FINITE JEST

FINITE JEST is an anatomy of The Joke. The Joke is that everybody dies. The question is: can we laugh about that together in a theater? In this solo performance about comedy, tragedy and death, artist Melanie Jame Wolf suspects that we need to.

The performance departs from Wolf’s own encounters with death and (nearly) dying through her experience with breast cancer treatment, the death of friends, and raising a five-year-old child who asks: “What happens when we die?” In stand-up, when a joke fails, the comedian is said to have died on stage. FINITE JEST explores the edges of where The Joke dies and asks how humor can make the fact of death—and the inevitability of grief—occasionally bearable.

Trigger: Depictions of death and dying, depictions of violence