Laughter, Power, and the Unconscious
Researching Emotional Responses in a Contemporary Audience Spectating Early Modern Comedy at Shakespeare's Globe
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Laughter, Power, and the Unconscious
Researching Emotional Responses in a Contemporary Audience Spectating Early Modern Comedy at Shakespeare's Globe
About this book
Laughter, Power, and the Unconscious offers paradigm-breaking insights into the psychological and sociopolitical dimensions of humour and comedy. Based on an innovative audience experiment at Shakespeare's Globe, the authors develop a revolutionary theory of humour as manic defence, challenging Freud's classic formulations while engaging with contemporary humour theories.
The text explores three key domains: firstly, it establishes and evaluates the theory in comparison to Freud's work in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, while positioning it within major humour frameworks; secondly, it demonstrates the theory's application to Renaissance comedy, examining characters like Malvolio from Twelfth Night alongside stock figures of cuckolds and madmen in both English theatrical traditions and commedia dell'arte; finally, it investigates the theory's broader sociopolitical relevance by analysing war-related humour and racist jokes while addressing comedy's dual capacity to both challenge and reinforce existing power structures.
This volume will appeal to the scholars and students of theatre and performance studies, psychology, literary theory and cultural studies interested in the sociopolitical implications of humour.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Research in Action audience experiment at Shakespeare’s Globe
- 2 Psychoanalytic rationale of the audience experiment
- 3 Researching unconscious responses to early modern characters at Shakespeare’s Globe: Results
- 4 A new theory of humour as manic defence
- 5 Reading theories of humour through the manic defence
- 6 The ecology of laughter and humour at the intersection of culture and biology
- 7 New insights into the socio-politics of humour
- 8 The historicised subject: Psychoanalytic discourse, Cultural Materialism, laughter and power
- 9 Cuckolds and madmen: Comic strength in the notoriously weak
- 10 Laughing with the ‘whole pack’ of us: Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and comic strength in contemporary production of early modern drama
- 11 Reading comedy as genre through the manic defence
- 12 Elements of unconscious emotional processes for a socio-politics of comedy
- Conclusions: A dialogue
- Index