Provocative Screens: Offended Audiences in Britain and Germany

SCREENS
Offended Audiences
in Britain and
Germany
Ranjana Das
Anne Graefer
Provocative Screens
Ranjana Das · Anne Graefer
Provocative Screens
Offended Audiences in Britain and Germany
Ranjana Das Anne Graefer
University of Surrey Birmingham City University
Guildford, UK Birmingham, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-67906-8 ISBN 978-3-319-67907-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67907-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952835
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: © saulgranda/Getty
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Ranjana dedicates this work to Reeta Das, her dear aunt.
Anne dedicates this work to all those who, with much emotion,
refuse to simply go along.
Acknowledgements
This book was the outcome of two academics meeting on a train from
Leicester to London, one afternoon. We arrived at this work from
different points of entry into media and communication studies, com-
ing together on a point of mutual interest. It involved a marriage of
approaches across cultural studies and the social sciences, a conver-
gence of diverse interests from feminism to media regulation and from
texts to audiences, amongst others. It could well have gone in different
directions, but did not because the diversity of approaches and back-
grounds created a productive intellectual space. Intellectual productivity
was punctuated, but not interrupted, for each author by the arrival of a
baby and this book was drafted over the course of our two consecutive
maternity leaves.
On this interesting and engaging ride, Ranjana thanks Anne for care-
ful attention to argumentation and detail and for critical work in pushing
her to really tease out analytical details behind the messiness of empirical
data. Ranjana thanks the University of Leicester for funding this study
and for a research sabbatical in 2017 to complete the manuscript. She
thanks Sonia Livingstone, in conversation with whom, while produc-
ing the Public Attitudes, Tastes and Standards report for the BBC in
2009, she first started engaging with this subject matter. She also thanks
Jonathan Ong for conversations at an early stage on offence and provoca-
tion, Peter Lunt for sharing insights from his work on public attitudes to
risk and regulation in the financial sector, colleagues at the Universities of
Bergen, Lincoln and Virginia at Charlottesville, and at the International
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Communication Association conference in 2014, amongst others, in

conversation with whom she developed various aspects of the project.
Ranjana also thanks Adam for being the perfect partner of an academic
spouse working at odd hours of the day (and night) and Arjo, of course,
for delaying the manuscript simply by arriving in her life.
Anne thanks Ranjana for her laser-like focus: both knew that a jour-
ney of a thousand miles starts with the first step, but Ranjana taught
how quickly and efficiently steps two and three can follow. In the pro-
cess of writing this book, she became not only a teacher and mentor,
but also a friend. Anne also thanks the University of Leicester for fund-
ing the study and Birmingham City University for awarding her research
funding via the Faculty Research Investment Scheme—the teaching and
administrative relief thus afforded made this book possible. She thanks
her colleagues, students and friends in the School of Media and the
Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, especially John
Mercer, who recognized early on the potential of this book for a new
field of ‘offence studies’, Inger-Lise Boreand Hazel Collie for feedback
on earlier drafts on chapters. She thanks Sara Ahmed, Carolyn Pedwell,
and Imogen Tyler for inspirational scholarship central to developing the
ideas for this project. Thanks also to Katariina Kyrölä for her insights on
the moral and ‘positive’ dimensions of offence. Anne is grateful to all the
research participants in Germany who generously invited her into their
living rooms or offices to share their experiences and from whom she
learned a great deal. The biggest thank you goes, as always, to Jonathan
and Finn, who patiently left the house on Sundays for extensive coun-
try walks, until the pushchair buckled and the book was finally finished.
Both Ranjana and Anne thank Jean Morris for her copyediting of this
book and Mark Wells for the indexing.
Contents
1 The Slippery Terrain of Offensive Television 1

Rethinking Offence 6
Affect-Laden Publicness in the Reception of Offensive Television 8
Fieldwork 13
Self-Reflexivity and Limitations 17
Chapter Outline 19
References 21
2 Producing the Imagined Audience of Offensive Screens 25

Offence and the Subject of Value 27
The Porous Border Between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ 33
Offence and Consumer Choice 37
Conclusions 41
References 42
3 Just Kidding! Negotiating the Line Between Humour

and Offence 45
Taking Humour Seriously 47
The Link Between ‘Humour Regimes’ and Offence 50
Offensive Humour as a Tool of Social Distinction 56
No Offence Taken: How Audiences Work to Avoid Offence 60
Conclusion 67
References 67
ix
x Contents
4 Audiences Speak Back: Re-Working Offensive Television 71

This Public is Not Condemned to Silence 73
It’s Easy to Punch Down Somebody Worse off Than You’: Critical
Investments in Reading Offensive Television 76
Conclusions 85
References 86
5 Audiences’ Expectations of Regulators and Producers 89

The Implied Audience and the Citizen-Consumer in German
and British Television Regulation 90
Who Is Responsible? Two Contrasting Views of Regulation 96
The (Seemingly) Consumer Audience of Provocative Screens 97
The Citizen-Audience of Provocative Screens 101
Going Beyond Red Flags and Red Herrings 107
References 110
6 Provocative Screens 113

Key Findings 115
Notes on Policy 121
Areas for Further Research 124
References 126
Bibliography 127
Index 129
CHAPTER 1
The Slippery Terrain of Offensive Television
Abstract  This chapter complicates offence as a term and presents

conceptual and methodological approaches for this project on the
reception of ‘offensive’ content. It sets the scene of the work in
the UK and Germany, drawing instances from contemporary pub-
lic discourse around offence and considers some of the key ques-
tions that underpin this book: what constitutes offensive media
material? Why is offence felt so differently? To what ends is offence
used or concerns about offensive material mobilised? How do peo-
ple act both as individuals and as publics in their very affective
responses to offensive content? Why do we assume offensive mate-
rial can be categorised solely into tick-boxes for profanity, swear
words, racism, overt discrimination or flash lighting? And how do
audiences understand the role and responsibilities of producers and
broadcasters?
Keywords  Offence · Affect · Television · Publics · Controversy

Feelings
In popular discussions, offensive media content is often described as

going ‘beyond the limits’ of what is deemed appropriate and acceptable
within a specific sociocultural context and as having negative effects on
audiences who consume it (Attwood et al. 2012). And yet some people
pride themselves in the media with their capacity to offend others:
© The Author(s) 2017 1

R. Das and A. Graefer, Provocative Screens,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67907-5_1
2 R. Das and A. Graefer
I delight in offending people. I think that the grievance brigade, victim-

hood, the idea that hurt feelings are some kind of special currency. I think
that needs to come to an end. (Milo Yiannopoulos, Channel 4 interview,
17 November 2016)
I don’t care about offending people. And I don’t really care about being
offended. There are quite a lot of people I actually want to offend. And
I want to offend them all the time. But if somebody stands on the other
side of the street and shouts nigger at me – I’m not going to be thrilled,
but I’m not going to argue for him to get locked up. (Trevor Phillips,
Guardian interview, February 2017)
The quotes above represent an idea popularly held across the politi-
cal spectrum, from liberal to conservative and far-right positions. For
some, offence and feeling offended are simply the price of living in
a liberal society, while for others (conservative voices and those on
the far right) the ‘right to offend’ seems like a valid panacea against
the so-called ‘generation snowflake’ and ‘political correctness’ that
seemingly stifles free speech. Examples abounded at the time of writ-
ing this book: Donald Trump’s ‘angry populism’, ripe with offen-
sive language and actions, shocks and fascinates the masses. Britain’s
right-wing tabloids issue frequent denunciations of “political cor-
rectness gone mad” and rail against the smug hypocrisy of the “met-
ropolitan elite”. Television programmes such as ‘Things We Won’t
Say about Race That Are True’ and ‘Has Political Correctness Gone
Mad?’ (both Channel 4) debate about who we should be allowed
to insult and how; and public figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos go
viral due to their outspoken racism and sexism in media interviews.
In Germany, right-wing populist movements such as PEGIDA and
political parties such as the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) claim
merely to speak the truth against a ‘Lügenpresse’ (lying press) that
is stifled by political correctness. This is the context, for instance,
in which the German far-right leader Frauke Petry (AfD) recently
blamed the Christmas 2016 terror attacks in Berlin on “institutional
political correctness”, and online many seemed to be agreeing that it
is time to “tell it like it is”, even if this causes offence, and is genu-
inely discriminatory.
1 THE SLIPPERY TERRAIN OF OFFENSIVE TELEVISION 3
On the other hand, we see that the right to offend is also claimed,
for entirely different reasons, from antipodal ideological positions. Liberal
popular comedians such as Ricky Gervais or Jimmy Carr, often build
jokes or comedy routines around race, ethnicity or even incest or paedo-
philia arguing that free speech is a pillar of western democracy. And lib-
eral ‘free speech’ campaigners supported comedian Jan Böhmermann in
2016 when he was prosecuted for insulting President Erdogan in a poem
aired on Germany’s public broadcasting service, ZDF. The satirical poem,
which described Erdogan as “stupid, cowardly and uptight”, (before
descending into sexual references) sparked a diplomatic row between
Ankara and Berlin and the ensuing political furore became known as the
‘Böhmermann Affair’, with human rights groups voicing their indigna-
tion and Chancellor Angela Merkel heavily criticized for allowing a crimi-
nal case to be opened. And then there are those concerned voices within
society that focus on the critical implications of mediated offence and on
the role of emotion in shaping political life. As we are writing this book,
Wikipedia is banning the use of the Daily Mail as a source of information,
and the Stop Funding Hate campaign on social media polices and shames
a range of media outlets for headlines believed to incite hate.
As these examples show, the topic of offence is trending online and
offline. Discussions of media content as having arguably crossed a line fre-
quently punctuate public life, whether in a celebratory tone (for example, The
Independent in 2016 published a compilation of Ricky Gervais’s most provoc-
ative moments) or in the context of media regulation (e.g., the BBC enquiry
into tastes and standards in 2009, c.f. Livingstone and Das 2009). Against the
backdrop of these recent discussions and events, the book aims to develop
a more nuanced understanding of mediated offence by analysing what audi-
ences in Britain and Germany find offensive when watching television.
We set our scene in the UK and Germany, two Western democracies
sharing a unique combination of contemporary cultural politics. Both
countries are geographically close, have a similar GDP and have, for a
while now, been ruled by conservative governments driving austerity
measures. There has been in both countries a national focus on diversity
and multiculturalism, and both have witnessed in recent years a growth
of populist groups and movements expressing concerns about increasing
levels of migration. Traditionally, both countries have shared an empha-
sis on public service broadcasting, with the BBC having served as the
blueprint for Germany’s public broadcasting system after the Second

World War. Both British and German broadcasters import US enter-
tainment programming, which guarantees that research participants
in both countries would tend to be familiar with some of the same TV
programmes. Yet while the UK successfully exports a range of TV pro-
grammes and formats, German domestic television production is limited
and broadcasters rely on imports to fill their schedules (Mikos 2015).
Moreover, and this is crucial for this project, Britain and Germany can
be seen as having different ‘offence cultures’. Whereas some research has
been conducted on different taste cultures (Hofstede 2010), very little is
known about offence in cross-cultural contexts. The differences between
Britain and Germany can be seen in everyday encounters, where German
‘directness’ may be experienced as hurtful and offensive in a British con-
text, or, on the other hand, instances of British ‘polite restraint’ read in
a German context as aloof and unengaged (House 1996; Evans 2011).
Furthermore, different histories and demographic make-up lead to dif-
ferent understandings of offence and political correctness. For instance,
in Germany there is little of the critical awareness of the black struggle
against white supremacy that we find in the USA or even in the UK. This
is why we can find a white actress (Katia Riemann) sporting dreadlocks
in a German public broadcasting film production (‘Freundinnen’ ARD
2016). Riemann’s hair-do was not critiqued for cultural appropriation,
but rather lauded by the press as a great look. This lack of acknowledg-
ment is particularly hurtful when offensive language is used on public
broadcasting services. In a documentary about German actress Uschi
Glas, she referred to herself as a ‘kleines Negerlein’ [English: ‘little
negro’] (ARD Mediathek 2016). Glas tried to explain how she had often
felt excluded as a child due to her black curly hair, and how other white
kids used to call her by such names. But the expression ‘Negerlein’ was
not problematized, either in the interview situation or afterwards by the
wider media. Examples like this demonstrate very clearly that words and
symbols that would not go unnoticed in other cultures such as that of
the UK may very well do so in Germany.
The aim of this book is not to map the cultural differences between
Britain and Germany, or to provide a complete list of all the things that
people in each country found offensive. Rather we explore concrete
moments in which audience members felt offended when watching tel-
evision because we understand this moment as one important intersec-
tion where personal feeling and public emotion meet. In other words,
we used the moment of feeling offence as an affective lens that can tell
us a great deal about the ways in which audiences draw their own lines
and how they establish, (re)negotiate and defend their values and ideas
about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ within a particular culture that has it
own ‘feeling rules’ or ‘structures of feeling’. In this sense, we suggest
that offence allows us to map the shifting boundaries of what is and is
not acceptable in contemporary Germany and the UK. Instead of relin-
quishing the topic of reading media content as offensive to a much revis-
ited theoretical analysis of the right to speak freely versus the right to
not be discriminated against or insulted, we decided to focus on televised
texts and their reception as a real, lived, empirical moment where offence
is experienced, felt and discussed.
We focus on audience responses to television because television “con-
tinues to be the most accessible mode of commination in the world and
is therefore an incredibly important medium to understand and study”
(Gorton 2009, p. 1). This might be surprising considering the increas-
ing convergence within media texts—across the Internet, television and
film. The demise of television—and of broadcasting in particular—has
long been forecast and debated, with particular attention focused on
what these changes might mean for audio-visual plurality and diversity
in the face of multiple media platforms, interactive opportunities, and
convergence. Yet, as Jeanette Stemmers notes “watching television as a
pastime is unlikely to die any time soon, but the way it is delivered and
the systems into which it is embedded are undoubtedly undergoing radi-
cal change” (Steemers 2015, p. 64; see also Katz 2009). We experienced
the results of these technological changes in our fieldwork, as partici-
pants often referred to on-demand television content and services such
as Netflix and Amazon or even participatory platforms like YouTube and
Facebook. We remained open for our discussions on television to spill
across the formats and platforms on which television is viewed, as this
illustrated to us how complex ‘watching television’ has become and how
it is indeed a ‘technology of the social’ that generates ideas and values
that spill over to other media forms and platforms.
In this book we understand television as a “technology of the social”
that “under certain circumstances, […] contributes to a shaping of atti-
tudes, including those which may affect society (through the creation of
prejudice) and those which may affect the individual (by making them
unduly fearful, for example)” (Livingstone and Millwood Hargrave
2009, p. 13). As Livingstone and Millwood Hargrave argue, television
has influence on stereotyping, fear of crime and other reality-defining

effects, although they highlight that it remains unclear what other social
influences also play a role, or how important television is by comparison
with these other factors (ibid.). Despite these uncertainties, many agree
on the social significance of television and scholars in media and affect
studies argue that television’s influence on society lies in its affectivity.
That is, its capability to generate ideas not only by making them visi-
ble, but by making them sensate (Kavka 2008; Skeggs and Wood 2012;
Jensen and Ringrose 2013; Jensen 2014). So while the analysis of tel-
evision content is about representations and creating meaning, these
processes are not only cognitive, but also highly emotive and  affective
where “sensing and making sense go hand in hand” (Paasonen 2011,
p. 25).
Rethinking Offence
The Oxford dictionary defines the feeling of offence as “[a]nnoyance
or resentment brought about by a perceived insult to or disregard for
oneself” (Oxford Dictionaries 2017). The tension between the right to
speak freely and the right to live in a society where offensive commu-
nication is monitored and regulated has longstanding roots within the
philosophical study of pragmatics and morality. These offer, by default,
only a partial understanding of a complex territory, precisely because
of the detailed cultural contextualization that a discussion of this sort
necessitates. The exchange between Barrow (2006) and Haydon (2005)
in the Journal of Moral Education demonstrates that philosophers have
long tried to grapple with whether something can be “inherently offen-
sive”. Barrow’s “empirical claim that a lot of the time we treat actions
and remarks that are not morally unacceptable as if they were” (p. 36)
reflects the view, held across the political spectrum, that words need not
be burdened with baggage, as Barrow tries to argue from his example of
the word “cripple”. He goes on to argue that:
respect for persons does entail, amongst other things, that we have con-
cern for them and do not offend them in ways that we would find unwel-
come ourselves. But that will not be sufficient to determine what is
inherently offensive and what is not. (p. 36)
Work on impoliteness (Culpeper 2008, 2010) has also focused on the rela-
tionship between language and offence, and returns to the same questions
as asked within moral education and philosophy: can offence be an inher-
ent function of language? Can certain words be offensive by default? Using
a number of social-psychological studies, Culpeper posits that the percep-
tion of impoliteness is more dependent on personal and cultural norms that
determine whether or not an utterance or depiction is inherently offensive.
Although offensive material is, in principle, distinguished from that
which is illegal (obscenity, child abuse images, incitement to racial
hatred, and so forth), it remains difficult to define the boundaries in a
robust and consensual fashion. What contents are considered acceptable
by today’s standards, norms and values, and by whom? Generally, media
content is judged to be offensive when it contains offensive language,
violence or depictions of sexual activity. Intrusive images of suffering,
or racist, classist or sexist depictions that contribute to stereotyping, or
bias and inaccuracy in news reports and documentaries are also often
reported as offending audiences. And yet offence is such a slippery sub-
ject that it resists clear definitions. Nearly anything (and yet nothing)
can be offensive or offend someone in a particular context. It may be
this vagueness that has made offence such an attractive subject to aca-
demics, who have turned to studies of the abject (Kristeva 1982) and
of disgust (Miller 1997) to explain why media representations that vio-
late or transgress physical or social boundaries can be experienced as
‘offensive’. Some genres, especially what Linda Williams (1991) calls
‘body genres’, are particularly prone to generate offence, both because
of the way they depict the body and because they have an arousing or
other physical effect on the body. Much academic work has focused
on horror films (Brottman 1997; Carroll 1980), comedy (Bucaria and
Barra 2016; Lockyer and Pickering 2009) and pornography (Paasonen
2011; Williams 2004), as well as on screen violence to the body (Abel
2009; Hill 1997; Schlesinger 1992; Schlesinger et al. 1998). Even
though these works make invaluable contributions to our understanding
of offensive media content, they are no substitute for talking to audi-
ence groups in order to understand their reasoning and reactions to the
content they view. Audience studies can be found in areas where offen-
sive media content has been discussed in relation to political discourse
and matters of public debate, most typically media effects and violence
(Barker and Petley 2001), moral panics (Thompson 1998; Critcher
2003) and related censorship campaigns (Barker 1984; Barker et al.
2001), as well as war reporting (Thussu and Freedman 2003; Hoskin

and O’Loughlin 2010).
In Public discussion, offensive media content is mainly understood
through simplistic, often psychological, theories of media effects. Here
it is assumed that ‘offensive’ images are harmful because they have a spe-
cial power to bypass the conscious mind and pervert our ‘true’ natures
(Attwood et al. 2012, p. 3). In the media effects tradition, offence
is understood as a monolithic bad thing that can be pinned to certain
media representations and eliminated through censorship. This view
that continues to circulate, and even dominate in the public domain, has
made it difficult to open up a nuanced debate about offence in the media
and its role in political life—one that takes its mobilising power and its
consequences for public debate seriously.
For the purpose of this book we challenge such a simplistic under-
standing by exploring how offence comes to matter in specific situations.
What makes something really offensive and to whom in what context?
Why it offence felt so differently? How can we understand the circulation
of offence as an intrinsic part of wider structures of power? And what are
some of the critical implications if the ‘ugly’ feeling of offence is avoided
at all costs? Rather than dismissing offence as merely a subjective feeling
that needs to be managed and controlled individually, we explore in this
book its complex relationships with social and public life. The moment
in which offence is felt in and through the body, becomes for us a crucial
lens into contemporary socio-cultural politics because it makes perceiv-
able where the borders of the self and this society lie and when they are
overstepped. We consider why ‘getting emotional’ is not only an indi-
vidual, subjective response but one way in which people speak as part of
wider publics. And we explore what implications that moment may have
for regulatory purposes in terms of expanding institutional understand-
ings of offensive content as more than a list of ‘red flags’.
Affect-Laden Publicness in the Reception

of Offensive Television
In this section, we bring together theorisations of affect in feminist writ-

ings and approaches to audiences as publics and citizens in order to pre-
sent our conceptualization of the space between an offended audience
member and their television set as an affect-laden private space where
public identities and publicness become recognizable. This space, as
we note repeatedly here, is not simply to be dismissed as subjective and
individual, or to be treated (solely) as a problem, for this space may well

have potential to push us into new critical directions.
As a starting point, we conceptualize offence and feeling offended as
an affective moment in televisual reception. This entails recognition of
the emotional messiness of offence. Feeling offended can entail anger,
shame, embarrassment, frustration and pain but also titillation, excite-
ment and other ‘positive’ affective jolts. Understanding offence as
affective also means paying attention to the gaps between feeling dis-
comfort and verbalizing it—a point highlighted in Skeggs and Wood’s
work Reacting to Reality Television (2012). This point becomes particu-
larly noticeable when conducting face-to-face fieldwork with audiences
and watching a programme with them—glances, looking away from the
screen, frowns and sighs cannot be easily transcribed. Locating offence
within culture and the specific interview situation also meant that we had
to think about how ‘feeling offended’ is performed. At times people felt
compelled to act as if they were offended or shocked when they actually
did find a particular representation offensive. We found this often with
regard to political correctness: people knew that a particular represen-
tation was not right, but they still found it funny and could not hide
their amusement through their body langue. At other times, people were
keen to let us know that they take pleasure in media content that oth-
ers might find offensive, thereby producing themselves as exceptional
or a connoisseur of a particular niche genre that other people “simply
wouldn’t understand” (Inger, 30, IT specialist). These considerations
about the messy, implicit or explicit reactions to television content (and
the interview situation) gesture towards the inherently relational nature
of offence.
We are interested in the feelings and emotions that our participants
displayed (explicitly, or implicitly through their body language and ges-
tures) because, as we argue, these feelings can tell us a great deal not
only about the person we interviewed, but also about societal boundaries
in contemporary Britain and Germany. Drawing on a long tradition of
feminist and queer writings on affect and the politics of emotions, we
suggest that, although feelings, emotions or affective jolts are commonly
understood as spontaneous, personal (felt within the individual body)
and apolitical, they are indeed linked to the wider sturctures of power
and ‘structures of feelings’ (Williams 1977) within a society. Theorists
such as Claire Hemmings (2005), Sara Ahmed (2004a, b, 2010), Ann
Cvetkovich (2012) and Lauren Berlant (1997, 2004, 2011) have shown
that even though feelings and emotions can move us in contradic-

tory and surprising ways, they do not float freely. Rather, they emerge
out of histories and travel along already defined lines of social and cul-
tural investment. This link between feeling/emotion and social hierar-
chies has been cogently demonstrated by Sara Ahmed (2000; 2004a, b).
In Ahmed’s analysis of the figure of the asylum seeker, the emotive lan-
guage found in politicians’ speeches, newspaper articles and online
debates emerges out of a rewriting of history, in which the labour of oth-
ers (migrants, slaves) is concealed in a fantasy that it is the white subject
who “built this land” (Ahmed 2004a, b, pp. 117–118). From such a per-
spective, the asylum seeker is already in advance of his/her arrival read as
a potential threat to the nation, as taking something away (jobs, security,
wealth) and causing injury to the nation. The uttered hatred, fear, and
suspicion towards the asylum seeker (who could be ‘bogus’), is not only
personal but it is also social and political in that it (re)produces hierar-
chical divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between the ‘good’ citizen and
those who do not belong, those who are “bodies out of place” (Ahmed
2000). From this perspective, we can understand how power circulates
through feeling and how politically salient ways of being and knowing
are produced through affective relations and discourses (Pedwell and
Whitehead 2012). This means ultimately that power structures do not
necessarily feel oppressive or forced upon us, but may indeed feel very
natural and therefore ‘true’ to us. Understanding affect and emotions as
‘pure’ and therefore outside of culture is problematic because it makes
unequal power structures that emotions can generate seem ‘natural’
rather than socially constructed, thereby escaping our critical enquiry
and the possibility to challenge them. This ‘naturalization’ of oppressive
power structures through feeling was often to be found in our fieldwork,
as the following example shows:
Anne: H ave you ever thought about why it angers you to see queer
people behaving ‘openly queer’ on television?
Silke: No, I have never thought about this. I do not mind if someone
is gay. But they do not have to show it so over the top… that
is just a feeling. A feeling where I say ‘no’ I do not want to see
this, and I do not have to.
Silke’s negative responses to depictions of queerness on German televi-

sion can be read as shaped by a heteronormative culture that produces
queerness as deviant, as a ‘disorientation’ (Ahmed 2006) that must be

hidden in the private sphere and pass as ‘straight’ in the public sphere.
But her responses also show how feeling redeems her from question-
ing her own reaction. She feels like this, therefore it does not need to be
questioned, but only (if possible) followed. Silke’s response shows sali-
ently how feelings may be the way in which social and cultural “[power]
structures get under our skin” (Ahmed 2010, p. 216) and why social
transformation is so difficult to achieve. Our affective attachments to
social norms keep them in place, and offence is one point where this
attachment becomes most visible and sensate.
And yet, these structures do not get under our skin without a strug-
gle. Even though there is a power imbalance between powerful media
institutions and individual audience members, as the analysis in this book
reveals, audiences critique and speak back to offensive screens, incorpo-
rating into their own feelings of upset, shock or anger a wider critique of
the societies they occupy and the times they live in, making their affec-
tive, visceral responses a component of their roles as publics in society.
Audiences, as members of these “immense yet fleeting” feeling commu-
nities, still speak to the institutions and public agendas that they oper-
ate within, and sometimes against. In seeking to explore the potentially
meaningful outcomes of audiences’ affective engagement with texts
they found offensive and the structures these are produced from and
sit within, we found useful John Corner’s concept of the citizen-viewer
(1991), Richard Butsch’s concept of citizen-audiences (2005), and
Ramaswami Harindranath’s of audience-citizens (2009). All these are
theorised against the background both of a longstanding interest within
audience studies in theorizing audiences as publics and citizens, and of
an attempt to add, with these terms, something new in the word audi-
ences hyphenated with citizens that the word audiences on its own may
not contain, although this has been debated (see Livingstone’s account
of publicness in the private, and privateness in the public, 2005). As
Richard Butsch reminds us in his work on the citizen-audience, images
of audiences have historically been evaluative and normative and “iso-
lated individuals were weak and vulnerable citizens” (p. 2). What comes
across to us most clearly from our analysis of “isolated individuals” and
their affective responses to content ranging from humorous but uncom-
fortable for some to profoundly distressing for others is that, far from
being isolated, weak or vulnerable, audiences, when speaking individu-
ally, speak as publics and engage with the world in ways that position
them in various overlapping communities. As Peter Dahlgren says, “the

looseness, open-endedness of everyday talk, its creativity, potential for
empathy and affective elements, are indispensable for the vitality of dem-
ocratic politics” (Dahlgren 2002, p. 11).
This loose and open-ended affective talk that Dahlgren maps into
the heart of democracy allows us to analyse the wider structures of
power within which audiences operate as they speak about provocative
screens. It encourages us to explore the complex weaving together of
‘the personal’ or ‘the emotional’ with ‘the public’ or ‘the structural’,
precisely by recognizing, as Dahlgren indicates, that everyday talk and
its affective elements are indispensable components of publicness. For
Harindranath, this is a project of connecting meaning-making with citi-
zenship (2009) via the cultural approach to citizenship articulated by
Dahlgren (2004). This, as Harindranath argues, is quite distinctly differ-
ent from the purposes behind the collection of audience data by states
and organisations (within which audiences are framed as citizens or con-
sumers), and instead links the interpretive practices of audiences to their
roles in civic society. The civic—in civic society—is for some scholars a
route through which to move from empirical analysis of the audienc-
ing of television content to saying something meaningful about how
this becomes a way of being public (Livingstone 2005). This is remi-
niscent of Janice Radway’s lesson to the field that women’s interpreta-
tions of derided romance novels were not simply a matter of individual
women somewhere enjoying the occasional romance, but rather, she
argued, a form of feminist protest (Radway 1984). Readers of these
novels saw themselves as involved in a social process with other women
that often allowed them respite from domestic requirements. Reading
was not only a way to escape, but also allowed them to glimpse ways
of life unlike their own, and to question their assumptions and options.
Radway had reminded a field largely derisive of ‘women’s’ genres and
focusing its political attention on ‘harder’ genres such as news and polit-
ical analyses, that:
If we are serious about feminist politics and committed to reformulating

not only our own lives but those of others, we would do well not to con-
descend to romance readers as hopeless traditionalists who are recalcitrant
in their refusal to acknowledge the emotional costs of patriarchy. We must
begin to recognize that romance reading is fuelled by dissatisfaction and
disaffection, not by perfect contentment with woman’s lot. Moreover,
we must also understand that some romance readers’ experiences are

