2025

Meta Humour in the 1950s Sitcom: Parafiction and Self-Reflexivity in The George Burns & Gracie Allen Show
Journal article by Bradley J. Dixon in New Review of Film and Television Studies 23, no. 2 (2025).
A persistent caricature of early television in the United States is that it was narratively formulaic and aesthetically sterile. There was, however, a significant undercurrent among some early television sitcoms of self-reflexivity and meta humour, particularly through the use of parafiction, or the deliberate deconstruction of the boundary between reality and fiction. No show exemplifies this more than The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950–1958), in which Burns and Allen play themselves as a pair of married vaudeville and radio entertainers. The show borrows heavily from their real lives, makes frequent reference to their careers, and further calls attention to its self-reflexivity through a central narrative device that sees Burns’ character literally step out of the set, look into the camera, and address the home audience directly. By modelling their characters’ lives so closely on their own, and by playing with meta humour so extensively, Burns and Allen set themselves apart among early television practitioners as particularly self-reflexive — an impulse developed from their many years as performers on the vaudeville circuit. Burns and Allen used this self-reflexivity to construct and maintain elaborate parafictional personas, which heavily inflected their image in the public sphere throughout their lives. The intentional blurring of any delineation between the truth and fiction in their life and work makes George Burns and Gracie Allen perhaps the earliest and most significant practitioners of parafictional persona in American screen comedy.
2024
Humour from the Right: Authoritarian Populism and Punch-Down Laughter in India
Journal article by Suchi Chowdhury in Open Library of Humanities Journal 10, no. 2 (2024).
This paper examines India’s authoritarian populist politics through a study of humorous speeches made by the nation’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, known for his Hindu supremacist right-wing stance. It qualitatively analyses Modi’s strategic use of humour that targets marginalised groups, including intellectuals, women, people with disabilities, and the Muslim community. The act of suicide and the state of widowhood have also been targets. By employing textual analysis of specific jokes and insults delivered by Modi in public forums, the study demonstrates how carnivalesque speech is used to ‘punch down’ on individuals and groups based on their identity. The paper draws a comparison with Donald Trump’s use of similar humour, noting how both leaders utilise it to destabilise their opposition and mock minorities. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival theory as a lens, which originally posits a democratic and inclusive potential to subvert power, the study argues that the ‘inverted carnival’ employed by leaders like Modi and Trump serves to consolidate power and undermine minority rights. This research introduces the concept of ‘inverted carnival’ as a new framework for analysing the use of humour in authoritarian populist governance globally.
PhD thesis by Bradley J. Dixon (2024).
This thesis draws on the concept of parafictional persona to examine the increasingly pervasive phenomenon of comedians playing themselves in fictional media. With reference to case studies selected from American comedy from the dawn of broadcast media to the present day, I identify and describe five distinct but closely interrelated “modes” of parafictional persona: parafictional stardom (George Burns and Gracie Allen in The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show); performative parafiction (Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm); proximate parafiction (Tig Notaro in One Mississippi); parodic parafiction (Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington in On Cinema at the Cinema); and parareality (Nathan Fielder in Nathan for You). I adopt a persona studies approach to investigate each of these comedians, aligning theories of self, celebrity, and performance to analyse the construction and enactment of their polysemic public selves across fictional, nonfictional, parafictional, and social media. Within this approach I consider parafictional persona as a construct, noting common attributes and effects across the case studies, but also observing how they differ from each other and how they separately fit into wider structures of media and culture. My research reveals these performers and texts to be emblematic of growing tensions in how we categorise and make sense of contemporary media, challenging traditional understandings of stardom, comic persona, and the self. By identifying and articulating these five modes of parafictional persona in comedy, this thesis illuminates the historical and contemporary meanings and significance of a highly self-reflexive mode of comic performance, representing a significant advance in the theorisation of persona and a novel contribution to persona studies, comedy studies, and media studies more broadly.
Older
Australian Radio Listeners and Television Viewers: Historical Perspectives
Book review by Kyle Harvey in Journal of Australian Studies 47, no. 2 (2023).
