The Odd One In: On Comedy

by Alenka Zupančič

Why philosophize about comedy? What is the use of investigating the comical from
philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives? In The Odd One In, Alenka Zupancic [haceks over both
cs] considers how philosophy and psychoanalysis can help us understand the movement and the logic
involved in the practice of comedy, and how comedy can help philosophy and psychoanalysis recognize
some of the crucial mechanisms and vicissitudes of what is called humanity. Comedy by its nature is
difficult to pin down with concepts and definitions, but as artistic form and social practice comedy
is a mode of tarrying with a foreign object--of including the exception. Philosophy's relationship
to comedy, Zupancic [haceks over both cs] writes, is not exactly a simple story (and indeed includes
some elements of comedy). It could begin with the lost book of Aristotle's Poetics, which discussed
comedy and laughter (and was made famous by Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose). But Zupancic
[haceks over both cs] draws on a whole range of philosophers and exemplars of comedy, from
Aristophanes, Molière, Hegel, Freud, and Lacan to George W. Bush and Borat. She distinguishes
incisively between comedy and ideologically imposed, "naturalized" cheerfulness. Real,
subversive comedy thrives on the short circuits that establish an immediate connection between
heterogeneous orders. Zupancic [haceks over both cs] examines the mechanisms and processes by which
comedy lets the odd one in. Alenka Zupancic [haceks over both cs] is Senior Research Fellow at the
Institute of Philosophy, Slovene Academy of Sciences, Ljubljana. She is the author of The Shortest
Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (MIT Press, 2003).

Genres: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction, Humor, Theory, Comedy, Psychology

240 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 8, 2008

About the author

Alenka Zupančič is a Slovenian philosopher whose work focuses on psychoanalysis and continental philosophy.

Born in Ljubljana, Zupančič graduated at the University of Ljubljana in 1990. She is currently a full-time researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and a visiting professor at the European Graduate School. Zupančič belongs to the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, which is known for its predominantly Lacanian foundations. Her philosophy was strongly influenced by Slovenian Lacanian scholars, especially Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek.

Zupančič has written on several topics including ethics, literature, comedy, love and other topics. She is most renowned as a Nietzsche scholar, but Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Henri Bergson and Alain Badiou are also referenced in her work.

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I expected, even hoped, that Zupancic’s book on comedy would contain exegetical commentary on Der Witz and Seminar V. It doesn’t,* and it’s for the best. This is not a work of academic textual interpretation but of contemporary cultural criticism, which simply means that instead of explaining what Freud and Lacan meant back then and what that means now, Zupancic explores the terrain of comedy as if it matters at this very moment.

Fear not, for the Greatest Bits of the Slovene School still make the crowd go mild: Hegel is the absolute comedian. Lacan is hysterical. Bergson and Deleuze are just sad clowns. And every body’s favorite Encore: It’s the stupid, phallus. (Sections I-III plus the Appendix, respectively.)

Of course, comedy is examined through the lenses of philosophy and psychoanalysis, but Zupancic also demonstrates how comedy always-already pervades those frequently humorless disciplines. The philosophical lesson can be isolated as: “Not only are we not infinite, we are not even finite!” And the cracks of life from which jokes spring (yes, complete with extended “boioioioioing”) demonstrate that no strategies of containment, no solace of good forms can defend any One from going to pieces. Section III critiques Bergson’s famous essay, offers a structural analysis of anticipation and retroversion intrinsic to comedic timing, and takes a long look at repetition as it operates in Deleuze’s and Lacan’s distinct vernaculars. The last chapter delivers some trenchant insights regarding castration, a notoriously hilarious topic. It's immense, some people can’t swallow it, but you gotta keep trying, bit by bit.

