ABSTRACT
The comic mode practised in Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy (2012), Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights (2006), and Woody Allen’s films conceals discrete approaches to history and memory in which the Holocaust collides with everyday life. The simultaneous activation of the pleasure principle and ethically charged guilt in these works creates a constant sense of empathic unsettlement that bears on questions about the future of memory. Humour ultimately belies an ironic intention on the part of the artist in question to articulate anxiety in the face of a contemporary culture increasingly desensitised to the meaning of history.
