Funny Moves

Abstract Funny moves, in their ambiguity, are often unsettling. The stakes are difficult to fathom, especially in dance, where funniness can never be disentangled from the bodies that perform it. Funniness, whether gleeful, surprising, or odd, intentionally so or not, is shown to arise from social disruptions, which may be progressive or conservative, or both, and which are always contested. Furthermore, the same skillfulness needed to make a dance “serious” can also make it seem funny to the “wrong” spectators. Moves found funny are the Other to dance because funniness emerges whenever bodies move otherwise and outside of discipline. In ten case studies found on stages, screens, and streets of Latin America, the Caribbean, South Asia, Europe, and the United States, Funny Moves tackles how movers embody differences, including men and women who mimic one another’s steps, transfeminine and gender queer comedians who physically mock heteronormativity, locally knowledgeable dancers who impersonate colonizers and mock exoticism, racial Others who use funny moves to have a laugh at Whiteness, and dancers who resist being laughed at for dancing badly. These chapters examine who laughs at whose moves, and who doesn’t, and they ponder the situated cultural politics of laughter.