In this examination of stand-up comedy, Rebecca Krefting establishes a new genre of comedic production, “charged humor,” and charts its pathways from production to consumption. Some jokes are tears ...in the fabric of our beliefs—they challenge myths about how fair and democratic our society is and the behaviors and practices we enact to maintain those fictions. Jokes loaded with vitriol and delivered with verve, charged humor compels audiences to action, artfully summoning political critique.
Since the institutionalization of stand-up comedy as a distinct cultural form, stand-up comics have leveraged charged humor to reveal social, political, and economic stratifications. All Joking Aside offers a history of charged comedy from the mid-twentieth century to the early aughts, highlighting dozens of talented comics from Dick Gregory and Robin Tyler to Micia Mosely and Hari Kondabolu.
The popularity of charged humor has waxed and waned over the past sixty years. Indeed, the history of charged humor is a tale of intrigue and subversion featuring dive bars, public remonstrations, fickle audiences, movie stars turned politicians, commercial airlines, emergent technologies, neoliberal mind-sets, and a cavalcade of comic misfits with an ax to grind. Along the way, Krefting explores the fault lines in the modern economy of humor, why men are perceived to be funnier than women, the perplexing popularity of modern-day minstrelsy, and the way identities are packaged and sold in the marketplace.
Appealing to anyone interested in the politics of humor and generating implications for the study of any form of popular entertainment, this history reflects on why we make the choices we do and the collective power of our consumptive practices. Readers will be delighted by the broad array of comic talent spotlighted in this book, and for those interested in comedy with substance, it will offer an alternative punchline.
Hannah Gadsby's widely viewed stand-up comedy special Nanette tackles pressing social justice issues like gender violence, sexual assault, and homophobia. Along the way, she challenges stand-up ...comedy as a masculinist cultural form and systematically exposes the limitations of satire, speaking the truths we dare not disclose for fear of losing the funny. Satire necessarily requires a play frame and seeks to elicit laughter. Privileging humor as vehicle for serious critique runs the risk of undermining the importance of human rights issues such as those raised by Gadsby. Satire has also proven to be advantageous for some but not others to deploy. Social conditioning informs reception to satire, meaning that certain identities will find it difficult to pull off this comedy style with the same ease and success as others occupying dominant categories of identity.
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In this article, we examine the myriad ways comics harness emergent social media tools and these online platforms impact the production, exchange, and consumption of humor. Review of popular media, ...interviews, and scholarship yielded three important themes. (1) The comedy industry is in flux, but this is in no way a new phenomenon. (2) There are multiple uses of social media and how comics use these media tools often hinges on their intent and status. To illustrate this, we describe the six most prominent uses of social media. (3) The substance of humor remains fairly consistent in content and style of delivery but social media is giving rise to tribalism among like-minded comedy fans, which has an impact on audience composition and the content of comedy. We conclude by warning against any preemptive celebrations of the Internet and social media as democratizing forces that challenge existing social hierarchies.
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5.
The Political Force of the Comedic Webber, Julie; Momen, Mehnaaz; Finley, Jessyka ...
Contemporary political theory,
06/2021, Volume:
20, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Political comedy, whether it is in the form of an entertainment news show, meme, cartoon or even when a comedian uses their set to focus on a political issue has become ubiquitous in the past 20 ...years. This is not just an American phenomenon. Countries worldwide have their own political comedy shows. Comedians who confront authority have been elected to office. A sense of humor is now seen as a requirement on campaign trails. We suggest that comedy’s dominance in popular culture is not only a means to inform and entertain audiences who are largely confronting precarity, increasing police power and state abandonment of its governing role, but also because it is the preferred genre: as the old saying goes, they laugh to keep from crying. Ridicule and parody, from both sides, also serve to energize audiences, and have done so for decades.This critical exchange is focused on how political comedy deepens the attention span of audiences, prepares them for policy, energizes their attitudes toward elites and perhaps educates them. Political comedy is often scoffed at because it can’t pass the test of turning audiences into agents, or, even less daunting, voters. Political comedy has also been seen as having little value for critique (Ferguson, 2018). What if comedy’s role in politics is something now more akin to music or any other aesthetic experience? People are not surprised when musical artists sue politicians for using their songs, but with comedy, somehow the bar for political efficacy is set much higher. One way to look at comedy is not through the traditional modern sense of agency but through the work it might do in preparing the ground work – the affective cultural shift – necessary to effect widespread change at some future point in time.
