Title: The Last Laugh
Subtitle: Grief, Death, and the Comic
Subject Classification:  Sociology, Psychology, Philosophy  
BIC Classification: JH, JM, HP
BISAC Classification: PSY052000, SOC036000, PHI034000
Binding: Hardback, eBook
Publication date: 04 Sep 2025
ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-83711-034-6
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-83711-035-3

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Description

This book investigates what the author terms “The last laugh,” which reveals itself as a crucial element in the work of grief and acceptance amid social strife and political injustice.

We hear and see the laugh emerge when engaged in situations that are not funny at first glance, at least not according to social conventions of propriety. The last laugh is seriously funny, insofar as it reveals the extent to which the laughing subject is thoroughly enmeshed in the unfunniness of social antagonisms yet also capable of accepting its position as something to laugh at and through in order to endure the pains of social life. The last laugh emerges at the hiatus between action/autonomy and passivity/non-doing. Chances are high that you have laughed this laugh.

This book is designed to help us all understand what it is and how it helps promote insight in the contemporary moment. Understanding the last laugh is necessary to enable full, open grieving of social injustice; treating the comic as a necessary component of open, or what the social sciences refer to as “adaptive,” grieving. It thus provides a new perspective on grief scholarship, as well as a new perspective on comedy studies.

Biography

Author(s):  Dr. Will Daddario is a Mental Health Counselor and Philosopher in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA

Reviews

"The Last Laugh does not aim to be the last word in any theory of comedy, because its scope is so much wider than that, ranging from the works of Chekhov and Monkman, through scholarly discussions of modern memes, The Onion, and ancient Cynicism, to an excoriating critique of Trumpism via Jacques Lacan. Daddario’s work is both a cri de coeur and a prolonged scream in the face of worldly horror, unearthing what might be called the ‘Unfunny Valley’ between the drôle and the dreadful, life and death, humour and torment. This book offers us a performance of comedic immanence that verges on unbearable grief just as much as it invites us into its laughter."
- John Ó Maoilearca, Honorary Professor, Department of Critical and Historical Studies, Kingston University, London

"What is a laugh that rivets us into the world? When a laugh laughs us into being, pushing us toward life’s limit, we dance at the edge of what laughter can do. Here, where grief and exuberance coincide, the laughter takes us with it, with the force of the unbearable, beyond it. This laughter, Daddario shows, exits “being-as-usual.” Moving eloquently from grief to addiction, from joy to the enthusiasm of a life lived beyond sameness, Daddario’s journey in The Last Laugh is a bold proposal to live otherwise, beyond the false binaries of our time. There is no laughter in addiction to sameness. This beautiful book is an invitation to be laughed into existence."
- Erin Manning, Research Chair - Speculative Pragmatism, Art, and Pedagogy, Director, SenseLab, Concordia University

"Will Daddario’s The Last Laugh is a supreme and ingenious example of performance philosophy. It takes comedy—both as practice and as subject—to its edge: that most compelling tipping point where laughter dies, the world wavers, and trembles in a singular silence from which something new, something different, might emerge or take place."
- Alenka Zupančič, Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School

"A new national therapist has been appointed. But has anyone actually appointed him? Is he not rather acting of his own accord? Certain malevolent people will call him a cynic and object that his ideas are the death of laughter. Others, though, claim that something radically new has appeared, and not only in therapy, since his thinking draws from vast archives ancient and modern; histories of theater, art, literature, television, the internet; philosophy and psychology and medicine. He collects extraordinary case studies and submits them to tireless analysis. His correctives take the form of pragmatic intertwinement of whatever is necessary, a weave of useful knowledge, that revises our common definitions of nearly everything. In any case, if we can hear him, Will Daddario will methodically, at times urgently, direct us through complex steps toward addressing our national addiction to sameness. He will shine a light of value on those fleeting moments of renewal, blossoming here and there unexpectedly, in the dark forested place and out-of-joint time of grief. He will call us back, again and again, to the transformative force in the laughter of nothing left."
- Matthew Goulish, Dramaturge, Every house has a door, Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago