the figure of the Little Tramp
as a purely comic figure. The temptation to make a social outcast pathetic is al-
most insurmountable, but Chaplin succumbs to it only on rare occasions in his
films— and he quickly regains his bearings and returns the Little Tramp to the
domain of comedy.
5. The Little Tramp’s attempts to dump the child that he finds on the
street are extremely significant for Chaplin’s creation of the Little Tramp. His
ability to display a complete lack of concern for the welfare of an abandoned
child is essential to the comedy of this figure. If he were caring and affectionate
at all times, we could not laugh at his plight. The coldness of the Little Tramp in
The Kid is difficult for Chaplin to sustain in later films, but its decline represents
a decline in the comic potential of the Little Tramp.
6. It is evident that Limelight functions as Chaplin’s farewell to Hollywood
and to the cinema as such. The death of Calvero and his symbolic replacement
with Thereza the ballet dancer indicates Chaplin’s own symbolic death as a comic
performer. When he returns in A King in New York (Charlie Chaplin, 1957), it is
primarily to launch an attack against the political and cultural situation in the
United States that precipitated his exile.
7. Chaplin films the final routine in Calvero’s act differently from the
first two. While we see the first two routines, the film cuts to the audience at the
benefit laughing enthusiastically with approval. During the third routine, Chaplin
provides no crosscut until the routine concludes. As a result, the spectator has no
idea whether or not Calvero is succeeding or bombing with the audience, which
contributes to the sense of tension during the routine. It also adds to the sense
of triumph when the routine concludes and Chaplin shows the cheering crowd.
8. Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” trans. Francis McDonagh, in Aesthet-
ics and Politics (London: Verso, 1977), 184–85.
9. For the classic account of the role that the exception plays in constitut-
ing the state as a whole, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1998).
10. The speech at the end of Monsieur Verdoux is less dogmatic and more
politically daring, though it ultimately suffers from the same vision that hampers
the speech in The Great Dictator. After his condemnation for murder, Verdoux

205
claims, “As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not
building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing? Has it not
blown unsuspecting women and little children to pieces? And done it very scien-
tifically? As a mass killer, I am an amateur by comparison.” Here the call for uni-
versal inclusion remains implicit in the critique of the development of large-scale
weapons like the atomic bomb, which had only recently been used.
11. Keaton’s belonging to the social order extends to his relationship to
the setting. While Chaplin is always alienated from the film’s setting, Keaton is
intimately involved in it and creates his comedy out of the world to which he
belongs. According to Robert Knopf, “In Keaton’s films, the world itself is an
integral part of the show, and consequently the world embraces the illogic of his
vaudeville comedy rather than serving merely as a background for it.” Robert
Knopf, The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1999), 82.
12. The ending of The General represents a case of Keaton quoting himself
in an earlier film, Seven Chances (Buster Keaton, 1925). In this film, James Shan-
non (Buster Keaton) spends the entire running time attempting to marry Mary
Jones (Ruth Dwyer). In the end, the marriage finally takes place at her house,
but as he prepares to kiss Mary for the first time, a series of other people inter-
vene to congratulate them and thereby interrupt the kiss. The film ends with
James looking exasperated and still unable to kiss his new bride. This version of
lack emerging out of excess is even more insightful than what The General shows.
It is marriage itself that is the barrier to romantic contact.
13. Battling Butler simply concludes with Butler winning the affection of
the Mountain Girl and her family. This unambiguous triumph at the end sep-
arates Keaton’s comic successes— Navigator (Donald Crisp and Buster Keaton,
1924), Battling Butler, and College ( James Horne and Buster Keaton, 1927)—
from his greatest masterpieces, like Sherlock, Jr. and The General.
14. Seven Chances also relies on racist stereotypes of black characters and
the fear of miscegenation for some of its comedy.
15. The problem is that one cannot simply dismiss Keaton’s racist films as
comic failures. Neighbors represents his most racist short film: not only does he
appear in blackface, but he uses black characters in a completely stereotypical
way. Nonetheless, the comic sequences in which he tries to rescue the neighbor
whom he loves from her house and to escape her father’s wrath are among the
high points in all of his shorts.
16. I should add that even though Chaplin himself never performs in black-
face, he does appear in a film in which others are in blackface. This is a 1915 short
entitled A Night in the Show that he directed.
17. Alan Bilton argues that Keaton even transforms nature into a machine
to make clear that it too can malfunction. Bilton states, “Keaton’s films portray
the natural world as just another enormous machine, a vast organic engine
prone both to overheating and to breaking down— which is one of the reasons
why there are so many storms, cyclones and floods in his work.” Alan Bilton,
Silent Film Comedy and American Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 183. Keaton
focuses so intently on the machine not because he has faith in the possibility of

