Post-Comedy

by Alfie Bown

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge.

Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, and so too is our social life. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore.  But what if we really can’t take jokes anymore?

This book argues that the spirit of comedy is the first step in the building of society, but that it has been lost in the era of divisive identity politics. Comedy flares up debates about censorship and cancellation, keeping us divided from one other. This goes against the true universalist spirit of comedy, which is becoming a thing of the past and must be recovered.

144 pages, Paperback

Published January 13, 2025

Reviews

[S. Kallahan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's the old nugget that if you have to explain a joke, you kill its humor. This felt like that. Instead of letting the complexity of laughter and it's constant ironic tone infect the theory, this felt like Brown was trying to force comedy into his theory. For example, his analysis of Ricky Gervais' humour only touched briefly on the layering of irony; he preferred instead to drill-down on its identitarian politics. While there is no doubt Gervais took an unfortunate turn to exclusionary humour, I think there's something more complicated going on with comedians like him. Great comedians are drawn to what can't be said within a particular "discursive regime." Gervais proved he was very much a comedian who targeted these pockets during his stint as Golden Globe host. By not addressing this aspect with any rigor when dealing with comedians, Brown misses a large feature and potential point of resistance within the practice of comedy. He spends too much time on content, and less on form. What's more interesting, and Brown does touch on this a little, is how the kind of iconoclasm fueling comedians like Gervais manages to get reinscribed back into formative, exclusionary discursive practices while at the same time pointing to potential ruptures within meaning making. There were moments in this book that were interesting, but I ultimately came away feeling it only skipped over the complexity of comedy in the 21st C. (Like what about that emblematic moment after 9-11 when Gottfried tried to speak the unspeakable, hit groans, so punished his audience with "The Aristocrats" joke? That says everything about comedy's relationship to restrictive speech and speaks volumes about what drives people like Acaster, Gervais and Chapelle).

[Aleksandr Popov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aegade algusest saadik on nali olnud ühiskondliku kokkukuuluvuse osa. Teda on tehtud nii enese, kui ka teiste üle. Eeskätt selleks, et leevendada pingeid.
Isikliku kogemuse näitel meenub aeg, kus noore korporandina üritasin aduda "aasimise" peenet kunsti - kaaskorporandi tögamine viisakuse piiridesse jäädes on köielkõnd, sest solvumine toob kaasa karistuse. Tänapäeval näen aga ise sama muret, mis raamatu autor - komöödiast ja naljategmisest on saanud omamoodi sotsiaalse võitlustandri osa. Me kasutame huumorit selleks, et kellelegi ära teha. Keegi paika panna. Kellelegi halvasti öelda. Sest "Schrödingeri sitapeaks" kehastumine on kerge tulema - kui nalja peale solvuti või peeti seda labaseks ning riivavaks, siis on kohe vabandus varnast võtt. "Ma ju tegin nalja noh...!"
Oma essees väidab Londoni Ülikooli Kuningliku kolledži digitaalmeedia ja tehnoloogiakultuuri õppejõud Alfie Bown, et komöödiavaimu au sisse tagasi toomine on esimene samm ühiskonna loomiseks. Me peame liikuma tagasi mõttemallide juurde, kus inimestevaheline suhtlus on huumoriga rikastatud, mitte mürgitatud. Ja see eeldab mitte ainult peenemat huumorisoont vaid soovi huumoriga ühiskonda rikastada, mitte seda mudamülkaks muuta.

[Monique Attrux]

I deeply enjoyed Alfie Brown's Playstation Dreamworld, so I was excited to read this and see what he had to say about comedy and its role in our day and age.

Brown's primary thesis in the book is that comedy is universalist and anti-capitalist, and he's writing in response to what he sees as the rising didacticism and particularist turns in comedy, where people only laugh because the joke accurately aligns with ethics.

He is brave in engaging with some of the spottiest issues in our current society, though the writing often falls into bothsidesism in issues where there are no both sides. While there's much more to critique, I will say that I learned a lot from Brown and appreciate the inclusion of jokes and humorous events.

There's just ONE thing that triggered me. Page 39, he writes, "...the British philosopher Northrop Frye..." At the risk of sounding particularist and divisive, I must underline that Frye is Canadian. (Admittedly, he's written so much about British literature that people can't tell.)