"When work is slowly killing us and destroying the planet and, at the same time, something impossible to imagine life without, Lane-McKinley considers the possibility of comedy as a revolutionary practice. By appealing to laughter-what Walter Benjamin called the most "revolutionary emotion of the masses," or as Audre Lorde put it, the "open and fearless underlining" of our capacity for joy-we can counteract many of our shared miseries under capitalism, including our relationship to work. But to think through these revolutionary aspects of comedy as a practice also involves troubling comedy's relationship to the global right turn of the last decade. Stand-up comedy's claims to the artistic freedom of hate speech in comedy represent a fascistic current of our world today, blurring the boundaries between left and "alt" right. Against this current, the book draws from a tradition of feminist critical utopianism, Marxist-feminism, and contemporary cultural criticism to reflect on an anti-fascist poetics of comedy, grounded in a critique of work"-- Provided by publisher.