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Abstract

Recent work in the sociological critique of humour and comic media has challenged the notion that humour is an absolute good. In this article, we review some of the most interesting work that takes humour seriously and addresses the difficult topic of whether there are ethical limits to humour and media comedy. We outline three main reasons for taking humour seriously and review some of the ways in which humour has been studied sociologically through a consideration of how British ‘alternative’ comedy directed the work of those interested in the limits of humour in relation to gender, race and ethnicity. We also summarise some of the most controversial examples of contemporary media comedy – the comedic performances and personae of Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G and Borat) and the Danish cartoons of the Holy Prophet Muhammad – in order to illustrate the importance of the critical analysis of humour and how the ethics of humour can be applied to comic media.
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You Must Be Joking:
The Sociological Critique of Humour and Comic Media
Sharon Lockyer and Michael Pickering
Sharon Lockyer
Lecturer in Sociology and Communications
School of Social Sciences
Brunel University
Uxbridge
Middlesex
UB8 3PH, UK
Email: Sharon.Lockyer@brunel.ac.uk
Michael Pickering
Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis
Department of Social Sciences
Loughborough University
Loughborough
Leicestershire
LE11 3TU, UK
Email: m.j.pickering@lboro.ac.uk
This is the pre-peer-reviewed version of the following article: LOCKYER, S. and PICKERING, M., 2008. You must be joking: the
sociological critique of humour and comic media. Sociology Compass, 2 (3), pp. 808-820, which has been published in final form at
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120185463/abstract
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You Must Be Joking: The Sociological Critique of Humour
and Comic Media
Abstract
Recent work in the sociological critique of humour and comic media has challenged the notion that humour
is an absolute good. In this article we review some of the most interesting work that takes humour
seriously and addresses the difficult topic of whether there are ethical limits to humour and media comedy.
We outline three main reasons for taking humour seriously and review some of the ways in which humour
has been studied sociologically through a consideration of how British ‘alternative’ comedy directed the
work of those interested in the limits of humour in relation to gender, race and ethnicity. We also
summarise some of the most controversial examples of contemporary media comedy – the comedic
performances and personae of Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G and Borat) and the Danish cartoons of the Holy
Prophet Muhammad – in order to illustrate the importance of the critical analysis of humour and how the
ethics of humour can be applied to comic media.
Introduction: Taking Humour Seriously
Taking humour seriously seems a mistaken venture. The common assumption is that humour should not be
taken seriously, for humour is an antidote to seriousness. It seeks to upset the proprieties of seriousness and
prevent us from taking ourselves too seriously. The application of sociological perspectives to humour only
seems to compound the mistake, so risking turning sociology itself into a laughing stock, or at least
diverting it from such serious issues as the social configurations of division and distinction, or changing
forms of sociality and social networks. To the objections that sociology should not stoop to such trivialities
as jokes or joking relationships, and that humour is too inconsequential to be worth detailed investigation,
we can add another. This is that laughter is beyond the reach of rational analysis and debate. To laugh is to
transcend the whole point and purpose of being analytical. Best, then, to keep humour and social analysis
firmly apart.
The most interesting and valuable work that has recently been accomplished in the sociology of
humour refutes these assumptions and objections. Our purpose in this article is to review this work and its
more specific focus on controversial examples of media comedy. We identify the key issues and themes it
addresses, and argue that its major critical point is the need to challenge the contemporary notion of
humour as an absolute good, as a necessary and vital attribute of being human . To begin with, we want to
outline three good reasons why humour should be taken seriously and why its sociological critique has to
negotiate the question of whether there are valid ethical limits to humour. We shall then elaborate on these
in discussing various examples of critical sociological work on humour and media comedy. In doing so we
operate with a working distinction which takes comedy as usually involving scripted or formalised versions
of comic discourse and conduct for stage and screen, and humour as the much broader phenomena of talk
or behaviour in everyday life which is the source of, or catalyst for, amusement, laughter and the joking
relationship itself.
First, humour is far from trivial. It is integral to social relationships and social interaction. It may
be taken in certain contexts as light-hearted banter, but in other contexts it can injure people’s social
standing, or cut deeply into relationships and interaction between people within and across different social
groups. Added to this is another critical point: if humour is a relatively trivial affair, how can it also be
regarded as transcendent and so exceeding the scope of rational analysis and debate? To see it in both ways
is a contradiction in terms, and it is not a spurious one. It arises because humour is not being taken
seriously enough, or because it takes itself too seriously. On both counts it supports the case for a critical
analysis of humour. Second, humour is not set diametrically in opposition to seriousness, not least because
it can have serious implications and repercussions. Some forms of humour, as for example those involving
sexist assumptions about gender roles and identities, are far from inconsequential. Third, to take humour
seriously is not being anti-humour. It is not intended to stop people laughing. It is to say instead that in its
various communicative acts humour forms a distinct modality of human interaction, universal in
occurrence yet highly particular in how it operates and how it is is sanctioned within different societies and
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different historical periods. What is found funny, and why, is spatially and temporally specific. Trying to
understand this can tell us much about social identities and values in space and across space, and in time
and over time. The sociological analysis of humour can tell us much about how existing social relations are
reaffirmed and normative social boundaries maintained.
