Only a Joke Can Save Us

Only a Joke Can Save Us
Author :
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Total Pages : 326
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780810135826
ISBN-13 : 0810135825
Rating : 4/5 (825 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Only a Joke Can Save Us by : Todd McGowan

Download or read book Only a Joke Can Save Us written by Todd McGowan and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only a Joke Can Save Us presents an innovative and comprehensive theory of comedy. Using a wealth of examples from high and popular culture and with careful attention to the treatment of humor in philosophy, Todd McGowan locates the universal source of comedy in the interplay of the opposing concepts lack and excess. After reviewing the treatment of comedy in the work of philosophers as varied as Aristotle, G. W. F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, and Alenka Zupancic, McGowan, working in a psychoanalytic framework, demonstrates that comedy results from the deployment of lack and excess, whether in contrast, juxtaposition, or interplay. Illustrating the power and flexibility of this framework with analyses of films ranging from Buster Keaton and Marx Brothers classics to Dr. Strangelove and Groundhog Day, McGowan shows how humor can reveal gaps in being and gaps in social order. Scholarly yet lively and readable, Only a Joke Can Save Us is a groundbreaking examination of the enigmatic yet endlessly fascinating experience of humor and comedy.


Only a Joke Can Save Us Related Books

Only a Joke Can Save Us
Language: en
Pages: 326
Authors: Todd McGowan
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-09-15 - Publisher: Northwestern University Press

GET EBOOK

Only a Joke Can Save Us presents an innovative and comprehensive theory of comedy. Using a wealth of examples from high and popular culture and with careful att
Language: en
Pages: 671
Authors: Ralph Nader
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2011-01-04 - Publisher: Seven Stories Press

GET EBOOK

"In the cozy den of the large but modest house in Omaha where he has lived since he started on his first billion, Warren Buffett watched the horrors of Hurrican
Only One Thing Can Save Us
Language: en
Pages: 274
Authors: Thomas Geoghegan
Categories: Business & Economics
Type: BOOK - Published: 2014 - Publisher: The New Press

GET EBOOK

Is labor's day over or is this the big moment? Acclaimed author Geoghegan asserts that only a new kind of labor movement can help the country switch course towa
Why Only Art Can Save Us
Language: en
Pages: 218
Authors: Santiago Zabala
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-09-05 - Publisher: Columbia University Press

GET EBOOK

The state of emergency, according to thinkers such as Carl Schmidt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, is at the heart of any theory of politics. But today t
Those who Save Us
Language: en
Pages: 497
Authors: Jenna Blum
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2004 - Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

GET EBOOK

Trudy Swenson, haunted by her German heritage, embarks upon a deeper investigation of her past and uncovers secrets her mother has kept hidden for five decades.