This chapter explores Kierkegaard’s writings on comic power in order to develop fresh insight into questions about democracy, rhetoric, and crowd politics. Foregrounding Kierkegaard’s interest in the material and the sensorial—rather than the usual focus on Spirit and the transcendental—the chapter shows how Kierkegaard views comic power as a potential way of constituting the crowd as a collective in which individuals share in their singularity. The chapter uses examples from Kierkegaard’s own time, as well as more contemporary cases, to develop the implications of this argument. The baseline is an often-overlooked link between democracy and comic power. What a true democracy needs,
Kierkegaard might have been meaning to suggest, is more—not less—comedy!