Product Description

Crammed full of comedy examples and house-hold names, from the music hall to The Royle Family, this book studies how English comedy reflects national concerns with class, race, gender and sexuality and traces the recurrence of themes and structures.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #266987 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review

'In A National Joke, Medhurst...uses comedy to pin down that most elusive of things, the English national identity.' The Guardian

'This is an excellent study of a popular comedy that links it into a variety of English cultural identities. Unusually for a book classified as cultural studies, it is clearly written, and by an author who enjoys humour... a splendid account' - The Times Higher Education

From the Back Cover

Comedy is crucial to how the English see themselves. This book considers that proposition through a series of case studies of popular English comedies and comedians in the twentieth century, ranging from the Carry On films to the work of Mike Leigh and contemporary sitcoms such as The Royle Family, and from George Formby to Alan Bennett and Roy 'Chubby' Brown.

Relating comic traditions to questions of class, gender, sexuality and geography, A National Joke looks at how comedy is a cultural thermometer, taking the temperature of its times. It asks why vulgarity has always delighted English audiences, why camp is such a strong thread in English humour, why class conditions what we laugh at and why comedy has been so neglected in most theoretical writing about cultural identity. Part history and part polemic, it argues that the English urgently need to reflect on who they are, who they have been and who they might become, and insists that comedy offers a particularly illuminating location for undertaking those reflections.

Andy Medhurst works in the Department of Media and Film at the University of Sussex. He has been teaching and writing about issues of identity, representation and popular culture since 1982. He is the co-editor of Lesbian and Gay Studies and the author of a forthcoming book on Coronation Street.

MEDIA / CULTURAL STUDIES

About the Author
Andy Medhurst works in the Department of Media and Film at the University of Sussex. He has been teaching and writing about issues of identity, representation and popular culture since 1982. He is the co-editor of Lesbian and Gay Studies and the author of a forthcoming book on Coronation Street.

Customer Reviews

Pefect!
Is it enough perhaps to simply recall Wisdom and Secombe (1986) and their enormously controversial position on the matter of the titanic brawl (Medhurst vs Plowdram, 1988), with all those trumpteted flourishes of aspersion during which accusations flew, apples bounced off bald heads, spectacles were disjointed, and a certain sentimental impecuniousness trumpeted measures of brash insistency? Polish and obscurity is the vain hope of so many of us even as we peer into the deep shine of our shoes while attempting to wrestle with the big problems of the day. Enough already! Read this book and it will change your life! Indeed, this is a jolly romp of a textual rampage. Sinewy adjectives jostle gently, nouns pull extravagant faces, adverbs simply cannot contain themselves and burst their sides in a continual roar of expectation. While the metaphors, gangly and majestic as they are, hang glumly from the chandeliers of expediency. Meanwhile, the endnotes run in all directions like rats bobbing along gutters in a mad babble of perspiring and ecstatic guffawings. A perfect stew!