The perils of parody : joking with stereotypes in a postcolonial context in Cien años de soledad

This article examines the comic treatment of the characters in Cien años de soledad. It challenges the previous studies of the novel’s comedy, which have tended to conclude that its comic formulas are necessarily subversive and carnivalesque. Employing Susan Purdie’s theory of comedy and Edward Said’s, Homi Bhabha’s and Walter Mignolo’s postcolonial theorisation of othering, the article analyses the ways in which Gabriel García Márquez’s comic depictions function as parodic exaggerations of certain stereotypical representations of the Latin American “other.” However, it is also argued that the diffuse nature of parody and of the technique of exaggeration open up these jokes to multiple readings. Moreover, according to Stuart Hall’s and Richard Dyer’s work on stereotypes, references to the “other” in jokes or in other types of narratives inevitably enter into an intertextual dialogue with established discourses, over which the author or text has little control. In this respect, the article aims to map the possible meanings of these jokes within the context of the novel’s global popularity. It investigates the possibility that certain comic representations of the “other” in Cien años de soledad run the risk of confirming certain discourses just as much as they have the potential to subvert them

Tragic but brave or just crips with chips? Songs and their lyrics in the Disability Arts Movement in Britain

Disability culture is a site within which social and positional identities are struggled for and dominant discourses rejected; in which mainstream representations of people with impairments – as victims of personal tragedy – are held to the light and revealed as hegemonic constructions within a disabling society. Drawing upon styles that range from jazz, blues and folk to reggae, performance poetry and punk, disabled singers and bands in the Disability Arts Movement in Britain have been central to the development of an affirmative disability discourse rooted in ideas of pride, anger and strength. Examining lyrics by Johnny Crescendo, Ian Stanton and the Fugertivs – performers emerging as part of this movement in the 1980s and 1990s – this article considers the dark humour which runs through much of this work. It is suggested that these lyrics' observational reflections on everyday experiences of being oppressed as disabled people have been overlooked within critical disability studies to date, but are important in developing an understanding of positive disability identity as a tool available to disabled people in order to make sense of, and express themselves within, the world in which they find themselves

Life’s Too Short to be polite : Exploiting impoliteness and rudeness in Gervais And Merchant’s humour about physical difference

T: What follows is a qualitative analysis of the use of impoliteness for comic effect in the British comedy series Life\u2019s Too Short written by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Because each episode centres on Warwick Davis, an actor with restricted growth, or dwarfism, there is a considerable risk of superiority or disparagement-type comedy about a taboo subject like physical difference, stigmatized in current British culture. In this analysis I set out to show that the authors\u2019 use of impoliteness plays an important role in allowing them to write comedy centred on this sensitive issue. The starting-point of the analysis is Culpeper\u2019s proposal that impoliteness can be entertaining, which in this case is applied to scripted comedy rather than impromptu or semi-spontaneous examples of impoliteness for purposes of entertainment. Referring to aspects of impoliteness applied to entertainment, and with reference to the concept of face, and to superiority, incongruity, and relief humour theories, the paper suggests there are at least six techniques by which the authors use impoliteness to reprise physical difference for a contemporary comedy series

Brave art: Scottish identity and stand-up comedy

Stand-up comedy remains a prevalent form of entertainment in Scotland, with comedians drawing sell-out crowds, and comedy making up the biggest section of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival programme. Moreover, stand-up comedy is recognised by many academics as a form of social commentary that can affirm or subvert cultural norms, or at the very least, provide a social thermometer that tells us what is going on in society. Research on Scottish stand-up comedy can therefore shed a light on how contemporary Scottish identity is constructed and understood. Yet, despite its popularity and potential social significance, few studies have focused on Scottish comedy to date, and none have chosen to analyse Scottish stand-up comedy specifically. The present research addresses this gap and uses discourse analysis to understand how Scottish stand-up comedy articulates representations of contemporary Scottish and British identities. The data for this study includes live comedy performances at the Edinburgh Fringe as well as interviews with stand-up comedians to gain a deeper insight. The findings show that Scotland is largely framed as a postcolonial nation with distinct values (inclusive, left-wing, egalitarian), particularly in comparison to ‘Brexit’ England. Despite this emphasis on civic nationalism, there are intersectional differences in how people experience Scottish identity, particularly for Scots positioned outside traditional white, heterosexual masculinity, who have to work harder to belong. The Edinburgh Fringe brings to the fore questions of belonging and exclusion as Scots make up a relatively small proportion of the comedy offering. Yet, the Fringe is also identified as a carnivalesque space with subversive potential. By disrupting the taken for granted, and highlighting possibilities for change, Scottish stand-up comedians at the Fringe engage in the political work of (de-)constructing the boundaries of identity and belonging

Double-voicing at work:power, gender and linguistic expertise

'Double-voicing' means that when a person speaks, they have a heightened awareness of the concerns and agendas of others, which is reflected in the ways they adjust their language in response to interlocutors. The Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin famously applied the concept of 'double-voiced discourse' to the world of literature, but just touched upon its relevance to everyday language. This book reveals how 'double-voicing' is an inherent and routine part of spoken interactions within educational and professional contexts. Double-voicing is closely related to the ways in which power relations are constructed between speakers, as it is often used by less powerful speakers to negotiate perceived threats from more powerful others. The book explores how women leaders use double-voicing more than men as a means of gaining acceptance and approval in the workplace. While double-voicing at times indexes a speaker's linguistic insecurity, the book argues that it can be harnessed to demonstrate linguistic expertise

Framing young children’s humour and practitioner responses to it using a Bakhtinian carnivalesque lens

This article presents findings from a pilot study offering an alternative framing of children’s humour and laughter in an early childhood education setting. It employs a Bakhtinian carnivalesque lens to explore the nature of children’s humour in an urban nursery and investigate the framing of children’s humour and laughter outside the popular paradigm of developmental psychology. In addition, it addresses the challenge that children’s humour can present for early childhood practitioners, turning to Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival to frame children’s humour as carnivalesque. This conception is then offered as a part of a potential explanation for practitioners’ occasional resistance to children’s humour, proposing that dominating, authoritative discourses within early childhood education play a significant role in this. The article draws on a number of theorists, including Bakhtin more widely, to address reasons why humour is not valued pedagogically within the UK early childhood field and suggests that further research in the area is imperative, in order that we gain a better understanding of the place and significance of children’s humour within early childhood practice

Laughing Doubles: The Duality of Humour

This thesis examines humour as a theoretical problem, taking humour as both an object to be defined and as a mode of thinking in its own right. In the first chapter, I position humour between good sense and nonsense within a Deleuzian and psychoanalytic framework, culminating in a discussion of humour’s relationship to perversion. In the second chapter, I further develop this connection to perversion through an analysis of Christian humour, exploring the incongruity between the transcendent heights and corporeal depths, with special attention paid to the comedic works of Erasmus and Rabelais. In the third chapter, I examine how humour functions without the transcendent principle operative in Christianity, considering humour as a problem of modernity. I present modern humour as the incongruity between vital matter and mechanical life through a reading of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman in dialogue with the theories of humour advanced by Henri Bergson and Wyndham Lewis. Across the various foci of this thesis, I develop a theory of humour as the expression of an incongruous duality that rejects resolution in favour of one term or a synthesis of the two into a higher principl