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As it seeks to win the hearts and minds of citizens in the Muslim world, the United States has poured millions of dollars into local television and radio programming, hoping to generate pro-American currents on Middle Eastern airwaves. However, as this fascinating new book shows, the Middle Eastern media producers who rely on these funds are hardly puppets on an American string, but instead contribute their own political and creative agendas while working within U.S. restrictions. The Other Air Force gives readers a unique inside look at television and radio production in Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, from the isolated villages of the Afghan Panjshir Valley to the congested st...
Examines the bleak television comedies that illustrate the obsession of the white left with its own anxiety and suffering At the same time that right-wing political figures like Donald Trump were elected and reactionary socio-economic policies like Brexit were voted into law, representations of bleakly comic white fragility spread across television screens. American and British programming that featured the abjection of young, middle-class, liberal white people—such as Broad City, Casual, You’re the Worst, Catastrophe, Fleabag, and Transparent—proliferated to wide popular acclaim in the 2010s. Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey track how these shows of the white left, obsessed with its ...
Since he burst on the world with his heavy-metal memoir Fargo Rock City in 2001, Chuck Klosterman has been one of the most successful novelists and essayists in America. His collections of essays Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas have established Klosterman not only as a credible spokesman for intelligent purveyors of popular culture. His writings and regular columns (in Spin, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine and other venues) about music, sports, and modern culture have sometimes become themselves touchstones in popular culture. The success of his card-based game Hypertheticals: 50 Questions for Insane Conversations has d...
A 2022 Best Comedy Book, Vulture A rousing call for liberals and progressives to pay attention to the emergence of right-wing comedy and the political power of humor. "Why do conservatives hate comedy? Why is there no right-wing Jon Stewart?" These sorts of questions launch a million tweets, a thousand op-eds, and more than a few scholarly analyses. That's Not Funny argues that it is both an intellectual and politically strategic mistake to assume that comedy has a liberal bias. Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx take readers––particularly self-described liberals––on a tour of contemporary conservative comedy and the "right-wing comedy complex." In That's Not Funny, "complex" takes on an...
At free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s new open access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Precarious Creativity examines the seismic changes confronting media workers in an age of globalization and corporate conglomeration. This pathbreaking anthology peeks behind the hype and supposed glamor of screen media industries to reveal the intensifying pressures and challenges confronting actors, editors, electricians, and others. The authors take on pressing conceptual and methodological issues while also providing insightful case studies of workplace dynamics regarding creativity, collaboration, exploitation, an...
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 essays in this collection explore taboo and controversial humour in traditional scripted (sitcoms and other comedy series, animated series) and non-scripted forms (stand-up comedy, factual and reality shows, and advertising) both on cable and network television. Whilst the focus is predominantly on the US and UK, the contributors also address more general and global issues and different contexts of reception, in an attempt to look at this kind of comedy from different perspectives. Over the last few decades, taboo comedy has become a staple of television programming, thus raising issues concerning its functions and appropriateness, and making it an extremely relevant subject for those interested in how both humour and television work.
This book serves as an accessible critical introduction to the broad category of American political television content. Encompassing political news and scripted entertainment, Political TV addresses a range of formats, including interview/news programs, political satire, fake news, drama, and reality TV. From long-running programs like Meet the Press to more recent offerings including Veep, The Daily Show, House of Cards, Last Week Tonight, and Scandal, Tryon addresses ongoing debates about the role of television in representing issues and ideas relevant to American politics. Exploring political TV’s construction of concepts of citizenship and national identity, the status of political TV in a post-network era, and advertisements in politics, Political TV offers an engaging, timely analysis of how this format engages its audience in the political scene. The book also includes a videography of key and historical series, discussion questions, and a bibliography for further reading.
In Sketch Comedy: Identity, Reflexivity, and American Television, Nick Marx examines some of the genre's most memorable—and controversial—moments from the early days of television to the contemporary line-up. Through explorations of sketches from well-known shows such as Saturday Night Live, The State, Inside Amy Schumer, Key & Peele, and more, Marx argues that the genre has served as a battleground for the struggle between comedians who are pushing the limits of what is possible on television and network executives who are more mindful of the financial bottom line. Whether creating new catchphrases or transgressing cultural taboos, sketch comedies give voice to marginalized performers and audiences, providing comedians and viewers opportunities to test their own ideas about their place in society, while simultaneously echoing mainstream cultural trends. The result, Marx suggests, is a hilarious and flexible form of identity play unlike anything else in American popular culture and media.
In this book, Curt Hersey explores the history of U.S. media, demonstrating how news parody has entertained television audiences by satirizing political and social issues and offering a lighthearted take on broadcast news. Despite shifts away from broadcast and cable delivery, comedians like Samantha Bee, Michael Che, and John Oliver continue this tradition of delivering topical humor within a newscast format. In this history of the television news parody genre, Hersey critically engages with the norms and presentational styles of television journalism at the time of their production. News parody has increasingly become part of the larger journalistic field, with viewers often turning to thi...