Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era - Hardcover

"This smart and savvy crew has noticed something creeping up on us, something with bite. Now we have to take satire TV seriously; it turns out to be the bearer of the democratic spirit for the post-broadcast age. In this field-shaping book, some of the brightest talents in TV studies show us how the marginal has become the model for a much-needed media make-over. See what happens when entertainment bares its teeth." John Hartley, author of Television Truths "It has been said that if you have to explain a joke, it's not funny. This wonderful collection proves that nothing could be farther from the truth. Satire TV takes the study of comedy in new directions, expanding beyond earlier work done on classical Hollywood cinema and the sitcom." --Heather Hendershot, editor of NickelodeonNation

Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era is a collection of academic essays that attempt a sophisticated look at how TV comedy politicized itself in the 2000s...The essays in Satire TV make use of a variety of theoretical models, some derived from the likes of Bakhtin and Aristotle, to define satire and elucidate how shows like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, South Park, and others are able to operate as politically subversive entertainments in a medium like television, for which the blandest, the safest, and the most banal fare had always set the tone...Satire TV still contains much that is of interest to media scholars and non-academics alike. --Patrick Gallagher, PopMatters, 14th May 2009

Jonathan Gray is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Television Entertainment, Television Studies (with Amanda D. Lotz), Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, and Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. Jeffrey P. Jones is Associate Professor of Communication & Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Entertaining Politics: New Political Television and Civic Culture and co-editor of The Essential HBO Reader. Ethan Thompson is Associate Professor at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He is the author of Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture, and co-editor of Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era.