Comedy of Language
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.125
Signification and Desire > From Needs to Desires
Theoretical move: Language transforms biological need into insatiable desire through the mediation of the signifier, introducing a foundational alienation; this structural excess over meaning is the ontological ground of comedy, wherein the signifier's capacity to produce nonsense reveals that its structure exceeds its capacity for sense.
Language is comical because it responds to lack with excess and thus marks the first moment of their coincidence, a coincidence that every comic moment reproduces.