Download or read book The Rhetoric of Racist Humour written by Simon Weaver and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today's multicultural and multireligious societies, humour and comedy often become the focus of controversy over alleged racist or offensive content, as shown, for instance, by the intense debate of Sacha Baron Cohen's characters Ali G and Borat, and the Prophet Muhammad cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Despite these intense debates, commentary on humour in the academy lacks a clear way of connecting the serious and the humorous, and a clear way of accounting for the serious impact of comic language. The absence of a developed 'serious' vocabulary with which to judge the humorous tends to encourage polarized debates, which fail to account for the paradoxes of humour. This book draws on the social theory of Zygmunt Baumann to examine the linguistic structure of humour, arguing that, as a form of language similar to metaphor, it is both unstable and unpredictable, and structurally prone to act rhetorically; that is, to be convincing. Deconstructing the dominant form of racism aimed at black people in the US, and that aimed at Asians in the UK, The Rhetoric of Racist Humour shows how racist humour expresses and supports racial stereotypes in the US and UK, while also exploring the forms of resistance presented by the humour of Black and Asian comedians to such stereotypes. An engaging exploration of modern, late modern and fluid or postmodern forms of humour, this book will be of interest to sociologists and scholars of cultural and media studies, as well as those working in the fields of race and ethnicity, humour and cultural theory.
Download or read book The Rhetoric of Racist Humour written by Simon Weaver and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging exploration of modern, late modern and fluid or postmodern humour, Weaver draws on the social theory of Zygmunt Baumann to examine the linguistic structure of humour, arguing that, being similar to metaphor, it is prone to be convincing. Deconstructing the dominant form of racism aimed at black people in the US, and Asians in the UK, this book shows how it expresses and supports racial stereotypes, while exploring the forms of resistance presented by Black and Asian comedians.
Download or read book Under the Surface written by Tom Wilber and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the updated paperback edition of Under the Surface, Tom Wilber has written a new chapter and epilogue covering developments since the book's initial publication. Chief among these are the home rule movement and accompanying social and legal events leading up to an unprecedented ban of fracking in New York state, and the outcome of the federal EPA's investigation of water pollution just across the state border in Dimock, Pennsylvania. The industry, with powerful political allies, effectively challenged the federal government’s attempts to intervene in drilling communities in Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and Texas with water problems. But it met its match in a grassroots movement—known as "fractivism"—that sprouted from seeds sown in upstate New York community halls and grew into one of the state’s most influential environmental movements since Love Canal.Wilber weaves a narrative tracing the consequences of shale gas development in northeast Pennsylvania and central New York through the perspective of various stakeholders. Wilber's evenhanded treatment explains how the revolutionary process of fracking has changed both access to our domestic energy reserves and the lives of people living over them.He gives a voice to all constituencies, including farmers and landowners tempted by the prospects of wealth but wary of the consequences; policymakers struggling with divisive issues concerning free enterprise, ecology, and public health; and activists coordinating campaigns based on their respective visions of economic salvation and environmental ruin. Throughout the book, Wilber illustrates otherwise dense policy and legal issues in human terms and shows how ordinary people can affect extraordinary events.
