If we follow the evolution of comic sub-powers, screwball comedy was one of the next big steps after its first roots of silent slapstick. Screwball comedy particularly enthused audiences in the 1930s and 1940s. He has produced films and stars such as Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night and Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story. Under this last heading, we are now looking beyond slapsticks in the context of Western deindustrialization and the resulting globalization of production and distribution networks. Here is the just-in-time comedy of slapstick technique, which focuses on orchestration and coordination, on the just-in-time logic (JIT) of contemporary containerization and global supply chains 18, in which, as Lucy Hunter and L. Ryan put it, „no matter where the pieces are assembled, no matter when.“ 19 Putting this more contemporary context next to Benjamin`s historical moment, we see a scalar extension of Benjamin`s logic and the general utility of slapstick toggling as a decisive tool for studying systemic crises. While the industrial slapstick confronted the machine itself as a synecdoche for industrial systems and Fordist logics, the post-industrial slapstick struggles with the more abstract machines forming global circulation systems. Our transhistorical confrontation recalls Benjamin`s strategy in his troubled historical era: to return to the recent (and not distant) past for an aesthetic practice that stopped the moment before his determination by taking into account the possibility of laughter against that of violence.20 This is ultimately the slapstick switch of free trade. The doubling of the liberal rhetoric of post-war internationalism, where the growing flow of free trade would lift all the boats, free trade efforts – at the end of the Washington consensus era – served to „strengthen a series of interests in search of rents and politically well-connected enterprises“ than those that had dominated an earlier era. Such a free trade policy, as Dani Rodrik pointed out, aimed at „purely redistributive results under the guise of `free trade`, which benefits `international banks, pharmaceutical companies and multinationals`. In this context, 55 logistics companies are still trying to perfect something other than free trade, despite declarations of pure form.
In the combination of community humour and violence, we see the spectacle of cooperation and belonging immediately disintegrating in the face of the kind of subimperial exploitation that formalizes free trade agreements between Korea and Latin America. These imbalances are not necessarily felt between the nations themselves, but are more staged between capital and labour, as well as between large and small producers of industry and agriculture. Class differences are increasingly transnational. It is therefore not surprising that the arguments against free trade agreements have generally been raised with respect to human rights.56 At the end of the Washington consensus, transnational trade agreements and trading blocs are more concerned with the weakness of the balance of competing interests and efforts to manage unequal leverage than at cancelling global playgrounds.57 The Community is becoming a kind of transnational exploitation and not a Remedy.
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