Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Things can change quickly.A few months ago, I had a conversation with a fellow humor scholar, and we observed that the omnipresence of humor scandals in the public sphere seems to be waning again already.Between 2017 and 2023, not a week could go by without something jocular turning into a public controversy, whether it be an "ironic" remark by a right wing politician, or a "bad" joke made during the Academy Award ceremony.This was true all over the western hemisphere, from the US to Estonia.But in the last year, and especially since the horrendous second term of Donald Trump's presidency started, there seems to be too much at stake in the realm of seriousness for journalists and their audiences to be really bothered by acts of comedy.When the world around us is changing at such a high speed, it is difficult for academia to keep pace.Within the field of humor and comedy studies, the focus on scandals still feels quite novel, even if the scholarly awareness of humor's potential for controversy dates back at least to the 2005-06 Mohammed Cartoon Crisis.It takes time to set-up collaborative research projects and get them funded.As a result, the transnational study of humor scandals is just getting started, for example via two European projects.1 The short monograph Comedy and Controversy: Scripting Public Speech, by theatre scholar Sarah Balkin and literary historian Marc Mierowsky, both affiliated to the University of Melbourne, Australia, forms an important contribution to this emerging branch of "humor scandal studies."It was published as part of the series Elements in Contemporary Performance Texts, which, in the words of its editors, "responds to the evolution of the form, role and meaning of text in theatre and performance in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries."In a little less than sixty pages, the authors of Comedy and Controversy analyze the impact of the changing media landscape of the last twenty years or so on the 1 I refer here to Humour Scandals (Hu-Sca): A cross-national analysis of humour controversies in Europe, led by Giselinde Kuipers (KU Leuven) and funded by the Flemish government, and the CELSA network project Humour and Conflict in the Public Sphere, led by Władysław Chłopicki (University of Kraków), Anastasiya Astapova (University of Tartu) and Giselinde Kuipers.
Author: Ivo Nieuwenhuis
Institution: Radboud University Nijmegen
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,712
Funders: KU Leuven, Tartu Ülikool, Vlaamse regering
OpenAlex ID: W4417508153