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Why Are Animals Funny?: Everyday Analysis, Volume 1
Why are Animals Funny? comprises 46 articles in which nigh on everything is analyzed, from the smartphone to the 2010 general election, from toasties to Margaret Thatcher, from anxiety in children's literature to David Cameron's music tastes...
- GenresNonfictionTheory
136 pages, Paperback
First published March 28, 2014
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About the author
EDA Collective
5 books3 followersEveryday Analysis - who publish under the author name EDA Collective - is a project set up by Alfie Bown and Daniel Bristow, which enlists a range of writers to analyse and deconstruct everyday life and popular culture through recourse to the theory of psychoanalysis and philosophy.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 27, 2025
Zero Books editions are not often to be spotted in the library, so it was a nice surprise to find one. The title also caught my eye. Why Are Animals Funny?: Everyday Analysis, Volume 1 collects short articles, one to three pages in length, on a variety of everyday topics that were zeitgeist-y between 2010 and 2014. Many still have considerable relevance in 2025, whilst a few are so very of their moment as to already feel historical. For example, the piece on the Liberal Democrats in the 2010 British general election.
The format of each piece is much the same: critical theory is applied to some specific, generally minor aspect of daily life. Lacan, Marx, Žižek, and Derrida are frequently name-checked, among others. There is a fun novelty about experiencing such theory, which is often obtuse in its original format, applied in a light-hearted and flippant manner. I found Why Are Animals Funny?: Everyday Analysis, Volume 1 easy to read, perhaps a little too much so. Most of the pieces did not attain any great heights of insight, or perhaps seem less witty and incisive more than a decade on. Nonetheless, several did stand out. Chapter 12 on CrossCountry trains contemplates the gap between advertising and expectations:
The titular piece was also rather fun, albeit not entirely convincing in its thesis of animals being funny because they highlight that there is no such thing as 'natural behaviour'. I appreciated the grumpily toned piece about coffee-related beverages sold by coffee shop chains, as such beverages have only become more elaborate in subsequent years. Green and blue coffee-based drinks are now advertised in the windows of these chains, containing I know not what.
This point, that what superficially appears natural is actually ideological, underpins most if not all of the short pieces. They're pretty diverting to read and I did appreciate the inclusion of a quote from my all-time favourite television episode ('Basic Lupine Urology', Community series 3 episode 17) in relation to the Daily Mail. However each piece is too short to take its analysis very far; I was also surprised not to see any references to Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life.
The format of each piece is much the same: critical theory is applied to some specific, generally minor aspect of daily life. Lacan, Marx, Žižek, and Derrida are frequently name-checked, among others. There is a fun novelty about experiencing such theory, which is often obtuse in its original format, applied in a light-hearted and flippant manner. I found Why Are Animals Funny?: Everyday Analysis, Volume 1 easy to read, perhaps a little too much so. Most of the pieces did not attain any great heights of insight, or perhaps seem less witty and incisive more than a decade on. Nonetheless, several did stand out. Chapter 12 on CrossCountry trains contemplates the gap between advertising and expectations:
In other words, there's no need any longer, on the ideological level, to represent a product's actual experience with a correlative expectation: there's no need for a monopolist to produce a true reflection of the product, to give its potential customers such real knowledge. Indeed, what other service can we use to get home?
The titular piece was also rather fun, albeit not entirely convincing in its thesis of animals being funny because they highlight that there is no such thing as 'natural behaviour'. I appreciated the grumpily toned piece about coffee-related beverages sold by coffee shop chains, as such beverages have only become more elaborate in subsequent years. Green and blue coffee-based drinks are now advertised in the windows of these chains, containing I know not what.
In the large skinny latte with extra coffee, fat-free cream, sugar-free vanilla syrup and an extra shot of expresson we see the simultaneous satisfaction of two contradictory ways in which 21st century culture conceives of the body. We are able to see our bodies as naturally desiring excess and consumption (excusing our role in consumer capitalism) and we are also able to see our bodies as natural uncontaminated temples which we need to preserve against the world (also the logic of capitalism). If we look closer at these structures we start to see that both views of the body - both of the body-as-natural - are part of capitalism's own contradiction, and therefore cannot be seen as natural at all.
This point, that what superficially appears natural is actually ideological, underpins most if not all of the short pieces. They're pretty diverting to read and I did appreciate the inclusion of a quote from my all-time favourite television episode ('Basic Lupine Urology', Community series 3 episode 17) in relation to the Daily Mail. However each piece is too short to take its analysis very far; I was also surprised not to see any references to Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life.
July 16, 2014
This will give you life. Its central concept is the wonderful, novel idea of applying critical theory to everyday situations and objects. Nothing is out of bounds, meaning that funny animals and toasties are given the same thorough analysis as the coalition government's daily slip-ups and Richard Dawkins' laughable tweets.
