Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy is more a book about the work of the rogue Parisian psychoanalyst Lacan than one about comedy. The last forty years have seen an explosion of excellent research into humor, particularly by psychologists, but there is no reference to any of it in the text. Even the work of that most distinguished and influential of Freudian humor scholars, Alan Dundes, does not get a mention. Psychoanalysis, a word that appears in the title, can be seen either as broad church or as a host of squabbling denominations, but all this richness has been lost. Here we find only the outpourings of the narrow sect founded by Lacan, though the founding scriptures of Freud are reverently mentioned, particularly his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

It is a book written by and for the devotees of a guru. Lacan was a charismatic charlatan, widely derided in his time even by some of his fellow “critical” theorists, but possessing a large band of followers. He died in 1981. What we see in this book is what Max Weber called the routinization of charisma keeping the movement alive after the cult leader is dead. In Dany Nobus’s essay “Psychoanalysis as Gai Saber: toward a new episteme of laughter,” there are seventeen references to the works of Lacan and only eleven to those of other writers, two of them commentaries on Lacan. Freud gets a single mention. Nobus’s chapter is a piece of hagiography,