206
technological successes but because he knows that technology will inevitably fail.
If nature is also a machine, then it can fail as well, which forces us to think of na-
ture’s problems as in some sense self-inflicted. This leads Jennifer Fay to consider
Keaton a filmmaker of climatology. See Jennifer Fay, “Buster Keaton’s Climate
Change,” Modernism/Modernity 21, no. 1 (2014): 25–49.
18. Deleuze does not isolate the difference between Chaplin and Keaton
in their attitude toward the machine. He begins with the claim that Keaton, in
contrast to Chaplin, is the only filmmaker to translate burlesque to what Deleuze
calls the large form, the form that focuses on a vast situation and requires a
significant action to change the situation. The burlesque action is typically in-
adequate to do so, but Keaton defies this limitation. He manages to resolve a
shipwreck or escape a deadly storm through comic acts, whereas such situations
typically require the actions of, say, a western hero like John Wayne.
19. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 176.
20. This is not to say that Keaton’s incredible stunts are successful solely
because of contingent factors. It is certainly Keaton’s skill as a stunt man that en-
ables him to perform the numerous stunts that he does. But in the diegesis of the
films, his skill is rarely shown to be responsible for his success. It is always some
contingent element— a house falling just the right way, a rival tripping at an op-
portune time, a log appearing just when he needs it, and so on.
21. The danger involved in the stunt of having the side of an actual house
fall on top of Keaton with just the open window missing his body prompted the
stunt coordinator for Steamboat Bill, Jr. to refuse to continue to work on the film if
Keaton insisted on performing the stunt. Keaton preferred to execute the stunt
as planned without the assistance of the stunt coordinator for the rest of the film.
Chapter 8
1. Just to name a few: Mikhail Bakhtin, Alain Badiou, Simon Critchley,

Robert Pfaller, and Alenka Zupančič.
2. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 94.
3. Bakhtin just missed it. He died in 1975, and De Palma released Carrie
in 1976.
4. To be fair to Bakhtin, he understands that the temporary suspension of
social hierarchies can serve to reinforce these hierarchies, but he nonetheless
clings to the idea that comedy and laughter themselves are inherently liberatory.
This is the fundamental point of contention.
5. Robert Pfaller sees the act of emphasizing division as characteristic of
all comedy, not just the comedy of critique. He writes, “Comedy is based on this
simple, sobering position of materialism: It recognizes the fundamental decen-
tering of individuals who perforce always see themselves as subjects, as centers.”
Pfaller, “Comedy and Materialism,” 264.

207
6. In his Bamboozled (2000), Spike Lee constructs a long montage sequence

from Hollywood films and television shows of the varying racist deployments of
blackness. Though we also see a few instances of dramatic rather than comic
racism, the primary focus of Lee’s montage is the creation of the coon figure
and its ubiquity. One can see traces of the coon figure in almost all of the other
figures: even though the hypersexualized buck figure is menacing, he also verges
on the ridiculous and thus is somewhat a coon figure.
7. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 4th ed. (New
York: Continuum, 2001), 8.
8. It doesn’t really matter if spectators laughing at the coon figure identify
with the coon figure or not. The point is that his exclusion produces the image of
the social order’s wholeness. This wholeness is the great ideological deception,
both for those who believe that they belong to it and for those who are excluded
from it.
9. The football game that concludes MASH completely disrupts the narra-
tive movement of the film. This indicates the discontinuity between narrative
and war: though we believe that authorities begin wars in order to vanquish the
opponent and reach the end, the film reveals that there is no real desire to end
the war but rather an enjoyment of its prolongation.
10. Altman may be the most inconsistent filmmaker in the history of cin-
ema. He made several unqualified masterpieces, like McCabe and Mrs. Miller
(1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), The Player (1992), and Short Cuts (1993). But he
also made several complete failures, including Popeye (1980), Prêt-à-Porter (1994),
and Dr. T. and the Women (2000).
11. Alenka Zupančič offers her own distinction between authentic and in-
authentic comedy. She writes: “False, conservative comedies are those where the
abstract-universal and the concrete do not change places and do not produce a
short-circuit between them; instead, the concrete (where ‘human weaknesses’
are situated) remains external to the universal, and at the same time invites us
to recognize and accept it as an indispensable companion of the universal, its
necessary physical support. The paradigm of these comedies is simply the follow-
ing: the aristocrat (or king, or judge, or priest, or any other character of symbolic
stature) is also a man (who snores, farts, slips, and is subject to the same physical
laws as other mortals). The emphasis is, of course, precisely on ‘also’: the con-
crete and the universal coexist, the concrete being the indispensable grounding
of the universal.” Zupančič, The Odd One In, 30.
12. Alain Badiou, “Rhapsody for the Theatre: A Short Philosophical Trea-
tise,” trans. Bruno Bosteels, Theatre Survey 49.2 (2008): 233.
13. In the preface to his own series of plays La Tétralogie d’Ahmed, Badiou
notes the necessary status of the diagonal character and claims that his creation
Ahmed is an exemplar of this position. He writes, “A ‘diagonal’ character . . . has
always been a major condition of comedy.” Alain Badiou, preface to La Tétralogie
d’Ahmed (Paris: Actes Sud, 2010), 18.
14. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 10.
15. Though there are some memorable scenes in A Night at the Opera (Sam

208
Wood, 1935) and A Day at the Races (Sam Wood, 1937), it is clear to most viewers
that the first five films made at Paramount constitute the Marx Brothers at the
height of their comic genius.
16. Their first two films were originally stage plays that the brothers per-
formed on Broadway. But even the later films written directly for the screen suf-
fer from the same stage-like quality that hampers the first films. There is no
marked formal difference that emerges in Monkey Business.
17. The football game in MASH directly alludes to the conclusion of Horse
Feathers, which lampoons college authorities by illustrating how a football game
is much more important than the college’s academic mission. In Altman’s film,
the football game trumps the war effort.
18. All of the brothers except Harpo occupy positions of authority in Duck
Soup. In addition to Groucho playing the ruler of Freedonia, Zeppo plays Fire-
fly’s assistant Bob Roland and Chico plays the Secretary of War Chicolini.
19. This was not the case when Duck Soup originally appeared. It did not fare
as well as their earlier films in terms of box office receipts or critical reception.
20. Slavoj Žižek sees canned laughter less as an ideological device than as
a purely structural one. He argues that it laughs in the stead of the subject, so
that the subject can enjoy itself through the Other rather than being forced to
go through the activity of laughing. See Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (Lon-
don: Verso, 1997), 109.
21. Richard Boothby, Loyola University Maryland, private conversation,
May 8, 2016.
22. Bergson, Laughter, 174.
23. Ibid., 187.
24. The failure to join in leaves one at risk of exclusion, which is the re-
verse side of comedy’s general inclusivity.

Index
Abrahams, Jim: Airplane!, 80 Athali. See Racine, Jean

Adam’s Rib. See Cukor, George Awful Truth, The. See McCarey, Leo
addiction, 24–27, 186n11, 186n13, 186– As You Like It. See Shakespeare, William
87n16 atheism, 104
Adorno, Theodor, 150
affectation, 43–45, 189n38 Badham, John: War Games, 134
Agamben, Giorgio, 195n1, 204n9 Badiou, Alain, 4, 12, 170, 190n12, 206n1,
Airplane! See Abrahams, Jim; Zucker, 207n13
David; Zucker, Jerry Bakhtin, Mikhail, 162–63, 169, 206n1,
alienation, 22–23, 113, 140 206nn3–4
Allen, Woody: Annie Hall, 189n38; Ball of Fire. See Hawks, Howard
Crimes and Misdemeanors, 57, 133, 138, Bamboozled. See Lee, Spike
202nn7–8, 202n9; Love and Death, 57; Bank Dick, The. See Cline, Edward F.
Manhattan, 44–45 barber’s paradox, 30–31
All’s Well That Ends Well. See Shakespeare, Bataille, Georges, 196–97n16
William Battling Butler. See Keaton, Buster
Altman, Robert: Dr. T and the Women, Ballamy, Ralph, 33, 187–88n26
207n10; The Long Goodbye, 207n10; Bauer, Bruno, 81–82
MASH, 168–70, 207nn9–10, 208n17; Benjamin, Walter, 200n13
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 207n10; The Bergson, Henri, 5, 50–56, 60, 64, 134,
Player, 207n10; Prêt-à-Porter, 207n10; 156–58, 176, 190n6–12, 202–3n10
Popeye, 207n10; Short Cuts, 207n10 big Other, 191n14
Animal Crackers. See Heerman, Victor Bilton, Alan, 205–6n17
Animal House. See Landis, John Blaché, Herbert: The Saphead, 159
Annie Hall. See Allen, Woody blackface, 155–56, 205n15, 205n16
À Nous la liberté. See Clair, René Blazing Saddles. See Brooks, Mel
Antz. See Darnell, Eric; Johnson, Tim blow job, 203n17
Antigone. See Sophocles Blue Velvet. See Lynch, David
anti-Semitism, 41, 63, 150, 163, 191– Blystone, John: Our Hospitality, 157, 159
92n22, 196n6 Bogle, Donald, 165–66
Apted, Michael: The World Is Not Enough, Bohr, Niels, 107–8
29 Bond, James, 29, 187n18
Aristophanes, 63, 86; The Clouds, 3–4, Boothby, Richard, 176, 185n3
61–62, 65, 176, 191n21; The Frogs, 3–4, Brecht, Bertolt, 90
62; Lysistrata, 176 Bringing Up Baby. See Hawks, Howard
Aristotle, 50, 86, 179 Brooks, Mel: Blazing Saddles, 80
Asher, William: How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, Bruckman, Clyde: The General, 153–54,
204n3 157, 205n12, 205n13
Astraire, Fred, 144 Buddhism, 40–41
209

