Publications
Publication details [#61001]
Eriksson, Göran. 2016. Humour, ridicule and the de-legitimization of the working class in Swedish Reality Television. Journal of Language and Politics 15 (3) : 304–321.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/jlp
Annotation
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.