Comedy and Lacanian theory go pretty well together, sometimes, such as in the work of Slavoj Žižek, who repeatedly uses jokes and humor to punctuate his theoretical examples. In fact, Žižek even has a book of philosophical jokes titled [b:Žižek's Jokes: Did You Hear the One about Hegel and Negation?|18197163|Žižek's Jokes Did You Hear the One about Hegel and Negation?|Slavoj Žižek|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1394406269s/18197163.jpg|25607377].

Nothing in here even remotely reaches the level of Žižek's humor, unfortunately. Manya Steinkoler opens the collection with a reflection on the birth of Isaac ("he who laughs"), but the whole exercise seems curiously flat: surely, there is a difference between laughter due to happiness, and laughter to humor? Dany Nobus makes a nice comparison between Lacan's "gayness" and Nietzsche's "gay science," but the comparison, while enticing, doesn't add up to much. Too many of the theoretical pieces in this book suffered from the same lack of consequence.

A couple of chapters toward the end of Part I dealt with clinical examples of comedy. I am yet to be convinced of the value of clinical analysis: in book after book about Lacan, the weakest and least interesting parts derive from this practice. Strangely, Part II was titled "Comedy on the Couch," even though the chapters here dealt instead with literary examples: Shakespeare, Austen (which I rather liked), and James.

Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy is not a bad collection of essays. It's just that it seems to suffer not only from a lack of ambition, but from the fact that so few of its examples exhibit the kind of humor they claim is so essential to Lacanian psychoanalysis. ( )