Post-Comedy Alfie Bown,  Polity, 2024,  144 pp., paperback, ISBN: 978-1-509-56339-5

Published online: 10 July 2025

© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2025

Unlike many works in philosophy, and perhaps, more surprisingly, in comedy, Post-Comedy by Alfie Bown is actually fun to read. It is set in today’s context, addressing current political and media trends, with a great selection of jokes to illustrate the main points—reason enough to read it.

Bown embraces and contributes to the psychoanalytic understanding of the subject and, in this context, develops a distinctive comprehension of comedy. He recognizes that at the centre of subjectivity is a lack, a void we collectively share. In his words, “We are created as failed, divided subjects with lack at our very core and, try as we might to impose completeness and order in our lives, the reminder of our origin always persists” (p. 109). Comedy reminds us of the inherent lack from which we all emerge, it confronts us with the lack at the heart of subjectivity by exposing “our own foolishness and incompleteness” (p. 29), and in doing so, it connects us to one another.

By their nature, ideologies and capitalism attempt to cover up this universal constitutive lack, offering a utopian fantasy to fill the void of existence—something capitalism sells to us as its central promise. By embracing the constitutive lack, comedy opens up the possibility of anti-capitalist resistance. While capitalism sustains itself by perpetuating inequality, promoting the ideology of exception, and emphasizing our differences to solidify our identities, comedy, for Bown, holds

revolutionary power as it has the potential to allow “universal solidarity to emerge” (p. 2).

Bown examines how contemporary comedy has been appropriated by capitalist ideology, shifting away from its subversive nature. Rather than exposing the shared lack at the heart of human existenc