Satire, Comedy and Mental Health : Coping With the Limits of Critique, Hardco...

Satire, Comedy and Mental Health : Coping With the Limits of Critique, Hardcover by Declercq, Dieter, ISBN 1839096675, ISBN-13 9781839096679, Like New Used, Free shipping in the USThe author explores the role of satire in sustaining good mental health in a troubled sociopolitical world. He combines approaches from analytic philosophy of art, medical and health humanities, media studies, and psychology to show how satire is a resource for coping with a problematic world and a tool for people to use when experiencing feelings of existential despair about the limits of critique, analyzing satire in novels, music, television, film, cartoons, memes, stand-up comedy, and protest artifacts, including the comments of satirists about their work. He argues that satire does not cure a morally sick world but helps people cope with it, that it helps people deal with the limits of critique through entertainment, and that it develops comic and ironic coping strategies, as well as how the strategies of satire distance people from the limits of critique and reframe the meaning of these limits from a less-threatening perspective. He discusses how satire is a genre with the moral purpose to critique and the aesthetic purpose to entertain; the idea of satire as therapy that cures sociopolitical sickness, and how it cannot meet that expectation; satire as a therapy for a world that is sick beyond full recovery; how it contributes to emotion-focused coping by providing pleasurable aesthetic entertainment; and comic irony as a satirical strategy for meaning-focused coping that reframes how people think about the limits of critique, and how the comic and ironic strategies of satire can be integrated into stories about moral imperfection. Distributed in North America by Turpin Distribution. Annotation ©2021 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR ()