American Culture Studies

Disparagement in Contemporary Female-Led US Sitcoms

Katja Schulze

• Publisher: transcript Verlag
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783839462607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Vituperation, disparagement, and debasement seem to have become part of the mainstream discourse in contemporary US-American media culture. Zooming in on a distinct televisual comedy genre, Katja Schulze explores the formal principles, media-specific realizations, and the cultural work of disparagement in contemporary female-led situation comedies. Subsequently, larger patterns of (gender-based) invective strategies and conventions that define the dynamism of this comedic genre come into view. Her study outlines case studies of popular sitcoms, like Parks and Recreation, Mike & Molly, and the revival of hit-sitcom Roseanne, thereby unearthing how the shows are able to stage humor as mass-mediated deprecation - a signifying practice with its own poetics and politics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Conceptual Impulses and Cultural Context
• 3. Invective Humor: Discourses of Otherness
• 4. Reflexive Invectivity: The Comedy of Super Niceness in Parks and Recreaction
• 5. Dynamizing Invectivity: The Role of Invectives in the Boundary Work of the Genre
• 6. Conclusion
• Bibliography