N Holm
Biographic Data
| ID | 36875 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Holm |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Holm |
| SIGNATURE | HOLM N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massey University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0391-939X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Introduction: The state of political comedy
Nick Butler: The Trouble with Jokes: Humour and Offensiveness in Contemporary Culture and Politics
Humour versus dignity in the public sphere
Dignity is an important—perhaps even essential—aspect of a functioning public sphere: one where citizens can meet each other as equals and respectful antagonists in the exchange of different perspectives and reasoned opinions. This potentially poses a problem, however, for those who seek to invoke humour as a productive element of public conversation and deliberation. Even when humour is not explicitly critical, to treat a subject or person in co…
I am in Great Pain, Please Help Me: Nihilism, Humour, and Rick and Morty
One of Cartoon Network's most successful shows ever, Rick and Morty (2013-present) has established a cult following for its blend of dark humour and existential themes. However, the show is more than just a representation of popular nihilism; through its sustained engagement with nihilistic themes, it also demonstrates how nihilism can be embraced, exhausted, and potentially eventually surpassed in a popular context. Drawing on Richard Hoggart's …
Everyone’s a Critic (So What Comes Next?)
What is the fate of critique – especially media critique – in a social context that widely and enthusiastically embraces criticism and critical approaches? Starting from the position that critique has become a widespread intellectual orientation across both intellectual work and popular cultural engagement, this article discusses how media critique might produce meaningful and productive knowledge when a critical attitude towards the media is wid…
The limits of satire, or the reification of cultural politics
In the first decades of the 21st century, humour has been increasingly embraced as a legitimate means by which to cover, analyse and intervene in political issues. Most frequently, this political application of humour has been interpreted through the lens of 'satire': a term that evokes an idea of humour as a politically meaningful cultural act. Such an account of humour connects satire with the long-standing theoretical tradition of 'cultural po…
No more jokes: Comic complexity, Adult Swim and a political aesthetic model of humour
For such a complex cultural form, the politics of humour have historically been understood in highly reductive terms: either as an abstract political function (e.g. carnival or ridicule) or as a simple formal flourish that can be pressed into the service of any cause. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams and Jacques Rancière, I argue instead for a ‘political aesthetic’ model that grasps humour as a cultural formation, the politics of which can…
Excalibur , aesthetics and an other Britain: From whimsical tradition to tabloid aesthetic
‘Britain’ has always been an odd entity in American superhero comics: not least in Marvel Comics’ Excalibur. At turns, innocently quirky and wryly cynical, Excalibur’s Britain has been a markedly different place in the hands of different writers (and artists). This article addresses three key runs of Excalibur – those of Chris Claremont, Alan Davis and Warren Ellis – with particular attention to the depiction of Britain not simply as a matter of …
No time for fun: The politics of partying during a pandemic
In 2020, in the face of the unparalleled epidemiological threat posed by Covid-19, multiple governments around the world sought to contain the spread of the virus by imposing strict lockdown measures that dramatically limited the movement and gathering of citizens. Not only did these restrictions severely curtail the regular patterns of economic, political and cultural life, they also made it very hard to have fun. While this last point may appea…
Trevor Noah and the contingent politics of racial joking
This article takes up the transnational comedy career of Trevor Noah as a way to explore how the political work of racial comedy can manifest, circulate and indeed communicate differently across different racial-political contexts. Through the close textual analysis of two key comic performances –“The Daywalker” (2009) and “Son of Patricia” (2018), produced and (initially) circulated in South Africa and the USA, respectively – this article explor…
Deadpan humour, the comic disposition and the interpretation of ironic ambiguity online
This article explores how the prevalence of deadpan and ironic modes of humour undermines the possibility of clear and stable interpretation in online contexts. Analysing key examples of online deadpan humour through the lens of literary and critical models of irony, I argue that the decontextualisation of deadpan humour in online spaces accentuates the deadpan comic mode’s tendency towards ambiguity in ways that hypothetically destabilise any cl…
Critical capital: Cultural studies, the critical disposition and critical reading as elite practice
