Self-Division of Authority
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.184
Ideology and Equality > Why *Duck Soup* Is Funnier Than *Monkey Business*
Theoretical move: Authority is theoretically prior to its transgression as a source of comedy because authority is constitutively self-divided — simultaneously lacking and excessive — and comedy achieves its highest potential by staging this internal split rather than merely defying authority from outside it; Duck Soup exemplifies this by placing a figure who doesn't fit the law in the position of ultimate authority, making the disjunction of social authority itself the comedic engine.
Authority itself is more comical than its transgression because the authority's self-division is the condition of possibility for its transgression and thus is logically privileged relative to transgression.