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The Comedy Studies Reader
Winner, MPCA/ACA Book Award, Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association, 2020 From classical Hollywood film comedies to sitcoms, recent political satire, and the developing world of online comedy culture, comedy has been a mainstay of the American media landscape for decades. Recognizing that scholars and students need an authoritative collection of comedy studies that gathers both foundational and cutting-edge work, Nick Marx and Matt Sienkiewicz have assembled The Comedy Studies Reader . This anthology brings together classic articles, more recent works, and original essays that consider a variety of themes and approaches for studying comedic media—the carnivalesque, comedy mechanics and absurdity, psychoanalysis, irony, genre, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and nation and globalization. The authors range from iconic theorists, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, and Linda Hutcheon, to the leading senior and emerging scholars of today. As a whole, the volume traces two parallel trends in the evolution of the field—first, comedy’s development into myriad subgenres, formats, and discourses, a tendency that has led many popular commentators to characterize the present as a “comedy zeitgeist”; and second, comedy studies’ new focus on the ways in which comedy increasingly circulates in “serious” discursive realms, including politics, economics, race, gender, and cultural power.
- GenresNonfiction
328 pages, Paperback
Published August 1, 2018
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June 4, 2024
Not uniformly good quality essays, but uniformly great at provoking the reader to think about the issues for himself. Great for a class, not optimal for reading cover-to-cover (which I did), so 4 stars.
What I mean: In §2 ("Comedy Mechanics") a full three out of four essays present totalizing (and incompatible) Theories of Humor which promise to explain to the reader how jokes work and what makes them funny. It's horribly obvious that none of these theories are as total as they claim to be (or, at least, Palmer's and Crafton's aren't; Bergson doesn't really get the chance to explain himself--kind of a shame). Is this a black spot on the book? No! You can't read this chapter without mentally rending your garments at how obviously wrong they all are. For a book like this, surely that's the point! And you can tell it's the point because the fourth chapter gives THE ERIC ANDRE SHOW as a case study, which is guaranteed to blow up pretty much any conventional theory of comedy you try to hit it with.
Another example: In §4 ("Irony"), the theory of irony put forward in the first essay* seems woefully inadequate for the analysis of post-internet irony (or really pre-internet, this essay is no good; see *) . But then the second essay incisively leverages Kierkegaard's analysis of irony to analyze how SNL changed before and after 9/11, in a way which seems shockingly relevant to our (digital) age. In short, the reader is invited to make his own analysis--of irony itself and of "our" irony. It's great.
Less great but still good is the handling of psychoanalysis and the carnivalesque. On the one hand the excerpts from Freud seem to be chosen to be as unconvincing as possible (like Bergson, a shame). BUT! the last essay in §3 (Psychoanalysis) and the first in §5 (Genre) both use Freud to tremendous effect, albeit almost always citing passages NOT excerpted by Marx & Sienkiewicz (the editors). It's a case study in re/appraisal. Is that a good thing? a bad thing? I don't know, but it's stimulating, and it made me want to go back and finish Freud's books on jokes. This is obviously less good because there's no way to know that you should really read §5.A before you make up your mind on Freud, but it's still provocative.
On the topic of the provocative, Eco's essay in §1 ("The Carnivalesque") is excellent for all the same reasons. Intellectually stimulating while also refreshingly concrete, nobody is going to agree with everything in it. It's the rare essay in this volume with real voice. It makes Bakhtin (excerpted (poorly, again, like Freud and Bergson) immediately before, from his essay on Rabelais) look bad, which is a shame because I love Rabelais and was hoping he would be enlightening.
Before moving past psychoanalysis for good, let me also mention the hilariously impenetrable "Lacan's Harpo" in the same chapter as the Freud excerpts. What the hell were the editors thinking? I'm no psychoanalysis schmuck--I know about das Ding and the mirror stage and juissance and all that jazz--but when I say I was lost I mean I was LOST. What the hell am I meant to make of stuff like this: "The constantly revolving elements in [Marx Brothers'] films undermine attempts at humanist redemption, instead emphasizing the obscene enjoyment that corrodes life beyond understanding or scopic mastery."????? It did make me watch Animal Crackers though, and, despite the schizophrenia of this essay, I do think he has a point.
