The Comedy Studies Reader

Winner, MPCA/ACA Book Award, Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association, 2020

From classical Hollywood film comedies to sitcoms, recent political satire, and the developing world of online comedy culture, comedy has been a mainstay of the American media landscape for decades. Recognizing that scholars and students need an authoritative collection of comedy studies that gathers both foundational and cutting-edge work, Nick Marx and Matt Sienkiewicz have assembled The Comedy Studies Reader.

This anthology brings together classic articles, more recent works, and original essays that consider a variety of themes and approaches for studying comedic media--the carnivalesque, comedy mechanics and absurdity, psychoanalysis, irony, genre, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and nation and globalization. The authors range from iconic theorists, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, and Linda Hutcheon, to the leading senior and emerging scholars of today. As a whole, the volume traces two parallel trends in the evolution of the field--first, comedy's development into myriad subgenres, formats, and discourses, a tendency that has led many popular commentators to characterize the present as a "comedy zeitgeist"; and second, comedy studies' new focus on the ways in which comedy increasingly circulates in "serious" discursive realms, including politics, economics, race, gender, and cultural power.

Author: Nick Marx
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 08/01/2018
Pages: 328
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781477316009

About the Author
NICK MARXFort Collins, ColoradoMarx is an assistant professor of media studies at Colorado State University.MATT SIENKIEWICZChestnut Hill, MassachusettsSienkiewicz is an associate professor of communication and international studies at Boston Coll