210
I NDE X
Buñuel, Luis, 94: Le Charme discret de la Cocoanuts, The. See Flory, Robert
bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the College. See Horne, James; Keaton, Buster
Bourgeoisie), 95; Le Fantôme de la liberté Comedy of Errors. See Shakespeare, William
(The Phantom of Liberty), 58, 95, 97, communism, 158
191n19; La Voie lactée (The Milky Way), contradiction, 8, 40, 41, 43, 52, 55, 89–
95–98 100, 107, 179–81; language, 30–32, 37,
Bush, George W., 9–10, 63, 168, 171 187n20; social order, 12, 73, 143, 145,
Butler, Judith, 69, 108 158, 164
constructivism, 201–2n2
Caesar, Julius, 136–37 Craven, Wes: Scream, 79–80
Campbell, Martin: GoldenEye, 187n Crimes and Misdemeanors. See Allen,
Camus, Albert, 99, 101–2, 105–6, 197n24, Woody
198n31 Crisp, Donald: The Navigator, 155–56,
canned laughter, 176, 208n20 205n13
capitalism, 48, 186n13, 190n10 Critchley, Simon, 184n10, 185n20, 206n1
Carlin, George, 203n12 crucifixion, 40
carnival, 161–62, 167–69 Cukor, George: Adam’s Rib, 53, 190n11
Carpenter, John: Halloween, 79–80
Carrey, Jim, 9, 184n16 Darnell, Eric: Antz, 201n1
Carrie. See De Palma, Brian Darwin, Charles, 199n3
Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote, 67 Day at the Races, A. See Wood, Sam
Chaplin, Charlie, 18, 127, 143–60, death drive, 73, 193n13, 193n14
186n14, 190n10, 204nn3-4, 205n11, death penalty, 71, 80, 193n9
206n18; The Circus, 147–48; City Lights, Deleuze, Gilles, 97–98, 158, 190n9,
146–47, 153; The Gold Rush, 4, 146– 196n8, 198n32, 206n18
47; The Great Dictator, 150–51, 154, Demme, Jonathan: Silence of the Lambs,
204–5n10; The Kid, 146–47, 204n5; 13–14
Kid Auto Races at Venice, 145; A King De Palma, Brian: Carrie, 162–63, 206n3
in New York, 204n6; Limelight, 148–50, Derrida, Jacques, 69, 108, 195n29, 196–
156, 204nn6–7; Modern Times, 52, 97n16
54, 147, 150, 156–58, 172; Monsieur Descartes, René, 87, 191n18
Verdoux, 151, 204n; A Night in the Show, dialectics, 89–91, 93–94, 106–7, 196n8,
205n16 196–97n16
Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Le. See Dickstein, Jonathan, 187n22
Buñuel, Luis Die Hard. See McTiernan, John
Chappelle, Dave, 164–65 Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The.
Cheney, Dick, 171 See Buñuel, Luis
Chiesa, Lorenzo, 200n11 Divorce, Le. See Ivory, James
Chimes at Midnight. See Welles, Orson Dr. Strangelove. See Kubrick, Stanley
Cho, Margaret, 16 Dr. T and the Women. See Altman, Robert
Chomsky, Noam, 201n26 Dolar, Mladen, 90, 183n5
Christianity, 40–42, 93–98, 103–4, 137–38 Donner, Richard: Lethal Weapon 4,
Chrysippus, 92 166–67
Circus, The. See Chaplin, Charlie Don Quixote. See Cervantes, Miguel de
City Lights. See Chaplin, Charlie dreams, 56–57, 72, 191n15
C.K., Louis, 20 Duck Soup. See McCarey, Leo
Clair, René: À Nous la liberté, 52, 190n10
Cline, Edward F.: The Bank Dick, 27; Eco, Umberto, 50, 65–66, 189n5, 190n6
Neighbors, 155; The Playhouse, 155 egalitarian comedy, 16, 38, 161, 163–65,
Clouds, The. See Aristophanes 167, 170–72, 177, 179

