Film and Television Comedy

A History of Italian Cinema, 2nd edition is the much anticipated update from the author of the bestselling Italian Cinema – which has been published in four landmark editions and will celebrate its 35th anniversary in 2018. Building upon decades of research, Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni reorganize the current History in order to keep the book fresh and responsive not only to the actual films being created in Italy in the twenty-first century but also to the rapidly changing priorities of Italian film studies and film scholars. The new edition brings the definitive history of the subject, from the birth of cinema to the present day, up to date with a revised filmography as well as more focused attention on the melodrama, the crime film, and the historical drama. The book is expanded to include a new generation of directors as well as to highlight themes such as gender issues, immigration, and media politics. Accessible, comprehensive, and heavily illustrated throughout, this is an essential purchase for any fan of Italian film.

In Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), we watch the film’s protagonist, Theodore, as he struggles with the end of his marriage and a growing attachment to his artificially intelligent operating system, Samantha. While the film remains unique in its ability to cinematically portray the Lacanian contention that “there is no sexual relationship,” this article explores how our digital non-relationships can be re-approached through the medium of comedy. Specifically, when looked at through a comic lens, notable scenes from Her are examined for the potential they provide in affording a self-decentrement which allows us to traverse the fantasies that structure our non-relations.

“Comedy is about timing, son”. È questa la battuta con cui un David Lynch particolarmente fuori dal tempo, nei panni dello stravagante producer televisivo Jack Dahl, tormenta il povero Louis C.K., alle prese con lo sforzo immane di “allenarsi” per la puntata pilota di un late night con cui potrebbe prendere il posto di David Letterman. Siamo tra l’agosto e il settembre 2012, e su FX va in onda, quasi alla fine della sua terza stagione, una trilogia di puntate di Louie che sembra quasi fantascienza.  [...]

This project will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines (including sociology, cultural studies, neuroscience, film and media studies) to investigate the experience of cringe as a key symptom of the contemporary cultural landscape. Cringe humour and other cringeworthy experiences across the media articulate a deeply-felt discomfort, one that is linked to the inability to successfully adopt political correctness, and to changing attitudes in the cultural mainstream. The experience of cringe involves the inability to extricate yourself (or to look away) from unpleasant situations, resulting in feelings of vicarious shame (Fremdschämen), for example when watching diplomatic blunders committed by prominent statesmen, uncomfortable ‘dare you’ challenges on social media platforms, and the kind of ‘unstable jokes’ to be found in transgressive comedy formats that involve protected groups like ethnic minorities and disabled people, even though the targets of the jokes are not al-ways clear.
The symposium will approach the phenomenon of painful laughter and cringing in three thematic sections: (I) psychology and affect, (II) the mediality of cringe (where ‘reality’ aesthetics and humiliation rituals play a role), and (III) the politics of cringe (where norms and values are renegotiated to indicate discomfort on a collective level).
Each of these sections will involve junior academics (including Ph.D. candidates) as well as more experienced researchers who currently work on cringe and related phenomena like awkwardness and disparagement. The aim is not just to initiate a conversation on a level playing field between participants at different career stages, with everyone contributing both as a presenter and as a respondent, but also to spark a conversation between the German and the Anglo-American research landscape.

Examines the bleak television comedies that illustrate the obsession of the white left with its own anxiety and suffering

At the same time that right-wing political figures like Donald Trump were elected and reactionary socio-economic policies like Brexit were voted into law, representations of bleakly comic white fragility spread across television screens. American and British programming that featured the abjection of young, middle-class, liberal white people—such as Broad City, Casual, You’re the Worst, Catastrophe, Fleabag, and Transparent—proliferated to wide popular acclaim in the 2010s. Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey track how these shows of the white left, obsessed with its own anxiety and suffering, are complicit in the rise and maintenance of the far right—particularly in the mobilization, representation, and sustenance of structural white supremacy on television.

Nygaard and Lagerwey examine a cycle of dark television comedies, the focus of which are “horrible white people,” by putting them in conversation with similar upmarket comedies from creators and casts of color like Insecure, Atlanta, Dear White People, and Master of None. Through their analysis, they demonstrate the ways these non-white-centric shows negotiate prestige TV’s dominant aesthetics of whiteness and push back against the centering of white suffering in a time of cultural crisis.

