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Comedy after Postmodernism: Rereading Comedy from Edward Lear to Charles Willeford
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Is comedy postmodern? Kirby Olson posits that no one has been more marginalized than the comic writer, whose irreverent truths have always made others uncomfortable. In a literary age that purports to champion diversity, comic writers remain an underclass huddling at the fringes of the canon. Olson challenges the status quo by inviting the comic writer into the center of literary debate. In the growing discipline of humor studies, Olson is the first to create a substantial link between the fields of comedy and postmodernism, discovering in comic writers a philosophy of oddness and paradox that parallels and extends the work of the major postmodern thinkers. With elegant clarity, Comedy After Post-modernism Edward Lear as he invents a comic picturesque to challenge the sublime of Kant and Ruskin Gregory Corso as he explodes the Great Chain of Being of his early Catholicism Philippe Soupault as a comic surrealist undoing the sacrificial aesthetics of André Breton P.G. Wodehouse as a social thinker with surprisingly deep affinities to anarchist Peter Kropotkin and radical social theorist Charles Fourier Stewart Home, the infamously violent punk author, as a pacifist whose narrative questions Marxist-anarchist terrorism in favor of patience and tolerance Charles Willeford, the maestro of the black humor police procedural, as a postmodern philosopher who deepens the problems of ethical and aesthetic judgment after postmodernism. “An original, splendidly researched, and necessary book. By pointing to the vast excluded literature of ‘comic writers,’ Dr. Olson opens the door to a postmodern scholarship capable of greater flexibility. Comedy After Postmodernism evinces a lucid, passionate, and engaging style.” ―Andrei Codrescu There was an old man on the Border, Who lived in the utmost disorder; He danced with the cat, and made tea in his hat, Which vexed all the folks on the Border. ―From The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear
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Genres
184 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1,2001
This edition
- Format
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184 pages, Hardcover
- Published
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January 15, 2001 by Texas Tech University Press
- ISBN
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9780896724402
- ASIN
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0896724409
- Language
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English
About the author
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Kirby Olson is Professor of Philosophy, Literature, and Creative Writing at SUNY-Delhi. He studied poetry at Naropa Institute with Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg from 1977 to 1979 and taught English and American Literature at a Finnish university. His poems have been published in First Things, Christianity and Literature, Lutheran Forum, Partisan Review, South Dakota Review, North Dakota Quarterly and Poetry East, among others.
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