The Comic Event

Comedic Performance from the 1950s to the Present

By: Judith Roof

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Hardcover | 11 January 2018

At a Glance

Hardcover
240 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
24.13 x 15.88 x 2.54

Hardcover

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The Comic Event approaches comedy as dynamic phenomenon that involves the gathering of elements of performance, signifiers, timings, tones, gestures, previous comic bits, and other self-conscious structures into an "event" that triggers, by virtue of a "cut," an expected/unexpected resolution.

Using examples from mainstream comedy, The Comic Event progresses from the smallest comic moment—jokes, bits—to the more complex—caricatures, sketches, sit-coms, parody films, and stand-up routines. Judith Roof builds on side comments from Henri Bergson's short treatise "Laughter," Sigmund Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and various observations from Aristotle to establish comedy as a complex, multifaceted practice. In seeing comedy as a gathering event that resolves with a "cut," Roof characterizes comedy not only by a predictable unpredictability occasioned by a sudden expected/unexpected insight, but also by repetition, seriality, self-consciousness, self-referentiality, and an ourobouric return to a previous cut. This theory of comedy offers a way to understand the operation of a broad array of distinct comic occasions and aspects of performance in multiple contexts.

Industry Reviews

Where other critics have sought to pin comedy down, upholstering it in categories and systems that are anything but funny, Judith Roof finds critical resources in comedy itself: performers such as Fry and Laurie, French and Saunders, Richard Pryor, Louis CK and Amy Schumer teach us everything we need to know about the comic event though their doubling, self-referentiality, layering, cutting, timing and seriality. If you have never had the outrageous pleasure of Judith Roof's company at an academic conference, then The Comic Event - a feat of scholarly stand-up - will serve as the next best thing.
kitt price, Senior Lecturer in English, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

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