engleski

‘How can we laugh when our world is dying’. Comedy as an Aesthetic Mode and Affective Form of Everyday Life

According to Bergson when the human body acts and moves and thinks like a machine, we have a formula for the comic (Bergson 1911). The comic is ”something mechanical encrusted upon the living”. I see this as a striking feature of the 19th century that has relevance today. Since the 19th century, the human body has been affected by different technologies, state control, a bureaucratic administrative universe focused on the ”final solution“, up until today’s prevailing ideology of happy-healthy bodies animated by the simulacra of permanent joy. All of these technologies constitute a fundamental confusion about the body in relation to suffering and joy. Alenka Zupančič (2008) argues that there is something in comedy that conceals the other side in it, something horrible and uncanny. The question is, what is this uncanny side of laughter today, when, as Lauren Berlant (2017) argues, we live in the moment of economic crisis, austerity and unemployment which characterizes humorlessnes. How can we laugh when our world is dying and inequality is casted ”as the appropriate order of things”. In this paper I analyze laughter (or impossibility of it) as it is associated with some political and cultural issues both in Croatia and globally.

comedy, laughter, emotions

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