Comedy and Power

Course Description

This course explores comedy’s relationship to political power. We begin with Aristophanes’ comedy The Knights in Ancient Greece before delving into an exhilarating exploration of Commedia dell’Arte—the anarchic, mask-driven improvisational theater that exploded onto Renaissance Italy’s streets and left its trace across the world. From Shakespeare’s jesters to Molière’s farces, from Bakhtin’s carnivalesque to contemporary stand-up, we trace how stock characters, masks, grotesque physicality, and satire continue to challenge authority, expose hypocrisy, reinforce power, and provoke laughter. 

We’ll investigate how Commedia traveled across borders and centuries, inspiring Italian opera buffa, Cuban teatro bufo, South Asian Bhand Pather, and legendary playwrights such as Dario Fo, Derek Walcott, and Tekle Hawariat Tekle Mariyam. Alongside historical study, we’ll analyze iconic performers like Charlie Chaplin, Richard Pryor, and contemporary stand-up comedians, asking how they create radical, subversive humor. We will study not only the subjects and objects of humor, but also its materiality, its rhythms, and its unruly passions. We will discuss critical theorists of humor including Mikhail Bakhtin, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Rene Girard, Michael Jeffries, Alenka Zupancic, Sianne Ngai, among others. Drawing on theatre, philosophy, performance studies, and cultural history, this course invites you to think deeply—and laugh hard—about one of humanity’s oldest, most dangerous arts.