Comedy and the Politics of Representation

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Mocking the Weak? Contexts, Theories, Politics

Abstract

This introduction focuses on case studies involving Donald Trump’s performance of offence in moments of public mockery and Frankie Boyle’s politically regressive satire as vehicles through which to explore the main concerns of the collection, which interrogates the ways in which “humorous” constructions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, class, and disability raise serious issues about privilege, agency, and oppression in popular culture. Outlining the theories, contexts, and politics pertinent to the chapters gathered in the collection, we demonstrate how questions of representation mediate the triadic relationship between teller, butt, and audience of jokes, and examine the dynamic role that humour plays in making and remaking identity and power relations in culture and society.

Helen Davies, Sarah Ilott

Chapter 2. Taking Liberties? Free Speech, Multiculturalism and the Ethics of Satire

Abstract

Satires are complex moral performances, which is why they assume such centrality in debates about freedom of speech, especially within broadly libertarian positions that seek to remove or restrict any curbs or limits on free expression. This is because it provides an excuse for mockery or “abuse and insult”, furnishing it with a moral seriousness it might not otherwise have. Satirical mockery speaks to the ethical considerations that are at the heart of any politics of representation because it raises crucial questions about freedom of expression. What gives free speech the legitimacy that endows upon it the status of a human right? Is it a good-in-itself, or because it enables certain good consequences? Should we tolerate expression that puts those consequences at risk?

Anshuman A. Mondal

Chapter 3. Openness, Otherness, and Expertise: Uncertainty and Trust in Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle

Abstract

This chapter argues that the BBC2 television series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle (2009–2016), raises important questions about uncertainty, authenticity, and trust in contemporary culture. It contends that Stewart Lee’s stand-up warrants particular attention due to a set of properties—many of which it shares with literary texts and other art forms—that demand, interrogate, challenge, and enact trust on a number of levels: formal, thematic, ethical, and political. By making demands on his audiences to trust in the performance, accept uncertainty, and allow expectations to be challenged and overturned, Lee’s work counters reactionary and/or conventional forms of comedy that implicitly or explicitly rely on the exclusion of otherness, and offers an alternative based on an aesthetics, an ethics and a politics of openness.

Rob Hawkes

Chapter 4. British Multiculturalism, Romantic Comedy, and the Lie of Social Unification

Abstract

Relationships between people from different cultures are frequently represented with reference to animosity, misunderstanding, or outright conflict. Yet romantic comedy offers an alternative version of the interpersonal relationship: one that is structured through desire, unity, and the social bond of marriage. Premised upon the successful union of the romantic leads, the genre reassures that the couple might function as guarantors for the future of the communities brought into contact through their union. This chapter focuses on interethnic relationships in Mixed Blessings (1978–1980) and Mischief Night (2006). I argue that these works comparably exploit the genre’s function as social unifier, bringing together cultures deemed not to mix, before addressing the implications of making the romantic couple bear the burden for problems of social division in contemporary Britain.

Sarah Ilott

Chapter 5. Parodying Racial Passing in Chappelle’s Show and Key & Peele

Abstract

This chapter examines the ways that contemporary African American comedians examine race, “blackness”, and “whiteness” by parodying the passing-for-white narrative genre. Dave Chappelle and Neal Brennan (“The Niggar Family”, 2004, Chappelle’s Show) and Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele (“Das Negroes”, 2012, Key & Peele) parody passing in order to offer readings of race and racial identity as performative and culturally constructed while also confronting the realities of racism and persistent inequality in a supposedly “post-race” era. This chapter offers a focused and detailed close reading of these sketches, placing them within a broader history of African American comedy and performance (including “passing” skits by Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor) and reading them alongside contemporary theoretical ideas about “signifyin(g)” (Henry Louis Gates Jr.) and post-blackness (Touré).

Janine Bradbury

Chapter 6. Blackness and Banal Whiteness: Abjection and Identity in the Italian Christmas Comedy

Abstract

The popular Italian comic films released annually around Christmas and known as “cinepanettoni” (“film-Christmas-cakes”) are, along with their audiences, culturally deplored, in part because of the racist characters and representations they contain. This chapter considers whether the cinepanettoni are found to be culturally embarrassing also because they explode “banal whiteness”, a term coined by analogy with “banal nationalism” (Billing 1995) to refer to the way whiteness is typically the unmarked racial identity and reproduced in mundane ways rather than in explicitly racist discourse. Banal whiteness is, arguably, refused in the cinepanettoni: whiteness is de-naturalized and rendered visible, and with it normative masculinities and sexualities. This suggests the ambivalence and even the utopian potential of the cinepanettoni, and by extension offensive popular comedy as such.

Alan O’Leary

Chapter 7. Sexual and National Difference in the High-Speed, Popular Surrealism of Tommy Handley and Ronald Frankau’s Double Acts, 1929–1936

Abstract

This chapter explores the gramophone recordings of the comedy double-acts of Tommy Handley and Ronald Frankau (as North and South, and Murgatroyd and Winterbottom) between 1929–1936 in order to explore both their high-speed popular surrealism and their sexist representations of women and chauvinist representations of foreigners and foreign lands—where women are sexual objects, not citizens; and foreigners are to be distrusted rather than treated as equals. It argues that their high-speed vocal performances helped hide the sexist and chauvinist representations by employing old jokes and puns in an inventive modernist surrealist formula putting the listeners’ focus on form more than on content. They constructed the performed identities of Murgatroyd and Winterbottom, especially, as contemporary consumption-based personalities congruent with the emerging England of the suburbs and the prosperous South-East of England rather than the depressed North.

