Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times

Comedy is so frequently the topic of cultural dialogue, but it is rarely taken seriously as an object of study. Comedy Against Work offers a major contribution to theorizing comedy but also thinking about the particular politics of the genre today.Work is a joke and often the butt of our jokes. Lane-McKinley argues that in comedy, we find ways to endure and cope with the world of work, but also to question the conditions of capitalist life. When work is slowly killing us and destroying the planet and, at the same time, something impossible to imagine life without, Lane-Mckinley considers the possibility of comedy as a revolutionary practice. By appealing to laughter we can counteract many of our shared miseries under capitalism, including our relationship to work.But to think through these revolutionary aspects of comedy, as a practice, also involves troubling comedy’s relationship to the global right turn of the last decade. Stand-up comedy’s claims to the artistic freedom of hate speech in comedy represent a fascistic current of our world today, blurring the boundaries between left and “alt” right. Against this current, Comedy Against Work draws from a tradition of feminist critical utopianism, Marxist-feminism, and contemporary cultural criticism to reflect on an anti-fascist poetics of comedy, grounded in a critique of work.