Table of Contents

Prolegomenon: “a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation”
Bit I: “At First Mere Improvisation”
Bit II: Reverberations: The Joke of the Joke
Bit III: Repetition and the Exquisite Seriesness of Series
Bit IV: “Play It Again, Sheldon” Nothing in Comedy Ever Only Happens Once
Bit V: The Comic Uncanny; or The Character of Caricature
Bit VI: Breaking Stacks and Cutting Layers: The Self-conscious Comedy of Comedy
Bit VII: Doubling Down on the Mise en Abyme: The Comic Contexts of Comedy
Bit VIII: Ourobouros—Epanalepsis: “a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation”
Bit IX: Ourobouroubouroubouros; Or When Parody Takes Itself On
Bit X: The Long and Winding Road
Epilogue: The Aristocratic Apparatus

Promotional Information

Exploring aspects of performance in British and American comedy from the 1950s to the present, The Comic Event offers a contemporary, dynamic theory of “the event” in comedy.

About the Author

Judith Roof is Professor of English and William Shakespeare Chair in English at Rice University, USA. She has published books and essays on narrative theory, studies in sexuality, Hollywood cinema, DNA, hoaxes, and on the work of such authors as Beckett, Pinter, Duras, Woolf, and Percival Everett.

Reviews

The Comic Event exemplifies how scholars can take seriously comedic performance while shifting analysis away from ‘reductive structural modes of analysis’… [Its} largest strength is its palimpsestic style that gathers comedy forms and artists not often paired together in theatre and performance histories.
*Theatre Journal*

Where other critics have sought to pin comedy down, upholstering it in categories and systems that are anything but funny, Judith Roof finds critical resources in comedy itself: performers such as Fry and Laurie, French and Saunders, Richard Pryor, Louis CK and Amy Schumer teach us everything we need to know about the comic event though their doubling, self-referentiality, layering, cutting, timing and seriality. If you have never had the outrageous pleasure of Judith Roof's company at an academic conference, then The Comic Event - a feat of scholarly stand-up - will serve as the next best thing.
*kitt price, Senior Lecturer in English, Queen Mary, University of London, UK*