Dis-placing Laughter in 30 Rock. Beyond Corporate Comedy or Back to the Funny Female’s Modern Roots

The significance of 30 Rock’s TV comedy for gendered laughter can only be evaluated fully if historical and theoretical perspectives are combined: Between Liz Lemon and her Boss Jack Donaghy a socially pre-modern comedy of carnivalesque reversal and familiarization clashes with a type of ambiguity that results from the different systems within modern society as described by Niklas Luhmann. While the corporate man’s sense of humour is tied to institutional hierarchies the funny female character may have become an institution – as head writer and star comedienne –, but her metafictional ironies are used to risk and secure follow-up in a way that shows awareness both of the change in social organization and the established status of women in comedy today. Even if the conditions of being subversive are not the same as in earlier waves of feminism and modernity, 30 Rock’s arrangement of comic modes owes its sophistication not simply to media intertextuality, the history and gender politics of comic communication turn out to be more structurally revealing.