Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times

Work is a joke. Laughing at it is political.Humor, Groucho Marx asserted, is "reason gone mad." For Walter Benjamin, laughter was "the most revolutionary emotion." In a moment when great numbers of people are reevaluating their commitment to the hellscape we call "work," what does it mean to take comedy seriously--and to turn it against work?Both philosophically brilliant and deeply personal, Comedy Against Work demonstrates how laughing about work can puncture the pretensions of tyrannical bosses while uniting us around a commitment to radically new ways of making the world together. At the same time, Lane-McKinley exposes a war at the heart of contemporary comedy between those who see comedy as a weapon for punching down and those whose laughter points to social transformation. From stand-up to sitcoms, podcasts to late night, comedy reveals our longing to subvert power, escape the prison of work, and envision the joys of a liberated world.

ISBN-13: 9781942173700

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Common Notions

Publication Date: 11-22-2022

Pages: 256

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

Madeline Lane-McKinley is a writer, professor, and Marxist-feminist with a PhD in Literature from the Universityof California, Santa Cruz. She is a founding member of Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The New Inquiry, Entropy, GUTS, and Cultural Politics. She is also the author of the chapbook Dear Z and a contributor to The Museum of Capitalism.

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As portraits of jokester managerialism, each version of The Office features a competing philosophy of humor. In the BBC version, David Brent reflects the long western tradition of superiority theory in humor—in Brent's case, rooted in Thomas Hobbes’s account of laughter in Leviathan, as a "sudden glory" and a passion caused "either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them, or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves."

Superiority theory in humor focuses on “the pleasure experience when one is the agent rather than the target of laughter,” Cynthia and Julie Willett explain: “This pleasure, the theory maintains, stems from an increase of one’s power, status, or reputation at the expense of others.” What’s driving most of David Brent’s “chilled out entertainer” managerial practices is this ambition to feel superior, for which joking becomes weaponized to maintain dominance. By contrast, Michael Scott’s jokesterism is more in keeping with the relief theory of humor, conceiving of the joke as a “release of the liberated inhibitory charge,” as Freud suggests. As opposed to David’s punching down, Michael’s jokesterism is verbal diarrhea, coming from a place of sincerity, and a pathetic yearning to be likeable. Where David is abusive, it would seem, Michael is simply compulsive.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i

Introduction: Work Is a Joke 1

Part 1 Comedy and the World of Work

Chapter 1 Watching Work on TV 19

Chapter 2 The Stand-Up Artist in the Age of Gigification 39

Part 2 Gender at Work: Comedy, Work Ethics, and Antiwork Ethics

Chapter 3 Comediennes 67

Chapter 4 The Trouble With "Authenticity" 95

Chapter 5 On Jokesterism 117

Chapter 6 Ode to Killjoys 139

Part 3 Comedy and Care Crisis

Chapter 7 Comedy Under Lockdown 155

Chapter 8 Quieting the World of Work 171

Chapter 9 Care, Laughter, and the Constraints of Capitalist Life 187

Conclusion: Antiwork Comedy as Utopian Method 203

Bibliography 223

About the Author 237

About Common Notions 238

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