The Comic Event: Comedic Performance from the 1950s to the Present

She has published books and essays on narrative theory, studies in sexuality, Hollywood cinema, DNA, hoaxes, and on the work of such authors as Beckett, Pinter, Duras, Woolf, and Percival Everett. About the AuthorJudith Roof is Professor of English and William Shakespeare Chair in English at Rice University, USA.

This theory of comedy offers a way to understand the operation of a broad array of distinct comic occasions and aspects of performance in multiple contexts.. In seeing comedy as a gathering event that resolves with a “cut,” Roof characterizes comedy not only by a predictable unpredictability occasioned by a sudden expected/unexpected insight, but also by repetition, seriality, self-consciousness, self-referentiality, and an ourobouric return to a previous cut. The Comic Event approaches comedy as dynamic phenomenon that involves the gathering of elements of performance, signifiers, timings, tones, gestures, previous comic bits, and other self-conscious structures into an “event” that triggers, by virtue of a “cut,” an expected/unexpected resolution.Using examples from mainstream comedy, The Comic Event progresses from the smallest comic moment-jokes, bits-to the more complex-caricatures, sketches, sit-coms, parody films, and stand-up routines. Judith Roof builds on side comments from Henri Berg

She has published books and essays on narrative theory, studies in sexuality, Hollywood cinema, DNA, hoaxes, and on the work of such authors as Beckett, Pinter, Duras, Woolf, and Percival Everett. . Judith Roof is Professor of English and William Shakespeare Chair in English at Rice University, USA