not strictly congruent with the set of ideological propositions that typi-
cally legitimate patriarchal marriage. They are characterized, rather, by a
sense of longing caused by patriarchal marriage’s failure to address all their
needs. (Radway 1983, p. 68)
This assertion is closely linked to the voices we seek to analyse and repre-
sent in this book, where the interpretation of texts as ‘offensive’ pushes
us to go beyond reading these in terms of ‘some people are sometimes
offended by some things’, perhaps then leading to a survey of which
demographic group is offended by what kind of content. While think-
ing through offensive content, which is most easily linked in people’s
minds, perhaps, to issues of censorship and free speech, time and again
we recalled that very early in the history of audience and reception analy-
sis we had a reminder that people’s interpretations in the private realm
were linked to their roles in the public realm. Their interpretations are
not just individual accounts, making what they wished of texts, but their
talk shows the disparities of power that audiences, as citizens, live with in
society, and the hierarchies and hegemonies that they operate against.
Thus, framing people’s engagement with texts that offend them as
both affective and participatory becomes a useful way for us to approach
the affect-laden publicness of the space between an audience and a screen
that challenged their senses and emotions. This was not just because it
stops us from partitioning audiences into neat, diverse compartments of
interpretively diverging individuals who will always be offended by one
thing or another, but also because it compels us to position ‘offended’
individuals as social actors, rather than disengaged individuals in front of
television sets.
Fieldwork
The findings of this study are based on interviews and focus groups
with 90 people in Britain and Germany. We interviewed people in big
cities (London, Berlin, Munich) as well as smaller towns (e.g. Leicester,
Bad Reichenhall) and rural areas (e.g., villages in the south of England,
Bedfordshire and Bavaria). Our participants consisted of a very wide
age and demographic range, including middle-class professionals, reli-
gious people, elderly and young people, sexual and racial minorities
and working-class audiences. It is important to note here that the UK
definition of ‘working-class’ does not translate directly into the German

context. Some professions that qualify as working-class in the UK are
considered middle-class in Germany as these jobs require vocational
training and qualifications (Niehues 2017). Thus, in this book, work-
ing-class is used in an elastic sense also encompassing Germans from
the ‘einkommensschwache Mittelschicht’ (low-earning middle-classes).
With half of these audiences we carried out individual, in-depth inter-
views, and we conducted focus groups with the other half. For each
interview and focus group (ranging from three to five people), we all sat
together and watched an ‘ice-breaker’ video clip that contained snippets
of television programmes that were reported by audiences to the media
regulators as being offensive. We then had a 60- or 90-minute long dis-
cussion about themes emerging around not only these but also similar
programmes. Focus groups and interviews were conducted with similar
topic guides rather than asking pre-formed questions, which enabled
respondents to feel empowered to raise the issues and topics that they
felt were important to the subject of study (Oakley 1981; Finch 1993).
All interviews were anonymised, audio recorded, transcribed, and both
sets of data were analysed on NVIVO with regular and frequent discus-
sions of codes between the two authors in order to arrive at the themes
we analyse in this book. The generic diversity built into this project in
terms of the programmes we watched reflected our original hunch that
controversial content is not precisely genre-bound and in fact spans a
range of formats from news to sketch-based comedies.
While audience researchers frequently set out to speak to audiences
about a particular text or texts they are interested in and of which they
have conducted a textual critique, we were unwilling to begin this pro-
ject with an a priori list of selected programmes. Instead, we began,
in a range of different ways, with the audience. In Britain, we collated
complaints made by the public to the British media regulator Ofcom by
tabulating the content of its published broadcast bulletins, following the
trajectory of a complaint from audience to regulator to broadcaster and
producers, and back. The findings were, on the one hand, rich because
they highlighted the long drawn-out and often inconclusive process
resulting from a complaint, but they also showed very little in terms of
what we were interested in. It seemed that people complained a great
deal about flashing lighting, biased reporting, product placement and
advertising, swear words and bad language, but we had a hunch that
speaking to people who had not actually made complaints would reveal
more. And it did. This was not surprising because the majority of audi-
ence members do not register complaints.
In Germany, however, we ran into substantial difficulties produc-
ing a similar list of issues complained about to that above, primarily
for the structural reasons mentioned earlier. German media regulatory
frameworks operate at the level of the federal states, and there is no
single unified counterpart of Ofcom from which we could source any-
thing equivalent to the Ofcom broadcast bulletins. So we adopted a
less structured approach and began by contacting several of the 14 state
media authorities (Landesmedienanstalten) and the audience offices
(Zuschauerredaktion) of public broadcasting services such as ARD and
ZDF. We looked through the yearly reports published online by pub-
lic broadcasters (ZDF-Jahrbuch) and received through personal corre-
spondence the yearly report from programmebeschwerde.de, a website
initiated by the state media authority of Saarland, to which audience
members can direct their complaints. We also researched on online
forums and websites such as Publikumsrat.de, studied news media cov-
erage and even followed up personal suggestions as to what seemed to
be causing offence. Through these diverse approaches we found many
similarities with the UK—for instance, in Germany too, people com-
plained about arguably biased reporting, product placement and adver-
tising. Rather than flashing lighting, people in Germany complained
about the poor quality of sound in television programmes that made it
hard (especially for the elderly) to understand the content. These reports
also showed that reality television provoked a lot of complaints about the
unfair portrayal of individuals. German viewers also took offence at the
sensationalist depiction of dead bodies in live news reports, the fact that
these reports made use of material shot by audience members on their
mobile-phone cameras, and the ethical and moral implications of this.
But, again, we hoped to find out more.
Participants for this study were recruited via snowballing. When we
began recruiting people for the study, they came up with very articulate
and convinced responses about stereotypes and embarrassing content,
violent and graphic content, and so on. We listened carefully during
the recruitment process to which programmes people themselves said
they found problematic, and selected a range of clips from these pro-
grammes to watch with audiences in the course of our focus groups and
interviews. So we began from what audiences themselves came up with
and, precisely because of this approach to the texts whose reception we
queried, we kept the process open throughout. The clips were intended
mostly as an ice-breaker or as the start of a conversation, and the dis-
cussions that followed could be about any text that audiences wished to
speak about. This approach, we felt, would give us the greatest depth
and breadth in our work, and as audience analysts we felt this was the
best way to prevent our work from becoming bound by the parameters
of a single textual unit or even a single genre. So the programmes that
our audiences discussed for this project include, but are not restricted to,
those which had been the subject of complaints to German and British
media regulators, and include programmes audiences themselves men-
tioned they found problematic.
The clips we discussed ranged widely from factual to non-factual
genres, and in Britain included clips from Little Britain (a sketch-based
comedy with boundary-pushing humour), Snog Marry Avoid (a real-
ity programme focusing on ‘make-unders’ with the help of a ‘Personal
Overhaul Device’), The Inbetweeners (an ensemble sitcom about teen-
age high-school boys that includes large amounts of profanity), the
news (including reports of terrorist incidents), stand-up comedy (e.g.,
Ricky Gervais), Embarrassing Bodies (a medical programme includ-
ing detailed camerawork of people’s private parts as frequent sites of the
medical problems depicted) and foreign cartoon-based programmes for
adults known to be popular in Britain, such as Family Guy and South
Park. In Germany, the clips included a sequence from Musikantenstadl
(Bavarian folk music show, usually watched by older conservative peo-
ple, aired on public broadcasting service), reality TV programmes like
The World’s Strictest Parents (Die strengsten Eltern der Welt), Pop
Idol (Deutschland sucht den Superstar), Wife Swap (Frauentausch),
Deeply in Love (Schwer verliebt, a show about obese people falling in
love), a snippet from a political talk show, (Der Polit-talk, presented by
Maybrit Illner) on public broadcasting, a snippet from a stand-up com-
edy programme with Mario Barth (private channel) and a snippet from
the late-night talk show Neo Magazin with Jan Böhmermann and guest
Carolin Kebekus (aired on ZDF Neo). In both countries, our discussions
spilled over to a whole range of other programmes, as these clips were
ice-breakers rather than (the sole) texts up for discussion.
Self-Reflexivity and Limitations
At the heart of this book lies the notion of self-reflexive scholarly agency. As
Ien Ang pointed out, “scrutinizing media audiences is not an innocent prac-
tice. It does not take place in a social and institutional vacuum” (2009, p.
183), Thus, interviewing people about their affective reactions to television
also required us to reflect about our own positionality and vulnerability to
the materials addressed in this research project. This book is motivated by
Ranjana’s long-standing interest in audiences and Anne’s curiosity about
the politics of emotions. Besides the big overlap of these interests, the data
that is created through these different prisms is slightly different, always
already shaped by one’s reactions, experiences and expectations.
In Germany, Anne was eager to delve into the emotional messiness
that television would bring up in her participants. Yet she learned very
quickly that people did not seem to be offended by anything or, they
even claimed that they actually never watched television! This disclaimer
is typical and exemplifies the defensiveness that people may feel in admit-
ting to television viewing in part because of its connotations of supposed
feminine passivity, laziness, and vulgarity (Seiter 1990, p. 62). Yet when
probed further, many had a very good idea about the programmes cur-
rently on offer and could easily spend an hour talking about television.
The same applied to statements that they would not be offended by any-
thing on television: “I don’t even go there. If I don’t like it, I switch
the channel” was the staple answer received. So Anne often started inter-
views with a conversation about what the German research participants
liked on television, which shows they watched and which presenters or
personalities they liked best. From this ice-breaker, it was often easier
to get people talking about what they did not like. It seemed that peo-
ple wanted to distance themselves from content that they perceived as
inappropriate; admitting to watch it—even critically—seemed absurd
to them (“why not simply change the channel?”). Our project was also
sometimes met with suspicion from German participants: “Why do you
want to know what offends me when I am watching television?” was
often the question. Face-to-face explanations, the printed information
sheet and a confidentiality form seemed to suffice for most people, but
others remained suspicious of this project about offence and withdrew at
the last minute. An older couple from a village in Germany, for instance,
explained: “Why do the British want to know what Germans find offen-
sive? We are just two old people; we don’t want to get into any trouble.”
Experiences like this made Anne aware how nebulous this research ques-
tion might appear to some people and how essential a good rapport and
trust between interviewer and participant are.
Besides these few experiences, however, most people were fairly
confident in speaking to Anne besides their initial anxieties about their
own ‘performance’ in the interview situation. She interviewed people
in their homes, offices or their youth club and a rapport was, in most
cases, easily established. Yet still participants interpreted her differently
as: an equal who happened to be an academic; as representative of the
media who can influence which programmes will be shown on televi-
sion; as someone whose identity is simply baffling; or (by some men) as
a young, blonde women for whom what she is actually doing needs to
be explained. These different interpretations, shaped the power dynam-
ics within the interview situation and, eventually, the data that was pro-
duced. Participants who read Anne as an equal or a representative of the
media were usually more forthcoming, and malleable to her directions in
the interview, whereas others were confrontational or exhibited a sheer
inability to understand her questions correctly due to unequal posses-
sions of cultural capital or language difficulties.
In the UK, Ranjana found that people were less surprised or suspi-
cious about the topic of the interview. The regular public appearance
of expressions like offensive material, or political correctness made the
project quite easily recognizable to audiences, and the fact that it was
conducted almost a decade and a half into the life of the media regu-
lator Ofcom, which provides a clear pathway to complain about media
content, meant that many, if not most, audience members were aware
of the very basic process of registering grievances about media content,
whether or not they chose to do so themselves. The fact that the pro-
ject was based at and being conducted with funding from a British uni-
versity lent it additional local credibility in Britain. But in Britain too,
Ranjana encountered the very well-known strategy of audiences distanc-
ing themselves from supposedly offensive television only to later reveal
the longstanding familiarity of avid viewers. Conducting the fieldwork in
Britain, Ranjana, as a person of Indian origin, also had some culturally
specific experiences in the process of fieldwork. As a researcher, enter-
ing community spaces to hold conversations with her respondents, she
noted how her own identity as perceived by her respondents shaped the
ways in which they responded to her; the expectations they had of her;
whether she was stripped of roles and identities she was—or thought
she was—performing; and, in addition, new identities were ascribed to

her—for instance the role of the elite academic who would now go and
speak to broadcasters and actually do something about things. Other
gendered and cultural interfaces also emerged between her and partici-
pants with whom she shared a common ethnic heritage. A middle-aged
Indian man reacted to her with caution because she was Indian but,
unlike the Indian women he spoke highly of, Ranjana was wearing jeans
and a sleeveless top—the very attire he said he found offensive on Big
Brother. Speaking to her about how he could not watch these shows
with his daughters, Ranjana noticed that he wavered and asked for her
agreement, almost as reassurance, that she too understood where exactly
he was coming from. In referencing cultural norms and codes from tradi-
tional middle-class Indian society within the Indian community in which
he lived, he sought repeatedly to affirm whether she agreed, whether she
was on the same page as him, and whether she too was offended.
Both researchers often wondered how their own ‘gut feelings’ and
emotive reactions influenced (unconsciously) the interviews we con-
ducted. Both struggled, at times, not to get annoyed by ‘mansplainers’
who hijacked the interview, and both, when confronted with discourse
that deliberately, or unconsciously other-ed other audiences, had to
remind themselves to step away from the position of the ‘pedagogic
researcher’ whom Ien Ang (1991) had scathingly critiqued as entering
their projects armed to critique people for finding ‘pleasure’ in watch-
ing stereotypes and ideals. Acknowledging these struggles meant real-
ising that all research is ‘passionate’ in the sense that it is guided and
shaped by the researcher’s positionality, experiences and vulnerabilities.
Rather than dismissing this as an obstacle to academic rigor, we align
ourselves with a long tradition of feminist researchers who argue that this
might indeed make for a more situated, nuanced and ethically responsi-
ble research. Hence, we aimed in this book to do passionate “audience
research which is ‘on the side’ of the audience” (Ang 1990).
Chapter Outline
In this chapter, we have complicated offence as a term and presented
our conceptual and methodological approaches. We have clarified that
the aim of this book is not to provide a complete list of what offence
is, or to pin down cultural differences, but to contextualise offence.
In other words, by exploring concrete moments in which audience
members felt the messy feeling of offence, we consider what exactly peo-
ple do with content they find offensive, not what it is or does ‘in gen-
eral’. Such a concrete anaylsis challenges assumptions about the nature of
offensive material that are taken for granted by policy makers, politicians,
educators and the general public. This chapter also brought out some
of the key questions that underpin this book: what constitutes media
material as offensive? Why is offence felt so differently? To what ends
is offence used or concerns about offensive material mobilized? How
do people act both as individuals and as publics in their very affective
responses to offensive content? Why do we assume offensive material can
be categorized solely into tick-boxes for profanity, swear words, racism,
overt discrimination or flashing lighting? And how do audiences under-
stand the role and responsibilities of producers and broadcasters?
In Chap. 2 we explore how offensive television content is often
experienced as ‘disgusting’, thereby affectively producing a distinction
between the self, and those tasteless, ill-informed others for whom the
programme is supposedly intended. We highlight audiences’ discursive
framing of others as gullible and mindless—a strategy of displacement, so
to speak, which works as a method of producing one’s own self as a sub-
ject of value. We also discuss how strategies of displacement feed into the
myth of the omnipotent, sovereign audience/consumer, and consider
how the link between offence and consumer choice becomes relevant for
commercial and public broadcasters.
Chapter 3 focuses specifically on people’s responses to offensive
themes in television humour in Britain and Germany. Humour is of great
interest in the context of offensiveness because it is often used as a tool
to justify or excuse offensive media content. We explore here how partic-
ipants negotiate the difficult terrain of humour, offence and free speech,
and we ask critically what it means when audiences work hard to avoid
the ugly feeling of offence.
In Chap. 4, we address people’s questioning of what they perceive to
be ‘offensive’ material on television, not only with regard to its realness,
but also in terms of its social functions and ‘effects’ in society. Chapter 4
explores these critical and even resistant moments when audiences look
through the offensive discourse on the screen. We argue that content
that aims to offend contains a call to emotional investment that may
invite radically critical readings of a representation. These can be ena-
bled, for instance, through a felt similarity, where the reader’s personal
experiences or memories are re-invoked at the moment of viewing.
In Chap. 5, we present our analysis of public perceptions of broad-

casters and regulators—those ‘behind the screen’. We query the discur-
sive devices used by audiences to express their expectations of producers
and regulators in the context of television content that they perceive as
offensive. We pay attention to the literature developed around media
regulation to distil theorizations of regulatory roles and use these as a
backdrop against which to read the perceptions and expectations audi-
ences articulate about those behind provocative screens. In our find-
ings, we identify the analytical difficulties of dividing audience responses
clearly based on their stated preferences for regulating offensive audio-
visual content—the picture is more complex than it appears.
Our concluding Chap. 6 brings our findings together within our the-
oretical framework, arguing for a much finer conceptualization of offence
and provocation than that existing within media analysis and regulatory
frameworks today.
References
Abel, M. (2009). Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema and Critique After Representation.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality.
Routledge: London.
Ahmed, S. (2004a). Affective Economies. Social Text, 22(2), 117–139.
Ahmed, S. (2004b). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge.
Ahmed, S. (2006). Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology. GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 12(4), 543–574.
Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.
ARD. (2016). Freundinnen - Alle für eine|Filme im Ersten Video|ARD
Mediathek. ardmediathek.de. Available at: http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv/
Filme-im-Ersten/Freundinnen-Alle-f%C3%BCr-eine/Das-Erste/Video?bcastI
d=1933898&documentId=40606276. Accessed 4 May 2017.
ARD Mediathek. (2016). Uschi Glas - Ich weiß, wo ich herkomm’| Lebenslinien
Video| ARD Mediathek. ardmediathek.de. Available at: http://www.ardme-
diathek.de/tv/Lebenslinien/Uschi-Glas-Ich-wei%C3%9F-wo-ich-herkomm/
BR-Fernsehen/Video?bcastId=14913740&documentId=38937414.
Accessed 4 May 2017.
Attwood, F., Campbell, V., & Hunter, I. Q. (2012). Controversial Images: Media
Representations on the Edge. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Barker, M. (1984). The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media.
London: Pluto Press.
Barker, M., & Petley, J. (2001). Ill Effects: The Media Violence Debate
Communication and Society. London: Routledge.
Barker, M., Arthurs, J., & Harindranath, R. (2001). The Crash Controversy:
Censorship Campaigns and Film Reception. London: Wallflower Press.
Berlant, L. (1997). The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex
and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press.
Berlant, L. (2004). Compassion: The Culture and Politics of Emotion. In L.
Berlant (Ed.). New York: Routledge.
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Brottman, M. (1997). Offensive Films: Toward an Anthropology of Cinema
Vomitif. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Bucaria, C., & Barra, L. (2016). Taboo Comedy: Television and Controversial
Humour. In C. Bucaria & L. Barra (Eds.). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Carroll, N. (1980). The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York:
Routledge.
Critcher, C. (2003). Moral Panics and the Media. Buckingham: Open University
Press.
Cvetkovich, A. (2012). Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Evans, S. (2011). What Paddington Tells Us About German v British Manners—
BBC News. BBC News. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-
europe-13545386. Accessed 24 February 2017.
Finch, J. (1993). “It’s Great to Have Someone to Talk To”: Ethics and Politics
of Interviewing Women. In M. Hammersley (ed.), Social Research: Philosophy,
Politics and Practice (pp. 166–180). London: Sage.
Gorton, K. (2009). Media Audiences: Television, Meaning and Emotion.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hemmings, C. (2005). Invoking Affect. Cultural Studies, 19(5), 548–567.
Hill, A. (1997). Shocking Entertainment: Viewer Response to Violent Movies.
Luton: University of Luton Press.
Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G. J., & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and
Organizations: Software of the Mind. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Hoskin, A., & O’Loughlin, B. (2010). War and the Media: The Emergence of
Diffused War. Cambridge: Polity Press.
House, J. (1996). Contrastive Discourse Analysis and Misunderstadnings:
The Case of German and English. In M. Hellinger & U. Ammon (Eds.),
Contrastive Sociolinguistics (pp. 345–363). New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Jensen, T. (2014). Welfare Commonsense, Poverty Porn and Doxosophy.
Sociological Research Online, 19(3). Available at: http://www.socresonline.org.
uk/19/3/3.html.
Jensen, T., & Ringrose, J. (2013). Sluts that Choose Vs Doormat Gypsies.
Feminist Media Studies, 14 (March), 1–19.
Katz, E. (2009). The End of Television? The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, 625(1), 6–18.
Kavka, M. (2008). Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy: Reality Matters. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Livingstone, S., & Millwood Hargrave, A. (2009). Harm and Offence in Media
Content. A Review of the Evidence. Bristol: Intellect.
Lockyer, S., & Pickering, M. (2009). Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour. New
Mikos, L. (2015). From The Office to Stromberg: Adaptation Strategies in
German Television. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 29(5),
694–705. Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/103
04312.2015.1068727.
Miller, W. I. (1997). The Anatomy of Disgust. London: Harvard University Press.
Niehues, J. (2017). Die Vermessung der Mitte - iwd.de. Institut der deutschen
Wirtschaft Köln. Available at: https://www.iwd.de/artikel/die-vermessung-
der-mitte-324607/. Accessed 20 March 2017.
Pedwell, C., & Whitehead, A. (2012). Affecting feminism: Questions of feeling
in feminist theory. Feminist Theory, 13 (2), 115–129.
Oakley, A. (1981). Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms. In Y. Lincoln
& N. K. Denzin (Eds.), Turning Points in Qualitative Research: Tying Knots in
a Handkerchief (pp. 243–264), Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
OxfordDictionaries. (2017). Offence—Definition of Offence in English. Oxford
Dictionaries. Available at: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/offence.
Accessed 3 August 2017.
Paasonen, S. (2011). Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
Schlesinger, P. (1992). Women Viewing Violence. London: British Film Institute.
Schlesinger, P., Haynes, R., & Boyle, R. (1998). Men Viewing Violence. London:
Great Britain, Broadcasting Standards Commission.
Seiter, E. (1990). Making Distinctions in TV Audience Research: Case Study of
a Troubling Interview. Cultural Studies, 4(1), 61–84. Available at: http://
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09502389000490051.
Skeggs, B., & Wood, H. (2012). Reacting to Reality Television: Performance,
Audience and Value. London: Routledge.
Steemers, J. (2015). Broadcasting is Dead. Long Live Television. Perspectives from
Europe. In J. Trappel, J. Steemers, & B. Thomass (Eds.), European Media in
Crisis. Values, Risks and Policies (pp. 64–82). New York: Routledge.
Thompson, K. (1998). Moral Panics. London: Routledge.
Thussu, D. K., & Freedman, D. (2003). War and the Media: Reporting Conflict
24/7. London: Sage.
Tyler, I. (2008). “Chav Mum Chav Scum”. Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain.
Feminist Media Studies, 8(1), 17–34.
Tyler, I. (2011). Pramface Girls: The Class Politics of “Maternal TV”. In B. Skeggs
& H. Wood (Eds.), Reality Television and Class (pp. 210–224). London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams, L. (1991). Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess. Film Quarterly,
44(4), 2–13.
Williams, L. (2004). Porn Studies. In L. Williams (Ed.). Durham: Duke
University Press.
CHAPTER 2
Producing the Imagined Audience

of Offensive Screens
Abstract  This chapter explores how audience members tend to distance

themselves from television programmes they find ‘offensive’. People we
spoke to often experienced this kind of content as ‘disgusting’, thereby
affectively producing a distinction between the self, and those tasteless,
ill-informed others for whom the programme is supposedly intended.
And yet, as we will discuss in this chapter, this border is far more porous
than assumed. By drawing on Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection, we
illustrate the ambiguous nature of offensive television content and how
people shift in and out of the category of the imagined audience of
offensive screens. We also discuss how strategies of displacement feed
into the myth of the omnipotent, sovereign audience/consumer, and
consider how the link between offence and consumer choice becomes
relevant for commercial and public broadcasters.
Keywords  Media effects · Television · Third person effect

Self-enhancement · Disgust · Abjection
Despite a few members of the audience who seemingly took pleasure

in their consumption of media content that is commonly deemed to be
‘offensive’, most people in our interviews were keen to distance them-
selves from television content they experienced as inappropriate. At the
beginning of each interview, when we watched the ice-breaker video
clips with our participants, they often signalled quickly that they were

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67907-5_2
displeased with what they saw. Frowns, sighs, shaking their head in dis-
belief, or sounds of disapproval such as tut-tut were some of the reac-
tions we encountered. Such reactions were, of course, invited through
our carefully crafted clip collection, which contained, amongst oth-
ers, many ‘money shots’ (Grindstaff 2002) from reality television pro-
grammes and talk shows, scenes of violence, and provocative news
content. These affective reactions were also partly provoked through
our research method and question when we asked our participants about
feelings of offence. Such a constellation of video material and research
question, might indeed invite some interviewees to perform offence, at
least at some point during the screening. Notwithstanding these con-
siderations, it might be wrong, however, to regard people’s responses
as always already inauthentic. Many people were confident in speaking to
us and used the clips more like a springboard to talk about other pro-
grammes and concerns. Others signalled openly to us that they knew
about the intended purpose of clips or questions (“Ah, I know where
you are trying to get here”) but that they simply did not feel offended at
all by what they just saw. Thus, this chapter (and the book more gener-
ally) does not aim to provide a complete overview about what offensive
television is but rather it explores what people mostly do with content
they identify as inappropriate. We find that they distance themselves from
it, thereby producing themselves as subjects of value vis-à-vis an imag-
ined audience for whom these inappropriate programmes are suppos-
edly intended. Such a focus is important as it allows us to illustrate how
offence comes to matter beyond the immediate viewing experience.
Overall, the chapter develops three key arguments. First, our find-
ings resonate with earlier audience studies and suggest that audiences
use offensive media content to distance themselves from the uncriti-
cal mass audience (for whom these programmes are apparently made)
thereby producing themselves as subjects of value. The people we spoke
to almost always adopted a critical position, away from the ‘rest of the
audience’ in society, who were imagined as less sophisticated and more
easily influenced and harmed by offensive content than themselves.
Secondly, we argue that the affective boundary between the self-reflec-
tive individual viewer and the homogenous, uncritical ‘mass audience’,
which is portrayed to consist of vulnerable, ill-informed and tasteless
members, is more porous than initially admitted. Thus, offended audi-
ences are a contingent category. Thirdly, we consider some of the criti-
cal implications that strategies of displacement (“offensive programmes
2 PRODUCING THE IMAGINED AUDIENCE OF OFFENSIVE SCREENS 27
exist because mindless masses want to see them”) have, and argue that
whether or not a programme is (perceived to be) a function of consumer
choice becomes an easily employed device through which people distin-
guish and judge television content.
Offence and the Subject of Value

People often compare their own television viewing to that of the imag-
ined mass audience, one that is more interested, more duped, more
entertained, more gullible than they are (Seiter 1990). In our interviews,
people often claimed that programmes that they themselves found to
be inappropriate are indeed watched and enjoyed by unknown others.
An interview with Sascha, a 28-year-old hotel employee of German/
Mexican descent, illustrated this point. While we were watching the ice-
breaker video, Sascha interrupted when WifeSwap came up.
Sometimes I think, well sometimes I wonder, why is this interesting to

some people? Right? I’m thinking, man, who on earth watches this? I am
surely not the only one who wonders about that. Well, at least, I hope I
am not the only one. Because, I don’t know, if I look at these people rep-
resented here, I think okay, they aren’t nice or attractive or interesting in
any way, and still they are on TV so that other people can watch them…
I think that is crazy. And that people actually watch them, I think is even
crazier. Right? So when I come across something like this on TV [Wife
Swap] then it doesn’t take longer than five seconds and I’ve switched the
channel.
Sascha expresses his astonishment here that people who “aren’t nice or
attractive or interesting in any way” are on television. He cannot under-
stand the appeal of such programmes (“who on earth watches this?”)
and claims to feel repulsed by such programmes (“when I come across
something like this on TV [Wife Swap] then it doesn’t take longer than
five seconds and I’ve switched the channel”). Many have shown how
interview situations invite people to ‘perform’ responses that are deemed
appropriate for their age, and gender and construct themselves as mor-
ally superior to a supposedly uncritical mass audience (Buckingham and
Bragg 2004; Skeggs et al. 2008; Seiter 1990). Also Sascha ‘performs’
in our interview: eager to present himself in a good light and to help
with the progress of this study about offence, he claims to be offended
by ‘low brow’ programmes such as Wife Swap and looks for reassurance
from the interviewer (“even crazier. Right?”). Sascha presents himself in
the interview as having the ‘right’ cultural resources to ‘look through’
media representations, to know what ‘good’ television is, and to remain
unaffected by the television programmes watched thereby producing
himself as a ‘subject of value’ that constitutes itself against an imaginary
‘other’. Ellen Seiter points out that “the imagination of that other tel-
evision viewer is deeply implicated in the class/gender system” (1990,
p. 63) thus ‘low brow’ programmes such as reality television or sensa-
tionalist news reports that offend the tastes of the middle-classes, are
seemingly only enjoyed by working-class people and women. Pete, 53,
quantity surveyor, from London explains:
I don’t watch a soap, etc. All my family—my wife and the two daughters,
they watch every Jeremy Kyle episode, record it, do everything like that.
I know I can’t actually sit with something like that, or some bloke get-
ting blown out of a minibus, or some bloke displaying his dirty laundry in
public, but that’s where everyone is different, and whilst if we were only
watching one programme all the time because everyone’s all the same, and
we’re not; some people have taste and morals, others don’t. Why do peo-
ple like my wife want to listen to a woman who says, I don’t know the
father of my five children?
Pete’s interview illustrates how people sometimes distance themselves

from the rest of the (female) audience through evoking notions of taste
and morality. His comment echoes longstanding popular discourses that
equate women’s taste in media consumption with the trivial, the low-
brow and the immoral, and their viewing preferences as threatening the
high standards and morals of culture (Wood 2009; Macdonald 2003).
Men’s talk in many instances veered towards a sexist, paternalistic cri-
tique of women, thereby trying to regulate what is deemed appropri-
ate for valuable consumption and establishing themselves as superior.
Programmes such as Jeremy Kyle or Wife Swap, which are associated
with the private and personal (and thus the feminized world) were often
outspokenly critiqued, thereby underlining traditionally gendered demar-
cations of value. People we spoke to also often invoked notions of class
to distance themselves from content they judged offensive. This lan-
guage was often rife with expressions of disgust and contempt. Ed, in
his forties, a school teacher from London reacted strongly when asked
about his feelings towards the Jeremy Kyle show.
It’s disgusting. I just think it’s another class of people that they get on
there, and that watching these shows, you don’t see, like, a solicitor going
on there, shouting and screaming at his wife, or watching these even, it
just seems to be the people that have got nothing.
Also our German participants referred often to feelings of bodily dis-

gust when talking about the class dimensions in ‘offensive’ television
programmes.
These shows disgust me, because it is really sad [meaning pathetic] to

watch them, really. It is sad, this Hartz IV television [television for receiv-
ers of state benefits] with all their arguments and affairs. I do not want to
see it. (Tina, 32, Berlin)
If I see stuff like that [refers here to The World’s Strictest Parents], I can’t
enjoy my beer anymore. It makes me sick to the stomach to see pro-
grammes like this… (Bernd, pensioner, village)
There is by now a rich body of literature that investigates the links

between feelings of disgust, class and television (for an overview see:
Wood and Skeggs 2011). Imogen Tyler, for instance, shows how media
representations of Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard (2008) or the young
mothers in Underaged and Pregnant (2011) draw on classed discourses
about the ‘dirty poor’ that provoke disgust reactions from middle-class
audiences. She argues cogently that audiences participate through their
affective talk in the process of class making, where, to borrow the words
of Stephanie Lawler, “their very selves are produced in opposition to ‘the
low’ and the low cannot do anything but repulse them” (2005, p. 430).
Through the lens of this critical scholarship, we can understand how
‘offensive’ television content becomes affectively pinned onto the work-
ing-class ‘other’ even though audience members from all social classes
watch and engage with it. Affective distancing happened in our inter-
views not only through expression of disgust but also through laughter.
Egon, for instance, a mid-thirties public relations manager from Berlin
laughed while we were watching a clip from Wife Swap. He notes:
I mean that is really the class system of Germany. For the masses that is
everyday life, and for those who a have a bit of intellect, for them this is
just like going to a spa. You watch it, switch off your brain, and immedi-
ately you feel better [laughs again].
In this interview segment, Egon, who sees himself as a well-educated and

liberal member of the middle classes, frames his statement with laugh-
ter. Some argue that laughter, especially in the form of ridicule and
disgust are not oppositional but rather quite similar affective reactions
(Tyler 2008; Menninghaus 2003). Both move us physically and figura-
tively when we feel aversion to or are moved away from the object or
figure we find disgusting/laugh at. Laughter and disgust are sensations
that generate affectively a boundary between us (those who are in on
the joke) and those we are disgusted by/laugh at. As we see in Egon’s
comment, laughter, like disgust, creates a distance between ‘them’ and
‘us’, asserting moral judgments and a superior class position. Also, on a
discursive level, we can see that this quote from Egon is classist: to watch
programmes such as Wife Swap requires the educated, middle-class audi-
ence to ‘switch off [their] brains’. Only then can they enjoy the cheap,
quick pleasure that such programmes seem to hold. Thus, the imagined
audience of these programmes is not only ‘einkommensschwach’, but
also uneducated and ignorant.
It is noteworthy that most television programmes that offended our
participants (violent action films, sensationalist news reports and reality
television), were understood as banal and dangerous at the same time:
on the one hand, they were judged as holding no value for society or
the viewers who watched them. Yet, on the other hand, they argu-
ably had the power to influence their viewers in undesirable ways, with
negative consequences for the individual as well as society as a whole.
Audiences often considered the most gullible were children, young peo-
ple and women. Gert, a retired builder from a rural area in Bavaria was
concerned about the influence that offensive media can have on younger
men:
These nonsense action movies that glorify violence. Empty of any real
value, but then if you watch it… and especially if boys of 14, 15 watch it…
I don’t think that’s right. […] Because the boys learn from what they see.
That has happened often that young people copied what they have seen on
television. Hold-up murder and burglary, right?
In Gert’s comment, recent events that happened in his usually quiet

village reverberate—an older citizen was stabbed by a young man,
seemingly without any reason. But the comment also encompasses
the common idea that young people’s access to offensive television
programmes places them in danger (they are easily influenced and adopt
the wrong values), thus making the youngsters themselves potentially
dangerous. Such an understanding of offensive television is often based
on the media effects model, which we encountered numerous times in
our fieldwork. This model is often critiqued for its reliance on simplis-
tic assumptions about the relationships between media use, attitudes and
behaviour as it fails to explain why effects arise in some cases and not
others. It does not adequately consider how people relate to other media
or other sources of information and in general, most critics agree that it
tends to oversimplify complex questions to do with the meanings and
pleasures people derive from the media (Buckingham and Bragg 2004;
Gauntlett 1998; Barker and Petley 2001). Even though these issues are
widely discussed within academia, this model of understanding the rela-
tionship between media, offence and audiences seems to retain a strong
grip on public discussions and dominated the ways in which others were
judged by our participants as ‘media victims’ with only negative conse-
quences for society. Ed from London, for instance, positions his taking of
offence as a concern for vulnerable others:
I feel genuinely concerned about the children in my school. Their mums

sitting at home and watching all this filthy rubbish—they aren’t really role
models are they now? Filthy crap on telly.
Throughout the interview, Ed, stressed again and again how children
and younger audience members especially were easily influenced by tel-
evision and needed to be protected. In simultaneously portraying chil-
dren as vulnerable and their mothers (note, not fathers or parents in
general) as mindless consumers of “filthy crap”, Ed creates a sexist dis-
course where others are both gullible and devoid of any worth (not “role
models”).
What is further noteworthy in all examples so far, is that it was always
others who were affected by so-called offensive media representations,
never the person we interviewed. Even though many would admit that
certain images they saw on television would stick with them and preoc-
cupy them, sometimes even for a few days, no one argued that a particu-
lar programme consumed would lead them personally into a behaviour
that would affect society in undesirable ways. This so called ‘third-person
effect’ (Davison 1983) may lead to attitudinal or behavioural outcomes,
such as support for censorship or stronger regulation of media content
(more on this in Chap. 5), but it also helps with self-enhancement, as the

example of Judith, a pensioner from a small village, demonstrates:
Television shows such as Top Model anger me because others believe eve-
rything they see! We see a top model such as Claudia Schiffer [she means
Heidi Klum] and then all the young girls want to be like Schiffer. But
they don’t understand that looking nice isn’t enough. There is hard work
behind this. And you have to have charisma, and these young girls they
don’t have this AT ALL…
Here, Judith portrays young women as easily influenced and gulli-

ble, thereby producing herself as the voice of reason and expertise: not
only is she clever enough to see through this mechanism, but she is
also expert enough to say that they lack the real quality it takes to be a
model: charisma. What we can see in Judith’s comment is that the imag-
ined gullible audience is constructed not only as inexperienced, but also
as worthy of contempt. Judith repeats the well-rehearsed argument that
women in particular are cultural dupes who are easily seduced and brain-
washed. Her answer also resonates with the notion of ‘role modelling’,
which is often used in public discourses around television—that is, the
idea that young people identify with glamorous media characters or per-
sonalities and are therefore led to copy their behaviour or develop what
researchers deem to be ‘unrealistic’ expectations or attitudes about real
life (Buckingham and Bragg 2004, p. 10). This, however, was contra-
dicted by one of our youngest audience members, Lena, an 18 year-old
service worker from Munich:
Anne: D o you get inspired to become a model when you see this [Top
Model]?
Lena: No.
Anne: And do you think it is likely that your friends would get
inspired when they are watching Top Model and maybe think
about becoming a Top Model too?
Lena: No.
Anne: But do you think other young women might get this idea?
Lena: Yes—absolutely!
Anne: Really?
Lena: Yes, especially if they are slim, like the models, then I think they
say ‘ha, I could do this too’… and so it goes.
So was Judith wrong in her assumption about television and young

women’s aspirations? As a young, working-class woman from a low edu-
cational background, Lena is precisely the type of audience that is often
constructed as gullible. But neither Lena nor, she claims, her friends are
buying into the idea that a career as a model is available to them. This is
not to suggest that audiences never buy into ideas that circulate on tel-
evision. However, it is to suggest that this ‘buying into’ may relate not
so much to the content of the media (their ‘message’) as to how they
invite us to engage in discussions regarding personal lives. Interestingly
enough, Lena uses the same strategy as Judith to construct herself as the
knowing viewer and others as gullible. This echoes research in audience
studies that suggests that media effects typically involve a form of dis-
placement in which it is always “other people who are seen to be more
vulnerable to influence than oneself” (Buckingham and Bragg 2004, p.
125). Children and young people are the most obvious target of this
form of displacement. The interview with Lena shows that young people
also seek to displace the effects of the media onto others. Thus, the gul-
lible is always located somewhere else, away from the self. Participants
from all social and educational backgrounds used the content they iden-
tified as offensive as a tool to make a distinction between them and the
rest of the audience.
The Porous Border Between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’

This rhetorical and affective positioning of the self as superior to the
imagined ‘other’ was clearly present throughout our work on this pro-
ject, as almost all our participants separated the television audience into
two categories: the self-reflective individual viewer and the homogenous,
uncritical ‘mass audience’:
Well, I think there are mainly two categories of viewers: the first category
realizes that this television programme is absolute rubbish, but when
she comes home in the evening and has worked for ten hours, then she
lets this go and maybe finds it also a bit amusing then. And then there
is apparently this other group of viewers who can identify with these
programmes and maybe find this REALLY entertaining… (Heidi, social
worker, Berlin)
Heidi does not deny that people from all groups might watch inap-
propriate programmes yet the difference is in the intensity of the view-
ing pleasure: some find it “a bit amusing” whereas others:find this
REALLY entertaining”. This boundary between those who are strongly
affected and those who are barely affected, was carefully constructed
and policed throughout our interviews, but there were instances where
cracks showed. For example, even though people from all social back-
grounds and ages insisted that they were not the viewers of these offen-
sive programmes (or if so only from an ironic stance, ‘switching off their
brains’), they were often highly familiar with these programmes, includ-
ing episode-by-episode narratives known by heart. In a focus group con-
sisting of white, working-class participants, Pam distanced herself from
others thus:
People who are unemployed, who seriously sit around drinking all day.
They’re the sort to watch Jeremy Kyle [it becomes evident later that Pam
herself is a devoted Jeremy Kyle viewer]. I think just that class of people. I
think they just make that class of people worse.
Pam admitted over the course of our interview that she actually knew
some of the episodes by heart, including names of characters, who
divorced whom and who cheated with whom and when. This might sug-
gest that some of our participants were more interested in programmes
that they deemed inappropriate than they were prepared to admit, at
least in the context of the interview situation. This striking co-existence
of avid viewership of programmes with a simultaneous disdain, scorn and
openly hostile attitude towards intended audiences of the programmes
was one of the most striking findings in the course of our fieldwork.
Furthermore, people often presented an ambiguous relationship with
programmes that they identified as a ‘tasteless’ and therefore offensive.
To illustrate this point we refer here to two of the richest examples we
came across in our fieldwork in Germany:
(We are watching a scene of the dating show Schwer Verliebt [Deeply in
Love]. In this scene both severely overweight participants are stripped
down to their underwear and nervously awaiting a full-body massage. To
break the silence, the woman makes fun of the man’s underwear, telling
him it is unflattering to his figure.)
Matthias: Grins and leans in.

Anne: Why did you smile when the clip of Schwer Verliebt came on?
Matthias: For one thing, because I once had a girlfriend who also didn’t
like my underwear. And secondly because… I don’t want to express myself
too harshly here… because it show two uneducated people, how they try
to communicate with each other. And that’s funny. Because it’s basically
two idiots on TV who open up their privacy, standing there in their under-
wear, which is private, on TV. I guess that’s typical of Hartz-IV television …
that makes the appeal of these shows.
The interview with Matthias is interesting because it shows the ambi-

guity at work when people watch ‘offensive’ programmes. On the one
hand, Matthias identified this show as ‘Hartz-IV television’ (Television
for the recipients of state benefits) and therefore implicitly as a pro-
gramme he should not watch, let alone get pleasure out of. And yet
Matthias seemed to enjoy it and smiled. When asked about this affec-
tive reaction, he justified it in two ways: firstly, by highlighting a similar-
ity between himself and the man on the screen (“I once had a girlfriend
who also didn’t like my underwear”). He then detached himself and
analysed how humour is evoked here (the transgression of bounda-
ries: “I guess that is typical for Hartz-IV television …. that makes the
appeal of these shows”). It could be argued that Matthias’s reaction, his
smile, helps to create zones of safety around the ‘abject’ object by step-
ping back and distancing himself from it. In and through this gesture, it
could be argued, the images and the protagonists are ‘othered’. Yet, his
reactions reveal more: he leaned in and smiled, which made him, at least
momentarily, affectively part of ‘the intended audience’. He watched
it, he got in the mood and even enjoyed it (however we would explain
his enjoyment as classed derision or a moment of looking through).
Eventually, Matthias realizes how porous the boundary has become, and
he works to reinstall it. He does so through self-reflexivity and through
a detached analysis of the scene, which allows him to produce himself
as a controlled, reasonable viewer who can deconstruct representations
through reason rather than being ‘uncontrollably’ emotionally moved.
This differentiates him from members of the ‘intended’ audience, who
are imagined as too passive and ignorant to distance themselves from
these representations and as simply ‘buying into’ any programme pre-
sented to them, seemingly without further reflection.
Another example of the porous border between ‘us’ and ‘them’, is

from social worker Heidi, who acknowledged that she enjoyed some of
the so-called ‘Hartz-IV’ programmes:
Hm… actually I can sometimes enjoy these so-called Hartz-IV TV

shows… this is not an expression that comes from me… that’s what it’s
called in the media, and funnily enough even by the people I work with
[people who depend on benefits], they are calling it that too… I can
enjoy them because I have such a distance from these programmes that
they can’t offend me, I can’t take them seriously. But I’m sure people exist
who really enjoy them and find them entertaining… But then, to be hon-
est, I found this part with the people in underwear also quite entertaining.
What’s it called again? I think this is something I would watch.
Throughout this, Heidi, as a member of the middle classes, slips in and

out of the audience for ‘Hartz-IV’ television. She realizes how problem-
atic and unstable the audience group is, even as she tries to construct
herself against it. She begins by justifying her word choice, ‘Hartz-IV’ as
a label for certain TV shows. Aware of the degrading and classist conno-
tations that this term contains, she calls on the media and even Hartz-IV
recipients themselves to legitimise her use of the word. After this, Heidi
admits to enjoying these programmes herself sometimes, because they
seem absurd to her. It could be implied that her response is to some
extent invited by the genre. Shattuc (1997) suggests that many day-time
television shows have a strong element of ‘camp’, particularly in their
theatricality and their use of ritual and humour. Thus, they address an
ironic, ‘playful’ viewer, who refuses to take them completely seriously.
Heidi identifies her viewing of these shows as very sporadic, while high-
lighting that she cannot really be moved by them, either pleasurably nor
negatively in the form of offence, but that there are people who really
enjoy them and find them entertaining. Similarly to Matthias in the prior
example, this functions to produce herself as the detached viewer in
opposition to those who are moved by the programme. And yet Heidi
admits that she also really enjoys some of these sorts of programmes
(especially when they revolve around romance and relationships), even
though she does not know the name of these shows, which, in turn,
signals to us that she is not an avid viewer. What does this zig-zagging
tell us about how Heidi positions herself? Both Matthias’s and espe-
cially Heidi’s account show that othering fellow viewers because of their
arguable viewing pleasure became messy when our interviewees realized

they were part of this themselves: the border between ‘us’ and ‘them’,
those mindless, vulnerable and gullible others, is porous when we realize
that the affective forces of ‘offensive’ television become alluring and titil-
lating for us too.
This affective ambiguity of ‘offence’ can be explained through Julia
Kristeva’s notion of  ‘abjection’. Abjection is a ‘twisted braid of affects’
(1982, p. 1) where that was is experienced as repugnant (and needs to
be expelled from one’s body or its proximity) similutaneously fascinates,
arrests attention, and refuses to go away. Hence, the abject is an issue
of affective intensity and affective ambiguity—something that oscillates
between excitement and disgust, joy and repulsion, because it “does
not respect borders, positions, rules” (1982, p. 4). What disgusts also
excites and attracts, and the oscillation between the two affective modes
explains much of offensive television’s appeal. We are not suggesting that
all affective reactions follow this pattern, but accounting for the ambig-
uous affective nature of ‘offensive’ television programmes allows us to
better understand the movement between connection and disassocia-
tion through which people make sense of ‘offensive’ television content.
These moments of joy, excitement and entertainment that we found in
our participants talk do not only create boundaries but such modes of
engagement legitimise the viewing of a programme that may otherwise
be deemed as inappropriate. In speaking of their entertainment, viewers
embraced the ‘offensive’ material that they had split off at the same time.
In the interview situation, they could at once articulate being offended
and different from the offensive content, while at the same time justify-
ing their continued consumption to us by evoking light-hearted motives
around entertainment (see also Johanssen, forthcoming). Moments like
these illusrated to us  how unstable and porous the boundaries between
imagined audiences are.
Offence and Consumer Choice

Many participants had a clear explanation for why these offensive televi-
sion shows that indoctrinate others (but not them) are shown on televi-
sion: because ‘they’—that is, the uncritical masses—want to see them. A
key figure in these discussions is ‘the housewife’ who passively consumes
daytime television, thereby negatively influencing what is produced for
and distributed through television. As Egon explained, “All this gets
produced in the first place because the masses want to see this. The
housewife who is at home at noon for her ironing, she wants to see this”.
Or, as Ed had remarked earlier, there was “the mother sitting at home
all day” watching “filthy crap” and not being a “role model”. And Tina
noted:
I’m always astonished, because everyone says, oh my God, how horrible.

But these shows have been on for many years, and I always think, if every-
one says they’re shit, then why are they still here? Hmm… normally that’s
a question of audience rating or not?
These responses resonate with public discourses in which the ‘mass audi-
ence’ is constructed by audiences themselves as homogenous, uncritical,
easily influenced and often feminized. It is not surprising, then, that our
participants, who wanted to produce themselves as self-reflective ‘sub-
jects of value’, were quick to distance themselves from the imagined
others who are, through their viewing preferences, responsible for such
‘bad’ television content.
In this section, we aim to tease out some of the implications of such
an understanding. What does it mean when the ubiquity of provoca-
tive television content comes to be explained as the result of supply and
demand? We argue that strategies of displacement (‘offensive programmes
exist because mindless masses want to see them’) reinforce the neolib-
eral idea of the audience member as a sovereign consumer who deter-
mines through individual choice what type of television programmes
are produced and distributed in society. This emphasis on individual
consumer choice misinterprets commercial television industries, and the
content generate, as ‘democratic’ rather than oligarchic. ‘Offensive’ tel-
evision content is therefore often viewed as merely the outcome of bad
consumer choices by the masses, rather than as produced by powerful
actors and institutions within the media industries who determine far in
advance of individual consumer choice which programmes will get pro-
duced, bought in from other countries, or distributed. Displacing respon-
sibility on to the ‘ignorant’ audience consumer obfuscates how these
programmes are also a response to an economic restructuring within
society and the television industry more specifically: from the mid 80s
onwards, we can see, through the force of neoliberalism, an increasing
deregulation of the media industry. Producers responded to the explo-
sion of cable channels and the concomitant fragmentation of audiences
by introducing cheaply produced formats such as reality television that

drove down production inputs and professional labour costs (Ross 2014).
By using non-traditional labour for story development, writing, perform-
ing and camerawork, as well as production inputs such as sets, props and
costumes, these shows not only reflect ‘lower taste’, but also allow for
lower production costs and profit for the cable networks. Thus, the fact
that so-called infotainment, reality-based television, tabloid TV, crime-
time television, trash TV and on-scene shows persist on television is not
only a result of viewer taste and demand, but a much wider structural
phenomenon. It is the economically based response to an industry with
increasing competition not only from other channels but also from online
media. Many media scholars argue that economically speaking low-brow
television programmes such as reality television and talk shows are an
outgrowth of both the rapid development of new media technologies
and a changing industrial context characterised by deregulation, increas-
ing competition and financial scarcity (see for instance Holt 2011; Kavka
2012; Ross 2014). Thus, understanding consumer choice as the primary
cause of a TV programme’s social existence leads to a damaging displace-
ment of responsibility in terms of media content production, especially
when speaking about private broadcasters, who are often framed as simply
reflecting consumer demand in order to attract advertisers.
This orthodoxy concerning the power of consumer choice is also the
reason why programmes on public broadcasting services are sometimes
experienced as offensive: even though many of our participants articu-
lated high expectations of public service broadcasters and their role in
public life (something we discuss later), these programmes were often
discussed in a dismissive, denigrating tone because they are not the result
of their individual choice as consumers, but produced with public fund-
ing. Ivan, a 43 year old Russian engineer who is—as he tell us—often
upset by the German bureaucracy in his everyday life, expressed his frus-
tration with public broadcasting and the programmes they show:
That makes me really go nuts. Recently I am wondering what this

licence that I pay for is actually good for. I basically pay money to
become dumber and dumber through these television programmes.
Why do I do this? I really don’t want to pay GEZ [abbreviation for the
“Gebühreneinzugszentrale” eng. the fee collection center of public broad-
casting institutions in Germany] any more, it really makes me sick what
they show…
When probed further about what exactly it is that make him “sick”, he
expresses his dissatisfaction with the news reporting on public broadcast-
ers. In his opinion, this kind of news reporting is biased and pro-USA.
Therefore, so he tell us, he is often forced to ‘find’ news himself online.
Ivan’s answer resonates with wider discussions in Germany about a
Lügenpresse (lying press) that misleads the public on purpose. And yet,
his comment also illustrate how strongly audiences feel about their free-
dom to choose the media content they want to consume, especially in
times where the trust in public broadcasters is diminishing. Online, Ivan
finds news that appears authentic to him (often provided on video blogs
by citizen journalists) and that reconfirms his view on political events.
Thus, the potential to feel offended is much lower here.
Egon from Berlin is equally irritated by the television programme pro-
vided by the public service broadcasters:
All these public broadcasters, and you even pay for them, they never ask
‘what do you want to see?’ And what really angers me is that every state
has his own channel too. And then this channel has another sub-channel.
You have RBB Berlin, RBB Brandenburg, and then god knows… but in
the end they all bring the same. The only difference is that they might
mention something more regional in the news. And to spend all our
money on this? I really don’t see the point.
Egon’s comment highlights the importance of consumer choice in ques-

tions of offence. He is angered because “they [PSB] never ask ‘what
do you want to see?’” Rather than diversity, which would allow him to
choose amongst the different television programmes, Egon argues that
they all bring the same content. As becomes apparent, in these accounts
it is not so-called gullible, tasteless others who are seen as limiting
choice for our participants, but the top-down model of public funding
(the GEZ fee) that is seen as hindering choice. Rather than recognizing
public funding as a necessary prerequisite for the role of public broad-
casting services in public life, some of our participants made the lack of
consumer choice their vehicle in turning against public broadcasting ser-
vices. Thus, whether or not a programme is (perceived to be) a function
of consumer choice becomes an easily employed device through which
people distinguish between and judge television content.
The ways in which consumer choice influences when and why we take
offence seems logical when read against the backdrop of commercialization
of the media and neoliberalism. And yet, like any myth, they allow curious
paradoxes to exist. For example, in our study, most people agreed that val-
uable, educational television content is produced and distributed on pub-
lic broadcasting services, yet they did not want to pay for it to be there.
The imbrication of consumer choice and offence is also very important to
explore at a time when new generations have more opportunities to avoid
public service broadcasters entirely, or when doubts about public service
television have been further deepened by concerns about the sustainabil-
ity of public funding, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of
2008 and in austerity regimes (Steemers 2015, p. 75).
Conclusions
In this chapter, we aimed to explore what audience do with televi-
sion content they find offensive. As we have shown, audience mem-
bers we spoke to almost always adopted a critical position, distancing
themselves from the ‘rest of the audiences’ in society, who were always
less sophisticated than them. A large amount of time was spent dis-
cussing the ‘real’ (intended) audiences of programmes, especially those
involving public displays of the private (e.g., The Jeremy Kyle Show,
Schwer Verliebt). Audiences stressed time and again that they were not
the intended audiences of these shows, which offended them, and that
there were these unknown other vulnerable, ill-informed, and even
tasteless audiences, for whom these programmes were intended. This
othering of fellow viewers often revealed a dichotomy between peo-
ple’s high levels of familiarity with these programmes, including epi-
sode-by-episode narratives known by heart, and an insistence on the
fact that they were not the viewers of these programmes. These—so
the argument went—were really meant for others who, depending on
the context, were discussed as either tasteless or vulnerable, or both.
Our fieldwork revealed that audiences use strategies of displacement
to construct themselves as subjects of value often excluding or vilify-
ing the ‘other’. As we have shown, this form of ‘othering’ fellow view-
ers is so prevalent that nearly all those we spoke to engaged in them.
No matter what your social or embodied position, the ill-informed,
vulnerable other is always located somewhere else. Even though this
distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is culturally constructed and
scrambled through the affective movement of connections and dis-
association through which audiences make sense of television, we
demonstrated that audience members work hard to ultimately reinstall

the boundary.
We found that these forms of othering enabled our interviewees to
construct themselves as ‘subjects of value’, which is crucial in neolib-
eral times when the self is constantly developing and improving itself
through the ‘right’ kind of consumption. Offensive television pro-
grammes (be these in the form of day-time talk shows, sensationalist
news reports or depictions of violence) are therefore the choice of the
‘other’, but not of the self. We found, further, that strategies of displace-
ment function to displace responsibility for media production away from
media instructions and regulators to the individual. When the apparent
ubiquity of provocative television content comes to be explained as the
result of consumer choice (‘These programmes are produced and dis-
tributed because people like this—that is the masses—want to see it!’),
any informed critique of the political economy of the media, and even
minimal opportunities for economically marginalized groups to commu-
nicate their experiences and identities within mainstream television, are
prevented. It is noteworthy that strategies of displacement not only mis-
read the workings of the commercial television channels, but also have a
damaging effect on public broadcasters. This is because strategies of dis-
placement that create subjects of value do not challenge, but ultimately
reinforce the importance of consumer choice. Rather than understanding
public funding as one way in which plurality and diversity can be sus-
tained, the subject of value experiences these programmes as infuriating,
as they are not the result of his/her choice but of some un-transparent,
state-ordered, top-down system. This, as we have shown, upsets many
audience members, who understand their freedom to consume as a fun-
damental marker of their viewing pleasure.
References
Barker, M., & Petley, J. (2001). Ill Effects: The Media Violence Debate Communi
cation and Society. London: Routledge.
Buckingham, D., & Bragg, S. (2004). Young People, Sex and the Media. The Facts
of Life? New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Davison, W. P. (1983). The Third-person Effect in Communication. Public
Opinion Quarterly, 47, 1–15.
Gauntlett, D. (1998). Ten Things Wrong with the “Effects Model”. In R.
Dickinson, O. Linne, & R. Harindranath (Eds.), Approaches to Audiences: A
Reader (pp. 120–131). London: Arnold.
Grindstaff, L. (2002). The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk
Shows. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Holt, J. (2011). Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of
Deregulation, 1980–1996. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Johanssen, J. (forthcoming). Other Bodies within Us: Shock, Affect and Reality
Television Audiences. In Anne Graefer (Ed.), Media and the Politics of
Offence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kavka, M. (2012). Reality TV. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Lawler, S. (2005). Disgusted Subjects: The Making of Middle-Class Identities.
The Sociological Review, 53(3), 429–446.
Macdonald, M. (2003). Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular
Media. London: Hodder Arnold.
Menninghaus, W. (2003). Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation.
New York: State University of New York Press.
Paasonen, S. (2011). Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Ross, A. (2014). Reality Television and the Political Economy of Amateurism. In
L. Ouellette (Ed.), A Companion to Reality Television (pp. 29–40). Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Seiter, E. (1990). Making Distinctions in TV Audience Research: Case Study of
a Troubling Interview. Cultural Studies, 4(1), 61–84. Available at: http://
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09502389000490051.
Shattuc, J. M. (1997). The Talking Cure: TV Talk Shows and Women: Women and
Daytime Talk Shows. London: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Skeggs, B., Thumim, N., & Wood, H. (2008). “Oh Goodness, I am Watching
Reality TV”: How Methods Make Class in Audience Research. European
Journal of Cultural Studies, 11(1), 5–24.
Steemers, J. (2015). Broadcasting is Dead. Long Live Television. Perspectives
from Europe. In J. Trappel, J. Steemers, & B. Thomass (Eds.), European
Media in Crisis. Values, Risks and Policies (pp. 64–82). New York: Routledge.
Tyler, I. (2008). “Chav Mum Chav Scum”. Class Disgust in Contemporary
Britain. Feminist Media Studies, 8(1), 17–34.
Tyler, I. (2011). Pramface Girls: The Class Politics of “Maternal TV”. In B.
Skeggs & H. Wood (Eds.), Reality Television and Class (pp. 210–224).
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wood, H. (2009). Talking with Television: Women, Talk Shows, and Modern Self-
reflexivity. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
Wood, H., & Skeggs, B. (2011). Reality Television and Class. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
CHAPTER 3
Just Kidding! Negotiating the Line Between

