Humour, Belonging and Exclusion: the Role of Gender and Religion
In the British context, having a “good sense of humour” is often imagined as an important marker of belonging and operates as a key framework through which groups are included or “othered”. Both religious people and women have historically been excluded (in the British context and beyond) from this coveted category of "good humour". While feminist scholarship in recent decades has pushed back against the framing of women as "humourless", the construction of humour as entangled with - and even protected by - modern, secular subjectivities has received limited scholarly attention. This project critically engages with these political (and at times academic) scripts concerning who can be understood as "humourous", and on which terms.
This Research Project
Therefore, this research project explores representations and self-representations of Jewish and Muslim women in British TV comedies and stand-up comedy performances. More concretely, I focus on the ways in which humourous (self-)representations of Jewish and Muslim women can variously reproduce, disrupt and satirically re-imagine racialised and gendered discourses about their intersecting religious and gendered identities. Scholars of humour have long understood humour through lenses of polysemy and ambiguity: both as a site of self-expression and resistance to established norms and as a cultural form through which stereotypes are reproduced and/or discourses considered normal or acceptable to the imagined “mainstream” are further entrenched. Humour is then an invaluable lens through which both to understand and problematise discursive norms within a particular cultural, temporal and sociopolitical context.
In the case of my research, this context in 21st century Britain, with examples including Citizen Khan (BBC, 2012-2016), We Are Lady Parts (Channel 4, 2021-) and Friday Night Dinner (Channel 4, 2011-2020), as well as a corpus of approximately 15 (recorded) stand-up comedy sets. Through a combination of qualitative textual analysis methods - namely, postsecular feminist discourse analysis and thematic analysis - I examine the ways in which secular (and religious) norms are both reproduced and disrupted in these examples. While my focus is primarily on the content of these productions and the cultural work that they may do, I supplement this with an analysis of media discourse about the shows and performers in question, as well as several interviews with stand-up comedians. This secondary material provides a clearer view of the production contexts and structures of power and labour within the creative industry behind these shows. I also draw out some differences between the genres of the TV sitcom and stand-up comedy, in which different comedic conventions are the “norm” and different humour techniques are deployed to discuss discourses on religion, gender and race.