211
I NDE X
ego ideal, 74 Gilliam, Terry: Monty Python and the Holy

emancipation, 12, 18, 143, 162 Grail, 13–14
Emmerich, Roland: 2012, 132 Gold Rush, The. See Chaplin, Charlie
End Game. See Beckett, Samuel Google, 185n4
Engels, Friedrich, 81–82, 195n27, 195n29 Go West. See Keaton, Buster
Engley, Ryan, 183n1 Great Dictator, The. See Chaplin, Charlie
Esperanto, 28, 186n Groundhog Day. See Ramis, Harold
evolution, 21–22, 111–12, 122, 123,
199n1, 199n3 Hajdini, Simon, 184n17
existentialism, 98–106, 197n24, 198n26 Halloween. See Carpenter, John
Hamlet. See Shakespeare, William
Fail Safe. See Lumet, Sidney Hangover, The. See Phillips, Todd
Falstaff, Jack, 75–77, 194n17, 194n20 Hangover, Part II, The. See Phillips, Todd
Fantôme de la liberté, Le. See Buñuel, Luis Hangover, Part III, The. See Phillips,
Farrelly, Bobby, 127 Todd
Farrelly, Peter, 127 Hardy, Oliver, 4
fascism, 100, 150, 151 Hawks, Howard: Bringing Up Baby, 11–12,
Fay, Jennifer, 205–6n17 184–85n18; Ball of Fire, 184–85n18;
feminism, 118, 200–1n17 His Girl Friday, 33, 187–88n26
Fenton, Elizabeth, 184n14 Heerman, Victor: Animal Crackers,
fetish, 124 173–74
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 81–82, 195n27 Hegel, G. W. F., 71, 81, 87–102, 106–9,
Fichte, J. G., 67 193n9, 197n17, 200n15; Christianity,
Fielding, Henry, 43–46, 124: Joseph An- 93–98; dialectics, 196n8, 196–97n16;
drews, 45, 124–25 jokes, 90–93, 100, 196n9, 196n13,
Fields, W. C., 26–27, 186n14 197n18; subject, 171; phrenology, 90–
Figgis, Mike: Leaving Las Vegas, 27 92; theory of comedy, 5, 50, 60; trans-
Flash Gordon. See Hodges, Mike lation, 117; transcendence, 87–
Flory, Robert: The Cocoanuts, 173 90; universality, 183n6
Fordism, 190n10 Heidegger, Martin, 192n4, 200n15;
Foucault, Michel, 108 being-in-the-world, 89–90, 192n6;
freedom, 51, 53–54, 104–5, 151, 161, finitude, 98–101, 105, 106, 108; jokes,
190n8, 190n12 179, 196n6; Nazism, 192n7, 196n6;
Freedom Tower, 48 pathos, 68–9; translation, 116–17,
Frege, Gottlob, 30–31, 115, 126, 187n21, 200n14
199n8, 200n10 Heine, Heinrich: Reisebilder, 56
Freud, Sigmund, 71–72, 138, 140, 189n3, Henry IV Part 1. See Shakespeare, William
200–1n17; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Henry IV Part 2. See Shakespeare, William
73; death drive, 73–74; The Ego and Hess, Jared: Napoleon Dynamite, 192–
the Id, 73; Jokes and Their Relation to the 93n8
Unconscious, 8, 50–51, 55–56, 184n15, Hinduism, 40
191n15; seduction theory, 193n12; His Girl Friday. See Hawks, Howard
theory of comedy, 5, 52–60, 64, Hitler, Adolf, 150
187n19, 190n6, 191n14 Hobbes, Thomas, 87
Friedlander, Jennifer, 120 Hodges, Mike: Flash Gordon, 132–33
Frogs, The. See Aristophanes Hollywood, 29, 52, 155, 184–85n18,
204n6, 207n6
General, The. See Bruckman, Clyde; Holocaust jokes, 40, 42, 63, 150, 191–
Keaton, Buster 92n22
German idealism, 87, 89, 102 Horne, James: College, 155, 205n13

