By Ethan Thompson
In this unique research, Thompson explores the complex relationships among americans and tv in the course of the Fifties, as noticeable and effected via well known humor. Parody and flavor in Postwar American tv Culture files how americans grew acquainted with realizing politics, present occasions, and pop culture via comedy that's at the same time severe, advertisement, and humorous. in addition to the fast development of tv within the Fifties, an explosion of satire and parody happened throughout a large box of yank culture—in magazines, comedian books, movie, comedy albums, and on tv itself. Taken jointly, those case reviews don’t simply learn and theorize the creation and intake of parody and tv, yet strength us to revisit and revise our notions of postwar "consensus" tradition as well.
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Additional info for Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture
Sample text
Life magazine soon provided a graphic interpretation of his distinctions, making it possible for readers to quickly position themselves within his taste schema by charting whether they preferred red wine over a martini or musical extravaganza films to the theater. 23 Guessing one another’s taste-culture thus became a popular cocktail game. Michael Kammen writes that Lynes’s essay, and the popularity of taste speculation that followed it, gave the sense that American tastes were becoming more stratified in the postwar period and that these distinctions reflected social and cultural realities.
One major theme in the discussion of comedy in the popular press from 1950 to 1962 made comedy a matter of national concern by speculating that a national sense of humor could be constructed to oppose the essentially humorless communists. “The stern, unsmiling faces of Malik, Mao and Malenkov are the outward signs of an inner attitude toward life,” posed Richard Armour in The Saturday Evening Post. ”3 This characterization of the communist temperament was not a postwar invention. American pop culture had already suggested that this overly serious demeanor was symptomatic of an ideology that valorized sacrificing personal happiness and gain for the betterment of the larger community.
Levine’s discussion of the responses of several subjects reveals how the test used humor to reinforce cultural characterizations. A “young woman who had been brought up in a rather strict home” responded with an embarrassed smile; a “spinster of 45 with a puritanical attitude toward sex” found the cartoon revolting; and a young schizophrenic woman reacted violently because of delusions caused by her unbearable sexual feelings toward her brother and other men. The fact that these individuals did not fi nd the cartoon funny became further evidence that they were deviant or maladjusted.