Before the less good parts, let me mention Medhurst's excellent "A National Joke," which makes an incisive analysis of a particular politically incorrect British comic via "ontological security," which sounds ridiculous but actually is very well done, and, in a rarity in this part of the book, well-written. Henderson's essay on her experiences as a women writer also benefits from being good and well-written and sharp, though, to be honest, I had a better time with Medhurst.
A pair of essays analyze the results of focus group studies: one on Rush Hour 2, one on The Office (UK) in Norway. The former is much better (Bore just seems to have nothing to say, but Park et al. manage to draw out some incisive stuff on stereotyping).
After that come the fun but not so stimulating essays: usually more concrete, they tell a story but don't do much in the way of evoking responses: Fuller-Seeley traces the origin of the Sitcom, Kumar talks about two particular Indian shows, Thakore & Hussain trace the career of Aziz Ansari.
It's not my domain, so I can't really comment intelligently on the Gender & Sex chapter. But I can say that unfortunately the whole essay on Ellen is outdated by the recent allegations, and it's a bit sad that the references to Clarice Lispector and Deleuze come in an analysis of Miss Piggy.
And last come the bad essays which seem drone on and on without making a single point. It's a general complaint of mine that most of these essays are written in a horrible low-academic soulless essay-ese, but at least some (like Martin Jr.'s sharp comparison of two 2015 sitcoms**) intersperse their droning with INSIGHTS. Mills's essay is 90% stuff like "the setting, [a] vehicle on the move, is [different] to those recurring locations [(the appartment, cafe, etc.)] in other sitcoms, precisely because it symbolizes movement." The car... symbolizes movement. Mills's essay, by the way, undermines 80% of its argumentation in the last paragraph. Hilarious.
In fairness even the bad essays manage to have some good lines. Mills (sorry for raggin on ya) manages to actually say the obvious but fundamental thing nobody in the last 250 pages of TV analysis has said: that if "we are being invited to find laughable the actions of a character who does not know they are doing something humorous," the "teller" of the joke "is the program itself." Thompson's essay, despite being kinda dry, is based on a genuine insight, and says some interesting stuff about the history of TV documentaries.
In sum: pretty good. It made me think. If I were a comedy/media studies prof teaching a 100/200 level course I'd jump on this book. I think it would facilitate good discussions. I just wish they excerpted the classics better.
May randomizer 3/?
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*which is pretty bad, actually--take a look at this zinger: "The interpreter [of irony] as agent performs an act--attributes both meaning and motive--and does so in a particular situation and context, for a particular purpose, and with particular means." Deep.
**YEA. it's a lot of sitcoms I KNOW. Let me point out that the editors of this volume are first and foremost scholars of TV, which explains the DISGUSTING TV bias in a book published in (!)2018. There's SO MUCH in here about sitcoms. I'm sick of sitcoms. I have sitcoms coming out of my ears.
What I mean: In §2 ("Comedy Mechanics") a full three out of four essays present totalizing (and incompatible) Theories of Humor which promise to explain to the reader how jokes work and what makes them funny. It's horribly obvious that none of these theories are as total as they claim to be (or, at least, Palmer's and Crafton's aren't; Bergson doesn't really get the chance to explain himself--kind of a shame). Is this a black spot on the book? No! You can't read this chapter without mentally rending your garments at how obviously wrong they all are. For a book like this, surely that's the point! And you can tell it's the point because the fourth chapter gives THE ERIC ANDRE SHOW as a case study, which is guaranteed to blow up pretty much any conventional theory of comedy you try to hit it with.
Another example: In §4 ("Irony"), the theory of irony put forward in the first essay* seems woefully inadequate for the analysis of post-internet irony (or really pre-internet, this essay is no good; see *) . But then the second essay incisively leverages Kierkegaard's analysis of irony to analyze how SNL changed before and after 9/11, in a way which seems shockingly relevant to our (digital) age. In short, the reader is invited to make his own analysis--of irony itself and of "our" irony. It's great.
Less great but still good is the handling of psychoanalysis and the carnivalesque. On the one hand the excerpts from Freud seem to be chosen to be as unconvincing as possible (like Bergson, a shame). BUT! the last essay in §3 (Psychoanalysis) and the first in §5 (Genre) both use Freud to tremendous effect, albeit almost always citing passages NOT excerpted by Marx & Sienkiewicz (the editors). It's a case study in re/appraisal. Is that a good thing? a bad thing? I don't know, but it's stimulating, and it made me want to go back and finish Freud's books on jokes. This is obviously less good because there's no way to know that you should really read §5.A before you make up your mind on Freud, but it's still provocative.
