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