LitLab: What’s Funny Now?

Date: 

Friday, October 30, 2020, 12:30pm

Humor has often been associated with the assertion of aggression or superiority, at least since Sigmund Freud offered his theory of comedy as a manifestation of unconscious hostility in his work “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious,” published in 1905.  But contemporary comedians like Hannah Gadsby are questioning this idea of a necessary relation between violence and comedy, tension and plot, with provocative implications for our understanding of aesthetic canons and their casualties. What is the future for stand-up comedy? How does the situation of comedy today relate to the shifts taking place in other art forms such as literature?

Open to the Harvard community. For more information visit our canvas site: 

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