Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak

By Helen Davies

This edited collection explores the representations of identity in comedy and interrogates the ways in which “humorous” constructions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, class and disability raise serious issues about privilege, agency and oppression in popular culture. Should there be limits to free speech when humour is aimed at marginalised social groups? What are the limits of free speech when comedy pokes fun at those who hold social power? Can taboo joking be used towards politically progressive ends? Can stereotypes be mocked through their re-invocation? Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak breaks new theoretical ground by demonstrating how the way people are represented mediates the triadic relationship set up in comedy between teller, audience and butt of the joke. By bringing together a selection of essays from international scholars, this study unpacks and examines the dynamic role that humour plays in making and remaking identity and power relations in culture and society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jul 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9783319905068

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2018

Helen Davies and Sarah Ilott (eds.)Comedy and the Politics of RepresentationPalgrave Studies in Comedyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90506-8_1

1. Mocking the Weak? Contexts, Theories, Politics

Helen Davies¹   and Sarah Ilott²  

(1)

Newman University, Birmingham, UK

(2)

Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

Helen Davies

Email: [e-mail]

Sarah Ilott (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak seeks to explore the diverse ways in which comedy is a vehicle for social and cultural identities to be consolidated, constructed, or even challenged. Comedy is an ambivalent mode of expression when it comes to the representation of identity; it can range from the reactionary and conservative to the radical and subversive. Questions related to comedy and the representation of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, class, and disability are becoming increasingly prominent in contemporary political debate and news journalism. For example: what are the limits of free speech in relation to humour aimed at marginalised social groups? What are the limits of free speech with regards to comedy that pokes fun at those who hold social power? Can taboo joking be used towards politically progressive ends? Can stereotypes be mocked by being re-invoked? And what are the hierarchies of power that shape the multiple, often contradictory answers to such questions? This collection examines the dynamic role that humour plays in making and remaking identity, and in negotiating power in culture and society.

This collection breaks new theoretical ground by focusing on questions of representation, and the important role that they play in mediating the triadic relationship negotiated between the teller, butt, and audience in a joking exchange. Where previous studies have often overlooked or not brought to bear the politics of representation in considerations of comedy, it is our contention that representation—whether via a visual/textual depiction, or verbal utterance—is integral to the mediation of this relationship by encouraging audiences to identify with or against the joker and/or butt. To paraphrase Richard Dyer (2002), representation matters, and this is nowhere more clearly the case than in comedy, wherein power relations are confirmed, negotiated, or undermined. Whether stereotypes are reiterated or subverted through comedy comes down to questions of representation. How characters are represented structures audiences’ responses to laugh with or laugh at them. When characters are constructed as failures, it is down to their representation to illustrate whether the satirical attack is directed at a flawed character or a flawed system.

Our subtitle is a play on words based on the popular British panel show, Mock the Week (BBC 2, 2005–) but, as we shall demonstrate, it also has resonance with various contemporary controversies about the politics of identity and representation beyond the UK. Mock the Week takes a satirical look at the week’s news, and features a selection of rising and established stars of the stand-up comedy circuit. However, it has developed a controversial reputation for various reasons. In 2007, regular panellist Frankie Boyle made reference to the Queen’s pussy in a joke , garnering complaints from both viewers and politicians. David Davies, the Tory MP for Monmouth in South Wales, was quoted as saying: It was a disgracefully foul comment to make about any lady (Quinn 2008). In an episode broadcast in August 2008, Boyle made several derogatory jokes about the appearance of Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington. Considerable public outrage followed, with the BBC Trust upholding complaints and deeming the comments humiliating for Adlington (Singh 2009), but Boyle remained unrepentant and, in an interview for Time Out discussing why he left the show in 2008, remarked:

It was all bollocks. Especially when you consider we’re fighting two wars, there’s fucking swine flu and the global economy is going down the toilet. There’s all this stuff people expect you to talk about, and what do the production team send us? A picture of Rebecca Adlington. (Arthur 2009)

An incident which took place on Boyle’s I Would Happily Punch Every One of You in the Face stand-up tour of the UK in 2010 provoked further debate about the ethics of his comedy. In a performance at Reading’s Hexagon theatre, he joked about the voices, clothes, and haircuts of people with Down syndrome. When he asked a couple (Sharon and Kieron Smith) in the front row of the venue what they were speaking about, they told him that their own daughter had the condition. His response was again unapologetic, and afterwards Sharon Smith expressed her thoughts on the incident in a blog. Her comments were picked up on Twitter, and received widespread media attention (Walker 2010).

