The comedian Stephen Colbert famously defined "truthiness" in 2004 as "the fact that you don't think with your head but that you know with your heart." He elaborates: "Who's Britannica to tell me that the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I want to say it was 1941, that's my right." (3) When emotion holds a higher purchase on knowledge than science or rational debate, laughter plays a vital civic function: to signify truth against the rampant spread of disinformation (e.g., climate-change denialism) and the digital media-precipitated crisis of the indexical sign and evidentiary image. (2) Comedy and humor scholars have approached these crises of mediation and belief primarily through notions of "fake news" and "truthiness," which are both variants of political satire. For example, the indexicality debates, which questioned the material basis of the digital image, loomed large for film and media studies throughout the early 2000s. The utter ubiquity of comedy in twenty-first-century life dovetails with profound technological changes that have fundamentally altered our very notions of truth, knowledge, and the evidentiary status of the sign.
In an era when breaking-news headlines read like satirical Onion articles, social activism is fueled by pithy memes, and comedians are often better equipped to explain current events than scholars or journalists, it is crucial to reconceptualize the genre's qualities, as well as its psychological dynamics and social politics.Ĭontemporary uncertainties about comedy's limits stem from broader cultural and institutional shifts. 'Comedy" used to mean the opposite of "tragedy," but now laughter sprawls out everywhere. Above all, this section is a springboard for exploring many of these untapped intersections of comedic modes, social politics, and critical media scholarship.
Yet comedic issues have crucial bearing on nearly every aspect of contemporary life, media culture, and interdisciplinary humanities scholarship.
We argue that comedy studies has been widely marginalized, deployed only to consider conventional genre comedies or identifiable comedic performers. (1) Across the essays in this section, our goal is to highlight the exciting scholarship in our field while also drawing attention to its limits and blind spots. The essays that follow have been borne out of our annual meetings of the Comedy and Humor Studies Scholarly Interest Group at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference. It might not sound like the start of a promising joke, but if it's any consolation, it only gets funnier from there. Twenty-some professors, graduate students, contingent lecturers, and independent scholars walk into a gray-toned hotel conference room, arrange the chairs into a makeshift semicircle, and energetically debate the future of comedy and humor studies as an academic field.