Lisa Trahair teaches in Film Studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is author of The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick (2007). She has published widely on film comedy and on the philosophy of comedy in journals devoted to film and the theoretical humanities and has co-edited several special issues of journals devoted to the intersection of film and philosophy. Her current projects include directing the Cinematic Thinking Network and co-authoring a book on Understanding Cinematic Thinking (with Gregory Flaxman and Robert Sinnerbrink).
Josephine Gray is (with Anmar Taha) artistic director of Iraqi Bodies, a physical theatre group based in Gothenburg, Sweden, dedicated to exploring the links between movement and gesture, dance and physical theatre. Her experimental practice is anchored in the theory and method of Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, among others. She is a graduate of L'école Internationale de Théâtre de Jacques Lecoq and has a Masters Degree in Philosophy from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, for which she wrote a thesis on the philosophy of comic performance in the work of Henri Bergson and Jacques Lecoq.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Comedy: Towards an Alternative History of Mimesis, by María J. Ortega Máñez

Chapter 2. The Two Laughters of Lecoq: The Clown and the Bouffon, by Caterina Angela Agus, Giovani Fusetti and Davide Giovanzana

Chapter 3. The Masked Comic Figure in Alain Badiou's Philosophy, by Fred Dalmasso

Chapter 4. The Body that Laughs and Cries: Helmuth Plessner's Keys to Anthropology and Theatre, by Xavier Escribano

Chapter 5. Valentin, Brecht and Comic Inelasticity: Ridiculing Rigidity as an Impediment to Social Change, by Meg Mumford

Chapter 6. Happiness, Dead and Alive: Object Theatre as Philosophy of the Encounter, by Carolyn Shapiro

Chapter 7. Living in the Doll House: Cavell, Comedy and The Ladies Man, by Lisa Trahair

Chapter 8. Trouble in Paradise?: Impotence and Comedy, by Lisabeth During

Chapter 9. "Only What Is Born Lives": Kafka L.O.L., by Jean-Michel Rabaté

Chapter 10. The Grotesque: Comic Performance and the Paradox of Acting, by Josephine Gray

About the Authors

Examining Henri Bergson's work, philosophy, and the body, this volume explores the history and philosophy of comedy, film, psychoanalysis and the comic performance of the future, creating a theoretical and practice-based framework for the field.