More recently, and in the context of the US, the power relations of mocking in comedy have been under scrutiny in relation to a photo shoot by Tyler Griffin with the American comedian Kathy Griffin. Released in May 2017, the pictures depict Griffin holding up a prop of a severed head that bears a distinct resemblance to the current US president, Donald Trump. In response to the frenzy of criticism that followed, Griffin apologised, tweeting OBVIOUSLY, I do not condone ANY violence by my fans or others to anyone, ever! I’m merely mocking the Mocker in Chief (cited in Mindock 2017). Donald Trump Junior, the president’s son, responded as follows: Disgusting but not surprising. This is the left today. They consider this acceptable. Imagine a conservative did this to Obama as POTUS? (@DonaldJTrumpJnr, May 30, 2017). Griffin has since retracted her apology, stating that Trump went for me because I was an easy target and citing her age and gender as the reason for the backlash against her (Bernstein 2017).

As indicated by Griffin’s naming of Trump as the Mocker in Chief, the current US president is now infamous for his derisive tweets aimed at a variety of targets. At the time of writing, Trump is locked into a war of words with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. While Trump’s insults to the North Korean dictator—often delivered via his presidential Twitter account—often take a mocking tone, the potential political consequences of these dispatches are hardly a laughing matter.¹ The North Korean state-controlled television station, Korean Central Television, features a comedy programme entitled The Stage of Optimism that Sangun Presented and in September 2016 it took the opportunity to satirise then-President Barack Obama in a sketch that represented Obama with a bandaged head, having fallen over in shock at the news of North Korea’s latest military test.² Nevertheless, the nation does not appreciate being on the receiving end of jokes. In the satirical film The Interview (2014, dir. Seth Rogan and Ethan Goldberg), two US journalists arrange to interview Kim Jong-un and are then recruited by North American authorities to assassinate him. The release of the film was delayed by some months due to the North Korean government threatening action against the US. Sony was then hacked by a group named Guardians of Peace, who leaked private data (including, notably, racist jokes made about President Obama by Sony employees) and also warned that terrorist attacks would occur at screenings of the film. In response, many major cinema chains cancelled their scheduled screenings, and the film received only a limited theatrical release in the US. In the ensuing media furore about free speech and censorship of humour, Ranier Maningding noted that The Interview was more troubling for its reiteration of tacky Asian stereotype jokes and also condemned the film’s insensitivity to the everyday suffering of North Korean people (2017). Perhaps most disturbingly of all, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported in September 2017 that North Korean authorities had been organising mass meetings to issue warnings against the use of sarcasm, which they said might be construed as criticism of the country’s regime:

The official conducting the meeting pointed specifically to commonly used expressions such as This is all America’s fault, which when spoken ironically could be taken to imply criticism of the regime. The habit of the central authorities of blaming the wrong country when a problem’s cause obviously lies elsewhere has led citizens to mock the party, RFA’s source has said. (Finney 2016)

Seemingly, mocking from the weak is perceived as dangerous to a dictatorship, and efforts are made to suppress it.

These examples give us an entry point into the process of thinking through complex relationships of power, agency, and oppression when it comes to identity politics and comedy. They also introduce contentious debates around free speech, the role of comedy in relation to social critique, and the significance of context and reception. David Davies’s defence of the Queen suggests that her public persona does not detract from her rights as a woman not to be a subject of sexist abuse. However, his choice of the term lady demonstrates how easy it is for condemnation of misogynistic joking to slip into quasi-chivalric, outdated terminology that rearticulates gendered power inequalities .³ Boyle’s justification of his comments suggests that a better subject of his comedy would be serious social issues, and that when provided with prompts about celebrity, misogyny is implicitly positioned as an easy default. Griffin defends her stance as an ethical, moral person, and suggests that those in positions of power and privilege are fair game to be mocked. Trump’s son’s response is to bring race into the debate, imagining the horrified backlash that might have occurred if Obama , the first black president of the US (2008–2016), was subjected to a comparable representation. But Trump Jr. fails to understand that whilst both men have had the status of president, they are not equal when it comes to the politics of identity: as a black man, Obama is a member of a community that has received centuries of racially motivated violence and hateful derision; as a white, heterosexual, wealthy and able-bodied man, Trump is the epitome of privilege. When it comes to comedy, the political becomes personal.

