ABSTRACT
Comedy affords us with a bottom-up, deeply embodied, materially sensitive, and heterarchical approach to mountain ecologies. Following Arthur Koestler’s suggestion to move from the ridiculous to the sublime, this chapter explores the comic as a creative model to a cinematic understanding of “mountain being.” It will do so by tracing the figure of the Chimera from its mythological origins as a mountain monster to its invocations in biotechnological domains and theories of humor. Bringing together assemblage theory developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and theories of humor, this chapter examines comedy as a performative framework to explore non-binary constructions and ways of being. Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality (1923) will serve as a case study of chimeric assemblages that situate humans in ever-changing technological relations to mountains.
