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157 pages

English

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How do various forms of comedy – including stand-up, satire, and film and television – transform contemporary invocations of nationalism and citizenship in youth cultures? And how are attitudes about gender, race and sexuality transformed through comedic performances on social media? The Cultural Set Up of Comedy seeks to answer these questions by examining comedic performances by Chris Rock and Louis C.K., news parodies The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, the role of satire in the Arab Spring and the groundbreaking performances by women in Bridesmaids. Breaking with the usual cultural studies debates over how to conceptualize youth, the book instead focuses on the comedic cultural and political scripts that frame them.

Chapter 1: The Cultural Set Up of Comedy

Chapter 2: Re-signifying the F-word: Comedy as Political Resistance or Entrenchment?

Chapter 3: Breaking the ‘Crass Ceiling’: Women as Comedians

Chapter 4: The Tone of Political Comedy in The Daily Show and The Colbert Report

Chapter 5: Globalizing Political Humor

Conclusion: After Comedy

Sujets

Power Resources

Performing Arts

Sciences et techniques

General officer

Technology

Engineering

General

Energie & environnement

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Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	09 novembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783201440
Langue	English

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Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Series: Cultural Studies Toward Transformative Curriculum and Pedagogy
Series ISSN: 2049-4025
Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos
Copy-editor: Michael Eckhardt
Production managers: Melanie Marshall and Tom Newman
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-031-3
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-145-7
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-144-0
Printed and bound by Hobbs the Printers Ltd, UK
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: The Cultural Set Up of Comedy
Chapter 2: Re-signifying the F-word: Comedy as Political Resistance or Entrenchment?
Chapter 3: Breaking the ‘Crass Ceiling’: Women as Comedians
Chapter 4: The Tone of Political Comedy in The Daily Show and The Colbert Report
Chapter 5: Globalizing Political Humor
Conclusion: After Comedy
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Writing this book has been a lot of fun for me. After writing about school violence and mass shootings in my previous work, the chance to write about political comedy was appealing. While this book certainly does not discuss all or even most of the political comedians working in the United States today, it does limit its range to deal with those comedians who explicitly reference political issues brought to the public’s attention by social media.
I have several people to thank for their support and encouragement during the writing of this book. The first is my husband, Scott, for taking time out of his own schedule to give it to me to finish the manuscript. Without our teamwork, this could not have been possible. I also want to thank and apologize to my twin sons for working. I would much rather have been riding bikes or reading books with them. My parents are always encouraging of my work as well.
I want to thank William M. Reynolds, the series editor, for his support and encouragement of the book. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for the glowing and sensitive review of the manuscript. I also want to thank Ali Riaz, Yusuf Sarfati and Kam Shapiro for reading drafts of chapters and making important comments. Thanks as well to Jeffrey Sconce for pointing me in the direction of some work in the field of communication; I am indebted to his version of ‘affect’ inspired by Raymond Williams.
Three of the chapters were presented as drafts at conferences. Chapter 2 was presented at the 2011 Western Political Science Association Conference. I would like to thank Joan Tronto, as well as members of the panel, for thoughtful comments on the draft and supportive comments during the presentation. Chapter 3 was presented at the 2012 Western Political Science Conference in Portland, Oregon. I want to especially thank an audience member (whose name I did not catch) for her thoughts on Bridesmaids , as well as reminding me of the relevance of a particular scene from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle . Finally, Chapter 5 was presented at the Midwest International Studies Association Conference in 2012.
Preparation of the book manuscript was supported by a Faculty Research Grant awarded in the spring of 2013 by the College of Arts and Sciences at Illinois State University.
This book is dedicated to Scott, Finn and Alec.
Chapter 1
The Cultural Set Up of Comedy
Look, I can appreciate this. I was young too, I felt just like you. Hated authority, hated all my bosses, thought they were full of shit. Look, it’s like they say: if you’re not a rebel by the age of 20, you got no heart, but if you haven’t turned establishment by 30, you’ve got no brains. Because there are no storybook romances, no fairy-tale endings. So before you run out and change the world, ask yourself, ‘What do you really want?’ (Buddy Ackerman in Swimming with Sharks [George Huang, 1994])