Neil Washbourne

Chapter 8. From Terry and June to Terry and Julian: June Whitfield and the British Suburban Sitcom

Abstract

Like masculinity, heterosexuality, or whiteness, the British suburban sitcom has been a relatively unexamined field in television studies. This chapter examines one of the most popular suburban sitcoms, Terry and June (1979–1987) in relation to the remarkable career of its female star, June Whitfield. Reading Terry and June through the lens of Whitfield’s later work on more “alternative” comedy shows such as Terry and Julian (1992) and Absolutely Fabulous (1992–2012), this chapter examines how British suburban sitcom, a feminine domestic genre, endorses but also undermines cultural norms of gender and class.

Rosie White

Chapter 9. Saintly Cretins and Ugly Buglys: Laughing at Victorian Disability in Hunderby

Abstract

Neo-Victorianism is not a genre which is usually associated with comedy, as the various social power inequalities of the nineteenth century are hardly a laughing matter. However, to what extent can neo-Victorian comedy be used as a political strategy to challenge Victorian attitudes towards disability, as well as critiquing our own contemporary prejudices? This chapter explores the representation of disability in the neo-Victorian television sitcom Hunderby (2012–2015). I argue that Hunderby’s depiction of two stereotypes of Victorian disability—the freak show, and the “cripple”—both reiterates and critiques ableist assumptions about desire and pity in relation to bodily diversity. The series pokes fun at the “seriousness” of neo-Victorian representations of the nineteenth century, but ultimately Hunderby tells us more about contemporary anxieties about disability than providing a meaningful challenge to Victorian ideologies of bodily difference.

Helen Davies

Chapter 10. Standing Up to False Binaries in Humour and Autism: A Dialogue

Abstract

This is a dialogical exploration of how stand-up comedy can “queer” notions of autism when practised by a stand-up performer with autism. It is underpinned by the “double empathy” problem posed by autistic scientist Damian Milton, which suggests that neurotypical and autistic people experience mutual misunderstanding, rather than the empathy lack of autistic people proposed by medical models. This chapter suggests that the intersubjective relationship formed between audience and performer in a stand-up context can temporarily overcome the double empathy problem. The autistic stand-up performer can therefore temporarily disidentify from stigmatising and stereotyping labels, which preclude them from even displaying a sense of humour.

Kate Fox

Chapter 11. Comedy and the Representation of the British Working Class from On the Buses to This Is England ’90

Abstract

This chapter argues that This is England ’90 (2015) uses comedy in a subversive way to critique commonly accepted class-based stereotypes in contemporary culture. Instead of “mocking the weak”, the series challenges neoliberal ideologies, introduced by Margaret Thatcher, which are still prevalent in contemporary society. Comedy has been used in popular British television from the 1950s onwards to represent the working class in both reactionary and radical ways. I show that demonisation of the working class has become common discourse in contemporary British culture. In contrast, This is England ’90 uses comedy in a radical way and challenges neoliberal ideologies of classlessness, individualism and upward monetary mobility, as well as redressing the demonisation of the working class.

Tracy Casling

Chapter 12. Theorising Post-Socialist Sitcom: Imported Form, Vernacular Humour and Taste Boundaries on the Global Periphery

Abstract

This chapter discusses the evolution of selected multi-camera sitcoms in post-socialist 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.

Dejan Jontes, Andreja Trdina

Chapter 13. Smile, Hitler? Nazism and Comedy in Popular Culture

Abstract

This piece examines the relationship between Nazism and comedy in popular culture, from film and television, to fashion and YouTube. Does comedy in this context serve a useful political purpose, or does it just reassert the status quo? Issues concerning taste, ethics, comedy as transgression, the unmasking of authority and the purpose of comedy and laughter are addressed here. Of key importance to the themes of this chapter is Look Who’s Back (2015), based on the 2012 novel by Timur Vermes. This reveals support for different current forms of Nazi related ideology is growing. While it might be funny, mocking Hitler and Nazi-related ideology is in many ways shown to be pointless, but comedy can at least provide a stark warning.

Jason Lee

Chapter 14. POTUS Stand-Up: The White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Abstract

It is known around Washington, D.C. as “Nerd Prom.” The White House Correspondents’ Association—the organisation that coordinates news coverage of the United States President—has held a gala dinner nearly every spring since 1922. In recent years, the guest speaker has been a comedian, and the event has included two comedy routines: one by a professional comedian and the other by the President of the United States. President Barack Obama was typically successful in his performances whereas Donald Trump rejected the platform, a punishment for what he deemed “fake news”. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner as an institution—as well as its particular performances—reward philosophical contemplation, inviting inquiries at the intersections of politics, morality, and comedy.

Sheryl Tuttle Ross

Backmatter