Introduction: UK and Irish Television Comedy—Representations of Region, Nation, and Identity

Abstract

An important interpretative theme of this collection is the question of whose viewpoints these comedies represent. Charlie Chaplin supposedly said that life is a tragedy seen in close-up but a comedy in long-shot, a saying which nicely encapsulates the distinct view which comedy has of any history, situation or community, a view through an alternative lens. This is argued by Bakhtin (1981, 1984) to be the inverted viewpoint produced by satire, one which happily represents the aspects of the world which a more proper, serious and official version suppresses or ignores. Bakhtin reminds us that jokers can ‘create around themselves their own special little world, their own chronotope’ (1981: 159) becoming keepers of the gateway to this alternative viewpoint, from which something which is officially ‘taken seriously’ can be laughed at and a symbolic boundary transgressed. As well as social, these symbolic boundaries are cultural (Douglas [1975] 1999) and psychological (Freud [1905] 1976), our surprised laughter or smile of recognition provoked by the realisation of the transgression. Stallybrass and White (1986) argue that the transgression of joking is a ‘symbolic struggle’ where there is some kind of contested boundary, and they describe Bakhtin’s notion of boundary-transgressing satire as ‘Janus-faced’ (1986: 13), neither inherently radical nor conservative, neither a preservation nor an upending of the social order (ibid.: 14). If we see the joking structure underlying comedy as ‘Janus-faced’, we can see the direction of the joke is not fixed: anyone can become the joker if an audience will laugh, laughter can be cruel or kind, exclusive or inclusive, told from the inside or the outside—in each instance, we can ask who or what is being laughed at and who we are laughing with. ‘UK and Irish Television Comedy: Representations of Region, Nation, and Identity’ explores television comedy drawn from across the UK and Ireland ranging chronologically from the 1980s to the 2020s. This introduction frames the collected chapters within theories of comedy and discusses their context within existing scholarship on UK and Irish comic representations of region and identity, particularly on television. Key ideas addressed here include analysis of the viewpoints of these regional comedies and the targets at which their jokes are aimed. This chapter presents an overview of the collection’s engagement with the particularity of the lived experience of time and place embedded within the wide variety of depictions of contrasting lives experience and sensibilities which the collected individual chapters offer. It also highlights the wealth of reflection and range of perspectives the collection offers on funny and engaging representations of the diverse fragmented complexity of UK and Irish identity explored thorough the intersections of class, ethnicity and gender.