Download or read book The Souls of White Jokes written by Raúl Pérez and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rigorous study of the social meaning and consequences of racist humor, and a damning argument for when the joke is not just a joke. Having a good sense of humor generally means being able to take a joke without getting offended--laughing even at a taboo thought or at another's expense. The insinuation is that laughter eases social tension and creates solidarity in an overly politicized social world. But do the stakes change when the jokes are racist? In The Souls of White Jokes Raúl Pérez argues that we must genuinely confront this unsettling question in order to fully understand the persistence of anti-black racism and white supremacy in American society today. W.E.B. Du Bois's prescient essay The Souls of White Folk was one of the first to theorize whiteness as a social and political construct based on a feeling of superiority over racialized others--a kind of racial contempt. Pérez extends this theory to the study of humor, connecting theories of racial formation to parallel ideas about humor stemming from laughter at another's misfortune. Critically synthesizing scholarship on race, humor, and emotions, he uncovers a key function of humor as a tool for producing racial alienation, dehumanization, exclusion, and even violence. Pérez tracks this use of humor from blackface minstrelsy to contemporary contexts, including police culture, politics, and far-right extremists. Rather than being harmless fun, this humor plays a central role in reinforcing and mobilizing racist ideology and power under the guise of amusement. The Souls of White Jokes exposes this malicious side of humor, while also revealing a new facet of racism today. Though it can be comforting to imagine racism as coming from racial hatred and anger, the terrifying reality is that it is tied up in seemingly benign, even joyful, everyday interactions as well-- and for racism to be eradicated we must face this truth.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race written by Ayanna Thompson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race shows teachers and students how and why Shakespeare and race are inseparable. Moving well beyond Othello, the collection invites the reader to understand racialized discourses, rhetoric, and performances in all of Shakespeare's plays, including the comedies and histories. Race is presented through an intersectional approach with chapters that focus on the concepts of sexuality, lineage, nationality, and globalization. The collection helps students to grapple with the unique role performance plays in constructions of race by Shakespeare (and in Shakespearean performances), considering both historical and contemporary actors and directors. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race will be the first book that truly frames Shakespeare studies and early modern race studies for a non-specialist, student audience.
Download or read book White Fragility written by Dr. Robin DiAngelo and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.
Download or read book Standing Up Speaking Out written by Matthew R. Meier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-14 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, some of the most celebrated and culturally influential American oratorical performances have come not from political leaders or religious visionaries, but from stand-up comics. Even though comedy and satire have been addressed by rhetorical scholarship in recent decades, little attention has been paid to stand-up. This collection is an attempt to further cultivate the growing conversation about stand-up comedy from the perspective of the rhetorical tradition. It brings together literatures from rhetorical, cultural, and humor studies to provide a unique exploration of stand-up comedy that both argues on behalf of the form’s capacity for social change and attempts to draw attention to a series of otherwise unrecognized rhetors who have made significant contributions to public culture through comedy.
Download or read book Beyond a Joke written by S. Lockyer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-11-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humour is pervasive in contemporary culture, and is generally celebrated as a public good. Yet there are times when it is felt to produce intolerance, misunderstanding or even hatred. This book brings together, for the first time, contributions that consider the ethics as well as the aesthetics of humour. The book focuses on the abuses and limits of humour, some of which excite considerable social tension and controversy. Beyond a Joke is an exciting intervention, full of challenging questions and issues.
Download or read book Civil War Humor written by Cameron C. Nickels and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Civil War Humor, author Cameron C. Nickels examines the various forms of comedic popular artifacts produced in America from 1861 to 1865, and looks at how wartime humor was created, disseminated, and received by both sides of the conflict. Song lyrics, newspaper columns, sheet music covers, illustrations, political cartoons, fiction, light verse, paper dolls, printed envelopes, and penny dreadfuls—from and for the Union and the Confederacy—are analyzed at length. Nickels argues that the war coincided with the rise of inexpensive mass printing in the United States and thus subsequently with the rise of the country's widely distributed popular culture. As such, the war was as much a “paper war”—involving the use of publications to disseminate propaganda and ideas about the Union and the Confederacy's positions—as one taking place on battlefields. Humor was a key element on both sides in deflating pretensions and establishing political stances (and ways of critiquing them). Civil War Humor explores how the combatants portrayed Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, life on the home front, battles, and African Americans. Civil War Humor reproduces over sixty illustrations and texts created during the war and provides close readings of these materials. At the same time, it places this corpus of comedy in the context of wartime history, economies, and tactics. This comprehensive overview examines humor's role in shaping and reflecting the cultural imagination of the nation during its most tumultuous period.