Through the lens of media analysis and feminist cultural studies, Nygaard and Lagerwey’s book opens up new ways of looking at contemporary television consumption—and the political, cultural, and social repercussions of these “horrible white people” shows, both on- and off-screen.

Phil Callaway says, "I have a fear of speed bumps, but I'm getting over it." Janice gave Ed a birthday present of Phil Callaway's newest book 'Laugh Again like a Child'. Reading this book caused us to laugh and chuckle deeply. We hoped then that we could interview Phil. Who might have imagined that a comedian could be a missionary? Phil was told that it would never work. "I took a lot of heat early on for combining a message of humour with a message of hope in Christ. To laugh didn't seem to be the holiest of things." Becoming a missionary comedian was not intentional:

Da Lucy ed io a Friends, da Happy Days a The Big Bang Theory, da I Jefferson a The Good Place, da Casa Vianello a Boris: la situation comedy è un genere televisivo importante, che sembra semplice ma non lo è, ha un linguaggio stratificato e una storia piena di svolte. Fa ridere il pubblico con la sua sapiente miscela di innovazione e ripetizione, ha dato vita a un importante modello produttivo e industriale, riempie i palinsesti tra prime visioni e repliche. I suoi personaggi diventano popolari, i suoi racconti proseguono per tante stagioni e circolano pressoché dappertutto. Il volume traccia una definizione della sitcom e ne ricostruisce le principali evoluzioni, negli Stati Uniti come in Italia. Getta poi uno sguardo sul presente e sul futuro di un genere spesso trascurato ma ancora centrale, che nello scenario digitale non solo resiste ma si trasforma, insieme alla tv che cambia.

I cinepanettoni: film di enorme successo e autentici cult contemporanei. Malgrado ciò rimangono, a livello di studio, ancora praticamente inesplorati. Questo libro è una storia analitica di un fenomeno unico per la cui comprensione si offrono vari spunti, mettendo l’enfasi soprattutto sull’aspetto carnevalesco, perfino utopico del filone. Oltre ai capitoli dedicati alla spesso negata varietà di tale produzione filmica, alla diffusa nostalgia sentita per il suo capostipite (Vacanze di Natale del 1983), e all’analisi del consumo dei cinepanettoni condotta mediante questionari in rete, il libro contiene un’ampia e vivace selezione delle numerose interviste condotte dall’autore con attori, registi, produttori, critici e fan.

Cover copy:

In defiance of the alleged "death of romantic comedy," After "Happily Ever After": Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age edited by Maria San Filippo attests to rom-com’s continuing vitality in new modes and forms that reimagine and rejuvenate the genre in ideologically, artistically, and commercially innovative ways. No longer the idyllic fairy tale, today’s romantic comedies ponder the realities and complexities of intimacy, fortifying the genre’s gift for imagining human connection through love and laughter.

It has often been observed that the rom-com’s "happily ever after" trope enables the genre to avoid addressing the challenges of coupled life. This volume’s contributors confront how recent rom-coms contend with a "post-romantic age" of romantic disillusionment and seismically shifting emotional and relational bonds. Fifteen chapters contemplate the resurgence of the "radical romantic comedy" and uncoupling comedy, new approaches in genre hybridity and serial narrative, and how recent rom-coms deal with divisive topical issues and contemporary sexual mores from reproductive politics and marriage equality to hook-up culture and technology-enabled sex. Rom-coms remain underappreciated and underexamined—and still largely defined within Hollywood’s parameters of culturally normative coupling and its persistent marginalization of racial and sexual minorities. Making the case for taking romantic comedy seriously, this volume employs critical perspectives drawn from feminist, queer, postcolonial, and race studies to critique the genre’s homogeneity and social and sexual conservatism, recognizing innovative works inclusive of LGBTQ people, people of color, and the differently aged and abled.

Encompassing a rich range of screen media from the last decade, After "Happily Ever After" celebrates works that disrupt and subvert rom-com fantasy and formula so as to open audience’s eyes along with our hearts. This volume is intended for all readers with an interest in film, media, and gender studies.