Presidents and dictators (and, indeed, Queens and celebrities) are in positions of enormous social privilege and influence in many ways, but they are also cast as vulnerable and weak in others by the discourses of offence and defence, and oppression and subversion that circulate when thinking seriously about comedy. And surely this volatile dynamic—of how the derided might become empowered through humour, and vice versa—is just as acute when it comes to the comic representation of the everyday and mundane, as well as the influential, rich, and famous. The personal is political as well. Boyle’s decision to focus on Down syndrome as a topic of ridicule does not sit comfortably with his desire to be considered as a satirist. Griffin’s invocation of her age and gender underscores the vulnerability of all women in a patriarchal society. The Interview becomes a martyr of the cause of free speech in comedy, but makes light of the very real suffering of North Korean citizens. Kim Jong-un’s attempt to censor his people’s speech might indicate the quietly subversive potential of humour in dictatorships, but clearly indicates that this does not lead to permanent political change. The politics of identity in relation to comedy affect us all, but some of us more than others at different times and in different places.

As the opening examples have demonstrated, comedy retains an ambivalence which means that allegations of offence are widely contested, leading to questions of intention and context in a manner that would be unnecessary if conventional rules of conversation and propriety were followed. John Morreall’s discussion of the model of conversation theory developed by Paul Grice indicates how humour breaks social conventions and operates according to a different set of rules. Where Grice advocates the omission of falsehood, humour allows people the opportunity to exaggerate or to utter falsehoods in moments of sarcasm; where Grice warns against speaking of things lacking evidence, this rule is violated for laughs when fantasies are presented as viable realities; where Grice preaches the avoidance of obscurity or ambiguity, this is transgressed to comic effect through deliberate evasion, or through play on the double meanings of words that allow for multiple interpretations; where Grice advocates brevity, Morreall cites the comic harangues of belligerent comedians such as Roseanne Barr and Lewis Black (Morreall 2009, 2–3).

The new rules of the game provided by comedy, humour, and joking create space in which to challenge social conventions, though this creates ambiguity, as it operates under the proviso that this is a different space—comparable to Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of carnival as people’s second life, organised on the basis of laughter—which in turn implies a first life that remains unchanged and in which conventions are upheld (1994, 198). Nevertheless, philosophers, theologians, and politicians alike have been wary of the subversive effects of laughter, suggesting that the change in outlook provided by the temporary space created by comedy or humour has lingering effects (cf. Morreall 2009, 4–6). It is the ambiguity inherent in comedy and its associates that have led to its appropriation to both conservative and radical ends, both to mock the weak and to provide a space in which to challenge and upturn social conventions that serve to stigmatise and alienate those marginalised by mainstream society.

Comedy is a mode that expresses an approach to the world and a means of understanding it in all of its absurdities. It is an amorphous beast, encompassing both narrative-based subgenres such as screwball, dark, or romantic comedy (alongside other narrative forms such as stand-up or isolated instances of joking) and non-narrative forms such as laughter at an unplanned incongruity (two people arriving in the same outfit, or a large animal being chased by a small one, for instance). When employed deliberately, comic subgenres create what Hans Robert Jauss has termed a horizon of expectations (2000, 131): audiences will expect to find cause for laughter in the way that the world and its inhabitants are represented. The particular subgenre will dictate the subject matter and directionality of the laughter—whether it is the superior laughter at other people of certain brands of stand-up comedy, the inclusive laughter of romantic comedy that presents the lovers as part of the viewers’ social world, or the nervous laughter of dark comedy that derives from taboo or offensive subject matter. The range of subject matter and directionality of the comic mode accounts in part for its ambiguous potential. How this reiteration or subversion of social norms occurs in comedy has been theorised by various critics, who have proposed the superiority, incongruity, and relief theories of humour detailed below.

