It feels a little superfluous analysing Kate Berlant and John Early’s work when the commentary is largely built in; to point out that they revisit certain preoccupations, like social performance and competition, for example, feels somewhat redundant when the revisiting is itself a theme of the work. That interest in refining an idea or an… Continue reading Berlant and Early: Intellectual vaudeville
Category: comedy
Leo Reich: Literally, Who Cares
Leo Reich’s debut Fringe show is dazzling. A portrait of rabid Gen Z narcissism that is brilliantly funny, and despite the artfully superficial persona, threaded through with melancholy and rage; emotion which is ironic and also not. Reich is incisive about the conditions that have generated contemporary pathologies - the warping effects of technology for… Continue reading Leo Reich: Literally, Who Cares
Catherine Cohen: the twist?… she’s gorgeous
‘The Twist...? She’s Gorgeous’, Catherine Cohen’s recent Netflix special, sees her concoct a flamboyant spectacle of feminine narcissism, in a show characterised by a rather perfect tension between self-regard and self-deprecation, conceit and vulnerability, play and pain. Part of what’s dazzling about Cohen’s performance is the sheer speed and precision with which she moves through… Continue reading Catherine Cohen: the twist?… she’s gorgeous
Mark Leidner: Anti-myth myth-making
Returning the Sword to the Stone, the title of Mark Leidner’s newest collection, gestures to renunciation, or reversal, and the invocation of myth is developed by a line within the poem itself: ‘removing royalty from your bloodline by returning the sword to the stone’. The notion of reversing or undercutting myth threads throughout the collection,… Continue reading Mark Leidner: Anti-myth myth-making
Dead Souls
A satire on the cultural sector, which uses humour to play with ideas about literary convention and value, Dead Souls is also a series of philosophical enquiries, with plagiarism the preeminent theme. Set in a slightly warped world where poetry has become immensely lucrative, the novel explores the case of a plagiarising poet, Solomon Wiese, publicly shamed… Continue reading Dead Souls
Googly eyes
The cartoonish owl in Nicole Eisenman’s new sculpture, ‘Love and Generosity’, eyes pointing slightly in different directions, is one of a string of recent characters with the same feature: Heihei, the stowaway chicken in the Disney film, Moana; the pigeon in Spies in Disguise who eats anything and everything; and most recently, the family’s pug… Continue reading Googly eyes
Nicole Eisenman’s Love or Generosity
Nicole Eisenman’s new sculpture, ‘Love or Generosity’, has just been installed outside the New Amsterdam Courthouse. Gender-fluid, and featureless save for a bulbous nose, with mussed hair and chubby hands, the figure is recognisable from the other over-sized figures of her recent oeuvre. This one is a real giant, though, about 5 metres high, and… Continue reading Nicole Eisenman’s Love or Generosity
Paul Beatty: Unmitigated Blackness
Paul Beatty is a hugely significant comic writer: one of only a few contemporary novelists whose work is consistently satirical. His most recent novel, The Sellout, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2016, shares DNA with other irreverent, iconoclastic masterpieces like Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five. The novel traces the tribulations of his protagonist,… Continue reading Paul Beatty: Unmitigated Blackness
Comic naivety in George Saunders’s ‘Ghoul’
The pleasure we find in naivety is complex: it’s partly superiority at a lack of social sophistication or adroitness about social conventions, and partly relief at the failure to maintain those norms – a chance to vicariously share in a momentary respite from the ceaseless self-consciousness and responsiveness required of us as social creatures. There’s… Continue reading Comic naivety in George Saunders’s ‘Ghoul’
Fake Accounts: irony and the aesthetics of alienation
A brilliantly funny novel, in its mordant fashion, Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts is also very engaged with the implications of humour in contemporary online culture. The specific conditions of the internet – the size of the networks involved, and anonymity of those networks - have meant that the potential scale and real-world impact of inside… Continue reading Fake Accounts: irony and the aesthetics of alienation
Humour in the Arts 