Comedies and Jails — Doğancan Özsel

A philosopher and a teacher: Tell us briefly about yourself and your work.

I regard myself as a student rather than a teacher, really. I work on social and political theory, mostly on the concept of political change and the various ways it has been conceptualised, both in different political ideologies and in the theoretical frameworks of political science. The two are not unrelated. A Burkean conservative and a Marxist disagree about where society should be heading, but underneath that they disagree about what change is in the first place: something that grows slowly out of inherited practice, or something that has to break with it. Frameworks in political science carry assumptions of the same kind, only they rarely say so openly.

These days I am especially interested in conceptions of gradual change in the historical institutionalism literature. For a long time that tradition explained change mainly through critical junctures, brief moments of rupture between long stretches of stability. Wolfgang Streeck, Kathleen Thelen and James Mahoney turned attention to slower processes such as layering and conversion, through which an institution can become something quite different while keeping its name and outward form. Coming from Türkiye, I find it hard to treat this as a purely academic question.

I also write periodically for online platforms that cover Turkish politics, mainly Medyascope and Yeni Arayış.

What is your understanding of "humour" proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention? And how does your work, as a self-declared student of political change, merge with, or how is it influenced by your encounters with a phenomenon as ambiguous as humour, especially in a country where comedy seems to flourish and to be punished in equal measure?

It is actually a theme I wrote about recently, when a number of comedians in Türkiye were being prosecuted for their jokes. What struck me then was a paradox. Türkiye has always had good humour. But in sheer volume and variety we may be living through something like a golden age of comedy, and this at a time of growing political pressure and impoverishment. I do not think it is accidental. Humour tends to grow in periods of crisis, when the social structure is changing fast and the distance between the values people profess and the lives they actually lead keeps widening. For instance one cannot really think of Nasreddin Hodja, a folk comedy figure in Turkey, apart from the chaos of thirteenth-century Anatolia under the Mongols.

My own understanding of the comic owes a great deal to Bergson. His formula, du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant, something mechanical encrusted upon the living, still seems to me the most productive starting point. We expect a living being to adapt, to see the step in front of it and adjust. When a body tumbles down the stairs like a sack instead, we laugh. Language works the same way. Words are supple and metaphorical, and when a comedian handles them as mechanical parts, taking a figure of speech literally, the joke is born. Boğaç Soydemir, one of the comedians I mentioned, was arrested over a joke that did exactly this with an old saying that turned our to be a sensitive issue for the government.

The same lens tells us something about why there is so much material in Türkiye today. Our days are filled with compulsory, repetitive routines we would rather not perform. Even our free time is run by social media, which keeps telling us how to live, what to wear, what to watch and what to react to. We think of ourselves as subjects while living, more and more, as objects, and comedians work precisely in that gap. For instance much of the humour in Gibi,  a wildly popular comedy series in the country, came from the distance between the characters' objective situation and the way they talked about it. This is also where humour meets my own work, I suppose. Someone who studies political change keeps running into moments when a form has outlived the life it was meant to hold, and comedians are often the first to notice them.

Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Judith Shklar, and Derrida have argued that cruelty is baffling because, even if we want to eliminate it from human life, it always finds a way to re-emerge therein, almost as if it were part and parcel of the same human life. Has cruelty ever entered your work's purview, or shaped your understanding of social and cultural phenomena?

Not as a theme I have theorised in its own right, I should say. It did enter my work quite early, though, through a study of customary killings in Türkiye that I co-authored with Hilal Onur İnce and Aysun Yaralı for Middle Eastern Studies in 2009. These are killings of women decided by a family council to "cleanse" the family's honour. The most surprising part was the geography. The usual assumption was that they belonged to the rural east, a remnant that modernisation would sooner or later sweep away, yet the official figures put Istanbul at the top of the list, followed by other metropolitan centres such as Ankara, Izmir and Bursa.

Our argument was that Turkish modernisation never really questioned patriarchy. Women were emancipated but unliberated, and the reforms replaced an old patriarchy with a new one instead of dismantling it. The cruelty went on, and with migration it moved to the cities. If this connects to the thinkers you mention, it is perhaps here: cruelty seems hardest to eliminate when those who commit it believe they are restoring an order. The killer was often treated by those around him as a hero.

Looking back, this may be where my interest in change began, and in particular in the kind of change that leaves the essential thing in place.

Are there two or three works that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes fuelling my own philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true "classics" and, therefore, advise the reader of this blog to familiarise themselves with — the way, say, Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince can be said to be "classics" in politics? And are there any works from this century, on these themes or on politics more broadly, that you would equally recommend?

I am wary of naming classics in a field that is more yours than mine, so I will name only one, and then stay with more recent books I keep going back to.

The classic is, inevitably, Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900). It is a short book and, unusually for philosophy, a funny one. I still have not found a better account of why we laugh when something living starts behaving like a machine. Readers coming from politics may be surprised by how much it has to say about ceremony and officialdom.

From this century, the first is Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia (2001). It moves from laughter towards melancholy, though not as far as one might expect. Boym separates a restorative nostalgia, which wants to rebuild the lost home and has no sense of humour about it, from a reflective nostalgia that can be ironic and even funny. Along the way she tells of a Russian commander who, in 1733, buried a soldier alive to discourage homesickness among his troops, a story that may interest anyone working on humour and cruelty at once. The book has aged very well, considering how much of today's politics runs on the promise of restoring something.

The second is much more recent: Anton Jäger's Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences (Verso, 2026; first published in German in 2023). Jäger describes a world where politics is everywhere but parties, unions and lasting commitments have largely gone, so we get intense waves of outrage with very few consequences. It is a short book, and it helped me make sense of a political landscape that changes faster than our concepts do, including the outrage campaigns against comedians I mentioned earlier.