Melanie Jame Wolf

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 new solo performance about comedy, tragedy and death, choreographer, performer and artist Melanie Jame Wolf’s suspicion is 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, the grief-feed scrolling on her phone screen, 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; stand up, drop dead. FINITE JEST is interested in the edges of where The Joke dies. In what ways can we work with humor as the absurd, weird thing that makes the fact of death—and the inevitability of grief—occasionally bearable? Melanie Jame Wolf, who also worked with Ania Nowak, invokes archetypal images—from Shakespeare, to the figure of the jester, to stand-up comedy—in order to question social scripts for how we grieve, how we think about dying, and how morality is produced around these topics.