Full Description
The Comic Event approaches comedy as dynamic phenomenon that involves the gathering of elements of performance, signifiers, timings, tones, gestures, previous comic bits, and other self-conscious structures into an "event" that triggers, by virtue of a "cut," an expected/unexpected resolution.
Using examples from mainstream comedy, The Comic Event progresses from the smallest comic moment—jokes, bits—to the more complex—caricatures, sketches, sit-coms, parody films, and stand-up routines. Judith Roof builds on side comments from Henri Bergson's short treatise "Laughter," Sigmund Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and various observations from Aristotle to establish comedy as a complex, multifaceted practice. In seeing comedy as a gathering event that resolves with a "cut," Roof characterizes comedy not only by a predictable unpredictability occasioned by a sudden expected/unexpected insight, but also by repetition, seriality, self-consciousness, self-referentiality, and an ourobouric return to a previous cut. This theory of comedy offers a way to understand the operation of a broad array of distinct comic occasions and aspects of performance in multiple contexts.
Contents
Prolegomenon: "a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation"
Bit I: "At First Mere Improvisation"
Bit II: Reverberations: The Joke of the Joke
Bit III: Repetition and the Exquisite Seriesness of Series
Bit IV: "Play It Again, Sheldon" Nothing in Comedy Ever Only Happens Once
Bit V: The Comic Uncanny; or The Character of Caricature
Bit VI: Breaking Stacks and Cutting Layers: The Self-conscious Comedy of Comedy
Bit VII: Doubling Down on the Mise en Abyme: The Comic Contexts of Comedy
Bit VIII: Ourobouros—Epanalepsis: "a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation"
Bit IX: Ourobouroubouroubouros; Or When Parody Takes Itself On
Bit X: The Long and Winding Road
Epilogue: The Aristocratic Apparatus
