Putting insomnia to good use, I decided to read some Zizek. Sublime Object of Ideology. I ran across this little ditty and just had to share.
After some supposedly funny or witty remark, you can hear the laughter and applause included in the soundtrack of the show itself–here we have the exact counterpart of the Chorus in classical tragedy…why this laughter?…The only correct answer would be that the Other–embodied in the television set–is relieving us even of our duty to laugh–is laughing instead of us. So even if, tired from a hard day’s work, all evening we did nothing but gaze drowsily into the television screen, we can say afterwards that objectively, through the medium of the other, we had a really good time.
Apropos of nothing. This is just why I love Zizek. Cause where else are you gonna get a discussion of Marx, Lacan AND laugh tracks?
G’night E’erbody!
