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.
An incisive, witty and comprehensive textbook that looks at the many genres of comedy from silent film onwards. Covering film, televison and radio it is not only up-to-date but also provides full ...historical context. It focuses on all of the key issues studied on university courses.
It is no coincidence that presidential candidates have been making it a point to add the late-night comedy circuit to the campaign trail in recent years. In 2004, when John Kerry decided it was time ...to do his first national television interview, he did not choose CBS's60 Minutes, ABC'sNightline,orNBC Nightly News. Kerry picked Comedy Central'sThe Daily Show. When George W. Bush was lagging in the polls, his appearance on theDavid Letterman Showgave him a measurable boost. Candidates for the 2008 presidential election began their late-night bookings almost as soon as they launched their campaigns.
How can this be? The reason is that polls have been consistently finding that a significant number of Americans-and an even larger proportion of those under the age of thirty-get at least some of their "news" about politics and national affairs from comedy shows. While this trend toward what some have called "infotainment" seems to herald the descent of our national discourse-the triumph of entertainment over substance-the reality, according to Russell L. Peterson, is more complex. He explains that this programming is more than a mere replacement for traditional news outlets; it plays its own role in shaping public perception of government and the political process.
From Johnny Carson to Jon Stewart, from Chevy Chase's spoofing of President Ford onSaturday Night Liveto Stephen Colbert's roasting of President Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner,Strange Bedfellowsexplores what Americans have found so funny about our political institutions and the people who inhabit them, and asks what this says about the health of our democracy. Comparing the mainstream network hosts-Jay, Dave, Conan, and Johnny before them-who have always strived to be "equal opportunity offenders" to the newer, edgier crop of comedians on cable networks, Peterson shows how each brand of satire plays off a different level of Americans' frustrations with politics.
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.
The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy marks the first comprehensive introduction and reference work for the unified study of ancient comedy. From the birth of comedy in Greece to its end in ...Rome, from the Hellenistic diffusion of performances after the death of Menander to its sympotic, artistic, scholarly, and literary receptions in the later Roman Empire, no topic is neglected. The result offers Hellenists an excellent overview of the earliest reception and creative reuse of Greek New Comedy, and Latinists a broad perspective of the evolution of Roman comedy. In recent decades, literary approaches to drama have multiplied (new historical, intertextual, political, performative and metatheatrical, sociolinguistic, gender-driven, transgenre-driven). New information has been amassed, sometimes by reexamination of extant literary texts and material artifacts, at other times from new discoveries. Archaeologists have rethought the physical configurations of theaters; new studies of vase paintings have contributed to our knowledge of the origins of comedy and its geographical spread; new Hellenistic mosaics have provided information on Menandrian plays; epigraphists have revised victory lists and production records that provide not only the names of plays, authors, and actors, but also the dates for dramatic competitions; epigraphic documents of the Panhellenic activities of the enigmatic “Artisans of Dionysus,” who may provide the missing link between Greek and Roman comedy, have been reexamined in recent monographs; and new papyrus texts have been discovered, while old, all but forgotten texts, have been newly edited after a century or more, and modern technology has even supplied ways to recover new readings from a mutilated palimpsest of Plautus. Forty-one essays and two appendices by an international team of experts offer up-to-the-minute guides through the immense terrain of comedy, while an expert introduction surveys the major trends and shifts in scholarly study of comedy from the 1960s to today.
The Comic Event approaches comedy as dynamic phenomenon that involves the gathering of elements of performance, signifiers, timings, tones, gestures, previous comic bits, and other self-conscious ...structures into an "event" that triggers, by virtue of a "cut," an expected/unexpected resolution. Using examples from mainstream comedy, The Comic Event progresses from the smallest comic moment-jokes, bits-to the more complex-caricatures, sketches, sit-coms, parody films, and stand-up routines. Judith Roof builds on side comments from Henri Bergson's short treatise "Laughter," Sigmund Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and various observations from Aristotle to establish comedy as a complex, multifaceted practice. In seeing comedy as a gathering event that resolves with a "cut," Roof characterizes comedy not only by a predictable unpredictability occasioned by a sudden expected/unexpected insight, but also by repetition, seriality, self-consciousness, self-referentiality, and an ourobouric return to a previous cut. This theory of comedy offers a way to understand the operation of a broad array of distinct comic occasions and aspects of performance in multiple contexts.
This book is the first sustained critical analysis of Cult British TV comedy from 1990 to the present day. The book examines 'post-alternative' comedy as both 'cult' and 'quality' TV, aimed mostly at ...niche audiences and often possessing a subcultural aura (comedy was famously declared 'the new 'rock'n'roll' in the early '90s). It includes case studies of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer and the sitcom writer Graham Linehan. It examines developments in sketch shows and the emergence of 'dark' and 'cringe' comedy, and considers the politics of 'offence' during a period in which Brass Eye, 'Sachsgate' and Frankie Boyle provoked different kinds of media outrage. Programmes discussed include Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Peep Show, Father Ted, The Mighty Boosh, The Fast Show and Psychoville. Cult British TV Comedy will be of interest to both students and fans of modern TV comedy.
The comic playwright Menander was one of the most popular writers throughout antiquity. This book reconstructs his life and the legacy of his work until the end of antiquity employing a broad range ...of sources such as portraits, illustrations of his plays, papyri preserving their texts and inscriptions recording their public performances. These are placed within the context of the three social and cultural institutions which appropriated his comedy, thereby ensuring its survival: public theatres, dinner parties and schools. Dr Nervegna carefully reconstructs how each context approached Menander's drama and how it contributed to its popularity over the centuries. The resultant, highly illustrated, book will be essential for all scholars and students not just of Menander's comedy but, more broadly, of the history and iconography of the ancient theatre, ancient social history and reception studies.
