What Comedy Tells Us About Ourselves — And How We’re Changing

Scholar of comedy Matthew McMahan: “Just as Michel Foucault encourages historians to look to moments of rupture and discontinuity when trying to decipher how a culture thinks and acts, I suggest students of comedy look to the moments when a successful joke simply stops landing with its audience. The moment when a loud guffaw quickly shifts to an appalled gasp can tell us a lot about how a culture is changing.” – HowlRound