Dissecting Humorlessness: Humorless comedy and the affective life of normative subjectivity

Abstract

Analyses of western late capitalism are diagnosing the overarching importance of humor and comedy in contemporary life. At the same time, the establishment of a broad neoliberal consensus and the progressive rise of conservative forces are tuning the political atmosphere towards theorizations of the rigid and the immovable. These two advancements overlap in analyses conducted through the notion of humorlessness. In this thesis, I argue for expanding the use of this notion beyond conceptualizations of rigidity through the development of an affective vocabulary of humorlessness. Using Lauren Berlant’s concept of humorless comedy as a tool for understanding humorlessness through its affective structure, I read Nathan Fielder’s TV series The Rehearsal as a case that exemplifies the contradictory affective tendencies nested inside the subject that inhabits contemporary normativity. By analyzing this case, the thesis pursues a twofold aim. First, to make propositions on what it feels to live in the historical present by outlining the affective life of contemporary normative subjects in the ambivalent relation between the desire to connect and that to control. Second, to use this expanded understanding of humorlessness in order to point towards replacing the rigid image of late capitalist power as an intractable formation with a more nuanced one, which accounts for more of its contradictions and uncertainties.