Comedy and Distinction: The Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’ Sense of Humour

Defying the recent economic downturn, British comedy is currently enjoying an unprecedented ‘boom’ both on TV and on the live circuit. Yet while there might be evidence of a transformation in British comic production, there is little understanding of how this has been reflected in patterns of consumption. Indeed, there has been a notable absence of studies probing comedy taste in British cultural sociology. This paper aims to plug this gap by examining contemporary comedy taste cultures in Britain.

Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data collected between 2009-2102 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it argues that comedy represents an emerging field for the culturally privileged to cash in their their cultural capital. However, unlike previous studies on cultural capital and taste, this research finds that field-specific ‘comic cultural capital’ is mobilised less through taste for certain legitimate ‘objects’ of comedy and more through the expression of rarefied and largely ‘disinterested’ styles of comic appreciation. In short, it is ‘embodied’ rather than ‘objectified’ forms of cultural capital that largely distinguish the privileged in the field of comedy. Such evidence of comedy acting as cultural capital is significant because it challenges dominant sociological notions that symbolic hierarchies are crumbling and British society is becoming more culturally tolerant and omnivorous. Instead, in the case of comedy, I find that taste acts as a powerful marker of cultural and class identity. Eschewing the kind of openness described in other cultural areas, comedy audiences make a wide range of negative aesthetic, moral and political judgments on the basis of comedy taste, inferring that one’s sense of humour reveals deep-seated aspects of their personhood.