Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy by Todd McGowan (review)

Todd McGowan's Only a Joke Can Save Us proposes that comedy—a term McGowan uses to denote anything designed to provoke laughter, although most of his examples are either jokes or films—arises from the combination and interdependence of excess and lack. He uses these terms in their Lacanian senses not just to mean the absence or abundance of something but as a way to articulate the fundamental dissatisfactions of the human condition, in which we eternally desire what we cannot have and compensate for our loss with too much of the wrong thing. McGowan follows Lacan in seeing this cycle as a fundamental part of language, which expresses both too little and too much. According to McGowan, language is thus always inherently comic, and the comic is always rooted in a traumatic moment of revelation. But trauma is the starting point, not the ending. He argues that finding lack and excess in the same object is not just funny but potentially transcendent, because comedy reveals both the flaws and the infinite potential of its subject matter. Comedy, like language, like lack and excess, is an essential component of conscious life: McGowan concludes, "Comedy is an encounter with the fundamental contradiction of our subjectivity" (181).

As McGowan acknowledges, this argument belongs in the familiar tradition of incongruity theory. His contribution to that tradition is twofold. First, his discussion of the comic union of excess and lack seeks to define precisely what kind of incongruities make us laugh. Second, and even more importantly, he establishes the very high stakes of that laughter. For readers who believe that comedy is significant as well as pleasurable, his argument is deeply satisfying. He suggests not just that comedy reveals patterns or points out absurdity but also that it is uniquely qualified to produce certain kinds of epiphanic fulfillment. Such fulfillment must by its nature be temporary, but it is more than escapism or release; rather, at its best, comedy transcends the inadequacies and losses that create it and enters the realm of the sublime.

McGowan states his theory clearly in the first chapter. The book's clarity throughout is noteworthy. McGowan's writing is as accessible as a Lacanian discussion of Hegel can possibly be, and furthermore, the jokes he uses as examples are genuinely funny. That may sound like damning the book with faint praise, but writing well about this sort of material is exceedingly difficult, and McGowan does it. The book then turns to some of its most interesting work: discussing the implications of this theory of comedy for major philosophers, including many who do not overtly discuss humor.

McGowan provides a good overview of philosophical discussions of comedy (Aristotle, Plato, Bergson, Freud, Zupančič) in chapter 2, but the most interesting discussion of philosophers comes in chapters 3 and 4, where he examines commentary by Heidegger, Marx, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Žižek. McGowan's determinations that these philosophers have contributions to make to the subject start from each philosopher's discussion or elision of humor but expand to address the degree to which each one believes that human beings are capable of transcending the physical world. The result is a thorough, engaging discussion not just of major philosophers' attitudes toward comedy but of the possibility of constructing a meaningful response to mortality—the greatest lack of all.

Chapter 5 returns to the argument's roots to discuss the inherently comic (that is, inherently both lacking and excessive) nature of language. Chapter 6 examines the importance of perspective in comedy, emphasizing the fact that "in order to appreciate comedy, one must identify with the comic object and have distance from it at the same time" (138).

The danger of this sort of theoretical model is always that it can be too flexible. If we are at all loose with our definitions, it will certainly be possible to describe any comic situation in terms of lack and excess, just...