Comedy & Culture

Since slavery, African and African American humor has baffled, intrigued, angered, and entertained the masses. Rolling centers Blackness in comedy, especially on television, and observing that it is often relegated to biopics, slave narratives, and the comedic. But like W. E. B. DuBois's ideas about double consciousness and Racquel Gates's extension of his theories, we know that Blackness resonates for Black viewers in ways often entirely different than for white viewers. Contributors to this volume cover a range of cases representing African American humor across film, television, digital media, and stand-up as Black comic personas try to work within, outside, and around culture, tilling for content. Essays engage with the complex industrial interplay of Blackness, white audiences, and comedy; satire and humor on media platforms; and the production of Blackness within comedy through personal stories and interviews of Black production crew and writers for television comedy. Rolling illuminates the inner workings of Blackness and comedy in media discourse.

The landscape of comedy has undergone a seismic shift in recent years with an increasing number of female comedians breaking through to mainstream audiences. Women are claiming high-profile roles as late-night hosts, sketch comedians, television producers, and standup stars. As they disrupt industry norms and transgress cultural boundaries, they have also become lightning rods for controversy, eliciting flares of anger, amazement, revulsion, or hope. Caught in the Crosshairs delves not only into the work of feminist icons like Samantha Bee, Amy Schumer, Leslie Jones, Michelle Wolf, and Hannah Gadsby, but also into the discourse surrounding their comedy. Author Amber Day argues that these debates transcend mere entertainment; they are cultural battlegrounds for larger philosophical and political conflicts, interrogating ideals of gender, race, power, and public space. We see conflicts over what should be considered scandalous or beyond the pale, who should be in the intended audience, what is appropriate behavior for which performing bodies, and what the boundaries of comedy ultimately are. Caught in the Crosshairs is an examination of how feminist comedy reflects the tensions of our times, disrupting established narratives and challenging traditional power structures.

While conventional wisdom has it that humor embodies a spirit of renewal and humility, a dispirited form of comedy thrives in a media-saturated and politically charged environment. When Comedy Goes Wrong examines how, beginning in the late-twentieth and carrying into the early twenty-first century, a certain comic dispirit found various platforms for disheartening cultural politics. From the calculated follies on talk radio programs like the Rush Limbaugh Show through the charades of "cancel culture" and ultimately to so-called Alt-Right comedy, the transgressions, improprieties, and ego trips endemic to a newfangled comic freedom produced entirely unfunny ways of being. To understand these unfunny ways, Christopher J. Gilbert challenges the prevailing belief in humor's goodness, analyzing radio personalities, meme culture, films, civil unrest, and even the language of ordinary individuals and everyday speech, all to demonstrate what happens when humor becomes humorless. As such, Gilbert imagines a nuanced sense of humor for a tumultuous world. Ultimately, “When Comedy Goes Wrong” transcends partisanship to explore the uglier parts of American culture, imagining the stakes of doing comedy, and being comical, as a means of survival.

Does it matter what television we watch? Despite their stodgy reputation among many consumers of television, sitcoms, or situation comedies, have stuck around as a cornerstone of the television landscape. Sitcoms and Culture examines sitcoms as cultural artifacts ripe for exploration as they reflect the shifting landscapes of our society. From questions of social change to the portrayal of women and other racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, sitcoms have evolved alongside the major social changes of the last half century. Using an interdisciplinary approach, author James Shanahan combines research on cultural indicators with an empirical methodology and cultural analysis to examine over 50 years of sitcoms to discern the reality of how these comedies have portrayed life to us across generations of television. Sitcoms and Culture helps us gain a deeper understanding of how sitcoms mirror and shape societal norms and of the pivotal role they have played in reflecting and influencing cultural trends.

Take funny music seriously! Though often dismissed as silly or derivative, funny music, Lily E. Hirsch argues, is incredibly creative and dynamic, serving multiple aims from the celebratory to the rebellious, the entertaining to the mentally uplifting. Music can be a rich site for humor, with so many opportunities that are ripe for a comedic left turn. Taking Funny Music Seriously includes original interviews with some of the best musical humorists, such as Tom Lehrer, "the J. D. Salinger of musical satire"; Peter Schickele, who performed as the invented composer P. D. Q. Bach, the supposed lost son of the great J. S. Bach; Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome of the funny music duo Garfunkel and Oates; comedic film composer Theodore Shapiro; Too Slim of the country group Riders in the Sky; and musical comedian Jessica McKenna, from the podcast Off Book, part of a long line of "funny girls." With their help, Taking Funny Music Seriously examines comedy from a variety of genres and musical contexts-from bad singing to rap, classical music to country, Broadway music to film music, and even love songs and songs about death. In its coverage of comedic musical media, Taking Funny Music Seriously is an accessible and lively look at funny music. It offers us a chance to appreciate more fully the joke in music and the benefits of getting that joke-especially in times of crisis-including comfort, catharsis, and connection.