Comedy and Distinction: The Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’ Sense of Humour (CRESC)

"Comedy is currently enjoying unprecedented growth within the British culture industries. Defying the recent economic downturn, it has exploded into a booming billion-pound industry, both on TV and on the live circuit. Despite this, academia has so far largely ignored comedy. Indeed, the majority of research that does exist--in disciplines as wide as English literature, film and television studies, cultural studies, and media studies--has focused on analysing comedians or comic texts. The problem with this scholarship is that it tends to assume that through analysing an artist's intentions or techniques, one can understand what is and what isn't funny. But this poses a fundamental question--funny to whom? How can we definitively discern how audiences react to comedy? Comedy and Distinction addresses this cross-disciplinary omission, bringing comedy audiences to the fore and providing the first ever empirical examination of British comedy taste. Drawing on a large-scale survey and in-depth interviews carried out at the 2009 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the monograph explores what types of comedy people like (and dislike), what their preferences reveal about their sense of humour, how comedy taste lubricates everyday interaction, and how issues of social class, gender, ethnicity and geographical location interact with patterns of comic taste. Friedman asks: Are some types of comedy valued higher than others in British society? Does more legitimate comedy taste act as a tangible resource in social life--a form of cultural capital?This book explores how popular culture shapes British cultural identities, the relationship between national fields and global cultural flows, and the role of taste in policing social class boundaries. It will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, social class, social theory, cultural studies and comedy studies"--