In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu famously proposes the concept of an ‘aesthetic disposition’: a capacity to conceive the world in terms of form rather than function. Acquired through education, this disposition serves as a key marker of cultural privilege. Building on subsequent critical discussions regarding the applicability of aesthetic disposition (or lack of) beyond Bourdieu’s own context, I argue that in the contemporary cultural context, fo…
Consider the (Feral) Cat: Ferality, Biopower, and the Ethics of Predation
Cats confound clear distinctions: not least that between the human and natural worlds. As a consequence, they are prime examples of “ferality”: a category of nonhuman subjects who are neither domestic, nor wild, but instead move between those realms. It is argued that that potential for movement informs particular social anxieties and debates that emerge regarding cat hunting behaviors. Drawing on the biopolitical work of Michel Foucault, in conj…
Fred, it’s a mess’: Fred Dagg and the cultural politics of the laconic
Writing on ‘The New Zealand Sense of Humour’ in his posthumously published book, Tinkering, John Clarke describes the comic temperament of his country of birth as ‘laconic, under-stated and self-deprecating’ (2017, 31). In evoking the laconic as a marker of national comic character, Clarke is far from alone: the term is frequently used as an easy, ready-to-hand account of the comic characteristics of both Clarke’s native New Zealand and Australia…
Introduction: Cultural Studies, Marxism and the Exile of Aesthetics
To reflect on the relationship between "cultural studies" and "aesthetics" is to master the art of holding two opposing insights in mind at once. In theory, at least as set out by some of cultural studies' leading lights, the aesthetic is bound up with forms of privilege, mysticism and elitism that are anathema to the key critical currents in the field. In practice, however, aesthetic engagement and aesthetic evaluation remain popular tools of th…
Dustin Bradley Goltz Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore: Screen Comedies and Online Audiences
Humour as edge-work: Aesthetics, joke-work and tendentiousness in Tosh.0 (or Daniel Tosh and the mystery of the missing joke-work)
This article interrogates the cultural politics of a 2012 incident in which stand-up comedian Daniel Tosh wished rape upon a female heckler and the substantial online debates that arose in response to his remarks. Through an investigation of the online reaction that followed Tosh's remarks, I illustrate how popular responses to controversial humour frequently follow discursive paths that characterise humour as alternately an aesthetic or ethical …
Introduction: You can't be serious
Consider the Squirrel: Freaks, Vermin, and Value in the Ruin(s) of Nature
Critique on Critique
A review of Luc Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2011
Ex(or)cising the Spirit of Japan: Ringu, The Ring , and the Persistence of Japan
In the adaptation of non-English language cinema for the American and global markets, studios often endeavour to excise alien cultural elements to endear texts to their new audiences. The example of Hideo Nakata's Ringu films and their American counterparts, The Ring series, illustrates the manner in which such adaptations can give form to normally unarticulated assumptions about national cultures, which can reemerge in extratextual criticism and…
Conspiracy Theorizing Surveillance: Considering modalities of paranoia and conspiracy in surveillance studies
In this paper I argue that the notion of paranoia can inform a post-panoptic theory of surveillance, without simply functioning as a pre-emptive dismissal of a critical engagement with technologies and regimes of surveillance as just paranoid. Rather, I seek to address how paranoia can be rearticulated to serve a productive, non-pathological function in an analysis of logics of surveillance. To this end, I consider the manner in which paranoia is…
The limits of satire, or the reification of cultural politics
In the first decades of the 21st century, humour has been increasingly embraced as a legitimate means by which to cover, analyse and intervene in political issues. Most frequently, this political application of humour has been interpreted through the lens of 'satire': a term that evokes an idea of humour as a politically meaningful cultural act. Such an account of humour connects satire with the long-standing theoretical tradition of 'cultural po…
Conspiracy Theorizing Surveillance: Considering modalities of paranoia and conspiracy in surveillance studies
In this paper I argue that the notion of paranoia can inform a post-panoptic theory of surveillance, without simply functioning as a pre-emptive dismissal of a critical engagement with technologies and regimes of surveillance as just paranoid. Rather, I seek to address how paranoia can be rearticulated to serve a productive, non-pathological function in an analysis of logics of surveillance. To this end, I consider the manner in which paranoia is…
Deadpan humour, the comic disposition and the interpretation of ironic ambiguity online