Humour and Offence
Abstract  This chapter investigates how people experience and negotiate the

fine line between humour and offence in the context of television. Since
humour exists not only in comedy programmes, but can also be found in
advertising, reality television or even factual television programmes such as
political discussions, we were attentive to any moments at which our par-
ticipants detected ill-fitting humour when watching television. We explore
what exactly people do with humorous content they find offensive, not
what this kind of humorous content does ‘in general’. Such a contextu-
alised approach illustrates the ethical and transformative potential of so-
called ‘negative’ affect. Thus, rather than perceiving offence as an ‘ugly’
feeling with merely negative consequences for society, this chapter demon-
strates that the avoidance of offence can also operate as a strategy for evad-
ing responsibility and action and thereby hindering social change.
Keywords  Humour regime · Television · Anger · Taste

Social distinction · Avoidance of hurt feelings
We have already mentioned that we began this project—unlike many

audience reception projects—without a specific text in mind. We were
bounded neither by genre nor by title, but simply guided by what our
audience participants wished to speak to us about, with our video clips
A version of this Chapter has appeared in the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67907-5_3
acting as discussion points or conversation triggers and emerging, also,

from audience suggestions rather than an a priori list of texts. We devote
a chapter particularly to questions of mediated humour and felt offence
because we found, looking at our audience responses, that humour fea-
tured strongly in their talk about the limits and roles of offensive mate-
rial, at individual and societal levels. Since humour exists not only in
comedy programmes, but can also be found in advertising, reality tel-
evision or even factual television programmes such as political discus-
sions, we did not limit our interviews and focus groups to the genre of
comedy, but instead were attentive to any moments at which our par-
ticipants detected ill-fitting humour when watching television. Still, in
order to initiate a discussion about humour, we watched in Britain clips
from Little Britain; Citizen Khan; The Only Way is Essex; Snog Marry
Avoid; alongside other clips from content such as stand-up comedy pro-
grammes that were accessed on tablets and PCs while surfing through
television channels (see our earlier discussion of the trans-media nature
of audio-visual content today). These clips acted as triggers, which then
resulted in a wide variety of programmes and themes being discussed.
In the case of Germany, participants watched snippets from stand-up
comedian Mario Barth and satirist Jan Böhmermann. Barth is regularly
shown on private channels such as RTL and is (in)famous for the sex-
ist jokes in his routine. Böhmermann, on the other hand, is known for
his polemic political satire and made international headlines in 2016
for insulting President Erdogan in a video. Furthermore, participants
found many instances of humour in reality television programmes such as
Frauentausch (Wife Swap) on RTLII or Schwer verliebt (Deeply in Love)
on Sat. 1. In our interviews, audiences debated whether boundaries need
to be more relaxed for comedy and humour to work, or whether this
becomes an oft-cited excuse to push as many limits as possible, as well as
how the genre of a text shaped their own expectations. So these repeated
references to humour in audience talk merited a chapter of their own.
This chapter aims to explore how people experience and negotiate the
fine line between humour and offence. It will firstly unpack the bold claim
that ‘no topic per se is off limits’ by highlighting some of the instances
in which people took a more nuanced approach or relativised their initial
statements. It will then illustrate the boundary-forming function of humour
and demonstrate how people used offensive humour as an affective-discur-
sive tool of social distinction. In the last part of the chapter, we demonstrate
how hard audiences sometimes work to avoid the ‘ugly’ feeling of offence
and consider some of the critical implications of this avoidance.
3 JUST KIDDING! NEGOTIATING THE LINE … 47
Taking Humour Seriously

In 2017, BBC2 aired a sketch called The Real Housewives of Isis as part
of the comedy show Revolting, upsetting many people. The satirical
clip shows four Western women, Afsana, Mel, Zaynab and Hadiya, who
have travelled to Syria to join so-called Islamic State and become ‘jihadi
brides’. They chat about their lives, husbands and fashion in the style
of the popular Real Housewives of… series, which included New York,
Orange County and Beverly Hills. In one scene, one of the wives appears
wearing a new suicide jacket, as others record her ‘outfit’ for Instagram.
‘Oh babe, you look gorgeous!’ her friend tells her, before telling the
camera in an aside ‘She looked MASSIVE. You’re gonna need a lot of
Semtex to kill that one.’ Programmes like this are contentious: ‘it is nor-
malising Islamophobia’, argues one side; ‘it is part of a liberal society to
make fun of religion’, says the other side.
The tension between appropriate and inappropriate humour has long
been of interest for scholars and media outlets alike. Because humour/
comedy often deals with sensitive topics, touching on or transgress-
ing social norms and moral boundaries such as sexuality, religion or
death, it is not only pleasurable and community-forming, but also rife
with the potential to hurt, exclude and offend. Academic literature and
even journalistic discourse on controversial humour/comedy often
mention the ‘fine line’ between humour and offence, and have some-
times veered towards a call for a more responsible and ethical use of
‘taboo’ humour. These writers recognize the dangerous potential of
humour to reinforce social inequalities and mechanisms of exclusion
(Billig 2005; Lockyer and Pickering 2008; Lockyer and Pickering 2009;
Weaver 2011). Also outside of academia, people question who is cho-
sen as the comic target of ridicule and what lies behind these choices.
For instance, stand-up comedian Dave Chappelle’s most recent rou-
tine has been critiqued by the media for containing transphobic
jokes and online many agree (Juzwiak 2017). What remains crucial is
whether the humour kicks socially upwards or downwards, whether
comic aggression is directed “at those who are in positions of power
and authority, or at those who are relatively powerless and subordi-
nated” (Pickering and Littlewood 1998, p. 295). On the other side of
the discussion, we have stand-up comedians and others who see offence
as a vital part of humour/comedy. In the view of the British comedian
Rowan Atkinson, “the right to offend is far more important than any
right not to be offended” (The Guardian, 7 December 2004). Such

an understanding implies that offence is not in and of itself wrong and
that, depending on the context, it can have a positive impact. Moreover,
many argue that if offence needs to be avoided at all costs that places
severe limitations on comedy and humour. Drawing in ideas of creative
freedom, Top Gear’s executive producer has argued, for instance, that if
guidelines and punishments were too strict, “humour or banter would
inevitably become strangled” (cited in Mills 2016). Limiting humour in
order to avoid offence is understood as an assault not only on creative
freedom and free speech, but also on the potential for humour to pro-
vide spaces for rebellion against normative hierarchies by binding peo-
ple together against formal power structures of authority (Bakhtin 1984;
Stallybrass and White 1986) or by providing new, irreverent and unusual
perspectives on a subject (Kotthoff 2006; Gray 2006; Graefer 2014b).
Despite their differences, both sides take humour seriously and argue
that humour/comedy has an effect on society.
This idea is also shared by television broadcasters and regulators, who
find themselves in a difficult position. In both Germany and Britain,
media regulators have historically said, as one of OFCOM’s predeces-
sors did in the UK, that it “is part of the broadcasters’ duty to find ways
of striking a balance between their creative freedom and their responsi-
bility to their diverse audiences” (BSC 1998, p. 3). In both countries,
humour/comedy is recognized as a difficult subject with a ‘special role’:
on the one hand it should be capable of moving its audiences in new criti-
cal directions, offering different perspectives on changing cultural norms
and trends in society. Yet on the other hand there is fear of its power to
“push boundaries, with the potential to be controversial or even offensive,
especially in relation to sensitive issues” (Sancho 2003, p. 72). Since tel-
evision, as a mass medium, aims to cater to a broad audience with diverse
and multiple preferences and sensitivities, televised humour cannot be too
edgy or too extreme, as this would alienate many viewers. On the other
hand, as a medium, television needs to provide new and fresh content in
order to remain interesting, so an inevitable conflict arises between the
ambition for innovation and creativity in broadcasting and the possible
offence or upset such programming may cause. Since humour, by defi-
nition, prioritizes “ambiguity, inconsistency, contradiction and interpre-
tative diversity” (Mulkay 1988, p. 26), and because television audiences
are made up of individuals with different ideologies, beliefs and bounda-
ries, and therefore differing ideas of what kinds of humour is and is not
‘acceptable’, the regulating bodies find it difficult to regulate televised

humour in meaningful ways (for an overview see Mills 2016).
It is, however, beyond the scope of this chapter to explore how a reg-
ulator goes about making decisions on comic material that some audi-
ence members clearly define as offensive, balancing the requirement for
broadcasting to minimize offence with upholding ideas of free speech.
Instead, this chapter investigates how participants negotiate the diffi-
cult terrain of humour, offence and free speech, and what this can tell us
about society and where the borders and boundaries in this society lie.
A key question in these discussions is how ‘offensive humour’ is
defined. Often, when we talk about the offensiveness of something,
we fail to see that the concept itself is relative, since it always implies
reference to a specific context (offensive to whom? in what situa-
tion?) (Bucaria & Barra 2016, p. 7). We tackle this problem by explor-
ing the perceptions and preferences of audiences in Britain and Germany:
what humorous content did they find offensive? Why? And how did they
deal with their hurt feelings afterwards? This is of importance because
we consider humour a very potent way of drawing symbolic boundaries
between social groups—those who are in on the joke and those who are
not (Kuipers 2009). Humour, as Sharon Lockyer and Michael Pickering
note, “is far from trivial. It is integral to social relationships and social
interaction. It may be taken in certain contexts as light-hearted banter,
but in other contexts it can injure people’s social standing, or cut deeply
into relationships and interaction between people within and across dif-
ferent social groups” (2008, p. 2). They argue further that:
[w]hat is found funny, and why, is spatially and temporally specific. Trying
to understand this can tell us much about social identities and values in
space and across space, and in time and over time. The sociological analysis
of humour can tell us much about how existing social relations are reaf-
firmed and normative social boundaries maintained. (2008, p. 3)
We follow critical scholars such as Kuipers (2006), and Lockyer and

Pickering (2008, 2009) in their arguments regarding the social signifi-
cance of humour, but we also highlight the affective site of humour in
these processes of boundary-making and community-forming. We sug-
gest that it is also humour’s affectivity, its power to move us physi-
cally and emotionally, that makes humour one powerful tool through
which ideas, norms and values are communicated, circulated and felt
(Graefer 2014a, b). The workings of humour can be felt within the indi-
vidual body (when we chuckle, blush with shame or cringe with embar-
rassment), but humour can also leave a trace between bodies: it can create
feelings of distance and exclusion, but also of intimacy and closeness
between bodies (Kuipers 2009). From this perspective, we can under-
stand how shared humour is community-forming, creates closeness
yet also creates a shared horizon of values and norms: it tells us what
deserves social derision and what does not; what is permissible as the
butt of a joke and what is taboo. Through our laughter we reaffirm this
distinction—not only in a cognitive way, but also affectively because we
reinforce the emotional structure that keeps a particular idea or value in
place for our community. The same happens when a joke fails and we
are offended, hurt or angered. Then we often feel very physically on our
skin or in our body that a boundary has been overstepped or violated:
something that we (or our community) values highly and are emotionally
attached to has been violated.
Whatever our reaction to humour (laughter, smiles, chuckles, shaking
our heads in disbelief, eye-rolling, blushing with embarrassment, anger,
pain), through our affective reactions we participate in the social fabric of
our community and (re)shape what is permissible and what is not, what
we value highly and what we value little. In this sense, we suggest that
popular humour to be found on television can tell a great deal about a
community and where the borders of this community lie, by making per-
ceivable the moment when cultural boundaries of acceptability, taste and
respectability are transgressed or violated.
The Link Between ‘Humour Regimes’ and Offence

Most of our participants challenged the belief that humour is inherently
‘good’, or that creative licence means permission to say just about any-
thing. Humour’s potential to offend, hurt or exclude people was clearly
recognized, at least on an abstract level, with many arguing that televised
humour has its limits, which are mostly drawn around ‘dark humour’—
that is, humour about death, sickness and disability; and racial, ethnic,
and minority humour, including sexist, homophobic and sacrilegious/
blasphemous humour. Yet this border was more porous than expected.
When we probed further, many participants stressed that it matters who
is telling the joke, as Tina, a young woman from Berlin, explained:
I really do not like jokes about disabled people… to be honest. Because it

is not their fault. They are born this way, at least some of them. I always
put myself in their shoes, I wouldn’t like to be ridiculed. It’s because of
this empathy that I would say ‘no’, jokes about disabled people that is an
absolute no-go… But if a disabled person makes fun of his or her disability
then this is gallows humour and that is funny, I think. I think that would
be okay because this person then choses to make fun about it and make us
laugh.
Tina’s comment shows that it matters who the sender of a joke is. Jokes
about disabled people are offensive if they are told by someone who is
not disabled, yet they can pass and even be experienced as funny when
told by a disabled person. Fieldwork in both countries showed the real-
life identity of on-screen actors and presenters becomes a major factor
in whether or not a particular text offends. In the UK, the most strik-
ing example of this, which came up in all the focus groups, was Matt
Lucas and his portrayal of Daffyd, the “only gay in the village” in Little
Britain. Gay and straight participants unanimously felt that Lucas ‘got’
the experience of being gay, because of his own publicly acknowledged
sexuality as a gay man. This, by extension, gives him an implicit author-
ity to create and portray Daffyd as a visibly ridiculous, attention-craving,
overly flamboyant, and perhaps in the end not gay, character in Little
Britain, who repeatedly insists that he is the “only gay in the village”. As
Felix, who is straight, pointed out:
I’ve seen, sort of, Frankie Boyle live, and he, sort of, pushes it a bit too
far as well, and it’s almost, kind of, whoa. But with anything that’s, kind
of, real, I mean, things… some of the other clips there, I mean, it’s almost
like they’re mocking themselves. I mean, things like the Daffyd on Little
Britain stuff, they’re, kind of, mocking themselves, or people that they
know in society.
This authority to construct and enact the character of Daffyd rests only
with Matt Lucas. As many respondents told us, if a straight man was in
the role, or even behind the role, that would seriously offend. Joe, a
young gay man, pointed out:
It also depends on who it’s coming from. For example, um, in the Little
Britain stuff they take the piss out of gays… like, because it comes from
Matt Lucas, an openly gay guy, for him to take the piss out of gays… it’s
acceptable. It’s kind of embracing who he is. But say he wasn’t doing it,
someone else was doing it—like a straight black guy—say he was doing
what Lucas was doing, I would find that offensive—he’s not laughing at
himself, he’s laughing at someone else.
This perceived rapport between the real-life identities of actors and the
leeway or licence they enjoy in mocking on screen someone they share a
key aspect of their identity with came up time and again, unprompted, in
conversation with audiences. With regards to stand-up comedians whose
content, in her eyes, crosses boundaries by venturing into topics such as
paedophilia or the Holocaust, Anessa maintained:
I think if he’s, like, an older, like, mature, straight guy that people could
find intimidating, then some people are intimidated by those types. It’s like
if a man was shouting at a woman it’s intimidating, because he is a man
taking the piss out of such a serious and sensitive thing. It’s, like, disgust-
ing because of who he is, really…
This resonates with the idea that humour and satire are governed by
‘humour regimes’, unwritten rules stipulating who can joke about what
(Kuipers 2011). By determining this, humour regimes endow some with
more right to speak in jest than others. Our interviews showed time
and again that it is crucial to take into consideration the directional-
ity of humour—that is, who the sender is and who the recipient of the
humorous message are. This directionality significantly contributed to
determining the underlying reasons why particular humour/comedy was
perceived as offensive. Most participants agreed that a joke is offensive
when delivered by a member of a majority group addressing a minority
group, whereas the opposite was generally considered less problematic.
Jokes about religious minorities, for instance, were perceived as offensive
and discriminatory mostly by participants who were religious themselves
or who experienced through their own lives the severe consequences of
such humour, as Resa, a young woman in Munich, explained:
I think jokes about your religious belief can go too far. And I came to
this conclusion because my father is Moroccan, and I know what religion
means to him. I have the feeling that this topic needs to be protected
and treated with respect and it angers me when others don’t respect this
border.
Most of those who were not offended by religious jokes and found them
funny viewed themselves as the most liberal in society—not being able to
find things funny seemed to cast people as humourless outsiders unable
to understand the values of a modern liberal society. Inger, a mid-thirties
IT specialist explained to us in Germany:
Yes I find jokes about religion funny. Because I think everyone has to right
to say and believe what they want. And my good god, it is comedy. That
is the reason why it exists, to make fun of things that seem sacred and
untouchable. And people have to see this just a bit more relaxed. It’s just
a bit of fun, it’s not serious. Well it is somehow also serious, of course, but
one has to take it with a pinch of salt.
Patricia, in the UK, echoed these sentiments that it is all just a bit of fun.
She said: “I don’t really care if someone makes fun of God, so I am not
sure I see why particular care should be extended to other religions.”
Implicit in this comparison is the assumption that all religions have equal
footing in social and public life; that they have equal power, access to the
public sphere, and confidence to joke and mock. Such an understanding
overlooks the unequal power positions from which Christian and Muslim
groups speak in countries such as Germany or the UK. As Khyati Joshi
points out: ‘the normative power of whiteness and Christianity in the
West, separately and in tandem, results in the racialisation of religion. For
non-white non-Christian groups who have settled in western nations,
their racial and religious minority status, along with encountering their
religions being racialised, is an essential challenge in becoming part of the
social fabric of the receiving nation (Joshi 2016, p. 128). This unequal
power position between religious groups shapes the ‘humour regime’
through which religious jokes operate. Dominant groups, which Patricia
is part of, have the power to determine what is off-limits and what not,
thereby silencing people, too, by dictating that one ‘should be able to
take a joke’ (Kuipers 2011, p. 69). The importance of free expression and
the value ascribed to having a sense of humour was also echoed by Ed a
school teacher from London, who said: “if you are a bit of a spoilsport
and can’t take a joke without getting your knickers in a knot, then you
may as well surround yourself with bricks and build a hole in the wall
for yourself.” As Ed’s comment demonstrates, offensive humour is often
justified to be part of a liberal society and, according to Ed, those who do
not understand this might as well “surround [themselves] with bricks”
i.e. distance themselves from this society. Giselinde Kuipers explores in

her work how having a sense of humour, especially about sensitive topics
such as religion, is often used and mobilised to draw a line between the
liberal, secular West and the rest who are humourless. She writes:
[N]ot having a sense of humour is associated with (strict) religiosity. There

is a long tradition of animosity between fundamentalist religion and frivo-
lous pastimes: Puritans closed down theatres, Calvinists forbade dancing,
the Taliban banned music. In secular Europe, Muslims stand out for their
overt religiosity and especially since 9/11, Islam is often conflated with
fundamentalism. Hence, the Muslim lack of humour has come to be seen
as a symptom of a more general opposition to fun associated with (fun-
damentalist) religion. […] [H]aving a sense of humour is associated with
modern personhood and […] central to western notions of personhood
since the 19th century. It is now a desirable social attribute for everyone
from potential spouses to political leaders. […] In today’s western socie-
ties, not having a sense of humour is not a trivial reproach, but a funda-
mental personal shortcoming. (Kuipers 2011, pp. 75–76)
This power of humour to draw symbolic boundaries between religious

minorities such as Muslims and the so-called modern, liberal self of the
West is drastically expressed by Tina:
Yes, humour… that is always a bit of a difficult subject with Turks. They
do not have self-irony and cannot laugh about themselves. They are
very touchy-feely with their religion and so on. Us Germans, we have
to develop a sense of self-irony because there are so many Hitler jokes
around, and we tell Hitler jokes ourselves. But when we say something
about the Turks and their Allah, then they lose their shit and bombard
France. Do you know what I mean?
The derogatory comparison between Hitler and Allah in Tina’s comment

is problematic as it produces Allah as a dangerous and damaging figure
of the past. As becomes evident from her statement, humour, in form
of ‘telling jokes’ and developing a ‘sense of self-irony’ about these fig-
ures, signals progress. In contrast, those who stay ‘very touchy-feely with
their religion’ and cannot laugh about it, are stuck in the past, overtly
emotionally attached and potentially dangerous. While explicit islamo-
phobic comments like the one above were rare, many of our participants
in both countries followed a culturally specific ‘humour regime’ that
silences religious minorities by arguing that cynicism, irony and indeed

blasphemy are part of the European culture and need to be accepted by
those offended.
Other people we spoke to were more sceptical of the liberating power
of humour on television. Rather than experiencing religious humour as a
liberating expression of free speech, some worried about the potential of
humour to do violence and degrade others. Tamara, a German teacher
in her early forties, was very intrigued by the topic of humour. She drew
in the interview very often on the experiences that she had made as a
teacher. Thus, when we talked about the limits of humour (should we
regulate and censor certain forms?) she started her considerations with a
reference to her students.
You can say that humour encourages a certain form of perceiving the
world. I mean even satire can become dangerous if people are lacking the
tools to interpret this, like my young students, for instance. They might
take something that is said in humour at face value. I always wonder how
they manage to read The Simpsons right… they watch this a lot […] But
when people in Cologne, for Carnival really went ahead and built that float
that made fun of the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, then this could be
seen as a form of working through the pain and trauma. But it can also be
misunderstood. And this is why I think the limits of humour are such a dif-
ficult terrain. And I think there are topics such as religion where you have
to question if freedom of speech is here used to do violence, to degrade
other people. And what tools do we have to calibrate this? Is it really a
slippery slope and humour is based on this slippery slope. ……Because
humour claims for itself the right to also hurt people. I really cannot say
anything about the limits of humour and where they should be drawn, if
there is a topic off limits or not, I really can’t.
Another such example is Meenakshi in Britain, who struggled to under-

stand how laughing at individuals and communities can exist in peace in
a world that aspires to be progressive. She linked it to a growing sense of
anti-intellectualism in contemporary socio-political cultures in Western
democracies, where expertise and intellectual critique are frequently
discounted as boring, out-of-touch with the ‘real’ world, or just simply
‘spoilsport’ behaviour (in contrast to the high values ascribed to having
a sense of humour). Such rhetoric circulates and operates to dismiss any
critical, intellectual concerns about damaging stereotypes. Meenaskhi
grappled with these ideas when talking about the character of Citizen
Khan on British television:
Citizen Khan is a character that encourages you to mock him. At lot of

humour is that, isn’t it? A lot of humour is sort of… I don’t know if you
knew Frank Spencer… and so… there was a lot of comedy in the 70s that
was just completely laughing at people, which, you know, why can’t we
live in a progressive world where people tolerate difference? You know, I
think there’s a very anti-intellectual culture. I mean, Frank Spencer wasn’t
an intellectual character, but for an example, people are very quick to mock
academics or people adding critique of any kind or… I’m not claiming I’m
academic but what actually is wrong with difference, and what’s wrong
with thinking about things deeply? So I think I’m just kind of sorting out
my own sense of being quite different to people, and actually wanting to
have a conversation about some of these things with anybody, rather than
just laughing at it and brushing it off.
Thus, even though people often claimed that nothing is off limits when
it comes to humour, women such as Resa, Tamara and Meenaskhi illus-
trate in their talk the complex workings of humour that has the poten-
tial to offend, as well as considering the power relations at play when
humour is mediated and performed. From their perspectives, a criti-
cal engagement with humour is not understood as ‘spoiling the fun’
or as an anti-liberal act but rather as a form of ethical responsibility.
Being offended on behalf of others means here to be considerate of
those who are deemed to be ‘different’ and often fixed as the butt of
the joke.
Offensive Humour as a Tool of Social Distinction

Many people we spoke to argued that they do not feel offend by an argu-
ably ‘insulting’ joke or humorous comment, if this joke is in ‘good taste’.
Nino, a graphic designer from Munich who identifies as gay, provided a
good example of this:
I can say that I think one can make fun about everything, in my opinion,
as long as it’s good. If it is in good taste, somehow. For example, I watch
this series about gays, and they make a lot of jokes about gays … and that
is sometimes very personal to me, but I find it incredibly funny because it
was done in a nice way.
Nino’s comment brings to the fore a well-known fact about the con-
tradictory nature of humour—that “humour that has potential to ‘hit
home’ and hurt us the most may also be the kind that makes us laugh
the hardest” (Kyrölä 2010, p. 76). His comment shows further, that it
is not necessarily the content but the delivery that influences if some-
thing is perceived as funny or offensive (or both). And yet if something
is in good taste or “done in a nice way” is not simply a matter of (indi-
vidual) taste, but is also connected to class and particularly to cultural
capital. As we know from Bourdieu (2010 [1979]), the taste of the
middle-classes, those with high cultural capital, determine the contours
of ‘good’ taste. Cultural products that are enjoyed by people with low
cultural capital, in turn, are often viewed as ‘bad’ taste. Based on these
considerations, scholars explored the links between taste cultures in tele-
vision comedy/humour and levels of cultural capital, and argue cogently
that “that comedy/humour is a field for the culturally privileged to acti-
vate their cultural capital resources” (Friedman 2011). In other words,
comedy/humour taste continues to be a strong marker of social class
and educational level. Even though humour is culturally specific and can
therefore not simply be applied in different national contexts, most stud-
ies have found that people with a low educational level and from a lower-
class background claim to enjoy over-the-top humour, whereas those
with a higher educational level and class background seemingly appreci-
ate complexity, ambiguity and even dark humour (Claessens and Dhoest
2010; Kuipers 2002). These earlier findings in British, Flemish and
Dutch contexts also mapped onto our German data. Our middle-class
participants often argued that they could not enjoy humour that was too
shallow (‘zu flach’) and too obvious. Iris, a young social manager from
Munich, for instance, could barely contain her anger when asked about
popular stand-up comedian Mario Barth:
Mario Barth? I think he is mega shit. That’s why I had to laugh when he
came on. He is just feeding into this man/woman cliché and that kind of
humour is simply too shallow for me. It angers and annoys me because it is
too simple.
When probed about what exactly she meant by “too simple” and why
this is the reason for anger and annoyance, Iris explains that she is “just
different from most people when it comes to humour”. She claims to
really enjoy “clever situational humour” yet when confronted with
calculated, formulaic humour (i.e. humour that plays too obviously

with transgression) she feels underestimated by the producer(s) and gets
annoyed. Her anger is also fuelled by the gendered stereotypes that such
humour circulates and reinforces. Iris’s interview speaks to the damaging
potential of mediated humour yet it also makes clear that she positions
herself as ‘different’ from the rest of the audience. Torsten, a German
policeman, reacted similarly when watching Barth’s routine on television:
I don’t get these jokes because I am much more a fan of Austrian cabaret
because that is better, cleverer…. a bit political. But this guy [Mario Barth]
annoys me! And he is even super popular and fills the Olympia Stadium!
That angers me. Especially when I have to learn that friends of mine go
there. I… then I wonder, do I actually know these people?
Like Iris, Torsten understands himself as different from the masses

because he has different taste and enjoys a different (arguably more
intelligent) kind of humour. This expression of preference and taste, is
boundary-forming, distinguishing those with ‘good’ taste from those
with ‘bad’ taste. To be affected by Barth’s humour in the ‘right’ way (i.e.
to be offended by it) is indeed so important that those who enjoy it can-
not be within the boundaries of his circle of friends—people who argu-
ably should feel like him. When he finds out that people close to him, in
his social group, appreciate this kind of humour he takes a step back and
re-evaluates them: are they similar to him, or has he misjudged them? As
Henry Jenkins notes:
the boundaries of ‘good taste’ […] must constantly be policed; proper

tastes must be separated from improper tastes; those who possess the
wrong tastes must be distinguished from those whose tastes conform more
closely to our own expectations. (Jenkins 1992, p. 16)
In both examples, Iris’s and Thorsten’s talk, overtly simple humour was
perceived as annoying and operated as a boundary-making exercise,
aligning those with ‘good’ taste against those with ‘bad’ taste who, in
turn, have to be different from the self. However, the power of humour
for social stratification was most drastically expressed in Sarah’s judg-
ment of Mario Barth’s comedy act: “Well this kind of humour is, I don’t
know… kind of Unterschichtenhumor [underclass humour]. I simply do
not find it funny.” ‘Unterschichtenhumor’ is a derogatory expression that
was sometimes used by German participants when judging humour as

too simple and too shallow. Even though the expression ‘Unterschicht’
is no longer used in official discussions about social class, it still appears
in everyday talk. It is an affectively charged term because it implies not
only a social hierarchy, but also a hierarchy of value and taste: whereas
some of the working classes are seen as respectable, hard-working and
deserving, people of the Unterschicht are constructed as a “workless and
workshy underclass which lacks taste, is politically retrogressive” (Lawler
2005, p. 434). ‘Unterschichtenhumor’ is a powerful label in audience
talk that drastically illustrates the associations between humour, taste and
class and the boundary-making mechanisms that come with these.
It was also often implied by our German middle-class participants that
working-class people would not understand intertextual nature and more
subtle social critical elements in televised humour.
Jacob: G
erhard Polt [German comedian] is actually quite critical of
German society. But I think that his audience isn’t offended
because they don’t even get this. That might be a bit mean to
say, but I really think that most people do not recognize that
he makes fun of them. Because he is basically only re-enacting
these pub talks that you can here in every bar.
Micha: And I think that really defines good humour. If it has different
levels. So even if you would realize, okay, this person is mak-
ing fun of me (or people like me) then it is still funny. And I
think that is simply not the case with Mario Barth or Cindy
from Marzahn [female German comedian – her character is the
equivalent to Britain’s Vicky Pollard]. There aren’t many dif-
ferent layers…
As the conversation between Jacob and Micha shows, humour does

not necessarily fail when it is not understood in its complexity, but, they
argue, it shows up distinctions among the audience: between those who
‘get’ it (the deeper meaning behind the joke) fully and those who do
not. This resonates with Sam Friedman findings, which suggest that peo-
ple with high cultural capital appreciate complexity and comedy that is
not just funny but is also critical of society more widely and that “the
desire for comic ‘difficulty’ often seemed to be bound up with the
knowledge that this style of appreciation set HCC [high cultural capital]
respondents apart from other comedy consumers” (2011, p. 359).
Even though much of the data that we collect confirms established

