[csaa-forum] NEW BOOK - Humour as Politics

[Holm, Nick]

Dear colleagues (with apologies for cross-posting),

I am delighted to announce the publication of Humour as Politics and hope that it will be of interest to people on this list. The book explores contemporary popular humour through the lens of cultural and critical theory and argues that comedy operates as a dominant aesthetic mode that actively shapes how we imagine ourselves, our connections to others, and the political possibilities of our current moment.

The official blurb and endorsements are pasted below.

https://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783319509495

Best,
Nick Holm

This book argues that recent developments in contemporary comedy have changed not just the way we laugh but the way we understand the world. Drawing on a range of contemporary televisual, cinematic and digital examples, from Seinfeld and Veep to Family Guy and Chappelle's Show, Holm explores how humour has become a central site of cultural politics in the twenty-first century. More than just a form of entertainment, humour has come to play a central role in the contemporary media environment, shaping how we understand ideas of freedom, empathy, social boundaries and even logic. Through an analysis of humour as a political and aesthetic category, Humour as Politics challenges older models of laughter as a form of dissent and instead argues for a new theory of humour as the cultural expression of our (neo)liberal moment.

"In a historical moment marked by lively debate over the political uses of comedy and satire, Nicholas Holm's Humour as Politics arrives to bring us the conceptual tools we need. Witty, rigorous and convincing, Humour and Politics is a landmark work of cultural analysis." (Will Straw, Professor, Department of Art History and Communications Studies, McGill University, Canada)

"This is a remarkably erudite, rigorous and persuasive analysis of one of the most important, and under-studied cultural forms of our time. An important work of cultural studies and cultural criticism, this ground-breaking study sheds crucial new light on the operations of this most central, but still elusive, point of interface between everyday life, media culture and the wider public domain." (Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory, University of East London, UK)

"Pushing beyond orthodox theories, this book draws attention to the aesthetics of humour, long-neglected by mainstream humour research. Challenging and insightful, the book offers food for thought to scholars of contemporary humour and comedy." (Jessica Milner Davis FRSN, University of Sydney, Australia. Author of Farce (1978) and Satire and Politics, Palgrave 2017)


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Dr Nicholas Holm<http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/expertise/profile.cfm?stref=990001> |Senior Lecturer in Media Studies |Program Coordinator for Media Studies
Building 7, Room 7C45 |Massey University |Wellington |Aotearoa New Zealand
+64 6 3569099 x 84544 | N.H.F.Holm at massey.ac.nz<mailto:N.H.F.Holm at massey.ac.nz>
https://massey.academia.edu/NicholasHolm
New Publications
Humour as Politics<https://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783319509495> // Advertising and Consumer Society: A Critical Introduction<https://he.palgrave.com/page/detail/advertising-and-consumer-society-nicholas-holm/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137471741> // Ecological Entanglements in the Anthropocene<https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498535694/Ecological-Entanglements-in-the-Anthropocene>

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