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Sharon Lockyer and Michael Pickering, eds, Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ISBN 978-0-230-59450-0.
Sharon Lockyer, ed, Reading Little Britain: Comedy Matters on Contemporary Television, LB. Tauris, 2010. ISBN 978-1-8451 1-939-3.
Television comedy continues to be a peculiarly under researched area, especially given its popularity, social impact and the recent revolution in its form that raises fundamental questions about television as a medium in transformation. In the last five years, there have been at least some new contributions to the debate after nearly 20 years of critical silence: Brett Mills' Television Sitcom1 followed by his study, The Sitcom,2 and Andy Medhurst's flawed but often brilliant A National Joke.3 There is still so much still to be said however, especially about the comic revolution of the last decade or so. With that in mind it can only be good that two new edited collections do tackle recent comedy texts and debates, adding to a critical mass of material that can create a sustained critical discourse on the subject. That's the good news - the bad news is that both books are rather disappointing, albeit with some good moments amid some wildly uneven writing and critiques.
Beyond a Joke tries to consider the role of offence in comedy. Can something be offensive yet funny at the same time? What limits can, or should, be placed on humour? These are important questions and the nature of offence is one that goes to the heart of comedy - its relationship with its audience. The book's brief is comedy in its widest sense, considering comic transactions ranging from jokes told by one individual to another to mass appeal broadcasts, and the carnival tradition. In television comedy, programmes build up a complex and dynamic relationship with their viewers based on shared textual and contextual comic codes.
The best chapters in this edited collection are those that tackle deep structural issues around comedy and its parameters - Jerry Palmer looks at the historical basis of parody as a comic form and Ken Wills delivers a very useful essay on structures of comic competence. Frances Gray also contributes a strong piece...