Lexington Books
Pages: 162
Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼
978-1-4985-8765-5 • Hardback • December 2018 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
978-1-4985-8766-2 • eBook • December 2018 • $105.50 • (£82.00)
Jennalee Donian is pursuing postdoctoral research in South Africa, with a focus on political humor and humorous politics.
1 Sketching the Terrain of Stand-Up Comedy
2 The Resurgence of Stand-Up Comedy
3 The Ideological Situation of Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy
4 The Comedic Performance as Dissensus
5 Re-Locating the Political Dimension of Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy in thePerformances
of Ellen DeGeneres, Pieter-Dirk Uys and Trevor Noah
'Jennalee Donian's book, Taking Comedy Seriously: Stand-Up’s Dissident Potential in Mass Culture, marks a significant step forward in the understanding of (stand-up) comedy in contemporary society, given her interpretation of the comedic phenomenon, not merely in relation to its development as a genre, or its expansion made possible by the Internet. Instead Dr Donian, drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis, neo-Marxist thinking, and the poststructuralist thinking of Jacques Ranciēre, contextualises stand-up comedy in the broad field of economic and political power relations, demonstrating, paradoxically, that its conspicuous rise in popularity cannot be separated from the suffering experienced globally under the neoliberal regime.'
— Bert Olivier, University of the Free State
A productive and politically-minded extension of contemporary humour theory, Donian's book situates the radical potential politics of stand-up humour in the bleak context of contemporary global capitalism. Drawing on a deep and insightful engagement with philosophy and political theory, Taking Comedy Seriously offers us a new psychoanalytic model of humour for the twenty-first century. Donian’s analysis of stand-up is alert to the ways in which stand-up comedy can not only perpetuate the irony-inflected ideology of neoliberalism, but also potentially assist us to re-examine deeply held social and political assumptions.
— Nicholas Holm, Massey University
Donian’s Taking Comedy Seriously: Stand-Up's Dissident Potential in Mass Culture is an impressive theoretical intervention for critical humor studies that significantly reinvigorates psychoanalytic interpretations of comedy. Donian focuses on stand-up comedy not as the antidote to today’s social and political ills but as a communicative form that is conservative and radical, and central to contemporary political life. Popular examples of successful comedy are unpacked for a critique of stand-up comedy, mass culture and neoliberalism that has wide reaching implications for understanding humor as politics.
— Simon Weaver, Brunel University London