The Joker Runs Wild

Artwork by Penny Slinger

Graduate of NYU Performance Studies Mady Schutzman (Ph.D. '94) returns to discuss her recent book Radical Doubt: the Joker System, after Boal. Schutzman proposes an approach to community building based on joke logic, strange loops, trickster tactics, irony, and even chaos. The approach derives from the dynamics of the Joker System – a mode of collectively devising “plays” through the merger of journalistic rigor and performative ambiguity. Devoted to discovering non-polarizing and non-identity-driven modes of resistance, Schutzman moves far beyond the stage, finding analogous “systems” in fields of ethics, anthropology, mathematics, language studies, and speculative science.