findings about class and preference in humour style, we also came
across reactions that seemingly contradict these findings. In the UK for
instance, Emily, a white, middle-class professional, pointed out that she
is able to find certain kinds of humour funny simply because they are
“trashy” and “very far exaggerated”, and therefore unable, in her view,
to contain any form of negative potential. When watching Little Britain
Emily said:
Because actually they are almost mocking certain groups of people, so

you’ve got the transvestite or… and you’ve got the big gay person, and it’s
mocking them, but it’s such an exaggerated comedy. It’s really unrealistic
that you would have a gay person walking around in PVC shorts and say-
ing, ‘I’m the only gay in the village.’ It just wouldn’t happen. It’s so far
removed from reality I think you could exaggerate it. I find them funny.
Emily justifies her enjoyment of Little Britain not through the rapport
between real life person and character (as discussed above) but by disas-
sociating it from reality (it’s so far removed from reality). By doing so,
the televised sketch is treated as isolated from the society in which it cir-
culates and therefore inconsequential. Disassociating verbally from overt
discrimination allows Emily to enjoy the joke and admit to it. Whereas
most of our middle-class participants in Britain and Germany emphasised
that they prefer ‘clever’ humour, Emily does not justify her apprecia-
tion of Little Britain for its satirical and critical qualities but because it is
“such an exaggerated comedy”.
No Offence Taken: How Audiences Work

to Avoid Offence
Most of this book is concerned with the ways in which people take
offence, how they express their offended feelings, and what feeling
offended can tell us about wider structures of power within society. In
this section, we investigate moments in which audiences did not take
offence even though they were confronted with what can be catego-
rized as ‘offensive’ televised humour. More specifically, we attend here
to the rhetorical and emotional strategies that audiences develop in order
to cope with and justify humorous content that can be labelled as sex-
ist. Paraphrasing Michel Foucault, who famously argued that what is not
said is just as important as what is said, we suggest that what is not felt
is sometimes just as important as what is felt. By exploring why certain
audience members avoid being offended by humour that ridicules dis-
empowered groups such as women, we aim to tease out how audiences
‘work’ to keep current ideas, values and norms, as well as the structures
of feelings that surround and animate them, alive and unchallenged. This
is not to say that all audience members should react to humour in the
same way or that felt offence directly results in social transformation.
Rather, what we are aiming to do here is to look at the strategies that
some audience members develop in order to avoid the ‘ugly’ feeling of
offence, and how we can think about this counter-intuitively. Counter-
intuitively means here conceiving the avoidance of feeling offended as
not necessarily good, and also as damaging and ‘cruel’ (Berlant 2011)
because it can operate as a strategy to help keep unequal power rela-
tions in place. This is based on our understanding of offence as an affec-
tive reaction that is not only negative, but can also serve to point out
moments of inequalities and injustice in the current system.
Certainly, a lot of our participants expressed to us their discomfort
when watching television content that contained humour that invoked
stereotypes or ‘went too far’—for whichever reasons. Others, however,
claimed that they could take humour that contains provocative references
even when delivered in a crude way. Supply teacher Kerry, in the UK,
is an excellent instance of where audiences presented themselves as very
bold and outgoing in terms of their sense of humour:
But I am quite strong really, I have a real dark humour, so that for me,
you know, that’s like a humour, rape, paedophilia humour I actually… I
hate the fact that it’s in my head, but my natural reaction to it is to laugh.
I don’t know if it’s one of the things… because it’s such a horrific thing to
happen, humour makes it more palatable.
Kerry admits here that she finds sensitive subjects such as rape or paedo-
philia humorous and justifies her enjoyment of ‘dark’ humour as a cop-
ing strategy, making “horrific things … more palatable”. Her comment
speaks to the ambiguous nature of humour in that we might be able
to find something offensive and funny at the same time. It is notewor-
thy that Kerry presents her ability to enjoy the joke rather than feeling
offended by it, as a sign of strength (“but I am quite strong really”).
In Lads and Laughter: Humour and the production of heterosexual
hierarchies, Mary Jane Kehily and Anook Nayak (1997) explore how
working class school boys produce themselves as ‘tough’ by telling
and ‘taking’ offensive jokes. Humour, mainly at the expense of young
women and men who do not subscribe to dominant heterosexual codes
of masculinity is here as a style for the perpetual display of ‘hard’ mas-
culinity drawing lines between ‘real’ lads (who tell them and take them)
and those susceptible to ‘feminine’ sensibilities and capable of feeling
offended and hurt. Yet, so they argue, humour operates here also as a
means for displacing fears and uncertainties about their own (homo)
sexuality and women. For Kerry then, not feeling offended by humour
about rape and paedophilia, is empowering: rather than feeling with
and/or like the victim/the butt of the joke, she is now ‘in on the joke’
and part of the dominant group. From such a perspective, it is easy to
understand how the avoidance of feeling offended can reinforce domi-
nant structures of power. Being in on the joke is then not such a bold,
transgressive act but more a buying into unequal hierarchies. And yet, it
is important to put audience talk like this into context. At the time of the
interview, Kerry is a single mother, living in social housing and depend-
ant on social benefits, all of which makes her a potential easy target for
violent humour. Talking back to provocative humour and admitting to
feelings of offence, even if only in an interview situation, requires con-
fidence. This is not to say that Kerry’s feelings are inauthentic yet when
we think about what avoiding offence can do, then we also have to con-
sider who can afford to claim to be offended and admit vulnerability.
While Kerry claimed to feel amused by jokes that ‘go too far’, other
people felt seemingly indifferent about it. Matthias, social worker from
Munich, is one such example. After watching a clip of stand-up come-
dian Mario Barth who is (in)famous for his sexist routine, he concluded:
Hm, okay. Well no, this doesn’t cause any extreme feeling in me now
because this is how relationships between men and women are, there are
always conflicts and there will always be compromises. I see this in my own
social environment often. That is simply a relationship thing. I mean, this
could also be a woman talking about a man. I do not see this in any way as
a negative reflection on women.
Matthias’s reaction to the stand-up routine of Barth was to feel quite

indifferent. For him, the routine represented simply how relationships
between men and women were. As a white man, he did not pick up on the
unequal power positions from which men and women speak, or how this
would influence the quality of the joke: kicking upwards or downwards
“This could also be a woman talking about a man”: Matthias did not take
offence because, maybe due to his own embodied and social position,
he could not see or feel any injury or injustice. The humorous content
can simply pass here and does not evoke any ‘unpleasant’ affective reac-
tions that have to be brought under control with emotional work. Other
participants recognized that certain forms of humour could be seen as
problematic, but still did not have to work hard to get over any hurt feel-
ings. For instance, Lena, a young shop assistant from Munich, expressed
her pleasure when watching Mario Barth: “Yes, [laughs when he appears
on the screen] well I don’t know… He always makes fun of his girlfriend
and that’s quite crass… if I was his girlfriend, I would ask him if he’s
quite right in the head… but it’s also very funny because he has such a
funny way of doing it, and then I always have to laugh out loud.” Lena’s
statement resonates with what we have pointed out above, that no topic
is off limits as long as the delivery is done well. Lena is amused. She can
enjoy the joke because she can feel that there is a transgression, but it
is not her place to police Barth’s routine, but his girlfriend’s (“if I was
his girlfriend, I would ask him if he’s quite right in the head”). For her,
Barth surely only causes negative feelings in his girlfriend (often the butt
of his jokes), but he is not offending other members of the audience.
Likewise, Katie in the UK went so far as to say:
When I plonk down in front of the telly, do I give a shit about sexism and
feminism in comedy? I don’t. I quite like watching the royal baby’s birth
announced without feeling, like I need to get all ruffled about monarchy
in the middle of poverty ladida. I enjoy stuff without thinking about all
sorts of deeper things if I am in the mood to enjoy something funny or
happy.
Katie’s answer reflects what was often expressed in terms of an ‘escape’,

where the pleasurable expectation of humour/comedy was used as a way
of ‘relaxing after a stressful day at work’. But both Lena’s and Katie’s
comments above represent also an attitude that many of our non-
offended participants shared: they conceived humour as only a bit of fun,
as trivial and inconsequential, and so they argued, humour has to trans-
gress and go a bit ‘too far’ in order to be funny.
Another group of people we interviewed felt some form of discomfort

with the humorous content they saw on television, but still did not want
to get upset about it. When watching Mario Barth with housewife Silke,
she noted: “Sometimes it [humour] really goes too far. But then I think,
well, people will get over it. They are used to much worse stuff. And I
forget it immediately, and I DON’T WANT to remember it. I do not
need this” Silke advises everyone to get over it, not to be hung up on
something when there is stuff that is much worse. It could be argued that
Silke implicitly admits that there is indeed something there that we need
to get over. Something that—if we look at it closely—might hurt, anger
or cause pain. Silke’s justification for such offensive content being shown
on television was that there is much worse stuff, but her own emotional
strategy to protect herself from feeling hurt and offended is to forget,
not to remember and to get on with things. She encourages herself to
forgot about it because thinking about it and taking it seriously might
cause negative feelings, bring her down and get in her way, and she does
not need this.
Again, others avoided taking offence by displacing the responsibility
for offensive behaviour on television. When discussing Dieter Bohlen,
an (in)famous judge on Germany’s talent show ‘Deutschland sucht
den Superstar’ (equivalent to the UK’s Pop Idol), housewife Ankatrin
remarked:
Yes, Dieter Bohlen is mean to women in his comments. But, God, that’s
just how he is. You cannot change him [laughs]. And this is also part of
the show and everyone knows that he is like this… so you do not need to
go there if you cannot sing.
Ankatrin experiences Bohlen’s language as inappropriate when judg-

ing young women who participate in the show. Yet, for her, offence
can be avoided if talentless people simply don’t show up for the show.
This not only misinterprets the calculated role that these seemingly tal-
entless people play in the making of the show, but more importantly
moves responsibility for sexist behaviour from the perpetrator to the vic-
tim. This is also a common practice in wider discussions about rape and
sexual violence. Through victim blaming, the wider structures of power
that produce and mobilize misogyny, sexism and rape culture remain
unchallenged and therefore intact. This is one of many examples that
illustrate quite drastically how the avoidance of taking offence can feed
into dominant discourses and muffle affective reactions that point out
moments of injustice.
We further observed that people sometimes worked hard to avoid
‘strong’ term such as sexism to describe the content they were watching.
Even if a sexist joke or humorous representation upset them, these par-
ticipants preferred to circumscribe scenes or sentences that irritated them
and to find alternative explanations rather than calling it out as sexist.
This point can be illustrated through our interview with Heidi, a social
worker from Berlin. In the beginning of the interview, she said:
I think a lot of people take themselves too seriously… In all sorts of con-
texts. I think, I do not take myself so seriously, that’s why I do not get eas-
ily offended by a bad joke.
Yet, while we were watching a sequence of stand-up comedian Mario

Barth, Heidi showed, in her body language and her laughter, clear signs
of disapproval and discomfort. When asked about her reactions she
explained:
Yes, I really don’t know what angers me when I watch him… I think he’s
disgusting… somehow… he’s so aggressive. I think that’s what annoys me
about him… he has something of an aggressive man in him and you can
see this in his performance style. I can totally see how he would be that
kind of man who loses his control when his wife cooks something bad for
dinner or so. I think that’s what it is…
It can be argued that Heidi’s comment resonates with much humour

research that argues that it is not necessarily the content but the deliv-
ery that matters and that causes or does not cause offence. Yet what is
noteworthy is that Heidi does not use the words sexism or misogyny to
explain her emotive reaction. In the first moment, she produces herself
as a woman who can take a joke, who doesn’t take herself too seriously and
is therefore not a killjoy who spoils the mood for others or herself. Even
later in the interview when she circumscribes the aggressive and threaten-
ing aspects of patriarchy and sexism in Barth’s routine (that kind of man
who loses his control) she refrains from explaining her discomfort and dis-
gust towards Barth as a result of his sexism—in words and performance.
This draws attention to an often-discussed issue within media and cul-
tural studies: the gap between affect and discourse. This usually means
the inability to put unease into words. People might say, for instance,
“I don’t know how to describe this feeling”. But in Heidi’s case, as in
that of many others we interviewed, it was the other way around: Heidi
experienced Barth as somehow disgusting. ‘Somehow’ is important here
because it signals her struggle to connect this feeling with her descrip-
tion of him and his comedy. It somehow seems implausible to her that
she should associate disgust with male aggression, but this is exactly what
sexism is about: the concept of sexism was created by feminists to give
expression to the myriad of feelings, such as anger, disgust and horror
that women experience in the face of patriarchy. Sara Ahmed explains
why women might refrain from pointing out sexism when confronted
with it: “The violence of what was said or the violence of provocation
goes unnoticed. However she speaks, the feminist is usually the one who
is viewed as ‘causing the argument’, who is disturbing the fragility of
peace.” (Ahmed 2010, p. 65). Put differently, by pointing out the prob-
lem, you become the problem. The problem wasn’t here; it wasn’t seen
before you pointed it out and disturbed the peace.
We are not arguing that the avoidance of using loaded words such
as ‘sexism’ or strategies that allow us not to take humour seriously and
feel offended are conscious decisions. Yet we suggest that they can
become habits, everyday micro-strategies that help us to get through the
day, through our social environments without causing too much trou-
ble. It could be argued that female audiences of comedy and humour
have historically been trained to overlook moments of offence because
much mainstream comedy comes from men, and so for women to enjoy
it, they have to ignore sexism. To hide when feeling offended or not to
allow oneself to feel offended by something that was said in jest, means
to go along with it. It means to not to cause any trouble and not to
be seen as a killjoy. This, so we argue can be an exhausting yet under-
standable strategy for marginalised groups but it is also problematic
because it leaves oppressive power relations within society unchallenged.
“Maintaining public comfort requires that certain bodies ‘go along
with it’. To refuse to go along with it, to refuse the place in which you
are placed, is to be seen as trouble, as causing discomfort for others.”
(Ahmed 2010, pp. 68–69) Some women and men in our study sought
to avoid feeling uncomfortable or in particular making others feel their
discomfort. But, as many feminists have argued, sometimes one first just
needs to feel really, really bad before changes—great and small, personal
and collective—start happening (Kyrölä 2015).
Conclusion
This chapter aimed for a nuanced and contextualised understanding
of offensive humour by exploring the relationship between televised
humour and audience reactions in specific moments. We found that
our participants considered no topic off limits per se. Whether or not
offence was taken depended strongly on the specific humour regime
(who is the sender, who the receiver) in which a joke was embedded
and on the delivery style. Humour regimes that determine who can joke
about what, change depending on the social and cultural context, and
they can, as we have shown on the example of religious jokes, reinforce
social inequalities and discrimination. Further, we found that audiences
used offensive humour as a tool for making social distinctions: by claim-
ing that certain humour was in poor taste and therefore experienced as
offensive, drew a symbolic line between themselves as subjects of value
and the rest of the audience. The final section of this chapter has set out
to explore how hard audiences sometimes work at not feeling offended
and why this is problematic. By reading offence counter-intuitively, we
considered how the avoidance of this ‘ugly’ feeling can operate as a strat-
egy for evading responsibility and action and thereby hindering social
change. If our current systems of inequality and injustice require us to
get along and show compliance through laughing at the right points,
then we can understand how important it is to take offence and feel
offended. As ‘being jolted out of one’s comfort zone can open up new
worlds’ (Kyrölä 2015, p. 142).
Note: A version of this Chapter has appeared in the European Journal
of Cultural Studies.
References
Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and His World. New York: Wiley.
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Billig, M. (2005). Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour.
London: SAGE.
Bourdieu, P. (2010). Distinction. New York: Routledge.
BSC. (1998). Code on Standards. London: Broadcasting Standards Commission.
Bucaria, C., & Barra, L. (2016). Taboo Comedy: Television and Controversial
Humour. In C. Bucaria & L. Barra (Eds.). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Claessens, N., & Dhoest, A. (2010). Comedy taste : Highbrow/lowbrow comedy
and cultural capital. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies,
7(1), 49–72.
Finding, D. (2010). Figuring Gender and Sexuality in Little Britain. In S.

Lockyer (Ed.), Reading Little Britain: Comedy Matters on Contemporary
Television. London: I B Tauris.
Friedman, S. (2011). The cultural currency of a “good” sense of humour: British
comedy and new forms of distinction. The British Journal of Sociology, 62(2),
347–370.
Graefer, A. (2014a). “Charlotte makes me lafe [ sic ] sooo much”: Online
laughter, affect, and femininity. Journal of European Popular Culture, 5(2),
105–120.
Graefer, A. (2014b). White stars and orange celebrities: The affective production
of whiteness in humorous celebrity-gossip blogs. Celebrity Studies, 5(1–2),
107–122.
Gray, J. (2006). Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and
Intertextuality. New York: Routledge.
Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.
London: Routledge.
Joshi, K. (2016). Racialization of Religion and Global Migration. In J. B.
Saunders, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh E., & S. Snyder, (Eds.), Intersections of Religion
and Migration: Issues at the Global Crossroads - Google Books (pp. 123–151).
London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Juzwiak, R. (2017). Dave Chappelle is Still Telling Transphobic Jokes, According
to Report. Jezebel.com. Available at: http://jezebel.com/dave-chappelle-is-
still-telling-transphobic-jokes-acco-1797475330. [Accessed September 15,
2017].
Kehily, M. J., & Nayak, A. (1997). “Lads and Laughter”: Humour and the produc-
tion of heterosexual hierarchies. Gender and Education, 9(1), 69–88. Available
at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09540259721466.
Kotthoff, H. (2006). Gender and humor: The state of the art. Journal of
Pragmatics, 38, 4–25.
Kuipers, G. (2002). Media culture and Internet disaster jokes: Bin Laden and the
attack on the World Trade Center. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 5(4),
450–470. Available at: http://ecs.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/1364942
002005004296. Accessed 20 Jan 2014.
Kuipers, G. (2006). Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Kuipers, G. (2009). Humor styles and symbolic boundaries. Journal of Literary
Theory, 3(2), 219–241.
Kuipers, G. (2011). The politics of humour in the public sphere: Cartoons,
power and modernity in the first transnational humour scandal. European
Kyrölä, K. (2010). Expanding Laughter: Affective Viewing, Body Image
Incongruity and “Fat Actress.” In M. Liljeström & S. Paasonen (Eds.),
Working with Affect in Feminist Readings. Disturbing Differences (pp. 72–85).

London: Routledge.
Kyrölä, K. (2015). Toward a contextual pedagogy of pain. Lambda Nordica,
1(2015), 131–144. Available at: http://www.lambdanordica.se/artikelarkiv_
sokresultat.php?lang=sv&fields[]=art_id&arkivsok=511#resultat.
Lawler, S. (2005). Disgusted subjects: The making of middle-class identities. The
Sociological Review, 53(3), 429–446.
Lockyer, S., & Pickering, M. (2008). You must be Joking: The Sociological
Critique of Humour and Comic Media. Sociology Compass, 2(3), 808–820.
Available at: https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/5599.
Lockyer, S., & Pickering, M. (2009). Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour. New
Mills, B. (2016). A Special Freedom: Regulating Comedy Offence. In C. Bucaria
& L. Barra (Eds.), Taboo Comedy: Television and Controversial Humour (pp.
209–227). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mulkay, M. (1988). On Humour. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Pickering, M., & Littlewood, J. (1998). “Heard the One About the White
Middle Class Heterosexual Father-in-Law?” Gender, Ethnicity and Political
Correctness in Comedy. In S. Wagg (Ed.), Because I Tell a Joke or Two:
Comedy, Politics and Social Difference (pp. 291–312). London: Routledge.
Sancho, J. (2003). Disabling Prejudice: Attitudes Towards Disability and Its
Portrayal on Television. London: BBC.
Stallybrass, P., & White, A. (1986). The Politics and Poetics of Transgressions.
London: Methuen.
Weaver, S. (2011). The Rhetoric of Racist Humour. London: Ashgate.
CHAPTER 4
Audiences Speak Back: Re-Working

Offensive Television
Abstract  This chapter addresses audiences’ questioning of what they

perceive to be ‘offensive’ material on television, not only with regard
to its ‘realness’ but also in terms of its social functions and role in
society. Through the development of critical responses to the text
depicted, for some audience members, overtly offensive material that
aims to marginalise particular groups enabled strong forms of emo-
tional responses, through deeply affective engagement with texts.
Offensive, provocative television, we suggest, is more than a negative
disposable—television content that openly provokes or offends might
become an important site where citizen-audiences perform a kind of
audiencing, which moves individual disgust or upset into a contribu-
tion to publicness.
Keywords  Reception · Television · Provocation · Action · Affect

Speaking back to television
In this chapter, we address people’s questioning of what they perceive

to be ‘offensive’ material on television, not only with regard to its ‘real-
ness’, but also in terms of its social functions and ‘effects’ in society.
This chapter explores the critical, and indeed even resistant, moments
when audiences ‘look through’ the offensive discourse on the screen.
For some audience members overtly offensive material aiming to mar-
ginalise particular groups enabled forms of emotional attachment rather

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67907-5_4
than detachment and disaffection. They reported to us feelings of sad-

ness and empathy, and affective bodily reactions such as crying. We
argue here that content that aims to offend might not only avert view-
ers but contains also a call to emotional investment that may foster
radically critical readings of a representation. These can be enabled, for
instance, through felt similarity, where the viewer’s personal experiences
or memories become re-invoked in the moment of viewing. By remem-
bering particular situations and the feelings that may have been associ-
ated with these, viewers may connect with the ‘offensive’ representation
in new ways (Skeggs and Wood 2012, p. 145). These findings illustrate
that we need to rethink ‘offensiveness’ as a negative monolith. What
causes offence, or is perceived as offensive, is more fluid and complex
than we commonly perceive. And our reactions to offensive material are
also diverse, ranging from buying into its ‘intended’ affective structure
to redirecting the anger towards unethical media producers and ena-
bling empathy and feelings of solidarity with the characters and scenes
depicted.
By paying attention to the nature of critique in audience responses
to offensive content, and their clearly articulated expectations of texts
and institutions, we locate this chapter within the rich array of research
that has been published on the relationships between popular television
and public life, where audiences’ affective engagement with popular cul-
ture has been theorised as meaningful for making sense of participation
in society. In this chapter, we suggest then that television content that
openly provokes or offends could become an important site where citi-
zen-audiences perform a kind of ‘audiencing’ (Fiske 1979), which moves
individual disgust or upset into a performance of publicness. In speaking
back to those behind provocative screens, audiences make the content
itself into a cultural resource and a rich site for locating not just a host
of negative emotions, but a myriad of ways in which individuals speak, in
private, as publics.
In this chapter, we investigate how audiences critique and speak back
to offensive television, and how these kinds of response say something
meaningful about people living in societies that may be simultaneously
multi-cultural and hostile, or that may house pockets of strong liberal
inclusiveness within a political majority that tilts to the right. Our find-
ings reveal that, while most of our audience members spoke back to TV
using a range of clearly public reference points and referring to social,
economic and political contexts behind what they saw, the range of
4 AUDIENCES SPEAK BACK: RE-WORKING OFFENSIVE TELEVISION 73
emotions and emotional involvement in their responses also made these

overtly public reference points personally meaningful. Reading this
against the backdrop of the affective nature of the work done by citi-
zen-audiences leads us to conclude that the space in front of an offen-
sive screen is more than a regulatory space—it is a site where privateness
and publicness, emotion and reason, affect and citizenship are blended.
Offensive screens are therefore sites—and resources—for investigation
because, by pushing audiences to their limits (subjective as these may
be), they open up possibilities of action. These small, private moments
of anger, disgust, sorrow or shock may contain potential for something
larger than the sum total of its parts.
This Public is Not Condemned to Silence

In this chapter, we draw on Claire Hemming’s concept of ‘affective
solidarity’ (2012) and Zizi Papacharissi’s theorisation of affective pub-
lics (2016). For Hemmings, affective solidary is necessary for sustain-
able social change, but it is rooted not only in ‘positive’ feelings such as
empathy but also very much in the experience of affective dissonances
such as anger, frustration and pain. Similarly to feminist theorists such
as Ahmed (2004, 2007), Lorde (1984) and Ngai (2005), Hemmings
complicates a binary understanding of affect that distinguishes between
‘good’ and ‘bad’ affect, and helps us to tease out the ‘positive’ aspects
of offence. Papacharissi’s work considers the power of affective attune-
ment—that is, how people come to feel their proximity to, or distance
from, current events, news stories or civic mobilisation through various
new media interpellations. In other words, she explores how public dis-
plays of affect can function as political statements and how we can under-
stand affect as a lens into “the soft structures of [civic] engagement”
(p. 115). Similarly to Hemmings, however, Papacharissi does not equate
feelings of engagement with immediate political change. And yet, like
Hemmings, she remains committed to thinking about how emotion and
affect may be related to the ways in which change and transformation
emerge.
While Papacharissi develops her work primarily in the context of
social media, as she works with the digital footprints of affect in the pub-
lic sphere, for the purposes of this project, we draw on her theorisa-
tion of how the physically felt array of emotions and sensations we speak
of as affect enables us to read individual critiques of offensive content as tools

with which people speak in private as publics. As Dayan reminds us (2001),
television’s “atomized public” need not be an “amorphous mass”, but,
It is possible for such a public to be pro-active, self-aware, now dismissive

of other publics, now defensive under their gaze. This public is not con-
demned to silence. (p. 745)
Papacharissi’s theorisation (2012) of affect as the “energy that drives,

neutralizes, or entraps networked publics” can be extended, we find, to
the angry, upset, dismayed or shocked responses of audiences to offen-
sive content, and it is through this critique—sometimes knee-jerk lashing
out against screens and sometimes considered, constructive responses—
that the spectator at home grows beyond an entity in an amorphous col-
lection of individuals, and becomes part of something larger. For too
long, of course, social science has restricted discussions of affect and the
public to an unproductive contrast between emotion and reason, and
interventions such as Papacharissi’s go productively beyond this dialectic
by introducing a theorization of affect into the heart of the very act of
being a public. In order for the atomized public of television not to be
“condemned to silence” (Dayan 2001), the waxing and waning of felt
emotions is central, constructive and critical—and the reception of pro-
vocative/offensive content is one of the richest sites in which we may see
this kind of productive interpretive critique at work.
And yet there are particularities about the medium of television.
Papacharissi’s affective publics leave physical traces of both their affec-
tive experiences and their publicness online. Tweets, emotive outbursts
on social media pages and comments in the blogosphere document what
goes on, and becomes an archivable, documented reality. The television
spectator, on the other hand, has no such way of physically rendering
her work visible and, as Hartley (1987) reminds us, the publicness of all
these emotions and interpretive work involved in reception is only vis-
ible textually. Is the television audience, with its host of bodily sensible
emotions and feelings, to be considered as atomised individuals that stay
invisible? Not quite, if we trace the rich work being done by scholars on
the bridges between popular culture, publicness and citizenship. Joke
Hermes (2006), for instance, remarks on the emotional attributes of the
space where an individual spectator becomes a citizen thus:
Cultural citizenship offers both the ground rules of interpretation and

evaluation and the space to be excited, frightened, enthralled, committed
or any of the huge range of states of mind and feeling that we connect
with the use of popular media rather than just be concerned or pleased as
becomes the informed citizen, the news chapter reader of old. Cultural cit-
izenship thus refers to processes of bonding and community building, and
reflection on that bonding, which we are well familiar with but have failed
to understand as the unruly but necessary input for more formally defined
citizenships. (p. 34)
There are countless other instances along these lines, many admit-
tedly focused on social media, which we have been inspired by as we
approach the private, angry, sometimes empowered, sometimes power-
less space between ourselves and an openly discriminatory on-screen
text that becomes, precisely because of the affective engagement it fos-
ters, a publicly meaningful space. Liesbet van Zoonen’s work on agonism
and antagonism, in the response to the film Fitna (van Zoonen et al.
2011), van Zoonen’s prior work (2005) on the convergence of popu-
lar culture and politics, Ytre-Arne’s (2011) use of feminist interventions
in the public-sphere conversation as she inspected the political potential
of reading women’s magazines—these are all instances from a long and
rich list of work in this regard. Helen Wood’s innovative text-in-action
method in her book Talking with Television (2009) grasps the critique,
resistance and agency involved in utterances made to the screen/pre-
senter as audiences sit in the private spaces in front of their televisions.
Extending Liebes and Katz’s (1990) attempts to map audiences speaking
alongside and ‘with’ television, Wood (2009) emphasises the discursively
critical role of speaking with, and often against, views and voices behind
a screen. Despite these interventions, moving from the space in front a
television set (however productive and critical of offensive content that
space may be) to a vision of the citizen-audience that is not solely ana-
lytical or textual is, of course, a difficult task, but it is important not
to be restricted at the level of swaying between whether or not the cri-
tique in audiences’ speaking back to provocative screens is ‘enough’. For
Livingstone and Lunt (2002), the critical viewer conducts social action
by both drawing from and feeding into a shared framework of social dis-
course; for Dayan (2001), “if a public exists in relation to television… it
is an almost public” (p. 762).
It’s Easy to Punch Down Somebody Worse off Than You’:

