CFP: SCMS Panel/Workshop: No, Seriously! The Comic in Mediated Landscapes
The weekend of July 15, Sacha Baron Cohen?s latest confection, Brüno,
opened to packed houses in North America, and a variation on the
fierce debate that attended his last foray into the borderlands of
xenophobia and satire, Borat, is recurring along very similar lines.
Does Cohen?s embrace of absurd stereotypes undermine their potency, or
does it reinforce them? Are his audience?s prejudices challenged or
reinforced? Does the debate itself reproduce or modulate the hurts it
decries? More broadly, do available understandings of the function of
humor adequately account for the popular embrace of the extreme forms
of physical humor, satire, and parody such as Cohen?s (likewise for
Dice-Clay, Silverman, Kinison, Chappelle, Stewart, Colbert), the
Jackass universe, and YouTube? This panel will consider the landscape
of mediated humor, comedy, and the joke pre- and post-9/11 (when
irony?s obituary was prematurely published). Do changes to this
landscape require a significant rewrite to the old maps of Freud,
Bergson, or Rourke (and what do we gain by doing so)? Likewise, we are
interested in what newer forays into the theory of humor, such as
those by Zupancic or Critchley, may add to our understandings of its
mediation. Proposals may cover any medium, and may be primarily
historical or theoretical in orientation, and are not necessarily
limited to issues in contemporary humor/comedy: the final disposition
of the panel will be determined by consonance across proposals, rather
than by medium or method. (Actually, a panel that effectively and
coherently crosses medium-specific disciplinary boundaries would be
ideal.) Potential topics may include:
Laughter and violence
Humor and race
Humor and intermediation
Irony and the audience
Jokes and inter-generational relations
Comedy and gender
Queer minstrelsy
Laughter and public affect
Comedy, inclusion, and exclusion
Class (conflict) and comedy
Humor and the Other
Post-generic humor
The pathology of humor
Humor and historical distance
Proposals should be a maximum of 500 words in length, and should
include a bibliography and contact information. Please send proposals
by August 10 to:
Professor Cynthia Chris
Department of Media Culture
College of Staten Island/City University of New York
(chris /at/ mail.csi.cuny.edu)
and
Professor Nicholas Sammond
Cinema Studies Institute
University of Toronto
(nic.sammond /at/ utoronto.ca)
Send individual topics & summaries to organizer(s) by: E-Mail
Nicholas Sammond
Cinema Studies Institute / Department of English
University of Toronto
Innis College
2 Sussex Avenue
Toronto, ON M5S 1J5
416.978.7271
(nic.sammond /at/ utoronto.ca)
You do
like shining a window,
But you
'aint got no window
So you
just picture a window...
Cab Calloway
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