I want to start my discussion of the parasite with an example from modern film comedy. In the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933), there is a famous mirror scene in which the spies Pinky (Harpo) and Chicolini (Chico) try to steal the war plan from Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho). When Pinky attempts to escape from Firefly, he accidently shatters the mirror. Without anywhere to go, Pinky pretends that he is Firefly's mirror image, imitating everything that the latter does. Not only can Pinky miraculously anticipate what Firefly does, the relationship between the subject and the mirror object becomes ambiguous as the scene goes on. When Firefly walks into the mirror, Pinky walks out from it. Intrigued by the image completely, Firefly acts as if he wants to sustain this illusion: when Pinky drops his straw hat on the floor, Firefly picks it up and hands it back to him. The scene ends when Chicolini barges in, creating the third image, breaking this illusion. Comparing this scene with another similar one in Volpone, this chapter attempts to explain the mechanism of comedy in these two scenes by proposing that their comedy can be explained through Lacan's concept of ‘the mirror stage’. The psychoanalytic theory illustrates how human beings gain their identity through the recognition of the mirror image. The essence of it, in sum, is how we, as human beings, are constructed subjects, a point which this chapter will elaborate later. While we are seldom aware of the working of the ‘mirror stage’ in our daily existence, comedy highlights the functioning of it. The exposing of this concept explains why comedy is often built on the concept of narcissism: a comic character is often the subject who is driven by the logic of the mirror.

This chapter argues that the comedy of Mosca is related to his role as a parasite. While this role has its traditional and historical meaning, it can be understood through a breaking down of the word – ‘para-site’. OED explains that ‘para-’, as a prefix, forms ‘miscellaneous terms in the sense “analogous or parallel to, but separate from or going beyond, what is denoted by the root word”’. Therefore, the word ‘para-site’, as a theoretical concept, can, perhaps, mean the existence of a space which is parallel to or even beyond the original one.