212
I NDE X
homophobia, 63, 163 205n13; Steamboat Bill, Jr., 157, 159–60,

horror, 52, 78–81, 184n12 206n21; What—No Beer?, 204n3
Horse Feathers. See Norman McLeod Kelly, Gene, 144
How Rastus Gets His Turkey. See Wharton, Kepler, Johannes, 92
Theodore Kid, The. See Chaplin, Charlie
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. See Asher, Kid Auto Races at Venice. See Chaplin,
William Charlie
Hughley, D. L., 58–59 Kierkegaard, Søren, 101–6, 137–38,
Hume, David, 87, 195n2 198n26, 198n28, 203n13
Hypocrisy, 43–44, 60 A King in New York. See Chaplin, Charlie
King Lear. See Shakespeare, William
I Am Sam. See Nelson, Jessie Klein, Melanie, 193n14
idealism, German, 87, 89, 102 Knopf, Robert, 205n11
ideology, 12, 18, 81, 100, 143, 145, 161– Kubrick, Stanley: Dr. Strangelove, 13, 66,
77, 184–85n18, 185n20, 208n20; fan- 131–32, 161, 202nn4–6
tasy, 47, 148; racism, 156, 207n8
“I Got You Babe.” See Sonny and Cher Lacan, Jacques: big Other, 191n14;
incongruity theory, 49–50 desire, 16, 23, 74, 113, 194n16, 199n6;
injustice, 145 enjoyment, 16, 23; signifier, 31, 118,
Intouchables. See Nakache, Olivier; 140, 201n22; translation, 116–17
Toledano, Eric Landau, Deborah, 188n28
Iraq War jokes, 168 Landis, John: Animal House, 172–73
irony, 86, 102–3, 124, 155, 195n29, 197– Laplanche, Jean, 193n12
98n25 Las Vegas, 6, 26–27
Islam, 40–41 Laurel, Stan, 4
Ivory, James: Le Divorce, 200n16 Lazarus, 40
Leaving Las Vegas. See Figgis, Mike
Jesus Christ, 39–40, 96, 108, 188n33 Lee, Spike: Bamboozled, 207n6; Original
Jewish jokes, 37–43, 63, 164, 191–92n22 Kings of Comedy, 58–59
Jim Crow, 47 Lego Movie, The. See Lord, Phil; Miller
John Paul II, 170 Christopher
Johnson, Mark Steven: Simon Birch, 79 Leibniz, Gottfried, 85, 92–93, 195n1
Johnson, Tim: Antz, 201n1 Lenin, V. I., 12
Joseph Andrews. See Fielding, Henry Lethal Weapon 4. See Donner, Richard
Judaism, 40–43 Levinas, Emmanuel, 68, 192n4
Liar Liar. See Shadyac, Tom
Kant, Immanuel, 71, 87–88, 102, 108; Limelight. See Chaplin, Charlie
jokes, 88, 100; moral law, 67; theory Lincoln (Abraham) assassination, 133,
of comedy, 49–50, 189n2 138
Karatani, Kojin, 40 Lloyd, Harold, 9, 144
Keaton, Buster, 18, 143–60, 188n31, Locke, John, 87
204n3, 205n11, 205–6n17, 206n18, logicism, 30
206n20; Battling Butler, 154, 205n13; Long Goodbye, The. See Altman, Robert
College, 155, 205n13; The General, 152– Lord, Phil: The Lego Movie, 20
54, 157, 205n12, 205n13; Go West, 159; Lost Weekend, The. See Wilder, Billy
How To Stuff a Wild Bikini, 204n3; The love, 3, 15
Navigator, 155–56, 205n13; Neighbors, Love and Death. See Allen, Woody
155, 205n15; Our Hospitality, 157–59; Love’s Labour’s Lost. See Shakespeare,
Pajama Party, 204n3; The Playhouse, William
155; The Saphead, 159; Seven Chances, Lubitsch, Ernst: Trouble in Paradise, 121–
205n12, 205n14; Sherlock, Jr., 152, 22, 201n23

213
I NDE X
Lumet, Sidney: Fail Safe, 202n4 Moses, 39

Lynch, David: Blue Velvet, 80–81, Much Ado about Nothing. See Shakespeare
194n25 William
Muhammad, 95, 137
malapropism, 124–25 Music Box, The. See Parrott, James
Manhattan. See Allen, Woody My Favorite Wife. See McCarey, Leo
Martin, Kerry, 199n7
Marx Brothers, 127, 144, 172–74, Nakache, Olivier: Intouchables, 78–79
184n11, 186n14, 207–8n15, 208n16; Nancy, Jean-Luc, 108
The Cocoanuts, 173; A Day at the Napoleon Dynamite. See Hess, Jared
Races, 207–8n15; Duck Soup, 172–75, Navigator, The. See Crisp, Donald;
208n18, 208n19; Horse Feathers, 173– Keaton, Buster
74, 208n17; Monkey Business, 172–74, Nazism, 42, 52, 100, 150, 192n7
208n16; A Night at the Opera, 207– Neighbors. See Cline, Edward F; Keaton,
8n15 Buster
Marx, Chico, 208n18 Nelson, Jessie: I Am Sam, 79
Marx, Groucho, 173–75, 208n18 Nelson, Thomas Allen, 202n5
Marx, Harpo, 208n18 Newton, Isaac, 92–93
Marx, Karl, 81–82, 195n27, 195n29 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 50, 90, 101–6,
Marxism, 195n27 189n3, 196n8, 197n18
Marx, Zeppo, 172, 173, 208n18 Night at the Opera, A. See Wood, Sam
Mary, Virgin, 96–97, 137, 203n17 Night in the Show, A. See Chaplin, Charlie
MASH. See Altman, Robert Nixon, Richard, 29
Mast, Gerald, 4, 143, 183n5
McCabe and Mrs. Miller. See Altman, Obama, Barack, 164
Robert Oedipus complex, 71, 73
McCarey, Leo: The Awful Truth, 33, 53; Oedipus Tyrannus. See Sophocles
Duck Soup, 172–75, 208n18, 208n19; Original Kings of Comedy. See Lee, Spike
My Favorite Wife, 32–34, 36 Our Hospitality. See Blystone, John;
McLeod, Norman: Horse Feathers, 173– Keaton, Buster
74, 208n17; Monkey Business, 172–74,
208n16 Pajama Party. See Weis, Don
McLuhan, Marshall, 189n38 Parrott, James: The Music Box, 4
McTiernan, John: Die Hard, 166 pathos, 14, 36, 65–83, 93, 128–33, 136,
Merry Wives of Windsor, The. See Shake- 145, 194n17, 204n4; psychoanalysis,
speare, William 172–75, 93n12; theory, 17, 195n26,
Miller, Christopher: The Lego Movie, 20 201–2n2
Miller, Geoffrey, 199n3 perversion, 58
miracle, 39–40, 88, 95–97, 188nn33–34 Pfaller, Robert, 77, 187n25, 195n26,
Misanthrope, Le. See Molière 206n1, 206n5
Mittérrand, François, 170 phallus, 113, 118–20, 200–201n17,
Modern Times. See Chaplin, Charlie 201n22
Molière, 63; Misanthrope, Le, 62; Tartuffe, Phantom of Liberty, The. See Buñuel,
62 Luis
Monkey Business. See McLeod, Norman phenomenology, 98
Monsieur Verdoux. See Chaplin, Charlie Phillips, Todd: The Hangover, 6–7; The
Monty Python and the Holy Grail. See Hangover, Part II, 6–7; The Hangover,
Gilliam, Terry Part III, 184n13
Moore, Julianne, 127 phrenology, 90–92
Morreall, John, 49–50, 101–2, 197n24, Pinker, Steven, 112, 126, 199n3
202–3n10 Plato, 49, 61, 86