2000 -) IS anchored by a complex comic sensibility that is rooted in the social and cultural identities of the show's principal characters, namely the series creator and star, Larry David. The series presents a candid portrait of the semiretired television writer and cocreator of Seinfeld (1989 -98) that at first glance offers an indictment of David's peculiar Hollywood lifestyle, but also resonates with an imbricated comedic nature that challenges essentialist categories of comic performance through the reversals of identity suggested by the show's innovative sense of humor. The show emphasizes the interplay of social and cultural identities, including David's own shifting persona. As a comic figure, David fuses a decidedly Jewish sensibility with one that openly criticizes the religious and cultural tenets of both Judaism and Christianity. Indeed, there is a fractal element to this humor, whereby the smallest character detail resembles the complexity of a much larger social structure. To understand the novelty of identity formation and humor within the series, what is most helpful is a theory of screen comedy that discloses the inventive and hybridized nature of its characters, situations, and themes. This article investigates the ways in which identity fluctuations challenge the social and cultural configurations of humor in Curb Your Enthusiasm. In the negotiation between intersecting identities, the commonplace is hyphenated with the alien; that is, the humor stems from the collision of contrasting features.

The paper concerns linguistic humour as an aesthetic-cultural category which is at the core of comedy. Linguistic material from contemporary Russian movies and their translations into Polish is analysed. The basic linguistic components creating linguistic humour include neologisms, linguistic games, modifications of phraseological units and intertextual references. The aforementioned components cause many problems in movie translations into a foreign language. The paper attempts to provide an overview of ways of translating.

This chapter studies the relationship between dark humor, addiction, and abjection. As a case study, it examines a stand-up routine by comic Craig Ferguson in which the comedian touches on such varied topics as peeing his pants, vulnerable populations, and alcoholic amnesia, noting how each relates to abjection. Since drunkenness frequently leads to vomiting and accidental urination, those examples provide the clearest cases of how alcoholism connects gross-out humor to bodily abjection. Ferguson also discusses how addicts form vulnerable populations, which demonstrates a social understanding of abjection as people left behind by society. Finally, Scepanski investigates drunken blackouts as temporal abjection. Since memory is so fundamental to understanding oneself, blackouts create an alienating disconnect between present and past.

La influencia del cine de Hollywood en la sofisticación de los cines clásicos latinoamericanos Alejandro Kelly Hopfenblatt Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)/CONICET Resumen El desarrollo y consolidación de los cines clásicos latinoamericanos supuso en distintos niveles una transición desde un cine de carácter popular hacia una producción más cercana a los valores de los sectores medios. En este proceso la cinematografía estadounidense ocupó un lugar fundamental, ya que sus modelos narrativos y representacionales, que dominaban el mercado cinematográfico internacional, proponían ejemplos a imitar para los diversos cines nacionales. Directores como Carlos Schlieper en Argentina o Jorge Délano en Chile encontraron en el cine de Hollywood influencias para la creación de films que presentaran mayor sofisticación en su representación de la realidad social y su lenguaje narrativo y, apelando a diferentes modelos, adaptaron con distinta suerte estas influencias a los cines latinoamericanos.

In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness.

By viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be ‘politically correct’, this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. In doing so, it engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to ‘PC Debates’, contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC ‘mockumentary’, The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies.

Drawing from psychoanalysis, social psychology and philosophy, this book will be highly relevant for postgraduate students and academic researchers studying comedy, race/racism, multiculturalism, political correctness and television/film.

This chapter examines the relationship between collective trauma and comedy as a meaningful cultural ritual. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Emile Durkheim, Scepanski highlights the temporal aspects of these theorists' work to note the ways in which comedy manages the emotional and political intensities initiated by events like 9/11.

A norma della legge sul diritto d'autore e del codice civile è vietata la riproduzione di questo libro o di parte di esso con qualsiasi mezzo, elettronico, meccanico, per mezzo di fotocopie, microfilm, registratori o altro. Le fotocopie per uso personale del lettore possono tuttavia essere effettuate, ma solo nei limiti del 15% del volume e dietro pagamento alla SIAE del compenso previsto dall'art. 68, commi 4 e 5 della legge 22 aprile 1941 n. 633. Ogni riproduzione per finalità diverse da quelle per uso personale deve essere autorizzata specificatamente dagli autori o dall'editore.

Stephen Chow is not a professional writer, nor did he attend acting school, and yet his films are instantly recognizable across Hong Kong people of all demographics. I wish to understand Chow’s comedic appeal, how he is able to cinematically embody the ‘everyday man’ and what his success would imply in terms of cinema’s capabilities to document society.

Special thanks to Dr Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram at QMUL, who supervised my dissertation progress.

