Politics and Comedy: Critical Encounters
This series brings scholars of political comedy together in order to examine the effect of humor and comedy in a political way. The series has three main components. Political Comedy Encounters Neoliberalism aims to look at how comedy disrupts or reinforces dominant ideologies under neoliberalism, including but not limited to: forms of authority, epistemological certainties bred by market centrality, prospects for democratic thought and action, and the implications for civic participation. Political Comedy as Cultural Text examines the relationship between the more bizarre elements of contemporary politics and comedy, including but not limited to countersubversive narratives that challenge or reinforce anti-democratic political authority and market thought, radical social movements that seek to undermine it, and political comedy’s relationship to the cultural unconscious. Lastly, the series welcomes proposals for scholarship that tracks the context in which comedy and politics interact. Political Comedy in Context follows the intersection of politics and comedy in viral, mediated, and affective environments.


Editor(s): Julie Webber (jawebbe@ilstu.edu)
Staff editorial contact: Joseph Parry (Joseph.Parry@bloomsbury.com)