Sense and Nonsense

In Zupančič's account of comedy (source: the-odd-one-in-on-comedy-alenka-zupancic), "Sense and Nonsense" names the fundamental structural dyad that comic repetition enacts and re-enacts. The concept refuses the commonsense picture in which nonsense is simply the absence or negation of sense. Instead, nonsense is only ever encountered retroactively, at the moment when sense surprises—that is, when a meaning erupts unexpectedly at the very limit where it seemed impossible. This means sense is not a natural given or a transparent correspondence between signifier and signified, but an error: a contingent, aberrant product that emerges from the failure or gap of the signifying chain itself. Comedy's work is precisely to stage this structure, to repeat the erratic moment in which sense crystallizes out of apparent meaninglessness, thereby exposing the radical contingency and instability of any meaning whatsoever.

The theoretical stakes are distinctly Lacanian. If sense "has the structure of an error," this aligns with the general Lacanian principle that the signifier does not cover the real but misses it, that meaning is always an effect produced across a structural gap rather than a successful capture of some underlying referent. Comic repetition, on this account, does not merely produce laughter by juxtaposing sense and nonsense as opposing terms; it performs the constitutive incompleteness of signification itself—the way every emergence of sense presupposes a nonsensical ground that it cannot fully domesticate. This is also why the most serious existential stakes—being, lack, death—can only be approached through comedy: comedy alone formally re-enacts the original errancy of sense.

Within the-odd-one-in-on-comedy-alenka-zupancic, "Sense and Nonsense" functions as the epistemological underpinning of Zupančič's broader theory of comic repetition. It specifies why comic repetition has genuine ontological force: because what repetition keeps re-enacting is the original, erratic emergence of sense at the limit of the subject's incongruence with the objet petit a. The concept is thus nested inside the argument about comic structure and is inseparable from the cross-referenced concept of Lack: if lack is the constitutive structural gap that makes the subject and desire possible, then sense-as-error is the analogous gap on the plane of signification — meaning never simply "is," it falls out of the void the way the objet petit a falls from the body or the Other to partially mark the constitutive void. The concept also pressures the account of the Real: sense-as-error describes precisely the second-order Real (R2) generated by the Symbolic's own internal failures, the crack immanent to representation rather than a brute pre-symbolic outside. Comic repetition circles this crack in the same way that repetition (Wiederholung) circles the traumatic missed encounter (tuché).

The relation to Objet petit a is equally direct: the "incongruence" between subject and objet petit a is the engine that generates both the erratic emergence of sense and the surplus that comedy mobilizes. Sense surprises precisely because it arises at the point where the subject cannot fully coincide with the cause of its own desire. The concept implicitly contrasts with Psychosis as well: in psychosis, the anchoring function of the signifier collapses and sense floods back from the Real as hallucination; in the comic structure Zupančič describes, sense remains tethered to the symbolic chain but is revealed as structurally accidental — an insight available to the neurotic subject precisely through the formal operation of the joke or comic scene.

The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.)Alenka Zupančič · 2008 (p.192)

we really encounter nonsense only when and where a sense surprises us... sense itself is an error, a product of error; sense has the structure of an error.

The phrase "sense has the structure of an error" is theoretically loaded because it reverses the default hierarchy: rather than nonsense being a deficient form of sense, sense is repositioned as a secondary, aberrant product that emerges contingently from a non-sense ground — which maps directly onto the Lacanian claim that the signifier does not cover but misses the Real, and that meaning is always an effect of the structural gap (lack) rather than a successful act of reference.