Comedy has both a long history and an obvious contemporary relevance for both political practices and political thought. For the former, think of the rich history of political protests using comedy, or of contemporary politicians like Boris Johnson whose success is partially derived from employing comedy. In terms of political thought, the interest in and concern with comedy begins as early as Plato. Somehow, in recent decades, political thought has lost interest in comedy, even though comedy continues to play an important role in politics. This poses a problem: by disregarding comedy, political philosophy is suddenly unable to account for a significant part of political life. This research programme was designed to address this gap in our thinking about politics.
The overall objective of this research programme was to demonstrate that comedy reflects the theoretical and methodological commitments of a strand of political philosophy called “political realism”, and to establish comedy’s contribution to political realism by drawing out its transformative potential.
Three specific research objectives were combined to support the overall objective. (a) The first objective developed an account of democratic citizenship informed by comedy by exploring Aristophanes’ comedies and Plato’s political thought. (b) The second objective developed an account of political judgment informed by comedy by analysing Machiavelli’s comedies and political writings in relation to each other. (c) The third objective developed an account of the relation between ideals and practice in politics informed by comedy via the theoretical reflections on comedy by Hegel, Vischer, and Marx.
Each of the specific research objectives corresponds to a central feature of political realism. By developing these objectives through comedy, the researcher showed that there are structural parallels between comedy and political realism. In each of the specific objectives, the transformative potential inherent in comedy was elucidated. In doing so, the researcher used insights derived from this parallel to develop a more nuanced understanding of political realism’s potential to conceptualize social transformation. Thus comedy transpires as the means through which the full potential of realism for political philosophy as a whole can be grasped for the first time. At the same time, the disruptive power of comedy in political life was explored.
