Comedy and Subjectivity
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.89
Tragedy and Pathos > The Status of the Body
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the difference between comedy and pathos lies in the visibility of the subject: the pathetic body is one reduced to mere finitude (matter without subject), while the comic body is one in which the subject's excess appears through and against the body's material constraints — making laughter more ontologically respectful than pity.
When we recognize the subject acting through the body, the valence of bodily functions changes, and what would be pathetic becomes comic.