This edited collection explores the representations of identity in comedy and 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. Should there be limits to free speech when humour is aimed at marginalised social groups? What are the...
This edited collection explores the representations of identity in comedy and 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. Should there be limits to free speech when humour is aimed at marginalised social groups? What are the limits of free speech when comedy pokes fun at those who hold social power? Can taboo joking be used towards politically progressive ends? Can stereotypes be mocked through their re-invocation? Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak breaks new theoretical ground by demonstrating how the way people are represented mediates the triadic relationship set up in comedy between teller, audience and butt of the joke. By bringing together a selection of essays from international scholars, this study unpacks and examines the dynamic role that humour plays in making and remaking identity and power relations in culture and society.
For Freud, laughter was fear appeased; we laugh when someone slips on a banana skin, but it is out of relief that they have not cracked their skull open. The very act of laughter in these circumstances can be a form of transgression, which inevitability reinforces boundaries. In this context, mocking Hitler may actually reassert the status quo, and is not transgressive or politically subversive at all. Transgression, then, is not the same as total disorder. A border may be crossed, but ultimately it reasserts order, and it is concerned with the limits. Within this mythology, Hitler is a figure who can be mocked in all sorts of ways, to reassert the social order. What is actually being mocked is not Hitler or Nazism or the Jews. What is being mocked is the notion of the absolute Other, whic... (查看原文)
Zygmunt Bauman, in a series of influential books, continues and extends the metaphor of the melting of “all that is solid” in his concept of “liquid modernity”. In Liquid Times, for example, Bauman speaks of:
the passage from the “solid” to a “liquid” phase of modernity: that is, into a condition in which social forms (structures that limit individual choices, institutions that guard repetitions of routines, patterns of acceptable behaviour) can no longer (and are not expected to) keep their shape for long, because they decompose and melt faster than the time it takes to cast them, and once they are cast for them to set. (2007, 1)
Bauman’s subtitle, Living in an Age of Uncertainty, is telling here, and it is in the context of a profoundly uncertain set of modern conditions—in which social... (查看原文)
0 有用 濛大板儿 2019-03-12 06:05:39
为了让自己今年的读书报告好看些，我着急忙慌地读完了一本论文，然后心心念念想着读完就可以标记了，结果豆瓣还没有这个条目。于是用小号创建了条目，现在终于可以标记了。我觉得大家不要学习我，我读书动机不纯。
0 有用 张华弥 2019-06-19 18:29:46
(为了Disser，只看了Stewart Lee和Hitler两篇