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The Authenticity of Play

Satiric Television's Challenge to Authorative Discourses
  • Jeffrey P. Jones
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The Power of Satire
This chapter is in the book The Power of Satire

Abstract

Employing the heuristic of space, target, media, rhetoric, and time, this chapter reexamines US scholarship on contemporary television satire. What we see repeatedly are struggles over what constitutes legitimate and illegitimate forms of public speech, language, and actions within televisual and non-televisual spaces. Satire has emerged, employing various forms of fakery and a rhetoric of play, to challenge the representative roles that politicians and news media have claimed for themselves, including the language of authority that undergirds their positions of power. Play and fakery invite popular participation and direct forms of representation, including across media forms. Finally, satire, parody and irony are seen as more authentic forms of public language and critique in an age dominated by the professionally packaged and managed discourses employed by politicians and commercial forces.

Abstract

Employing the heuristic of space, target, media, rhetoric, and time, this chapter reexamines US scholarship on contemporary television satire. What we see repeatedly are struggles over what constitutes legitimate and illegitimate forms of public speech, language, and actions within televisual and non-televisual spaces. Satire has emerged, employing various forms of fakery and a rhetoric of play, to challenge the representative roles that politicians and news media have claimed for themselves, including the language of authority that undergirds their positions of power. Play and fakery invite popular participation and direct forms of representation, including across media forms. Finally, satire, parody and irony are seen as more authentic forms of public language and critique in an age dominated by the professionally packaged and managed discourses employed by politicians and commercial forces.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgments vii
  4. About the contributors ix
  5. Introduction 1
  6. Mapping the Field
  7. Satire and dignity 19
  8. The Authenticity of Play 33
  9. Cultural Flow 47
  10. Space
  11. Reshaping the Border Zone. An Approach to Satirical Space 61
  12. Mediating satire 71
  13. Arab Sitcom Animations as Platforms for Satire 81
  14. Target
  15. Contesting Political Boundaries in Contemporary Moroccan Satire 95
  16. How to Burlesque a Burlesquer 105
  17. Who is the ape, who the human? Reize door het Aapenland (1788) and Die Affenkönige oder die Reformation des Affenlandes (1789) considered 135
  18. Rhetoric
  19. Looking backward. The rhetoric of the back in visual satire 147
  20. "A bull is a ludicrous jest": fable and the satiric bite in Arbuthnot's John Bull pamphlets 175
  21. Bas Jan Ader's Ludic Conceptualism 185
  22. Media
  23. Absolutely Fabulous 197
  24. TV Satire and its Targets 207
  25. Enlightenment Subverted 217
  26. Time
  27. On the power of Money and the King of Spain's son-in- law 235
  28. Who are the Frogs? The Transmigration of a Symbol of Nationality 247
  29. Hydropathe Caricature 259
  30. Conclusions 269
  31. Index 275
https://doi.org/10.1075/thr.2.03jon

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgments vii
  4. About the contributors ix
  5. Introduction 1
  6. Mapping the Field
  7. Satire and dignity 19
  8. The Authenticity of Play 33
  9. Cultural Flow 47
  10. Space
  11. Reshaping the Border Zone. An Approach to Satirical Space 61
  12. Mediating satire 71
  13. Arab Sitcom Animations as Platforms for Satire 81
  14. Target
  15. Contesting Political Boundaries in Contemporary Moroccan Satire 95
  16. How to Burlesque a Burlesquer 105
  17. Who is the ape, who the human? Reize door het Aapenland (1788) and Die Affenkönige oder die Reformation des Affenlandes (1789) considered 135
  18. Rhetoric
  19. Looking backward. The rhetoric of the back in visual satire 147
  20. "A bull is a ludicrous jest": fable and the satiric bite in Arbuthnot's John Bull pamphlets 175
  21. Bas Jan Ader's Ludic Conceptualism 185
  22. Media
  23. Absolutely Fabulous 197
  24. TV Satire and its Targets 207
  25. Enlightenment Subverted 217
  26. Time
  27. On the power of Money and the King of Spain's son-in- law 235
  28. Who are the Frogs? The Transmigration of a Symbol of Nationality 247
  29. Hydropathe Caricature 259
  30. Conclusions 269
  31. Index 275
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