Comic Distance
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#01
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.150
Distance and Proximity > A Freudian Slip
Theoretical move: Trauma is never experienced immediately or immanently but always through mediating distance, which is simultaneously the condition of possibility for trauma and for comedy; the subject's constitutive self-distance — the gap between experiencing and witnessing oneself — is what allows even the most traumatic event to become comic.
My distance from myself even during the fall enabled the traumatic event to become comic. I was experiencing the event, but I was also witnessing the event occur as an observer.