Appreciated today only for the style of the early-and mid-1960s Hollywood studio product, the crime comedy film featured strong female roles that paralleled the collapse of the traditional female roles in the era's spy films. Influenced by Hitchcock's sexualized women and Audrey Hepburn's independent 1950s gamines, the female "caper" character of the 1960s signals a dislocation of women's roles brought on by a world caught between hedonism and political avowal. In this short-lived subgenre, larcenous-minded men are thwarted, mostly to their own advantage, in their attempt to force female accomplices and love interests into prescribed social behavior and appearance. The lack of an overt counterculture in these films has branded them "establishment" products, supposedly rife with the social and gender role conservatism they actually challenge and destabilize.

Published in HARTS&Minds Journal, December 2017.

In this article, I argue that Buster Keaton’s 1921 short film 'The Playhouse' links the fragile ontology of masculine identity with the technological uncanny, two pervading anxieties of the silent period.

Scholars such as Kathleen Karlyn and Peter Krämer have argued that the narrative structure and content in Keaton’s work directly addresses a liminal gender identity. Expanding on this, in this essay I engage theories of the ludic body and object as ‘thing’ with Keaton’s work (e.g. Engell, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson), arguing that Keaton’s multimodal play of props and body creates a carnivalesque space of mutable identities. Drawing on historical studies, I show how white North American masculinity at the turn of the 20th Century was constructed through the navigation of acute and shifting anxieties related to labour and increased mechanisation. Masculine identity in the period was not only changeable in itself, but also vulnerable to notions of change (Hilkey, Kimmel). I argue that Keaton plays on this vulnerability in ‘The Playhouse’. I begin by arguing that the establishment of machine systems in the film allows Keaton's character to negate the social obligations of his work place. In this way, he enacts the literal displacement of social and manual labour with mechanical play: his machines are a replacement society. Keaton’s integration of work/play objects into a system of comedic, repetitive, machinery undermines their specific identities, making them thing-like. This highlights the instability of objects/things in general, mirroring and impinging the unstable position of masculine identity.

Drawing from existing literature in the field of comedy studies (including work related to three long-established theories of laughter: superiority theory, incongruity theory, and relief theory), this paper examines the humorous elements in Hong Sang-soo's films. Focusing on the Korean director's tellingly titled film HaHaHa (2010), the author puts forth the idea that both internal and external bursts of hilarity (coming from the characters and from the audience, respectively) form a line of bivalent critique that links textual and extratextual aspects of screen comedy. That linkage is gestured toward by the artificial ‘movement’ (or, rather, magnification) of the image specific to the zoom shot, which can be seen in nearly every one of this film's simultaneously painful and pleasurable, uncomfortable and entertaining, sequences. In addition to expanding Paul Willemen's theory of cinematic zooming, the author seizes upon some of the most persuasive writings about the comic mode in order to critically frame Hong Sang-soo's unique brand of humorous self-reflexivity.

Girls (HBO, 2012-17) é uma série de dramédia estadunidense que desde seu lançamento suscitou muitos debates de diferentes vieses. Ao longo de suas temporadas é perceptível uma mudança de um viés predominantemente cômico para um aumento de carga dramática na narrativa. A proposta desse trabalho é analisar como essa dinâmica de tensionamentos entre euforia versus disforia, que enxergamos como intrínseca à dramédia, causa impactos diretos na tipificação cômica (BERGSON, 1983; JAUSS, 2005) da protagonista e em sua Jornada do Herói (CAMPBELL, 1949; VOGLER, 2006), o que vemos que reflete também em sua estrutura narrativa quanto a uma lógica mais episódica ou serializada (MITTEL, 2006; NERI, 2015). Assim, nos propomos a analisar como o imbricamento entre drama e comédia impacta diversos elementos textuais do nosso objeto de pesquisa.

The focus of this work is on the formal construction of jokes within the popular form of entertainment, the televised workplace situation comedy. The narrative universe of a sitcom is a product of industry, and so it is created to have a mass appeal as well as to reinforce social norms. However, the smaller units of humor transmission within the sitcom, the jokes, enforce the reality of the constructed universe. What seems unremarkable to a character will seem absurd to an audience, and so the joke can be an instrument of challenging boundaries and social change.
Parallel to this analysis will be an exploration of the worlds created within these shows: how they operate and differ from our reality, how they reflect our society and in turn, how our society is informed by the power of these shared imaginary worlds. What is the impact on the collective imaginary and our relation to narratives when the barriers between them breech?
Specific objects of interest areThe Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1978), Murphy Brown (1988-1998), and 30 Rock (2006-2013). Despite the 40 year span of these works, each premise is centered around a white female protagonist living in a metropolitan area, balancing her domestic life with a career in the industry of television production. This dissonance of the boundary crossing examined is reflected in the shows within these shows (a live local news show, a weekly news magazine, and live variety show, respectively) revealing the both liberating and limiting act of constructing an aesthetic object that must present as authentic and authoritative.

