Univerza V Ljubljani Fakulteta Za Družbene Vede
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UNIVERZA V LJUBLJANI FAKULTETA ZA DRUŽBENE VEDE HELENA POPOVIĆ AUDIENCE, TEXT AND CONTEXT: TELEVISION COMEDY AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE (OBČINSTVO, TEKST IN KONTEKST: TELEVIZIJSKA KOMEDIJA IN DRUŽBENA KRITIKA) DOKTORSKA DISERTACIJA 1 LJUBLJANA, 2011. Univerza v Ljubljani Fakulteta za družbene vede Helena Popović Mentorica: red. prof. dr. Breda Luthar Audience, Text and Context: Television Comedy and Social Critique Občinstvo, tekst in kontekst: televizijska komedija in družbena kritika DOKTORSKA DISERTACIJA Ljubljana, 2011. 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research project would not have been possible without the support of many people. First of all, I wish to express my gratitude to my supervisor Breda Luthar who was abundantly helpful and offered invaluable assistance support and guidance which enabled me to structure my thesis appropriately. Breda is also key in terms of introducing me to certain relevant areas of media studies which were new to me at the outset of my PhD studies. I would also like to express my sincere appreciation to Ivan Šiber, the Project Coordinator at the Faculty of Political Science who reached out and provided invaluable support at a crucial period in my professional career and without whom the carefree continuation of my PhD studies would not have been possible. My sincere gratitude goes to David Morley for his supervision during my stay at Goldsmiths. His research experience and guidance in terms of literature and suggestions relating to contemporary key authors working in my relevant area of interest all helped in the exploration of this area. Deepest gratitude is also due to Vida Zei and Sanja Puljar D’Alessio, both members of the Supervisory Committee whose advice and assistance enhanced my thesis greatly. In the final phase of my writing a special thanks goes to my sister Lidija McKinney who proofread the text in difficult circumstances of a late pregnancy – a situation which made it necessary to engage the additional help of Antonija Primorac who came to our rescue at very short notice. Furthermore, a section of the text required translation into Slovenian and this was accomplished by Hajrudin Hromadžić and Gašper Kralj for which I am also very grateful. The administrative part was diligently carried out by the Office of Postgraduate Studies at FDV; in this respect a special thanks goes to Meta Gnidovec who provided all the necessary information during my period of study. I would also like to convey thanks to a number of institutions which made significant contributions to my work. The financial support provided by the Open Society Institute through the Global Supplementary Grants Program and the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sports was crucial. Data gathering and audience assessment was made possible due to the assistance of research agencies AGB Nielsen and Puls, as well as the media agency Vox Communications. The Croatian Radiotelevision kindly gave access to television texts relevant to my research. Special thanks goes to my work colleagues at the Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb. On a more personal note, I would also like to thank my partner and friend Hajrudin Hromadžić for numerous fruitful discussions and valued advice relating to my work, but in particular I would like to thank him for his patience and support without which it would not have been possible to give this project the necessary time and commitment. Great appreciation also goes to all my friends and relatives who I tormented in the last couple of years with endless narrations about matters regarding my thesis - I probably managed to kill the fun in comedy in some instances. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Dragica and Petar Popović for their continuous support and interest in my work and most of all in my continuous wellbeing. Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to the interviewees in London and Zagreb who kindly participated in this research. Respect! 3 Abstract This research sets out to explore the social reception of a controversial television comedy series in a comparative perspective including Croatia and the United Kingdom (UK). The research is framed within media theory on the text-audience relationship that has moved from the ‘old’ to a ‘new’ paradigm which includes different visions of the power of the text and audiences as well as different visions on how to research this area. Setting out with the assumption that a cultural product never stands alone, but rather that it refers to previous texts and is multiplied in the extra-textual environment, this new paradigm argues that the process of meaning-making can only be located in the more complex connections between texts, audiences and context of encoding and decoding. Following the reception theory’s assumption that interpretation and the negotiation of meaning is always social, I attempt to locate the ways that meaning is produced and to identify which maps of meaning emerge with regards to comedy with all its generic specificities. The social context within which these maps of meaning are formed is important because it fosters some interpretive repertoires while rejecting others, and thus reveals what types of ideas are dominant in a specific socio-cultural context. Thus, the aim of the research is to explore the reception of television comedy, framed within the dispute between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ paradigm, in order to understand how the meaning- making processes evolve. I argue that although the text provides clues for its reading, meaning- making is socially determined: the broader socio-cultural context provides the frames that guide what a text means for the audiences. In addition, although the ‘new’ paradigm has shed important light on the text-audience relationship, the ‘old’ paradigm has not yet been completely exhausted in the assessment of the relationship between the text and audiences. Setting out with the assumption that a cultural product never stands alone, but rather that it refers to previous texts and is multiplied in the extra-textual environment, I have, as indicated in the title of my thesis, organized the study of social reception of this ambiguous, controversial text into three interconnected parts: the text/genre, the extra-textual environment (including academic and newspaper articles), and an exploration of the interpretive community that likes this type of text. In the first part, I consider the text. I focus on Da Ali G Show, created by Sacha Baron Cohen, which is (based on my own reading) a critical commentary. In addition to the fact that all popular texts are useful for understanding everyday life and the construction of meaning, creation of identity and community in a particular culture – this type of provocative comedy 4 and its broader reception also reveals the boundaries of what can and should be said in public, as well as what counts as civilized and tasteful in contemporary society. This is particularly interesting since comedy and humour in general is an area in which tolerance of the blunt and the outspoken is more acceptable than in most spheres of life, revealing the nitty-gritty of social life – the acceptable and its transgression. Even if sensitive themes provoke reaction and constantly balance on the border of (un)acceptable utterance, it is true that comedy, in the last two decades, carries a more overt ‘ruthlessness’, perhaps as a negative reflection of the normative condescension that has emerged with the political correctness debate. The second part is the analysis of the extra-textual environment. This includes academic articles, and newspaper articles mainly written by professional journalists and critics located in UK and Croatia. The academic articles mainly originate from the British, Canadian and American academic community. Three discourses were found, the most dominant one being the identity and political correctness discourse - linked to the interplay between powerful and subordinated identities, in which the one arguing in favour of the text claimed that it subverts stable categories and initiates discussion and self-criticism while the opponents argued that it perpetuates stereotypes and is politically incorrect, harmful and offensive. However the ‘victims’ of Cohen’s comedy were differently defined: Black, Eastern Europeans, Kazakhstan, Muslims. The other discourse that appeared was the discourse on cultural competence – here the conventions and communicative strategies of the text were put forward as the factors creating ambiguity. The underlying assumption of this discourse is that the text is a repository of meaning but that because of its deliberately confusing communicative strategies the audiences might not recognize the preferred meaning, which is social commentary. The third one was labelled the postmodern ‘diagnosis’ of contemporary cultures - that in line with one of its main features – distance, didn’t carry any particular position, pros or cons of the text, but immersed it in the context of signifiers such as hyper-reality, remediation, post-irony, deconstruction, camp, narcissism etc. The analysis of the newspaper articles in the UK and Croatia that referred to the text showed that in both contexts parallels were drawn to previous work and inter-textual references were frequently made in order to make sense of the text. Also two types of discourse dominated the extra-textual field in the evaluation of the show: Meaning - the issue of whether it was offensive or not – which was related to power and identity and the potential social consequences of