Alfie Bown, "Post-Comedy" (Polity, 2025)

Alfie Bown, "Post-Comedy" (Polity, 2025)

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge. Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, and so too is our social life. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore. But what if we really can’t take jokes anymore? Post-Comedy (Polity, 2025) argues that the spirit of comedy is the first step in the building of society, but that it has been lost in the era of divisive identity politics. Comedy flares up debates about censorship and cancellation, keeping us divided from one other. This goes against the true universalist spirit of comedy, which is becoming a thing of the past and must be recovered. Alfie Bown is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at Kings College London. His research focuses on psychoanalysis, digital media and popular culture. He has also worked as a journalist, writing for The Guardian, Paris Review, New Statesman, Tribune, and others. His books include The Playstation Dreamworld, Post-Memes, and Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships. He is the founder of Everyday Analysis which publishes pamphlets and essay collections with contemporary social and political issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Episoder(2227)

The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, and the Struggle for Work in America

The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, and the Struggle for Work in America

Most employers in the United States routinely conduct criminal background checks on job applicants, weeding out those with criminal convictions—and thus denying opportunities to those who need them m...

26 Mar 54min

Hsuan L Hsu, "Olfactory Worldmaking" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)

Hsuan L Hsu, "Olfactory Worldmaking" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)

Smell is a vital, if underappreciated, medium through which we inhabit and imagine the world. In Olfactory Worldmaking (University of Minnesota Press, 2026), Dr. Hsuan L. Hsu traces how olfactory expe...

24 Mar 26min

Prolepsis

Prolepsis

In this episode of High Theory, Gloria Fisk talks to Kim about Prolepsis. Defined by Gerard Genette in the 1970s, prolepsis is a flash forward, the opposite of analepsis, a flash back. Initially the p...

23 Mar 16min

David Bather Woods, "Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

David Bather Woods, "Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods An engaging biography of one of the most influential Western philosophers and a thought-provoking ex...

23 Mar 1h 16min

Philip C. Almond, "Noah and the Flood in Western Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Philip C. Almond, "Noah and the Flood in Western Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

In a world beset by climatic emergencies, the continuing resonance of the flood story is perhaps easy to understand. Whether in the tortured alpha male intensity of Russell Crowe’s Noah, in Darren Aro...

21 Mar 50min

Becca Voelcker, "Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction" (U California Press, 2025)

Becca Voelcker, "Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction" (U California Press, 2025)

Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction considers nonfiction filmmakers and film collectives whose work advances an understanding of land as a locus of social and environmental responsibility. Diving into...

21 Mar 1h 10min

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani et al. eds., "The Futures of Reparations in Latin America: Imagination, Translation, and Belonging" (Rutgers UP, 2026)

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani et al. eds., "The Futures of Reparations in Latin America: Imagination, Translation, and Belonging" (Rutgers UP, 2026)

Over the last thirty years, Latin America has undergone an unprecedented wave of reparations targeting victims of political violence during military regimes, Indigenous and Afro-Latin groups affected ...

20 Mar 1h 13min

Paul Kohlbry, "Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2026)

Paul Kohlbry, "Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2026)

The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland. Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But afte...

20 Mar 1h 10min

Populært innen Vitenskap

fastlegen
tingenes-tilstand
jss
rekommandert
forskningno
sinnsyn
villmarksliv
rss-paradigmepodden
liberal-halvtime
rss-nysgjerrige-norge
tomprat-med-gunnar-tjomlid
nevropodden
fjellsportpodden
diagnose
tidlose-historier
kvinnehelsepodden
rss-inn-til-kjernen-med-sunniva-rose
psykopoden
dekodet-2
rss-rekommandert