Laughter As Politics

Reviews / Votes

Laughter as Politics is an exemplary work of critical political theory. Patrick T. Giamario develops a critique of laughter, which neither denounces nor affirms, but instead shows how laughter is shaped by power and how power is unleashed in laughter, how laughter destabilizes the opposition between logos and phone and exposes the limits of liberalism, how laughter upholds a social order and sustains the imagination of something beyond it. Giamario sets aside the question of whether we should be laughing, at our political leaders or their followers, so that he can ask the more difficult question of what we are doing when we laugh and how our laughter shapes and is shaped by politics. His answers, drawing from Thomas Hobbes, Theodor Adorno, Ralph Ellison, and a number of contemporary feminist and queer theorists, are sophisticated and insightful. -- Robyn Marasco * CUNY * Laughter as Politics is an exemplary work of critical political theory. Patrick T. Giamario develops a critique of laughter, which neither denounces nor affirms, but instead shows how laughter is shaped by power and how power is unleashed in laughter, how laughter destabilizes the opposition between logos and phone and exposes the limits of liberalism, how laughter upholds a social order and sustains the imagination of something beyond it. Giamario sets aside the question of whether we should be laughing, at our political leaders or their followers, so that he can ask the more difficult question of what we are doing when we laugh and how our laughter shapes and is shaped by politics. His answers, drawing from Thomas Hobbes, Theodor Adorno, Ralph Ellison, and a number of contemporary feminist and queer theorists, are sophisticated and insightful. -- Robyn Marasco, CUNY