In spite of recent studies discussing its myriad definitions, the asexual orientation has rarely been discussed in regards to its representation within television programming, being regarded as a “relatively uncharted area of sexual variability”. Despite the common definition of asexuality as “a lack of sexual attraction”, the orientation has arguably received little accurate portrayal within televisual fiction, where as a consequence, its few representations could perceivably be viewed as enforcing imprecise or negative stereotypes. One of the most impactful means by which negative depictions of the asexual identity is potentially spread is through the genre of television comedy, given the perception of “humour as forces of conservatism” that can support the “preservation of the status quo”; in this case being the ideals of “heteronormativity”, which “presumes heterosexuality to be natural”.

This dissertation proposes to investigate representations of asexuality within television comedy, analysing how the term as a “sexual orientation, just like heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality” can be read and interpreted within a selection of case studies made up of examples of television sitcoms. By analysing how asexuality is discussed within media texts, the representations can then be likened to how other queer identities have been historically presented and stereotyped within television, as well as investigate how asexuality’s associated behavioural traits are central to the construction of humour within sitcom.

This essay establishes a first genealogical link between
William E. Connolly’s pluralist thought and a recent mimetic
turn—or re-turn of mimesis—in critical theory. Crafting new connections
between Connolly’s diagnostics of affective contagion,
crowd behavior, and aspirational fascism, on the one hand, and a
Nietzschean diagnostic of the Dionysian powers of simulation, the
mimetic unconscious, and the contagious intoxications it generates,
on the other, the essay opens up new possibilities for encounters
between new materialism, poststructuralism, and mimetic
theory via the ancient view that humans are, for better and worse,
imitative creatures—or Homo mimeticus. In the process, it aligns
Connolly’s insights into the powers of mimesis with a minor tradition
in continental philosophy— from Nietzsche to Deleuze—and
furthers a Janus-faced evaluation of satirical TV shows that fight
contra (new) fascism at the level of the message, yet might further
comic fascism at the level of the mass medium.

Per molti versi antesignana di Allegri gemelli (Our Relations, 1936), la versione di Brats (1930) recuperata dal progetto "S.O.S. Stanlio e Ollio" presenta una somiglianza ancora maggiore rispetto al lungometraggio in questione, grazie al fatto che, trattandosi della riedizione risalente alla fine degli anni Trenta, vi è stata aggiunta buona parte della stessa musica di sottofondo. Si tratta dello storico doppiaggio anteguerra di Carlo Cassola (Stanlio) e Paolo Canali (Ollio), finora ritenuto perduto, scampato alla distruzione del magazzino italiano della Metro Goldwyn Mayer di Roma nel 1942, quando in pie-no regime fascista di Monopolio, fu ordinato il taglio e l'invio al macero di tutte le pellicole di provenienza estera. Prodotta da Hal Roach e diretta da James Parrott, la comi-ca in due rulli Brats fu distribuita dalla MGM il 22 Marzo 1930. Scritta e filmata tra Gennaio e Febbraio del 1930, nell'edizione italiana venne intitolata I monelli o I fratellini (Metri: 458 in pellicola 35mm; N.O. n. 29964 del 12 Gennaio 1938). La tra-ma è semplice: Stanlio e Ollio tentano di rilassarsi giocando partite amichevoli di dama e biliardo, ma i loro pestiferi figlioletti-versioni miniaturizzate di Stanlio e Ollio stessi-provocano scompiglio e disastri. Dopo aver dato la caccia ad un topolino con una doppietta, i bimbi lasciano aperto il rubinetto dell'acqua nella stanza da bagno e vanno a dormire. Stanlio e Ollio cantano loro una nenia, dopo di che Ollio junior chiede un bicchiere d'acqua. Suo padre apre la porta del bagno provocando una gigantesca inondazione comica.

