Page 18 - The University of Wisconsin Press Spring 2013
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S
PRING
2013
CULTURAL STUDIES / FOLKLORE / HUMOR / MEDIA STUDIES
Q: What’s the difference between Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett?
A: About three hours.
Widely publicized in mass media worldwide, high-profile tragedies and celeb-
rity scandals—the untimely deaths of Michael Jackson and Princess Diana, the
embarrassing affairs of Tiger Woods and President Clinton, the 9/11 attacks or
the Challenger space shuttle explosion—often provoke nervous laughter and
black humor. If in the past this snarky folklore may have been shared among
friends and uttered behind closed doors, today the Internet’s ubiquity and instant
interactivity propels such humor across a much more extensive and digitally
mediated discursive space. New media not only let more people “in on the joke,”
but they have also become the “go-to” formats for engaging in symbolic interac-
tion, especially in times of anxiety or emotional suppression, by providing users
an expansive forum for humorous, combative, or intellectual communication,
including jokes that cross the line of propriety and good taste.
Moving through engaging case studies of Internet-derived humor about
momentous disasters in recent American popular culture and history,
The Last
Laugh
chronicles how and why new media have become a predominant means
of vernacular expression. Trevor J. Blank argues that computer-mediated com-
munication has helped to compensate for users’ sense of physical detachment in
the “real” world, while generating newly meaningful and dynamic opportunities
for the creation and dissemination of folklore. Drawing together recent develop-
ments in new media studies with the analytical tools of folklore studies, he makes
a strong case for the significance to contemporary folklore of technologically
driven trends in folk and mass culture.
Trevor J. Blank
is visiting assistant professor in
the Department of English and Communica-
tion at SUNY Potsdam. He is editor of the
e-journal
New Directions in Folklore
and of the
books
Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular
Expression in a Digital World
and
Folk Culture in
the Digital Age: The Emergent Dynamics of
Human Interaction
.
PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
JUNE
LC: 2012032669 GR
176 PP. 6 X 9 12 B/W ILLUS.
E-BOOK $19.95 ISBN 978-0-299-29203-4
INTRODUCING A NEW SERIES
FOLKLORE STUDIES
IN A MULTICULTURAL
WORLD
“The Last Laugh
is required reading
for anyone interested in the many
roles digital media now play in our
everyday lives.”
Robert Glenn How-
ard, author of
Digital Jesus: The Mak-
ing of a New Christian Fundamentalist
Community on the Internet
18
THE UNIVERSIT Y OF WISCONSIN PRESS
•
O f r e l a t e d i n t e r e s t
“Hilarious and philosophical at the same
time, a nifty probe of the genre, regularly
guilty of wise humor.”—Carlin Romano,
Philadelphia Inquirer
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2006
LC: 2005005443 K 448 PP. 7 × 10
57 B/W ILLUS.
E-BOOK $16.95 ISBN 978-0-299-21353-4
Philip Sanfilippo