214
I NDE X
Player, The. See Altman, Robert Sartre, Jean-Paul, 43–44, 101–2, 105–6,
Playhouse, The. See Cline, Edward F.; 189n37, 197n24
Keaton, Buster Saturday Night Live, 48
pleasure principle, 73, 193n14, 194n16 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 199n8
Plotinus, 86 Schumer, Amy, 127–28, 192n23
Poe, Edgar Allan: “The Purloined Scream. See Craven, Wes
Letter,” 201n23 screwball comedy, 11, 22–23, 62–63,
politics, 18, 151, 154, 160, 161–77 184–85n18
Popeye. See Altman, Robert Sedgwick, Edward: What—No Beer?,
pornography, 58 204n3
power, 9, 99, 118, 161–62, 168–71, 176 seduction theory, 72, 193n12
Prêt-à-Porter. See Altman, Robert September 11, 48, 136
priest jokes, 170, 203n17 Seven Chances. See Keaton, Buster
Protestant(s), 38 sexism, 47, 63, 64, 127–28, 163
Provost, Evan, 203n17 Shadyac, Tom: Liar Liar, 184n16
“Purloined Letter, The.” See Poe, Edgar Shakespeare, William, 143–44, 189n3;
Allan All’s Well That Ends Well, 62; As You
Like It, 66; Comedy of Errors, 183n3;
Rabelais, François, 162 Hamlet, 62, 66–68, 71–77, 82, 123–
Racine, Jean: Athalie, 62 24, 183n3, 192n6, 193n10; Henry IV
racism, 47–48, 58, 59, 63, 78, 88, 91, Part 1, 75–77, 194n17, 194n20;
155–56, 160, 163–67, 205n14, 205n15, Henry IV Part 2, 75–77, 194n17,
205n16, 207n6, 207n8 194n20; King Lear, 183n3; Love’s
Ramis, Harold: Groundhog Day, 32, 34– Labour’s Lost, 123; The Merry Wives of
36, 188n28 Windsor, 194n17, 194n20; Much Ado
Ratner, Brett: Rush Hour 3, 167 about Nothing, 124; Taming of the Shrew,
Reisebilder. See Heine, Heinrich 183n3
Reisner, Charles: Steamboat Bill, Jr., 157, Sheridan, Richard: The Rivals, 124
159–60, 206n21 Sherlock, Jr. See Keaton, Buster
relief theory, 49–50 Shoot the Piano Player. See Truffaut,
repetition, 7–10, 34–36, 73–74, 82, François
173, 174, 188n27–30 Short Cuts. See Altman, Robert
representation, 26, 135–36 signifier, 27–32, 38, 113–26, 186n11,
repression, 38, 176 186n15, 200n11, 201n22; reference,
revolution, 46, 100, 105, 107, 161 23, 199n6, 199n8, 200n10; subject,
Ride Along. See Story, Tim 40, 47, 125, 140, 186n7, 188n32
Rivals, The. See Sheridan, Richard Silence of the Lambs. See Demme,
Road Runner, 75 Jonathan
Rock, Chris, 47–48 Simon Birch. See Johnson, Mark Steven
romanticism, 188 Silverman, Sarah, 58, 191–92n22
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Sisyphus, 105
See Stoppard, Tom Smith, Winchell: The Saphead, 159
Rush Hour 3. See Ratner, Brett socialism, 158
Russell, Bertrand, 30, 187n23; jokes, Socrates, 61–62, 65, 86, 103, 176, 191n21
100–101 Sonny and Cher: “I Got You Babe,” 35,
Russell’s paradox, 30–32, 187n20 188n30
Sophocles, 194n16; Antigone, 3–4, 62,
Saint Paul, 103 66–69, 74–75; Oedipus Tyrannus, 3–4,
Saphead, The. See Blaché, Herbert; 65–66, 75, 194n16
Smith, Winchell Spinoza, Baruch, 188n34, 198n32

