The Politics of Awkward Comedy
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Awkward! The Politics of Awkward Comedy Tom van der Krieke 10550003 Research Master Thesis Department of Media Studies University of Amsterdam 28 June 2019 Supervisor: Abe Geil Second reader: Carolyn Birdsall 1 Abstract This thesis seeks to trace the politics of an emotion that has become all too common in the Western world: the feeling of awkwardness. The popularity of awkward comedy since television series like The Office (2001-2003) and Curb Your Enthusiasm has been enormous. What does this popularity say about the current political and economic systems? Part of this investigation is into the notion of awkwardness itself. Film reviews from the early 20th century mostly refer to awkwardness when discussing certain physical features. Not only does this thesis seek to trace the political roots of awkwardness, but it also seeks it in the ontology of the medium of film and television as well with the help of theories on film by Giorgio Agamben and Siegfried Kracauer. To come closer to an understanding of the political meaning of awkwardness this thesis also seeks to gain a better understanding of the link between comedy and awkwardness through the humour theories of Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson. These theories will provide an answer as to why we laugh at awkward comedy as well as provide an understanding of the relationship between awkwardness and society. Awkwardness also has a certain affective and contagious quality to it. That is why this thesis also seeks to understand how awkwardness works as a negative affect through the works of Sianne Ngai and Laurent Berlant. Ultimately all these different sides of awkwardness together show how it is a notion, which is constantly changing with the politics and economics of the era. It will be argued that research on the subject of awkwardness ultimately can lead to understanding of power, through its many qualities. 2 Table of Contents 1. An Awkward Introduction…………………………………………………………………..p. 4 2. A Brief History of Awkwardness in Film and Television……………………………...p. 8 2.1 The Use of the Term Awkwardness in Early Film Reviews…………………………p. 8 2.2 Slapstick and Physical Awkwardness………………………………………………….p. 10 2.3 Television and Social Awkwardness…………………………………………………...p. 15 2.4 I Love Lucy…………………………………………………………………………………..p. 17 2.5 The Party…………………………………………………………………………………….p. 18 3. Awkwardness and Comedy………………………………………………………………...p. 22 3.1 Bergson and Awkward Laughter………………………………………………………...p. 23 3.2 Freud and The Awkward Ego…………………………………………………………….p. 25 3.3 The Office…………………………………………………………………………………….p. 27 3.4 Curb Your Enthusiasm…………………………………………………………………….p. 30 4. Awkwardness and Affect…………………………………………………………………...p. 34 4.1 Cringe Comedy……………………………………………………………………………..p. 34 4.2 Eighth Grade………………………………………………………………………………..p. 38 5. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………p. 44 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..p. 45 3 1. An Awkward Introduction Life for many people often feels like a string of awkward moments. This awkwardness can be found in the workspace, romantic relationships, or friendships. It often expresses fears of doing something wrong in a social context. This particular feeling has become popular over the last twenty years or so. In shows like The Office (2001-2003) and Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000-) humour shifted to a sole focus on awkward moments. MTV even created a show with the name Awkward. (2011-2016). This show undoubtedly helped popularize this particular phrase by describing certain moments in once life. An exclamation of the word awkward indeed has become a term of its own. Memes with the phrase “that awkward moment when …” have also been and are still a popular way to describe certain pains from daily life. While many people recognize awkwardness in their own life, or even defining big parts of their life, awkwardness has not yet been recognized as a defining emotion of our time. Emotions like anger (Pankaj Mishra), fear (Heinz Bude), and anxiety (Sianne Ngai), have become recognized as emotions that define the post 9/11 Western world. Awkwardness could easily be added to this list, as it is a dominating force in daily life, as well as dominating popular culture. Adam Kotsko undertakes one of the few investigations into this phenomenon in his book “Awkwardness”. Kotsko investigates awkwardness from a philosophical and a political perspective. The etymology of the word awkwardness contains the words ‘awk’ and ‘ward’. Awk is a medieval English word for something that has been turned into the wrong direction, while the -ward part implicates some form of movement, as in backward or forward. Awkwardness is thus a movement in the wrong direction (Kotsko 6). Kotsko believes that we are currently in “a state of cultural awkwardness” (17). This awkward state according to Kotsko is to be traced back to the 1960s and post-Fordism. Fordism had been a fairly