Comedy and Representation
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Where it appears in the corpus (1)
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#01
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.147
Distance and Proximity > Laughing from a Distance
Theoretical move: The passage argues that comedy requires a paradoxical combination of disinvestment from an event's social utility AND investment in the event itself, dismantling the simple "distance = comedy" adage by showing that pure distance produces indifference, not laughter; representation is identified as the privileged site where this dual requirement is most reliably met.
Representation of any stripe is the most fertile ground for comedy because the fact of representation itself produces the requirement for comedy— proper distance and the necessary proximity.