Fall

Research Assistant: Is This a Joke? Absurd Humor as Social Criticism in Contemporary Danish and Scandinavian Film and Culture

Danish humor is strange in a specific way. You are not always sure whether you are supposed to laugh, whether something is being satirized, or whether what you just watched was even meant to be a comedy. Directors such as Lars von Trier (The Kingdom), Ruben Östlund (Triangle of Sadness), and Roy Andersson (A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence) create humor that is deliberately ambiguous, unsettling, and hard to place. This project asks why that is and what it reveals about how humor functions as social and political criticism.