Fall 2023 SIG events!

The Comedy and Humor SIG Co-Chairs, Adrien, Evelyn, and Kriszta, would like to welcome you to a series of virtual book club events this Fall and coming Spring. We are excited to meet you all periodically again and exchange ideas! We have curated a list of recent books that were of interest to the group at our SIG meeting in April 2022. We hope you will consider joining us.

All meetings will take place at 1pm PT/2pm MT/3pm CT/ 4pm ET on Friday afternoons. We realize that not everyone will be able to make it, but we do hope that this is a good time for most people. Please put this on your calendar. We will send more reminders and details for attending the Zoom meeting as the date gets closer.

Here’s a peek ahead at what we have planned:

Series One:

1. October 7: The Souls of White Jokes (Raúl Pérez) and That’s Not Funny (Nick Marx and Matt Sienkiewicz). We will be reading the first chapters of these books and discussing them in conversation with one another. Our hope is to think of these two recent books as representatives of a current trend in comedy studies.

   1. This session will NOT be attended by the authors. We will instead focus on the shared concepts and pedagogical potential of the texts.

2. October 21: We have invited authors Raúl Pérez, Nick Marx, and Matt Sienkiewicz to come have a conversation on their books. Please come with questions for them! This will be a continuation of our discussion from October 7.

Series Two:

1. November 18: We will start off another mini-series on new books on comedy, capitalism, and affect with a discussion of the introduction from Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick.

2. January (date TBA): Ngai’s work will be followed by Madeline Lane-McKinley’s Comedy Against Work, which is coming out November 15, 2022. This will be an exciting engagement with a brand new publication.

3. February/March (date TBA): Finally, we will be discussing Tina Post’s Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression. This will also be a brand new book, coming out in January 2023. This work may be a useful update on Ngai’s early concept of “animatedness” in Ugly Feelings.

SIG Business:

1. The graduate student essay contest will have a late January deadline this year–please send in your papers! And faculty, please encourage your students to submit pieces for the contest.

2. We will see everyone at our virtual SIG meeting in March 2023.

3. We are hoping to sponsor a lot of great comedy and humor panels for SCMS in Denver, April 2023.

4. We will be inviting self-nominations for a graduate student co-chair position, with the election to be held in April after SCMS.