Comedy and Distinction: The Cultural Currency of a Good Sense of Humour [Paperback]

1. Introduction: Funny to Whom?  Part I: Positioning the Research  2. From Music Hall to the Alternative Boom: The Changing Field of British Comedy  3. Cultural Capital: From Resources to Realisation  Part II: The Cultural Currency of a Good Sense of Humour  4. Liking the Right Comedy  5. Working for your Laughter: Comedy Styles and Embodied Cultural Capital  6. Cultural Omnivores or Culturally Homeless? Exploring the Comedy Tastes of the Socially Mobile  Part III: Comic Cultural Capital: Strength and Legitimacy  7. Comedy Snobs and Symbolic Boundaries  8. The Tastemakers: Comedy Critics and the Legitimation of Cultural Capital  9. The Hidden Tastemakers: Comedy Scouts as Cultural Brokers  10. Conclusion

Comedy is currently enjoying unprecedented growth within the British culture industries. Defying the recent economic downturn, it has exploded into a booming billion-pound industry both on TV and on the live circuit. Despite this, academia has either ignored comedy or focused solely on analysing comedians or comic texts. This scholarship tends to assume that through analysing an artists intentions or techniques, we can somehow understand what is and what isnt funny. But this poses a fundamental question  funny to whom? How can we definitively discern how audiences react to comedy?

Comedy and Distinction shifts the focus to provide the first ever empirical examination of British comedy taste. Drawing on a large-scale survey and in-depth interviews carried out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the book explores what types of comedy people like (and dislike), what their preferences reveal about their sense of humour, how comedy taste lubricates everyday interaction, and hlÃ"