American Book Review, Oct-Nov 2001
It is Olson's light touch as well as his enlightening and idiosyncratic interpretations that make this book well worth attention.

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Summer 2001
Kirby Olson chooses to rethink comedy in terms of an aspect of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Francois Lyotard.

Choice, June 2001
...the book rereads these 'poetic canon crackers' from the perspective of incongruity, wit, and singularity.

Literary Research/Recherche Litteraire, Summer 2001
Olson's efforts to discuss a type of literature... only from a philosophical and aesthetic point of view is commendable.

Book Description
Alone among the giants of the French cultural left of the seventies, Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Francois Lyotard tried to work out a new non-Marxist direction, one that was marked by comic thought, a delight in incongruity, and humor. Formerly minor writers such as Edward Lear, P.G. Wodehouse, Philippe Soupault, Stewart Home, Gregory Corso, and Charles Willeford can now be read not as unworthy of serious attention, but as philosophical writers whose wit equals and in some ways extends the riotous thinking of Deleuze and Lyotard. It is the intent of this book to trace the ways in which these underappreciated comic writers extend postmodernism, in order to reevaluate them and spark an inspiration to reevaluate similar writers.

From the Publisher
Applying Lyotard's definition of the postmodern, Kirby Olson sets out to rescue the long-marginalized comic writers and their literature. Who, he asks, refuses the consolation of correct forms better than Edward Lear, or the consensus of taste better than Gregory Corso and Stewart Home? From Lear to Charles Willeford, Olson discovers in comic writers a philosophy of oddness and paradox that parallels and extends the work of the major postmodern thinkers. "An original, splendidly researched, and necessary book. By pointing to the vast, excluded literature of 'comic writers,' Dr. Olson opens the door to a postmodern scholarship capable of greater flexibility. Comedy after Postmodernism evinces a lucid, passionate, and engaging style." -- Andrei Codrescu (from the back cover)

From the Author
I wrote about six authors who I think should be reevaluated after the advent of postmodernism. Before this, Lear, Gregory Corso, Philippe Soupault, P.G. Wodehouse, Stewart Home, and Charles Willeford, were thought to be throwaway lightweights. Now, thanks to Gilles Deleuze and J.-F. Lyotard, I believe these authors can be reevaluated. The spirit of comedy is very close to the spirit of postmodernism. In my introduction, I wrote, "Laughter has escaped every means of rational description by philosophers and other writers during the whole course of our civilization, despite thousands of valiant tries, from Cicero to Hobbes to Freud.' Along with poetry, laughter was one of the things that Plato sought to banish from the Republic, precisely because of its a-rationality. My aim in writing the book was to discuss how after Darwin and Nietzsche, tragedy is no longer the central aesthetic of western civilization. Comedy has taken its place. Throughout the book, I discuss why this is so, and the pleasures and dangers of the new world ahead. Comedy is getting more and more academic recognition. There are several important academic journals devoted to comedy (Humor, Studies in American Humor, Thalia, are probably the big three), and increasingly scholars are turning to it as a new kind of wisdom. My book is meant to study this trend and also to promote it.

From the Inside Flap
Milan Kundera defines humor as 'the intoxicating relativity of human things; the strange pleasure that comes of the certainty that there is no certainty.' In keeping with Kundera's definition, Comedy after Postmodernism examines - Edward Lear as he invents a comic picturesque to challenge the sublime of Kant and Ruskin - Philippe Soupault as a comic surrealist undoing the sacrificial aesthetics of Andre Breton - P.G. Wodehouse as a social thinker with surprisingly deep affinities to anarchist Peter Kropotkin and radical social theorist Charles Fourier

About the Author
Kirby Olson has worked as an arts journalist and published poetry in Partisan Review, Exquisite Corpse, and elsewhere. He wrote Comedy after Postmodernism while teaching at the University of Tampere in Finland and finished it at SUNY-Delhi. He currently is an assistant professor at SUNY-Delhi in the Catskills.