The superiority theory of humour sees laughter as aggressive and deriving from a sense of superiority in the self in comparison with the inferiority of those forming the butt of the joke. Ronald de Sousa coins the term phthonic to describe the malicious attitude inherent in this type of humour, arguing that the appreciation of such humour is dependent on an endorsement of its ideology: the logic follows that you will not find a sexist joke funny unless you too are sexist (1987, 238). This understanding of laughter as entailing a hostile element dates at least as far back as the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 BC), who recognised the mixture of pain and pleasure involved in watching a comedy, and deemed that it was malice that makes us feel pleasure in our friends’ misfortunes as one might when watching a comedy (1978, 1129 [Philebus, 48a]; 1131 [Philebus, 50a]). In the Laws, a dialogue about the laws that would exist in a good constitution, Plato went so far as to suggest that No composer of comedy, iambic or lyric verse shall be permitted to hold any citizen up to laughter, by word or gesture, with passion or otherwise (1978, 1485 [Law 11, 935e]). Skip to seventeenth-century England, and Thomas Hobbes was similarly concerned with the role of laughter in his own treatise on the ideal structures of society and governance, Leviathan (1651). He described the cause of laughter as the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves, reading much Laughter at the defects of others as a signe of Pusillanimity (Hobbes 1973, 27). As such, laughter is constructed as resting on a perceived hierarchy between others and ourselves in which those marked by difference are deemed inferior. The power dynamic at play here is evident in sexist, racist, or homophobic jokes (for example), but can also be used more subversively to denote moral superiority by laughing at sexists, racists, or homophobes. Henri Bergson, a twentieth-century proponent of what has become known as the superiority theory of comedy, outlines the function of laughter, which is a social one (1921, 8). He suggests that a defect that is ridiculous […] endeavours to modify itself, or at least to appear as though it did and in this manner laughter ‘corrects men’s manners’ (Bergson 1921, 17). In sum, the superiority theory of comedy is concerned with the social function of laughter in its elision with structures of power, though it has been viewed alternatively as both a destructive and a corrective force.

The way that a joke is understood—as aggressive, self-deprecating, or inclusive—is in part dependent on the positions adopted. There are three available positions in a joking exchange—teller, audience, and butt—and more than one of these positions can be adopted by the same person in a given exchange. When a stand-up comedian such as Boyle makes jokes at the expense of Rebecca Adlington, the joking positions are relatively clear: Boyle is the teller, TV viewers are the audience, and Adlington is the butt. Yet the apparent simplicity of this set-up is complicated by those who might identify primarily with Adlington on account of their gender (and an exasperation at a woman’s appearance often taking precedence over her considerable achievements according to patriarchal ideology) or in solidarity regarding the insult to her appearance. As such, the joke’s attack might extend beyond its initial target and alienate a much greater viewing audience, as Adlington becomes representative of particular alienated groups (women and those constructed by normative discourse as unattractive in this case). Susan Purdie provides an analysis of the discourse of joking that aligns with superiority theories inasmuch as the teller and audience of the jokes are constructed as ‘masters’ of discourse, their mastery confirmed through an ability to break and to keep the basic rule of language which is held to signify their full human subjectivity (1993, 5). Her argument is weakened by her discussion of women as representative of all abjected groups in a manner that denies the difference acknowledged through intersectional approaches, but she nevertheless makes some valid points regarding the relationships constructed through the joking exchange: the ‘Butt’ […] is constituted by the joking exchange as excluded from the Teller-Audience relationship and, in being so, reciprocally confirms the collusion of these two positions as masterful jokers (Purdie 1993, 145; 58). Though in self-ironising jokes, the butt can also be the teller and/or the audience, Purdie notes the aggressive potential of jokes when the Butt involves actual targets, as they are constructed as not fully members of the community of proper speakers, and this involves complex and often strong feelings towards them (1993, 58). Turned on its head, the community-building potential of jokes, in which a delicious intimacy or potent joint subjectivity is created between teller and audience (Purdie 1993, 5) has also been remarked upon by Marie Gillespie, who suggests that those who share a joke belong to a community, however temporary, of people alike enough in outlook and feeling to be joined in sharing a joke (2003, 93). This further highlights the adaptability of comedy to conflicting agendas, embodying the power to make or to break communities, often in the course of the same joking exchange (in which, for example, sexists are legitimised through the voicing of a shared outlook in the same breath as women are constructed as not fully human by virtue of their gender).

