The Comic Event: Comedic Performance from the 1950s to the Present

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.

Table of Contents:
Prolegomenon: “a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation” Bit I: “At First Mere Improvisation” Bit II: Reverberations: The Joke of the Joke Bit III: Repetition and the Exquisite Seriesness of Series Bit IV: “Play It Again, Sheldon” Nothing in Comedy Ever Only Happens Once Bit V: The Comic Uncanny; or The Character of Caricature Bit VI: Breaking Stacks and Cutting Layers: The Self-conscious Comedy of Comedy Bit VII: Doubling Down on the Mise en Abyme: The Comic Contexts of Comedy Bit VIII: Ourobouros—Epanalepsis: “a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation” Bit IX: Ourobouroubouroubouros; Or When Parody Takes Itself On Bit X: The Long and Winding Road Epilogue: The Aristocratic Apparatus

About the Author :
Judith Roof is Professor of English and William Shakespeare Chair in English at Rice University, USA. She has published books and essays on narrative theory, studies in sexuality, Hollywood cinema, DNA, hoaxes, and on the work of such authors as Beckett, Pinter, Duras, Woolf, and Percival Everett.

Review :
The Comic Event exemplifies how scholars can take seriously comedic performance while shifting analysis away from ‘reductive structural modes of analysis’… [Its} largest strength is its palimpsestic style that gathers comedy forms and artists not often paired together in theatre and performance histories. 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.