‘Can mom laugh?’: The production of the Japanese television family, 1960s–80s | Intellect Skip to content
1981
Modern Popular Culture in Middle-Class Japan
  • ISSN: 2051-7084
  • E-ISSN: 2051-7092

Abstract

In this article, I examine the history of audience laughter on Japanese television and its role in producing and sustaining the image of an intimate, family-like public during the medium’s early decades. With a focus on the progressive gendering of audience laughter on Japanese television from the 1960s onwards, I demonstrate how the move to procure female laughter on the medium reflected broader ideological expectations that women and their laughter might unify a family-like, national audience. I argue that Japanese television sought to leverage female laughter – both concretely through paid waraiya ‘laughers’ in the audience and through the gender ideology surrounding laughter – to negotiate television’s foundational tensions between the public and the private. More broadly, I suggest that the history of television laughter and its gendering can throw into relief television’s co-imbrication with discourses on gender, nation and consumption.

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2022-09-01
2024-04-28
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): affect; audience; gender; Japanese comedy; laughter; media history; sound studies
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