There's the rub. I think a lot of these fall along gender lines - with generally males finding them laugh out loud and females saying they're silly. This from a small sample. It rather depends how funny is defined, of course. The fact of laughing at it doesn't make it comedy - see reactions to roller coasters, say. Bergson doesn't explain why puppetry funny in muppets but scary in (say) The Exorcist.
Largely the examples are labelled as sitcoms.
I confess to being more taken by Lacan's definition ("[Comedy] is a question of the relationship between action and desire, and of the former’s fundamental failure to catch up with the latter." Jacques Lacan, 1992. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The Seminars of Jacques Lacan VII. London: Routledge - although it would include a lot of non-comic narratives). The contradictions in Bergson's theory attract me to it as it feels like it will help me unpack my problem: do we care for that idiot/monster or not?
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Date: 2008-01-14 11:29 am (UTC)Largely the examples are labelled as sitcoms.
I confess to being more taken by Lacan's definition ("[Comedy] is a question of the relationship between action and desire, and of the former’s fundamental failure to catch up with the latter." Jacques Lacan, 1992. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The Seminars of Jacques Lacan VII. London: Routledge - although it would include a lot of non-comic narratives). The contradictions in Bergson's theory attract me to it as it feels like it will help me unpack my problem: do we care for that idiot/monster or not?