Why philosophize about comedy? What is the purpose of researching the comic from a philosophical and psychoanalytic perspective? This book considers how philosophy and psychoanalysis can help us understand the movement and logic that are involved in the practice of comedy, and how comedy can help philosophy and psychoanalysis recognize some of the most important mechanisms and fates of what is called “humanity.”

By its nature, comedy is extremely difficult to grasp with concepts and definitions, but as an artistic form and social practice, it is a way of creating ideas with a foreign object, a way of including the exception. Zupančič takes up these questions from various philosophers and examples of comedy from Aristophanes, Moliere, Hegel, Freud and Lacan, to George W. Bush and Borat. She sharply distinguishes between comedy and the "natural" joy that has been ideologically imposed on our society. For the author, a real comedy is subversive and thrives on short circuits that establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous orders.