Amy Schumer, Samantha Bee, Mindy Kaling, Melissa McCarthy, Tig Notaro, Leslie Jones, and a host of hilarious peers are killing it nightly on American stages and screens large and small, smashing the ...tired stereotype that women aren’t funny. But today’s funny women aren’t a new phenomenon—they have generations of hysterically funny foremothers. Fay Tincher’s daredevil stunts, Mae West’s linebacker walk, Lucille Ball’s manic slapstick, Carol Burnett’s athletic pratfalls, Ellen DeGeneres’s tomboy pranks, Whoopi Goldberg’s sly twinkle, and Tina Fey’s acerbic wit all paved the way for contemporary unruly women, whose comedy upends the norms and ideals of women’s bodies and behaviors. Hysterical! Women in American Comedy delivers a lively survey of women comics from the stars of the silent cinema up through the multimedia presences of Tina Fey and Lena Dunham. This anthology of original essays includes contributions by the field’s leading authorities, introducing a new framework for women’s comedy that analyzes the implications of hysterical laughter and hysterically funny performances. Expanding on previous studies of comedians such as Mae West, Moms Mabley, and Margaret Cho, and offering the first scholarly work on comedy pioneers Mabel Normand, Fay Tincher, and Carol Burnett, the contributors explore such topics as racial/ethnic/sexual identity, celebrity, stardom, censorship, auteurism, cuteness, and postfeminism across multiple media. Situated within the main currents of gender and queer studies, as well as American studies and feminist media scholarship, Hysterical! masterfully demonstrates that hysteria—women acting out and acting up—is a provocative, empowering model for women’s comedy.
SOUTH KOREAN AMERICAN COMIC Margaret Cho will be the first one to tell you that she is not an authority on all things Asian or even Korean, but that does not stop people from asking her to weigh in ...as a comic spokesperson on matters concerning the Orient. But she also identifies as queer, as a fag hag, as a feminist, as an activist, and as a recovering alcoholic, among many other identities. While the media has a narrow vision regarding the matters upon which Cho can comment (i.e., race/ethnicity), her fans understand that she is both/and. She is both
Like many cultural practices, comic performance is one of a host of weapons in the arsenal of tactics, strategies, and offensive maneuverings available to individuals and communities seeking to ...redress inequitable distributions of wealth, power, rights, and cultural visibility. This dissertation examines contemporary jesters opting to use humor to develop community, instruct and mobilize audience members, and lobby for political and cultural inclusion. It is a kind of humor that illumines one’s position in a specific socio-political, historical matrix; it is humor that creates community and conversely demonstrates the ways in which one does not belong. An examination of the economy—the production, exchange, and consumption—of this humor reveals how and why comics produce charged humor or humor that illumines one’s status as second-class citizen and how this kind of humor is consumed in the US. I employ a mixed-methods qualitative approach using ethnography, archival research, and critical discourse analysis to investigate comic performances: stand-up comedy, sketch comedy, and one-woman shows. Throughout, I draw from dozens of contemporary comics performing in the US, but take as case studies: Robin Tyler, a Jewish lesbian comic and activist who is currently spearheading the marriage equality movement in California; Micia Mosely, a Brooklyn-based, Black, queer woman whose one-woman show, Where My Girls At?: A Comedic Look at Black Lesbians, is touring the country; and a group of young people (eighteen and under) participating in Comedy Academy programs (a non-profit arts education organization in Maryland), allowing them to author and perform sketch comedy. My sources for this project include popular culture ephemera such as print and electronic media, public commentary, documentaries about stand-up comedy, interviews with comics and industry entrepreneurs, performance and program evaluations, comic material (jokes), and performance texts. Drawing from nation and citizenship theories, cultural studies, performance studies, and a number of identity-based disciplines, I argue that humor intervenes on behalf of minoritarian subjects and it is part of our task to read these performances for the tactics and approaches they supply for being fully incorporated in the national polity.
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