Authorized Transgression
On this page 1 section ›
This concept page does not yet have synthesis content. The extractor flagged it as a load-bearing concept; a future synthesis pass will populate it. The All Occurrences section below shows every place it appears in the corpus.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (1)
-
#01
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.179
Ideology and Equality > Faking Critique
Theoretical move: Comedy that appears to target authority can serve ideological functions by positioning the authority figure as a "substantial subject" who can afford self-mockery, thereby reinforcing rather than undermining the symbolic structure that sustains power; this argument extends Bakhtin's carnival critique to show how comic subversion—even when sincere—enables authority to function more efficiently rather than challenging it.
The White House Correspondents' Dinner is an authorized space, like the medieval carnival. The jokes that emerge from it remain within that space unless they manage to disturb its fabric by violating the conventions that sustain the space.