*It does make one particularly noteworthy extension of Freud’s Witz, and in true Lacanian fashion this is accomplished by compounding the original insight with the logic of the signifier. Whereas Freud saw one of the chief functions of the joke to be a permissible and momentary lowering of inhibitions which allows one a titillating glimpse of taboo topics, Zupancic suggests that the so-called obscenities—the joke’s content, or butt—are in fact a smokescreen dissembling the formal destabilization of the subject’s habitual relations to the signifier. It relates directly to both Freud’s and Lacan’s observations that the comic threatens to throw the entire universe into disarray. (Didn’t some famous wit claim that the destruction of the world would be a small price to pay for a memorable bon mot?) She summarizes, “On a certain level, there is a dimension of precariousness and fundamental uncertainty in our very world that gets articulated and becomes manifest in every joke. In this perspective, the process of joking is not only 'work done with the help of the Symbolic' (condensations, displacements, playing with homonyms, and so on), but always also something that displays the 'Symbolic at work'... when we laugh at the butt, a certain amount of pleasure gets realized and makes it possible for us to laugh also in face of this discomforting dimension (displaying the precariousness of our world and its dependence on contingent mechanisms of the production of sense), instead of being seized by anxiety in the face of it.”

[Mehmet B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zihin açıcı bir kitap. Komedinin trajediden farkı, gerçeğin üzerindeki örtüyü kaldırması, direnişle ilişkisi, yeni olasılıkları acabilme işlevi, tekrarlama yoluyla anlamsızlıkla yüzleşme sağlaması, Lacan'ın İmgesel, Simgesel, Gerçek alanlarında komedinin karşılığı, Simgesel'in Gerçek'le ilişkisini ortaya koyuşu gibi konular anlaşılır biçimde tartışılmış. Asıl konusu olmasa da Lacan üzerine okuduğum en açık, anlaşılır kitaplardan biri. Arisyoteles'ten Hegel'e, Bergson'dan Althusser'e komedi üzerine yazmış birçokdüşünür kitabın konuğu. Geniş bir perspektifle tarışmış komediyi Alenka Zupancic, gerçekten hayranlık uyandıran bir düşünür.

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zupancic's move of positioning Hegelian comedy as an answer avant la lettre to Bergson's idea of laughter as "something mechanical encrusted on the living" is ambitious, and with minor reservations succeeds. Her slogan-worthy opposition of a metaphysics of the finite and a speculative physics of the infinite reframes the unproductive debate between metaphysics and its critics, exposing the metaphysical underside of supposedly skeptical thought as well as the entanglement of supposed skeptics and full-blown metaphysics in the tragicomic register.

I wasn't compelled by the appendix on the phallus, that transcendentalized castration as an unsurpassable horizon of human subjectivity. Even if we don't accept the Lacanian implications in her construction, her claim that psychoanalysis, far from legitimating phallic discourse, is the surest ground for its critique is profoundly progressive:

"it would be very wrong to think that so-called phallocentrism could be countered by a politically correct restriction regarding the use of the term phallus. As history makes more than clear, phallocentrism can work splendidly, and much better, if the phallus is not directly
named, but reserved for Mysteries. And we should not forget that it was only with the advent of psychoanalysis that talk about phallocentrism really took off in the first place."

Zupancic's work opens a critical possibility insofar as it insists on the contingency provoked by the unveiling of the phallus. After the false necessity of the (myth of the) phallus is dispelled, we can begin to imagine a broader analysis that would mobilize discontent with phallic enjoyment rather than treating it as an unfortunate or unhealthy pathology.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel safe saying that this is an absolutely sublime, in the fullest sense of the term, work of speculative philosophy. In America, there seems to be a discursive prohibition on explaining why something is funny or what makes something comical or a comedy. Zupančič refers to the derision comedy usually garners from “serious” philosophers and theorists, but goes ahead with her own conceptualizations anyway. She is following Hegel’s, the most serious and “hysterically funny” of philosophers, analysis of comedy in the Religion chapter of Phenomenology of Spirit - in his dialectical analysis of Religion, comedy comes right before the revelation of Christianity or, in other words, the “Consummate Religion”. Why this relationship between Christianity and Comedy? Is not the tale of Christ supremely tragic? Well, Hegel (and Zupančič) would also claim that Christ could be seen as the ultimate comic object - the intersection of the “highest” and the “lowest” like Hegel’s famous dictum on the male reproductive organ (the phallus - which Lacan says is the source of all comedy) that combines the highest of human activity (it’s further generation) and the lowest (pissing). Christ consummates the intersection of God and man - the highest of all Being with the lowest miserable human object hanging on a crucifix like a criminal or slave. It’s something to think about.

