Work Never Works: On Malay Comedy’s Politics of Labour

Abstract

What accounts for Malay comedy’s longstanding preoccupation with work? This article argues that it marks a way of questioning capitalism’s universality wherein labour is not regarded as human nature but a specific demand emerging out of a recent and modern symbolic order. The radicality of this move will be demonstrated via Alenka Zupančič’s dialectical account of how comedy functions through revealing the contingency of meaning. Malay comedies operate to similar effects through a regular use simulation – such as mimicry, impersonation and disguises – where the notion of “work” is singled out to be scrutinised and estranged. But beyond this, bringing Malay comedy into conversation with Zupančič allows for a historical materialist extension of comedy’s dialectical operation in two regards. First, meaning is contingent not due to the “nature” of concepts but the extent to which concepts are affected by historical capitalism. Second, the simulations stress the corporeality of this process as the comic body is reducible neither as “just another object,” nor idealised as an emancipatory experience as how it has been rendered by notable theories of comedy. It is, rather, a site where historical understanding takes place.