Lecture by Nikolaus Müller-Schöll (D)

Lecture by
Nikolaus Müller-Schöll (D)
The Lists and Tricks of Laughing. On the Interference between the Comical and the Performative

Date: Fri, May 11, 18:00
Venue: TQW / Studios

Ambivalence is one of the those things that should be added to the lists and tricks of laughing: divine and infernal, inclusive and exclusive, promoting the truth and suppressing it, a minor subversion, but also a cold exercise of power... Laughing is Janus-faced, as is shown by the somewhat innocentsounding proverb \"He who laughs last, laughs longest\", which tells of the victim who appears as a cold victor. But the last laugh is also that of the small boy, who, with a \"suppressed laugh\" (Roberto Benigni: La vita è bella), lends meaning to what in the eye of the executioner is the nonsensical grimace of his father on the way to execution. Based on its history, theories and fictions, I explore laughing in the forms of representation that rely on it or are disrupted by it.

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Nikolaus Müller-Schöll is a professor at the Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt a.M.


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