Laughter As Politics
Critical Theory in an Age of Hilarity
- Provides the first full-length study of the politics of laughter
- Rejects the traditional, normative question of whether laughter should play a role in politics in favour of a new, critical question of how laughter operates politically
- Advances a critical theory of laughter that challenges the conventional wisdom that laughter is a naturally emancipatory experience
- Critically re-reads the accounts of laughter offered by Thomas Hobbes, Theodor Adorno, Ralph Ellison and feminist and queer theorists such as Hélène Cixous and Judith Butler
- Demonstrates the contemporary relevance of these theoretical accounts through analyses of recent events of laughter including the 2010 Jon Stewart "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear"; Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out; and Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 Netflix special Nanette
- Offers the theoretical resources to make sense of the political stakes and possibilities of the present Age of Hilarity
Laughter As Politics offers a novel account of laughter’s role in contemporary political life. A world awash in hilarity has rendered the traditional philosophical question of whether laughter should play a role in politics obsolete. Faced with the laughter generated by late-night comedians, Twitter trolls, and reality TV presidents, we must instead trace how laughter operates politically. Only an account of gelopolitics – that is, of the concrete practices of and regulations around laughter (gelōs [γέλως]) that shape and reshape a political community – can reveal the possibilities and dangers of the current moment. Through investigations of the accounts of laughter offered by Thomas Hobbes, Theodor Adorno, Ralph Ellison, and feminist and queer thinkers like Hélène Cixous and Judith Butler, this book develops a critical theory of laughter that illuminates laughter as a privileged site wherein the contemporary social order constructs, preserves, and transforms itself politically.
Introducing Gelopolitics
- The Laughing Body Politic: The Counter/sovereign Politics of Hobbes’s Theory of Laughter
- Beyond A/gelasty: Adorno’s Critical Theory of Laughter
- Over a Barrel: Ralph Ellison and the Democratic Politics of Black Laughter
- The Best Medicine? Re-politicizing Laughter for Contemporary Feminist and Queer Politics
The End of Laughter? Gelopolitics and the New Agelasty
Laughter as Politics is an exemplary work of critical political theory. Patrick T. Giamario develops a critique of laughter, which neither denounces nor affirms, but instead shows how laughter is shaped by power and how power is unleashed in laughter, how laughter destabilizes the opposition between logos and phōnē and exposes the limits of liberalism, how laughter upholds a social order and sustains the imagination of something beyond it. Giamario sets aside the question of whether we should be laughing, at our political leaders or their followers, so that he can ask the more difficult question of what we are doing when we laugh and how our laughter shapes and is shaped by politics. His answers, drawing from Thomas Hobbes, Theodor Adorno, Ralph Ellison, and a number of contemporary feminist and queer theorists, are sophisticated and insightful.
Laughter as Politics is an exemplary work of critical political theory. Patrick T. Giamario develops a critique of laughter, which neither denounces nor affirms, but instead shows how laughter is shaped by power and how power is unleashed in laughter, how laughter destabilizes the opposition between logos and phōnē and exposes the limits of liberalism, how laughter upholds a social order and sustains the imagination of something beyond it. Giamario sets aside the question of whether we should be laughing, at our political leaders or their followers, so that he can ask the more difficult question of what we are doing when we laugh and how our laughter shapes and is shaped by politics. His answers, drawing from Thomas Hobbes, Theodor Adorno, Ralph Ellison, and a number of contemporary feminist and queer theorists, are sophisticated and insightful.
