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Title
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Comedy taste: highbrow/lowbrow comedy and cultural capital
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Author
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Abstract
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| Drawing on Bourdieus theories about taste and class, this paper investigates how viewers with different levels of education evaluate different forms of comedy. Following up on the research by Giselinde Kuipers, who connected Dutch taste cultures in television comedy to levels of cultural capital, we interviewed Flemish viewers about their appreciation of an exemplary lowbrow, middlebrow and highbrow comedy TV series. We found clear patterns in the knowledge and evaluation of these series, related to the interviewees level of education. Quite predictably, the lower educated respondents have a better knowledge of and prefer relaxing lowbrow comedy while the higher educated better know and appreciate complex middle- and highbrow comedy. These divergent readings can be related to cultural knowledge, as the lower educated do not notice many of the layers and social references in highbrow comedy, only commenting on the easier (often visual) elements of humour |
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Language
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English
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Source (journal)
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Participations: journal of audience and reception studies. - Middlesex
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Publication
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Middlesex
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2010
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ISSN
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1749-8716
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Volume/pages
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7
:1
(2010)
, p. 49-72
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