Comedy after Postmodernism: Rereading Comedy from Edward Lear to Charles Willeford [Hardcover]

Kirby Olson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2001

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

Editorial Reviews

Review

...the book rereads these 'poetic canon crackers' from the perspective of incongruity, wit, and singularity. -- Choice, June 2001

It is Olson's light touch as well as his enlightening and idiosyncratic interpretations that make this book well worth attention. -- American Book Review, Oct-Nov 2001

Kirby Olson chooses to rethink comedy in terms of an aspect of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Francois Lyotard. -- Rain Taxi Review of Books, Summer 2001

Olson's efforts to discuss a type of literature... only from a philosophical and aesthetic point of view is commendable. -- Literary Research/Recherche Litteraire, Summer 2001

From the Publisher

Applying Lyotard's definition of the postmodern, Kirby Olson sets out to rescue the long-marginalized comic writers and their literature.

Who, he asks, refuses the consolation of correct forms better than Edward Lear, or the consensus of taste better than Gregory Corso and Stewart Home?

From Lear to Charles Willeford, Olson discovers in comic writers a philosophy of oddness and paradox that parallels and extends the work of the major postmodern thinkers.

"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 (from the back cover)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 184 pages
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press (January 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0896724409
• ISBN-13: 978-0896724402
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,179,936 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting even for professional comedians, August 20, 2002

By 

bob wilson (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Comedy after Postmodernism: Rereading Comedy from Edward Lear to Charles Willeford (Hardcover)

I got this book out of my library to see if I could get some ideas about what postmodernism might mean to a professional stnad-up comic. The book is itself very funny in places. He accuses the professional philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jaques Lacan of having been Maoist, and claims that Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Francois Lyotard were not. I remember those people from a critical theory class I took from this professor ten years ago when he was saying the same thing.

Olson is always sort of idiosyncratic. He wore a cowboy hat and a paisley shirt to classes.

His boots were pink.

The book he has written here is also idiosyncratic. He mixes weird stuff: like Hegel and Wodehouse in one chapter, and ancient Greek philosophy and modern mystery stories in another chapter. It was fun to see him go in depth.

The basis for humor, as he once pointed out in a class, was that you take two conflicting schemas, two completely opposite ideas, and have them make love. Their boundaries tickle. It's like omparing motorcycles and oranges. There is always a way to do it. Goosebumps, they both roll, they both smell good, and so on, until you get a productive comparison that makes you laugh. Olson keeps working until he gets it.

Olson is doing that through this whole book. It's a hard thing to sustain because it can get so complex that it falls into apostasy. But that's where comedians should be headed. This is sit-down comedy, though. Sit down, and think about it.

I should maybe try to ompare apples and speedboats.