Dame Edna and ‘the help’

Q2 Social Sciences European Journal of Humour Research Pub Date : 2021-12-30 DOI:10.7592/ejhr2021.9.4.568
A. Hale
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

‘Dame Edna Everage’, a persona originally created by the Australian comedian Barry Humphries in 1955, is a character designed to simultaneously shock and amuse. Dame Edna voices (and satirizes) the discourse of ‘average’, older, politically conservative Anglo-Australians who feel compelled to ‘tell it like it is’ – no matter how offensive their opinions might be. In the Anglosphere, Edna’s humour is well understood and sustained international success has followed Edna for more than 60 years in Britain, Canada, the US and Australia. However, Edna occasionally misfires. In 2003, for instance, Edna’s satire outraged Latinos across the USA, in fulfillment of Poe’s Law (Aikin, 2009). Simply put, Latinos assumed that Edna’s comments satirising negative mainstream attitudes towards them were expressive of Edna’s authentic racism. This paper investigates the Edna joke in the overall context of failed humour and then specifically for the offensiveness it generated amongst the Latino minority in the United States. It then tests whether this reaction was the result of a discursive frame specific to the US context, by conducting an exploratory study amongst a small sample of highly educated Australian bilingual Latin American immigrants and their adult children, to see whether they thought Edna’s joke was funny. These Australian individuals of Latin American heritage responded via an online questionnaire, and an analysis of their responses is presented here. The study’s main finding is that while these individuals generally demonstrated a high comedic literacy across both English and Spanish, including a prior awareness of Edna’s and Australian humour, they overall rejected the intention and humour of Edna’s joke. This paper asserts that, when it comes to humour, some transnational migrant speech community loyalties transcend other notions of identity and language competence.
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埃德娜夫人和“帮手”
1955年,澳大利亚喜剧演员巴里·汉弗莱斯创造了“艾德娜·埃弗里奇夫人”这个角色,这个角色既令人震惊又令人发笑。埃德娜夫人的声音(并讽刺)是“普通的”、年长的、政治上保守的英裔澳大利亚人的话语,他们觉得有必要“实话实说”——不管他们的观点有多无礼。在英语圈,埃德娜的幽默得到了很好的理解,60多年来,埃德娜在英国、加拿大、美国和澳大利亚都取得了持续的国际成功。然而,埃德娜偶尔也会失败。例如,2003年,埃德娜的讽刺作品激怒了美国各地的拉丁美洲人,以实现坡定律(Aikin, 2009)。简单地说,拉丁美洲人认为埃德娜的评论讽刺了对他们的负面主流态度,这是埃德娜真实的种族主义的表达。本文从失败幽默的整体背景下研究了埃德娜的笑话,然后特别研究了它在美国拉丁裔少数民族中产生的冒犯性。然后,通过对受过高等教育的澳大利亚双语拉丁美洲移民及其成年子女的小样本进行探索性研究,看看他们是否认为埃德娜的笑话有趣,来测试这种反应是否是美国语境下特定话语框架的结果。这些有拉丁美洲血统的澳大利亚人通过在线问卷进行了回答,下面是他们回答的分析。这项研究的主要发现是,虽然这些人普遍表现出较高的英语和西班牙语喜剧素养,包括事先意识到埃德娜和澳大利亚的幽默,但他们总体上拒绝了埃德娜笑话的意图和幽默。本文认为,在幽默方面,一些跨国移民的言语社区忠诚超越了其他身份和语言能力的概念。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
European Journal of Humour Research
European Journal of Humour Research Social Sciences-Cultural Studies
CiteScore
1.10
自引率
0.00%
发文量
34
审稿时长
6 weeks
期刊介绍: The European Journal of Humour Research (EJHR) is a peer-reviewed quarterly journal with an international multidisciplinary editorial board. Although geographically-oriented towards the ˋold continentˊ, the European perspective aims at an international readership and contributors. EJHR covers the full range of work being done on all aspects of humour phenomenon. EJHR is designed to respond to the important changes that have affected the study of humour but particular predominance is given to the past events and current developments in Europe.
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