At this stage it would appear necessary for me as a researcher/writer to outline to you, the reader/marker how I have come to be undertaking this particular study. In this section I will attempt to answer questions such as:
Why the focus on humour rather than comedy? Why South Park? Why this particular episode? Why take such a broad and interdisciplinary view of humour rather than directly applying specific theories to a text?
All of the questions above relate directly to how I have engaged with this topic. The original impetus behind researching humour was that all throughout my undergraduate and graduate study whenever I was required to give a presentation I found myself using humorous audio-visual clips from Monty Python, Blackadder, The Young Ones, The Simpsons and (most often of all due to its continuing contemporary relevance) South Park, as a brief and humorous means of introducing the topic to be addressed.
Ultimately, I always felt that the humour in the clips was far more successful in communicating and critiquing the topic than any of my rather more verbose serious academic expositions ever were. Furthermore, humour achieved this in a fraction of the time whilst simultaneously entertaining and enlivening the audience, encouraging them to interact with each other and engage with serious and potentially divisive topics in a manner which in some peculiar way reduced the chance of heated conflict arising.
Once I began investigating humour as a potential area for research I was immediately struck by the lack of mainstream academic interest in the topic.
I was also fascinated by the debate over whether humour is a subversive agency within society, by promoting social change, or whether it helps to maintain the status-quo by acting as a safety-valve releasing repressed energies, which if not expressed in the relatively harmless form of humour, might result in more radical and destructive oppositional activity.
The decision to look at humour rather than comedy was essentially because of the primacy of humour: you need a sense of humour in order to ‘get’
comedy, but you do not need a sense of comedy to ‘get’ humour.
Furthermore, humour is a much more interesting, fluid and socio-culturally situated concept than comedy, which carries connotations of fixed formal characteristics and established guidelines for engagement and analysis founded in the strong academic tradition of literary and dramatic criticism.
The decision to use South Park as a text for analysis and discussion was based on two factors. First of all, I have been a fan of the show since 1998 and have knowledge of all of the episodes that have been broadcast as well as other creative works by Parker and Stone. And second of all, over the nine complete series which have aired to date, South Park’s particular brand of carnivalesque humour has created a veritable encyclopaedic compilation of the issues, events, politicians, personalities, media products, consumer products, trends, technologies and fixations of the last ten years.
The choice to link postmodernism with humour was initially a result of the generic and flippant way in which the moniker ‘postmodern’ was attached to South Park in the popular press. I was interested in what it actually meant for humour to be postmodern. The selection of the one-hundredth episode
‘I’m a little bit Country’ as the sole subject-text for analysis was the result of space restriction (I originally intended to analyse multiple episodes) and the fact that it seemed like such a clear example of Mary Douglas’s conception of humour exposing the hidden joke which underpins the
practices and perceptions of every society. The episode exposes the underlying joke of the United States of America. It is also interesting for the way in which it exemplifies the postmodern predilection for using imagery and narratives from the past and rearticulating them in a contemporary context. The central claim put forward in this episode is that the United States of America are far from united and that the political spectrum of contemporary U.S.A. is divided along the very same ideological and socio-political lines as it was in 1776 when the USA was founded.
8.0 100th Episode: I’m a little bit Country Key quote:
Cartman You people who are for the war, you need the protesters because they make the country look like it is made of sane caring individuals. And you people who are anti-war, you need these flag wavers.
Because if our whole country was made up of nothing but soft pussy protesters, we'd get taken down in a second. That's why the Founding Fathers decided we should have both. It's called 'having your cake and eating it too.'
Synopsis:
Against the backdrop of the town of South Park’s adults being violently divided over America’s illegal invasion of Iraq, the kids are given an assignment to find out what the Founding Fathers of America would have thought about such pre-emptive action. Deciding that there is far too much information for a nine-year-old to deal with Cartman devises a series of attempts to force a flashback to the year 1776 for his research, in which he is finally successful. While Cartman is near dead in hospital, having his flashback, Kenny, Stan, and Kyle are left to do the assignment themselves.
The episode climaxes with an all out brawl between right-wing, pro-war, country music fans, and left-wing, anti-war, rock music fans, which is resolved by Cartman who after his successful flashback journey to 1776 clarifies for the townsfolk what the Founding Fathers intended for America as a warring nation. With equilibrium restored the characters start directly addressing the television audience and self-reflexively celebrating 100 episodes of South Park in mock variety-show fashion.