In order to laugh about something you perceive, you must first possess knowledge. What spectators laughed about in a 17th-century staging of Amphitryon differs from what people find funny about Anakin and Padme-memes on social media today: Directly or indirectly, audiences access culturally specific knowledge, for example, of social practices, aesthetic conventions, current political debates or simply their own experience of the world. Such knowledge is often implicit and difficult to articulate.
The special issue of the journal Comedy Studies thus sets out to explore two interconnected questions: How does comedy depend on ‘comic literacies’, i.e., historically and culturally variable knowledge formations? And how can research access and theorise this implicit knowledge involved in comedy? Like other studies in literacy (media, social, visual, etc.), we understand comic literacies as culturally and socially situated discourses and practices that produce, process, transform and contest meaning in a variety of different comedic contexts. In this sense, comic literacies can be understood as shared yet unevenly distributed repertoires of knowledge that allow performers and audiences to perceive and mobilise something as comic in historically specific ways. Comic literacies can be observed when studying comedy’s materialities, its arrangements and its affects. Regarding the first area of investigation, the special issue asks how comic literacies are connected to, and indeed depend on, the materiality of human or non-human bodies and things. The second area of inquiry turns to practices of arrangement in comedic dramaturgy, choreography, oratory, etc. which involve the positioning and coordinating of words, bodies, things, actions or sounds in space and time. Finally, the special issue is interested in the evolving relationship between comic literacies and affect.
Please submit proposals to aileen.behrendt@uni-potsdam.de by end of July 2026. Selected proposals will be invited to prepare articles which will be due on 31st of January 2027 and will be peer reviewed. The articles will be published as a special issue of the journal Comedy Studies in early/mid 2028. For more information please click here.
The special issue is edited by Aileen Behrendt (University of Potsdam), Karin Peters (University of Bonn) and Roxanne Phillips (KWI Essen).
