Article published In:
Formality and Informality in Online PerformancesEdited by Sofia Rüdiger and Susanne Mühleisen
[Internet Pragmatics 5:1] 2022
► pp. 92–114
Edited by Sofia Rüdiger and Susanne Mühleisen
[Internet Pragmatics 5:1] 2022
► pp. 92–114
Brutal spoons and cheesy gloves
The formal, the informal and the spoof cooking show on web stage
In its long presence on television and the internet, the genre of the cooking show has changed and diversified significantly. The initial principally instructional character has given way to more entertaining sub-genres, including parodic ones, that is, ‘spoof cooking shows’ on the internet. The presentation of self (Goffman 1959) takes on many forms in everyday life, but the possibilities of publicly managing one’s own impression have enormously increased on the largest stage in the world, the internet (cf. Shulman 2017). The blurring of the Goffmanian concepts ‘front-’ and ‘backstage’ are important here in the presentation of self as ‘fake’ or ‘real’ person on the web. This article looks at the diversification of the genre of the cooking show in its transition to the internet, first by investigating strategies of formality or informality (Irvine 1979, 2001), then by exploring a particular spoof show, Cooking with Paris, as an example of how genre conventions are manifested by undermining.
Keywords: genre development, cooking show, online spoofs, presentation of self, formality, informality
Article outline
- 1.Introduction: Cooking with Paris
- 2.Cooking shows as genre(s): Definitions and diversifications
- 3.Formality and informality in cooking shows: Performances on backstage and/as frontstage
- 4.Spoof cooking shows on the web stage: Mimicry, parody, and the real person behind the fake person
- 4.1Exaggeration
- 4.2Contradiction and failure
- 4.3Speech acts and evaluations
- 4.4Meta-comments and subversive hints
- 5.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
References
Androutsopoulos, Jannis
2015 “Negotiating authenticities in mediatized times.” Discourse, Context & Media 81: 74–77. 
Bakhtin, Mikhail M.
1984 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bradbury, Malcolm
1989 “An age of parody: Style in the modern arts.” In No, Not Bloomsbury: Collected Writings on British Fiction since 1945, ed. by Malcolm Bradbury, 46–57. London: Arena.
Cambridge English Dictionary Online
n.d. [URL]
Collins, Kathleen
2009 Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows. New York: Continuum.
Duan, Bingqing
2019 “Genre diversification of American cooking shows.” Unpublished MA thesis, University of Bayreuth.
Goffman, Erving
1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday.
Heritage, Stuart
2020 “ ‘Spoons are so brutal!’ Paris Hilton’s cooking show is a rare work of comic genius.” The Guardian 20 January. [URL] (accessed 20 March 2020).
Hoëm, Ingjerd
2001 “Theater.” In Key Terms in Language and Culture, ed. by Alessandro Duranti, 244–247. Malden: Blackwell.
Hutcheon, Linda
2000 A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (2nd edn.). Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Irvine, Judith
1979 “Formality and informality in communicative events.” American Anthropologist 81(4): 773–790.
2001 “Formality and informality in communicative events.” In Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, ed. by Alessandro Duranti, 189–207. Oxford: Blackwell.
Johnson, Thomas
2019 “You Suck at Cooking won’t make you hungry, but it will make you laugh.” The Washington Post 18 March. [URL] (accessed 15 September 2020).
Ketchum, Cheri
2005 “The essence of cooking shows: How the Food Network constructs consumer fantasies.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 29(3): 217–234.
Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky
1967 “Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience.” In Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, ed. by June Helm, 12–44. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Lacey, Nick
2000 Narrative and Genre: Key Concepts in Media Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lai-Yeung, Theresa Wai, and Simon Wing Wah So
2010 “TV as a multimedia synchronous communication for cooking and eating activities: Analysis of TV cooking shows in Hong Kong.” In ISM 2010: The IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia, 302–307. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society.
Marwick, Alice, and danah boyd
2011 “To see and be seen: Celebrity practice on Twitter.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17(2): 139–158.
Matwick, Keri, and Kelsi Matwick
2019 “Bloopers and backstage talk on TV cooking shows.” Text & Talk 40(1): 49–74.
Meng, Bingchun
2011 “From Steamed Bun to Grass Mud Horse: E Gao as alternative political discourse on the Chinese internet.” Global Media and Communication 7(1): 33–51.
Mittell, Jason
2004 Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture. New York: Routledge.
Mühleisen, Susanne
2020 “Formality and informality in cooking shows: Paula Deen and the development of a genre.” In Talking about Food: The Social and the Global in Eating Communities, ed. by Sofia Rüdiger, and Susanne Mühleisen, 189–207. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Naccarato, Peter, and Kathleen Lebesco
2012 Culinary Capital. London: Berg.
Rea, Christopher
2013 “Spoofing (e’gao) culture on the Chinese internet.” In Humour in Chinese Life and Culture: Resistance and Control in Modern Times, ed. by Jessica Milner Davis, and Jocelyn Chey, 149–172. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Shifman, Limor
2013 “Memes in a digital world: Reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 181: 362–377.
Shulman, David
2017 The Presentation of Self in Contemporary Social Life. Los Angeles: Sage.
Swales, John. M.
1990 Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Setting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.