Critical Investments in Reading Offensive Television
The semantic and syntactic dimensions of critical reading in audiences’
interpretive work have, of course, longstanding roots in Hall’s encoding-
decoding (2001) and the rich spate of research conducted throughout
the 1980s and 1990s by the Birmingham School, as well as in socio-
logical and cultural research conducted in the American academy and
exemplified by David Morley, Andrea Press, Joke Hermes, Elizabeth
Bird, James Lull and Mary Brown, amongst others. Nearly four decades
after the particular historical moment in Western media studies when
this research made its contributions, one may successfully draw from it
a focus on interpretive engagement, implicit in which may now be the
recognition that audience research meets its real challenges not in discov-
ering attentive, critical, subversive readings, but in analysing why and how
people make sense of the media in the ways they do (Livingstone 1998),
what cultures this paints, what histories this tells and what stories this
documents. The critical role of audience interpretations now has nearly
half a century of research behind it. This includes Morley’s (2003) expo-
sition of oppositional readings, where viewers questioned the very basis
and premise of television texts, thus painting a picture of a politically
resistant viewer opposing hegemonic texts. It also includes Liebes and
Katz’s (1990) analysis of referential and critical decoding, where referen-
tial interpretations involved treating the text as applicable to real life, and
critical interpretations treated the text as conveying specific messages or
narrative formulas. And it includes Livingstone and Lunt’s (2002) analy-
sis of audiences’ views about the nature of the programme, the nature of
communicative engagement and the nature of discussions on the show.
Without rehearsing these findings, in this chapter we build upon this
history to focus on the socio-political and cultural critiques emerging
from audiences’ response to offensive content. When we started listening
to audience reactions to content they found offensive, we encountered a
spate of emotions, felt bodily sensations and many unarticulated expres-
sions of critique. In these, we could easily identify aesthetic, political,
socio-economic and cultural themes. Socio-political lines of engagement
see viewers speaking back to the text by critiquing the social, economic
and political contexts of its operation. These include instances where
they speak about and against the state of democracy they witness, chang-
ing climates of investment in public resources, historical shifts in the
nature and shape of public service programming, and their experiences

with and expectations of private and public media institutions. More cul-
tural-contextual lines of investigation see viewers engaging critically with
cultural issues, including instances where individuals recount troubling
experiences of discrimination, where they debate the role of humorous
offensive content in a society that continues to discriminate, and where
they reflect on the intersectional axes of discrimination at play in think-
ing about themselves as audiences in society.
All forms of critique encountered in our research—be they socio-
political or cultural-contextual in nature—contain two key themes. First,
most audience members showed strong emotions and affective reactions
in their critique, because that critique was often animated by their per-
sonal experiences, location and embodiment. We paid attention to these
affective moments, which found their expression not only in words, but
also in unarticulated expressions, requests to pause interviews, requests
to not watch certain clips, or even turning away from the screen. Second,
most audiences articulated normative expectations of public institutions,
not from a standpoint of vulnerability and seeking protection, but rather
as an expectation that institutions would contribute to a responsible, rep-
resentative, inclusive and diverse media sphere. In both kinds of critique,
as described below, both these themes cut through visibly.
For instance, Heidi, from Berlin, felt disgusted at the portrayal of
the vulnerable on screen. While we were watching a reality TV pro-
gramme about unruly teenagers from deprived social backgrounds,
she said:
I am a social worker and I start to wonder: what kind of image of our soci-
ety does television actually want to portray? What is their (TV producers’)
intention? […] The picture that I get from the TV shows is actually quite
disgusting.
As is visible from this quote, Heidi is not offended by the young, dys-
functional teenager on the screen, but rather, due to her personal expe-
rience, she ‘looks through’ these representations and performs an
alternative reading of the show that makes her angry with the TV produc-
ers who are (in this new reading) responsible for generating a “disgust-
ing” picture of society. Skeggs and Wood argue that it is exactly “[r]eality
television’s call to emotional investment [that] may undermine traditional
structures of representation and forms of subject positioning usually
determined by processes of signification” (Skeggs and Wood 2012,

p. 144). This means that, even though the television series is representing
the teenager here as dysfunctional and worthy of social derision, viewers
such as Heidi can use their own experiences, and the feelings that may be
associated with these, to look through the symbolic representation on the
screen and find a different connection to and evaluation of him. This new
connection enables Heidi to shift her perspective and to utter a critique
of political-economic structures of the media industry and society rather
than of singular individuals. Taking offence is here a necessary tool for
uttering socio-political critique, even if this may—in the first instance—
stay within the confined space of her living room.
Similarly to Heidi, Kelly, a young mother in Britain, questioned the
motives of programme makers and implicitly uttered her disappointment
with media institutions and regulators who failed to meet her expecta-
tions and provide useful children’s programmes. As our interview with
her revealed, she was offended by children’s TV programmes such as
Barbie, which teach her daughter wrong gender ideals:
White, blonde, ridiculously, unhealthily skinny, which is why I don’t

like her watching it [Barbie] because, I mean, we like to promote a very
healthy body image. My husband’s a PT, so you know, we’re very aware of
health and stuff like that and, you know, we don’t want her thinking that
you’re only beautiful if you’re skinny. She happens to be blonde and white,
but that’s not the point. I’m very aware of the sort of mini-cultures. Like,
you know, I make sure she sees me getting changed and stuff, because I’m
not skinny […] I want my daughter to see my surgery marks and stretch
marks and all so she knows that kind of a false glaze is false—and, well,
I really feel disgusted by that [Barbie]. Is there nobody who actually thinks
about, you know, big-picture stuff—what messages we are conveying to
society, ladidadida?
This theme of feeling ‘disgusted’ could be dismissed easily, where

recorded in a transcript, as an expression and nothing more, but the fre-
quency of its recurrence and the face-to-face expressions that accompa-
nied it signal the very real, lived bodily experiences that texts can invite
in audiences, and how these very responses may then prompt thought
and engagement in the discourses a particular spectator participates
in and contributes to. On a first level, we could say that Kelly’s dis-
gust finds the programme Barbie as an object that she reads as harmful
to her daughter because it circulates unattainable, idealised standards of

beauty. Our aim here is not to evaluate the well-rehearsed debate about
this (for a critical discussion of this, see Coleman 2009), but to high-
light how taking offence motivates her to develop habits and practices
through which she hopes to correct her daughter’s “false gaze”. Kelly
is disgusted not only by Barbie but, on a second level, also by social and
cultural inequalities and the knowledge systems that naturalise these. Her
act of undressing in front of her daughter can therefore be seen as a prac-
tice that aims to counter this naturalisation by providing an alternative
view. By doing this, she want to re-orientate her daughter away from the
Barbie image (Kelly turned away in disgust), towards the ‘real’ body.
By drawing attention to the emotive responses of our participants, we
do not want to divert attention away from analysis of wider structures
of power. As we explained already in the Introduction of this book, we
are not arguing for depoliticization or for an over-privileging of the indi-
vidual. Rather, we explore the complex imbrications of ‘the personal’ or
‘the emotional’ with ‘the public’ or ‘the structural’. Tamara, a teacher
from Germany who we already referred to in chap. 3, showed how cer-
tain television programmers made her feel powerless and physically
sick—not because of her own individual sensibilities (even though they
intersected with her experiences as a teacher and were felt in her body),
but because she saw in them oppressive structures of power represented
and reinforced. While we were watching a clip from Deutschland sucht
den Superstar (Germany’s version of Pop Idol) she reported:
I find this really hard to watch. I am so overwhelmed with emotions.

It angers me to see how people are exploited and made fun of here even if
it is all staged. It makes me nuts. How people are misrepresented here and
broken down into stereotypes. And it also angers me because my students
watch shows like this. Or Germany’s next Top Model… and this is really
how they learn about gender roles, it’s unbelievable but true. And they
learn that they have to give everything. That they have to shame them-
selves, and give everything just to please others.
Despite this initial paralysing state of being “overwhelmed with emo-

tions”, the quote from Tamara also shows signs of the appropriate and
productive reaction of anger. These programmes make her feel uncom-
fortable, at times even powerless, but taking offence at representations
that seem unfair and unjust also makes her a critical teacher who wants
to give her students the right tools for deconstructing and challenging
them. This resonates poignantly with Papacharissi’s (2016) theorisation
of affect as a liminal space that renders “individuals powerful and poten-
tially powerless at the same time” (p. 311).
Abdul, in Britain, also illustrated this ambivalent nature of feeling
offended as paralysing and empowering at the same time. Abdul, who is
a religious leader of a community mosque, is upset by the bad language
that he finds on many TV programmes, even on the public broadcasting
services.
I feel a bit… paralysed sometimes. Yes, the BBC is a public broadcasting

organisation. And if they allow these sort of things, anybody who is sit-
ting there censoring the programmes, editing the programmes, they’re not
thinking. Because these programmes also are watched by children in my
house, not necessarily adults. I don’t know what time these programmes
are shown, but I feel very, very bad that my kids may copy what they see.
Abdul’s quote shows that he feels helpless, powerless towards the media
institutions and regulators that distribute media content that might harm
his children. He worries for his young immigrant family, who he fears
may not be “forgiven quite so easily for youthful transgressions, living
in London today”. His sense of feeling offended is closer to a sense of
fear and worry about his children potentially adopting lifestyle choices
that he does not approve of, and, worse, about his children being for-
given less easily in a society he finds sceptical of migrants. His worries
about the younger generation are ones he shares with Tamara and Kelly,
quoted above, but the bases of these concerns are different and speak
to different axes of socio-cultural norms and prejudices. His worry, too,
is felt intensely in his body and speaks of concern rather than anger—
this critique comes from a different place than one of shock or horror
or disgust alone. But both Abdul and Kelly, quoted above, report feel-
ing sensate emotions in their roles as parents from very different cultural
contexts and backgrounds. Both their feelings arise from concern for
those they care for, and yet the nature of their concern prompts different
kinds of talk, carrying different kinds of bodily responses. It is important
to read Abdul’s comment about worrying more for his immigrant kids’
transgressions as a lens into the kind of fragmented and fearful society
we currently occupy. Like Kelly as a mum, or Tamara as a teacher, Abdul
is concerned about what the next generation is learning. But in the next
moment he is doubly worried—and hence different from either Tamara

or Kelly—because of his raced position as an immigrant. He worries that
his children’s transgressions, however youthful they may be, may not be
forgiven by Western society precisely because they are immigrant kids.
That is an impactful lens into a society that could use the kind of affec-
tive action we speak of in this chapter.
Paul, a male nurse in Germany, reflected on the changing nature of
broadcasting over time and was very critical of the pressure that public
broadcasting services feel in times of neoliberalism, when every aspect of
life has to submit to economic profit-making. He no longer understands
public broadcasting services as providing programmes that may be difficult
and at time uncomfortable, luring the viewer out of his/her comfort zone.
By now, he argues, “they participate in the race to catch audience atten-
tion by providing content that is easy to digest… hipster TV that is flat-
tering its own middle-class audience’” Sarcastically, he dubbed ZDF Neo,
a public broadcasting service, ‘ZDF Neoliberal’. And yet Paul is nuanced
in his critique and does not buy into a right-wing rhetoric that has hi-
jacked critiques of neoliberal capitalism for its own nationalist(ic) purpose.
Instead, he took offence when we asked him if he thought neutral pro-
grammes such as the news were manipulated to catch audience attention:
No, I don’t think so. And that conversation can easily go wrong. The
best example is Germany in the last three months, the Pegida movement
in Leipzig where there are 20,000 Wutburger (angry citizens) demon-
strating against a ‘lying press’. In Munich we have the opposite demon-
stration, again with 20,000 people, and I was one of them and we were
against Pegida. And what do you get to hear all the time as their (Pegida’s)
biggest argument: German Press, lying press […] and then Pegida people
don’t allow us to label them as Right, or as neo-Nazis. They claim that all
the news in Germany is just bad because it is manipulated. In my opinion
that has quite a strong anti-Semitic or conspiracy-theory touch.
Taking offence, as a feeling of dissonance, had mobilised Paul to become

part of a highly visible public that demonstrates against populist move-
ments such as Pegida. That sense of dissonance was transformed in Paul’s
case into a sense of injustice and then a desire to rectify that. Feminist
theorists such as Claire Hemmings or Audre Lorde have long argued
that the moment of affect—anger, frustration, or even rage—can be the
birth of transformation and change, even if its outcome remains unstable
and cannot be foreseen. To quote Hemmings: “[affect] as the core of

transformation is of course an unstable entity and its impact cannot
be controlled. The possible next actions it results in are myriad. […]
Affective dissonance [offence] cannot guarantee […] politicisation or even
a resistant mode. And yet, it just might…” (Hemmings 2012, p. 157)
Richard, a young, gay media worker in Germany, is offended by the
gender stereotypes that he finds in German detective stories such as
Tatort) because these ideas, he contends, are woven into everyday ban-
ter, water-cooler chit-chat at the office, and soon become part of the tap-
estry of social life:
Tatort is such a macho thing… there’s always, well, in nearly every new
episode [laughs] that young inexperienced forensic doctor, just fresh out
of Uni… and she gets ridiculed and not taken seriously. And I think that’s
horrible because it underpins this gender stereotype. It doesn’t work
against this cliché, but feeds into it.
Similarly, Iris, a white, middle-class professional from Munich, is angered by

the fact that the real world concerns of women embedded within patriarchy,
and within race and class relations, do not make their way into German tel-
evision programming. This tells her that the media has failed in its tasks of
responsibly contributing to the world it operates within, and that exclusion-
ary and discriminatory social relations continue to be (re)produced. She said:
I think it is really upsetting that TV never represents women that actu-

ally exist in society. For instance, women who worry about money and the
gender pay gap. No woman in a German TV show would actually ever talk
about this! They are portrayed as housewives or young pretty things that
want to marry an old rich guy. But we never see representations of female
bosses who talk money… The only time you get someone talking about
money is maybe in an interview from the Oscars where an actress states
that she finally wants to get the same pay as her male colleagues… but that
would never be a topic for German TV series or film.
These moments of taking offence, which do not necessarily come about

spontaneously when watching a particular series, but that emerged when
our participants reflected on the German television landscape as a whole,
still have the potential, we would argue, to create affected and critical
publics because these feelings hint towards a felt injury that is shared by
many marginalised subjects in patriarchal society. The anger and offence
felt and uttered not only build a counter-discourse to the hegemonic dis-
course, but could change the ‘structure of feelings’ that holds patriarchal
norms in place. The representations that offended Richard and Iris are
built on traditional gender stereotypes long appreciated and welcomed
by audiences, making audiences laugh and TV producers hope to attract
sympathy and attention through this. The quotes here from Richard and
Iris speak of a different public that experiences these representations not
as pleasurable, but as hurtful and offensive. This may only represent an
‘almost public’ that finds expression here, and their affective dissonance
may not translate into immediate political action, but, as Hemmings
notes, change starts with feeling differently about something that has
previously passed as ‘normal’. She reminds us that “in order to know dif-
ferently, we have to feel differently” (2012, p. 150).
And yet not all of our participants’ critiques were limited to affect and
discourse. Jackie, a bisexual LGBT rights activist, who is disabled, newly
unemployed and lives in inner-city London, took action. She came across
as perhaps the most critical, vocal and articulate of the audience members
we spoke to in Britain. Her unarticulated and discursively non-verbalized
emotions were striking—our interview had to be paused many times,
clips had to be fast-forwarded, and in Jackie we met someone who was
committed to things changing with regard to the ways in which minority
communities in general are the object of ridicule, directly or indirectly, in
contemporary broadcasting’s search to ‘qualify as funny’. Upset, Jackie,
said of the programme Derek, as well as Little Britain:
This insults my intelligence, insults every part of me that’s queer, that’s

different and it’s just… Yes, and also, like, the sexualised stuff like getting
pulled into the police car, lady rape, lady rape, which is unbearable. Sorry
I had to ask you to switch it off. Sorry, this society claims to be very toler-
ant and anti-racist and anti… and equality’s a big thing. But I think a lot of
society have got very strange views, speaking as a black person, of what…
like, racist is only racist if somebody’s, like, throwing a brick and shout-
ing. Not the little things that get you down day after day and just make
life unbearable; and the same goes for homophobia or biphobia, it’s not
somebody throwing a rock and beating up a queer person, it’s the little
insults and the jabs. I don’t know if people who have been abused in the
past would be laughing at Ricky Gervais, they may; if they’re in a whole
room with people laughing they may do it out of self-preservation, but the
whole logic of it… That whole punching down, it’s easy to punch down
somebody who’s worse off than you.
This quote above was perhaps the most impactful point in the British
phase of our fieldwork. Jackie’s emotions, her felt sensations, her sense
of feeling punched down was real, lived and sensate; especially, she
shared with us her experience of being asked, when revealing her dis-
ability, ‘are you Derek, or what?’ Like so many we spoke to, her critique
did not come from a place of detached, objective socio-political evalua-
tion (alone), it arose from a deeply personal and political place of feeling
trodden on. This pain mobilized Jackie to create her own art:
I really would like to see some kind of reflection of myself, and I never get
that. Not on TV, not in magazines. And, I mean, that’s part of the reason
why I started writing fiction, to see myself reflected a bit more.
Emily, in Britain, said that for her personally, offence is felt most directly
when television chooses to ridicule minority communities who have to
experience ridicule in the streets of her country and in the Western world
at large. Even more so, she said, than sexism or classism, the casual,
throwaway comments about religious communities that seek to taint one
and all with the same brush upset her ‘beyond belief’. She spoke of her
friend’s experiences of living with this, and to her this speaks far more
personally than any other form of ridicule on television.
I think jokes on terrorism of any form are really upsetting… I was away
with one of my friends who’s a Muslim when that, when that behead-
ing happened. Yes, and she felt like everyone was looking at her. She, yes,
because society was, kind of, turning in on, oh, she’s a Muslim. You know,
it’s that, all the backpack jokes about, you know, after 911, all that had
jokes about, oh it’s a Muslim with a backpack, ooh, you know, there’s
going to be a bomb. That must be really hard to deal with.
Taking offence on behalf of others points us towards the potential for

solidarity that lies within the ‘negative’ feeling of offence. When the
kind of reflexivity visible in the quote above leads to feelings of anger
and upset about certain representations of religious minorities, then this
may be a productive basis from which to seek solidarity with others, not
founded on a shared identity or on a presumption about how the other
feels, but on also feeling the desire for transformation arising out of the
experience of discomfort, and against the odds.
Conclusions
In discomfort, anger and upset, one stands out and feels ‘out of place’,
becomes disoriented and remains on the margins, floating, which in
turn demands reorientation and, according to Ahmed, can open up
new worlds much more effectively than remaining comfortable. Of
course, offence does not always enable new or positive perspectives,
but, as Kyrölä (2015) notes, discomfort can create a productive space.
Whether or not our offended audiences are (part of) affective publics,
or how far they are from becoming affective publics or ‘almost pub-
lics’, these are not questions that are easy to answer when it comes to
non-digital media, where the act of reception leaves no physical traces.
Drawing on these conversations, the argument we would make is not
that audiences sometimes speak of more ‘obviously’ public concerns—
such as the media’s lauded right to free speech, austerity regimes affect-
ing public services including broadcasting, or critiques of the ways in
which multiculturalism has worked in Western democracies—when criti-
quing and speaking back to offensive media content (although they do).
It is rather that there is a publicness of citizen-viewers, audience-citizens
or citizen-audiences that can be found embedded within the gamut
of emotions people physically feel and express in front of a screen that
offends them. The very site of offensive media content becomes a fas-
cinating one for study, precisely because the physically felt, un/articu-
lated affective trajectories of anger, upset, shock or disgust are vehicles
that are mobilised to respond to the social, economic and political world
that audiences make sense of, engage with and sometimes, feel trapped
within. Livingstone and Lunt’s account (2002) of the critical viewer
of television talk shows argued not only that people’s critical responses
draw on social knowledge, but that “the products of critical response are
also social” (p. 91). Moving away from dealing with the form of critique
(for instance, whether critique is referential or interpretive, syntactic or
semantic), in this chapter we have explored the affective nature of cul-
tural, social and political critiques spoken back to offensive texts by audi-
ences, with the intention of highlighting the potential carried in these
critiques. We have tried to argue that the complexity of ‘offensive’ mate-
rial lies not simply in clarifying what is offensive (or how subjective this
is), or even in expanding regulatory understandings of the term (with the
expensive messiness that involves), but also in the liminal space between
an individual spectator who is disgusted, annoyed or upset and her televi-

sion screen. This space, as we have shown, is home to strong lines of crit-
ical investment in reading and responding to that which causes offence,
and it is along these lines that an ‘investment’ in provocative screens con-
tributes to an individual’s sense of belonging, identity and place in the
society s/he lives in. These living-room spaces in front of a television set
that provokes or angers are not simply negative, vulnerable, unproduc-
tive spaces, but spaces where action may originate, even if that means
initially for verbalised discontent within the home. Borrowing from Dean
(2010), who admittedly writes about online networks, this kind of affec-
tive investment may not produce communities, but it may produce feel-
ings of community. We suggest that perhaps it is these kinds of affective,
critical investments that create possibilities for Dayan’s ‘almost publics’
to lose the ‘almost’ and become closer to publics, especially as European
societies show parallel trends of increasing popularity for political parties
of the right, and a strong and growing history of public protests against
this. The individuals provoked to feel such strong, sensate emotions,
generating passionate, articulate critique, are all participants in their own
social networks outside their living rooms—somewhere, these voices
make themselves heard: in private homes, at water coolers, in cafeterias,
at family gatherings, or even in formal forums. In a patchwork quilt of
individual and collective action, we suggest that if we return to the affec-
tive spaces between individuals and provocative texts (instead of simply
writing of these as of an unknowable entity, subjective and elusive) and if
we investigate the nature of individual, affective investments in speaking
back to these texts (not just, or at all, to see how far a message has been
rejected or opposed), then we may recognise in these outbursts, and
sometimes considered critical responses, some potential for action.
References
Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. New York: Routledge.
Ahmed, S. (2007). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Coleman, R. (2009). The becoming of bodies: Girls, images, experience.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Dayan, D. (2001). The peculiar public of television. Media, Culture & Society,
23(6), 743–765.
Dean, J. (2010). Affective networks. Media Tropes eJournal, 2(2), 19–44.
Fiske, J. (1979). Semiotics: Its Contribution to the Study of Intercultural

Communication. Educational Broadcasting International, 12(2), 51–57.
Hall, S. (2001). Encoding/decoding. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks,
166–176.
Hartley, J. (1987). Invisible fictions: Television audiences, paedocracy, pleasure.
Textual Practice, 1(2), 121–138.
Hermes, J. (2006). Citizenship in the Age of the Internet. European Journal of
Communication, 21(3), 295–309.
Hemmings, C. (2012). Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political
transformation. Feminist Theory, 13(2), 147–161.
Kyrölä, K. (2015). Toward a contextual pedagogy of pain. Lambda Nordica,
Liebes, T., & Katz, E. (1990). The export of meaning: Cross-cultural readigns of
Dallas.
Livingstone (1998), Livingstone, Sonia. “14 Relationships between media and
audiences.” Media, Ritual and Identity (2002): 237.
Livingstone, S., & Lunt, P. (2002). Talk on Television: Audience Participation
and Public Debate. Routledge.
Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Trumansburg: Crossing
Press.
Morley, D. (2003). Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. Routledge.
Ngai, S. (2005). Ugly feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Papacharissi, Z., & de Fatima Oliveira, M. (2012). Affective news and net-
worked publics: The rhythms of news storytelling on# Egypt. Journal of
Communication, 62(2), 266–282.
Papacharissi, Z. (2016). Affective publics and structures of storytelling:
Sentiment, events and mediality. Information, Communication & Society,
19(3), 307–324.
Skeggs, B., & Wood, H. (2012). Reacting to reality television: Performance, audi-
ence and value. London: Routledge.
van Zoonen, L. (2005). Entertaining the citizen: When politics and popular cul-
ture converge. Rowman & Littlefield.
van Zoonen, L., Vis, F., & Mihelj, S. (2011). YouTube interactions between
agonism, antagonism and dialogue: Video responses to the anti-Islam film
Fitna. New Media & Society, 13(8), 1283–1300.
Wood, H. (2009). Talking with television: Women, talk shows, and modern self-
reflexivity. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
Ytre-Arne, B. (2011). Women’s magazines and their readers: The relation-
ship between textual features and practices of reading. European Journal of
Cultural Studies, 14(2), 213–228.
CHAPTER 5
Audiences’ Expectations of Regulators

and Producers
Abstract  This chapter explores the expectations audiences articulate

about regulatory processes behind television content they find offensive.
First, mapping people’s responses on to the conceptual pairing of citizens
and consumers, we find audiences aligning themselves with citizen inter-
ests, even when, often on the surface, they respond to media regulation
and institutions with suspicion. Second, we find that complaints that make
it to media regulators are just the tip of iceberg. Third, in investigating
people’s expectations of actors and institutions in their responses to televi-
sion content that startles, upsets, or simply offends them, we note that it is
crucial to treat a conversation on free speech and censorship with caution.
Keywords  Regulation · Television · Policy · Offence · Expectations

Audiences
In this chapter, we unpack audiences’ expectations of media regulators

and producers in the context of television content that they perceive as
offensive. We pay attention to the literature developed around media reg-
ulation in order to distil theorisations of regulatory roles and use these
A version of this chapter has been previously published as - Das, R. & Graefer, A.
(2017). The regulatory perceptions of offended audiences:The citizen-audience
of provocative screens. Communication Culture and Critique. Online First.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67907-5_5
as a backdrop against which to read the perceptions and expectations

audiences articulate about those behind provocative screens. This chap-
ter focuses on three conclusions. First, mapping people’s responses on
to the now established conceptual pairing of citizens and consumers, we
find audiences aligning themselves with citizen interests, even when, often
on the surface they respond to media regulation and media institutions
with suspicion. Second, our results show that complaints that make it to
media regulators are the tip of icebergs. Contrary to what we expected,
swear words, bad language and inaccurate facts were not always what peo-
ple wanted to talk to us about. Third, in investigating people’s expecta-
tions of actors and institutions in their responses to television content that
startles, upsets or just offends them, we note that it is crucial to treat a
conversation on free speech and censorship with caution. The voice of
the audience is not satisfactorily—yet—incorporated within media policy
design and frameworks, and these findings highlight the necessity for tele-
vision regulation to better incorporate and include the voice of audiences.
The Implied Audience and the Citizen-Consumer

in German and British Television Regulation
In this chapter, we turn to Lunt and Livingstone’s work over the last dec-
ade (2011, 2012) on making sense of the UK media regulator’s work
and its relationship as a ‘quango’ (quasi-autonomous non-governmental
organisation) with the British public. Juxtaposing neoliberal visions of a
receding, small state with diminished or diminishing regulatory responsi-
bilities against social-democratic visions of a state that seeks to participate
in, engage with and enhance the public interest, Livingstone and Lunt dis-
tinguish between the consumer interest and the citizen interest (Table 5.1).
Lunt and Livingstone (2012) use four criteria from Habermasian pub-
lic sphere theory to ask whether the British media regulator “(1) rec-
ognises when it is dealing with issues of public concern (2) recognises
Table 5.1 From
Consumer interest Citizen interest
Livingstone and Lunt
(2012) Wants Needs
Individual Society
Private benefit Public benefits
Language of choice Language of rights
5 AUDIENCES’ EXPECTATIONS OF REGULATORS AND PRODUCERS 91
through its principles and practices that it represents one institution

among many (3) gives equal recognition to effectiveness and legitima-
tion and (4) respects rather than undermines the right to self-determi-
nation of citizens” (2011, p. 9). These underlie, they argue, the citizen
interest in media and communications, where audiences are conceptu-
alised as publics and where media institutions function with key social
and democratic responsibilities, rather than the consumer interest where
audiences are conceptualised as self-regulating consumers.
The pairing of German and British national contexts in this pro-
ject has been particularly insightful to trace the citizen interest against
the consumer interest for a few reasons. In both countries, the arrival
of the Internet and on-demand television has posed significant chal-
lenges to audio-visual regulation of ‘offensive’ content. There has been,
in both cases, a shift from top down prohibitions towards self-manage-
ment and self-regulation creating an audience of self-regulated viewers
in the context of a rapidly fragmenting and internet-dominated envi-
ronment. Public service broadcasting (henceforth PSM) in Germany
has been developed largely along the lines of the BBC in the UK, with
widely social-democratic ambitions behind its existence, and aspira-
tions that it would be free of vested interests, performing a key role in
German public life, and governed by a body of stakeholders represent-
ing a wide variety of professions and expertise from public life. The
intentions behind this constitutional and legal role of PSMs has histori-
cally been an interest in the transparent, bureaucracy-free, independent
socio-democratic role of media institutions, and the furthering of what
Livingstone and Lunt have called the citizen interest (2012). In reality,
however, this has run into a range of difficulties in Germany, including
a range of economic and political pressures that German PSMs, and in
particular, smaller public broadcasters, have been under, ranging from
substantial amounts of public unwillingness to pay the required license
fee (GEZ), to a lack of transparency in terms of the interface between
media institutions, regulatory mechanisms and audience participation. As
this project was conducted, the newest debate surrounding broadcasting
in Germany has been the role of the second largest PSM—the channel
ZDF—and whether at all its broadcasting council composition is in align-
ment with the constitutional mandates. As Horz (2016) demonstrates
succinctly, the role of the audience was often ‘implied’ (spoken for, and
assumed) in the process in certain states, and in general, barely repre-
sented (see also Webster and Phalen 1994; Eilders et al. 2006). While
this paper does not permit us to delve deeply into this recent contro-
versy surrounding ZDF and regulatory reform, a few things stand clear.
First, Germany enshrines, legally, the citizen interest in public broad-
casting, with ambitions to preserve PSMs as free of vested interests and
to serve social and democratic functions for its audiences in contribut-
ing to a rich and fair public life. Second, the picture in reality is inter-
sected by conflicting approaches across the federal states, economic and
political pressures around the non-payment of license fees (which links
to public perceptions of media institutions and public service broadcast-
ing channels) and a lack of audience voice in regulatory mechanisms
(Puppis et al. 2007; Horz 2016; Hasebrink 2011). Anne, who was doing
fieldwork for this project in Germany, approached media institutions as
a member of the public, and ran into substantial difficulties in establish-
ing clear and transparent information on regulatory processes, debates or
even a record of audience complaints. When she explained to a former
employee of the Medienanstalten in Munich that organisations she had
contacted were not willing or able to tell her which programmes viewers
complained about the most, he said that he was not surprised and if they
didn’t want to give any detailed information then he wouldn’t either if he
was approached to be interviewed. An employee of Radio Deutsche Welle
(Germany’s international public broadcaster) said, similarly, that she was
not surprised that regulators were not keen on sharing their insights for
this study. An employee of ‘Progammbeschwerde.de’ (programme com-
plaints.de), an online portal were people can go online and complain
about something they have seen on a private broadcasting channel, said
that they do not collect this data as “this wouldn’t make any sense”.
When contacted again—a year later—he referred us to a report, which
was, at best, vague. We cite these instances from fieldwork, to make the
case, that, in keeping with recent regulatory literature about German tel-
evision broadcasting, the citizen interest, while enshrined into the con-
stitution, is insufficiently reflected in practice, and audience voices are
insufficiently incorporated into the regulatory process, staying ‘implied’
(Lunt and Livingstone 2012), assumed and spoken on behalf of. As Horz
remarks: “It is a peculiarity of the German system that an organization like
the British Voice of the Listener and Viewer (VLV) does not exist, although
the German PSM System is comparable to the BBC.” (2016, p. 357).
British broadcasting, has been, since 2003, been regulated by the
Office of Communications (Ofcom), the country’s media regulator.
A greater deal of transparency might be noticed in Britain, compared
with Germany. Setting aside the work of organisations representing

