Comedy Is Killing Us
The Politics of Laughter and Rage
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Does comedy really speak truth to power, or has it become one of power’s most effective tools? In Comedy Is Killing Us, literary and cultural critic Joseph Litvak offers a bold reckoning with the role of laughter in an age of authoritarian resurgence. Moving between political theory, media culture, and performance, Litvak argues that the modern strongman thrives not despite his ridiculousness but because of it. From twentieth-century fascist spectacle to the contemporary politics of insult comedy and “postcomedy,” this book traces the deep entanglement of humor and terror across the United States and beyond.
Drawing on thinkers including Lauren Berlant, Alenka Zupančič, John Limon, and Alain Badiou, Litvak challenges the comforting assumption that progressive resistance simply means reclaiming comedy’s liberatory power. Instead, he shows how even oppositional humor can reproduce structures of domination, blurring the line between comic critique and comic cruelty. Through readings of stand-up, media culture, and political performance, he situates the contemporary comedification of politics within a longer history linking laughter to fascism, nationalism, and gendered violence.
Yet Litvak does not abandon comedy altogether. Turning to queer and experimental forms of postcomedy, he explores the possibility of a humor that resists both authoritarian spectacle and punitive satire. At once incisive and accessible, Comedy Is Killing Us offers an unorthodox perspective on the cultural conditions that have allowed rage-driven humor to flourish, and sketches a vision of what comedy after the present crisis might look like.
“Joseph Litvak’s brilliant and funny Comedy is Killing Us moves comedy from the margins of mere entertainment into the center of political analysis. Almost every sentence brings a laugh and each new aperçu a gasp as we are guided through the right’s theft of the countercultural left’s humor. An absolute must-read!”—Bonnie Honig, author of Shell-Shocked: Feminist Criticism after Trump
“In this masterful and bracing book, Joseph Litvak chooses ruthless criticism over riotous comedy, showing how not merely the clowning of a certain fascist President, but also that of everyone else, necessarily pushes its subjects up against terror. Reading alongside the communist philosopher and comic playwright Alain Badiou, Litvak chops through the theatrical piety of a Hannah Gadsby and the phobic charisma of a Stephen Colbert to give us a new history of the comic as an intrinsically wounded and wounding method of representation.”—Grace Lavery, author of Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques
