JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM最新文献

This article explores the psychoanalytic points of commonality between stand-up comedy shows and fascist rallies, arguing that both are concerned with the creation of a “mass” audience. The article explores the political significance of this analogy by arguing that while stand-up shows are not as regressive as fascist rallies, their “mass” character does run counter to any political aspirations they may have toward the end of critical consciousness raising.

The function of the comic in the midst of tragedy is not clear. After all, is it simply comic relief that wounded nations, communities, or individuals seek? Tragedy has long been cast as memory and mourning while comedy offers for the masses a Nietzschean moment of joyful forgetting and for the Stoic mind a measure of transcendence from our grief. The latter view came into prominence for modern American culture with the nineteenth-century satirist Mark Twain, who wrote that “the secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow,” which has been interpreted through the often-quoted formula: comedy is tragedy plus time. The assumption is that we need some distance emotionally in order to mock or transcend the tragic. While we grant the humor of transcendence can produce some momentary relief through emotional distance, we wonder if there might be another way that humor can deal with suffering? Popular psychology often speaks of five stages of grief, and while that progression seems too linear and simplistic, we find that the now much more inclusive comic stage has something to offer their audiences struggling to make sense of a volatile world.

What are the rules of the comedic roast? Initially, there might seem to be a tension between “the comedic” and “roasting” or “insult.” The comedic is concerned with the funny or mirth while insults are mean-spirited in nature, tools of injury. So how can the two be combined to produce something fun? In this article, I entertain a few views that attempt a resolution of this apparent tension. I conclude with a proposal that suggests when they are successful, roasts employ mechanisms that redirect attention from the joke's content to its formal properties; it is when those mechanisms fail that roasting becomes disagreeable.

Stand-up so closely resembles—and is meant to resemble—the styles and expectations of everyday speech that the idea of technique and technical mastery we typically associate with art is almost rendered invisible. Technique and technical mastery is as much about the understanding and development of audiences as collaborators as it is the generation of material. Doing so requires encountering audiences in places that by custom or design encourage ludic and vernacular talk—social spaces and third spaces such as bars, coffee houses, and clubs. Cultivating uncultivated speech and cultivating real audiences in found settings form the background of developing the stand-up comedian, neither of which lend themselves to the conservatory tradition we think of when we think of the development of artists. This article addresses two areas of the overall question of stand-up as art, starting with the ontological question of stand-up comedy: if it is an art where is it located, and what we may mean by “artworks” and “artworld” in stand-up comedy? Then I consider whether stand-up comedy as practiced can be reconciled with several recent definitions for art and note some of the special conditions and contexts for stand-up.

This article investigates the moral wrongness of joke theft. Working through a trove of real-world cases, and using the sitcom The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as a touchstone, I argue, ultimately, for a pluralist approach, contending that there are several wrongs that may be present in any case of joke theft, but which cannot be reduced to each other and which are collectively irreducible to any sort of “superwrong.”

Magic and stand-up comedy have a lot in common. For example, when successful, both tend to elicit laughter, and many magicians regularly perform in comedy clubs. Nevertheless, the close relationship between magic and comedy is poorly understood. The goal of this article is to explore this relationship and to defend the thesis that magic is actually a form—arguably a limit case—of stand-up comedy. This requires first introducing definitions of both stand-up comedy and magic. The core argument then deploys one of today's best-developed philosophical theories of comic amusement to show that magic, when successful, is humorous. In this way, the article contributes to our understanding of both the emotional response to magic and the nature and scope of comedy. The article begins with an analysis of Steve Martin's 1968 TV debut on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, in which he performs a “socko-boffo comedy routine” that seamlessly integrates absurdist comedy with magic tricks.

Contemporary comedy audiences are accused by some comedians of being too morally sensitive to appreciate humor. To get closer to an answer, I will first briefly present the argument over audience sensitivity as found in the nonphilosophical literature. Second, I then turn to the philosophical literature and begin from the idea that “funny” is a response-dependent property. I present a criticism of this response-dependence account of “funny” based in the claim that funniness is not determined by what normal audiences actually laugh at, but by what merits laughter. Third, I argue that excessive or deficient moral sensitivity distorts audience receptivity to humor. Fourth, I turn to candidates for ideally sensitive audiences. I conclude by returning to the particular cases of supposed oversensitivity or undersensitivity to jokes to see how we might judge them.