215
I NDE X
Spivak, Gayatri, 108 vanity, 43–45, 189n37, 197n18

Spottiswoode, Roger: Tomorrow Never vitalism, 53, 56
Dies, 29 La Voie lactée. See Buñuel, Luis
Steamboat Bill, Jr. See Reisner, Charles; Voltaire, 85, 195n1, 197n17
Keaton, Buster
Stein, Mark, 203n17 Waldron, John, 197n21
Stirner, Max, 81–82, 195n29 Wall, Brian, 186n12
Stoicism, 92 War Games. See Badham, John
Stoppard, Tom: Rosencrantz and Guilden- Washington, Denzel, 127
stern Are Dead, 66, 70, 82 Weis, Donald: Pajama Party, 204n3
Story, Tim: Ride Along, 167 Welles, Orson: Chimes at Midnight,
superego, 74, 176 194n20
superiority theory, 49–50 Wharton, Theodore: How Rastus Gets His
Sykes, Wanda, 46–47 Turkey, 166
What—No Beer? See Sedgwick, Edward
Taming of the Shrew. See Shakespeare, White House Correspondents’ Dinner,
William 167–68
Taoism, 40 Whittington, Harry, 171
Tartuffe. See Molière Who, The: “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” 10
terrorism, 48, 164–65 Wilder, Billy: The Lost Weekend, 27
Thoreau, Henry David, 188n29 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 116, 200n12
Toledano, Eric: Intouchables, 78–79 “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” See The Who
Tomorrow Never Dies. See Spottiswoode, Wood, Sam: A Day at the Races, 207–8n15;
Roger A Night at the Opera, 207–8n15
tragedy, 3–4, 14, 17, 65–83, 133, 138, Woods, Tiger, 39
144, 183n3, 202n7; politics, 161, 176; World Is Not Enough, The. See Apted,
psychoanalysis, 193n12, 194n16; Michael
theory, 49–50, 62, 179, 189n3, 190n6, World Trade Center, 48, 136
192n6
translation, 116–17, 200n13 YouTube, 183n2
Trotsky, Leon, 12 You’ve Got Mail. See Ephron, Nora
Trouble in Paradise. See Lubitsch, Ernst
2012. See Emmerich, Roland Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, 187n20
Tyson, Mike, 7 Žižek, Slavoj, 12, 106–9, 198n35, 208n20
Zucker, David: Airplane!, 80
utility, 134–36, 167, 186n15 Zucker, Jerry: Airplane!, 80
universality, 4–5, 32, 41, 60–65, 183n6, Zupančič, Alenka, 50, 60–64, 190n6,
187n20, 189n2, 191n21, 197n18, 191n21, 197n25, 199n4, 206n1,
207n11; inclusion, 151, 156 207n11


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Northwestern University Press

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Copyright © 2017 by Northwestern University Press.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McGowan, Todd, author.

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Introduction: The Similar and the Dissimilar 3

1 Lack and Excess 19

2 Theory and Opposition 49

3 Tragedy and Pathos 65

4 Philosophy and the Finite 85

5 Signification and Desire 111

6 Distance and Proximity 127

7 Outside and Inside 143

8 Ideology and Equality 161

Conclusion: Speculation and Levity 179

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I owe a debt of gratitude to Jill Delaney-Shal, who was the first to

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The Similar and the Dissimilar

The experience of comedy doesn’t provoke reflection. This contrasts it

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tragedies, such as Oedipus Tyrannus or Antigone.2 We can appreciate the

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to the world. We universalize— that is, we use definitions— in order to

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become normalized. It occurs when a comic trigger alerts us to the con-

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has a long-standing familiarity with this homophone and is accustomed

Repeating Funny Jokes

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two seemingly unconnected elements becomes apparent. This is the mo-

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stammers in the midst of recounting it. Finally, he simply abandons the

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Why We Don’t Bring Up Baby

Every comic moment is traumatic. The enjoyment that comedy offers is

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The Comic Structure of Subjectivity

The fundamental opposition that defines subjectivity is the opposition

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As speaking beings, we relate to our biological being rather than

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Lack and Excess

The Exigencies of Social Coherence

It is psychoanalysis that is chiefly responsible for theorizing the concepts

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group rituals, like hazing prospective fraternity and sorority members,

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