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"When work is slowly killing us and destroying the planet and, at the same time, something impossible to imagine life without, Lane-McKinley considers the possibility of comedy as a revolutionary practice. By appealing to laughter-what Walter Benjamin called the most "revolutionary emotion of the masses," or as Audre Lorde put it, the "open and fearless underlining" of our capacity for joy-we can counteract many of our shared miseries under capitalism, including our relationship to work. But to think through these revolutionary aspects of comedy as a practice also involves troubling comedy's relationship to the global right turn of the last decade. Stand-up comedy's claims to the artistic freedom of hate speech in comedy represent a fascistic current of our world today, blurring the boundaries between left and "alt" right. Against this current, the book draws from a tradition of feminist critical utopianism, Marxist-feminism, and contemporary cultural criticism to reflect on an anti-fascist poetics of comedy, grounded in a critique of work"--
List of contents
Introduction: Work is a Joke
Part One: Comedy and the World of Work
1 Watching Work on TV
2 The Stand-Up Artist in the Age of Gigification
Part Two: Gender at Work
3 Comediennes
4 The Trouble With 'Authenticity'
5 On Jokesterism
6 Ode to Killjoys
Part Three: Comedy and Care Crisis
7 Comedy Under Lockdown: Housework and Utopian Longing
8 Quieting the World of Work
9 Care, Laughter, and the Constraints of Capitalist Life
Conclusion: Comedy as Utopian Method
About the author
Madeline Lane-McKinley is a writer, professor, and Marxist-feminist with a PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a founding member of Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The New Inquiry, Entropy, GUTS, and Cultural Politics. She is also the author of the chapbook Dear Z and a contributor to The Museum of Capitalism.
Summary
Work is a joke. Laughing at it is political.
Humor, Groucho Marx asserted, is “reason gone mad.” For Walter Benjamin, laughter was “the most revolutionary emotion.” In a moment when great numbers of people are reevaluating their commitment to the hellscape we call “work,” what does it mean to take comedy seriously—and to turn it against work?
Both philosophically brilliant and deeply personal, Comedy Against Work demonstrates how laughing about work can puncture the pretensions of tyrannical bosses while uniting us around a commitment to radically new ways of making the world together. At the same time, Lane-McKinley exposes a war at the heart of contemporary comedy between those who see comedy as a weapon for punching down and those whose laughter points to social transformation. From stand-up to sitcoms, podcasts to late night, comedy reveals our longing to subvert power, escape the prison of work, and envision the joys of a liberated world.
Foreword
Outreach to Comedy organizations and festivals
Direct Marketing to Literary Magazines (including The New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, The White Review, The Paris Review, London Review of Books, Literary Hub), Comedy / Pop Culture Publications, Left Publications (including Spectre, Dissent, Teen Vogue, Protean Magazine), Academic Publications (including the International Journal of Cultural Studies, The Journal of American Culture, The Journal of Popular Culture, Utopian Studies, The Feminist Review)
Podcasts outreach
Excerpts in appropriate journals
In person events on the west coast (Bay Area / Portland / Seattle) and Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Albuquerque. Online events and conference presentations.
