This panel asks what comedy can do to revive hope and sustain critique in the throes of ecological collapse, rising authoritarianism, and obscene capitalist inequality. Comedy has always represented a hopeful genre, licensing its transgressive complaint via the promise of raucous enjoyment. From incisive satire to grotesque-carnivalesque body comedy, humor temporarily overthrows the reigning order and reveals something unseen within its dominant images. Recently, the field has taken a sharp pessimistic turn from the aesthetics of hope to the polemics of “humorlessness.” Against the unending exploitation of all enlivening affects by the cruel machinations of information-driven capital, the permission to enjoy has mutated into an “obligation to enjoy,” spawning the rise of the “killjoy,” the “comb-over subject,” and other fun-deflecting variants. The panels in this session pursue recent comedic performances (both popular and experimental) to resuscitate the politics of hope from the abyss of neoliberal enjoyment.

We begin with Joseph Litvak’s paper, “Marxist-Feminist-Muslim-Punk Comedy: We Are Lady Parts,” which takes Nida Manzoor’s 2021 comedy series (about a female Muslim punk band) as a possible location for comic hope, against the (unevenly) crushing effects of capitalism, in the unbearable heaviness that would seem to prevent comedy, or anything else, from leaving capitalism’s circular tomb of dreams. Litvak builds on Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai’s critique of “permanent carnival,” a pervasive condition that exacerbates the feeling of stasis that comedy-as-carnival is supposed to overcome, or at least to relieve. Even the philosopher and comic playwright Alain Badiou has moved from defining comedy as “nothing other than the incomparable present...of communism” to a much less hopeful model of it that he discerns in the “very bitter” conclusion of Jean Genet’s The Balcony: “the play itself seems circular, as if nothing, outside the tomb of dreams, could ever happen.” Placing Badiou’s proletarian trickster character (Ahmed) in concert with a Muslim punk rocker (Amina), Litvak elaborates his concept of a comedy of aggravation that takes gravity and stasis not just as its themes but also as its essential principles for hope.

Next, we move from the gravity of permanent carnival to the leitmotif of confrontational satire. Siddhart Bhogra’s paper, “No Comfort, No Closure: Stewart Lee and Confrontational Satire,” focuses on the British comedian Stewart Lee’s television special, Content Provider (2018), which uses outrage humor to draw laughs from the audience’s palpable anxiety and discomfort, thereby withholding the reparativity of the punchline. Like Litvak, Bhogra invokes the problem of “permanent carnival” as a point of departure from the impasse of the present, rendering it a more speculative, if uncertain, space for experimentation. Where contemporary anglophone liberal media satires rely on their audience’s prior alignment with the comedian’s stance, mimetically reproducing outrage and alleviating it with the pleasure of the joke, Lee positions himself as a glitch in the reproduction of ideological certainty. Critics and audiences often mistakenly locate satire’s hope in its ability to hold a position of moral and political rightness, Bhogra argues, and in its reparative potential for inducing laughter. His paper contends that satire’s more historically contingent form of hope for moral or political guidance hinges on its suspension of certainty and refusal of closure.

In that spirit of anti-closure, we conclude our panel with Theresa Geller’s “‘Intro to Senselessness’: The Anti-Social Thesis of the Situation Comedy,” which examines the affective work of the situation comedy at the height of the “platinum era of television.” Following directly on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis, Community (NBC, Yahoo 2009-15) and Cougar Town (ABC, TBS 2009-15) offered pleasurable counter-narratives to neoliberalism’s disappointed fantasies of the good life. These atypical comedies situate ludic play (homo ludens) as an anti-social response to the “senselessness” of affective life reconfigured by late capitalism. Rather than take these anti-work sitcoms at their word, Geller playfully brings them into conversation with anti-capitalist critiques of enjoyment—from Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) to post-2016 political theologies of late capital. She thus takes a leap of faith into the belly of the beast of formulaic network comedy, whose aleatory nonsense, she argues, provides the grounds for an affectively restructured form of community.

From aggravation to discomfort to ludic catharsis, these three papers explore different affective forms and multi-media formats to keep hope alive against its strangulation by all-consuming capital and compulsive, dystopian fun.