Covers a wide range of comedy with examples taken from Chaplin, Daffy Duck, Bilko, Ben Elton, Woody Allen and many others Locates comedy within the history and institutions of cinema and broadcasting

Can comedy on television harbour elements of gender transgression or subversion? If a man is permitted to be 'funny peculiar' – playing the underdog or misfit – does a woman seem stranger in his place? Mapping examples from British and American comedy television over the past 60 years, from I Love Lucy to The Big Bang Theory and Smack the Pony to Waiting For God, this book asks: are particular forms of television comedy gendered in specific ways? Paying attention to series which have not been addressed in academic work, as well as more established shows, White offers fresh insights for the fields of television studies, gender and women's studies, cultural history and comedy.

This book looks at television comedy, drawn from across the UK and Ireland, and ranging chronologically from the 1980s to the 2020s. It explores depictions of distinctive geographical, historical and cultural communities presented from the insiders’ perspective, simultaneously interrogating the particularity of the lived experience of time, and place, embedded within the wide variety of depictions of contrasting lives, experiences and sensibilities, which the collected individual chapters offer. Comedies considered include Victoria Wood’s work on ‘the north’, Ireland’s Father Ted and Derry Girls, Michaela Coel’s east London set Chewing Gum, and Wales’ Gavin and Stacey. There are chapters on Scottish sketch and animation comedy, and on series set in the Midlands, the North East, the South West and London’s home counties. The book offers thoughtful reflection on funny and engaging representations of the diverse, fragmented complexity of UK and Irish identity explored through the intersections of class, ethnicity and gender.

This book is the first sustained critical analysis of Cult British TV comedy from 1990 to the present day. The book examines ‘post-alternative’ comedy as both ‘cult’ and ‘quality’ TV, aimed mostly at niche audiences and often possessing a subcultural aura (comedy was famously declared ‘the new ‘rock’n’roll’ in the early ‘90s). It includes case studies of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer and the sitcom writer Graham Linehan. It examines developments in sketch shows and the emergence of ‘dark’ and ‘cringe’ comedy, and considers the politics of ‘offence’ during a period in which Brass Eye, ‘Sachsgate’ and Frankie Boyle provoked different kinds of media outrage. Programmes discussed include Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Peep Show, Father Ted, The Mighty Boosh, The Fast Show and Psychoville. Cult British TV Comedy will be of interest to both students and fans of modern TV comedy.

The study of television and music has expanded greatly in recent years, yet to date no book has focused on the genre of comedy television as it relates to music. Music in Comedy Television: Notes on Laughs fills that gap, breaking new critical ground. With contributions from an array of established and emerging scholars representing a range of disciplines, the twelve essays included cover a wide variety of topics and television shows, spanning nearly fifty years across network, cable, and online structures and capturing the latest research in this growing area of study. From Sesame Street to Saturday Night Live, from Monty Python to Flight of the Conchords, this book offers the perfect introduction for students and scholars in music and media studies seeking to understand the role of music in comedy onscreen and how it relates to the wider culture.

Exploring the pioneering career of the man whose quirky comic experiments influenced decades of television, from Laugh-In to Late Night. A true pioneer of television, Ernie Kovacs entertained audiences throughout the 1950s and early 1960s with his zany, irreverent, and surprising humor—and also inspired a host of later comedies and comedians, including Monty Python, David Letterman, much of Saturday Night Live, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, Captain Kangaroo, and even Sesame Street. Kovacs created laughter through wildly creative comic jokes, playful characterizations, hilarious insights, and wacky experiments—“Nothing in moderation,” his motto and epitaph, sums up well Kovacs’s wholehearted approach to comedy and life. In this book, Andrew Horton offers the first sustained look at Ernie Kovacs’s wide-ranging and lasting contributions to the development of TV comedy. He discusses in detail Kovacs’s work in New York, which included The Ernie Kovacs Show (CBS prime time 1952–1953), The Ernie Kovacs Show (NBC daytime variety 1956–1957), Tonight (NBC late-night comedy/variety 1956-1957), and a number of quiz shows. Horton also looks at Kovacs’s work in Los Angeles and in feature film comedy. He vividly describes how Kovacs and his comic co-conspirators created offbeat characters and situations that subverted expectations and upended the status quo. Most of all, Horton demonstrates that Kovacs grasped the possibility for creating a fresh genre of comedy through the new medium of television—and exploited it to the fullest.

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.

This collection of essays examines landmark British television programs of the last forty years, from Doctor Who to The Office, and from The Demon Headmaster to Queer As Folk. Contributions from prominent academics focus on the full range of popular genres, from sitcoms to science fiction, gothic horror and children's drama, and reconsider how British television drama can be analyzed. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in many academic disciplines that study television drama.

The question of why we laugh (or don't laugh) has intrigued scholars since antiquity. This book contributes to that debate by exploring how we evaluate screen comedy. What kinds of criteria do we use to judge films and TV shows that are meant to be funny? And what might that have to do with our social and cultural backgrounds, or with wider cultural ideas about film, TV, comedy, quality and entertainment? The book examines these questions through a study of audience responses posted to online facilities such as Twitter, Facebook, review sites, blogs and message boards. Bore’s analysis of these responses considers a broad range of issues, including how audiences perceive the idea of "national" comedy; what they think of female comedians; how they evaluate romcoms, sitcoms and web comedy; what they think is acceptable to joke about; what comedy fans get excited about; how fans interact with star comedians; and what comedy viewers really despise. The book demonstrates some of the ways in which we can adapt theories of humour and comedy to examine the practices of contemporary screen audiences, while offering new insights into how they negotiate the opportunities and constrictions of different online facilities to share their views and experiences.

A wide-ranging survey of the subject that celebrates the variety and complexity of film comedy from the ‘silent’ days to the present, this authoritative guide offers an international perspective on the popular genre that explores all facets of its formative social, cultural and political context A wide-ranging collection of 24 essays exploring film comedy from the silent era to the present International in scope, the collection embraces not just American cinema, including Native American and African American, but also comic films from Europe, the Middle East, and Korea Essays explore sub-genres, performers, and cultural perspectives such as gender, politics, and history in addition to individual works Engages with different strands of comedy including slapstick, romantic, satirical and ironic Features original entries from a diverse group of multidisciplinary international contributors