Our Dissertations, Ourselves
I’m ready to share more of my dissertation topic. A dissertation topic is a sensitive issue: it’s like an extension of our academic identity. And since there’s literally nothing else going on, it becomes a whole identity. I’ve shared that my dissertation is comedy roasts, and most people respond positively because they think it is an interesting topic. So that is encouraging, but no one can make a topic and tediously dissect it. Hence, it has no meaning anymore like an academic, so don’t think my dissertation is actually a list of jokes roasting academia (I’ve thought about doing that, of course.)
There’s a lot of mystery about what a dissertation actually is, and until only a few months ago, I wasn’t exactly sure either. My intent here is to demystify academic rituals and share what I will be committed to for the next year and a half: thy dissertation, thy self.
So, here it is, all in its naked glory. Of course, subject to change, and by this time next year, I could be writing a manifesto about the use of a single word in a roast.
I also want to be clear: I am not asking for feedback or suggestions at this time. I have a committee for that. This is to share what I am working on, and maybe it piques your curiosity to learn more. Feedback has its time and place, and this ain’t it.
The summary (title tbd)
This dissertation examines comedy roasts as a uniquely American form of cultural performance ritual. A roast is a performance in which the participants honor a well-known public figure. Notably, the process of “honoring” the person involves ridicule, lampooning, carefully crafted insults, or what is known as “roasting.” This cultural ritual was formalized in name by the Friars Club, a social club for those in the theater and entertainment business, founded in New York City in 1904. Since being televised beginning in the 1960s, the roast has continued to attract well-known participants from entertainment and politics. My specific focus is on televised comedy roasts from the mid-twentieth century to the present.
The project’s focus on culturally specific developments, rather than ahistorical aesthetic, philosophical, or psychological studies of comedy or humor, places it within the interdisciplinary field of American Culture Studies. The cultural studies methodology, shaped by performance, feminist, critical race, and media studies scholarship, is designed to examine comedy roasts of powerful individuals as an American invention popularized and complicated by its wide circulation on American television.
The project considers that the comedy roast’s cultural-aesthetic form is not just an American Studies subject because it has developed within America’s geographic confines. Instead, it seeks to clarify how the changing dynamics in comedy roasts closely intertwine with shifts and developments in American values, identity, and inequalities. Its major case studies are designed to show that an individual roast reflects the dominant American culture of its time and challenges prevailing norms. Besides providing previously absent critical insight into comedy roasts, I offer new knowledge that challenges the idea that comedy roasts are an exclusionary ritual that sustains white male supremacy. Recent evidence suggests that participants use roasts to challenge patriarchy, racism, and gender norms.
[This is not an official abstract.]
Further reading of interest
These are more of the accessible, non-theoretical texts that are of interest to a larger audience. If you want some dense reading about performance theory, ritual, or racial identity formation, please hit me up. I’ve got plenty.
Desrochers, R. 2016. New Humor in the Progressive Era: Americanization and the Vaudeville Comedian. Palgrave Macmillan.
Goltz, Dustin. 2017. Comic Performativities: Identity, Internet Outrage, and the Aesthetics of Communication. Taylor and Francis.
Meier, Matthew R., and Casey R. Schmitt. 2017. Standing up, speaking out: stand-up comedy and the rhetoric of social change. Routledge.
MacDonald, J. Fred. 1992. Blacks and White TV: African Americans in Television since 1948. 2nd ed. Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers.
Bogle, Donald. 2001. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. 4th ed. New York: Continuum.
Taylor, Yuval, and Jake Austen. Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012.
Gilbert, Joanne R. 2004. Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique. Humor in Life and Letters Series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Levine, Elana, 2007. Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television. Durham: Duke University Press.
Dolan, Jill. 2012. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Second edition. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Schwadron, Hannah. 2018. The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender, and Jewish Joke-Work in US Pop Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bailey, Marlon M. 2013. Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Negra, Diane. 2009. What a Girl Wants?: Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism. London; New York: Routledge.
(Some academics like to suggest texts to other academics under the guise of helping, but it’s more of a power move to show that they know something the other person doesn’t. So I must repeat: this is not everything I am using. I have a bibliography of 100+ sources, so I assure you, I probably have everything.)
There’s only one tiny thing left to do: write the damn thing.
What is this? A semi-regular newsletter about culture and academia and academic culture.