Volume 23, Issue 2

This manuscript provides an understanding of the complex process through which the social organization is (re)produced and transformed through its member's everyday humor. This study is based on a yearlong ethnography of a hotel kitchen that focuses on the in-group humor of chefs as they work. It reveals the chefs' humor as a communicative process that establishes the group's boundaries, the identity of the group members, and the processes through which the group makes sense of and performs its labor. Humor's role within this organizational group is demonstrated through situated episodes that not only (re)produce the status quo, but also provides a strategy for employees to subvert or challenge authoritative power and constraining organizing practices.

Folk and country music were rural-based music styles that developed during the pre-rock decades of the early twentieth century. Largely performed by working-class practitioners for working-class audiences, these genres captured the hardships of poor constituencies through markedly different means of humorous expression. Whereas folk employed an often strident satire in resisting perceived oppressors, country looked inwards, using self-deprecating and personalized humor as a shield and relief against outside forces. Narrative tall-tales and regional vernacular were ubiquitous features of folk and country humor, and both crafted struggling characters to serve as illustrative metaphors for broader class concerns. In surveying these music forms in their infancy—as well as their key players—we are connected to the roots of American humor, as well as subsequent developments in rock & roll rebellion.

The point of this article is to show how the “You might be a redneck” joke cycle is appropriated to designate a lower social category within the Southern working class in Alabama, and to negotiate the boundaries between the good old boy working class “red neck” and the lower category of “white trash.” Close attention to language is important in the analysis because the jokers exaggerate features of the vernacular dialect to perform members of the lower social category. Within the tradition of the study of conversational joking (Fry, Sweet madness: A study of humor, Pacific Books, 1963; Tannen, Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends, Oxford University Press, 1984; Davies, C. E., Joint joking: Improvisational humorous episodes in conversation: 360–371, 1984, Language and American ‘good taste’: Martha Stewart as mass-media role model, Routledge, 2003a, Journal of Pragmatics 35: 361–1385, 2003b; Norrick, Conversational joking: Humor in everyday talk, Indiana University Press, 1993; Kotthoff, Coherent keying in conversational humour: Contextualizing joint fictionalisation, John Benjamins, 1999), combined with the discourse analyis of radio talk (Coupland, Language, situation, and the relational self: Theorizing dialect-style in sociolinguistics, Cambridge University Press, 2002; Goffman, Forms of talk, The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), and “performance speech” (Schilling-Estes, Language in Society 27: 53–83, 1998), this study examines joking interaction on a popular morning radio talk show in Alabama that is hosted by two men, known to their audience as Jack and Bubba. The data are a set of CD recordings identified as “The Best of . . .” supplemented with additional regular shows. Examining the joking as an important part of a linguistic “presentation of self” (Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life, Doubleday, 1959; Davies, C. E., Texas Linguistic Forum 44: 73–89, 2002), the analysis reveals how the joking between the two hosts and with members of the studio audience is rooted in sociolinguistic and cultural dimensions of the working class American South.

Strange Brew developed from an SCTV skit in response to the Canadian Broadcasting's demand for more “Canadian” content in mainstream media. The film embodies virtually every stereotype about Canadians, especially their passions for donuts, hockey, and beer. One of the sub-plots of the film, moreover, loosely follows that of Shakespeare's Hamlet , a connection that is generally unacknowledged. The inclusion of the Hamlet subplot, though, endows the film with a more complex and sophisticated level of humor than the main plot alone could do. The following analysis begins by establishing the scripts for Hamlet and Strange Brew as opposite, consistent with the Semantic Script Theory of Humor, and argues that the real humor and meaning of the film arises at the points where the two scripts overlap. When Strange Brew most explicitly borrows from Hamlet two things happen—the most sophisticated humor emerges and questions of Canadian identity come to the forefront. At the conclusion, however, the film abandons the plot of Hamlet , and only absurdity remains, Viewers are left laughing, but puzzled. In Strange Brew , both the Hamlet subplot and humor provide ways to examine problems of identity, but both fall short when attempting to solve them.

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of humor in challenging hegemonic discourses on social class and gender, as they are reproduced in the popular sitcom format. Mindful of sitcoms' entrenched role in the audience's commodification process, the study explores whether a form of critical humor on social class and gender can emerge in the TV palimpsest. For this purpose, the study will look specifically at the sitcom Roseanne and at the public persona of Roseanne Barr. The study adopts a “multiperspectival approach” that considers all three elements of production, text and reception. First, Roseanne will be historically contextualized to understand the contradictions with which working-class representations are fraught. Secondly, a textual analysis will be performed to assess the extent to which class and gender are used as sources of humor and for which functions; finally, metatexts and viewers' responses will be analyzed considering the tensions between hegemonic and oppositional meanings attached to the sitcom. The case study of Roseanne will show that, in spite of obvious containment strategies—often through the secondary plotline and the metatexts, the sitcom provided its audience with critical humor to challenge hegemonic representations of class and gender.