Disinvestment and Investment in Comedy
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Where it appears in the corpus (1)
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#01
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.147
Distance and Proximity > Laughing from a Distance
Theoretical move: The passage argues that comedy requires a paradoxical combination of disinvestment from an event's social utility AND investment in the event itself, dismantling the simple "distance = comedy" adage by showing that pure distance produces indifference, not laughter; representation is identified as the privileged site where this dual requirement is most reliably met.
Comedy necessitates a disinvestment from the utility of the event taking place, but it also requires an investment in the event itself.