The Cultural Set Up of Comedy: Affective Politics in the United States Post 9/11 (Cultural Studies Toward Transformative Curriculum and Pedago) - Softcover

Webber, Julie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783200316 ISBN 13: 9781783200313

Verlag: Intellect, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

How do various forms of comedy - including stand up, satire and film and television - transform contemporary invocations of nationalism and citizenship in youth cultures? And how are attitudes about gender, race and sexuality transformed through comedic performances on social media? The Cultural Set Up of Comedy seeks to answer these questions by examining comedic performances by Chris Rock and Louis C.K., news parodies like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, the role of satire in the Arab Spring and women's groundbreaking comedic performances in television and the film Bridesmaids. Breaking with the usual cultural studies debates over how to conceptualize youth, the book instead focuses on the comedic cultural and political scripts that frame them through affective strategies post-9/11.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Julie Webber is associate professor in the Department of Politics at Illinois State University.

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The Cultural Set Up of Comedy

Affective Politics in the United States Post 9/11

By Julie Webber

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-031-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Chapter 1: The Cultural Set Up of Comedy, 
Chapter 2: Re-signifying the F-word: Comedy as Political Resistance or Entrenchment?, 
Chapter 3: Breaking the 'Crass Ceiling': Women as Comedians, 
Chapter 4: The Tone of Political Comedy in The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, 
Chapter 5: Globalizing Political Humor, 
Conclusion: After Comedy, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Cultural Set Up of Comedy

Look, I can appreciate this. I was young too, I felt just like you. Hated authority, hated all my bosses, thought they were full of shit. Look, it's like they say: if you're not a rebel by the age of 20, you got no heart, but if you haven't turned establishment by 30, you've got no brains. Because there are no storybook romances, no fairy-tale endings. So before you run out and change the world, ask yourself, 'What do you really want?' (Buddy Ackerman in Swimming with Sharks [George Huang, 1994])

This is a famous quote from a parody of Hollywood studio culture, Swimming with Sharks, starring Kevin Spacey in one of his signature performances as an 'asshole.' The film examines a cut-throat industry through the lens of a producer of Michael-Bay-like films named Buddy Ackerman. As he says while critiquing the sound editing in one of his projects, 'I told you, it's gotta be loud, loud, loud! The audience should feel their balls tremble, their ears should bleed!' His assistant (read: slave) is the Everyman, Generation Xer named 'Guy.' Guy believes that he can 'work really, really hard' and succeed honestly in Hollywood. Buddy schools him otherwise. The lead quote demonstrates a kind of political and cultural truism about American culture and its relationship to youth: that is, that young people are simply 'playing around' until it's time to get serious. The 'hard' reality of life eventually bears down on a person and they give up the soft dreams of 'fairy-tale endings' and 'storybook romances.' Just such an event was said to take place on 9/11 that was meant to force the entire country into a decisive and serious tone and ask the question: 'What do you really want?' Instead, contrary to all the predictions of the anti-irony crowd who longed for seriousness in American cultural life prior to 9/11, the media did not 'return' to a sober, reflective mode of information transmission, politicians did not earnestly make policy designed to improve the lives of their constituents (by and large), and Americans did not demand intelligent, thought-provoking news and cultural programming. Instead, most Americans got exactly what they wanted: the Michael Bay version of America on a daily loop on Fox News and other competing networks. Students turned to Tom Clancy novels for answers about the terrorist attacks rather than actual history or foreign policy texts. Being 'dumb' was fashionable and humble, just like our president, George W. Bush, who never lived in Texas as a child, but developed an accent when he became governor of the state, and exaggerated it when he became president of the country. As Molly Ivins once said of him, 'Born on third and thinks he scored a triple,' George W. Bush was paradigmatic of the kind of leadership people throughout the country would come to emulate through their consumption of media and information. A member of the patrimonial elite to his core, W. epitomized the new American dream: the person who pretends to have worked hard from nothing to 'earn' their guaranteed inheritance. People chose their president because he seemed like someone they'd like to have a beer with rather than because he had shown he could lead a country in a time of war. Once established in media and politics, this genre of information-sharing institutionalized both the 'expert' discourse of the pundit and the authoritative aura of the wealthy who patronized them. The only way to 'talk back' to such an establishment was indirectly through strategies of irony, parody and exaggerated imitations of what passed for 'common sense.' The media, enthralled by having access to this elite core of wealthy leaders, stayed on the path of unquestioning obedience. In doing this they equated wealth with justice as a hegemonic norm. Throughout this book, we will examine how comedy of the political variety attempts to maneuver its way through the hegemony of earnest political cronyism. Furthermore we will refer to this cultural hegemony that often passes as 'common sense' in the Gramscian tradition as:

[...] a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our sense and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values – constitutive and constituting – which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives. It is, that is to say, in the strongest sense a 'culture', but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes. (R. Williams 1977: 110)

In the absence of thoughtful political analysis and responsible journalism, political comedy emerged as the only strategy to challenge the hegemonic norm of earnestness and ignorance. The smartest thing about American cultural life was its comedy. Oddly, it was comedy that was covering serious news, rather than News covering news at all (McKain 2005). One reason for this, according to media scholars, is that news and entertainment had been blurred to such an extent that no one knew what objectivity meant anymore. So let's take a short jaunt through the recent history leading up to this pragmatic conjuncture where fact meets fiction.

Scholars of political entertainment mark the debut of the blurring of the lines between hard and soft news at the 1992 US presidential election, when candidates began to avail themselves of talk shows such as Oprah(and nowadays The View) in order to bypass the media filters and speak directly to publics (Holbert 2005: 441). Cartoon shows like the The Simpsons (1989–), which frequently feature parodies of political figures and celebrities, have been around for over two decades (debut half-hour sketches began in 1989). Blurring would be accelerated around 1995 by the duplication of information-sharing achieved by the Internet, and the technologies and applications that followed to enhance its communicative capacities, such as Facebook, mobile web services, satellite radio, YouTube, aand so on. A related trend in news media was the invention of the 24-hour news cycle. This cycle encouraged the transformation of the news anchor, a person charged with objectively presenting 'facts' to the American public at 6 p.m., with little or no affect, into an editorializing affect manager, whose goal was less to communicate information than to create controversy (Baym 2010). Around 2000, television struck back at declining ratings with 'reality-based programming,' the lure of which is to create reality on a sensational register using the same techniques as fictional television: editing and scriptwriting with actors. Its novelty was to present reality as outrageous, making otherwise banal lifestyle...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783200316
• ISBN 13: 9781783200313
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 230
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland