B O O K S

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01/2001. vi, 184 pages.
0896724409
978-0-89672-440-2

Comedy after Postmodernism: Rereading Comedy from Edward Lear to Charles Willeford

By Kirby Olson

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 examines:

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