Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai explicate comedy’s role in undermining and creating categories of race and racial identities. By extension, comedy and the telling of… Read More »Sairaa Bains: Tasteless jokes in BlacKkKlansman
Tim Burton’s Addams Family spinoff, Wednesday is punctuated with elements of comic amusement as well as horror given the presence of monsters such as the… Read More »Sairaa Bains: Noël Carroll and the Confluence of Horror and Comedy in Burton’s Wednesday
Adam Kotsko refers to awkwardness as a “social phenomenon” and states that the emphasis should not just lie on “awkward individuals” but on the entire… Read More »Fleabag: Awkwardness as Social Phenomenon
Jack Babuscio argues in his ‘Camp and the Gay Sensibility’ that camp is “exaggerated” and when the stress on style is outrageous or too much,… Read More »Sairaa Bains – Jennifer’s Body as Camp Horror
Umberto Eco argues that a “carnival is revolution (or revolution is carnival): kings are decapitated (that is, lowered, made inferior) and the crowd is crowned.”[1]… Read More »Sairaa Bains: Eco’s “Carnival is Revolution” and The Capitol Hill Riots
Mary Douglas considers a joke’s role in destroying “hierarchy and order” and “denigrating and devaluing” dominant values or codes. By this definition a joke becomes… Read More »Laughter as a ‘Cathartic Joke’: Analyzing the Joker in Dark Knight Rises and Joker
The use of background laughter in sitcoms such as Friends or Mr. Bean, aligns with Bergson’s theories about laughter that is elicited through “automatism.” In… Read More »Sairaa Bains – Bergson + Background Laughter in Sitcoms
I will be analyzing a Saturday Night Live Digital Short titled, Threw it on the Ground alongside Tom Gunning’s Crazy Machines in the Garden of… Read More »Sairaa Bains – Gunning + SNL’s ‘Threw it on the Ground’