Psychic Distance
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All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (2)
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#01
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.144
Distance and Proximity > Envisioning the End of the World
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the affective register of any event—comic, pathetic, or indifferent—is not intrinsic to the event itself but is entirely a function of the subject's positional distance or proximity to it, using three films about Earth's destruction as comparative cases to demonstrate how comedy specifically requires the precise interplay of identification and distance.
It is this capacity for psychic distance that is always at work in the structure of comedy.
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#02
Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.148
Distance and Proximity > The Possibility of Offense
Theoretical move: Comedy requires a paradoxical dual operation of simultaneous identification and distance from its object; neither proximity alone nor distance alone enables comedy, and the possibility of offense — theorized through Kierkegaard's structure of Christian faith — is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for comedy, structurally paralleling the joke's timeliness with the believer's contemporaneousness with Christ.
Everyone, even Caesar's contemporary admirers, have so much psychic distance from him that they would be unable to laugh at a joke making fun of him.