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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: 157 Mangrum's Comical Computation (JP)
Description: When does comedy become more than a laugh?Ā Ben MangrumĀ of MIT joinsĀ RtBĀ to discuss his new book,Ā The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love ObsolescenceĀ (Stanford UP, 2025), which in some ways is organized around āthe intriguing idea that human knowledge work is our definitive feature and yet the machines we are ourselves made are going to replace us at it.ā
Comedy has provided a toolbox (Charles Tilly calls themĀ "collective repertoires") for responding to the looming obsolescence of knowledge workers.John's interest in Menippean satire within science fiction leads him to ask...