Louise Peacock - A Cultural History of Comedy in the Modern Age

A Cultural History of Comedy

General Editors: Andrew McConnell Stott and Eric Weitz

Volume 1

A Cultural History of Comedy in Antiquity

Edited by Michael Ewans

Volume 2

A Cultural History of Comedy in the Middle Ages

Edited by Martha Bayless

Volume 3

A Cultural History of Comedy in the Early Modern Age

Edited by Andrew McConnell Stott

Volume 4

A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Enlightenment

Edited by Elizabeth Kraft

Volume 5

A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Empire

Edited by Matthew Kaiser

Volume 6

A Cultural History of Comedy in the Modern Age

Edited by Louise Peacock

The cast of Single Parents, ABC, 2018.

The cast of Saturday Night Live, NBC, 2017.

Comedian Jimmy McGhie.

Josie Longs spidergram.

The Noise Next Door.

Comedian Amy Schumer.

Comedian Wanda Sykes.

The cast of The Big Bang Theory, CBS, 200719.

The cast of Modern Family, ABC, Season 8, 2017.

Buster Keaton in The Navigator, 1924.

Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire.

Comedian Bernard Manning.

Comedian Mike Reid.

Comedian Stewart Lee.

Comedian Richard Herring.

Peter Buse is Professor of Visual Culture and Dean of the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool, UK. He has published widely on film, photography, psychoanalysis, and comedy, including articles in journals such as Textual Practice, Parallax, Journal of Visual Culture, History of Photography, Continuum, photographies, and Romance Quarterly. His most recent book is The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography (2016).

Oliver Double is Reader in Drama at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. He is author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (1997), Britain had Talent: A Historyof Variety Theater (2012), and Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings ofStand-Up Comedy (second edition 2014), and he is the co-editor of Popular Performance (2017). In 2013, he established the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive, and is the creator and co-presenter of a podcast based on the items it contains, A History of Comedy in Several Objects. Before becoming an academic he was a professional comedian on the British comedy circuit, a member of Red Grape Cabaret, and used to run the Last Laugh, Sheffields longest running comedy club. He continues to explore the creative possibilities of stand-up in shows like Saint Pancreas (2006) and Break a Leg (2015), performing both locally and sometimes as far afield as Orlando, Florida.

Joanne Gilbert is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Communication at Alma College, Michigan. She is the author of Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique, which has been featured on WCMU Public Television, WGVU and KZSC Public Radio, and in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her work exploring the relationship between humor and power also appears in Text and Performance Quarterly, Fan Girls and the Media, Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers, and many other publications. She is the Contributing Editor to Studies in American Humor and the recipient of numerous awards including the Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding scholarship in Interpretation and Performance studies from the National Communication Association.

Brett Mills is Professor of Media and Culture at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of Television Sitcom (2005), The Sitcom (2009), and Animals on Television: The Cultural Making of the Non-Human (2017), and co-author of Reading Media Theory (2009, 2012) and Creativity in the British Television Comedy Industry (2017). He was the Principal Investigator on the three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, Make Me Laugh: Creativity in the British Television Comedy Industry, and Curator of the comedy archive at the British Archive for Contemporary Writing.

Louise Peacock is an Associate Professor in Drama at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. She is the author of two books, Serious PlayModern Clown Performance (2009) and Slapstick and Comic Performance (2014). With Oliver Double and Adam Ainsworth, she co-edited Popular Performance (2017). She has written numerous peer-reviewed articles and chapters on commedia dell arte, stand-up comedy, and clowning.

Michael Pickering is Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University, UK. He has published in the areas of social and cultural history, the sociology of art and culture, and media and communication studies. His most recent books include Researching Communications (second edition 2007), co-written with David Deacon, Peter Golding, and Graham Murdock; Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation (2001); Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value (2004), co-written with Keith Negus; Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour (second edition 2009), co-edited with Sharon Lockyer; Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain (2008); Research Methods for Cultural Studies (2008); Popular Culture, a four-volume edited collection (2010); The Mnemonic Imagination (2012), co-written with Emily Keightley; Research Methods for Memory Studies (2013), co-edited with Emily Keightley; Rhythms of Labour: Music at Work in Britain (2013), co-written with Marek Korczynski and Emma Robertson; Photography, Music and Memory (2015) and Memory and the Management of Change (2017), both co-written with Emily Keightley.

Chris Vognar was the 2009 Nieman Arts and Culture Fellow at Harvard University, where he focused on connections between African American literature and pop culture. He is currently Culture Critic for the Dallas Morning News, where he has worked since 1996. Chris co-hosts the Big Screen show on the NPR affiliate KERA. He is a contributor to Transition, Harvards quarterly publication covering African and African American culture. He has taught journalism at Harvard Summer School, film history at the University of Texas at Arlington, and arts journalism at Southern Methodist University. He earned his BA in English from UC Berkeley.

Eric Weitz is Adjunct Associate Professor of Drama and Theater Studies, Trinity College Dublin. His publications include Theater & Laughter (2016) and The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy (2009); he is co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theater & Performance (2018). His recent publications also include a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor, titled Online and Internet Humor (2017). He also contributed to the Encyclopedia of Humor Studies (2014), Performance Research, the Irish University Review, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theater and Performance (2003). He is an active member of the International Society for Humor Studies and serves on the Advisory Board of the