“Marcus Pound is probably the best person working at the intersection of theology and psychoanalysis. His analysis of comedy and its importance for Christianity and our current society here is profound, beautiful, and important. Here, love is structured like a joke and laughter is our shared practice of love that resists consumer capitalism. This book is smart, clear, and also it is extremely funny!”
Theology, Comedy, Politics
What relevance has comedy for the global crises of late-modernity and the theological critique thereof? Coming out of the experience of war, a generation of modern theologians such as Donald MacKinnon, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and, more recently, Rowan Williams, in their accommodation to literature, choose tragedy as the paradigm for theological understanding and ethics. By contrast, this book develops recent philosophical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical studies of humor to develop a theology of comedy. By deconstructing secular accounts of comedy it advances the argument that comedy is not only participatory of the divine, but that it should inform our thinking about liturgical, sacramental, and ecclesial life if we are to respond to the postmodern age in which having fun is an ideological imperative of market forces.
- Publisher Fortress Press
- Format Paperback
- ISBN 9781506431628
- eBook ISBN 9781506458359
- Dimensions 5 x 7
- Pages 120
- Publication Date September 3, 2019
Endorsements
This book is smart, clear, and also it is extremely funny!
Clayton Crockett | University of Central Arkansas
We are living through a comedy revolution.
“The great gift of this book is that it is a serious engagement with comedy by a theologian. We are living through a comedy revolution. There has been quite simply an explosion of comedy both live and streamed. Never has there been a more important time for this topic to come to the fore in theological work. Marcus Pound sets out to explore the depths of our obsession with comedy, and he finds his answer in a comedic God.”
Pete Ward | Durham University
A funny and illuminative read.
“Pound bypasses the common image of Christianity as a religion of tragedy both historically as well as theologically to present an insightful and exhilarant theology of comedy. This goes beyond the scope of historical questions to fashion a theological response to the problems incited by the contemporary, postmodern imperative of capitalist enjoyment: a funny and illuminative read.”
Florian Klug | University of Würzberg