Comedy Now
Description
In the introduction to their 2017 special issue of Critical Inquiry, Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai describe the “commedifcation” of contemporary culture, noting that “it is comedy that people increasingly come to expect in the kinds of social interaction that take place in all zones of modern life—politics, education, journalism, even religion.” Comedy is everywhere, but it no longer fits long-established genre categorisations. In literary studies, it has become a marginal concern, the prevailing mood tending towards the sad, the bleak and the tragic. Why should this be? Have the significance and profile of literary comedy waned? Does literary comedy require a renewed focus, or do we now look elsewhere for humor?
The answers to these questions are uncertain, but it is clear that comedy has changed. It has evolved across new mediums, slipping free from the formal definitions according to which it was previously known. How, then, can we understand comedy? Is it a tonal quality? Is it something that is visible only in the perception of comic intention? And what happens to our ability to perceive comedy when it crosses borders between languages, cultures, and generations? Our encounters with comedy are frequently shorn of context – no laugh tracks, even in sitcoms – and new platforms mean that comic material can be made by a particular group, for a particular group, with fewer concessions to commercial concerns or legibility to those not already in on the joke. What vocabularies do we have for understanding these changes? Has the conversation about comedy stalled, and do we need new critical models for understanding it?
As comedy’s prominence and genre boundaries have expanded, so has its politics become increasingly fraught. On the one hand, makers of comedies express their fear of censure and misinterpretation, and on the other hand, there are no shortage of audiences for material that borders on or crosses the line into hate speech. Why is comedy used in this way, and is the contemporary situation substantively different from previous eras? Is part of its significance the very slipperiness of the genre, which provides a pre-emptive shield of irony?
This seminar seeks to explore where comedy is now and what resources we have for understanding it. We particularly welcome approaches that situate comedy in global or cross-cultural perspectives and that seek to develop new critical vocabularies to explore emergent forms of comedy.
Topics might include:
- New theories of comedy and humor
- Comedy and cultural politics
- Comedy and the political right
- Comedy and online form
- Comedy and the right to be unserious
- Comedy and AI
- Comedy and the unfunny
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Huw Marsh is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Comic Turn in English Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Beryl Bainbridge (Liverpool UP, 2014), and has published in journals including Textual Practice, Adaptation, and Contemporary Literature. His recent work has focused mainly on topics related to comedy and humour and he is currently writing a book about the relationship between comedy and work.
Speaker Bio
Katharine Streip is an Associate Professor in the Liberal Arts College at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec. She has published articles on William S. Burroughs, Jean Rhys, Marcel Proust, Philip Roth, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Beat influences on Canadian literature zombies and photography and the Whole Earth Catalog. Her research interests include comedy, Beat literature, avant-garde movements, media theory, sound studies, affect theory and ecocriticism.
Speaker Bio
I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Assumption University. I completed my PhD in English at Brandeis University in 2025. I also have an MA in Philosophy from Tufts University. Broadly, my work explores the philosophical underpinnings of modernist representations of mind. My articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Partial Answers, Studies in the Novel, Philosophy and Literature, and The Slavonic and East European Review.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Andrew Dean is a Lecturer in English at University College London. His first book, Metafiction and the Postwar Novel, was published in 2021 by Oxford University Press. He is currently working on a book about Jewish American comic writing after 1945, and has published several essays from this work, including in Studies in the Novel and MELUS. From 2023 – 2024 he was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress.
Speaker Bio
Catherine Flynn is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Berkeley
where she works on Irish modernist literature and culture in a European avant-garde
context and on critical theory. She is the author of James Joyce and the Matter of
Paris (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and editor of the New Joyce
Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and The Cambridge Ulysses: The 1922
Text with Essays and Notes (Cambridge University Press, 2025). She is currently at
work on a monograph about Flann O’Brien/Brian O’Nolan/Myles na gCopaleen and the
young Irish State.
Speaker Bio
Amadi Ozier is a scholar specializing in black diasporic literature, with a particular interest in humor in psychoanalysis, performance studies, black capitalism, and cultural history. They are currently developing a book project on “uppity humor” in black middle class literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Social Text, Modernism/modernity, Early American Literature, Oxford Handbook of African American Humor, and elsewhere.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Daniel Lukes is a writer and editor based in Montreal, with a PhD in comparative literature from NYU. He co-edited the book Black Metal Rainbows (PM Press, 2023) on black metal music, queer theory, and antifascist activism. He has taught classes on comedy in culture at Indiana University, and is now working on a short monograph on how to defeat evil clowns, titled “This Is Clowncore.” Currently he is Part-Time Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at University of Ottawa.
Speaker Bio
Tamar Hanstke is a PhD student in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, and her dissertation research seeks to re-conceive classic psychoanalytic film theory through a Mad Studies lens. Tamar currently serves as the graduate student representative for the Society For Cinema and Media Studies' Disability Caucus, and her research can be found in Stream: Interdisciplinary Journal of Communication, University of Toronto Quarterly, and a 2025 JCMS Teaching Dossier.
Speaker Bio
Michael Wagner has a degree in English and Physics from the University of Salzburg, Austria, and is now a Ph.D. candidate at the department of German, Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch at the University of Minnesota.