Comedy and Critique: Stand-Up Comedy and the Professional Ethos of Laughter

ISBN-13: 9781529200157 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 216 str.

Daniel R. Smith

Opis

Comedy and Critique explores British professional stand-up comedy in the wake of the Alternative Comedy movement of the late twentieth century, seeing it as an extension of the politics of the New Left: standing up for oneself as anti-racist, feminist and open to a queering of self and social institutions. Daniel Smith demonstrates that the comic sensibility pervading contemporary humour is as much `speaking truth to power' as it is realising one's position `in' power. The professionalisation of New Left humour offers a challenge to social and cultural critique. Stand-up comedy has made us all sociologists of self, identity and cultural power while also resigning us to a place where a comic sensibility becomes an acknowledgment of the necessity of social change.