ESSAY PROPOSAL
Order Description
This assessment task gets you started on your research essay. It requires you to choose a topic, identify/pose research questions, identify your sources, and discuss how you will answer your question. Your proposal should include: 1. Question: The question you will answer (a list of suggested questions is available on Blackboard) 2. Identify research questions and possible answers: What questions do you need to answer to respond to the bigger question? What hypothetical answers have you formed based on your research? 3. A brief analysis of the literature relating to your topic. This should include: major debates, agreement and disagreement amongst scholars, absences in the literature if there are any, different approaches and methods (2-3 paragraphs) 4. An annotated bibliography divided into primary and secondary sources. Annotations: You should write no more than 3 lines about each source. Information to include: the main argument of the source; relevance of topic/main argument to your essay and how you will use it. Primary sources: these include songs, skits, television and radio shows, films, newspapers, stand-up routines, albums, plays, websites, magazines, and articles written at the time. You don’t need to list every primary source but should at least include them in groups. For example, instead of listing each article from a newspaper you can simply include the name of the newspaper, the date range of the articles, and how they relate to your topic. (Possible sources include: Splitsider, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, youtube.com (for videos and documentary footage.) Secondary sources: You need to use at least 5 secondary sources (5=5 books: consider two articles equivalent to a book). These include books, journal articles, and magazine articles.
Choose one essay question to do this essay proposal
1) It’s just a joke! What cannot be joked about in the United States, and has this changed since the 19th century? Critically evaluate to what extent this reveals the structure and content of American society and/or political culture. (Some ancillary questions that might help orient your response: What is not funny in America? How has this stayed the same? Should there be topics, people, or events that do not get a comedic or humorous treatment?)
2) Why is there a Golden Globe Award for “Best musical/comedy?” Why did Weird Al Yankovic go to No.1 on the Billboard charts in 2014? Critically examine the relationship between comedy and music, beginning with vaudeville, or popular songs of the 19th century.
3) If, as Theodor Adorno stated, to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, what about humour and comedy? Discuss the role, impact, and limitations of American comedy and humour in responses to national and international disasters and/or crises and/or atrocities.
4) “Stand-up comedy, like jazz, is a unique American art form.” Critically evaluate this statement by reference to entertainment history, and critically evaluate the idea that there is such a thing as “American humour.”
5) “Antebellum authors were engaged rhetorically in an effort to shape their society’s beliefs about the importance … of laughter itself to the process of imagining an ideal nation” (Jennifer Hughes, “Hysterical Power: Frontier Humor and Genres of Cultural Conquest”). What kinds of political, social, and cultural work has humour and comedy performed in building a national imagination, an “Americanness”? Look at examples from different regions and/or genres.
6) “Popular culture of so many kinds created an iconography and a rhetoric that both reflected and shaped the cultural and political meanings of the war for the people then—a dynamic process because the war evolved over time and the meanings changed” (Cameron C. Nickels, paraphrasing Alice Fahs, on the popular literature of the Civil War period). Discuss the influences between comedy and war by critically analysing texts and/or performances and/or audio-visual material across two or three different wars or conflicts. (Some ancillary questions that might help orient your response: How do comedy and war affect each other? Are the effects significant or lasting? What differences are discernible between different conflicts?)
7) How has humour and the law interacted throughout American history? Answer this question by critically examining particular cases and/or laws (for example, Berlin v. E.C. Publications, Inc. (1964); Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation Comedy (1978); the Commstock Laws—most of these relate to obscenity). What consequences have resulted from the interaction of comedy and law in the United States?
8) “Other states indicate themselves in their deputies . . . . but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors . . . but always most in the common people…. the President’s taking off his hat to them not they to him—these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it”—Walt Whitman, in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, thought this the ground for American poetry. Critically analyse the history and impact of comedic and humorous critiques and parodies of at least three presidents/presidential candidates of the United States.
9) “Mark Twain gave pleasure – real intellectual enjoyment – to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come … His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature”—President Taft, on Mark Twain’s death. Critically evaluate the legacy of Mark Twain—his techniques, his subjects, his sympathies—on American comedy and humour in the 20th and 21st centuries.
10) From “The Yada Yada,” Seinfeld
Tim [Dentist, newly converted to Judaism]: All right, it is cavity time. Ah, here we go. Which reminds me, did you here the one about the rabbi and the farmer’s daughter? Huh?
Jerry: Hey.
Tim: Those aren’t mahtzah balls.
Jerry: Tim, do you think you should be making jokes like that?
Tim: Why not? I’m Jewish, remember?
Jerry: I know, but…
Tim: Jerry, it’s our sense of humor that sustained us as a people for 3000 years.
Jerry: 5000.
Tim: 5000, even better. Okay, Chrissie. Give me a schtickle of flouride.
Discuss the role of humour and comedy for ethnic minorities in the United States. In what ways has it been used beneficially? How has it hampered the minority?
11) “No subject was excluded from the province of humor which allowed black people to express their feelings on the whole range of American violence from rape to legalized capital punishment to extra-legal race murder” (Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 1977). Discuss the role of comedy and humour for African Americans, and African American history. In what ways have comedic and humorous forms been used to define and position African Americans, both from within and without?
12) “[Jon] Stewart came out on top of a 2009 TIME online poll asking who was the most trusted newscaster in America after the death of Walter Cronkite, and young viewers in particular cited The Daily Show as a top source of information.” To what extent has “soft news” improved political discourse in the United States—by the media, the public, and politicians?
13) “Podcasting saved my career” (Marc Maron). Discuss the impact of social media and new technology on American comedy and humour, in the 21st century. (Be sure to ground your discussion in entertainment history before the Internet.)
14) “Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny”—Christopher Hitchens on “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” Critically examine the uses and abuses of comedy and humour by and against American women. Can we relate other social and political changes for women in the United States to their changing roles in and for comedy and humour? What accounts for the recent ascendancy of women in American comedy and humour?
15) What are the most important developments of television comedy since the 1950s to the present day? To what extent has American television comedy preceded, influenced, or lagged behind, wider social and cultural changes in the United States? What accounts for this? Be sure to refer to television comedies from at least three distinct eras.
16) “The presence of spoken language in film made possible the representation of the many forms of symbolic power and linguistic capital with which speech is invested” (Christopher Beach, Class, Language, and American Film Comedy). Critically examine the ways American film comedies represent class in the United States, especially in relation to the idea that the United States is a classless society. Use films from at least three comedic genres (rom com; slapstick [which is silent…]; screwball; gross out; teen; comedy of manners; ensemble dramedy; mockumentary; and so on).
17) Devise your own question and answer it, in consultation with the unit coordinator.
