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This book chapter reflectively explores the challenges of studying provocation, satire, bad taste and offence in stand-up comedy. The author’s sociological lens on the topic is situated within the broader field of humour studies, which is a relatively small yet creative and innovative field within the human, cultural and social sciences. This lost ethnographic project contains shelved and dormant interview data with a number of stand-up comedians, including the controversial and emotive late Bernard Manning and an early career Steve Coogan. The project also explores the author’s autoethnographic journey into rant poetry, as both a hobbyist and, on further reflection, a way of keeping the project informally but theoretically alive. The issues of censorship, political correctness and informed consent are key ones in the author’s confessional type analysis. Finally, the value and richness of loss, failure and resilience as marginalised yet significant and unacknowledged learning resources in our academic adventures are frankly discussed. The call here is for more lost ethnographic projects to be recognised and appreciated in academia.

This chapter will explore the development of a research project which seeks to capture the experiences of young disabled people who are undertaking a programme with The Comedy Trust. The programme seeks to address the barriers encountered by disabled young people when entering the world of work and to encourage more inclusive recruitment practices. The authors seek to highlight how comedy can be used not only as a tool to promote social justice but also as a research method. The chapter is based on co-produced piece of research which brings together a young disabled person (Harry Georgiou), a careers lead and inclusion mentor based within a special school (Sarah Spoor), a community operations and fundraising manager based within The Comedy Trust (Charlene Davies) and a university academic (Marie Caslin). For all of the team the authors' central aim is to ensure that young disabled people's voices are heard throughout this chapter and the authors will outline how they hope to achieve this. The authors are currently at the very early stages of their project, and with this chapter, the authors hope to provide an insight into the lessons we have learnt so far.

This study focuses on how the creation of a new market identity, defined here by the social categories that specify what to expect of products and organizations, helps legitimize normatively illegitimate products and thereby facilitate the formation of markets for these products. A product is given a legitimate market identity by recombining existing product and status categories in a way that is both isomorphic with and differentiated from these preexisting categories. I argue that the creation of a new market identity helped create a market for feature films that combined legitimate comedy and illegitimate pornography following the legalization of pornography in Denmark in 1969. Topological analyses of the cultural content of all the film posters used to promote Danish films between 1970 and 1978, and regression analyses of the status of the actors appearing in these films document the importance of market identity in legitimizing illegitimacy.

Popular images in romantic comedies of the gallant knight and relationships that end with “Happily Ever After” affect women's expectations of what a relationship should be like and what a man should do in the relationship. This standard is mediated by both the women's interaction with the movie and its images, along with patriarchal notions of women wanting, and even needing a relationship. Using in-depth interviews from 18 heterosexual women, this study focuses on displaying how women are impacted by romantic movies and, using a Feminist Interactionist Cultural Studies perspective, how women interact with these movies to construct meaning in their own lives and relationships, while still maintaining the gendered status quo.

In this chapter, we examine narratives of inclusion and exclusion told by professional performers with lifelong impairments who are successfully leading “inclusive” lives in order to bring their voices and experiences to the attention of academics, educators, policy makers, and service providers. We draw on stories told during in-depth interviews with 10 disabled comedians conducted as part of a larger project on the complex seemingly paradoxical relationship between disability and humor. We take an interpretive approach to our data collection and analysis consistent with principles of the emancipatory tradition in disability studies. These performers clearly value the inclusive childhoods their families provided. As children, they were educated in inclusive settings and participated in a wide variety of activities – often centering on the performing arts. Their rich and varied experiences (even the negative ones) have provided both fuel for performance and confidence to push back against attempts by others to exclude them from social and professional life in the everyday world. Their inclusive childhoods, however, are not entirely without a downside. In many cases, they did not develop a sense of disability pride, or even a disability identity, until they had opportunities to interact with others who have impairments during the transition to adulthood. For children raised in more inclusive settings, a conscious effort to provide opportunities to engage with other children and adults with impairments may be an important adjunct to inclusion.

Comedy and parody in rock and metal music have been around since the genre's inception. The Italian comedic music genre known as rock demenziale employs the use of nonsense and surrealism which turns conventions upside down. The demenziale has also attracted a slew of bands that employ this humour within the heavy metal genre, most famous of which is the Roman band Nanowar of Steel. With their jabs at Manowar and power metal bands, they place mundane activities and characters into the grandiose medievalist and fantasy worlds commonly used by those bands to the point of absurdity. However, with humour being deeply culture-specific, jokes that draw from a country's pop culture and makes extensive use of puns may be lost to an audience not familiar with that culture. Nanowar of Steel's unique position of having songs written in seven languages, primarily English and Italian, allows us to take a deeper look at how language and humour interfaces with the local and global metal scenes.

Our focus is on the use of narrative in ethics education in organisations. The effectiveness of stories as a basis for executive education and organisational development has been described in other chapters in this book and elsewhere. Many writers provide examples linking stories and ethics, but the examples are drawn most often from overtly ethical stories. We offer a more expansive and inclusive view, suggesting that all stories are valuable for teaching ethics. We use Booker’s (2004) finding that all stories belong to one of seven basic plots – overcoming the monster; rags to riches; the quest; voyage and return; comedy; tragedy; and rebirth – to show that no major category of narrative need be omitted from those which can provide examples or links to the development of virtue in organisations. We provide examples of how stories can be used to encourage the development of specific virtues including courage, integrity, hope, inquisitiveness, humour and prudence. Six further aspects are considered – whether only moral stories are useful, the value of complexity, the benefit of familiarity, stories of failure, the selection of appropriate stories and whether non-fiction can be included.

The ability to act in a purposeful and effective way amid institutional tensions and paradoxes is, right now, a highly prized quality in public leadership. The purpose of this chapter is to qualify moderately brave acts as a learning format that combines the analytical and performative skills implied in this kind of agency.

The chapter explores the engagement with paradoxes as a narrative praxis. From existing literature, it sums up an understanding of agency as a social process of mediating paradoxes in order to make action possible. Drawing on Northrop Frye’s theory of modes, the chapter explains this praxis as a narrative endeavour balancing the dynamics of tragedy (disintegration) and comedy (integration). Moderately brave acts are formed as a kind of low-mimetic synthesis – very much akin to comedy and realistic fiction. The narrative dynamics of low-mimetic synthesis are pursued in the case story of Christian, a Master of Public Administration (MPA) student from Copenhagen.

Moderately brave acts appear as a learning format that can inspire a less idealised, but not entirely ironic approach to the paradoxes of management. In this way, they can foster a nuanced and pragmatic agency that combines analytical reflexivity with the ability to take practical action in problematic situations.

The chapter may inspire teachers to use narrative techniques to allow students to deal with real problems of daily praxis in a way that embraces the tension between idealisation and deconstructive irony.