Archive for January, 2008



Calling on the Colbert Nation: How fan practices complicate irony

Catherine Burwell, University of Toronto — January 17th, 2008

Irony, we know, is always a slippery proposition. It not only functions in the service of a wide array of political interests, but simultaneously subverts and legitimizes its targets. Still, we can go a step further in recognizing irony’s ambiguities by seeing it not simply as a text or technique, but as a complex social interaction. As Linda Hutcheon suggests, irony (and parody, as a form of ironic representation) might be best viewed as a set of plural and shifting relations between text, co [...]
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Two Words: Chuck Norris

Ian Reilly, University of Guelph — January 16th, 2008

Mike Huckabee's collaboration with Chuck Norris – a minute-long advert suggestively called HuckChuck Facts – provides a playful window into the political culture of celebrity endorsements. With HuckChuck Facts, Huckabee isn’t rewriting the book on celebrity endorsements nor is he reframing the way celebrities serve as the golden mouthpieces for a candidate’s campaign; what he is doing, however, is engaging in a playful reconsideration of how celebrity endorsements are constructed, dissem [...]
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Ironic Authenticity: Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping

Amber Day, Bryant University — January 15th, 2008

Reverend Billy is the bouffant-hairdoed, Jimmy-Swaggart style preacher (created by performance activist Bill Talen) who presides over the Church of Stop Shopping. Together with his choir, Billy holds regular performances, stages stop-shopping interventions at retail corporations like the Disney Store, Walmart, and Starbucks, and stars in a recently released documentary called “What Would Jesus Buy.” What is striking about Reverend Billy’s use of irony is its extreme earnestness. The [...]
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South Park’s Ironic Whiteness

Ted Gournelos, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — January 13th, 2008

As scholars like Richard Dyer and George Lipsitz have pointed out, one of the difficulties in studying "whiteness" in the U.S. and Western Europe is its presence both as a dominant and a silent (oppressive) norm. Irony, however, allows a text to rely on the process of the construction of the dominant itself and a knowledge of its insufficiency or undesirability. In this clip from South Park's first episode of their eleventh season, we see Randy Marsh (often used affectionately to point out [...]
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