To defend my use of “sublime” in the first sentence I’ll say this. Like all the best works of speculative and/or analytic philosophy and theory (dialectical materialism, for short), while reading Zupančič, one must get lost in the trees and forget the forest. One must get lost in the difficult theoretical elaborations and work hard to grasp what the writer is saying right then and there. Or in other words, one must grasp in abstraction the minute details of the work and then only after, in concrete life, does the forest come into full view. This book is no exception. It amazes me that I’d read away trying to grasp all the notions she puts forth on comedy and beyond using the Ancient Greek comedies, Shakespeare, and Moliere for reference and after a seemingly boring read, I’d get in bed, throw on an episode of “Curb”, and find everything I’d read come to life. I used “sublime” because it wasn’t just the theory I had been reading starting to make sense concretely in the work of Larry David, but also because I would laugh uncontrollably throughout the episodes. Let me get this straight, this book is not a funny book, it’s high theory, but when I’d put it down and watch some “Curb” I found “Curb” so hysterically funny that I’d have to shut it off if I wanted any chance of falling asleep that night. Most notably, on the days I did not read the book and watched “Curb”, I of course still found it funny but it did not produce the same sublime effect of uncontrollable laughter. I can’t really explain it, hence my use of “sublime”. When the theory would concretize and the forest would come into view, the sublime effect of hysterical laughter would come upon me without appearing to be connected to the concrete theory that was coming to life in front of me. This was entirely repeatable: on days I didn’t read, just normal watching and on days I did read, hysterical laughter throughout - it got to the point where I didn’t want to finish the book because I didn’t want to lose this sublime effect. It is a testament to the genius of Larry David and Alenka Zupančič - both hitting the comedic nail on the head in two entirely different ways.

Zupančič is the best!!

[Colin Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the opening pages of Alenka Zupančič's The Odd One In, she stakes a compelling claim about comedy's relationship to the universal and the concrete. She writes, "Comedy is not the undermining of the universal, but its (own) reversal into the concrete; it is not an objection to the universal, but the concrete labor or work of the universal itself. Or, to put it in a single slogan: comedy is the universal at work" (27). Here, Zupančič explores the dialectical, which is to say, non-binary relationship between the universal and the concrete. Zupančič seeks to understand how the universal can manifest itself in the concrete; she calls this process "comedy."

When this comedic process becomes apparent or is concretized, it manifests as the subject. Zupančič writes, "In comedy, the subject is (or becomes) the universal, the essential, the absolute. Which is to say that the universal, the essential, the absolute becomes the subject" (28). For example, Zupančič recalls Lacan's commentary on lunacy. She writes, "A lunatic is not some poor chap who believes that he is a king; a lunatic is a king who believes that he really is a king. Does this not hold even more for comedy? It is not some poor chap who believes himself to be a king who is comical (this is rather pathetic), but a king who believes that he really is a king" (32). Building on Lacan, Zupančič understands the comic as the gap that is constitutive to subjectivity. For Zupančič, comedy is not just the lack of subjectivity, but also the subject's failure to recognize this lack.