This article explores how the prevalence of deadpan and ironic modes of humour undermines the possibility of clear and stable interpretation in online contexts. Analysing key examples of online deadpan humour through the lens of literary and critical models of irony, I argue that the decontextualisation of deadpan humour in online spaces accentuates the deadpan comic mode’s tendency towards ambiguity in ways that hypothetically destabilise any cl…
No more jokes: Comic complexity, Adult Swim and a political aesthetic model of humour
For such a complex cultural form, the politics of humour have historically been understood in highly reductive terms: either as an abstract political function (e.g. carnival or ridicule) or as a simple formal flourish that can be pressed into the service of any cause. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams and Jacques Rancière, I argue instead for a ‘political aesthetic’ model that grasps humour as a cultural formation, the politics of which can…
Humour as edge-work: Aesthetics, joke-work and tendentiousness in Tosh.0 (or Daniel Tosh and the mystery of the missing joke-work)
This article interrogates the cultural politics of a 2012 incident in which stand-up comedian Daniel Tosh wished rape upon a female heckler and the substantial online debates that arose in response to his remarks. Through an investigation of the online reaction that followed Tosh's remarks, I illustrate how popular responses to controversial humour frequently follow discursive paths that characterise humour as alternately an aesthetic or ethical …
Nick Butler: The Trouble with Jokes: Humour and Offensiveness in Contemporary Culture and Politics
Conspiracy Theorizing Surveillance: Considering modalities of paranoia and conspiracy in surveillance studies
In this paper I argue that the notion of paranoia can inform a post-panoptic theory of surveillance, without simply functioning as a pre-emptive dismissal of a critical engagement with technologies and regimes of surveillance as just paranoid. Rather, I seek to address how paranoia can be rearticulated to serve a productive, non-pathological function in an analysis of logics of surveillance. To this end, I consider the manner in which paranoia is…
Ex(or)cising the Spirit of Japan: Ringu, The Ring , and the Persistence of Japan
In the adaptation of non-English language cinema for the American and global markets, studios often endeavour to excise alien cultural elements to endear texts to their new audiences. The example of Hideo Nakata's Ringu films and their American counterparts, The Ring series, illustrates the manner in which such adaptations can give form to normally unarticulated assumptions about national cultures, which can reemerge in extratextual criticism and…
Consider the Squirrel: Freaks, Vermin, and Value in the Ruin(s) of Nature
Critique on Critique
A review of Luc Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2011
Introduction: You can't be serious
Humour as edge-work: Aesthetics, joke-work and tendentiousness in Tosh.0 (or Daniel Tosh and the mystery of the missing joke-work)
This article interrogates the cultural politics of a 2012 incident in which stand-up comedian Daniel Tosh wished rape upon a female heckler and the substantial online debates that arose in response to his remarks. Through an investigation of the online reaction that followed Tosh's remarks, I illustrate how popular responses to controversial humour frequently follow discursive paths that characterise humour as alternately an aesthetic or ethical …
Introduction: Cultural Studies, Marxism and the Exile of Aesthetics
To reflect on the relationship between "cultural studies" and "aesthetics" is to master the art of holding two opposing insights in mind at once. In theory, at least as set out by some of cultural studies' leading lights, the aesthetic is bound up with forms of privilege, mysticism and elitism that are anathema to the key critical currents in the field. In practice, however, aesthetic engagement and aesthetic evaluation remain popular tools of th…
Dustin Bradley Goltz Inger-Lise Kalviknes Bore: Screen Comedies and Online Audiences
Fred, it’s a mess’: Fred Dagg and the cultural politics of the laconic
Writing on ‘The New Zealand Sense of Humour’ in his posthumously published book, Tinkering, John Clarke describes the comic temperament of his country of birth as ‘laconic, under-stated and self-deprecating’ (2017, 31). In evoking the laconic as a marker of national comic character, Clarke is far from alone: the term is frequently used as an easy, ready-to-hand account of the comic characteristics of both Clarke’s native New Zealand and Australia…
Critical capital: Cultural studies, the critical disposition and critical reading as elite practice
In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu famously proposes the concept of an ‘aesthetic disposition’: a capacity to conceive the world in terms of form rather than function. Acquired through education, this disposition serves as a key marker of cultural privilege. Building on subsequent critical discussions regarding the applicability of aesthetic disposition (or lack of) beyond Bourdieu’s own context, I argue that in the contemporary cultural context, fo…
Consider the (Feral) Cat: Ferality, Biopower, and the Ethics of Predation
