ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the antagonisms can help constitute comedy’s Real subversion. When tackling political correctness and multiculturalism, it is comedy which can help achieve a sustained critique of the ‘empty’ universality which both political correctness and multiculturalism achieve. The ‘reflexive twist’ is what posits a comic subversion that induces a parallax shift in the fundamental coordinates of the big Other and our relation to it. This subversion can be achieved, not by confronting the big Other, but by performing certain universal, abstract notions in a concrete form; that is to say, through performing comedy as concrete universal. In fact, whereas Buster Keaton’s comedy exposed the exclusion at the heart of the social order, his comic subversion emanated from his ability to highlight the inconsistencies of this system through its own ‘excess’ – that is, through his own ‘inclusion’ in a system of ‘exclusion’.