An alternative theory of humour—known as the incongruity theory—sees laughter as arising from the conception of something that fails to match up to people’s expectations, according to how they have been conditioned to experience the world. Though this might seem like a relatively apolitical theory of laughter—there is little that is subversive in laughing at a cat walking on its hind legs, for example—it can speak volumes about the norms and conventions of a given society. Historically, festivals deriving enjoyment from incongruity and the temporary suspension of social norms have functioned as a safety valve, sanctioning riotous enjoyment before a return to normality. The classical Roman festival of Saturnalia saw masters serving their slaves and the practice of the (usually proscribed) act of gambling; in the Middle Ages, the Feast of Fools and Feast of the Ass parodied ecclesiastical rituals and involved a series of inversions of high and low positions; contemporary carnival and Mardi Gras celebrate practices not permitted at other times, with bizarre and eccentric costumes marking a deviation from everyday habit. In turn, this reveals what is prized by specific societies, be it religious structures, power hierarchies, or rules of propriety around what is deemed appropriate dress and/or behaviour. Critics such as Simon Critchley have followed the likes of Bakhtin and his work on the carnivalesque in recognising the potential for comedy to challenge the status quo and to give agency and expression to the disempowered. For Critchley , jokes are a play on form, where what are played with are the accepted practices of a given society (2002, 10). In this manner, jokes premised on incongruity have a potentially subversive function as social critique: by being subjected to laughter, institutions lose their perceived power, and the structures that hold them in place are revealed to be arbitrary. It is worth noting that incongruity is not always the cause for laughter: the violation of expectation is equally the subject of horror films, and Morreall also numbers the tragic, grotesque, macabre, horrible, bizarre and fantastic amongst alternative modes in which individuals experience the cognitive shift associated with incongruity (2009, 73). The incongruity of a xenophobic, notoriously misogynist man with multiple bankruptcies becoming president of the US can summon a variety of responses, incredulous laughter and fear ranking highly among them. The proximity of fear and laughter as responses to incongruity fuels dark comedy, to which Helen Davies turns in her chapter.

A final theory of comedy—popularly known as the relief or release theory—is based on the idea that laughter releases a form of nervous energy. Though this theory had earlier proponents (cf. Moreall 2009, 16), it was consolidated and popularised through Sigmund Freud’s work on the cathartic release of psychic energy enabled through laughter at a joke , in which the joke-work allows the momentary overcoming of inhibition. Freud distinguished between innocent jokes, in which the moderate pleasure derives from the joke’s intellectual content, and tendentious ones, which are rewarded with a more conspicuous burst of laughter derived from the joke’s expression of aggressive or obscene content (1960, 96–97). The work of the tendentious joke is to allow the expression of instincts otherwise repressed by the superego: the joke will evade restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible (Freud 1960, 103). It allows a momentary rebellion against social strictures. As such, laughter at taboo subject matter can tell us a lot about what a particularly society constructs as correct and/or normative. Lockyer and Pickering sum it up perfectly: Humour is only possible because certain boundaries, rules and taboos exist in the first place (2009, 16). It is therefore possible—and indeed in part the function of this collection—to read comedy as a diagnosis of a particular society, revealing the boundaries, rules, and taboos that must be already in existence for the humour to work.

Chiara Bucaria and Luca Barra’s edited collection Taboo Comedy: Television and Controversial Humour takes up a similar range of subjects to our collection. Under the umbrella term of taboo humour, they include dark humour, sexual humour, racial, ethnic, and minority humour, gross-out/sick humour, sacrilegious/blasphemous humour, and physical appearance humour as the thematic categories engaged in the volume (2016, 3). Whilst they are similarly concerned with questions of sexism, racism, disability, homophobia, and religious intolerance, there is an apolitical ethos to the collection—it is meant to present scholarly research on issues concerning and arising from the use of controversial comedy […] without necessarily offering value judgements on it (Bucaria and Barra 2016, 2–3). Where our collection differs is that we take seriously the politics of representation and as such our contributors do not pretend to take a neutral stance: dealing with comedy that perpetuates exclusionary worldviews is the political raison d’être of this collection, and a value judgement on comedy that punches down is writ large. As such, the aims of this collection are closer to that of Sharon Lockyer and Michael Pickering’s Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour in questioning where the ethical limits of humour may lie, extending their project to focus in particular on the politics of representing minority groups (2009, 5).

