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Item Trevor Noah and the contingent politics of racial joking(Cracow Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies, 2021-11-01) Donian J; Holm NThis article takes up the transnational comedy career of Trevor Noah as a way to explore how the political work of racial comedy can manifest, circulate and indeed communicate differently across different racial-political contexts. Through the close textual analysis of two key comic performances –“The Daywalker” (2009) and “Son of Patricia” (2018), produced and (initially) circulated in South Africa and the USA, respectively – this article explores the extent to which Noah’s comic treatment of race has shifted between the two contexts. In particular, attention is paid to how Noah incites, navigates and mitigates potential sources of offence surrounding racial anxieties in the two contexts, and how he evokes his own “mixed-race” status in order to open up spaces of permission that allow him to joke about otherwise taboo subjects. Rejecting the claim that the politics of Noah’s comedy is emancipatory or progressive in any straightforward way, by means of formal analyses we argue that his comic treatment of race does not enact any singular politics, but rather that the political work of his racial humour shifts relative to its wider political contexts. Thus, rather than drawing a clear line between light entertainment and politically meaningful humour, this article argues that the political valence of racial joking can be understood as contingent upon wider discourses of race that circulate in national-cultural contexts.Item No time for fun: the politics of partying during a pandemic(Taylor and Francis Group, 2021-05-04) Holm NIn 2020, in the face of the unparalleled epidemiological threat posed by Covid-19, multiple governments around the world sought to contain the spread of the virus by imposing strict lockdown measures that dramatically limited the movement and gathering of citizens. Not only did these restrictions severely curtail the regular patterns of economic, political and cultural life, they also made it very hard to have fun. While this last point may appear flippant, this article proposes that a proper accounting for fun is absolutely necessary if we are to understand not just the challenges passed by lockdown measures, but also the legal and biomedical risks people were willing to take to engage in activities like hosting parties, surfing and attending raves, during a pandemic. Arguing against the idea of fun as a form of displaced political practice, I instead suggest that fun is best understood as an example of contingent, non-transcendent aesthetic value that is absolutely central to everyday desire and the appeal of popular culture. Often easy to overlook, the experience of lockdown brought the appeal and importance of fun into sharp relief in ways that point towards the powerful role fun plays in shaping our lives both during a pandemic and (hopefully) after.