Sulgi Lie: Gehend kommen. Adornos Slapstick: Charlie Chaplin & The Marx Brothers

Adorno's slapstick, Adorno's comedy - a constellation that may seem exceedingly strange at first glance. Can there be anything at all to laugh about in the case of a declared representative of a "sad science" [Minima Moralia]? The aim of Sulgi Lie's study is nothing other than to break a theoretical lance for Adorno's laughter and to trace it not only in his texts, but also in the films of those comedians he admired: Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. From the parallel reading of philosophical texts and Hollywood films a film aesthetic is extracted of which some still assume that it cannot exist in a thinker who once claimed to come out more stupid after every visit to the cinema. But dialectics with and after Adorno also means extracting the clever from the stupid and the high from the low. Adorno took comedy so seriously that he once even devoted a philosophical seminar to it in Frankfurt. In the unpublished notes on this so-called laughter seminar, there is the following entry: “Horkheimer, who taught his dog to bark.” In this note, Adorno's comic theory is condensed into one sentence: just as the aggressive sound of the dog is more appearance than being, so too slapstick in its original sense of the word owes its origin to a practice of the Italian Commedia dell'arte, in which the clowns beat each other loudly on the head with doubled wooden surfaces, but only pretended to do so. Destruction and play, the real and the imaginary, the visible and the audible, pain and jest are thus combined in Adorno's slapstick, which is not a baton.