Graduate Student Panel February 27th: Benjamin Aspray and Sabrina Negri
Join the Chicago Film Seminar on February 27th at 7:30 pm for our annual graduate student panel, featuring graduate students Benjamin Aspray and Sabrina Negri. Zoran Samardzija will serve as respondent. Gross-out as Gatekeeper: Disgust, Anti-comedy, and Taste Distinction in Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! by Benjamin Aspray Psychologist Susan B. Miller describes disgust as “the gatekeeper emotion,” and indeed, the wide-ranging scholarly concepts of disgust almost unanimously understand it as signifying the transgression of a boundary, whether biological, cultural or social. Hence its use in comedy, a close ally of transgression - particularly gross-out comedy, the film and TV subgenre centered on the human body’s impolite functions. But whereas many accounts of gross-out comedy understand it as a populist discourse, celebrating universal animal drives in defiance of civil society’s inhibitions, few consider its potential for the contrary: deliberately alienating the viewer and flo...