This is a famous quote from a parody of Hollywood studio culture, Swimming with Sharks , starring Kevin Spacey in one of his signature performances as an ‘asshole.’ The film examines a cut-throat industry through the lens of a producer of Michael-Bay-like films named Buddy Ackerman. As he says while critiquing the sound editing in one of his projects, ‘I told you, it’s gotta be loud, loud, loud! The audience should feel their balls tremble, their ears should bleed!’ His assistant (read: slave) is the Everyman, Generation Xer named ‘Guy.’ Guy believes that he can ‘work really, really hard’ and succeed honestly in Hollywood. Buddy schools him otherwise. The lead quote demonstrates a kind of political and cultural truism about American culture and its relationship to youth: that is, that young people are simply ‘playing around’ until it’s time to get serious. The ‘hard’ reality of life eventually bears down on a person and they give up the soft dreams of ‘fairy-tale endings’ and ‘storybook romances.’ Just such an event was said to take place on 9/11 that was meant to force the entire country into a decisive and serious tone and ask the question: ‘What do you really want?’ 1 Instead, contrary to all the predictions of the anti-irony crowd who longed for seriousness in American cultural life prior to 9/11, the media did not ‘return’ to a sober, reflective mode of information transmission, politicians did not earnestly make policy designed to improve the lives of their constituents (by and large), and Americans did not demand intelligent, thought-provoking news and cultural programming. Instead, most Americans got exactly what they wanted: the Michael Bay version of America on a daily loop on Fox News and other competing networks. Students turned to Tom Clancy novels for answers about the terrorist attacks rather than actual history or foreign policy texts. Being ‘dumb’ was fashionable and humble, just like our president, George W. Bush, who never lived in Texas as a child, but developed an accent when he became governor of the state, and exaggerated it when he became president of the country. As Molly Ivins once said of him, ‘Born on third and thinks he scored a triple,’ George W. Bush was paradigmatic of the kind of leadership people throughout the country would come to emulate through their consumption of media and information. A member of the patrimonial elite to his core, W. epitomized the new American dream: the person who pretends to have worked hard from nothing to ‘earn’ their guaranteed inheritance. People chose their president because he seemed like someone they’d like to have a beer with rather than because he had shown he could lead a country in a time of war. Once established in media and politics, this genre of information-sharing institutionalized both the ‘expert’ discourse of the pundit and the authoritative aura of the wealthy who patronized them. The only way to ‘talk back’ to such an establishment was indirectly through strategies of irony, parody and exaggerated imitations of what passed for ‘common sense.’ The media, enthralled by having access to this elite core of wealthy leaders, stayed on the path of unquestioning obedience. In doing this they equated wealth with justice as a hegemonic norm. Throughout this book, we will examine how comedy of the political variety attempts to maneuver its way through the hegemony of earnest political cronyism. Furthermore we will refer to this cultural hegemony that often passes as ‘common sense’ in the Gramscian tradition as:
[…] a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our sense and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values – constitutive and constituting – which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives. It is, that is to say, in the strongest sense a ‘culture’, but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes. (R. Williams 1977: 110)
In the absence of thoughtful political analysis and responsible journalism, political comedy emerged as the only strategy to challenge the hegemonic norm of earnestness and ignorance. The smartest thing about American cultural life was its comedy. Oddly, it was comedy that was covering serious news, rather than News covering news at all (McKain 2005). One reason for this, according to media scholars, is that news and entertainment had been blurred to such an extent that no one knew what objectivity meant anymore. So let’s take a short jaunt through the recent history leading up to this pragmatic conjuncture where fact meets fiction.
Scholars of political entertainment mark the debut of the blurring of the lines between hard and soft news at the 1992 US presidential election, when candidates began to avail themselves of talk shows such as Oprah (and nowadays The View ) in order to bypass the media filters and speak directly to publics (Holbert 2005: 441). Cartoon shows like the The Simpsons (1989–), which frequently feature parodies of political figures and celebrities, have been around for over two decades (debut half-hour sketches began in 1989). Blurring would be accelerated around 1995 by the duplication of information-sharing achieved by the Internet, and the technologies and applications that followed to enhance its communicative capacities, such as Facebook, mobile web services, satellite radio, YouTube, and so on. A rela