Ferimur per opaca locorum. Books that disdain their readers do not really deserve reviews, but in the hope this book is not an outright hoax, I will write a few lines. Here is why I grumble:

This passage is emblematic of the claims, pronouncements and conclusions of the book and the style they are offered in. It is gibberish and should be called such.

Librum si malus est, nequeo laudare. What is Laughing Awry? It is a scattershot romp through the twenty-one plays of Plautus, narrated in stream-of-consciousness style. It assumes you have read them all in Latin and know their plots well, and that you know most of the scholarship too. Discussion leaps and lurches from one play or topic to another without warning. Over the course of eight chapters, the only discernible threads seem to be that language and power are related, that comedy addresses social, political and legal relationships, and that it is an unreliable mirror of life.

Ch. 1, methodological, argues that nothing in comedy stands up to scrutiny if you really think about it. Ch. 2 deconstructs the ancient biography of Plautus. Ch. 3 tells us that aphorisms aren't really true — ironically so, since Gunderson prefers to express himself in aphorisms. Ch. 4, on Hegel and Plautus, and ch. 7, on Amphitryo — the famous tragicomedy of the subtitle — are so incoherent they defeated me entirely; I have no idea what they are about. Ch. 5 free associates on ‘intersecting circuits of desire within the plays of Plautus' (Oxford Scholarship Online chapter abstract). This apparently means you can manipulate and flatter people to achieve your social, economic or sexual ambitions. We also learn that the fiction of the plays really is fiction, this being demonstrated by analyses of Gorgylio, Mostellaria and the adjective lepidus. Ch. 6, on Pseudylus, and more intelligible, again meditates on the power of rhetoric and the nature of fiction and lies, and argues that laughter consists of ‘surplus’, which means comedy arises from inefficiencies in communication or expression. Ch. 8 illustrates the contention that ‘the comic arises in the proximity of fear, malice, and trauma’ (online chapter abstract) via Epidicus, internet sitcoms and movies — not because the latter shows are relevant to Plautus, but because ‘they provide ways of thinking about the sort of work that staged fictions can do. And both allow us to think about Plautus’ own experiments with form’ (252). I did not see their relevance myself.

The nearest to a thesis statement I found anywhere is this: ‘What ensues is an ostentatious re-finding of Plautus, a re-finding that takes place within circumscribed terms’ (28). In place of a general conclusion, the book ends with these words: ‘And yet Lu [a movie director] has also made a revolutionary gesture. And it is a gesture that bespeaks an assiduous reader of a certain somebody's essays on Lordship and Bondage as translated into the original Latin by Plautus' (255). The style on display here is characteristic. Throughout the book, G. offers untranslated and unsourced quotations in lots of languages, because you are supposed to know them — just as you should know that G.’s title genuflects to Žižek's 1992 tome Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. So we read:

Tragicomedy, indeed.

What do we learn? In G.’s view, Plautus is a social critic, he critiques power, his plays contain ironic discourses upon ironic discourses (mainly about power) and identity is performed. Such banalities — not necessarily true, and in fact probably untrue — are cast in the forbidding idiom of theory, with its telltale tics and adverbs (‘precisely’, ‘always’, ‘nevertheless’) and connected by a flight of ideas, wherein puns — like ‘wor(l)d’ — substitute for logic. The result is an unreadable book.

And there you have it, dear reader — my best shot at deciphering this mystery. I cheerfully admit that I may have misunderstood it entirely. But since G. thanks no editor (nor anyone else), it is clear that he has written the book he wanted to write.