Chapter 10 – The power of fiction and comedy

Activities and comments/projects

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Activity 54

Look at the following advertisement and analyse the various aspects of visual and verbal parody as expressed in it.

Amul advert

www.amul.com/files/hits/amul-hits-1894.jpg

Project 5

You could make a parody or write a piece of fan fiction, in either case using humour to undermine power and authority, either of people or texts. You may wish to include visuals (and visual parody) as part of your text.

Your text should be accompanied by a commentary. In this you will analyse your text according to the models of parody introduced in this chapter, and explain how your text and the humour in it is used to resist power.

You may also, as we did with the Red Riding Hood parody, analyse the speech acts to see how patterns of power change between the source text and parodied text. If it is fan fiction, you should try to identify the class of fan fiction it belongs to.

It would be useful if you could include (samples of) the text you are parodying, with some analysis of the discourse and linguistic features (and visual elements) in that source text which also figure in your derived expression.

Quiz

Further Reading

Further reading for Chapter 10

For the project

  1. An excellent textbook on creative writing, using the insights of discourse analysis to inform the writer, is Jeremy Scott’s Creative Writing and Stylistics. This could be useful in guiding the project involving the writing of subversive humorous texts.
    • Scott, J. (2014). Creative Writing and Stylistics: Creative and Critical Approaches. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Books and an article on humour

    There are many important books on the theory of humour, but the following seem most relevant to the present unit.

  2. Oring, in Engaging Humor, exemplifies how humour can be used to attack and vilify, for example in racist discourse.
    • Oring, E. (2003 [1945]). Engaging Humor. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
  3. Michael Billig, in Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour, explores the ways in which language is used as a means of socialisation and control through embarrassment. Simpson’s book is the source of the satirical triad in this chapter, and his work prefigures Billig by establishing an agenda combining CDA with humour studies.
    • Billig, M. (2005). Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. London: Sage.
    • Simpson, P. (2003). On the Discourse of Satire: Towards a Stylistic Model of Satirical Humour. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins.
  4. Goatly’s Meaning and Humour is a comprehensive overview of semantic, pragmatic and discourse theory in relation to jokes. Chapter 10 expands on the introduction to this chapter.
    • Goatly, A. (2012). Meaning and Humour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  5. Lindner’s ‘Cashing-in on risk claims: on the for-profit inversion of signifiers for “Global Warming”’ analyses how visual humour can be used for subversive purposes.

    6. Parody and fan fiction

  6. Walter Nash’s The Language of Humour is the source for the models of parody developed in this chapter.
    • Nash, W. (1985). The Language of Humour. Harlow: Longman.
  7. Ewan Morrison’s short but informative article on fan fiction is the framework for the discussion in this chapter.
  8. The parody of the Red Riding Hood story is taken from Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. Other examples of humour used to subvert texts can be found below.
    • Garner, J. (1994). Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. New York: Macmillan.
    • Hazeley, J. and Morris, J. (2015). Ladybird Book of the Hangover: Volume 5 of Ladybird Books for Grown-ups. London: Penguin.
    • YouTube. (2015). ‘Global Warming’ – Fosters. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z-dCLZtwYg, retrieved 25 October 2015.
  9. The links below illustrate how the digital media can use humour intertextually to challenge romantic or sexual ideologies. The first link is the trailer of the movie Twilight (2008); the second link is a spoof or parody of that trailer. The video parody can be analysed by applying the concepts of source expression, derived expression and displacing content.

    10. Fan fiction websites

  10. The most popular fan fiction sites are given in the links below. FanFiction is considered to be the world’s largest fan fiction archive. It currently has well over two million users, and hosts stories in over 30 languages. Asianfanfics is mostly about Asian characters and topics from Asian culture. The service claims it is ‘one of the most feature-rich Asian fanfiction websites on the Internet’. The Archive of Our Own is a project founded and operated by the Organization for Transformative Works. deviantART is one of the most important sites that let artists showcase and discuss their work. The site is most famous for visual art, but there is a surprisingly high number of verbal texts as well.
    • Fanfiction.net. (2015). FanFiction. www.fanfiction.net, retrieved 25 October 2015.
    • Asianfanfics.com. (2015). Asianfanfics – For Fans of All Things Asian. www.asianfanfics.com, retrieved 25 October 2015.
    • Archiveofyourown.com. (2015). Home | Archive of Our Own. http://archiveofourown.org, retrieved 25 October 2015.
    • Deviantart.com. (2015). DeviantArt – The Largest Online Art Gallery and Community. www.deviantart.com, retrieved 25 October 2015.

    Fan fiction examples that challenge the authority of storytelling

  11. The following links are particularly interesting in the way they use humour and satire to challenge power and the authority of storytelling. Graphic fan fiction in the format of the graphic novel genre can be seen in the Star Trek fanfic series websites (with the related article by Markiewitz), where new media makes possible various forms of resistance. These examples can be analysed with the use of the theoretical framework for discussing parody introduced in this chapter.

Supplementary material