Pure and Simple: Music as a Personal and Comedic Resource in Car Share

Mills, Brett and Rimmer, Mark ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6916-6795 (2017) Pure and Simple: Music as a Personal and Comedic Resource in Car Share. In: Music in Comedy Television. Routledge. ISBN 978-1138193581

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Abstract

This chapter examines Peter Kay’s Car Share (BBC1, 2015) to consider the ways it represents pop music as both a resource which the characters draw on to make sense of their lives and, by virtue of this, a fertile site for comedy. One way the programme does this is by showing how pop functions as a marker of taste and a resource for the enactment of cultural snobbery. Here we suggest that the programme’s comedy can – in certain respects – be understood via the superiority theory of humour. However, we also go on to argue that superiority is not, in fact, the key way in which humour functions in the series. Rather, what might at first appear to be a comedy which mocks the granting of undue significance to pop music, instead ultimately offers up as humorous attempts to deny the powerful personal emotional resonances that such supposedly simple culture can facilitate.

Item Type: Book Section
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Art, Media and American Studies
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Film, Television and Media
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Depositing User: Pure Connector
Date Deposited: 24 Sep 2016 01:03
Last Modified: 21 Jul 2023 10:38
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/60433
DOI:

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