Comic Event

Judith Roof is Professor of English and William Shakespeare Chair in English at Rice University, USA. She has published books and essays on narrative theory, studies in sexuality, Hollywood cinema, DNA, hoaxes, and on the work of such authors as Beckett, Pinter, Duras, Woolf, and Percival Everett.

• Prolegomenon: “a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation” Bit I: “At First Mere Improvisation”Bit II: Reverberations: The Joke of the JokeBit III: Repetition and the Exquisite Seriesness of SeriesBit IV: “Play It Again, Sheldon” Nothing in Comedy Ever Only Happens Once Bit V: The Comic Uncanny; or The Character of Caricature Bit VI: Breaking Stacks and Cutting Layers: The Self-conscious Comedy of ComedyBit VII: Doubling Down on the Mise en Abyme: The Comic Contexts of Comedy Bit VIII: Ourobouros—Epanalepsis: “a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation” Bit IX: Ourobouroubouroubouros; Or When Parody Takes Itself On Bit X: The Long and Winding Road Epilogue: The Aristocratic Apparatus

The Comic Event exemplifies how scholars can take seriously comedic performance while shifting analysis away from ‘reductive structural modes of analysis’… [Its} largest strength is its palimpsestic style that gathers comedy forms and artists not often paired together in theatre and performance histories.