Jokes and Innovative Action by Paolo Virno

(an essay on the transformative nature of jokes, published in his book Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, also in Artforum sometime)

I always enjoy simple explanations on complicated but everyday kinda things, so Virno’s simple explanation on why jokes are important - and super important at that, that is politically - is nice, and long. And useful: since reading it I see the basic idea format everywhere; things that are ordinary in the sense that we’re always around them (jokes, art, religion, popular music, love) but extraordinary in the sense that they nonetheless have the power to shock or disrupt us out of (political?) slumber or whatever.