On the topic of the provocative, Eco's essay in §1 ("The Carnivalesque") is excellent for all the same reasons. Intellectually stimulating while also refreshingly concrete, nobody is going to agree with everything in it. It's the rare essay in this volume with real voice. It makes Bakhtin (excerpted (poorly, again, like Freud and Bergson) immediately before, from his essay on Rabelais) look bad, which is a shame because I love Rabelais and was hoping he would be enlightening.
Before moving past psychoanalysis for good, let me also mention the hilariously impenetrable "Lacan's Harpo" in the same chapter as the Freud excerpts. What the hell were the editors thinking? I'm no psychoanalysis schmuck--I know about das Ding and the mirror stage and juissance and all that jazz--but when I say I was lost I mean I was LOST. What the hell am I meant to make of stuff like this: "The constantly revolving elements in [Marx Brothers'] films undermine attempts at humanist redemption, instead emphasizing the obscene enjoyment that corrodes life beyond understanding or scopic mastery."????? It did make me watch Animal Crackers though, and, despite the schizophrenia of this essay, I do think he has a point.
Before the less good parts, let me mention Medhurst's excellent "A National Joke," which makes an incisive analysis of a particular politically incorrect British comic via "ontological security," which sounds ridiculous but actually is very well done, and, in a rarity in this part of the book, well-written. Henderson's essay on her experiences as a women writer also benefits from being good and well-written and sharp, though, to be honest, I had a better time with Medhurst.
A pair of essays analyze the results of focus group studies: one on Rush Hour 2, one on The Office (UK) in Norway. The former is much better (Bore just seems to have nothing to say, but Park et al. manage to draw out some incisive stuff on stereotyping).
After that come the fun but not so stimulating essays: usually more concrete, they tell a story but don't do much in the way of evoking responses: Fuller-Seeley traces the origin of the Sitcom, Kumar talks about two particular Indian shows, Thakore & Hussain trace the career of Aziz Ansari.
It's not my domain, so I can't really comment intelligently on the Gender & Sex chapter. But I can say that unfortunately the whole essay on Ellen is outdated by the recent allegations, and it's a bit sad that the references to Clarice Lispector and Deleuze come in an analysis of Miss Piggy.
And last come the bad essays which seem drone on and on without making a single point. It's a general complaint of mine that most of these essays are written in a horrible low-academic soulless essay-ese, but at least some (like Martin Jr.'s sharp comparison of two 2015 sitcoms**) intersperse their droning with INSIGHTS. Mills's essay is 90% stuff like "the setting, [a] vehicle on the move, is [different] to those recurring locations [(the appartment, cafe, etc.)] in other sitcoms, precisely because it symbolizes movement." The car... symbolizes movement. Mills's essay, by the way, undermines 80% of its argumentation in the last paragraph. Hilarious.
In fairness even the bad essays manage to have some good lines. Mills (sorry for raggin on ya) manages to actually say the obvious but fundamental thing nobody in the last 250 pages of TV analysis has said: that if "we are being invited to find laughable the actions of a character who does not know they are doing something humorous," the "teller" of the joke "is the program itself." Thompson's essay, despite being kinda dry, is based on a genuine insight, and says some interesting stuff about the history of TV documentaries.
In sum: pretty good. It made me think. If I were a comedy/media studies prof teaching a 100/200 level course I'd jump on this book. I think it would facilitate good discussions. I just wish they excerpted the classics better.
May randomizer 3/?
----
*which is pretty bad, actually--take a look at this zinger: "The interpreter [of irony] as agent performs an act--attributes both meaning and motive--and does so in a particular situation and context, for a particular purpose, and with particular means." Deep.
**YEA. it's a lot of sitcoms I KNOW. Let me point out that the editors of this volume are first and foremost scholars of TV, which explains the DISGUSTING TV bias in a book published in (!)2018. There's SO MUCH in here about sitcoms. I'm sick of sitcoms. I have sitcoms coming out of my ears.
Displaying 1 of 1 review