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Article published In:
Multimodality, Politics and Ideology
Edited by David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen
[Journal of Language and Politics 15:3] 2016
► pp. 304–321

Humour, ridicule and the de-legitimization of the working class in Swedish Reality Television

| Örebro University, Sweden

Drawing on tools from Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis this paper analyses the editing techniques in a Swedish docu-soap showing that humour is used to ridicule the working-class participants, representing them as slow, inflexible, undynamic and unstylish. The paper places this within broader discursive shifts in Sweden where the rise of neoliberalism requires a dismantling of the welfare state, legitimized partly though establishing the lower social economic groups as morally flawed and themselves responsible for their increasingly disadvantaged situation as social inequalities increase.

Keywords: Reality Television, Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, Social Class, Humour, Ridicule, Recontextualization of Social Practice
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The making of social class through ridicule
  • 3.The case and methodology
  • 4.Ridiculing the working class
    • 4.1Music frames actions and suggests mental states
    • 4.2Re-sequencing of scenes
    • 4.3Camera work
  • 5.Concluding comments
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 August 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.15.3.05eri
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