This lack, and the corresponding failure to recognize it, produces an excess that is unmistakably comedic. Zupančič writes, "One could say that the flaws, extravagances, excesses, and so-called human weaknesses of comic characters are precisely what account for their not being 'only human.' More precisely, they show us that what is 'human' exists only in this kind of excess over itself" (49). Zupančič explores the transcendent quality that comedic subjectivity possesses because, again, if a random person saw themselves as a king, this would fail the comedic test. Instead, only a king who truly believes themselves to be the king is comic. The former is pathic, a lack without an excess, but the latter is excess coupled with lack. But the larger theoretical point Zupančič makes builds on Hegelian dialectics, specifically the irreconcilable tension between lack and excess. Zupančič writes, "In other words, what is comical is not simply how words can move a very long way from sense-reality, how they can be completely detached from it, but, rather, the fact that, even in this detachment, they still function pretty well, and produce material effects of truth. What is comical is not simply their disjunction but, rather, the 'impossible' points of their joint articulation" (83). Even when using language as an example, Zupančič suggests that the impossibility of articulation simultaneously produces some possibilities. Dialectics is this tension between two opposing forces, but in that tension, something generative emerges, and in that emergence, we rebound back to the irreconcilability of the dialectical process. Properly understood, dialectics asks us to reckon with this irreconcilability, not resolve it. This is why comedy, unlike tragedy, "always materializes and gives a body to what can otherwise appear as an unspeakable, infinite Mystery" (210).

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A completely interesting romp in the realms of Lacanian psychoanalysis and comedy. I still trip up on Lacan’s theories but the discussion of what exactly makes us laugh, why we laugh and how it could be harnessed disrupt cultural and political seems prescient. After reading Freud’s economic take on jokes and dreams, this book was something of change in speeds and tone. A refreshing run through the sprinklers. A gallop actually because we move fast between Hegel and Freud and Lacan and Bergson and Deleuze and land on Lacan’s famous thoughts on Plato. (And an argument about why the phallus is the phallus and quite literally hiding inside the closet of every comedy.) whew! I feel refreshed and exhilarated after finishing this book. What I could understand of it was heavily underlined and I’ll come back to it many times.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may look like a good book and read like a good book, but don't let that fool you. It really is a good book.

[Salvador Ramírez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esta obra de Alenka Zupančič aborda la comedia desde la filosofía y la teoría (crítica), con el fin de transformar o derribar concepciones comunes sobre lo que se considera comedia. Tomando en cuenta que la comedia abarca distintas configuraciones como situaciones cómicas, de humor, bromas, entre otras. Así como existen vertientes conservadoras y otras que se pueden clasificar como autentica comedia.

El libro se divide en 3 secciones y un apéndice. Cada uno de estos tiene a su vez esta conformado por capítulos, que están escritos al estilo de ensayos y que en conjunto forman la obra con un sentido global.

La primera parte, explora la comedia, su relación con la filosofía y el psicoanálisis. Así como establece la diferencia como la épica, la tragedia y la comedia. Conceptualizando a esta última como lo universal concreto, desde la teoría lacano-hegeliana. En la épica, el héroe es narrado como el universal, en la tragedia el héroe habla por sí mismo representando lo universal a través de su carácter, mientras en la comedia el actor encarna las contradicciones del movimiento del espíritu a la materialidad y viceversa. Es decir, expone lo real de manera concreta. Así como señala que los humanos no sólo no son finitos, sino que fallamos incluso en ser finitos.

La segunda parte haba sobre las diferentes configuraciones de la comedia usando los conceptos freudianos de: El yo y el ego, el yo y el yo, el otro y el otro. Esto es, usa el Id, el Ego y el Otro para explicar cómo estas interacciones crean distintos tipos de personajes y situaciones cómicas. Conceptos que dan para una gran exploración sobre los diferentes tipos de situaciones cómicas.

La tercera parte se enfoca en algunos conceptos para explicar la comedia, desmenuzando los conceptos de pulsión, su conexión con el goce y la demanda del otro, donde define que en la comedia “la satisfacción se produce en un lugar diferente al que esperamos”. También explica las diferencias entre un chiste y una secuencia cómica; así como las diferencias y similitudes con la tragedia en torno a la repetición. Siendo una de las secciones mejor logradas.

