COMEDY

INTRODUCTION 15as Jennifer Saunders and Jo Brand, is now a platform from which tolaunch attacks on such types of repressive and conservative thinking.Is comedy therefore a political genre? The answer is yes, andChapter 5 discusses the extent to which comedy has been involved inpolitical debate since its first structured manifestations in the work ofAristophanes. Politics, of course, can have many agendas and thischapter discusses satire, the way in which comedy has been used toserve reactionary ends, such as reinforcing negative racial or sexiststereotypes, and also efforts to produce a political comedy in service ofthe politics of the left wing. The final question of this chapter is whetheror not comedy can ever be a suitable forum for the discussion ofextremely sensitive and emotionally charged political issues.Considering three film comedies that look in part at the horror of theconcentration camps, this chapter will evaluate the response of comicform to difficult content, and question the suitability and desirability ofplacing such issues alongside some degree of comic content.The final chapter shifts the thematic focus of the book a little andconsiders laughter, something that does not belong to comedyexclusively but which is coupled to it to the degree that comedieswithout laughter are nowadays considered failed comedies. Laughterremains an inexplicable aspect of human behaviour, but there have beenmany attempts to either incorporate it into a theory of human nature orequate it with kinds of moral impropriety. To conclude, this chapterlooks at the trope of laughter as it has been invoked in contemporarypoststructuralist theory as a means of conceptualizing the limit and veryedge of everything that can be said and understood.