Masters thesis by Til Knowles (2022).
Abstract
Australian comedy chatcast The Little Dum Dum Club (2010 – present) is a loosely structured weekly podcast hosted by two stand-up comedians and good mates Tommy Dassalo and Karl Chandler. Each episode usually features one to three guests, often also stand-up comedians, who casually chat with Chandler and Dassalo and joke about their lives and the world around them. In this thesis I establish how hosts, guests and listeners of comedy chatcasts cocreate their performance conventions by collaboratively and often unwittingly combining a range of social norms, stand-up comedy techniques and conversational skills. Understanding how these conventions are created and shared shows how comedy chatcasts influence host and listener behaviour in podcast-related spaces and in their broader lives. As I demonstrate, comedy chatcasts have influence even when the intention of the hosts and guests is only to be funny.
The comedians in The Little Dum Dum Club are always looking for the joke, and the humour is often insult-based and puerile. These are contemporary larrikin performances, involving taking the piss out of one another, themselves and authority in an egalitarian way, a shared self-deprecation that also encompasses a sense of mateship. Rather than uncritically reiterating these dominant conventions of white Australian masculinity, however, the comedic performances in the podcast both represent and critique them. The performance conventions of comedy chatcasts create a “safe space” in which comedians can humorously explore ideas and respond to changing cultural norms in a way that does not radically reshape them but does suggest opportunities for intervention and evolution. The impact of this is clear, for instance, in the meaningful but humorous discussions of suicidality on the podcast and how joking about lived experience reframes flippant suicide jokes to lessen shame and promote help-seeking behaviour among listeners and comedians.
Listeners likewise have a set of conventions which enable them to perform their fandom of the comedy chatcast. Building on podcast scholarship about intimacy and parasocial relationships, I show how listeners attempt to replicate the mateship form of friendship iii performed on the podcast using its jokingly abusive comedy style. For listeners of The Little Dum Dum Club, successfully performing their listenership requires navigating a series of at times conflicting conventions which are often at odds with broader norms of appropriateness and do not necessarily find a willing audience. Podcasts have niche global audiences and conventions need to be interpreted and performed to receptive audiences in order to be successful. The Little Dum Dum Club is unique in its content, but not in its construction. This thesis shows how comedy chatcasts as new media enable analysis of the shifts in and discussions of our cultural norms that happen in non-radical, flexible and playful ways. Through such analysis, we can see how comedy chatcasts can be influential in minor and major ways for those involved.
Book chapter by Kyle Harvey in Children, Youth, and International Television (D Olson and A Schober [eds], Routledge, 2022).
Book chapter by Kyle Harvey and Kate Darian-Smith in Translating Worlds: Migration, Memory and Culture (R Wilson and S Radstone [eds], Routledge, 2021).
Journal article by Kyle Harvey and Sukhmani Khorana in Media International Australia 174, no. 1 (2020).
Journal article by Kyle Harvey in Media International Australia 174, no. 1 (2020).
Abstract
This article examines the practice and function of casting in the Australian television industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. It investigates the role of ethnicity and accents and the practice of casting actors of migrant backgrounds in Australian drama, variety and comedy. In an industry so often dominated by Anglo-Australian stories, faces and voices, the increasing presence of actors from non-English-speaking backgrounds and non-European ethnicities has been a key feature of the changing nature of Australian television production. By analysing ‘Showcast’ casting directories, supplemented with oral history interviews, this article suggests that actors have tended to adopt fluid or hybrid identities to navigate the casting process and find steady work in the television industry. The manipulation of identity, I argue, sits at the nexus of overlapping cultural spheres amid the challenging operation of multiculturalism in Australian media.
Journal article by Bradley J. Dixon in Popular Culture Studies Journal 7, no. 2 (2019).
Abstract
This paper applies the theory of parafictional persona to This Is the End (2012), positioning its ensemble cast as a key example of an increasingly common occurrence: actors and performers playing themselves in fictional media.