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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. My own engagement with the show…
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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…
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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…
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“Give me the Seth Rogen laugh”: This Is the End and parafictional persona
This paper applies the theory of parafictional persona to This Is the End (2012), positioning its ensemble cast as a key example of an increasingly common occurrence: actors and performers playing themselves in fictional media.