From the 1990s through the 2000s, gross-out comedy – in the broadest terms, the style of physical comedy that emphasizes bodily functions and fluids, transgressive imagery and behavior, and shock value and disgust – triumphed as a subgenre of popular narrative film and television comedy. Gross-out comedy first emerged as a film genre in the late 1970s and early ‘80s with such films as National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) and Porky’s (1981), and the prevailing explanation for its popularity argues that the films affirm a ‘grotesque realism’ of radically democratic carnality and abundance. This dissertation analyzes the gross-out comedy of the decades that followed by both affirming and elaborating this thesis. Specifically, the dissertation examines the rhetorical functions of disgust, spectacle, and irony as correlates of popular laughter in addition to, and sometimes in tension with, the populist ethos of grotesque realism. Furthermore, it taxonomizes the gross-out gag as a trope unto itself that has dispersed during this same period across a wide range of narrative film and television genres, identifying its consistent formal characteristics. Key case studies include the gross-out romantic comedy hybrid film There’s Something About Mary (1998), the Eddie Murphy fatsuit vehicles The Nutty Professor (1996) and Norbit (2006), and Freddy Got Fingered (2001) and Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! (2007-10), two ‘cult’ texts that are emblematic of gross-out comedy’s migration and evolution during the early digital era’s atomization of mass media audiences into specialized taste niches.

Creator

• Aspray, Benjamin Kole

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-k9jd-a381

Subject

• Film studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_944524
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16341

Keyword

• disgust
• irony
• film comedy
• TV comedy

Date created

• 2022-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright