Comic Machinery of the Social
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#01
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.170
Outside and Inside > Human versus Machine
Theoretical move: By contrasting Chaplin's and Keaton's relationships to the machine, McGowan argues that comedy's contradiction is not external (the machine excluding the human) but internal to any subject-like structure: lack generates excess within the machine itself, making the machine a lacking subject and locating comedy in the immanent dysfunction of the social order rather than in its exclusions.
The contradiction that produces comedy exists in the midst of the machine of the social order itself.