In this project I examine the significance and sophistication of comedy in
contemporary American storytelling, in order to get beyond its frequent
characterisation as either a superficial sweetener or a form of escapism. My thesis
argues instead for comedy’s usefulness as a strategy for effecting multiple
responses: intimacy, recognition, attachment, de-familiarisation, celebration and
catharsis, all in the service of confronting the unbearable. Examining work by
George Saunders, Miranda July, Donald Antrim, and the filmmaker, Jordan Peele, I
argue that comic license allows for the forthright address of troubling issues; class in
Saunders’s short fiction; sexuality in July’s first novel; national identity for Antrim and
race in Peele’s film, Get Out. This license is effected in multiple ways: through the
obliviousness of characterological traits such as naivety and pedantry for instance,
as well as through the mechanisms of incongruity and relief.
Given that the works I examine are challenging, ‘edgy’, both in terms of style and
content, I suggest that the comedy is inflected by what we might loosely call
extremity. While extremity is arguably foundational to comedy, in that the comic
violation of conventional boundaries necessitates it to one degree or another; I also
argue that the comic license enables the work’s ‘extreme figurations’ by ensuring
the reader’s or the viewer’s consent. Comic pleasure thus keeps us close to what
might otherwise be overwhelming.
In addition, comedy’s tendency towards the material and the particular – the
proverbial slip on the banana skin - helps to ground or embed the extremity of the
work’s abstract or fantastical aspect