Download or read book Engaging Humor written by Elliott Oring and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the structure, motives, and meanings of humor in everyday life In Engaging Humor, Elliott Oring asks essential questions concerning humorous expression in contemporary society, examining how humor works, why it is employed, and what its messages might be. This provocative book is filled with examples of jokes and riddles that reveal humor to be a meaningful--even significant--form of expression. Oring scrutinizes classic Jewish jokes, frontier humor, racist cartoons, blonde jokes, and Internet humor. He provides alternate ways of thinking about humorous expressions by examining their contexts--not just their contents. He also shows how the incongruity and absurdity essential to the production of laughter can serve serious communicative ends. Engaging Humor examines the thoughts that underlie jokes, the question of racist motivation in ethnic humor, and the use of humor as a commentary on social interaction. The book also explores the relationship between humor and sentimentality and the role of humor in forging national identity. Engaging Humor demonstrates that when analyzed contextually and comparatively, humorous expressions emerge as communications that are startling, intriguing, and profound.
Download or read book The Joke Is on Us written by Julie A. Webber and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume brings together scholars of comedy to assess how political comedy encounters neoliberal themes in contemporary media. Central to this task is the notion of genre; under neoliberal conditions (where market logics motivate most actions) genre becomes “mixed.” Once stable, discreet categories such as comedy, horror, drama and news and entertainment have become blurred so as to be indistinguishable. The classic modern paradigm of comedy/tragedy no longer holds, if it ever did. Moreover, as politics becomes more economic and less moral or normative under neoliberalism, we are able to see new resistance to comedic genres that support neoliberal strategies to hide racial and gender injustice such as unlaughter, ambiguity, and anti-comedy. There is also an increasing interest with comedy as a form of entertainment on the political right following both Brexit in the UK and the election of Trump in the U.S. Several essays confront this conservative comedy and place it in context of the larger humor history of these debates over free speech and political correctness. For comedians too, entry into popular media now follows the familiar neoliberal script of the celebration of self-help with the increasing admonishment of those who fail to win in market terms. Laughter plays an important role in shaming and valorizing (often at the same time!) the precarious subject in the aftermath of global recession. Doubling down on austerity, self-help policies and equivocation in the face of extremist challenges (right and left), politics foils the critical comedian’s attempt to satirize and parody its object. Characterized by ambiguity, mixed genre and the increasing use of anti-humor, political comedy mirrors the social and political world it mocks, parodies and celebrates often with lackluster results suggesting that the joke might be on us, as audiences.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Humour written by Jan Bremmer and published by Polity. This book was released on 1997-07-07 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humour is without doubt a vital element of the human condition but it has rarely been the subject of serious historical research. Yet a closer look at jokes and other comic phenomena shows us that the nature of humour changes from one period to another, and that these changes can provide us with important insights into the social and cultural developments of the past. This important and highly original book sets out to explore the terra incognita of humour through the ages - from jokes and stage humour in Greece and Rome to the jestbooks of early modern Europe, from practical jokes in Renaissance Italy to comic painting during the Dutch Golden Age, from Bakhtin's conception of laughter to the joking relationships of anthropologists. These innovative accounts move humour into the centre of social and cultural history and throw an unexpected light on life and manners through the ages.
Download or read book The Rhetoric of Brexit Humour written by Simon Weaver and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 2016 there has been an outpouring of humour, comedy and satire on the United Kingdom’s EU Referendum and decision to leave the EU, or Brexit. This book examines the relationship between Brexit and its comedy, exploring how Brexit and comedy are connected in both Leave and Remain discourse. It argues that both populism and comedy are rhetorical in nature and so are linked through their semantic structure and communicative potential. Considering the incongruities that Brexit presents for British society, the author analyses the populism that has emerged from those incongruities in the form of ironic, ambiguous and dichotomous discourse. Through the analysis of a range of comedy on the EU Referendum and Brexit, including material from stand-up and situation comedy, and political satire of various types, The Rhetoric of Brexit Humour examines the way in which comedy acts as a rhetoric that draws on, supports and attacks the discourses of Brexit. This provides not just an advance in our understanding of political satire but also a clearer description of the nature of populism. This book will appeal to sociologists, political scientists, media and communications scholars, and anyone interested in Brexit, populism and comedy.
