1st Edition

Television Sitcom and Cultural Crisis

180 Pages

by Routledge

180 Pages

by Routledge

180 Pages

by Routledge

Also available as eBook on:

Taylor & Francis eBooks
(Institutional Purchase)Opens in new tab or window

Description

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... Read more

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