Customer Reviews

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

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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.