Linguistic Maladaptation
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.137
Signification and Desire > Linguistic Maladaptation
Theoretical move: Language is constitutively comic because it is both lacking (it cannot fully describe the world) and excessive (it performatively over-compensates for that lack); the comic effect emerges precisely at the point where sense meets the nonsense intrinsic to signification, so comedy is not incidental to language but reveals its essential structure.
it is lacking and excessive at the same time, and this is what makes it essentially comic