-
Doctorb
Last month I submitted the amended version of my thesis, meaning that after I sprint across the stage at Marvel Stadium and execute an exquisite flying kick to the Vice-Chancellor’s bonneted head, I’ll be a doctor. I haven’t looked it up but I assume this is the procedure. I hate to make this all about…
-
Performing the Self: Parafictional Persona and the Comedian Comedy
A PhD drawing on the concept of parafictional persona to examine the phenomenon of comedians playing themselves in fictional comedy television.
-
Cringe Comedy and the Suspension of Empathy
Cringe comedy has been an ascendent form of comic media for the past two decades, testing viewers’ ability to endure extreme levels of awkwardness and abjection. One popular mode of cringe comedy — practiced by the likes of Sacha Baron Cohen, Nathan Fielder, and Eric Andre — involves staging interactions between a comedian and real…
-
Comedy Community: An Ecology of Comedy on Community Media in Australia
A project that aims to explore the importance of community media as an incubator and training ground for comedians in Australia.
-
Comedy Archive
For several years I have been maintaining an archive of rare and obscure comedy media, mostly from Australia, with the intention of preserving it for future use by researchers and academics. I am especially interested in preserving the early-career work of comedians who started on community television or radio before becoming more widely recognised in…
-
Fan-led preservation practices: remastering The Ricky Gervais Show
“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” John Gilmore I’m part of a small but enduring community of online weirdos centred around The Ricky Gervais Show, a comedy programme hosted by Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and producer Karl Pilkington on and off between 2001 and 2010. The show is now mostly forgotten,…
-
Meta Humour in the 1950s Sitcom: Parafiction and Self-Reflexivity in The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
Scholars of television in the United States have noted an undercurrent of self-reflexivity in the early sitcom, typically understood as techniques that call attention to the medium’s artifice and the apparatus of television itself. However, one aspect of self-reflexivity in early television sitcom that warrants deeper analysis is the use of parafiction, or the deliberate…
-
Art and (in)accessibility
Love this piece in Overland, by Kieran Stevenson, noting the grotesque irony of Julian Rosefeldt’s Euphoria — a purportedly anti-capitalist screed of a film — playing at Melbourne’s bougie marquee arts festival RISING. The worst part of the show’s marketing isn’t encountered until after you decide to leave—attendees must exit through the gift shop, where…
-
‹SCREEN INQUISITION›
A regular series of curated screenings and discussions that spotlight and intersect with research being undertaken in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University.
-
Parafiction in the 1950s Sitcom: Meta Humour and Self-Referentiality in The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950–1958) portrays the domestic life of its titular comedians as a pair of married vaudeville and radio entertainers. Replicating the dynamic of their own successful vaudeville and radio double act, Burns plays the put-upon but patient straight man, leaving most of the comedic heavy lifting to Allen, whose…
-
Friends with Benefits: Neoliberalism and Heteronormativity in the Bromance Film
Critical readings of the bromance film genre – as typified by Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) – often focus on how such films ostensibly reconfigure the tropes of the romantic comedy away from privileging heterosexual coupledom and towards platonic male friendship. The romantic comedy has long been identified as an agent of neoliberal ideology…