Download or read book Punchlines written by Leon Rappoport and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2005-10-30 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of ethnic, racial, and gender humor is as sensitive a subject today as it has ever been; yet at no time in the past have we had such a quantity of this humor circulating throughout society. We can see the power of such content manifested continually in our culture's films and stand-up comedy routines, as well as on popular TV sitcoms, where Jewish, black, Asian, Hispanic, and gay characters and topics have seemingly become essential to comic scenarios. Though such humor is often cruel, it can be a source of pride and play among minorities, women, and gays. Leon Rappoport's incisive account takes an in-depth look at ethnic, racial and gender humor. Despite the polarization that is often apparent in the debates such humor evokes, the most important melting pot in this country may be the one that we enter when we share a laugh at ourselves.
Download or read book Comedy and Distinction written by Sam Friedman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was shortlisted for the 2015 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize. Comedy is currently enjoying unprecedented growth within the British culture industries. Defying the recent economic downturn, it has exploded into a booming billion-pound industry both on TV and on the live circuit. Despite this, academia has either ignored comedy or focused solely on analysing comedians or comic texts. This scholarship tends to assume that through analysing an artist’s intentions or techniques, we can somehow understand what is and what isn’t funny. But this poses a fundamental question – funny to whom? How can we definitively discern how audiences react to comedy? Comedy and Distinction shifts the focus to provide the first ever empirical examination of British comedy taste. Drawing on a large-scale survey and in-depth interviews carried out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the book explores what types of comedy people like (and dislike), what their preferences reveal about their sense of humour, how comedy taste lubricates everyday interaction, and how issues of social class, gender, ethnicity and geographical location interact with patterns of comic taste. Friedman asks: Are some types of comedy valued higher than others in British society? Does more ‘legitimate’ comedy taste act as a tangible resource in social life – a form of cultural capital? What role does humour play in policing class boundaries in contemporary Britain? This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, social class, social theory, cultural studies and comedy studies.
Download or read book All Joking Aside written by Rebecca Krefting and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-09 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A professor of American Studies—and stand-up comic—examines sharply focused comedy and its cultural utility in contemporary society. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice In this examination of stand-up comedy, Rebecca Krefting establishes a new genre of comedic production, “charged humor,” and charts its pathways from production to consumption. Some jokes are tears in the fabric of our beliefs—they challenge myths about how fair and democratic our society is and the behaviors and practices we enact to maintain those fictions. Jokes loaded with vitriol and delivered with verve, charged humor compels audiences to action, artfully summoning political critique. Since the institutionalization of stand-up comedy as a distinct cultural form, stand-up comics have leveraged charged humor to reveal social, political, and economic stratifications. All Joking Aside offers a history of charged comedy from the mid-twentieth century to the early aughts, highlighting dozens of talented comics from Dick Gregory and Robin Tyler to Micia Mosely and Hari Kondabolu. The popularity of charged humor has waxed and waned over the past sixty years. Indeed, the history of charged humor is a tale of intrigue and subversion featuring dive bars, public remonstrations, fickle audiences, movie stars turned politicians, commercial airlines, emergent technologies, neoliberal mind-sets, and a cavalcade of comic misfits with an ax to grind. Along the way, Krefting explores the fault lines in the modern economy of humor, why men are perceived to be funnier than women, the perplexing popularity of modern-day minstrelsy, and the way identities are packaged and sold in the marketplace. Appealing to anyone interested in the politics of humor and generating implications for the study of any form of popular entertainment, this history reflects on why we make the choices we do and the collective power of our consumptive practices. Readers will be delighted by the broad array of comic talent spotlighted in this book, and for those interested in comedy with substance, it will offer an alternative punchline.
Download or read book Race Racism and Political Correctness in Comedy written by Jack Black and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-25 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness. By viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be ‘politically correct’, this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. In doing so, it engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to ‘PC Debates’, contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC ‘mockumentary’, The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies. Drawing from psychoanalysis, social psychology and philosophy, this book will be highly relevant for postgraduate students and academic researchers studying comedy, race/racism, multiculturalism, political correctness and television/film.
