In ‘The Zany Science’, Sianne Ngai considers the emergence of the ‘zany’ as an aesthetic category that reflects anxieties surrounding the increasingly blurred distinction between… Read More »‘I’m charmed I’m sure’ – The Zaniness of Mrs Featherbottom
Content warning – Zombie gore Jonathon L. Crane argues that the horror genre may be ‘corrupted’ to produce the ‘horror-comedy’, which is designed to conjure… Read More »How To Survive a Zombie Apocalypse: Zombieland (2009)
*Content warning: Mentions/ depictions of (attempted) suicide When explicating Freud’s theoretical ideas on humour, Simon Critchley notes that, according to Freud, humour is resultant from… Read More »Freudian Humour and In Bruges (2008)
According to Susan Sontag, the camp sensibility is a kind of aesthetic attitude that ‘revels’ in artifice, exaggeration and the stylisation of cultural artefacts. I… Read More »Noughties Camp: Scooby Doo (2002)
Arguably, social media platforms operate as a kind of 21st century Bakhtinian ‘Carnival’, providing a virtual “second world”, that fosters the playful transgression of social… Read More »The Mukbang and Grotesque Realism
The arrival of Web 2.0 has seen the proliferation of ‘reaction’ style videos on sites such as Youtube, whereby one or more people watch a… Read More »Try not to laugh…at laughing: Reaction Videos and Laughing Collectives
Drawing upon Northorp Frye’s distinction between Old and New Comedy, Stanley Cavell outlines a genre called the ‘comedy of remarriage’, which are romantic comedy films… Read More »Social reconciliation and ‘remarriage’ in The Parent Trap (1998)
Mary Douglas argues that the meaning and effect of jokes, as symbolic ‘rites’, are not only contained within the speech or act itself, but must… Read More »Mary Douglas and ‘Wee mental Davey’: Jokes and Social Experience
Within his analytical account of the comic, Henri Bergson contends that laughter is a social action, that ‘implies a kind of…complicity, with other laughers, real… Read More »‘Real or Imaginary’: Henri Bergson and the ‘Laugh Track’
Whilst reading Tom Gunning’s analysis on the ‘mischief gag’ in early cinema, Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1990) stood out to me as an example of… Read More »Home Alone and the ‘Mischief Gag’