Laughing at the world: Schadenfreude, social identity, and American media culture

This project explores historical questions of televisual form and cultural production, centering on the proliferation of media texts that mobilize real-life misfortune as a form of entertainment in U.S. television and culture. Specifically, it examines how a variety of "reality" formats in contemporary television stage and exploit spectacles of failure, defeat, suffering, and humiliation for the pleasure of the viewing audience. These texts speak to a wide range of emotional engagements, from pity and sympathy to pure schadenfreude . However, all encourage narrative pleasure in real-life adversity.; Historically, schadenfreude has been condemned by scholars and thinkers as a "base" emotion, while reality television is often dismissed as lowly "trash" television. However, the use of real individuals' televised trauma has larger cultural, sociological, and ethical significance beyond the texts themselves. Much like literary and stage melodrama in the nineteenth century, contemporary media's exploitation of actual is closely tied to negotiations of status and justice---a means of working through issues of morality an ethics on a national scale.; In this project, then, I examine schadenfreude and suffering as both a textual strategy and a site for exploring social identity in American culture. On the one hand, the spectacle of suffering remains as one of the final "authentic" emotions available in the arsenal of reality television, a unifying textual feature that can be found across the form's many individual subgenres. On the other hand, the very real pleasures that viewers find in these often denigrated texts speaks to the significance of this impulse's proliferation as a wider cultural sensibility, particularly in the changing arenas of dating and relationships, fame and celebrity, and makeovers and self-presentation. The ways in which we emotionally engage with reality television thus speak to larger issues about both our relationship with media texts and our own status within American culture.