Cats confound clear distinctions: not least that between the human and natural worlds. As a consequence, they are prime examples of “ferality”: a category of nonhuman subjects who are neither domestic, nor wild, but instead move between those realms. It is argued that that potential for movement informs particular social anxieties and debates that emerge regarding cat hunting behaviors. Drawing on the biopolitical work of Michel Foucault, in conj…
Excalibur , aesthetics and an other Britain: From whimsical tradition to tabloid aesthetic
‘Britain’ has always been an odd entity in American superhero comics: not least in Marvel Comics’ Excalibur. At turns, innocently quirky and wryly cynical, Excalibur’s Britain has been a markedly different place in the hands of different writers (and artists). This article addresses three key runs of Excalibur – those of Chris Claremont, Alan Davis and Warren Ellis – with particular attention to the depiction of Britain not simply as a matter of …
No time for fun: The politics of partying during a pandemic
In 2020, in the face of the unparalleled epidemiological threat posed by Covid-19, multiple governments around the world sought to contain the spread of the virus by imposing strict lockdown measures that dramatically limited the movement and gathering of citizens. Not only did these restrictions severely curtail the regular patterns of economic, political and cultural life, they also made it very hard to have fun. While this last point may appea…
Trevor Noah and the contingent politics of racial joking
This article takes up the transnational comedy career of Trevor Noah as a way to explore how the political work of racial comedy can manifest, circulate and indeed communicate differently across different racial-political contexts. Through the close textual analysis of two key comic performances –“The Daywalker” (2009) and “Son of Patricia” (2018), produced and (initially) circulated in South Africa and the USA, respectively – this article explor…
Deadpan humour, the comic disposition and the interpretation of ironic ambiguity online
This article explores how the prevalence of deadpan and ironic modes of humour undermines the possibility of clear and stable interpretation in online contexts. Analysing key examples of online deadpan humour through the lens of literary and critical models of irony, I argue that the decontextualisation of deadpan humour in online spaces accentuates the deadpan comic mode’s tendency towards ambiguity in ways that hypothetically destabilise any cl…
No more jokes: Comic complexity, Adult Swim and a political aesthetic model of humour
For such a complex cultural form, the politics of humour have historically been understood in highly reductive terms: either as an abstract political function (e.g. carnival or ridicule) or as a simple formal flourish that can be pressed into the service of any cause. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams and Jacques Rancière, I argue instead for a ‘political aesthetic’ model that grasps humour as a cultural formation, the politics of which can…
Everyone’s a Critic (So What Comes Next?)
What is the fate of critique – especially media critique – in a social context that widely and enthusiastically embraces criticism and critical approaches? Starting from the position that critique has become a widespread intellectual orientation across both intellectual work and popular cultural engagement, this article discusses how media critique might produce meaningful and productive knowledge when a critical attitude towards the media is wid…
The limits of satire, or the reification of cultural politics
In the first decades of the 21st century, humour has been increasingly embraced as a legitimate means by which to cover, analyse and intervene in political issues. Most frequently, this political application of humour has been interpreted through the lens of 'satire': a term that evokes an idea of humour as a politically meaningful cultural act. Such an account of humour connects satire with the long-standing theoretical tradition of 'cultural po…
Humour versus dignity in the public sphere
Dignity is an important—perhaps even essential—aspect of a functioning public sphere: one where citizens can meet each other as equals and respectful antagonists in the exchange of different perspectives and reasoned opinions. This potentially poses a problem, however, for those who seek to invoke humour as a productive element of public conversation and deliberation. Even when humour is not explicitly critical, to treat a subject or person in co…
I am in Great Pain, Please Help Me: Nihilism, Humour, and Rick and Morty
One of Cartoon Network's most successful shows ever, Rick and Morty (2013-present) has established a cult following for its blend of dark humour and existential themes. However, the show is more than just a representation of popular nihilism; through its sustained engagement with nihilistic themes, it also demonstrates how nihilism can be embraced, exhausted, and potentially eventually surpassed in a popular context. Drawing on Richard Hoggart's …
Nick Butler: The Trouble with Jokes: Humour and Offensiveness in Contemporary Culture and Politics
Introduction: The state of political comedy
Sociology (16 works) · Art (14 works) · Aesthetics (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Literature (8 works)