Screen Comedy and Online Audiences

Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Theory in the School of Media at Birmingham City University, UK.

• 1. Introduction2. Comedy and comedian fandom: Parks and Recreation on Tumblr3. Women in Hollywood comedy: P/reviewing Bridesmaids and Ghostbusters 4. National and transnational comedy: Lilyhammer on NRK and Netflix 5. Black web comedy: Brothers With No Game on YouTube6. Sitcom audiences and genre developments: Everybody Hates Chris, Miranda and Gavin & Stacey7. Reviewing romcom: (500) Days of Summer on IMDb8. Comedy and transgression: Pinning Amy Schumer 9. Unintentional comedy and comic failure: Tommy Wiseau fandom on reddit

Screen Comedy and Online Audiences is boldly, brilliantly diverse, offering up a multi-text exploration of how different modalities, hybrids and subgenres of screen comedy are valued (or not) by an equally diverse range of audiences. Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore also adopts a multi-sited approach, deftly analysing responses and reviews across the likes of amazon.com, Facebook, imdb, Pinterest, reddit, Tumblr, Twitter and YouTube. Brimming with insight, this book shows how indispensable fan/audience studies can be for understanding comedy’s cultural politics and affective resonances.—Professor Matt Hills, University of HuddersfieldAt last! A detailed, evidence-based study of the major gap in the study of media and comedy; audiences. Offering a convincing argument for the specificity of comedy as a mode of popular media, this book artfully explores audience responses to a range of humorous media on TV, in film, and online. With chapters on gender, fandom, romcom, offence and comic failure, Bore’s analysis pinpoints the importance of finding out what people do with comedy. As such, it impressively forges an important new direction in the study of media and humour.—Dr. Brett Mills, University of East Anglia