LISA TRAHAIR & JOSEPHINE GRAY- COMEDY AND PHILOSOPHY

Lisa and Josephine will discuss their current research into comic performance and philosophy and their emphasis on the corporeality of comedy and its connection to philosophical thinking. They are currently co-editing the anthology Second Nature: Comic Performance and Philosophy set for publication 2020.

About their forthcoming publication:   
While artists, philosophers, psychologists have long undertaken to observe the comic, for this anthology we sought essays that investigate how the comic act itself is also an expressive and performative philosophical act that precedes philosophical conceptualisation. Human existence has always used comedy to express the human condition – we want to continue that tradition by looking both back at philosophies that have incorporated its operations into their theories and forward to suggest what comedy might mean for future generations and what such meaning will bring to bear on philosophy as we know it.

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 (Albany, NY: SUNY, 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 artistic director of Iraqi Bodies together with Anmar Taha. 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. She has a Masters Degree in English from the University of Sheffield for which she wrote a thesis on the grotesque figure in the re-writings of Shakespeare’s plays by Eugéne Ionesco and Carmelo Bene.

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