A National Joke Medhurst, Andy
2007, 2005-01-01, 20070101
eBook
Comedy is crucial to how the English see themselves. This book considers that proposition through a series of case studies of popular English comedies and comedians in the twentieth century, ranging ...from the Carry On films to the work of Mike Leigh and contemporary sitcoms such as The Royle Family, and from George Formby to Alan Bennett and Roy 'Chubby' Brown.
Relating comic traditions to questions of class, gender, sexuality and geography, A National Joke looks at how comedy is a cultural thermometer, taking the temperature of its times. It asks why vulgarity has always delighted English audiences, why camp is such a strong thread in English humour, why class influences what we laugh at and why comedy has been so neglected in most theoretical writing about cultural identity. Part history and part polemic, it argues that the English urgently need to reflect on who they are, who they have been and who they might become, and insists that comedy offers a particularly illuminating location for undertaking those reflections.
Pornography (and all its contentious pleasures, contested politics and attendant problematics) is enjoying a fresh wave of academic attention. The overwhelming majority of these studies, however, ...focus on the visual discourses of sexually explicit material. This risks the sonic dimensions of pornography being overlooked entirely. Yet porn is anything but silent. This speculative article maps out some of the ways in which the sounds of pornography (and the pornography of sound) might be approached in the analytical context of gay male culture. Not only do the texts of porn contain assorted sounds (dialogue, soundtracks, non-verbal noises of participation, background and accidental audio), they also seek to prompt sounds (not least the non-verbal noises pornography seeks to elicit during the moments of its consumption) and sometimes depend on sound alone (telephone lines that allow access to recorded narratives or 'live' chat). Pornography speaks in particular accents, it mobilizes particular music, it dances to particular tunes and it relies on the pants we hear as much as the pants we see. If queer cultures have their own distinctive worlds of sound, then the sonic armouries of porn play a prominent role within them.
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I’M NOT SURE HOW QUALIFIED I AM TO WRITE THIS ESSAY. BATMAN HASN’T BEEN particularly important in my life since I was seven years old. Back then he was crucial, paramount, unmissable as I sat twice ...weekly to watch the latest episode on TV. Pure pleasure, except for the annoying fact that my parents didn’t seem to appreciate the thrills on offer. Worse than that, they actually laughed. How could anyone laugh when the Dynamic Duo were about to be turned into Frostie Freezies (pineapple for the Caped Crusader, lime for his chum) by the evil Mr. Freeze?
Batman and
This article explores the use of comedy in the films of Pedro Almodóvar, and argues that his commitment to comic sequences and sensibilities throughout his work causes several complications in how he ...has been culturally placed and understood. Three themes are considered. First, although he has been marketed and analysed as a contemporary inheritor of the traditions of European art cinema, his use of comedy sits uneasily with those traditions' commitment to discourses of seriousness and solemnity. Second, his adoption by the primarily Anglo-American 'queer academy' often involves a neglect of the specifically Spanish context of his work and the role of humour within it. Third, his refusal to jettison comedy from the complex emotional range of his narratives lends his films a richness that disregards conventional genre boundaries and cultural hierarchies in their insistence that comedic representation and thematic depth are perfectly compatible.
This article explores the use of comedy in the films of Pedro Almodvar, and argues that his commitment to comic sequences and sensibilities throughout his work causes several complications in how he ...has been culturally placed and understood. Three themes are considered. First, although
he has been marketed and analysed as a contemporary inheritor of the traditions of European art cinema, his use of comedy sits uneasily with those traditions' commitment to discourses of seriousness and solemnity. Second, his adoption by the primarily Anglo-American queer academy often involves
a neglect of the specifically Spanish context of his work and the role of humour within it. Third, his refusal to jettison comedy from the complex emotional range of his narratives lends his films a richness that disregards conventional genre boundaries and cultural hierarchies in their insistence
that comedic representation and thematic depth are perfectly compatible.
Testifying to the fact that British cinema is richer and more diverse than is generally recognized, this collection comprises essays which bring new perspectives to bear on neglected topics in this ...area. Topics include: Gainsborough Studios, Alfred Hitchcock's British films, Derek Jarman's Shakespeare roles, homosexuality and British cinema, women's films of the 1980s, film criticism in the 1940s, post-war films and the English avant-garde.
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