‘Perfectly, perfectly funny’?: laughing with the internet in Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This

Abstract

ABSTRACT Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021) has been hailed as an authentic literary depiction of the contemporary internet. This essay homes in on its protagonist’s veneration of ‘perfectly, perfectly funny’ internet humour as a way of reading the novel’s troubled relationship with the digital world it parodies. I argue that Lockwood’s novel is a perpetually collapsing parody, whose distance from its subject is in perpetual flux, and whose humour hinges on this very instability. Drawing on cross-disciplinary approaches to internet humour and on Michael Dango’s theorisation of ‘bingeing’ as a contemporary crisis style, this essay proposes a reading of Lockwood’s novel as a ‘perfectly, perfectly funny’ troubled transposition of the contemporary internet to the novel form, whose struggle to distinguish between parody and participation is all part of the joke.