It's lively, intelligent and often hilarious, uncompromisingly using major philosophical ideas (many are introduced off the cuff, which might be frustrating but also a catalyst to find out more) once the reader's hooked in with titles like 'Why Justin Bieber should Listen to Neutral Milk Hotel' and 'Fear and Anxiety in The Gruffalo'.
You won't agree with everything but you're almost certainly not supposed to. In the book's introduction - the lengthiest piece here - the anonymous authors defend the idea of using theory and position it in the face of a unanimous and still undefined 'common sense'. This is a thrilling uncommon rejection. I'm excited for volume 2.
It's lively, intelligent and often hilarious, uncompromisingly using major philosophical ideas (many are introduced off the cuff, which might be frustrating but also a catalyst to find out more) once the reader's hooked in with titles like 'Why Justin Bieber should Listen to Neutral Milk Hotel' and 'Fear and Anxiety in The Gruffalo'.
You won't agree with everything but you're almost certainly not supposed to. In the book's introduction - the lengthiest piece here - the anonymous authors defend the idea of using theory and position it in the face of a unanimous and still undefined 'common sense'. This is a thrilling uncommon rejection. I'm excited for volume 2.
September 12, 2015
It's really hard to give a star-rating to a book of essays all written by different people.
So here is my justification for two stars:
- First, this book was not what I was expecting. This is not a book of analysis on everyday things written in everyday language for everyday people. This is a book on everyday things written by and for academic theorists with broad understandings of the work of Freud, Lacan, Zizek, Barthes, Marx, etc. I (somewhat) enjoy reading theory, but I found these essays very dense and often incomprehensible without reference materials.
- Second (related to the above), I think these essays would be better served to remain as blog posts and not have graced the physical page. Many of the essays are clearly responses to other works, and popular culture phenomena, that would be best served with the reference materials alongside (you can tell many of these originally had hyperlinks to other webpages, which were clearly removed for print).
- Third, as a Canadian, I was lacking many of the cultural references in what is clearly a British author-heavy collection. This is fine, as I'm the one who chose to read something published out of the UK, but I did find myself missing the joke or the point in a few essays that relied heavily on cultural understandings of advertisements, tv shows, news events, etc.
- Fourth, I found quite a few of the essays to be boring...perhaps because they were theoretical analysis for theoretical analysis' sake, without much/any broad application in the quote-unquote real world.
Shout outs to some of the essays I liked:
- 15. Newphoria and the Case of the Mobile Phone
- 16. Tazreen Fashions Factory Photographs and their Reception
- 17. Autocorrect in the History of Literature
- 23. The Daily Mail: A Text that Reads Itself
- 33. Drink Responsibly and the Limits of the Infinite
- 39. Fear and Anxiety in The Gruffalo
- 42. Miroslaw Balka's How It Is: A Textual Analysis
- 45. Worbining (Word-Combining)
So here is my justification for two stars:
- First, this book was not what I was expecting. This is not a book of analysis on everyday things written in everyday language for everyday people. This is a book on everyday things written by and for academic theorists with broad understandings of the work of Freud, Lacan, Zizek, Barthes, Marx, etc. I (somewhat) enjoy reading theory, but I found these essays very dense and often incomprehensible without reference materials.
- Second (related to the above), I think these essays would be better served to remain as blog posts and not have graced the physical page. Many of the essays are clearly responses to other works, and popular culture phenomena, that would be best served with the reference materials alongside (you can tell many of these originally had hyperlinks to other webpages, which were clearly removed for print).
- Third, as a Canadian, I was lacking many of the cultural references in what is clearly a British author-heavy collection. This is fine, as I'm the one who chose to read something published out of the UK, but I did find myself missing the joke or the point in a few essays that relied heavily on cultural understandings of advertisements, tv shows, news events, etc.
- Fourth, I found quite a few of the essays to be boring...perhaps because they were theoretical analysis for theoretical analysis' sake, without much/any broad application in the quote-unquote real world.
Shout outs to some of the essays I liked:
- 15. Newphoria and the Case of the Mobile Phone
- 16. Tazreen Fashions Factory Photographs and their Reception
- 17. Autocorrect in the History of Literature
- 23. The Daily Mail: A Text that Reads Itself
- 33. Drink Responsibly and the Limits of the Infinite
- 39. Fear and Anxiety in The Gruffalo
- 42. Miroslaw Balka's How It Is: A Textual Analysis
- 45. Worbining (Word-Combining)
April 18, 2014
Really great read - so wonderfully interesting and insightful. Would absolutely recommend to everyone.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews