Uncomfortable Comedy

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(Un)comfortable Comedy

• Recent TV Comedy in the Classroom

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Comedy

• Basic kind of text (response to text)
• Often most popular sort of text
• Found in most genres
• Lots of sub-genres
• Very different effects

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Comedy

• Difficult to talk about
• Often depends on surprise
• Usually depends on social assumptions
• Hard to explain the effect and the meaning
• Not a rational phenomenon

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Working with comic texts

• Theoretical framing
• Defining the sub-genre
• Appeal to audience
• What is target audience?
• How they work on/with their target audience

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Theories of comedy

• Incongruity
• Superiority
• Release of tension

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Comedy
A joke is a play upon form. It brings into
relation disparate elements in such a way that
one accepted pattern is challenged by the
appearance of another which in some way was
hidden in the first. -Mary Douglas
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Comedy
The joke merely affords opportunity for realising
that an accepted pattern has no necessity. Its
excitement lies in the suggestion that any
particular ordering of experience may be
arbitrary and subjective. It is frivolous in
that it produces no real alternative, only an
exhilarating sense of freedom from form in
general. - Mary Douglas
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Effect of comedy

• Subversion
• Undercuts social values it presents
• Irony, satire
• Incorporation
• Accepts social values
• Sentimental comedy
• Experienced communally

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Sketch Comedy

• The Skithouse
• Reversal of expectations
• Little Britain
• Outrageous behaviour
• Bad taste

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Why do we laugh?

• Incongruity
• Superiority
• Release of tension
• Carnival (Mikhail Bakhtin)
• Day of licence
• Upturning of social order

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Comedy of Bad Behaviour

• Sitcom
• Kath and Kim
• Arrested Development
• Quasi-documentaries
• The Office
• We can be Heroes
• Soap opera/drama
• Desperate Housewives

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Comedy of Bad Behaviour

• No laugh track
• Distancing strategies
• Voice over
• Stylistic parody

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Audience Positioning

• Attitude to characters
• Configuration of attitudes
• Satirical targets
• How much is it satire?
• Who watches it?
• Different audience sectors
• Uncomfortable?

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(Un)comfortable Comedy

• Recent TV Comedy in the Classroom