There are of course occasions when humour seems almost anarchic in its disrespect for established
structures or cherished values, but as Mary Douglas (1968: 366) famously pointed out, successful jokes
must be recognised as such and socially permitted, at least by more than one participant. The same
principle applies to humour more generally. In a study of humour that is predicated on its serious
sociological analysis, Jerry Palmer asks what happens when jokes fail, or are not given institutional
sanction. The question takes us beyond the formal consideration of comic discourse, and does so because
the success or failure of humour depends upon how it corresponds to the appropriateness of the social
occasion and circumstances in which it occurs. Humour is never exclusively derived from its cultural forms
or from its prescriptive functions, for it has also to be regarded as appropriate to its occasioned performance
and the ways in which such performance relate to a broader social order. Both the teller and the recipients
of humour are implicated in whether it works or falls flat on its unfunny face. Their social identities and
relations, as well as the occasions and settings in which they are placed, have at least tacitly to be
understood for any appreciation of why comic meaning is successful or not. All jokes are, in a sense, in-
jokes and we need to be at least partially in-the-know in order to have any evaluative sense of them.
Examining the limits of humour does not mean a denial of comic structure but rather, as Palmer points out,
negotiation of that structure in relation to the principles of comprehensibility, performative adequacy and
inoffensiveness. For Palmer, an attempt at humour is likely to be found offensive according to three main
variables, which may figure in any combination in individual circumstances: the structure of the joke,
considered as a representation of the world external to the joke; the relationship between the joke-teller and
the others involved in its accomplishment – the butt and the audience; and the nature of the occasion on
which the attempt at humour is made (Palmer, 1994: chapter 13; see also Palmer, 1987).
Politics of Alternative Comedy
Those who have investigated the question of comic failure and the limits of humour were at least to some
extent directed towards this as a result of the anti-sexist, anti-racist shifts that distinguished British
‘alternative’ comedy in the 1980s (Pickering and Littlewood, 1998; see also Cook, 1994, Wagg, 1996,
Double, 1997: chapter 8). This branch of comedy developed from the late 1970s in reaction to the comic
acts and routines of mainstream media and showbiz comedy. By the 1970s the offensive comedy rife in
working men’s clubs and similar entertainment milieux had filtered through in diluted form to television
and radio. Such comedy was nevertheless replete with racist and sexist stereotypes. With ‘alternative’
comedy, jokes of the ‘jungle bunny’, ‘thick Mick’, ‘Essex girl’, ‘mother-in-law’ kind were out; send-up
forms of self-narrative and social realism with a satirical edge were in. Packaged gags and tired
catchphrases were swept away by comic onslaughts against Thatcherism, middle-class foibles and male
hypocrisies, and feminist or feminist-aware comedians began at last to gain a foothold on the comedy
circuit. A lovely example of this was Jo Brand’s turning of the comic table on men: ‘The way to a man’s
heart is through his hanky pocket with a bread knife’. Such shifts led to greater ethical awareness on the
part of both comedians and their audiences, and to some extent a backlash in defence of comedy based on
racial and gender stereotypes or gratuitous obscenity. In the main, the politics of ‘alt com’ were liberal or
libertarian rather than leftwing or directly oppositional to mainstream values and practices, but at its best
‘alternative’ comedy seemed to say what it meant and mean what it said, in a new, values-on-its-sleeve
approach.
Since the 1980s, the increased attention paid to the need for thinking self-reflexively about the
social implications of comic representations has been conducive to research and writing focused on the
ethics of humour. Various studies have looked specifically at the politics of gender in comedy while also
reclaiming a female comic tradition (see Banks and Swift, 1987; Barreca, 1988; Finney, 1994; Gray, 1994;
Sochen, 1994; Cotterill, 1996; Oddey, 1999; and various examples in Wagg, 1998). Racism in humour has
also remained a major topic. In both cases the question of comic failure is paramount, for when a joke is
critically evaluated as sexist or racist, by definition the joke fails and becomes severely devalued as comic
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discourse. Why humour is sometimes found offensive, what social functions offensive humour performs,
and how the ethical limits of humour can be negotiated are the sort of questions raised by its failure. This is
particularly the case with racism in humour. Racist humour is a form of comic malice, but like any form of
humour, it involves both ethics and aesthetics. There is on the one hand a need to appreciate how humour
not only permits but can also legitimate and exonerate a racist insult. The sociological critique of humour
and negotiation of its ethical limits remains stunted without a detailed examination of the linguistic
structures and situational dynamics of racism as it is comically manifest. On the other hand, the ethics of
humour necessitate attention to the difficult relationship between free expression and moral censure. They
cannot be confined to a right to offend.
The Right to Offend
In the view of the British comedian, Rowan Atkinson, ‘the right to offend is far more important than any
right not to be offended’ (The Guardian, 7 December 2004). Clearly, opposing racism is not synonymous
with abolishing anyone’s right to offend or right to freedom of speech more generally, but at the same time
liberal tolerance is not synonymous with the acceptance of public expressions of racist bigotry or hatred –
comic or otherwise – since such bigotry or hatred itself stands counter to liberal values. By extension,
questioning comic offensiveness is not equivalent to illiberal moralism. These points apply to racist humour
just as they do to any communicative act, but what has to be recognised in the case of comic discourse is
that ‘it is precisely the symbolic separation from the realm of serious action that enables social actors to use
humour for serious purposes’ (Mulkay, 1988: 1). Anyone studying humour needs a sharp ear for the
ambiguities and polysemia that are integral to its specific semantic domain and the ways in which it
operates discursively. They have also to be attentive to the ways in which humour provides a licence to be
offensive, racially or otherwise. As a result of this, ‘only joking’ is the classic let-out clause when a racist
joke falls on unreceptive ears or when a gag with racist implications seriously backfires. The excuse
assumes that a joke is just a joke and cannot be taken seriously. This is exactly the rhetorical effectiveness
upon which offensive comic discourse relies. The consequence is our difficulty in objecting when humour
is regarded as overstepping the mark and causing offence. Other rhetorical devices become necessary.
Complaints against offensive humour often use forks of linguistic framing to offset potential objections to
what is said, with attempts to protect the complainant from accusations of being humourless also working
to augment the power of the complaint: for example, the typical opening clause ‘I have a sense of humour
but …’ creates an initial endorsement for a subsequent, semantically divergent objection to what has been
experienced as comically offensive. The strategy is an attempt to navigate the treacherous waters between
ethical issues and comic discourse (see Lockyer and Pickering, 2001 for a case study of the strategy). Such
double-handed manoeuvres signal recognition of the tensions that arise between the ‘right to offend’ and
the rightful articulation of objections to comic misprision and the joking vehicles of stereotyping,
particularly as the so-called humour in these cases can act to camouflage or deflect attention from the
stereotyping (see Pickering, 2001 for a sociological critique of stereotyping).
Over the past twenty years or so offensive jokes made by stand-up comedians, politicians and
media pundits have received intense coverage in the press and on radio and television. Despite this public
attention, quite what is involved in thinking about the ethical limits of humour has stood in need of fuller
discussion and debate. A recent contribution to such debate brought together some of the key sociological
writers on humour (Lockyer and Pickering, 2005). This book is dedicated to exploring in detail the tensions
between serious and comic discourse, and more specifically between humour and offensiveness. It is
especially attentive to how comic offensiveness relates to social divisions and inequalities, and structures of
power in society. Blatant examples of racism in humour are critically treated. These range from violent
racist jokes on Ku Klux Klan websites through Silvio Berlusconi’s Nazi gaffe in the European parliament
and Ann Winterton’s Chinese cocklepicker joke to more ambiguous comic forms involving ethnic
impersonation and comedic uses of embarrassment. The blurred lines between ‘mockumentaries’ and
mockery, and between affirmation and derogation in dramatic personae, are also subject to analysis. If there
is a ‘right to offend’, what remains crucial is whether the humour kicks socially up or down, whether comic
aggression is directed ‘at those who are in positions of power and authority, or at those who are relatively
powerless and subordinated’ (Pickering and Littlewood, 1998: 295). The new self-consciousness about the
relations of laughter and power in social life has heightened awareness of the significant differences
between satirical assault on venal politicians and capitalists, and the comic ridicule of those already
5
oppressed and socially marginalized. While the primary focus in recent critical work has been on racism
and humour, attention is now turning to comic representations of social class, though again asking the same
question: does the humour ridicule and mock those in privileged and powerful social positions, or those in
vulnerable or deprived positions, such as single parents, the homeless or those on welfare (see Lockyer,
2009).
Specifically racist forms of humour and the rhetorical techniques through which they operate have
been extensively studied by Simon Weaver (2007). Weaver charts the shift from biological racism and
embodied racist humour to the more recent coded forms of cultural racism, as well as dealing with attempts
by ethnic minorities to resist and reverse racism in comic discourse. He draws particularly on Zygmunt
Bauman’s treatment of the move from modernity to postmodernity, and uses his concept of liquid
modernity in relation to the fluid and complex ambivalences of racist semantics in contemporary media
comedy. What Weaver calls liquid racism (racism which is elusive because masked in irony) makes the
task of sociological critique harder but no less imperative than in relation to its earlier, cruder forms and
their comic expression. While such forms continue to exist (see e.g. Billig, 2001; Howitt and Owusu-
Bempah, 2005), they are not as rooted in order-building processes as they were in the period of high
modernity and imperialism (for these, see Pickering, 2001). Race thinking and racial discourse were closely
associated with humour during that period. This has been particularly well highlighted in the historical
work that has been done on humour and comedy. Key examples are American and British studies of
blackface minstrelsy, a transatlantic cultural form which subjected black people to sentimental and comic
stereotypes, and studies of the mediation of empire, race and nationhood on the popular stage (see e.g. Toll,
1974; Bratton et al, 1991; Lott, 1993; Platt, 2004; Pickering, 2008). Those construed as racially inferior
were those constructed as figures of fun and comic derision.
Humour and comedy can easily descend into ridicule and mockery. Who has been chosen as the
comic targets of ridicule and mockery and what lies behind these choices need to be seriously investigated
if we are to move towards a more sensitive ethical consideration of cultural representations in public forms
of humour. Just as importantly, we need to question whether humour itself is necessarily and
unambiguously good. As its sociological critique has now made abundantly clear, comic discourse and
narrative can have pernicious implications and consequences, yet bringing these into serious analytical
focus always runs the risk of seeming po-faced and stereotypically donnish. This will always remain the
case when humour itself is regarded as an intrinsically positive dimension of social life. The view that it is
lies enshrined in such popular sayings as ‘better to laugh than cry’ and in common-sense advice
encouraging us to ‘see the funny side’ of things. It is also advanced in some of the most celebrated
scholarly writings on humour. Michael Billig (2005) has subjected one-dimensional positive evaluations of
humour to thoroughgoing critique in his book Laughter and Ridicule. The title reflects his contention that
ridicule is not an aberrant feature of humour, but central to it and the aggression which it masks. The key
point of the book is that ridicule itself, along with its comic vehicles, resides ‘at the core of social life, for
the possibility of ridicule ensures that members of society routinely comply with the customs and habits of
their social milieu’ (p. 2). This imparts to humour a key role in social discipline and the maintenance of
social order.
Billig concentrates largely on theoretical claims that humour is invariably beneficial rather than on
the analysis of media comedy. This has the virtue of showing that current eliminations of the negatives of
humour have not been present in other historical periods. His critique also has various implications for
future work that takes comic offensiveness seriously and tries to develop and apply an ethics of humour to
comic media. Such applications would test whether Billig has over-emphasised ridicule as a powerful but
not all-pervasive feature of humour, and whether all forms of comic media inevitably carry a downside. Is
it always a case of laugh and repress, joke and discipline? What does this say of the laughter of the
oppressed? If media and cultural analysts want to ensure that such laughter is not lost in the critical
distance, they will need to learn how to square an ethics of humour with the aesthetics of comic
ambivalence.
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Battle of Baron Cohen
In recent years, questionable examples of media comedy and jokes told in public settings by politicians and
celebrities have increasingly become the object of critical attention, especially after being reported and
discussed in the press. Jokes and joking performances that are perceived by some as moving into the realm
of offensiveness have ignited academic and media-based debates regarding the intentions of humour
makers, comedy’s potential to challenge taboos, and the limits of free speech and expression. Jokes,
cartoons, spoof interviews and mockumentaries about a range of topics from race and ethnicity to religion
and terrorism, have been key issues in these debates.
One contemporary performer who has received considerable critical attention is the British comedian,
Sacha Baron Cohen (Malik, 2002; Lockyer and Pickering, 2005; Howells, 2006; Saunders, 2007). Two of
Baron Cohen’s fictitious characters – Ali G, a wannabe gangsta rapper from the South East of England, and
Borat, a Kazakhstani television reporter – have been at the centre of the controversies that together
constitute the ‘Battle of Baron Cohen’. Although Ali G has been immensely popular among some British
and American film and television viewers, he has not only been criticised for his homophobic and
misogynistic outlook, but also opposed by black comedians for pandering to racist stereotypes. Others have
objected to the intense media exposure given to him, on the grounds that this would not have been given to
a black comedian (see Malik, 2002; Howells, 2006). The controversy surrounding this popular comedy
icon was in many ways generated by the complex layering of his persona where an educated white Jewish
comedian acts out the street style of an uneducated Black-British ‘yoof’. The key issues have revolved
around the question of who was impersonating whom in the Ali G persona and whether this subverted or
perpetuated the possibilities of black stereotyping. Was Ali G a white, Jewish or Asian wannabe?
Alternatively, was he a white man pretending to be an Asian pretending to be black, or a Jewish man
pretending to be an Asian pretending to be a white man pretending to be black? Perhaps he was something
entirely different to any of these, such is the difficulty of identifying him (Malik, 2002; Lockyer and
Pickering, 2005; Howells, 2006). The difficulty of identification surrounding Baron Cohen and his Ali G
persona suggests that audiences have been laughing for different, and often contradictory, reasons. Such
responses could be read as a contemporary version of what has been termed the ‘Alf Garnett Syndrome’
(Lockyer and Pickering, 2005), where anti-racist critique is misinterpreted as racist celebration. It can be
argued that Sacha Baron Cohen ‘gets away’ with his racist, homophobic and misogynist jokes, with
condoning drug use and car crime, and with being obsessed by designer labels and the size of his penis due
to three features of his performance: 1) the (mis)use of comic impersonation, which extends the ethical
limits to permit offence, and distances Baron Cohen from criticism and hostility (Howells, 2006; Lockyer
and Pickering, 2005); 2) his use of the ‘humour of transgression’, where humour is generated by
transgressing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour so that it is not necessarily created by the content of
Ali G’s speech, but by the inappropriateness of saying certain things in certain situations; and 3) resisting
requests for interviews, so avoiding the need to be explicit or provide explanations about who Ali G is or
what he is trying to say or achieve through his performances. To some extent these conditions apply also to
Baron Cohen’s other comic persona, Borat Sagdiyev.
Although his media identity as a Kazakhstani television reporter is less ambiguous that the Ali G persona,
Borat met with an intensely hostile reaction from the Kazakhstani government following his appearances
on the MTV Europe Music Awards in 2005, and (in global box office terms) the highly successful film,
Borat: Cultural Learning of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006). In this film
we follow Borat as he travels across the United States. Through globally-linked mass-media Borat mocks
Kazakhstan and its post-soviet culture at a time when, since gaining independence in 1991, the country is
preoccupied by the question of its national identity. The Kazakhstani government, sensitive about the
negative portrayal of Kazakhstani culture and character, closed down Borat’s website, borat.kz, and
threatened legal action. Concerns resonate around Borat’s representations of the extra-European Other, or
more specifically, the contrast between developed and undeveloped countries, the gratuitous cruelty of his
comic ridicule, and in the Borat film, his avowed anti-Semitism (Muravchik, 2007). In the conclusion to
his analysis of the Borat phenomenon in the global marketplace, Saunders writes:
Baron Cohen’s subreption of Kazakshilik [Kazakhness] is therefore more than just a joke – it is an
alternative narrative told at the global level through transnational, deterritorialized media. As a
7
result of the weaknesses of Kazakhstani national identity and the country’s keen desire to present
an attractive brand to the global marketplaces, the Borat phenomenon is especially unwelcome at
this particular juncture. Nazarbayev and the political elites he controls realize their role as
arbitrageurs of the nation – a nation which has been wounded by Baron Cohen (2007: 249)
Opinion seems to have shifted since the Borat controversy in 2005. The president’s daughter, Dariga
Nazarbayeva, now avers that the closure of the Borat web site was more damaging than the website itself.
Disregarding the rights or wrongs of the responses of the Kazakh authorities, the Borat controversy, and the
debates around Ali G, are socially significant due to the way in which they illustrate the complexity of the
issues surrounding the interacting coordinates of racism and ethnic identity, comic performance and intent,
and the context of audience reception and understanding.
Danish Cartoon Crisis
Another contemporary controversy over media comedy that has severely tested the ethical limits of comic
representations manifest at local, national and international levels is the furore over the depiction of the
Holy Prophet Mohammad in twelve satirical cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten
in September 2005 (Hervik, 2006; Ammitzbøll and Vidino, 2007; Codina and Rodríguez-Virgili, 2007;
Kunelius et al, 2007; Müller and Özcan, 2007). Through stylistic conventions that include exaggeration,
ridicule and distortion (Müller and Özcan, 2007), cartoons have a form that ‘helps create a subversive way
of understanding the world’ (Maggio, 2007: 238). Published under the title ‘Faces of Muhammad’, the
cartoons made liberal use of these conventions, as for example in depicting the Prophet wearing a bomb-
shaped turban with a lighted fuse. According to Codina and Rodríguez-Virgili, their publication was a
‘strategy to challenge moderate European Muslims to speak out on the social consequences of some radical
Islamist standpoints’ (2007: 32). This was in a socio-cultural context where, since the early 1990s, neo-
nationalism and neo-racism have become once again ascendant and where the rise of the anti-immigrant
Danish People’s Party (DPP) has negatively targeted and stereotyped the Muslim minority (Hervik, 2006;
see also Müller and Özcan, 2007)
Publication of the cartoons outraged members of the Danish Muslim community and the wider
international Muslim community, and their anger was reinforced by the refusal of the Prime Minster,
Andres Fogh Rasmussen, to meet with ambassadors representing Muslims and the Islamic faith. Readers’
letters of complaint were sent to the newspaper at the centre of the storm; a number of transnational
protests and riots occurred, some peaceful, others involving the torching of Danish embassies in Beirut and
Damascus and resulting in a total of 130 deaths related in some way to the violence (Kunelius and Eide,
2007); fatwas were issued appealing for the death of the cartoonists; Danish products were boycotted by
Muslims; and some of those demonstrating against the cartoons in the UK have been convicted of soliciting
to murder after telling a demonstrating crowd to bomb the UK and for stirring up racial hatred during the
cartoon protests. The unprecedented row over the cartoons has been described as ‘the most serious crisis in
Danish foreign policy since the Second World War’ (Hervik, 2006: 225) and as ‘arguably the second major
event after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that brought “Muslims” as a group of political actors to
the forefront of international politics’ (Müller and Özcan, 2007: 287). The cartoons and the subsequent
row can be explained by the racial biases within Danish society and fears over Islam fundamentalist
terrorism on the one hand and, on the other, from a Danish Muslim perspective, the reinforcement of
stereotypes of the Danish in their disrespect of Islamic religious beliefs and their regard of all Muslims as
terrorists (Müller and Özcan, 2007).
Conclusion
Challenging the notion of humour as an absolute good means that humour cannot be taken as a form of
discourse or performance that is isolated from other discourses or from wider configurations of sociality
and social relations. Humour may at times provide distraction or diversion from the serious sides of life or
from entrenched social problems, but it is not separate or separable from the broad spectrum of
communicative forms and processes or from the manifold issues surrounding social encounter and
interaction in a multicultural society. Sexism, racism, homophobia and other kinds of prejudice and bigotry
are not exonerated by their appearance in comic discourse; indeed, they may be more effectively
8
communicated, disseminated and reinforced by being articulated under the wraps of humour and comedy.
Critical humour studies not only addresses the relations between comic and other forms of discourse and
rhetoric, but also focuses on what is specific to jokes and joking relationships and what makes humour and
comic genres distinctive as modes of communication and representation. Most importantly, this emergent
field of study recognises the centrality of comic media in contemporary western cultures, and on this basis
investigates the interface between humour and ethics. The relationship between them is mutable and always
shifting, and so always up for negotiation and renegotiation. How, when, where, by whom and on what
terms this is undertaken are among the most pressing questions we face in trying to understand humour and
comic media sociologically.
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and Roland Schroeder. Working Papers in International Journalism. Bochum/Freiburg Projectverlag.
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Working Papers in International Journalism. Bochum/Freiburg Projectverlag.
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Short Biography
Sharon Lockyer is a Lecturer in Sociology and Communications in the School of Social Sciences at
Brunel University, UK. Her research interests are in the sociology of mediated culture and critical humour
studies. She is co-editor, with Michael Pickering, of Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour (2005) and has
published in a variety of academic journals including Discourse and Society; Journalism Studies;
International Journal of Social Research Methodology: Theory and Practice and Ethical Space. She holds
a BSc and a PhD in Communication and Media Studies, both from Loughborough University, UK.
Michael Pickering is Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis in the Department of Social Sciences at
Loughborough University, UK. He has published in the areas of cultural history and the sociology of
culture as well as media analysis and theory. His recent books include History, Experience and Cultural
Studies (1997); Researching Communications (1999/2007), co-written with David Deacon, Peter Golding
and Graham Murdock; Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation (2001); Creativity, Communication
and Cultural Value (2004), co-written with Keith Negus; Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour (2005), co-
edited with Sharon Lockyer; Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain (2008) and Research Methods for Cultural
Studies (2008).
Chapter
This chapter of Women Scientists in American Television Comedy: Beakers, Big Bangs and Broken Hearts reviews existing literature examining the persistent underrepresentation of women in STEM fields and how television portrayals contribute to this disparity. We highlight how cultural stereotypes present science as a masculine pursuit, where women scientists are frequently depicted through limiting narratives that prioritize traditional gender roles, personal conflicts and diminished competence. Such portrayals can influence public perceptions and discourage young women from pursuing STEM careers. The chapter delves into the impact of humor as both a reinforcing and challenging force in these portrayals. By framing women scientists as sources of comic relief, TV shows risk trivializing their professional identities, which can perpetuate stereotypes. However, the chapter also explores how comedy has the potential to disrupt these norms, offering viewers alternative, empowering representations of women in STEM. An intersectional perspective is considered in how media portrayals affect not only women but also marginalized groups in STEM. We address how the use of ironic and feminist humor in popular media can activate audience reflection on gender norms, supporting broader engagement and cultural change. Through an examination of humor’s role in representation, this chapter sheds light on the complexities of gender, STEM and media influence, underscoring humor’s power to challenge stereotypes and foster positive shifts in how women scientists are perceived in American television.
Article
Humor is a form of speech capable of boosting the political value of a speech’s content or even reversing its meaning. Courts acknowledge these qualities by considering that an expression may enjoy an elevated level of free speech protection against government sanctions or private suits if it is formulated in a humorous way. This article spotlights another key attribute of humor, that is perhaps more consequential for the socio-political impact of an expression but that nonetheless does not seem to be invoked in free speech litigation: its power to increase the exposure of the speech. A humorous presentation of an idea offers its audience an entertaining form that is desirable to consume independently of the message it conveys. It lowers the costs of processing irrelevant or objectionable content and so bears the potential of catching the attention of those who would not otherwise be exposed to it. I argue that the capacity of humor to “raise the volume” of speech must be accounted for in the balancing formulas of constitutional and international free speech litigation. To underline the importance of this factor, I focus on cases of hate speech, a category where humor plays a decisive role in the outreach to audiences that do not always share the prejudice or intolerance of the speaker. This article analyzes the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and of French courts as an example of the general disregard of courts for humor’s amplification of hate speech. The far-reaching damage potential of this disregard is demonstrated on the case of Dieudonné, a notorious French antisemitic comic who has masterfully exploited humor to expose large audiences to hateful content.
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This paper will discursively examine the complex power structures involved in the university setting, as exposed by a student’s verbalised objection to a tutor’s racist humour which targeted Asian international students. By speaking out, this student then became the target of censure from another student who defended the tutor’s use of humour. Such an incident illustrates the dilemmas presented by the (inappropriate) uses of humour in the educational setting, in the context of increasingly literate and confident challenges to such uses/abuses of humour. Using various Discourse Analysis approaches, including Face Theory, this paper will demonstrate how this instance of failed humour invoked many competing social aspects of power, collisions of literacy, hidden institutional assumptions, and emerging notions of how humour can be identified and resisted.
Article
As an autobiographical mode of performance, stand-up comedy is interlinked with debates on identity, inequality and social justice. While much of the existing stand-up comedy and identity literature has prioritised the analysis of a single axis of identity, this study significantly extends existing analysis to examine intersectionality in stand-up comedy. Taking an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical approach derived from humour studies and cultural studies, we explore how intersectionality is involved in the construction of humour in contemporary stand-up comedy. Via a rigorous thematic analysis, we analyse the comedic material of three contemporary stand-up comedians on Netflix – Jimmy Carr, Dave Chappelle and Hannah Gadsby. We examine the intersections of their identities in terms of the representation of inequalities, privilege, discrimination and prejudice. Analysis reveals three key themes demonstrated by Carr, Chappelle and Gadsby that illuminate an original understanding of the relationship between identity, intersectionality and humour. These themes concern: 1) intersecting race, gender and sexuality; 2) depicting gendered violence; and 3) intersectional differences in the uses of disclaimers through which comedy is defended.
Article
The article wants to set the stage for the rest of the special issue titled ‘From resistance to legitimation: The changing role of humour in politics’ by providing an overview of some the key concepts, theories and approaches to humour. It begins by considering different concepts of and some of the theoretical approaches to the functions and implications of humour including relief, superiority and incongruity as well as carnival theory and the role of parody. From these ideas, it outlines several functions of using humour in politics which include the raising of public attention and distraction, provocation and isolation from critique, humour as a means of persuasion and anxiety management as well as the use of humour as a means of stabilizing and de-stabilizing hierarchies. Turning to the main contribution of the special issue it outlines the changing relationship of humour in politics from a means of critique of power to a means of legitimation of power. It places the contribution of the special issue in this debate and holds that humour plays an ambiguous role and calls for further research into the dark and unfunny side of humour in politics.
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White Belongings: Race, Land, and Property in Post-Apartheid South Africa deepens ongoing critical deconstruction of the role of whiteness in maintaining racial order. Scott Burnett , argues that the protection of white entitlement and cultural connection to the land are intimately interwoven, using detailed discourse analysis of campaigns aimed at preventing rhino poaching, stopping fracking in the Karoo, and advocating for the existence of a poverty “crisis,” which reveal how whites hold on to their “belongings” in everyday talk. White Belongings goes beyond the preoccupation with identity in whiteness studies to elaborate how specific subject roles and institutions are motivated and rationalized in hegemonic discursive regimes.
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Full-text available
Although comedy was part of television entertainment in formerly socialist countries before the 1990s, it was only with the appearance of commercial television stations in the mid-1990s that the generic form of American situation comedy was appropriated in local production in Slovenia. What is more, the first attempts were instantly successful and came to stand for the flagship of local commercial television production in the country until the rise of reality television approximately ten years later. Therefore, during an era in which the conventions of the American sitcom were already being contested, especially with the rising popularity of single-camera sitcoms (Newman and Levine 2012, 59–79), the genre appeared in the post-socialist media environment in its early form and did not evolve further on the formal level. In the context of post-socialist transformations and corresponding reconfigurations of social relations, the chapter analyses selected Slovene sitcoms primarily from the perspective of nation, class, and gender performances. The authors define post-socialism as a kind of semantic break (with all the ruptures and continuities) where post-socialist transformation is understood primarily as a cultural process that transforms people‘s practices and beliefs and affects the ways in which they make sense of the social world and their place in it. What is more, the authors argue that the local vernacular aesthetic plays a key role as one of the taste cultures in a specific locality which highlights the significance of locally bounded taste cultures as (culturally and historically) specific ideographic symbolic systems in the context of globalisation. In this manner, the contribution broadly addresses the shifting discourses of exclusion and inclusion in a post-socialist context while also reflecting on the constructions of new social and cultural hierarchies and reproductions of their legitimacy through popular culture.
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Book
Stereotyping stands in need of serious re-appraisal. This book provides a critical assessment of the concept and its use in the social sciences, considering its theoretical basis and historical development and linking these closely to the concept of the Other. As the first sustained book-length treatment of stereotyping in either sociology or media and cultural studies, the text embraces such key topics as nationalism and national identity, gender, racism and imperialism, normality and social order, and the figure of the stranger in the modern city. It is genuinely interdisciplinary, moving between sociology, social psychology, cultural history, psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, and offers an indispensable examination of the roots of prejudice and bigotry in modern societies.
Book
Stand-Up! is the first book to both analyse the background of stand-up comedy and take us inside the world of being a solo comedian Oliver Double writes a lively history of the traditions of British stand-up comedy – from its roots in music hall and variety to today’s club and alternative comedy scene – and also engages in a serious exploration of what it is like to be a comedian onstage in front of a sometimes adoring and sometimes hostile audience. He looks critically at the work of such stand-up stars as Frankie Howerd, Les Dawson, Billy Connolly, Victoria Wood, Ben Elton and Eddie Izzard. And he looks at himself as a performer.
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Alison Oddey's interviews with prominent performing women span generations, cultures, perspectives, practice and the best part of the twentieth century, telling various stories collectively. Stand-ups, 'classic' actresses, film and television personalities, experimental and 'alternative' practitioners discuss why they want to perform, what motivates them, and how their personal history has contributed to their desires to perform. Oddey's critical introductory and concluding chapters analyse both historical and cultural contexts and explore themes arising from interviews. These include sense of identity, acting as playing (recapturing and revisiting childhood), displacement of roots, performing, motherhood and 'being', performing comedy, differences between theatre, film and television performance, attitudes towards and relationships with audiences, and working with directors. The prominent subtext of motherhood reveals a consciousness of split subjectivities with and beyond performance.
Book
Alison Oddey's interviews with prominent performing women span generations, cultures, perspectives, practice and the best part of the twentieth-century, telling various stories collectively. Stand-ups, 'classic' actresses, film and television personalities, experimental and 'alternative' practitioners discuss why they want to perform, what motivates them, and how their personal history has contributed to their desire to perform. Oddey's critical introductory and concluding chapters analyze both historical and cultural contexts and explore themes arising from the interviews. These include sense of identity, acting as playing (recapturing and revisiting childhood), displacement of roots, performing, motherhood and 'being', performing comedy, differences between theatre, film and television performance, attitudes towards and relationships with audiences, and working with directors. The prominent subtext of motherhood reveals a consciousness of split subjectives with and beyond performance. This new edition of the book includes three new interviews with actresses, and is useful primary resource material for undergraduate students on performance studies courses.
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Some readers may have a sense of déjà vu as they examine this section. When I began this book I imagined discovering, guiltily, how out-of-date my knowledge of comic theory is, that complex and passionate debates by critics of both sexes about the relationship between laughter and gender were so well established that even non-specialists could point me towards the relevant texts. It wasn’t like that. I did find exciting work by women which dealt with specific comic practitioners — generally literary practitioners — and offered insights into comic theory on the way. But when it came to discussing and defining ‘humour’, there seemed to be very little that was new. The students I talked to who were doing courses on ‘comedy’ seemed to be reading texts which grounded themselves in the same assumptions about gender as those I read as an undergraduate twenty-five years ago; which means that to attend a course on ‘comedy’ in an academic environment is still to learn a vocabulary that serves to reassert the idea of female humourlessness. Perhaps I should not have been surprised. Regina Barreca suggests that ‘feminist criticism has generally avoided the discussion of comedy, perhaps in order to be accepted by conservative critics who found feminist theory comic in and of itself’.1 Barreca’s own 1988 volume, by combining jokes, analysis and comic theory, thus created a significant milestone in political as well as in cultural terms.
Book
Acknowledgements - PART ONE THEORIZING LAUGHTER - Introduction: Why This Book Does Not Exist - Theoretical Perspectives: Who's Laughing? - Why Laugh - PART TWO SITCOM: STORY OR SPECTACLE? - Born in the USA: A Story of Money and Angels - The Fifties - The Sixties - The Seventies - The Eighties and After - British Sitcom: A Rather Sad Story - Domestic Dragons and 'Doing it Very Well' - Female Independence or Female Lack? The Work of Carla Lane - Role and Representation: the Work of Penelope Keith - The Future - PART THREE STAND UP AND BE COUNTED - On the Halls: Ms/Readings and Negotiations - Making It on Your Own: Women in the New Comic Traditions - Take My Wife - Please! or, Coping with the Clubs - New Comedy, New Chances? - Other Selves: Character Comedy and the One Woman Show - One Woman Many Faces - Snapshots, 1987-1992: Not Really a Conclusion - Suggestions for Further Reading