Popular Humour and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth Century Vienna

Comical Modernity looks at the years between 1857–1890, a period of dramatic urban renewal within Vienna during which the city’s rapidly changing face was a popular topic in publications. This book shows how humor provided access to understanding modernity in an era of radical change, thus broadening our understanding of the cultural history of nineteenth-century Vienna.

Though long associated with a small group of coffeehouse elites around the turn of the twentieth century, Viennese “modernist” culture had roots that reached much further back and beyond the rarefied sphere of high culture. In Comical Modernity, Heidi Hakkarainen looks at Vienna in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period of dramatic urban renewal during which the city’s rapidly changing face was a mainstay of humorous magazines, books, and other publications aimed at middle-class audiences. As she shows, humor provided a widely accessible means of negotiating an era of radical change.