Simon Critchley argues that “a sense of humour is often what is felt to be best shared with people who are from the same place… Read More »Ash Johann Curry-Machado | Blog 8 – Shen Teng and the Universality of Chinese Comedy
As Noel Carroll explores, horror and comedy are fundamentally philosophical opposites: “horror oppresses; comedy liberates… comedy elates; horror stimulates depression, paranoia and dread.” It is… Read More »Ash Johann Curry-Machado | Blog 7 – Scream and the Metatextuality of Horror Comedy
In reading Sianne Nagi’s ‘The Zany Science’, I was struck by the immediate associations of humour with “character as an aesthetic form”. It made me… Read More »Ash Johann Curry-Machado | Blog 6 – The Purple Rose of Cairo and the Zaniness of Living Characters
I was struck by Sontag’s notes on Camp as “bad art”, as it immediately made me think of student filmmaking. Films made by students are… Read More »Ash Johann Curry-Machado | Blog 5 – The Dirties and the Camp of Student Filmmaking
As Parvulescu writes in ‘So We Will Go Bad’, “Daisies shows us that the spectacular, cheeky revolt against manners cuts the body, as in the… Read More »Ash Johann Curry-Machado | Blog 4 – Floating Heads in Daisies and Hausu
Reading Mary Douglas’s thoughts on African comedy in the context of ‘Jokes’ immediately made me think of the Wakaliwood comedies, which gained notoriety in the… Read More »Ash Johann Curry-Machado | Blog 3 – African Comedy in Who Killed Captain Alex
I was most struck by this passage in Henri Bergson’s ‘Laughter: an essay on the meaning of the comic’, as at face value it seems… Read More »Ash Johann Curry-Machado | Blog 2 – Bergsonian Comedy in the Jedi and Sith of Star Wars
For my first blog post, I would like to focus on Buster Keaton. I found Kristine Brunovska Karnick’s writing on him in ‘Crazy Machines in… Read More »Ash Johann Curry-Machado | Blog 1 – Buster Keaton, God or Puppet?