To what extent are certain forms of comedy more closely aligned to social critique, and how productive might this be in practice? Satire, for instance, has come to be associated in contemporary comedy with the exposure of the foolishness or hypocrisy of politicians, powerful public figures, or serious social issues such as religion or crime. In Andrew Stott’s definition: satire aims to denounce folly and vice and to urge ethical and political reform through the subjection of ideas to humorous analysis (2004, 156). In this light, satire appears to be an especially productive method to offer a critique of entrenched values about identity politics and attendant social power inequalities . Indeed, some aspect of satire informs almost all of the examples of comedy discussed in this book. However, what will also emerge is that satire—like all forms of humour—is unpredictable in its consequences and effects, as demonstrated by Anshuman A. Mondal’s chapter. Intention is key, as is the position of power of both the deliverer of the joke and the butt of the humour. For instance, in the discussion of Boyle above, the forum for his jokes—a weekly panel show that deals with topical issues—is certainly satirical. Politicians and celebrities are standard fodder for satirical treatment on Mock the Week , and in Boyle’sstand-up shows. Yet it is difficult to argue a case for the ridicule of people with Down syndrome (as performed by Boyle in 2010) as being to urge ethical and political reform. Kieron Smith makes this point when he expresses the disappointment felt by himself and his wife at Boyle’s anti-progressive attitude, considering Boyle has elsewhere celebrated comedy as a last vestige of subversion and political progressiveness (2011, 47). Smith was writing on the cusp on non-invasive testing for Down syndrome, and urges that the public needs to have more information about the ways in which people with the condition are just as different and human as anyone else, away from stereotypes and stigma that might encourage termination of pregnancies (2011, 70). Since the publication of his book, this call has become all the more urgent, considering that non-invasive testing for Down syndrome has been approved by the UK government and will be introduced via the National Health Service in 2018. If, as we argue, comedy is a crucial vehicle for shaping broader cultural attitudes towards social identities, then what might be the ideological consequences of representing people with Down syndrome as unfashionable, foolish, and worthy of mockery? Ironically, Boyle’s remarks might then be taken as serving the political agenda of a government that believes a life with Down syndrome not to be worth living. This is satire, of a fashion, but not as political progressiveness knows it.

This example illustrates the ambivalent consequences of satire, and this emphasis on ideological ambivalence might be extended to other forms of comedy as well. The comedy featured in the case studies in this volume is frequently parodic, exemplified by the performance of whiteface by black comedians—a strategy that mocks the concept of essential racial difference—that Janine Bradbury discusses. As Jerry Palmer has outlined, recent theories of parody understand it primarily as one form of intertextuality (2009, 83); put another way, it is a form of comedy that is forced to reference that which it mocks. So how might an audience distinguish between what is being reiterated, and what is critiqued by a comic representation of social identities? Michael Pickering’s and Sharon Lockyer’s concept of the Alf Garnett syndrome of anti-racist critique being misinterpreted as racist celebration is pertinent here (2009, 198). Alf Garnett (played by Warren Mitchell) is a character in the British sitcom Till Death Us Do Part (1965–1975), and his supposedly laughable racist views found an unfortunate resonance with cultural anxieties about race and immigration at the time. As Sarita Malik notes, Alf was a peculiarly sympathetic character, which encouraged audience identification, and Within the context of news and documentary images of the Black problematic at this time, Alf’s views, for many, inevitably appeared logical (if extreme) attitudes towards race, and validated their racist opinions (2002, 93). Whilst the ambivalent politics of parody and race are especially relevant to the contributions of Alan O’Leary and Janine Bradbury, the tension between reconsolidation and critique in relation to comedy and the politics of identity in some way informs all of the chapters in this collection.

To what extent does the medium affect the message when it comes to comedy and the politics of representation? In a recent article about the emergence of stand-up comedy in China, Christopher Beam suggests that despite the tendency towards state censorship of the media: In practice, though, restrictions are usually felt only a high levels – on TV and in large theatres. In bars, comedians can say whatever they want, except during sensitive periods like the Tiananmen anniversary (2015). This disparity seems to be a matter of reach: television can reach a much larger audience and so might be considered more dangerous in terms of the subversive effects of comedy that criticises the status quo (or, from another perspective, which reiterates damaging stereotypes). The conceptualisation of stand-up comedy as being a