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Despite the long history of stand-up comedy as a distinct form of popular entertainment, there has been little sociological attention given to its cultural significance. Comedians have arguably become legitimate and visible voices in many public conversations about social issues and social justice. This dissertation explores the cultural work of women’s comedy in popular culture. Specifically, I examine narrative representation and audience reception of women’s stand-up comedy through multi-method qualitative inquiry. First, I analyze stand-up performances by popular U.S. comedians Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes, and Margaret Cho. Through narrative analysis, I focus on the ironic performativity of Schumer and the charged styles of Sykes and Cho, and I discuss how these women use humor (in different but overlapping ways) to challenge dominant cultural narratives pertaining to gender, race, and sexuality. Second, I conduct an audience reception analysis using focus groups in order to better understand how people consume and interpret stand-up comedy. Due to the polysemic nature of comedy and satire, audiences decode these texts in a myriad of ways. My analysis shows how different audiences perceive the comedian as unpacking social “truths” in comedy. I elaborate these audience decoding positions, discuss the layers of interpretation (i.e., intersectional positionality and interpretive frameworks), and discuss how participants negotiate symbolic boundaries around what is deemed funny or topically appropriate for comics to say. My findings further highlight the importance of identity in critical referential viewing by incorporating standpoint epistemologies. In particular, audience members of marginalized social groups experience a “bifurcated consciousness” (Smith 1974) in their interpretations compared to those from dominant identity groups, and women and minority audience members are more likely to interpret these performances as counterhegemonic texts.

The present work examines the construction of race on reality television through the use of an exemplar in this genre, MTV's The Real World. By the sheer fact of its popularity and ubiquity, as The Real World is nearly two decades old and is the longest-running example of the genre, reality television programming warrants deeper academic investigation. The present work argues that as we are consuming mass media, we are also consuming specific ideas about our social world. These ideas inform audiences and are necessary to uncover in order to learn about the social structure of our racialized society. Findings reveal race and ethnicity is embedded in our culture and how this show has communicated race through its depiction and even exclusion. Further, findings reveal that racial and ethnic relations are most often depicted as a "Black versus White" issue. The current work focuses specifically on the construction of race because of the similarly ubiquitous nature of race in society. Because The Real World is a long-running series, it provides an ample database from which to sample for a discourse analysis. The show is marketed and viewed by a specific target audience such that it allows for the exploration of one of the research arguments: that we must continue to rethink and challenge our view that mass media audience members, specifically here television, are passive consumers of material. The present work seeks to extend the application of theoretical contributions of Hall, Morley, Ang, and Jenkins by applying models to a type of programming that complicates the vision of media where consumers and producers are identifiably different spheres. The field of reality television programming is unique because of its dependence on viewers to become cast members and participants in the media production process. Finally, as previous research has shown, even in fictional settings viewers have conflated the individual who plays a character and the character the actor is playing. Thus by analyzing issues of race, where the line between real and unreal is purposely blurred the impact of how race is constructed can be quite great.

This dissertation addresses a significant gap in audience-orientated criticism by introducing a new approach to theatre audience research: audience contribution through the vehicle of a postperformance discussion. Audience contribution considers the physical and vocal behaviour of audience members as contributions to the theatrical event. Much scholarship has concentrated on the written and performance texts. What I posit as the audience text, comprised of audience contributions, has been predominantly ignored. The audience text is an integral part of the theatrical event that changes, adds to and informs the theatrical experience for audience and arts professionals alike. Over the past century the audience role has changed from interactive contributor to passive receiver. For the contemporary theatre audience member, opportunities to contribute to the theatrical event have been limited to laughter, applause and consumerist practices such as the purchasing of theatrical merchandise. Similarly in much theatre audience theory, audiences are perceived as passive receivers of the drama whose only active contribution is through autonomous cognitive meaning-making processes. The study takes into account the extant audience theory of audience reception and builds on this. Post-performance discussions, which have risen significantly in popularity in the last decade, are an under-explored and under-utilised avenue for audience contribution. A new method for the facilitation of post-performance discussions that encourages audience contribution and privileges the audience voice is introduced. Case studies of post-performance discussions held after performances of Anne of the Thousand Days and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? trial this new discussion model. An audience text is created that informs the theatrical event and a new role for the contemporary audience is discovered: audience critic. Through the post-performance discussions, audience members become active contributors to, and co-creators of, the theatrical event. Audience contribution has significant implications for audience theory and theatre practice alike.

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Lifestyle blogging has become a vast and profitable domain, with visitors engaging with new content in a variety of ways. The communities that begin to form around these blogs has rarely been analyzed, due to a lack of metrics and a complex definition of virtual communities. Relying on Henry Jenkins work on virtual communities, a set of metrics were used to analyze the depth and breadth of three communities: A Cup of Jo, Wit & Delight, and Cupcakes and Cashmere. The three areas these metrics worked to measure were: awareness, membership, and belonging. Through this audience reception study the clear marker of a community was the direct and systematic blogger engagement with the readership. Many other factors are influential in building a virtual community on a blog, however, what set the three blogs apart was the ways in which Joanna Goddard (A Cup of Jo) and Kate Arends (Wit & Delight) reached out and built relationships with their readers, strengthening their community and allowing it to thrive.

This thesis examines Chappelle's Show’s use of racial satire to challenge dominant stereotypes and the effectiveness of that satire as a tool to achieve perspective by incongruity. I use a variation of D’Acci’s circuit of media study model to examine the institutional challenges and limitations on the show due to the context in which it was created, produced, and distributed; to interrogate the strategies employed by the show’s writers/creators to overcome these challenges through the performance of race; and to analyze the audience’s understanding of the use of racial satire through a reception study of the show’s audience. I argue that using satire often has the unintended consequence of crossing the line between “sending up” a behavior and supporting it, essentially becoming that which it is trying to discount, though this is not to say that its intrinsic value is therefore completely negated.

Stieg Larsson has reached vast audiences with his popular, page-turning crime novels, the Millennium Series. The series tells a story not just for fictional purposes, but to draw attention to what people did not see about the society that Larsson lived in. In 2009, local actors starred in a film adaptation of Larsson’s first novel, which went beyond the Swedish public. In December 2011 an English-language remake based on the same bestseller was released, starring famous Hollywood actors. Considering language can hinder the reach of foreign language movies in international markets and that international and Swedish audiences demands differ, the current research aims to find out how the two movie adaptations diverge in terms of gender representation, production, graphic content, ideological meaning, and cultural representation as they attempt to target their respective audiences. In order to find answers, this thesis adopted a qualitative approach using two different, supporting methods. First a semiotic analysis of a representative scene with a high psychological and graphic impact on the viewer in both movies was conducted. Second, focus group interviews, with International and Swedish audience members, were conducted. The findings suggest that considerable differences exist between the two movies and that audiences have a different pre-conception in the way they perceive the same media product: gender role dynamic has been reversed in the two movies, the American version is more graphic in its display of nudity, and lacks the ideological layer. Furthermore, this study can serve as a basis for future research that could try to statistically represent the way Swedish and international moviegoers draw on the two adaptations.

Reality shows that feature people going about their presumed daily lives are not base entertainment. Internet message boards about reality programs are sites where moral work happens. Viewers write about the appearance and actions of show characters and construct moral lessons. Through naturally occurring data produced by fans of these shows, I find that viewers generally express a traditional heteronormative morality around class and gender through stating moral lessons, explaining what is wrong with the characters, or through ridicule and praise.