Broadcast for over two decades, South Park is a satirical cartoon that challenges norms and asks its viewers to assess their values. A show whose existence has been challenged long before the era of ...consequences for offensive actions known as “cancel culture,” South Park remains popular in part because of its ability to evolve. While updating the show’s comedy to reflect the current cultural context, the willingness of the show’s creators to address prior comedic errors begs examination of older episodes to see what still works (and what does not). One episode that provides plenty of laughs and timely satire seventeen years after it first aired is “Krazy Kripples,” the second episode of the seventh season that was originally broadcast on 26 March 2003. Bringing the intersection of disability and race to the fore, episodes of South Park like “Krazy Kripples” act as a conduit through which both individual and societal discussions on difference and inequality can occur without temporal constraints. Encouraging self-reflection rather than just laughs, “Krazy Kripples” contains a transformative body politic, a concept coined by Nirmala Erevelles in her 2011 book Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic.
The article discusses popular joke cycles about American tourists and comparable “others”, published in the first decades of the twentieth century in the satirical press of the Yishuv. This rich ...corpus of humoristic literature, which has never received adequate scholarly attention, might shed new light on the nascent Israeli view of competing Jewish centers, and expose the difficulties that accompanied the early formation of local Israeli identity. The article focuses on the satirical expression of identity representations and images, and their affinity to different humoristic genres. It shows how parodies on pilgrimages to Israel allowed Yishuv writers to express self-criticism and mark symbolic inner boundaries, while the more universal jokes let them express ideological criticism and apparently mark symbolic external boundaries. However, since the satirical press of the Yishuv was written in Hebrew for local readerships, we can assume that its “boundary work” was aimed in each case at establishing a new social hierarchy, by setting new criteria for inclusion, and deepening readers’ solidarity and self-awareness, at the expense of similar Others from competing Jewish centers.
This article offers insight into the meanings of the unprecedented political potential of humor in the early twenty-first century by discussing three parodic forms of contemporary political humor: ...carnivalesque politics, parodic reworkings of political discourses, and political protests and satirical activism. Revealing how political parody both produces ambiguity and hinges on it, the article proposes a shift in attention from its effects and capacity to promote or hinder a political change, and from the domination versus resistance binary, toward ambivalent political subjectivities that unfold in the production and consumption of political parody. The ambiguity of political parody, its reflexivity, and its capacity to build or reconfigure affective communities are workings of political humor that enable individuals to embrace their own involvement and vulnerability and the ambiguous and unpredictable moral consequences of their complex positioning as an authentic and potentially productive form of engaging with political reality.
The X-Files episode “Bad Blood” (5.12) was broadcast on February 22, 1998 on Fox. Written by Vince Gilligan, it tells a voluntarily simplistic vampire story confronting the points of view of its two ...protagonists, FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, who present one after the other their version of the events. Self-parody is played out in particular in the way the two investigators consider each other. Each agent simultaneously idealizes and mocks the other in their story, which is filmed in the same settings and from the same camera angles. The opposition produces a dramatic tension that is highly serial, between, on the one hand, the audience's familiarity with the omnipresent protagonists and, on the other hand, the redundancy of the “Monster of the Week” episodes, often accused of making the series go in circles and preventing its mythology from advancing. Yet it is the repetitiveness inherent to the serial form (even in its most serialized versions) that allows The X-Files to self-parody and renew itself while, paradoxically, treading water.
While there is a conspicuous link between utopian conjectures and natural space, the accelerated environmental degradation in the Anthropocene has significantly blunted the utopian appeal of ...'untainted' nature. A similar crisis afflicts notions of utopia as 'undiscovered' space following Reinhart Koselleck's 'temporalization' of utopian speculation. These developments complicate or make impossible literary representations of utopia as unknown or unaltered nature. Drawing on Timothy Morton's ideas of 'space' and 'place' as well as on Eva Horn's reflections on an 'aesthetics of the Anthropocene', the paper examines how narratives of nature as utopia are critiqued and satirised in Christian Kracht's Imperium (2012). The island landscape of the South Pacific remains outside the protagonist's narrative control, resisting attempts to abstract it by staging a 'revenge of place.' Representations of nature as non-descript, homogeneous and empty (or 'space') are confronted with the uncanny and dangerous aspects of a specific 'place.'