The negative stereotype of the weak, passive, Jewish male has been a staple in the United States for well over a century. Even though there has been a larger Jewish presence on US television over the past twenty years, the portrayal of Jewish men is still negative and stereotypical. On the popular comedy, The Big Bang Theory, the character of Howard Wolowitz is the quintessential emasculated, Jewish male stereotype. Not only is he thin, gawky, and passive, this thirtysomething is ruled by his mother. This article addresses the historical depiction of the Jewish male in US society as well as popular television in the United States. The Wolowitz character will also be compared with the weak, Jewish male stereotype, citing examples from The Big Bang Theory. How the consistent use of these negative stereotypes affects both Jews and non-Jews will also be explored. The Stereotypical Portrayal of Jewish Masculinity on The Big Bang Theory

Negli ultimi anni la serialità comedy ha iniziato a svilupparsi e a mutare in modalità che hanno richiesto una riarticolazione delle procedure di comprensione del genere. Alcune serie contemporanee si risolvono in commedie di formato breve che, se da un lato dimostrano richiami evidenti alla situation comedy cosiddetta classica, dall’altro sono attraversate da elementi appartenenti a generi differenti che si ibridano tra loro dando vita a forme innovative.
Il presente elaborato è frutto di un percorso di ricerca che, partendo dal contesto mediale contemporaneo, confluisce nell’analisi di due serie televisive – Fleabag (2016) e Chewing Gum (2015) – le quali ci sembra fungano da testimonianze di due differenti realtà, elemento questo che cercheremo di far emergere nel corso dei capitoli ad esse riferiti. Queste due produzioni risultano focalizzate principalmente su figure femminili, le quali portano sullo schermo i propri corpi “indisciplinati” e la propria sessualità, servendosi di una serie di percorsi narrativi e strategie enunciative – come la rottura della quarta parete – che si distaccano dalla struttura testuale della sitcom tradizionale.
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Lo scopo del lavoro è innanzitutto volto ad un’analisi delle strategie distributive e promozionali messe in atto per questi due show. Partendo da una breve revisione dei piani editoriali dei network originali delle serie – ovvero BBC Three e Channel 4 –, dei loro elementi in comune, fino alle divergenze, cercheremo di metterne in luce i punti di forza, ma anche le difficoltà cui entrambi i network “tradizionali” devono far fronte, in un panorama odierno complesso, pieno di sfide e di nuovi player concorrenti, come le piattaforme SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand)1. Vedremo che di fronte ad un panorama così sfaccettato, non basta limitarsi al controllo della competizione a livello nazionale, ma è necessario fare i conti con l'ascesa di piattaforme come Amazon o Netflix, le quali che contribuiscono allo sviluppo di nuove modalità di storytelling, oltre all’espressione più libera e creativa di alcune voci critiche. Seguirà quindi un’analisi delle strategie comuni tra questi due (relativamente nuovi) player, e di come le varie forme di contenuto ne siano influenzate.
Nel corso del secondo capitolo metteremo a fuoco il contesto mediale da cui i nostri due esempi di analisi (Fleabag e Chewing Gum) sono nati, cercando di dare il giusto spazio anche ai paratesti – elementi che circolano attorno ai contenuti primari – che possono da una parte essere estrapolati dai testi stessi, riconfigurati e tesi verso nuovi significati – è il caso degli original short-content –, ma possono anche essere elementi paratestuali legati alla figura dell’autrice/showrunner, o fattori che servono a collocare le serie in una posizione di legittimità culturale, estetica e artistica.
Nel terzo capitolo cercheremo invece di indagare più in profondità le dinamiche testuali ed in particolare, i meccanismi umoristici che fanno rientrare i due show in esame all’interno del grande ventaglio comedy, con tutte le varie declinazioni e criticità che caratterizzano il genere. L’obiettivo del capitolo si risolve perciò nel tentativo di analizzare le due serie, attraverso una revisione dei contenuti, dei personaggi e delle rappresentazioni di genere: vedremo infatti come l’elemento cringe e il legame comunicativo con lo spettatore, che affiora nei momenti awkward delle protagoniste – messo in atto da strategie testuali come la rottura della quarta parete –, siano alla base della creazione del “comic impetus” delle rispettive comedy. Inoltre cercheremo di indagare le modalità ambigue con cui questi show si inseriscono all’interno del dibattito postfemminista – attraverso l’esame delle politiche del corpo e della sessualità messe in scena – e a quale tipologia di spettatrice potrebbero essere rivolti.