Comedy and Distinction : Routledge : 9780415855037 : 0415855039 : 22 Apr 2014 : "Comedy is currently enjoying unprecedented growth within the British culture industries. Defying the recent economic downturn, it has exploded into a booming billion-pound industry, both on TV and on the live circuit. Despite this, academia has so far largely ignored comedy. Indeed, the majority of research that does exist--in disciplines as wide as English literature, film and television studies, cultural studies, and media studies--has focused on analysing comedians or comic texts. The problem with this scholarship is that it tends to assume that through analysing an artist's intentions or techniques, one can understand what is and what isn't funny. But this poses a fundamental question--funny to whom? How can we definitively discern how audiences react to comedy? Comedy and Distinction addresses this cross-disciplinary omission, bringing comedy audiences to the fore and providing the first ever empirica