Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Comedy and the Politics of (Global) Resistance
- 1 Everyday Comic Resistance in Global Context
- 2 The Satire Boom: Imperial Decline and the Rise of the Everyday Elite
- 3 Alternative Comedy and Resistance to ‘Thatcher’s Britain’
- 4 Irony and the Liminality of Resistance
- 5 Austerity and the Rise of Radical Comedy
- 6 Brexit, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Single Market
- 7 The Globalization of Comic Resistance?
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - The Globalization of Comic Resistance?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Comedy and the Politics of (Global) Resistance
- 1 Everyday Comic Resistance in Global Context
- 2 The Satire Boom: Imperial Decline and the Rise of the Everyday Elite
- 3 Alternative Comedy and Resistance to ‘Thatcher’s Britain’
- 4 Irony and the Liminality of Resistance
- 5 Austerity and the Rise of Radical Comedy
- 6 Brexit, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Single Market
- 7 The Globalization of Comic Resistance?
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
This book has engaged with the practice and politics of everyday global resistance through a performative study of the emergence of British comedy. Against instrumental and critical approaches to the role of comedy and resistance in global politics, I argue that we need to pay more attention to the productive elements of humour. Too often, the study of comedy is limited by a particular vision of politics, whether state-centric and driven by a normative ontology of satirical engagement, or universalist and based on a quite demanding view of emancipation through subversion. Instead, by tracing a more performative account of comic resistance, the book suggested we should move away from questions of whether this or that joke can make an impact, or spark revolutionary change. Everyday comic resistances perform within a context of global social power relations. While certain jokes, in certain circumstances, may question, subvert, or otherwise undermine the everyday hierarchies of global market life, others may work to affirm such exclusions, or else provide a socially resonant, if potentially violent, mode of inclusion. Simply put, comedy does different things in different circumstances and that is precisely why it is political. By adopting this more open understanding of comedy ‘as’ politics, my framework of analysis has in turn licensed a more proliferative understanding of what comedy and humour can be/ do. As Berlant and Ngai (2017: 235) argue:
comedy isn't just an anxiogenic tableau of objects disrupted by status shifting, collapse and persistence, the disruption by difference, or a veering between the tiny and the large. Nor is it just a field of narrative expectation punctuated by the surprise of laughter or vertiginous enjoyment. It is also epistemologically troubling, drawing insecure boundaries as though it were possible to secure confidence about object ontology or the value of an ‘us’ versus all its others.
British comedy seems a particularly fascinating case of an ‘epistemologically troubling’ discourse because so much of its focus has been upon the limits of Britishness: the ridiculous arrogance, the elitism, the racism and so on. Ironically, this critical reflexivity seems to be the very basis of its commercial success. How such an ambiguous vernacular is recuperated, re-phrased or re-imagined is a complex question of politics and the political that eludes easy resolution.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Ironic StateBritish Comedy and the Everyday Politics of Globalization, pp. 139 - 152Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2021