Second Nature

Josephine Gray is co-artistic director of Iraqi Bodies, a theatre group based in Gothenburg, Sweden, dedicated to exploring the links between movement and gesture, dance and physical theatre. Her experimental practice is anchored in the theory and method of Artaud, Grotowski, Ionesco and Beckett, among others. She trained at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris and studied philosophy at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and English literature at the University of Sheffield. Lisa Trahair teaches in film studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is author of The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick. She has published widely on film comedy and on the philosophy of comedy in journals devoted to film and the theoretical humanities and has co-edited several special issues of journals on the intersection of film and philosophy.

This fascinating collection of essays reveals that the comic is not funny. It’s about things close to the tragic, the grotesque, impotence, and crying—all the things that make up what we call our world. Ultimately, it’s appropriate that there is such close etymological affinity between kosmos and komodia.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1. Comedy: Towards an Alternative History of Mimesis, by María J. Ortega MáñezChapter 2. The Two Laughters of Lecoq: The Clown and the Bouffon, by Caterina Angela Agus, Giovani Fusetti and Davide GiovanzanaChapter 3. The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy, by Fred DalmassoChapter 4. The Body that Laughs and Cries: Helmuth Plessner’s Keys to Anthropology and Theatre, by Xavier EscribanoChapter 5. Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity: Ridiculing Rigidity as an Impediment to Social Change, by Meg MumfordChapter 6. Happiness, Dead and Alive: Object Theatre as Philosophy of the Encounter, by Carolyn ShapiroChapter 7. Living in the Doll House: Cavell, Comedy and The Ladies Man, by Lisa TrahairChapter 8. Trouble in Paradise?: Impotence and Comedy, by Lisabeth DuringChapter 9. “Only What Is Born Lives”: Kafka L.O.L., by Jean-Michel RabatéChapter 10. The Grotesque: Comic Performance and the Paradox of Acting, by Josephine GrayAbout the Author