engleski

“Incorrect” Television Comedy: egotiating the Borders

This paper will focus on the analysis of a specific sub-genre of television comedy with a special emphasis on two programs broadcasted in Croatia. A television program can be categorized within a specific genre through its content and through the conventions used in structuring the program. Within the subgenre of comedy, the general attributes of the texts are that they usually are made in a half-hour format ; they are late-night comedy shows, based on humor which brings distant, powerful elements in society closer to the viewers by diminishing hierarchical positions, and thus carries subversive potentials. An interesting feature of the content is that it carries a specific type of discourse that challenges dominant social values and pose a social critique by using elements of satire, parody and irony. The use of these modes as a tool of social critique is, in the contemporary world of popular culture, tabloidization, hypercommercialization and unification of media content, an asset to media diversity and may be a way to erode the unified discourses of media products. I will analyse the properties of two texts (South Park distributed globally, and the locally distributed show Zlikavci) with emphasis on the subversion of the question of political correctness and the use of satire as a tool of social critique placed in the social context in which they appear. The analysis will be contextualized in regards to freedom of expression which is approached differently in post-socialist states where open censorship was a part of resent history, compared to a more covert manifestation of censorship which appears in the form of self-censorship and “political correctness” in the West.

“incorrect” comedy, television, social critique, media diversity, satire, freedom of expression

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