The Artillery Of Critique Versus The General Uncritical Concsensus: Standing Up To Propaganda, 1990-1999
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2011, leading comedy scholars singled-out two shortcomings in stand-up comedy research. The first shortcoming suggests a theoretical void: that although “a number of different disciplines take comedy as their subject matter, the opportunities afforded to the inter-disciplinary study of comedy are rarely, if ever, capitalized on.”¹ The second indicates a methodological void: there is a “lack of literature on ‘how’ to analyse stand-up comedy.”² This research project examines the relationship between political consciousness and satirical humour in stand-up comedy and attempts to redress these two shortcomings. It offers a new theoretical model and a new set of longitudinal data: the political content of American stand-up comedy over the course of the decade from 1990-1999. It capitalizes on the interdisciplinary study of comedy, which scholars describe as a “huge cultural phenomenon,”3 by offering a plausible context for the manifestation of satirical stand-up comedy content. The development of the context proceeds in logical steps integrating insights from five realms of inquiry – language science, political economy, propaganda studies, mass media effects and humour theory – into a consistent theoretical framework. The interdisciplinary effort offers a new method to analyse stand-up comedy, captured by the symbolic formula SC2={OGB,CERP}, whereby the satirical content of stand-up comedy (SC2) manifests itself in the association of two sets of statements: operative group beliefs (OGBs) and contrary empirical rational propositions (CERPs). As a whole, this research project falls within the conflict theory tradition of sociological research.¹ It argues that structurally, the aggregate demand for stand-up satire is stimulated by the dominion exerted by mass media over mass opinions. Given that elite “control of society, while certainly manifest in material modes of production, is culturally embedded and naturalized in the minds of the people via its hegemony over discourse,”² the content of stand-up satire cannot be properly examined unless the political economic repercussions of mass communication are taken into account. Mass propaganda and satire are inextricably entwined. This dissertation hypothesizes that the former fuels the general uncritical consensus while the latter acts as the artillery of critique. 1 Lockyer et al., 2011:99. 2 1 Klaehn et al., 2010:10. 2 Theobald, 2006:26. iv
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".