the voices of audiences such as VLV, Ofcom has performed a central
role in terms of collecting and responding to public complaints. This is
clearly and readily accessible on the Ofcom website and Ofcom them-
selves were open and welcoming to us when approached at the start of
this project to listen to early findings and share insights. However, an
analysis of the political purposes that underlie the relationships between
media institutions and audiences, conducted succinctly by Peter Lunt
and Sonia Livingstone in their work on the British media regulator (Lunt
and Livingstone 2012), reveals a tendency for the citizen interest to
lose out—still—on many occasions, to the consumer interest. Lunt and
Livingstone frame this against the backdrop of two parallel philosophies
behind regulation i.e. the liberal-pluralistic model that calls for largely
individual control and decision making in a self-regulatory process, and
the social-democratic model of protecting citizen’s interests, regulating
against unfair treatment of individuals and discriminatory representa-
tions. They map these two approaches on to the consumer interest and
the citizen interest, “ultimately concluding that, in cases where there is a
conflict of interest, the citizen interest – and the civic republican vision that
underpins it – tend to lose out to the consumer interest” (p. 39).
So, how does the UK respond to ‘offensive’ television content?
In 2009, one of us co-authored a review of the literature for the BBC
on public attitudes tastes and standards (author removed, 2009). The
review revealed gaping limitations in empirical audience research, in
terms of its insufficiency to inform public policy. And yet, British poli-
cymakers continue to be both interested and often plagued by con-
cerns about offensive content. The British Broadcasting Code (Ofcom,
March 2013) makes the ‘protection of Under-18s’ a clear priority, with
the responsibility for such protecting presumably shared with those who
look after children and young people see also young people’s response
to the consultation on the Code (Ofcom 2005). The British communi-
cations regulator also aims to ensure that generally accepted standards
are applied to the content of radio and television services to provide
protection from harmful or offensive material (Sect. 2 of the Code).
In much of the research that exists for policy purposes (BBFC 2005;
Cumberbatch 2003), two kinds of contexts seem to be studied: the pro-
gramming context and the viewing context. Findings from such sectors
are useful—indeed, they provide quantitative analyses correlating demo-
graphic attributes to whether or not somebody finds something offensive
(for more on this see author removed, 2009). These findings have histor-
ically been mirrored in Germany with its system of state media authori-
ties (Landesmedieananstalten) at the federal level that hold primary
responsibility for evaluating viewer complaints and also legal authority to
monitor issues arising when a complaint is upheld. Similar to the UK, in
Germany too, as Hasebrink noted (1994), complaints have historically
related mostly to ‘protecting the vulnerable’ from violent and sexually
graphic content—enshrined in the Ofcom broadcasting code in Britain.
Crucial to note here is that the historical claim made in Germany—
that the “interests and needs of the viewers are hardly definable (BrL)”
(Hasebrink 1994, p. 32)—is as valid and applicable to both countries
today, where despite the more recent shift to racism and sexism in addi-
tion to violent content or swear words, much about audiences continues
to be implied and assumed. As Horz (2016) notes: “These results corre-
late with the ‘implied image’ from regulators of the audience-as-consumers
rather than citizens in media regulation: the audience seems to accept its
consumer role and has difficulties in identifying itself as citizens, especially
when it comes to partaking in media policy debates” (p. 352).
We were keen in our fieldwork to probe audiences’ expectations of
the regulatory process in the context of media content that they them-
selves identified as problematic or outright offensive. In our findings, we
identify the analytical difficulties of dividing audience responses clearly
on the basis of their stated preferences for regulating offensive audio-
visual content, because the picture is more complex than it appears. At
first glance, it would seem that a significant proportion of respondents
aligned themselves with the neoliberal framework in which the individ-
ual audience member is responsible for her or his own consumption of
media, and thus that being offended by something on television is her/
his own fault. A significant minority, meanwhile, were aligned with a
social-democratic view whereby state or quasi-autonomous bodies have
a role in regulating television content to serve the democratic, cultural
and social needs of society. Probing the former (majority) group further,
though, it soon became evident that this alignment with the vision of the
neoliberal, self-managing individual was more of a reflex response to a
vision of heavy-handed censorship. Participants often cited instances of
countries where extreme levels of state censorship prevail, and aligned
themselves with a position as far from that as possible. It was important
in analysis, therefore, to probe further these statements by our partici-
pants. We identified that the neoliberal, self-regulating position was in
reality merely a case of rejecting a censoring machinery with indiscrimi-

nate scissors—rather than a considered rejection of the social-democratic
ideals that could lie behind the kind of media regulation that aims to
engage publics, to further the best interests of citizens and audiences,
and to protect the vulnerable from problematic content.
Our book was written well into the second consecutive term
of a British Conservative government, which began its journey at
Westminster in 2010 with a stated aim of significantly reducing the
role of direct and less direct forms of state intervention and regula-
tion in public life. In Germany, which had also been under a con-
servative government for a comparable amount of time at the time of
writing this book, and where media regulatory responsibilities have his-
torically followed a federal structure with both press freedom and pro-
tection of the young written into the legal parameters, the Länder
(federal states) are the protagonists of audio-visual media policy.
Less evidently, perhaps, owing to the structure of media regulatory
authorities, but present on scrutiny, the British Labour–Conservative
ideological positioning on regulation maps on to the views of the (con-
servative) Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU) and the (social-
democratic) Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) on the
regulatory responsibilities of the state and its relationship with the pub-
lic. Germany’s current CDU government, which, in its many austerity
measures, promotes a vision of a responsible, clever, self-managing indi-
vidual, runs on politics based largely on neoliberal ideology. This vision
is interspersed with occasional and sporadically heavy-handed interven-
tions in the censoring of media content whenever the economic success
of the nation-state is threatened, as seen in recent examples involving the
comedian Jan Böhmermann. The federal nature of the state of Germany
constitutionally enshrines a dual system of media regulation, with no
real equivalent to the Office of Communications established in 2003
in the UK, since 14 different media authorities operate, with a central
office in Berlin. The Rundfunkstaatsvertrag, or Interstate Broadcasting
Agreement, offers a general framework for coordinating state laws on
broadcasting.
These constitutional differences notwithstanding, four essential simi-
larities remain that are key to keep in mind as we discuss in this chapter
members of the public and their visions and expectations of the regula-
tory process with regard to problematic media content. First, we describe
how we met, in both countries, with the fundamental assertion that the
media need to be free to express themselves. Second, we refer to the

antipodal visions of the state’s regulatory responsibilities of the two lead-
ing, government-forming parties in a two party-dominated, multi-party
political system in both countries. Third, in both cases, the neoliberal,
conservative vision of the receding state in the realm of public life has
been re-elected to power, with Germany showing an even longer history
than Britain of this electoral mood. And finally, in both countries, we
see the recent rise of the populist right, with its absolute rejection of any
form of state regulation—often in the guise of populist rhetoric against
‘political correctness’.
Who Is Responsible? Two Contrasting Views

of Regulation
We note here that in our fieldwork that we worked with the broadest
possible definition of regulation, from state and international bodies
(e.g., European law on broadcasting and its role in Germany) and from
the individual, with other actors dotted in between across the private and
public spectrum. This allowed us to explore the depth and breadth of
responsibility-allocation in the minds of people when it comes to pro-
vocative and offensive audio-visual media content, allowing us also to
‘plot’ people’s expectations onto their ideological lenses. Here, the defi-
nition of regulation put forward by Lunt and Livingstone (2012) proves
useful, as they employ the term regulation “to refer to the relations
between power and the ordering of social behaviour at all levels of soci-
ety from the nation state up to the transnational organisation and down
to the subnational organisation or community and, even, the individual”
(2012, p. 4).
Our findings are grouped into two key categories across a scale, from
an alignment with a self-managed and regulated approach to controver-
sial content (the consumer interest) to an alignment with an approach
where institutions had clear social-democratic roles to play (the citizen
interest), with the vast majority falling somewhere in between these posi-
tions and often not distinguishing between broadcasting and regulatory
institutions. Each position embodies a specific outlook on the limits and
roles of actors in the regulatory relationship. Each category comes with
its own outlook on the longstanding wrangle between free speech and
censorship, the responsibilities of representing all demographic groups,
un/clearly voiced concerns about the ways in which media regulation

of offensive content works, and varying levels of dis/engagement with
the question of offensive content. The real analytical issue that emerged
for us, however, was that of reading people’s positions on this scale at
face value. The clearest instance of this was our first category below,
which presents the high number of people who seemed to align them-
selves with an individual-led and monitored approach to regulating
problematic content, but who were also the people who interpreted reg-
ulatory intervention as heavy-handed, top-down censorship (often cit-
ing instances of totalitarian regimes) and, on further probing, revealed a
closer alignment with a more negotiated position.
The (Seemingly) Consumer Audience of Provocative

Screens
Our clearest category emerged with a sizeable majority of people argu-
ing for a completely individual-led and monitored approach to televi-
sion content that they deemed problematic, offensive or provocative.
However—and this is crucial—this group was also the least clear on what
the real alternative to this was, assuming time and again that the only
possible alternative to switching off the TV, throwing away the remote
or making similarly drastic choices was what one respondent described as
“the North Korean alternative”. Embodying the sentiments of many at
this end of the spectrum, we therefore cautiously interpret the strongly
voiced, but thinly understood support for the privately regulating audi-
ence of offensive screens. Kerry, a school teacher and mother in Britain,
said:
We have to look at ourselves because they wouldn’t be putting it out there

if we weren’t watching, and we have an off button… we do ultimately have
a control over what we… what technology we choose to access. I find I
don’t watch many programmes because of that any more. I just turn it off.
When questioned about what she felt would be a useful alternative

to this switching off, and whether she was aware of the mechanisms
through which audiences might be consulted on such matters, Kerry
responded strongly that she believed firmly in free speech. The dichot-
omy, or indeed dilemma, that this group of audiences posited—between
free speech and censorship—distracted from a conversation on the nature
and purpose of documents like the Broadcasting Code, because it set up

the conversation about provocative/offensive content as an irresolvable
struggle between the champions of free speech on the one hand and the
heavy-handed scissoring of all things spoken or broadcast on the other.
Umesh, an Indian gentleman in his sixties living in Britain, was an excel-
lent demonstration of this point:
I think once you get the state involved in sensitising anything, then where
do you draw the line with that? What…? Who, within government, has the
right to say, this is offensive, so we’re not going to broadcast this, and then
you’re restricting somebody’s… you know, then all of a sudden you end
up like North Korea and you can’t see anything.
Umesh speaks from a position of fearing the scissor-wielding censor. The

very fact that his train of thought leads him to an absolute dictatorial
regime like North Korea speaks volumes about public perceptions of
the regulatory process—a matter of concern, we suggest, for the process
itself. A question to ask here might be why it is both frequent and almost
normal to come across public perceptions of media regulatory processes
as either bureaucracy-ridden and laden with creativity-stunting devices
or, on the other hand, dictatorial and extreme. Apart from the factual
in/accuracies of any of this, such a vision of the regulatory process works
as a useful device with which to shut down conversation on the very
word ‘offensive’ by re-routing it into a black-and-white conversation on
free speech and censorship. As we argue later in this chapter, this is a red
herring.
Amongst a substantial section of audiences at the self-regulating end
of the spectrum, there was also a misunderstanding of the regulatory
process as such, even if they did not contrast self-regulation with the
alternative of a totalitarian state, as cited above. Some struggled with the
idea that full responsibility for any risks or harm associated with prob-
lematic media content should lie with individuals, but still said that it
must because they found the idea of the alternative far too uncomfort-
able. This idea, as it turned out, bore no resemblance to how the media
regulator would operate, for instance, in the UK. A doctoral student in
Britain, Sally, is an example of this:
Individuals should make a decision [on] what you are going to buy or to
watch because, again, you are paying for this so you’re not going to pay
for those things because you don’t want to see it. I don’t think that the
responsibility lies with those who are drawing up laws and rules because
the only reason why they have to do this is because others are not reacting
in a responsible way.
When asked what she envisioned the alternative would look like, she
said, “I think unfortunately it would have to be some outdated, out of
touch government institution who’s setting up a law and saying those
things are okay and those things are not—unfortunately.” The ‘unfortu-
nately’ here is key, for such work is indeed being done, but her choice of
word corresponds to the perceived outdatedness of these bodies.
One of our youngest audience members from Germany, for example,
positioned his case for self-regulation when faced with offensive material
as: “because artistic freedom is important”, his fear being that “censor-
ship gets quickly out of hand. Who has the authority to draw the line?”
In Germany, people often made references to the USA, where swear
words are censored. They produced themselves with pride as responsible,
self-regulating individuals who do not need these kinds of regulation.
Marina explained in a focus group interview with middle-class profes-
sionals in Berlin:
Censorship never paid off. And I think that it is quite ridiculous that in
many other countries, such as the US, you are not allowed to use swear
words on TV. As if people wouldn’t know these words just because they
aren’t shown on TV. I am actually really happy that we do not beep these
words over, except for programmes before 6 pm maybe…
Interviews demonstrated again and again that regulation was equated

with heavy-handed censorship and thus was seen as patronization rather
than as furthering public interests. Even when speaking about vulnerable
audience members or children, the responsibility was again placed on the
individual (the parent). As Wolfgang, in Germany, pointed out:
No, in this respect [regulation] we in Germany are much more relaxed

than other countries. Because we think that parents have the responsibility
to look after their children and make sure that they only look at appropri-
ate TV programmes. Nowadays every TV has a parent code where you can
limit what your child can watch.
Dawn, in Britain, concurred in practice with this vision of Wolfgang’s,

saying:
To an extent, but when it comes to children, for example, we’ve not got
Sky or anything. We’ve just got Free View… all the X-rated channels, so
I just hide all those channels, but because I don’t want them in the lists…
And indeed, part of the self-regulatory ideal emerges from conserva-

tive visions of the media’s and the state’s roles in society that are handed
down in families, across generations. Speaking to this generational
point, in terms of attitudes towards uncomfortable content on television
screens at home, middle-aged Caroline recounted:
My dad used to always… when Mary Whitehouse was on her high horse,
he used to say, well, if you don’t like it, just turn it off. You know, why
bother watching it if it’s going to offend you? You don’t. If you know it’s
going to be near the knuckle, then… you know…
This vision of responding to what the Broadcasting Code in Britain cat-

egorizes as offensive material is simple: the responsibility lies with the
audience. For museum curator and modern art enthusiast Connie, it is
all a bit like walking through a museum where one chooses to walk away
from displays that one does not agree with (taking the museum analogy
further, one might, of course, push to ask how would it then be decided,
and by whom, what content comes into the galleries in the first place).
Connie said:
You can tune in and you can tune out or you can go to, you know, a his-
tory museum or something else. So there are different things that people
can get access to. And if something is truly offensive, you have a taster of it
or you want to see it for a couple of minutes, you also have the option to
say, actually I don’t like that. I’ll switch over. It’s your job at the end of the
day. Otherwise—what… [laughs]… no museums, or what?
We returned repeatedly to this vision of regulation as heavy-handed cen-

sorship that automatically creates its own desirable opponent: the self-
regulating audience. A teacher who runs a small Facebook community,
as its moderator, used her own role, which she described as ‘very light-
touch’, to illustrate how, even if images are very graphic and abhorrent,
she would rather walk away than “embrace—I don’t know—totalitarian

bureaucracy”. Dawn continued:
So you see, I think nobody has the right to be protected from being
offended, but everybody has the right to reply, you know, in order to… to,
you know, yes, if you like, if you’d have presented me with images of Klu
Klux Klan and BNP, I would have found that quite abhorrent. But it’s on
me to walk away.
These voices of our seemingly self-regulating audience should not be

read at face value, assuming that people are vastly against the placing of
any responsibility at all for offensive material in the hands of producers
or regulators, since their reasoning was guided by a heavy-handed vision
of a scissor-wielding bureaucratic censor. These findings remind us of a
parallel story that emerged from Livingstone and Lunt’s focus groups
with audiences in 2006, where, although not speaking about the matter
of offensive media content, they found “an initial barrage of anti-regu-
lation views”, which were largely to do with red tape and bureaucracy…
which “were qualified further into each discussion” and that “alternative
views emerged” (p. 11).
The Citizen-Audience of Provocative Screens

Some audience members argued for a clearer role for institutions to bet-
ter serve the needs of audiences. According to this group, media reg-
ulators and producers had the responsibility to provide content that
informs, educates and entertains the public in the interests of a demo-
cratic society. We found here a closer alignment with the democratic
ideals behind the media’s and media institutions’ responsibilities. This
applied not simply, or even at all, to the blanket use of categories such
as censorship (which in itself is of course highly nuanced), but rather
to the broader role that others in the media–audience relationship—
those not holding the remote—might play in the process. Here too, we
note that it is not easy, and indeed not accurate, to read the surface of
these responses as calling for limits to artistic freedom, or to freedom of
expression in general. As we illustrate below, these responses speak more
about the ideals and expectations placed on institutions acting and speak-
ing for and on behalf of audiences and publics.
Ernie—a middle-aged LGBT activist who lives in inner-city London,

spoke of taking offence when certain content lies outside what is cap-
tured on screen, conspicuous by its absence or shallow treatment. By
stating that he was offended by the absence of certain representations,
Ernie made one of the key arguments we try to make in this book—that
‘offensive’ material, as a category, needs more expansive consideration
than a list of clear red flags. Ernie spoke of the responsibilities of those
behind the screen:
There was always a very small amount of disability programming… and I

think they were all kind of early 1990s BBC initiatives that were interest-
ing, but a little bit… I don’t know. I’ve always found that with identity
programmes anyway that… identity programmes are problematic because
it specifies something… but you kind of need to do it, until we can get to
the place where people have gone past that into more proper inclusion, if
that makes sense. That never happens…
These views were mirrored by the vast majority of audience members,

who spoke about the responsibilities of institutions, rather than of audi-
ences. Here it also became very clear that public broadcasters and state
or semi-autonomous institutions have a different range of expectations
placed on them compared with private players in what is clearly identi-
fied by people as a market. Amy, who lives in the Midlands in the UK,
described it thus:
I would have… it’s higher expectations of ethical standards, really, from

public bodies who deal with the media. As for the Internet – it’s almost
like you’ve sold your… if you go on the Internet, you’ve sold your soul, so
it’s, kind of, pointless, so… but which is a bit defeatist, I suppose.
Amy clearly articulates here the expectations she has of media institutions
and of institutions that regulate the media. Speaking to the different status
ascribed to public and private institutions in both countries, we found that
not only genre (news versus comedy), but also the type of broadcaster
(public or private) had significant influence on whether or not offence was
taken. Paul, a young professional from Munich Germany, remarked:
Well, I also find this kind of language quite problematic. This was shown
on a public service broadcaster, ZDF – they shouldn’t use this kind
of language … such as fuck and shit… I don’t know, it’s just not right
because these channels have such a wide outreach, many people can see
this. You can talk like this privately, but it creates a weird public image if
this kind of language is used by public broadcasters.
Paul, so it seems, is offended because he did not expect this from a pub-
lic broadcasting service. This is in line with much research about offence
that states that offence is related to people’s expectations, that is, when
people expect to be offended they take less offence than if it takes them
by surprise (Mills 2016). The different expectations that people placed
on various broadcasters was also based on their (public) funding: in
Germany, for example, people were angered if public service broad-
casters violated borders of good taste because, in their understanding,
these channels were paid for by the tax payer to produce valuable, non-
offensive content. As Klaus expressed it:
But I sometimes really wonder what I get for my 17 Euros a month. You
are forced to pay for an institution that is separated from the state and has
its own administration, but is still highly propagandistic.
Klaus refers here to the broadcasting councils, for public broadcasting

corporations such as ZDF or ARD, which are composed of representa-
tives from the so-called ‘socially significant groups’ such as political par-
ties. In Britain, a significant minority were also critical of the conditions
within and against which media institutions operate. They worried about
the sustainability of public funding for public broadcasters in the after-
math of the financial crisis in 2008. They were mindful of the fact that
austerity regimes were likely to have an impact on public service broad-
casting, that the representation of minorities on screen were likely to be
linked to contemporary socio-cultural atmospheres, rather than solely
being a question of individual creative eccentricities. Ella pointed out:
Even the BBC, and the BBC will probably suffer, in addition to all pub-
lic bodies really, given what’s happening, but even the BBC is a body
of relative power and there are countless voices never heard, faces never
represented.
Jackie, a disabled LGBT activist living in London, mirrored these

views, as she tried to understand institutions, including producers and
regulators, as part of a map where race, gender and sexuality continue to

draw lines, in her view, just as in the world in which she works and lives:
There’s so much, so much when it comes to TV, that is held by white men
who are part of a certain… and they’re not… it never… that sort of thing
never touches them, they never have to worry about the consequences
of people coming up to people in wheelchairs and saying, oh, you’re just
like… when Ricky Gervais had a series recently about somebody with a
mental health illness… is it Derek?
She went on to note that programmes like these may, in a ‘tick-box’

sense, stick to the broadcasting code where each individual sentence or
word is ‘fine’, but, as Jackie asked, “who is listening to the way a char-
acter is developing, telling a story to the world, and how people are liv-
ing with these characters in their own lives full of struggle out on the
streets?”
Jackie’s voice betrayed a lack of faith in the conversations happening
around permissible yet problematic—in her eyes—programming when
she said: “You look at the BBC website, about all their equality things
and everything, and you just think, no, no you’re not…” She remem-
bered writing an email to Ofcom about a phone-in programme she had
a complaint about and that it felt good to speak about concerns she felt
nobody had listened to, but the reply she received was “far too generic”,
she said. Like Jackie, Beth, who has recently transitioned from male to
female, complained about the representation of trans issues on Little
Britain. She too said she got a generic response, acknowledging that she
had sent in a complaint, but little beyond that. Rebecca, in Britain, told a
similar story of finding a response to a complaint very generic, and that it
even addressed her wrongly: “And the funniest thing was, I complained
about something and they wrote back to ‘Mr Gilmore’.”
These findings were mirrored by people in Germany, who held high
expectations of institutions participating in a manner that furthered and
protected the interests of a democratic society, and yet never engaged
with regulatory or broadcasting authorities. Bernd, a pensioner in
Germany, said “But what would it change? If I write a complaint, then
some man will read it and dismiss it because I come from a small village,
I am not important.” Silke, also in Germany, echoed this:
But then I am just one of many that moan about something. They don’t
care anyway […] Well, I can see if many complained then we would show
that something is not right. But I’m left alone. I don’t know who else
complained, or so. And honestly, I think it will just get wiped under the
carpet. You sit on your laptop for an hour or so to complain and then
nothing happens.
These examples show clearly how distant our participants felt from media
regulators and producers. There was a strong sense that, even though a
programme was experienced as damaging and offensive, no one would
listen. It could be argued that, at least in Germany, this sense of disen-
franchisement is increased by a lack of transparency. Whereas the UK
publishes data about complaints from audiences, Germany’s regula-
tory bodies still refuse to share these data publicly. Despite outspoken
critique from the public and from media experts such as Hans-Martin
Kepplinger, public broadcasting services such as ZDF and ADR refuse
to publish data about audience complaints in their so-called year books,
which are accessible online.
Largely, our respondents fell into different positions between the
points on the spectrum described above when discussing state or quasi-
autonomous bodies involved in regulating content. What came across
strongly in our conversations was a sense of struggle—to make sense of
things that did not quite feel right, to balance viewpoints against one
another, to make sense of their own preferences and choices—rather
than a clearly stated position that could then be clearly mapped on to
one or another approach to media regulation. This was clearest in the
group that placed the greatest responsibility for monitoring content on
media producers (not regulators), even though discursively they diffused
responsibility across the various actors and institutions in the field. In a
focus group of young people, all of whom were LGBT university stu-
dents, a negotiated discussion took place on where exactly they would
place the blame for stereotypes they did not agree with and felt were
damaging. In the end, Beth grasped the mood succinctly when she said:
I am at the moment looking at a transgender person on Big Brother –

shocking really. America is often criticized for their news stories and chan-
nels being influenced and influencing stories and betraying people [in]
different ways. I think anyone who has some kind of social… awareness…
are always responsible for acting responsibly. The person sitting at the back
should have stopped it. That person who let it go on a DVD – then the
person who let that happen – let that be broadcast – the person cheering at
home – should have done something.
Catherine, a middle-aged professional in the UK, placed these responsi-

bilities in a similarly diffused and dispersed manner, but on further prob-
ing revealed that she looks to both producers and audiences, although
asserting that “the producers of this material have perhaps the biggest
responsibility”. Tim, a young student in the Midlands in the UK, strug-
gled similarly to make sense of whether the responsibility for regulating
offensive material falls on the producer or the regulator and decided ulti-
mately to settle on the producer. The solution, he felt, was to involve
members of communities who are the focal points of seemingly harmless
jokes on television in the writing of programmes that seem offensive. For
him, it was in the process of production that the responsibility to regu-
late and monitor at source would lie:
The people that are making the programme, they should see it before, and
when they’re writing, or whatever, they should think… I think people…
Like, if they’re going to talk about gay people, just an example, then a
person that’s a producer should speak to a gay person and say, would you
think this is acceptable? Would you find it funny? And then they can get a,
kind of, feedback from them. And then, if they get complaints, then they
stop the programme, because it could get worse.
As Connie pointed out, institutions operate under a range of pres-

sures and act within and against economic contexts, much of which
are unknown to audiences (we discuss this in more depth in Chap. 3).
Connie raised questions about the decision-making process thus:
And I do think certainly, for the companies that are like BBC, Channel 4,
5USA, if there are licence payers, who are the decision-makers there? If
it’s, you know, advertising, sponsorship, what can we put on those chan-
nels? So again, they play a factor as well.
Connie reveals here confusion about the different natures of broadcast-

ers, conflating public broadcasters and licence fees with private broad-
casters and advertising. These kinds of confusions often also overlap, we
found, with confusions around the roles of broadcasting and regulatory
institutions, representing part of the struggles some audiences sense

in trying to locate where responsibility lies. Like the clearly articulated
dual vision of the media regulatory process identified above, these con-
fused or conflicted views also hold meaning, for they indicate an attempt
to make sense of why things work the way they do, and the fact that
responsibility for media content must surely exist somewhere.
Going Beyond Red Flags and Red Herrings

