Emergent Feminisms and Racial Discourses of Televisual Girlfriendship

This chapter focuses on the cycle’s integration of emerging feminist discourses and its disruption of the postfeminist sensibility by interrogating its focus on female friendship. It highlights how the centrality of female friendship demonstrates the cycle’s liberal politics and therefore its appeal to upscale liberal or progressive audiences. The close, complex, honest relationships between main female friends on these shows, like Abbi and Ilana on Broad City, Gretchen and Lindsay on You’re the Worst, Quinn and Rachel on UnReal, or Rebecca and Paula on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, allow them a critical self-awareness to interrogate gender norms, whiteness, and millennial culture. But the cycle’s incredibly insular and encouraging friendships also obscure racial politics and diversity by recentering whiteness and celebrating a particularly narrow type of liberal feminist girl culture that also frequently centralizes white fragility. Thinking through the critical humor and other modes of political discourse of these friendships within the context of television’s racist and postfeminist roots, this chapter situates these representations of female friendships in the context of contemporary empowerment rhetoric to interrogate the potential and limitations of television’s representational politics in this era of the reemerging or mainstreaming of feminism.

Greek migrant jokes online

This study adheres to critical humor studies investigating how humor targeting the migrant ‘Other’ may reproduce social inequalities in the form of racist stereotypes. We examine two datasets of online migrant-targeting jokes from two different time periods in Greece. Our first collection of jokes comes from the period 1990–2010, i.e., when Greece, enjoying financial prosperity, received mostly Albanian migrants, while the second one comes from 2014 onwards, i.e., when Greece, facing a severe financial crisis, received mostly Muslim migrants. Our analysis shows that the local sociopolitical context plays a significant role in shaping the ways migrants are humorously represented and targeted: the incongruities identified in the first dataset are different from those of the second. In both cases, however, migrant-targeting jokes seem to reinforce national homogenization by circulating racist stereotypes for migrants in a light-hearted manner and by naturalizing the latter’s marginalization and/or assimilation.

Carnival, Hybridity, and Latin American Digital Humor

Enchufe.tv, an online comedy series that satirizes Ecuadorian idiosyncrasies and local urban culture, became the most popular online TV series in the country and a regional phenomenon in Latin America. The online show questions cultural stereotypes and social norms, while adapting and parodying transnational audiovisual formats and entertainment genres. Based on interviews and textual analysis, this chapter analyzes Enchufe.tv as a case study of Latin American digital humor, an increasingly relevant phenomenon to understand how cultural globalization and hybridity operate in today's transnational, multimedia entertainment. The case of Enchufe.tv not only reveals the challenges and opportunities of the digital medium for independent audiovisual projects, but also how the limits of critical humor are negotiated in cultural, political, and commercial terms.

HUMOR DALAM PESAN DAKWAH

<p><em>Humor in dakwah has an important position. The difficult material can be accepted by mad'u easily. Beside to attract attention, humor also can be used as a tool of education for mad'u and as a tool critic to against inequality that happens in society without loss the basic character of smooth and not provocative. Using improper of humor will cause a blurring the essence and purpose dakwah. There are four ethical criteria of humor which must be considered by dai. <strong>First</strong>, humor educative is humor which has the content of educating and the mission of enlightenment. <strong>Second</strong>, critical humor is humor who stimulate dai to do analysis a number of inequality and imbalance reality of life. <strong>Third</strong>, not racist, humor not contains insult, desecration, stigmatic against someone, institution, religion, race, and class. <strong>Fourth</strong>, doesn’t contain pornographic. Humor is not exploit sensational body through talk of dirty and porn.</em><em></em></p><p align="center">***</p><p>Humor dalam dakwah menempati posisi penting. Materi yang sulit dapat dengan mudah dicerna mad’u melalui humor. Selain untuk menarik perhatian, humor juga bisa digunakan sebagai sarana edukasi mad’u dan bahkan dapat dipakai sebagai alat kritik tajam terhadap ketimpangan yang terjadi di masyarakat dengan tanpa kehilangan karakter dasarnya yang halus serta tidak provokatif. Namun penggunaan humor yang tidak tepat akan menyebabkan kaburnya esensi dan tujuan dakwah. Terdapat empat kriteria etis humor yang harus diperhatikan dai yaitu <strong>Pertama</strong>, humor edukatif yakni humor yang memiliki kandungan pesan mendidik dan membawa misi pencerahan, <strong>Kedua</strong>, humor kritis yakni humor yang menstimulus dai untuk melakukan analisis terhadap sejumlah ketimpangan dan ketidakseimbangan realitas kehidupan, <strong>Ketiga</strong>, tidak rasis, humor tidak berisi hinaan, penodaan, dan citraan stigmatis terhadap seseorang, lembaga, agama, ras, atau golongan, <strong>Keempat</strong>, Tidak berunsur pornografi, yaitu humor yang tidak mengeksploitasi tubuh dan sensasional badaniyah melalui pembicaraan jorok dan porno.</p>

