Comedy Against Work
Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times
Work is a joke. Laughing at it is political.
Humor, Groucho Marx asserted, is 'reason gone mad.' For Walter Benjamin, laughter was 'the most revolutionary emotion.' In a moment when great numbers of people are reevaluating their commitment to the hellscape we call 'work,' what does it mean to take comedy seriously — and to turn it against work?
Both philosophically brilliant and deeply personal, Comedy Against Work demonstrates how laughing about work can puncture the pretensions of tyrannical bosses while uniting us around a commitment to radically new ways of making the world together. At the same time, Lane-McKinley exposes a war at the heart of contemporary comedy between those who see comedy as a weapon for punching down and those whose laughter points to social transformation. From stand-up to sitcoms, podcasts to late night, comedy reveals our longing to subvert power, escape the prison of work, and envision the joys of a liberated world.
'Comedy can be a weapon, Madeline Lane-McKinley reminds us, in any hands, for good or for fascist purposes. In her hands, it is a scalpel for taking apart the world of work, for teaching us how it got so damn bad. But it is also, she brilliantly reminds us, a tool for dismantling capitalist common sense. Join her as she encourages us to embrace laughter as a refusal of work and to claim the rich pleasures of being a killjoy.' — Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won't Love You Back
'Comedy Against Work is the most pleasurable, wide-ranging, and deeply knowledgeable guide to the contradictions of contemporary capitalist culture that I have read in a very long time. Lane-McKinley achieves that rare accomplishment: a book that will appeal equally to casual lovers of humor and its history, from the origins of stand-up to the lockdown comedy podcast, and to readers looking for a critical account of how this history of humor intersects with the changing landscape of work in the U.S. context from the 1970s to the present. Comedy Against Work sits squarely within the great tradition of Marxist books that offer a framework for thought to an audience longing to understand why things are the way they are, how they got to be that way, what it means, and what we can do with this knowledge to change our conditions for the better. A great addition to the growing corpus of popular manifestos coming from leading thinkers of the Left.' — Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
'From working-class sitcoms to podcasts about making podcasts, this whirlwind tour of American comedy brings labor to the front, where Madeline Lane-McKinley reveals it has been all along. You’ll never laugh the same!' — Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials
'What a deeply creative exploration of humor and its discontents Madeline Lane-McKinley has given us, one which takes readers on a tour of sitcoms, standup, late night and comedy strikes. What is so funny about late capitalism, anyway? This is a book about the wages of laughter and it’s for anyone who has wondered whether the joke is on capitalism or them.' — Leigh Claire La Berge, Fellow at Free University of Berlin and author of Wages Against Artwork
Madeline Lane-McKinley is a writer, professor, and Marxist-feminist with a PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a founding member of Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The New Inquiry, Entropy, GUTS, and Cultural Politics. She is also the author of the chapbook Dear Z and a contributor to The Museum of Capitalism.