El apéndice es una parte en donde profundiza algunos conceptos y su relación con la comedia. En especial trata sobre el falo y la castración y de cómo la comedia puede mostrar concretamente su presencia.

Este escrito fue publicado originalmente en inglés en 2006 bajó el titulo “The odd one in: on comedy”, siento el título de esta edición en español de Paradiso Editores (2012) una traducción no exacta. Soló escogieron la parte del mismo, perdiendo parte de su nombre original. Esta escrito con lenguaje técnico referente a la teoría crítica, la filosofía y el psicoanálisis, al mismo tiempo que usa referencias de la cultura general para explicar sus puntos – aunque no usa muchos ejemplos cómicos como se podría esperar de una obra así. Este libro para un público no especializado puede resultar complicado de leer en consecuencia, pero generar muchas preguntas que invitan a profundizar tanto en la filosofía como en la comedia. Sin duda es muy recomendable para interesados en la filosofía y teoría (critica).

[Jeffrey Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In
(The MIT Press, 2008)
Sometimes a cigar is just a penis. But neither one is anything without the other—and both are kept “alive” by the possibility that the other may not be part of the “Real.” Alenka Zupancic’s treatise on the connection between philosophy and comedy is her second contribution to the Short Circuits series edited by Slavoj Zizek.
Zupancic convincingly weaves together all of philosophy’s grand poobahs into a remarkable synthesis. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, Lacan and Marx (Karl and Groucho) — the author sorts it out.
Most comedy represents a fusion of positions: a never-ending separation and subsequent unification of reflecting entities that form dyads. This couple, or “copula” then overcomes the gap between the two and acts as one.
By way of illustrating the dyad, Zupancic revisits Moliere, who was re-visiting a play by Plautus. Jupiter has sex with a mortal and fathers Hercules. Jupiter apologizes to the husband but the poor man has nothing to say. Embarrassingly, his servant stands up. Whereas Plautus equalized god and man, Moliere equalized master and servant. Both dramas require a “ludic” dyad.
A chapter called “Repetition” draws on Being and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze. Repetition is a break from the past, “offering something new.” Zeroing in on the “break”, on what’s behind the curtain, we glimpse sublimity. Zupancic asserts “comedy… functions in the background of something that has always-already succeeded and draws its power from there.” So plug in.

[Kamakana · Rating 4 out of 5]

060119: there is rarely for me much reason to reread philosophy texts, but for this i might make an exception. i own a copy. it has been years since read. i am interested in reading her recent book ‘what is sex’ as someone promises it is yes sex, psychology, philosophy, but the ground is not Freud but maybe Foucault...

first review: the only reason this is not a five is that i have not read much lacan or deleuze, but it seems to argue well. rather than defining the comic as socially disruptive, she shows how it can be ideologically conservative. i understand the earlier passages, much more than these repressive/ controlling thinkers, in referring to false general cultural ideology that unhappiness or struggle are failures of yourself rather than world. an interesting examination of bergson's essay 'laughter' very helpful, main criticism is that the man does not go far enough, towards constitutive or ideological affects on what we think is comic: with good examples suggesting tragedy is epic and comic is repetitive, then examples of other, historical, French and Greek comedy. the focus on repetition makes me think of the movie 'Groundhog Day' and tragedy archetypical plot against impossible comic recovery made me think of 'Back to the Future'... and it may not have looked like it, but i found it very funny...

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not hooey.

Enjoyed thoroughly.

I come from a place where psychoanalysis is mostly hooey. Such has been my training on that point. But a lot of this book made sense.

The author drew parallels between such diverse sources as to make commentaries on our society that exist outside of certain times and places.

She did it entertainingly, intelligently, and in such a way that I got really pissed off when I lost my copy of this for a few weeks.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute must-read.
Alenka writes clearly and provides numerous examples to justify her theses.
If you ever wanted to know if there's a relationship between Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegel, and comedy, when you read this book, you'll think that this is the only way to think of comedy.