1st Edition
Television Sitcom and Cultural Crisis
This volume demonstrates that television comedies are conduits through which we might resist normative ways of thinking about cultural crises.
By drawing on Gramscian notion of crisis and the understanding that crises are overlapping, interconnected, and mutually constitutive, the essays in this collection demonstrate that situation comedies do more than make us laugh; they also help us understand the complexities of our social world’s moments of crisis. Each chapter takes up the televisual representation of a modern cultural crisis in a contemporary sitcom and is grounded in the extensive body of literature that suggests that levity is a powerful mechanism to make sense of and cope with these difficult cultural experiences.
Divided into thematic sections that highlight crises of institutions and systems, identity and representation, and speculation and futurism, this book will interest scholars of media and cultural studies, political economy, communication studies, and humor studies.
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Humor and/in Crisis
Holly Willson Holladay and Chandler L. Classen
Part I: Systems and Institutions
1. “Quiet Quitters”: Detectorists, Hobbies, and Resistance to Neoliberal Capitalism
Hannah Andrews and Gregory Frame
2. Laughing to Keep from Crying at Abbott Elementary: Humor's Potential in the Teacher Demoralization Crisis
Stephanie Brown and Amanda Brown
3. The Struggle Is Real and It’s Hilarious: The Crisis of Choice in Workin’ Moms
Kristin L. Fitzsimmons, Lauren J. Johnsen, and Molly M. Hardy
4. Comedy at Cloud 9: Union Dynamics and Corporate Critique in Superstore
Melina Meimaridis
5. Veep, Tragicomedy, and the Perpetual Crisis of American Democracy
Simon Stow
Part II: Identity and Representation
6. Never Have I Ever…Challenged Whiteness
Madhavi Reddi and Joseph Richards
7. “Poor People Can’t Afford to Quit Their Jobs to Make Things Better”: Working-Class Crisis in The Conners
Nancy Bressler
8. “No, the World Is Ending Because of Me”: Satire, Neoliberal Crises, and the Millennial Female Subject in Search Party
Sarah Lahm
Part III: Speculation and Futurism
9. “It’s Better than Not Trying, Right?”: The Good Place and Humor in the Durative Present
Caroline Guthrie
10. The Crisis of Technological Reliance and the Spectacle of Authority: Avenue 5’s Ironic Depiction of Technology
Brent Kice
11. Kinship at the End of the World: Apocalyptic Media and The Last Man on Earth as a Manifesto for Life in Eco-Crisis
Chandler L. Classen and Holly Willson Holladay
Index
Biography
Holly Willson Holladay is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Missouri State University, USA.
Chandler L. Classen is a doctoral candidate in Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.
