A National Joke

Crammed full of comedy examples and household names, from the music hall to The Royle Family, this book studies how English comedy reflects national concerns with class, race, gender and sexuality and traces the recurrence of themes and structures.

Autorentext

Andy Medhurst works in the Department of Media and Film at the University of Sussex. He has been teaching and writing about issues of identity, representation and popular culture since 1982. He is the co-editor of Lesbian and Gay Studies and the author of a forthcoming book on Coronation Street.

Zusammenfassung
Comedy is crucial to how the English see themselves. This book considers that proposition through a series of case studies of popular English comedies and comedians in the twentieth century, ranging from the Carry On films to the work of Mike Leigh and contemporary sitcoms such as The Royle Family, and from George Formby to Alan Bennett and Roy 'Chubby' Brown.Relating comic traditions to questions of class, gender, sexuality and geography, A National Joke looks at how comedy is a cultural thermometer, taking the temperature of its times. It asks why vulgarity has always delighted English audiences, why camp is such a strong thread in English humour, why class influences what we laugh at and why comedy has been so neglected in most theoretical writing about cultural identity. Part history and part polemic, it argues that the English urgently need to reflect on who they are, who they have been and who they might become, and insists that comedy offers a particularly illuminating location for undertaking those reflections.

Inhalt

1. Introduction 2. Concerning Comedy 3. Notions of Nation 4. Englishnesses 5. Music Hall: Contours and Legacies 6. Our Gracious Queens: English Comedy's Effeminate Tradition 7. Lads in Love: Gender and Togetherness in the Male Double Act 8. Thirty Nibbles at the Same Cherry: Why the 'Carry Ons' Carry On 9. Bermuda My Arse: Class, Culture and 'The Royle Family' 10. Anatomising England: Alan Bennett, Mike Leigh, Victoria Wood 11. Togetherness through Offensiveness: The Importance of Roy 'Chubby' Brown 12. Conclusion: A National Sense of Humour ?