Comedy as Philosophical Category
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#01
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.105
Philosophy and the Finite > Christ as Comedian
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Christianity is structurally a comic religion because its central event—the incarnation of the infinite God in the finite figure of Christ—embodies the contradiction that is the philosophical essence of comedy; Hegel's dialectic formalizes this structure, making him the most comic philosopher, and Buñuel's *La Voie lactée* renders it cinematically without blasphemy by depicting Christ's finite humanity literally.
Hegel is funny because Christianity, despite the absence of comic priests, is a philosophically comic religion. It emerges through the unity of the infinite and the finite, and it is this insistence on the infinite becoming finite that renders Christ a ridiculous figure.