Comedy Matters traces the long tradition of the expansive comic embrace of cultural difference and diversity that manages to survive even in some of mankind s darkest moments. Demastes argues that comedy has a hard-nosed, pragmatic dimension that can be mobilized against belligerent cultural forces. Drawing from the works of Shakespeare, Stoppard, and a number of other comic masters, Comedy Matters demonstrates how comedy continues to work against cultural regimentation by striving to re-calibrate our decision-making processes and challenging the stultifying rigidity of human economy in the broadest sense of the term.

"Demastes' study is a thoughtful, cogent, and, ultimately, very useful consideration of comedy, an oft overlooked and certainly under theorized genre of dramatic literature . . ..that it is simultaneously theoretically perceptive and lucid. The study could well be viewed as an example of contemporary theatre scholarship at its best." - Jonathan Chambers, Bowling Green State University

Autorentext
WILLIAM B. DEMASTES is Professor of English at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA.

Inhalt
Into the 21st Century The Organics of Comedy On The Razor's Edge Connecting Mind to Body More than Matter Matters The Orderly Disorder of Comic Vitality and Its Liberating Potential Comedy as Gift Comedy Confronts Commodity Via the Adaptive Unconscious Things Could Be Better, Things Could be Worse