Egalitarian Comedy
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All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (3)
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#01
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.175
Ideology and Equality > Class Struggle at the Carnival
Theoretical move: Comedy has no inherent political valence; the distinction between egalitarian and ideological comedy lies not in who produces or targets it, but in whether it reveals internal division/splitting in both subject and object (egalitarian) or sustains a sense of wholeness that reinforces social authority (ideological).
Egalitarian comedy exposes the contradictions of the social order and of the subject who exists within this order. In egalitarian comedy, both the source of the comedy and its target appear divided internally.
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#02
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.182
Ideology and Equality > Egalitarian Comedy
Theoretical move: McGowan argues that genuine egalitarian comedy must expose the division within authority itself (not merely mock discursive identities), running parallel to Hegel's move in the Phenomenology that substance is always also subject; this means egalitarian comedy can target both authority figures and the excluded, provided it refuses to idealize either pole as a substantial ground.
A genuinely egalitarian comedy must reveal that the social authority itself is not simply a discursive entity but necessarily lacking. It must show the social order and the subject as at odds with themselves.
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#03
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.189
Ideology and Equality > The Fundamental Barrier
Theoretical move: Comedy's inherently social structure—its impossibility of being enjoyed alone—generates both its ideological function (producing a superego-like pressure toward inclusion and wholeness) and the fundamental barrier to egalitarian comedy: the illusion of wholeness that its amalgam of inclusion/exclusion produces, an illusion that genuine egalitarian comedy must disrupt by showing that all wholeness is already beset by the disparate.
the fundamental stumbling block to egalitarian comedy is not that it must exclude. It is instead the illusion of wholeness that derives from comedy's specific amalgam of inclusion and exclusion.