Funny Moves: Dance Humor Politics

Funny Moves: Dance Humor Politics explores the intersection of dance and humor and the political stakes that bodies incur when they dare to be both aestheticized and funny. The editors posit that funny moves are dance’s Other--the missteps or oversteps that don’t fit a particular dance form. Funniness in dance, whether gleeful, surprising, or odd, causes disruptions which may be progressive or conservative, inciting pleasures that counterbalance the artform’s often serious codes.

Writing from Latin America, the Caribbean, South Asia, Europe, and the United States, the book’s ten authors provide diverse observational techniques and creative vocabularies for finding, analyzing, and theorizing funny moves across dance forms, dance scenes, and dance screens. Some of the authors find hope in the laughter of their artist subjects and their audiences, and some linger in the ambiguity and confusion so created. Each essay takes on a single surprise factor or a choreographic comic rupture, relishing in the amassed effects or affects across an absurdist cinematic, staged, or quotidian sequence. What is ＂funny＂ in each case pops up as a wildcard that evokes recognizable shared experiences, sometimes pushing back against dominant or mainstream logic and its supremacist laughter.

Marta E. Savigliano is Professor Emerita of Critical Dance Studies, Dance Department, University of California, Riverside and of Culture and Performance, World Arts and Cultures Department, University of California Los Angeles. She is the author of Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, Angora Matta: Fatal Acts of North-South Translation and of numerous articles. She received the Dance Studies Association Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance Award (2024).

Hannah Schwadron is Associate Professor of Dance, School of Dance, Florida State University. She is the author of The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender, and Jewish Joke-Work in US Pop Culture and various published essays. She received the de la Torre Bueno Prize for Best First Book (2018).