With the rise of internet-based digital participatory cultures in India, social networks have become sites of volatile political discourse. As in other countries such as Brazil, China and Russia, ...this has led to the concurrent eruption of memes in India’s political landscape. This paper examines humorous politicized memes that are deployed to critique the Hindu right-wing in India. Through an examination of the formal nature of the meme and its connection to other visual forms such as the caricature, the visual joke and the graphic novel, I demonstrate how seemingly frivolous objects can hold potential for serious discourse. Employing a mix of visual and textual analysis, as well as a survey of virally circulating memes on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, I forward the concept of “memetic visuality”—a mode of imagining the world and the political community through a series of intertextual connections. I argue that social media communication has led to the eruption of a memetic mode of engaging with political culture in India, in which virally fueled parody and satire infuses seemingly non-memetic objects with meme-like characteristics. In doing so, memetic political discourse in India becomes part of a larger global language of online political discourse.
Abstract
The first decades of Victor Pelevin’s writing coincided with the burst in popularity of neo‐Eurasianist and neo‐imperialist ideas. This paper traces the various forms that Pelevin’s ...treatment of civilizational and geopolitically focused ideologies has taken over the course of his career. His preoccupation with these ideas ranges from inconspicuous reflection of the Eurasian phenomenon to Eurasianism’s intensifying critique, and, eventually, to a more comprehensive engagement with concepts of classical geopolitics. If early on Pelevin’s portrayal of neo‐imperialists and their ideas has been largely satirical (
Empire V
, 2006), in the 2010s his texts began to demonstrate a deeper entanglement in civilizational thought and expression of a geopolitical worldview. “Operation ‘Burning Bush’” (2010),
S.N.U.F.F
. (2012), and
Batman Apollo
(2013), while maintaining a satirical take on aspects of the neo‐imperialist worldview, reveal the author’s internalized perception of the world as a stage for the clash of civilizations, and Pelevin’s seemingly growing conservatism. Ultimately, as postmodernist tendencies become common in the political sphere, Pelevin again blends the esoteric and the political by bringing Eurasianist noospherism into “The Art of Light Touches” (2019), lending a metaphysical angle to the antagonism between Russia and the West, and demonstrating how fiction can penetrate public discourse and vice versa.
The paper analyzes the popular nonsense verses of the Bengali poet Sukumar Ray compiled as Abol Tabol (1923) to characterize the humor in them and assess their universality. While the colonial ...critique and satirical insinuations implicit in these poems have been pointed out and applauded in recent scholarly readings, the same does not account for their complex comicality. Ray's
(the spirit of whimsy) threads together the author's preoccupations with inconclusiveness, rejection of grammatical and lexical conventions, aural suggestiveness, dialectic conciliation of contrary elements, intra-structural contingency, systemic autonomy, and linguistic play. By referring to existing theories of humor, especially Freud's theory of "play," and Ray's own critical observations on language, the article reflects on the alternative way to enjoy these poems as Nonsense.
Scholars of Edmund Spenser have focused much more on his accomplishments in epic and pastoral than his work in satire. Scholars of early modern English satire almost never discuss Spenser. However, ...these critical gaps stem from later developments in the canon rather than any insignificance in Spenser's accomplishments and influence on satiric poetry. This book argues that the indirect form of satire developed by Spenser served during and after Spenser's lifetime as an important model for other poets who wished to convey satirical messages with some degree of safety. The book connects key Spenserian texts in The Shepheardes Calender and the Complaints volume with poems by a range of authors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Joseph Hall, Thomas Nashe, Tailboys Dymoke, Thomas Middleton and George Wither, to advance the thesis that Spenser was seen by his contemporaries as highly relevant to satire in Elizabethan England.
