Taboo comedy
television and controversial humour

Contents -- Taboo Comedy on Television: Issues and Themes -- Mapping Taboo Comedy on Television -- Taboo Comedy and Humour Studies -- Taboo Comedy and Television Studies -- A Large and Complex Field of Study -- Bibliography -- Part I: Controversial Humour in Comedy and Drama Series -- The Rise and Fall of Taboo Comedy in the BBC -- The Era of the Little Green Book -- The Great Culture War -- Why the Culture War Was Lost -- A New Hegemony -- Notes -- Bibliography -- The Last Laugh: Dark Comedy on US Television -- Approaching and Retreating from Death -- Incongruity Theory and Corpses

Catharsis Theory and Mortality -- Superiority Theory and Accidents -- Concealing and Revealing Death -- Medicalizing Death -- Idealizing Youth -- Veiling the Corpse -- Secularizing Death -- Mediatizing Death -- Responding to the Absence/Presence of Death -- Notes -- Bibliography -- 'This Is Great, We're Like Slave Buddies!': Cross-Racial Appropriation in 'Post-Racial' TV Comedies -- Projection and Puppetry: Arrested Development -- Embodied Appropriation: Trailer Park Boys -- Deconstructing the Post-Racial Turn: Party Down -- Conclusion -- Bibliography

Phrasing!: Archer, Taboo Humour, and Psychoanalytic Media Theory -- Archer and the Duality of Psychoanalytic Cultural Reading -- Archer and Dreamwork, Contemporary Television as Dreamscape -- Archer, Animation and the Logic of Dreams -- Archer and the Id, Archer and Oedipal Desire -- Archer, Eros and Thanatos -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Taboo Humanity: Paradoxes of Humanizing Muslims in North American Sitcoms -- The Logic of Synecdoche and Representation -- Television's Stages of Representation -- Canadian Broadcasting and Multiculturalism -- Commercialism and the CBC

Discrimination as Comic Misunderstanding -- Conclusion: Television's Logic of Personal Responsibility -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Part II: Controversial Humour in Variety Shows, Commercials and Factual Programming -- Dummies and Demographics: Islamophobia as Market Differentiation in Post-9/11 Television Comedy -- Laughter as a Weapon: Targeting Bin Laden and Terrorism -- Arab Is the New Black: Relativizing the Other -- A Pitiable Enemy: Jeff Dunham and Achmed the Dead Terrorist -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Excessive Stand-Up, the Culture Wars, and '90s TV

Culture Wars, The Multichannel Transition, and Stand-Up Comedy -- 'Bad Boys' on Late Night -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Tosh.0, Convergence Comedy, and the 'Post-PC' TV Trickster -- Comment Comedy, on TV and Online -- Participatory Humiliation or Redemption? -- Is It (or the Host or the Audience) Racist? -- Conclusion: Trickster 2.0 -- Bibliography -- Crude and Taboo Humour in Television Advertising: An Analysis of Commercials for Consumer Goods -- The Uses of Humour in Advertising -- Humour as an Advertising Strategy -- Alienating the Audience? Risky Uses of Humour in Ads

Analyzing Ad Campaigns