Finite Jest
2026
new solo performance for theatres / 60 minutes

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.

 

Finite Jest departs from Wolf’s own encounters with death and (nearly) dying through her own experiences with breast cancer treatment, the death of friends, the grief feed on the phone screen; and raising a 5-year-old child asking: “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. And in what ways can we work with humour as the absurd, weird thing that makes the fact of death – and the inevitability of grief – occasionally bearable? 

 

Melanie Jame Wolf invokes archetypal images – from Hamlet, through the figure of the jester, to pop culture – in order to question social scripts for how we grieve, how we think about dying, and how morality is produced around these topics.

 

The piece departs from her 2024 essay for Delfi Magazin titled The Mean Well.