Abstract
This chapter acknowledges that comedy is a genre of repetition, but argues that comic repetition is not merely a reiteration of an original process, form or person. Rather, a comic repetition always includes an element of what is typical for performance art: what is repeated is actually only produced in the act of repetition which manifests it. The chapter looks at the examples of such performative repetition in three seemingly unrelated examples of the popular comic art of the 1990s: in a clown routine in Vyacheslav Polunin’s Slava’s Snow Show and in the television sit-coms Coupling and 3rd Rock from the Sun. The chapter concludes by recalling J. L. Austin’s formulation of performative utterances and argues that they are to be regarded as constituting parts of legal or moral ceremonies, inscribed in what Louis Althusser described as ideological apparatuses. Both comedy and ideology proceed as performance in the described sense—though this does not imply that comedy is necessarily ideological.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
There are countless examples of this procedure, but the classic one is perhaps to be found in The Satyricon, in an episode recounted by Eumolpus about his seduction of an ephebe in Pergamon. This lustful episode is usually interpreted as an inversion of the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades—the teacher and the student—as described in Plato’s Symposium: Alcibiades complains about Socrates’ disinterest in having sex with him, and thus ends up praising Socrates’ virtue. Eumolpus, however, is a very different kind of teacher. The young charge of Eumolpus does not give himself up easily, though, and warns Eumolpus, when he is being particularly persistent, that he should just go to sleep or the boy will “tell the father.” In a comical turn of events the seduction is nevertheless successful, so much so that the youth ends up waking Eumolpus several times during the night, wanting more. Finally, Eumolpus is too tired to go on and orders the boy to fall asleep, lest he will “tell the father” (see Petronius 2011, 85–87).
- 2.
See also a slightly divergent explanation in Zupančič (2008, 36).
References
3rd Rock from the Sun. 1996–2001. Carsey-Werner Company, YBYL Productions.
Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books.
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words, Ed. J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon.
Coupling. 2000–2004. TV Series. Hartswood Films.
Dolar, Mladen. 2017. The Comic Mimesis. Critical Inquiry 43 (Winter): 570–589.
Hewitt, Andrew. 2005. Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lubitsch, Ernst (Dir.). 1942. To Be or Not to Be. Romaine Film Corporation.
Pascal, Blaise. 1995. Pensées and Other Writings, Trans. Honor Levi. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Petronius. 2011. The Satyricon, Trans. J. P. Sullivan. London: Penguin.
Pfaller, Robert. 2006. The Familiar Unknown, the Uncanny, the Comic: The Aesthetic Effects of the Thought Experiment. In Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek, 198–216. London: Verso.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2008. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Moder, G. (2019). Comedy as Performance. In: Mascat, J., Moder, G. (eds) The Object of Comedy. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-27741-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-27742-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)