Journal of Popular Culture最新文献

It's entirely possible to watch all nine seasons of The Office without asking the obvious: Is Jim Halpert Looking at Me? The six-hundred-fifty times Jim looks at us and the six-hundred-fifty sins to which his famous glare responds result in a training that confers viewers with the ability to mime the mime; to recover Jim's stupid, vampiric face by matching it's subtle permutations, to dismiss the naïve exertions of others as stupid and embarrassing; to find success, comfort, and safety in the image of the pitiless scientist, the capitalist boss, and the fascist father.

In films, the Magic Negro is a stock character whose supernatural gifts promote the success of a White protagonist. A character with parallel traits found in a number of mystery series is the Magic Indian, who has supernatural connections and abilities unavailable to others. In his Walt Longmire mysteries, Craig Johnson develops a strong supernatural thread with the agency of Native American characters who can be considered Magic Indians. While Johnson's Magic Indians share similarities with Magic Negroes, they exhibit key differences in the way their spirituality is presented that make them more realistic characters serving an educational function.

Scholars have underestimated comics as an art form. This article uses an analysis of unreliable narration to show the complexity of this narrative mechanism in comics and, in turn, the sophistication of comics. Groensteen divides comic narrators into reciters and monstrators, and this distinction provides the basis to discuss unreliable narration in comics. This article categorizes comics with unreliable narration into mono-sequence and dual-sequence unreliable narrations according to the picto-verbal relationship in the works. Moreover, medium-specific features of comics such as spatialization of time and panel designs lead to unique types of unreliability.

Crave TV's niche hit Letterkenny is packed with exercises in wordplay and examinations of semantics that serve various functions in its presentation of life in small-town Canada. This article examines how the progymnasmata of classical rhetorical education and the linguistic comedy bits in Letterkenny serve a similar role in preparing their users (and viewers) to both engage in a specific type of dialogue and establish and enforce moral boundaries as are accepted in the society in which they live and participate, and how fan circulation of these language memes reflects the transference of those morals to the culture.

Esports and the broader professionalization of playing video games demonstrates the neoliberal project's continuing expansion across new horizons. By transforming leisure into labor and extracting value from play, major gaming and digital media companies extend the commodity life of video games beyond the sale of the games themselves and into the actual play and even spectatorship of the games. As these companies continue to reframe the actual playing and watching of video games as product, the physical performance of the players' bodies becomes increasingly troublesome, a physical disruption of the media corporations' digital feedback loop.

Analyzing the comedy of Ziwe Fumudoh, this paper examines how repeated comedic bits can challenge white audiences' disingenuous anti-racism, satirize toxic white womanhood in the U.S., and script what is possible when white feminists demonstrate sincere attempts at cross-racial connection. Each artifact from Ziwe's comedy—an interview with chef Alison Roman, a musical sketch titled “Lisa Called the Cops,” and an interview with activist Gloria Steinem—carve out productive modes of confrontation. Ziwe satirizes the ridiculousness of white performative allyship and toxic white womanhood, and demonstrates the push and pull between hope and hopelessness of structural progress in the U.S.

Antiques Roadshow Events are held in historic locations across the United Kingdom. On site, experts evaluate objects brought in by attendees, who are often cast as passive recipients, while edited highlights make up the long-running BBC TV program. Through Collaborative Event Ethnography at one Roadshow Event we show how object stories are navigated through “value talk” between attendees and experts in front of live audiences. Value is not a measurement but a dimension of the thing and its context. Stories and money are both integral in understanding worth, and final valuations are only partially shaped by given expertise.