Taboo Comedy on Television: Issues and Themes

This research sets out to explore the social reception of the television comedy Da Ali G Show -a text that raised controversy due to its politically incorrect discourse. It was carried out in two different socio-cultural settings: London/United Kingdom and Zagreb/Croatia. The results are based on eighteen interviews with these interpretive communities built on shared preference for the show and the type of humour it promotes. There were obvious differences in the position the text itself had in these respective communities: While it was very popular in the UK, especially among young people, it had a marginal position the in Croatia, viewed by a small niche that considered themselves to be alternative to the Croatian mainstream. The decoding of the text showed profound differences: in the UK interpretive community mechanisms were found that enabled appreciation of the show while still remaining within a politically correct discourse. In the Croatian interpretive community, however, these mechanisms were absent, since there was no sense of violation of a norm if one engaged in a politically incorrect discourse. The findings suggest that the broader social context determined the position the text itself had in these respective interpretive communities, and was important in shaping the way it was decoded by the readers.

This chapter discusses the evolution of selected multi-camera sitcoms in postsocialist media culture in the case of Slovenia and Croatia. In order to consider the interaction of the local and the global as well as possible paradoxes and tensions in small-nation/post-socialist sitcom humour, the chapter analyses selected shows on the production, textual and audience level. On the production level the specifics of local production context, influenced especially by low level of audience fragmentation, are highlighted. On the level of representations authors argue that a specific one-layered, vernacular humour is a distinct characteristic of these shows and in the last part the connection between this kind of humour and the audience’s taste in comedy is emphasised.

Although impoliteness and humour are not two terms that sound related anyhow, this thesis focuses on impoliteness and humour interaction. The conversations from the TV show ‘Arkadaşım Hoşgeldin’are extracted based on the idea that each conversation involves impoliteness and humour in itself. The analysis involves how such conversations are initiated and closed, how humour and/or impoliteness is triggered in conversations, and some remarks about the conventional strategies and formulae used as well as the length of laughter as a reliability check in these conversations. Impoliteness and power phenomena are a particular area of interest in research on impoliteness. According to Bousfield (2008b), for a face-attack to be successful, the interactant should be offended. Although Arkadaşım does not seem to be offended, his sarcastic jokes invoke more laughter and applause. Arkadaşım, the butt, not being offended and the audience being amused by his humiliation by the Director are suggested to be related to the genre of such TV talk (see Uçar & Yıldız, 2015), namely: Entertaining Impoliteness (Culpeper, 2011b) or Disaffiliative Humour (Dynel, 2013b). However, neither of these terms fully explains the nature of the talk on this show. In order for these terms to prevail, the audience should be safe and superior. Yet, the audience in the hall is neither safe nor superior. The Director sounds superior to them as well, and they might be humiliated or they are being told what to do, which is an infringement on their personal spaces. Thus, their enjoyment by the show can be related to two concepts of social psychology: authority and obedience.

This article argues that humour can provide researchers with a unique access point into the professional cultures of media producers. By reconsidering an earlier case study, and reviewing relevant literature, it illustrates how humour can fulfil several functions in media production. Importantly, humour is a central means of performing the 'emotional labour' that increasingly precarious media work demands. For production research, the everyday joking and banter of media workers can provide an important and, heretofore, overlooked means of accessing culture, meaning, consensus and conflict in media organizations. The article argues that humour's organizational role should be considered as a sensitizing concept when designing production research.

The political valence of comedy is difficult to determine. It appears often to mock figures of authority, but ideology also relies on comedy to create an investment in the ruling social structure. This essay argues that comedy has no inherent political leaning. We must determine the politics of comedy by analyzing how the conception of the social order that it produces. If comedy creates an image of the social order as a whole, it has a conservative function. But if comedy reveals the incompleteness of the social structure, it functions as a critical comedy that plays an emancipatory role in political struggle.

Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Bloomsbury Press , 2016

Comedy is difficult to define, though the word has been in active use for thousands of years. In ancient Greek, komoidia and, in classical Latin, comoedia referred to amusing stage-plays. In fourteenth-century French, there was comedie, and the frst recorded use of ‘comedye’ in English dates to Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde in 1374. Today, if you go to ‘Genres’ on any movie database, you will and ‘Comedy.’ But if you click on ‘Subgenres’, you will discover more than a dozen options, including ‘Dark Comedies’, ‘Mockumentaries’, ‘Romantic Comedy’, ‘Satires’, ‘Slapstick’, ‘Stand-up Comedy’, and more. Send-ups of politicians, jokes about sex, love stories that end in marriage, and old people making themselves ridiculous by pretending to be young are all forms of comedy that have a long history. Political humour, satire, farce, burlesque, sketch comedy, comedy of character, and comedy of manners – these many kinds of comedy employ different styles and make fun of diverse targets. Is it possible to generalize across this diversity?

European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022

In this introductory article to a special issue on 'the politics and aesthetics of humour', we argue that today in the Global North, humour forms a heavily debated topic, which is deeply embedded in political struggles over who are included and excluded in post-9/11 nation states. Under influence of the recent shift from post-politics to hyper-politics in the European and Anglo-American public sphere, we observe a repoliticisation of humour. To understand how humour in this cultural conjuncture is related to processes of power distribution and contestation, a cultural studies approach is needed. We outline the following four main characteristics of such an approach: (1) it studies humour in the plural, as a set of cultural and aesthetic conventions embodied in practices that are not guided by one grand social or political function, (2) it seeks to understand how humour is embedded in relationships of power, and contributes to the negotiation, contestation and maintaining of social hierarchies, (3) it looks specifically at the form and style of humour, its aesthetics and how on this formal level, political meaning is created and (4) it contends that, while humour often purposefully creates confusion and ambiguity, through its rhetorical and aesthetic operations it also has the ability to foreground particular interpretations, thus making the meaning of comic utterances less undecided than is often claimed.

Critical Inquiry, 2017

At the beginning of the 21st century, comedy dominated the Japanese entertainment industry. The popularity of the comedians - and of the rare female comedians - reached an unprecedented level, and some have progressed to become permanent guests on TV. As a result, the public image of this profession also changed. Previously, the comedic craft was considered slightly disreputable, but now comedians are respected as hard-working professionals. This book is the first comprehensive study on the phenomenon of the comedy-boom in Japan. Erving Goffman's frame concept provides the basis of the interpretation; also basic approaches from theatre studies and the theory of humour and critical work of Japanese comedy experts are used to analyze numerous examples of different genres such as manzai, sketch comedy and rakugo. The focus is in particular on the relationship of the comedians to their roles and the media presentation. Weingärtner, Till. 2013. Comedy-Boom in Japan: Performative and media framing of humour in current popular culture. Band 27 in Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Irmela (ed.), Iaponia Insula: Studien zu Kultur und Gesellschaft Japans. München: Iudicium Verlag. ISBN 978-3-86205-251-6. 430 pages, paperback, 50 illustrations. EUR 48.