Satiric TV in the Americas

In the post-truth era, postmodern satiric media have emerged as prominent critical voices playing an unprecedented role at the heart of public debate, filling the gaps left not only by traditional media but also by weak social institutions and discredited political elites. Satiric TV in the Americas analyzes some of the most representative and influential satiric TV shows on the continent (focusing on cases in Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, Chile, and the United States) in order to understand their critical role in challenging the status quo, traditional journalism, and the prevalent local media culture. It illuminates the phenomenon of satire as resistance and negotiation in public discourse, the role of entertainment media as a site where sociopolitical tensions are played out, and the changing notions of journalism in today’s democratic societies. Introducing the notion of “critical metatainment”—a postmodern, carnivalesque result of and a transgressive, self-referential reaction to the process of tabloidization and the cult of celebrity in the media spectacle era—Satiric TV in the Americas is the first book to map, contextualize, and analyze relevant cases to understand the relation between political information, social and cultural dissent, critical humor, and entertainment in the region. Evaluating contemporary satiric media as distinctively postmodern, multilayered, and complex discursive objects that emerge from the collapse of modernity and its arbitrary dichotomies, Satiric TV in the Americas also shows that, as satiric formats travel to a particular national context, they are appropriated in different ways and adapted to local circumstances, thus having distinctive implications.

Latin American Digital Satire

Chapter 6 focuses on Latin American digital satire, analyzing the cases of: 1) Enchufe.tv, an online comedy series that satirizes Ecuadorian idiosyncrasies and local urban culture; 2) El Pulso de la República, an independent Mexican online satiric news show created in 2012 by comedian Chumel Torres; and 3) Cualca, an Argentinean satiric sketch show focused on gender issues, created by feminist YouTube star Malena Pichot. Critically dialoguing with their respective national contexts and sociopolitical tensions, these cases not only reveal successful models for the development of Latin American independent digital media but also exemplify how cultural globalization and hybridity operate in today’s transnational entertainment and commercial critical humor.

Socially Critical Humor: Discussing Humor with Erich Fromm and Theodor W. Adorno

This article brings Erich Fromm and Theodor W. Adorno back into dialogue by discussing the cultural phenomena of humor and laughter based on their theoretical writings. I argue that what is typically considered socially critical humor, like offensive jokes or harsh satire, often fails to meet the preconditions of criticism in the light of Adorno’s and Fromm’s thinking. Humor, to be socially critical, has to be life-affirmative and non-positional, and it has to challenge the limits of humor. It is also claimed that in this scope, humor cannot be instrumental.

The rhetoric of disparagement humor: An analysis of anti-semitic joking online

Studies of humor informed by an understanding of rhetoric offer a number of conceptual tools for the analysis of disparagement humor. This article examines recent rhetorical approaches to humor analysis and evaluates their strengths and weaknesses. Where possible, it seeks to synthesise these approaches for what might be called an emerging methodological branch of humor studies. Although not all rhetorical analysts can be considered critical theorists, the article argues for the particular usefulness of these approaches for critical humor studies. A sample of 28 online anti-Semitic jokes is used to illustrate the various methods of rhetorical humor analysis. The discussion examines the fundamental assumptions, propositions, uniqueness and limitations of each theory. The central observation is that rhetorical humor analysis provides methods that add to disparagement theory. This central observation is supported by three points: that humor is structured with rhetorical devices that might, in various ways, convince; that the context of utterance influences the meaning of humor and thus the context of utterance is rhetorical; and, that the discursive content of humor provides the material to be reinforced.

The role of social context in the interpretation of sexist humor

An experiment supported our hypotheses about the relationship between the social context in which sexist humor is delivered and the adoption of a non-critical humor mindset to interpret it. First, a professional workplace setting implied a local norm that is more prohibitive of sexist jokes than the general societal norm, whereas a comedy club implied a local norm of greater approval of sexist jokes. Second, offensiveness ratings revealed that participants were less likely to adopt a non-critical humor mindset to interpret sexist jokes delivered in a professional workplace setting and more likely to do so in a comedy club setting, compared to a setting governed by only the general societal norm. Finally, meditational analyses revealed that participants used the local norm of acceptability of sexist jokes to determine whether they could interpret the jokes in a non-critical humor mindset.

Class and gender as a laughing matter? The case of Roseanne

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of humor in challenging hegemonic discourses on social class and gender, as they are reproduced in the popular sitcom format. Mindful of sitcoms' entrenched role in the audience's commodification process, the study explores whether a form of critical humor on social class and gender can emerge in the TV palimpsest. For this purpose, the study will look specifically at the sitcom Roseanne and at the public persona of Roseanne Barr. The study adopts a “multiperspectival approach” that considers all three elements of production, text and reception. First, Roseanne will be historically contextualized to understand the contradictions with which working-class representations are fraught. Secondly, a textual analysis will be performed to assess the extent to which class and gender are used as sources of humor and for which functions; finally, metatexts and viewers' responses will be analyzed considering the tensions between hegemonic and oppositional meanings attached to the sitcom. The case study of Roseanne will show that, in spite of obvious containment strategies—often through the secondary plotline and the metatexts, the sitcom provided its audience with critical humor to challenge hegemonic representations of class and gender.