stable economic system that created a huge (white) middle-class in the United States. In the mid 1960s however it became clear through social unrest that this economic system had hugely neglected the African-Americans and women in its growth (Kotsko 18). What the social movements in the 1960s provided was considerable improvement for women and African- Americans, but any radical changes were halted. For Kotsko the origins of the awkward age are to be found here. The normative social model saw some great changes, while “they did not produce any viable positive alternative” (Kotsko 19). What then came into being was a world where people do not know how to attain and retain equality, as well as a world where people do not really know their place anymore. In the 1970s a lot of the foundations that helped create a middle class through the model of Fordism, became depleted by decreasing the power of the unions, and deindustrialization (Kotsko 20). 4 This thesis seeks out to trace the political implications of awkward comedy. Kotsko already heads into this direction with his focus on the economic conditions into which awkwardness came into being. Kotsko dives into the political and economic forces that created awkwardness but fails to trace this awkward comedy through the history of film and television. This thesis will seek an answer to the following question: what are the underlying politics and economics that have created the subgenre of awkward comedy in the early twenty-first century? This question will be answered by looking at three relatively unexplored areas of awkwardness, namely tracing the history of awkwardness, explaining the link between awkwardness and humour theory, and tracing the affective qualities of awkwardness. Each chapter will deal with one of these topics paired with a focus on particular political and economic systems. In the analysis of various films and television series with awkward comedy these theories will be further explained. The first chapter looks at the origins of the word awkward and how this word has been used since the start of comedy film. Unsurprisingly, the meaning of the word awkward in describing comedy has immensely altered. In early film reviews the use of the word awkward was almost exclusively used to describe a form of physical comedy. This physical comedy in the form of slapstick already has some mimesis that can also be found back in the type of humour that we have now come to describe as awkward comedy. This chapter attempts to trace the roots of awkwardness by both looking at the ontologies of film and television, while simultaneously also focussing on the economic systems. In this chapter the focus will be on Fordism and post-Fordism as economic systems that first allowed a certain awkwardness to grow. To trace back the politics of awkwardness in history it is crucial to find a moment where this form of comedy finds a shift. To do this the first chapter will be analysing an episode of the well-known television series I Love Lucy (1951-1957). I Love Lucy is one of the first television sitcoms, and was the first sitcom to introduce several techniques that can still be recognized to this day in the genre; these are the three-camera setup and the use of a live audience. The other object that this chapter will be analysing is the ground-breaking and in some ways radical comedy film The Party (1968). This is one of the first films to deal with awkwardness on a much more social level. What this chapter will attempt to provide is trace the histories of awkwardness through both film and television, as these are the places where the awkward comedy can predominantly be found today. In the second chapter we jump to the early 21st century, where a wave of awkwardness hit the sitcom genre with The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm. This chapter will try to gain a better grip on the philosophical relationship between awkwardness and comedy. To do this, this chapter will be mainly focussed on the field of humour theory, where there is a philosophical inquiry in why we laugh at certain types of comedy. There is an 5 explicit link between comedy and awkwardness. Just try to think of watching a show filled with social awkwardness without having to laugh at it. This would be pure torture! Henri Bergson’s Laughter provides key insights into the reason why we laugh at something. Traditionally there have been three theories of humour: superiority theory, relief theory, and incongruity theory (Critchley 2). According to the superiority theory we laugh at something or someone because there is a feeling of being superior. This is the theory that dominated philosophical thinking on laughter until the eighteenth century. The relief theory argues that there is a certain tension that gets released through laughter. This is where Freud’s theory on humour also fits in. Incongruity theory argues that humour is created through a felt incongruity between what we know to be true and the reality that takes place in the joke (Critchley 3).