In this chapter, we have given attention to the perceptions and expecta-
tions audiences articulate about the regulatory processes behind media
content they find offensive. We found that most people felt regulation in
the form of censorship was not an adequate tool to deal with offensive
material. This, however, was based on their view of regulation as heavy-
handed, state-imposed censorship or as a form of patronizing rather than
protecting them. Those people who wanted to see some sort of regula-
tion by institutions had different expectations of public and of private
broadcasters: the threshold for what causes offence was much lower for
public broadcasting services, which were seen as responsible for protect-
ing the moral fabric of society by sustaining plurality and diversity and
not distributing content that could offend. Private channels, on the
other hand, were expected to be edgy, as they were seen as products of
market forces that need to grab the attention of their audiences. We also
found that most people who understood the significance of media reg-
ulators and institutions still often avoided engaging with them. This is,
for instance, because they felt that their input (complaint) would not be
heard or because they had had bad experiences in the past. Moreover,
we observed that people who placed responsibility equally on broadcast-
ers, producers and regulators were often confused about the boundaries
between the three and where responsibilities of the one ended and the
other began. Overall, we suggest that people’s rejection or apprecia-
tion of regulation maps onto neoliberal and social-democratic models of
regulation, although, as said before, careful analysis reveals that prefer-
ences for the former are often actually misinterpretations of regulation as
totalitarian censorship. Reading audiences’ perceptions of regulation at
face value turned out to be a red herring and, as we have demonstrated,
needed to be probed further to show how audiences struggle to place
responsibility.
Our findings in this chapter also demonstrate that the complaints that
make it to the regulator often arise from an insufficient list of red flags.
Offence is a slippery term that spills across the boundaries of all sorts of
texts and genres. It is by nature volatile and changes shape depending on
context, genre and audience expectation. Regulators, who have a duty to
contain it within the perimeters of broadcasting regulations, try to put
offence and its causes into boxes such as profanity, overt discrimination,
or even flash lighting. All this offends audiences, as we can read in the
reports. And yet, what escapes in the midst of all this is a real sense of
what offends people (since this, as our fieldwork revealed, is far beyond a
list of red flags such as swear words, profanity and so forth), the impact
of being offended, and the emotions it evokes as individuals speak of and
to the world they live in and are sometimes startled by.
In investigating people’s expectations of actors and institutions
in their responses to television content that startles, upsets or simply
offends them, it is crucial, we find, to treat a conversation on free speech
and censorship with caution. Often, it seemed to us, this issue showed up
as a red herring, misleading people into conflating regulation with cen-
sorship and interpreting censorship as a monolith of high-profile, totali-
tarian, often religiously motivated shutting down of art (as exemplified
by the banning and burning of books in certain countries). The real con-
versation was instead about the expectations people felt able (or unable)
to place in the institutions that act on their behalf, and will continue to
do so. So we were keen, in this chapter, to discover whether theorisations
of regulatory responsibilities map well onto the framework of expecta-
tions that publics as audiences articulate when they speak of television
content that offends them. What kinds of expectations are articulated,
what responsibilities are placed on the media themselves and on those
who regulate them, and what division of responsibility between regula-
tors, producers, broadcasters and individuals do people adhere to? The
answers are of interest because they signal not just the public ‘mood’
on longstanding debates about free speech and censorship, but because
they are a lens into the unarticulated yet nonetheless present ideologi-
cal underpinnings of citizens’ expectations of televisual media and the
national frameworks within which they operate.
As is evident from this chapter, while individual countries have indi-
vidual, historically established national traits, values and therefore taste
cultures (Hofstede et al. 2010), and while claims have long been made
about the unknowability of what offends whom and why (these claims
often being extended to mean, therefore, that beyond the obvious lines
relating to graphic profanity and violence, nothing much can be known
or done), speaking to audiences revealed a consistent set of assumptions.
These assumptions were based around what the regulation of offensive
material actually involves, the differences between a conversation on the
regulation of such content and the shutting down of any artistic freedom
via totalitarian attitudes to censorship, as well as a set of expectations
around the roles of individuals as opposed to the roles of institutions in
the process. These expectations, on the surface, mirror the conservative
or social-democratic ideological positions adopted in national legal and
other frameworks with regard to regulating audio-visual content, but
on further probing it became clear that it is not easy to conclude, for
instance, from our large majority of people aligning with self-regulation,
that their arguments are really for institutions to recede from monitoring
or regulating provocative screens, since the clearest basis for their self-
regulatory positions is often a misplaced vision of authoritarian censor-
ship regimes as the only viable alternative.
That these confusions remain in this relationship between audiences,
producers, broadcasters and regulators is telling, as is the fact that many
audiences continue to feel that institutions treat the category of offensive
material as though it were so simple, and a question of recognising, and
then eliminating, a finite list of red flags. Whether this perceived simplic-
ity is or is not the case, or more likely falls somewhere in between the
two, it is of critical importance that these voices are heard (rather than
responded to generically), that these assumptions are investigated (rather
than criticised, or brushed aside, accusing audiences of naiveté), and that
definitions and scopes of offensive content are revisited. Everyone may
not be reading broadcasting regulations and even fewer may be com-
plaining, but, as we reveal elsewhere, the space between an individual
member of the audience and a provocative screen is a deeply affective
one, and affect, especially when discursively unarticulated, is often very
difficult for even the best conducted research project to pin down.
Finally, as readers of this chapter from other countries may identify,
what is at stake in a conversation about material perceived to be offen-
sive is, we argue, the citizen-interest. This is because, in the end, the
‘implied audience’ (Lunt and Livingstone) prevails across many media
institutional frameworks, as the voices of audiences are far too often
assumed and spoken for. In the recent legal controversy surround-
ing a German public service broadcaster (ZDF), for example, only two
contributors are bottom-up audience groups (Publikumsrat and Ständige

Publikumskonferenz) and only one statement was sent by an individual cit-
izen (Horz 2016). This speaks volumes of the relationship being encour-
aged and built between individuals and institutions in the media-sphere,
where, on the one hand, in a digital, international media framework,
audiences have apparently greater visibility and voice, such voice often
being written into institutional frameworks, and, on the other hand, reg-
ulatory processes still do not adequately involve the audience to inform
the regulatory process, from conceptualisations and definitions to policy
making. Some form of public consultations of course already exist—we
note, for instance, the Broadcast Bulletins in the UK, which reveal a use-
ful mechanism in place for audiences to communicate their grievances
and a process for documenting the ways in which the regulator responds
to these complaints. This process is far less straightforward in the federal
system of Germany. Improvements to both these contexts are possible,
although of course, speaking to the public is expensive and time-consum-
ing. We hope that academic research, such as ours, can continue to stay
grounded in the political purposes lying behind media institutions’ role
in public life, and that it can perform its critical role, using the concep-
tual pairing of the citizen consumer, to access, interpret and communicate
audiences’ expectations, and argue for the social-democratic citizen inter-
est over the neoliberal self-regulating consumer interest.
Note: A version of this chapter has been previously published as—
Das, R. & Graefer, A. (2017). The regulatory perceptions of offended
audiences: The citizen-audience of provocative screens. Communication
Culture and Critique. Online First.
References
British Board of Film Certification (BBFC). (2005). Public opinion and BBFC
guidelines. London: BBFC.
Cumberbatch, G., Gauntlett, S., & Littlejohns, V. (2003). A content analysis of
sexual activity and nudity on British terrestrial television. London: BBC, BSC,
& ITC.
Eilders, C., Hasebrink, U., & Herzog, A. (2006). Das aktive Publikum.
Instituionalisierung zivilgesellschaftlicher Kontrolle des Fernsehens auf
europäischer Ebene. In W. Langenbucher & M. Latzer (Eds.), Europäische
Öffentlichkeit und medialer Wandel (pp. 330–351). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag.
Hasebrink, U. (1994). Country report Germany. In J. Mitchell et al. (Eds.),

Television and the viewer interest. Explorations in the responsiveness of
European broadcasters (pp. 25–46). London, Paris & Rome: John Libbey.
Hasebrink, U. (2011). Giving the audience a voice: The role of research in mak-
ing media regulation more responsive to the needs of the audience. Journal
of Information Policy, 321–336. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/
stable/10.5325/jinfopoli.1.2011.0321.
Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G. J., & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and
Organizations: Software of the Mind. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Horz, C. (2016). The public: Consumers or citizens? Participatory initiatives
and the reform of public service media regulation in Germany. Comunicação e
Sociedade, 30, 349–366.
Livingstone, S., Lunt, P., & Miller, L. (2012). Citizens, consumers and the citi-
zen-consumer: Articulating the citizen interest in media and communications
regulation. Discourse & Communication, 1(1), 63–89.
Lunt, P., & Livingstone, S. (2012). Media regulation. London: Sage.
Mills, B. (2016). A Special Freedom: Regulating Comedy Offence. In C. Bucaria
& L. Barra (Eds.), Taboo Comedy: Television and Controversial Humour (pp.
209–227). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ofcom (Office of Communictions). (2005). Language and sexual imagery in
broadcasting: A contextual investigation. London: Ofcom.
Ofcom. (2013). The Ofcom broadcasting code. London: Ofcom.
Puppis, M., d’Haenens, L., & Saeys, F. (2007). Broadcasting policy and regula-
tory choices. In F. Saeys & L. d’Haenens (Eds.), Western broadcast models:
Structure, conduct and performance (pp. 61–78). Berlin, NY: Mouton.
Webster, J. G., & Phalen, P. F. (1994). Victim, consumer, or commodity?
Audience models in communication policy. In J. S. Ettema & D. C. Whitney
(Eds.), Audiencemaking: How the media create the audience (pp. 19–37).
London: Sage.
CHAPTER 6
Provocative Screens
Abstract  This chapter concludes the book with six key findings from the
analysis presented in the preceding chapters, and concludes with some
thoughts on the policy-relevant aspects of audience responses to offen-
sive content and on future research. The chapter notes first, that avoid-
ing the feeling of being offended can operate as a strategy for evading
responsibility and action. Second, identity-forming ‘us-and-them’ bound-
aries invoked by audiences to describe taste cultures are actually porous
and thus need constant reinforcing and maintenance. Third, the neolib-
eral sovereign consumer judges which television programme is offensive
through the device of ‘choice’. Fourth, feelings of offence operate often
in and through the body, but they sometimes stay discursively unartic-
ulated. Fifth, affective, bodily reactions to offensive television content
can create a productive space with potential for action. Sixth, humour
regimes continue to matter, but are intersected by exclusionary taste cul-
tures where being offended is perceived as ‘uncool’. The chapter argues
that in terms of the regulatory treatment of offensive material, the cat-
egory itself is currently insufficiently defined and populated. And finally,
the chapter posits that a conversation on the subject matter of ‘offensive’
content is readily derailed into a conversation on free speech and censor-
ship, which is an unproductive and reductive outcome.
Keywords  Audiences · Reception · Offence · Regulation · Affect

Humour · Policy · Television

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67907-5_6
In this chapter, we present six of our key findings from the analysis pre-
sented in the preceding chapters, and conclude with some thoughts on
the policy-relevant aspects of audience responses to offensive content
and on future research. One of the questions we have often been asked
when presenting this work in various places concerns comparison: what
differences and similarities have we found when comparing Britain and
Germany? What difference in taste cultures have we found between
British and German audiences? We have had to think about this carefully,
since the ambitions of this project did not include cross-national compar-
isons. While much of cross-national comparative research is quantitative,
there are increasing instances of applying comparative techniques within
qualitative research, including comparative methods designed for qualita-
tive data. In order to develop true comparisons that are robust, challeng-
ing, thorough and critical, we would have needed to design a different
kind of project, one where comparison was embedded in the method-
ology, and where the tools of cross-national comparison were written
into our ambitions, design and analysis. This however, was not what we
set out to do, so if we were to venture into the territory of forwarding
confident comparisons, these would be at best exemplary and illustrative
rather than systematically established. This is not a task, therefore, that
we shall take up in this final chapter.
However, a few points about this invite discussion. First of all, debates
on the centrality of the nation-state as a unit of analysis have long
occupied comparative researchers, and even though we have not con-
ducted comparative research, the nation-state has implicitly and explic-
itly entered this work—in the sub-title of the book, and in the fact that
we have ourselves presented similarities and differences in broadcasting
contexts, regulatory regimes, televisual histories and political climates in
these two countries, for instance in Chaps. 1 and 5. So we have indeed
compared, and these comparisons have used the nation-state as a cate-
gory that was ready to use, and, in all fairness, the most useful way in
which to discuss similarities and differences in the media environments
and political histories of these countries. We have tried, however, not
to refer to our audiences as either British or German, for this would
bring attendant complexities as to what our audiences themselves iden-
tified as, and what we could call a British audience or a German one.
We have, therefore, consciously spoken of audiences in Britain and in
Germany, rather than British or German audiences. Reflexively speaking,
each author has often found herself on the brink of making comparative
6 PROVOCATIVE SCREENS 115
statements or observations, struggling to find the right kind of data to

back up ‘hunches’ based on national cultures. A good example of this
is the often-arising question of taste cultures, where research is limited,
and where individual hunches are based on individual, and largely sub-
jective, experiences. We too have struggled in this book to convey these
felt hunches without essentialising and without reducing complexities
to simple, off-the-cuff comparative remarks. We felt not only that such
remarks would have no place in critical academic work, but, perhaps
more importantly, such remarks urgently need critical, qualitative, com-
parative research, precisely so that comparisons and comparative work
can be built up across a range of different (kinds of) projects, even with
different methodologies, rather than any one project having to take up
the significant, time-consuming and expensive business of rigorous
comparison.
Key Findings
Our purpose with this book was to take the intellectual gaze on provoca-
tive/controversial texts away from artificial dualities of free speech and
top-down censorship, towards a long and critical history of engagement
with what people do with mediated texts as cultural products. As we did
this, it seems that sometimes our audience spoke with a liberal, social-
democratic voice; arguing for the role of media institutions to be strong
and fair in public life; arguing for a fair and just media system; and criti-
cally analysing the structural and systemic pressures on certain kinds of
media. This became clear, for instance, in Chap. 5, where we listened to
people speak about their expectations from institutions, and in Chap. 4,
where we found in people’s affective responses to offensive texts, small,
but nonetheless significant potentials for new critical directions. And yet, at
other times, it seems our audiences aimed to position themselves as intel-
lectually superior to unknown others, distancing themselves from other,
more vulnerable audiences, and using texts they found offensive to pro-
duce and maintain themselves as subjects of value. This is clear in Chap. 2,
where we analyse people’s distantiation strategies in producing themselves
and others. Rather than being contradictory, these findings suggest that,
when confronted by mediated texts that provoke, disgust, worry, upset or
shock, audiences embody both these stances within themselves. Audience
discourse is complex, and often simultaneously liberal and judgemental.
We aimed in this book to be able to contain and do justice to the entire
spectrum of discourses that came up in audience talk, rather than pitting

lighter and darker sides of audience discourse against one other.
In what follows, we would like to highlight six key issues that have
emerged from our analysis in the preceding chapters. These six are of
course not our only findings, but they are our defining findings, which
were first suggested—we see now—by the research questions, hunches
and perplexities that led us to this project in the first place, and which,
as findings read in conjunction with their wider families of research in
media, communication and cultural studies, map out the critical con-
fluence of affect and publicness in contemporary British and German
societies.
Finding 1
Avoiding the feeling of being offended can operate as a strategy for
evading responsibility and action. In our study, we found that some
audience members worked quite hard to avoid the ‘ugly’ emotional state
of feeling offended. We attended to the rhetorical and emotional strate-
gies that audiences develop in order to cope with and to justify humor-
ous content that can be labelled as offensive to them. By exploring why
certain audience members failed to be offended by humour that ridi-
cules disempowered groups such as women, we aimed to tease out how
audiences ‘work’ to keep current ideas, values and norms, as well as the
structures of feelings that surround and animate them, alive and unchal-
lenged. Such a view is based on our understanding of offence as an affec-
tive reaction that is not only negative, but can also serve to point out
moments of inequalities and injustice in the current system. Avoiding
the painful feeling of being offended can then be seen as a failure to
point out injustice and as allowing our participants to blend in and go
along with the status quo. As Sara Ahmed argues, “Maintaining public
comfort requires that certain bodies ‘go along with it’. To refuse to go
along with it, to refuse the place in which you are placed, is to be seen
as trouble, as causing discomfort for others” (Ahmed 2010, pp. 68–69).
Some women and men in our study avoided feeling uncomfortable and,
in particular, making others feel their discomfort. But, as many feminists
have argued, “sometimes one just needs to feel really, really bad first
before great and small, personal and collective, changes start happening”
(Kyrölä 2015). This finding shows that offence studies need to explore
not only moments in which offence is felt, but also moments in which
this uncomfortable feeling is avoided—because these moments can also

tell us a great deal about the ways in which structures of inequality stay
in place and stubbornly persist.
Finding 2
Identity-forming ‘us-and-them’ boundaries invoked by audiences to
describe taste cultures are actually porous and thus need constant rein-
forcing and maintenance. Television content identified as ‘offensive’ by
our participants because it is too violent, too vulgar or too mindless
often operates as a tool for distancing oneself from the rest of the audi-
ence. Our interviewees’ descriptions of the tasteless, ill-informed and
vulnerable others who might enjoy these programmes resonated with
public discourses in which the ‘mass audience’ is constructed as homog-
enous, uncritical, easily influenced and often feminised. It is not surpris-
ing, then, that our participants, who wanted to produce themselves as
individuals, as ‘subjects of value’ who were self-reflective, were quick to
distance themselves from the imagined mass audience for whom these
offensive programme were apparently intended. And yet the audience
is always an imagined audience with unstable contours. Othering other
people because of their arguable viewing pleasure became messy when
our interviewees realised that they were part of this themselves. While
watching, they had to admit that they were attracted by something that
they first labelled inappropriate. These affective reactions can help us to
further understand the movement between connection and disassocia-
tion through which audiences make sense of television. They also enable
us to undertake a critical shift in our understanding of offence, or that
which seemingly causes offence. Offence is not that which is distinct and
separate from us, but that which is within us, which we are attracted to,
which hovers on the fringes. When our interviewees experienced a fright-
ening loss of distinction between themselves and others, they tried to
reinstall this boundary by presenting themselves as detached and there-
fore respectable viewers who can master their mixed emotions.
Finding 3
The neoliberal sovereign consumer judges which television programme is
offensive through the device of ‘choice’. When discussing offensive televi-
sion content with our participants, we often encountered the neoliberal
idea of the audience member as a sovereign consumer who determines

through individual choice what type of television programmes are pro-
duced and distributed in society. According to this logic, offensive tel-
evision programmes are prominent because mindless and tasteless
others demand them. This emphasis on individual consumer choice
misinterprets the commercial television industries as ‘democratic’ rather
oligarchic. ‘Offensive’ television content is thus seen merely as the out-
come of the ‘bad’ consumer choices of the masses, rather than as pro-
duced by powerful actors and institutions within the media industry
who determine far in advance of individual consumer choice what pro-
grammes get produced, bought in from other countries, and distributed.
Understanding consumer choice as the primary cause of a TV pro-
grammes’ social existence leads to a damaging displacement of respon-
sibility in terms of media content production, especially when speaking
about private broadcasters, who are often framed as simply reflect-
ing consumer demand in order to attract advertisers. This orthodoxy
concerning the power of consumer choice is also the reason why pro-
grammes on public broadcasting services are sometimes experienced as
offensive: even though many of our participants articulated high expec-
tations of public service broadcasters and their role in public life, these
programmes were often discussed in a dismissive, denigrating tone
because they are not the result of their individual choice as consumers
but nevertheless are produced with public funding. Rather than recog-
nising public funding as a necessary prerequisite for the role of public
broadcasting services in public life, people make the lack of consumer
choice their vehicle in turning against these services. Thus, consumer
choice becomes a crucial element that shapes whether a programme is
perceived as offensive or not.
Finding 4
Feelings of offence operate often in and through the body, but they some-
times stay discursively unarticulated. One of our key findings with
regard to the nature of the messy word ‘offence’ or the umbrella term
‘feeling offended’ was how very powerful and physically, viscerally sen-
sate this feeling was for audience members. For many, offensive texts
brought out memories and experiences they would not ordinarily have
recalled and underlined word-of-mouth stories heard elsewhere to
etch these firmly into their lived recollections—anger, upset and shock
were articulated, making these texts into pathways for a range of dif-
ferent kinds of emotional attachments. Many audience members spoke
of crying, looking away or feeling angry as they linked television con-
tent to events they had lived through or that they had watched their
loved ones living through. The physicality of many of these sensations
was striking, with words such as ‘overwhelming’, ‘too much’ and ‘nau-
seating’, amongst others, employed to express emotions and sensations
that everyday labels like ‘angry’ or ‘sad’ did not quite cover. The clear
articulation of sensations is a key finding in the space that lies between
an offended audience and their television screen. But, for us as qualita-
tive researchers, this came with the attendant finding that offence is not
always articulated, even when it triggers a physically sensate reaction.
When a response overwhelms someone and they look away from the
screen, or request the interview to be paused for a while, the strength
of the silence that follows, the prolonged glances away from the screen
and the refusal to watch certain clips do not translate into discourse that
can be transcribed or quotes that are ready to be employed in writing up
a narrative. As researchers, fieldwork meant for us being able to go with
the flow of these interviews, and both stay with and stay at a respect-
ful distance from people whose powerful, physically felt sensations were
overwhelming. It has been crucial for us to be able to synthesise these
into the clear finding that not only do responses to provocative screens
fall across a range of different kinds of emotional categories and come
with a range of different labels we readily understand, but there is a
raw, sensate, visceral dimension to these lived and felt emotions that are
brought out and mobilised by provocative screens. For research with
offensive material, this is a critical take-away, at once conceptual and
methodological: there must be scope in research design with this kind of
content to make space for these sensations to emerge and be articulated,
communicated when articulation is impossible, and then to be recog-
nised in the analytical journey in field notes and transcripts.
Finding 5
Affective, bodily reactions to offensive television content create a pro-
ductive space with potential for action. Following on from our previous
finding, one key highlight of this work has been the lesson that dismiss-
ing offensive material as something to be eliminated, or dismissing the
feeling and experience of being offended as something (only) negative
and damaging, is reductive and does not do justice to the richness of the
space opened up when audiences react with indignation or upset to tel-
evision they find offensive. In their critique of offensive texts, our audi-
ences mobilised those very sensations to articulate political positions,
ideological positions, expectations of media institutions and their roles
in public life, as well as their own stances and strategies, hopes and fears
as individuals, parents, friends and citizens. These affective responses
became the raw material from which all of the above was formulated
and articulated, and often clarified in conversation. Both the countries
where we did fieldwork are multicultural, with a discursive welcome
for many religions and countries evident in social and civic life, while
simultaneously housing pockets of heightened nationalism excluding
those from elsewhere, whether in the form of extreme-right movements
or in a general growing scepticism of immigration. In that context,
deeply affective responses were woven through audiences’ views and
personal positions on racism, sexism, xenophobia, disablism and other
discriminatory axes—all of which are used on television to construct
jokes, and all of which can potentially offend. In mobilising their affec-
tive responses to speak back to, rework and make sense of television
that pushes their boundaries, our audiences spoke as publics, refer-
ring to current socio-economic, cultural and political issues surround-
ing them, displaying clearly where their emotions translated into action.
This was the case whether this meant making a complaint to media
institutions and pursuing it when dissatisfied with the response, par-
ticipating in political protests, or altering—apparently simply, but per-
haps profoundly—the ways in which they acted personally, for instance,
as friends or parents. These displayed to us concrete, lived, real-world,
everyday practices where the strength of an affective response mobi-
lised action, or at least created the conditions for action. Speaking back
to our original ambitions of tying together affect and publicness in the
domain of offensive material and reactions to it, we have discovered that
the space in front of provocative screens is more than an individually
atomised, purely subjective space (and therefore inherently unknowable
and elusive), or simply a regulatory space (where offence can be elimi-
nated from a checklist), or even a negative, damaging space. Rather, this
space, evident discursively and sometimes non-discursively in our field-
work, was where private emotions and public sensibilities merged, where
the affective dynamics of audiences speaking not as atoms but as parts
of a larger whole emerged, and where we saw audiences using offensive
material as textual resources with which private emotions created a space

larger than the sum of its parts.
Finding 6
Humour regimes continue to matter, but are intersected by exclusion-
ary taste cultures where being offended is perceived as ‘uncool’. Our
participants confirmed that humour and satire are governed by ‘humour
regimes’—unwritten rules stipulating who can joke about what (Kuipers
2011). Our interviews showed time and again that it is crucial to take
into consideration the directionality of humour—that is, who the sender
is and who the recipients of the humorous message are. And this direc-
tionality significantly contributed to determining the underlying reasons
as to why particular humour/comedy was perceived as offensive. Most
participants agreed that a joke is offensive when delivered by a member
of a majority group addressing a minority group, whereas the opposite
was generally considered less problematic. This finding, however, inter-
sected with the idea that a modern, liberal person should have a good
sense of humour and be able to laugh at ‘taboo’ humour. Enjoying
humour that is most likely offensive to others was presented as char-
acteristic of the modern, liberal, postmodern self that both knows and
intentionally plays with the borders of good taste. Thus, our liberal
young audience members often used humour in this way and argued that
religious people simply had to get over it, even when a joke was at the
expense of a minority. An inability or outright unwillingness to go along
with a joke that is ‘politically incorrect’ not only turns subjects into per-
ceived humourless outsiders, but marks them as lacking taste and class.
These complex intersections of ‘humour regimes’ with exclusionary taste
cultures in a postmodern context (where we can make use of racist and
sexist humour while suggesting that it is all a deliberate and knowing
post-modern joke) make both offence and the mechanism of exclusion
and marginalisation that it can generate elusive.
Notes on Policy
In this book, we have listened with care to the expectations that audi-
ences articulate about media institutions when responding to television
content they find offensive. Policy-relevant research on this matter had
already generated findings that we built upon. These were largely about
programming context and viewing context, figures on what kinds of

audiences were offended by what kind of content, data on swear words
and bad language and the various categories currently recognised within
broadcasting regulations in Britain and Germany as ‘offensive material’.
This much, we found, was already established and we did not, therefore,
take up the investigation on any of these axes in the Provocative Screens
project. In this section, we would like to highlight three key policy-rele-
vant conclusions from this work.
Our first conclusion in terms of the regulatory treatment of offen-
sive material as a category is that the category itself is currently insuf-
ficiently defined and populated. Our fieldwork has shown us clearly that
the complaints that make it to the regulator often arise from an insuf-
ficient list of red flags. But when we took these to audiences in cities and
villages in Britain and Germany, contrary to what we expected, swear
words, bad language or flash lighting were not always—or at all—what
people wanted to talk to us about. Rather, they were concerned with
wider issues around the construction of characters, the relative power
and positions of the actors/creators behind characters, the absence and
erasure of faces and issues and, in all of these cases, the list of red flags
we started out with soon proved much too restrictive. This was not
only because delineating the line where offence ends and harm begins
is very tricky, but because representations can be truthful, yet offensive.
Depictions can be benign, and yet misleading. One kind of offensive
material may only offend a significant few, but the offence may well be
profound and, even if unexpressed officially and very indirect, may be
lasting in terms of demonstrable societal consequences. A second type
of offensive material may be more ‘straightforward’, provocative and
shocking. Recognising and regulating for the second may be an easier
task (if there is such a thing) than doing so for the first—and this, in
part, may be behind the fact that swear words/bad language seems
to be researched more often than anything else under the umbrella of
offensive content. In this book, we argue that in the context of a long-
standing conversation on the roles of broadcasters and regulators in
protecting the public from harmful and offensive material, a further
nuancing of what qualifies as offensive material is now required. In other
words, the umbrella of ‘harmful and offensive material’ needs more
nuanced, focused and critical research, and perhaps requires more inter-
generational, more repetitive and more time-consuming interaction with
members of the public than currently exists. Our recent fieldwork has
shown us that we should not focus only on those complaints that reach
the regulator. These concerns can easily be brushed away as individual
aesthetic sensibilities, or just interpretive diversity, but without under-
standing offence in this way, we are stranded at the level of bad lan-
guage. So the moment is right, we would argue, to go beyond ‘obvious’
triggers of offence such as bad language, and to provide a more nuanced
understanding of this affective term.
Second, we frequently found, while presenting or speaking about
this project, that a conversation on the subject matter itself was readily
derailed into a conversation on free speech and censorship, which is an
unproductive and reductive outcome. A conversation on the regulation
of offensive content, if derailed into one where a totalitarian, scissor-
wielding, audience-excluding model of censorship is constructed as a
straw man, leads to no conversation at all on the regulation of offen-
sive content, simply because one has instead stepped into a free speech
versus censorship debate, where, of course (and rightly so), there is
only one clear winner. We would argue, though, that this derailing is
unproductive because it shuts down conversation by creating a straw
man, which then generates its preferable opposite. We found ourselves
returned time and again to this image of regulation as heavy-handed
censorship that by default created its desirable opponent—the self-reg-
ulating audience. Therefore, we suggest that one treats a conversation
on free speech and censorship with caution when engaging academically
and with members of the public on questions of media offence—the
obvious opposition between free speech and censorship will be invoked
regularly and early on in these conversations. As we have already noted,
this issue showed up for us as a frequent red herring, misleading people
into conflating regulation with censorship and interpreting ‘the censor’
as a monolithic straw man: high-profile, totalitarian, often religiously
motivated, shutting down communication (the banning and burning of
books in certain countries was often cited)—and this was the image that
generated the self-regulating individual, a response that always needed
further probing.
Third, we wish to stress that audiences have strong expectations from
media institutions, despite the fact that key confusions exist in their
minds about where the responsibilities of producers and broadcasters
end, begin and overlap. Our findings on public expectations of broad-
casters and regulators are grouped into two key categories across a scale
from (1) alignment with a self-managed and regulated approach to
controversial content to (2) alignment with an approach where institu-

tions have potentially useful roles to play in regulating such content—
with the vast majority of our research participants falling somewhere
between these positions. The real analytical issue that emerged for us,
however, concerned the reading of people’s positions on this scale at
face value. At first glance, it seemed that a significant proportion of our
respondents aligned, when it came to issues emerging out of consum-
ing offensive content, with a vision of the self-regulating audience/indi-
vidual. When we probed this further, however, it soon became evident
that this alignment with the vision of the self-managing individual was
more of a reflex response to a vision of heavy-handed censorship, with
many citing instances of countries where extreme levels of state censor-
ship prevail, and aligning themselves as far away from that as possible.
This was, then, a case of rejecting a censoring machinery with indiscrimi-
nate scissors, rather than a considered rejection of the social-democratic
ideals that could lie behind the kind of media regulation that aims to
engage publics, further the best interests of citizens and audiences, and
protect the vulnerable from problematic content. A key issue in terms
of the umbrella of ‘offensive content’ in broadcasting regulations, which
is visible on probing further, concerns the expectations people feel able
(or unable) to place in the institutions that act on their behalf. If these
expectations do exist in the minds of those who feel upset or offended,
how can they be met? And if these expectations do not exist with confi-
dence, then why not?
Areas for Further Research

Provocative Screens explores how audiences react affectively to televi-
sion content they find offensive, and how they generate meanings and
moral judgments from this encounter. This book does not aim to define
what offensive television is, but rather has explored some of the ways in
which offensive encounters touch and mobilise people, or fail to do so.
By searching for instances of offence not in extreme but in everyday tel-
evision programming that contains a wide range of genres and texts, our
book opens up the notion of ‘offence’ and goes beyond the usual list of
red flags. By attending only to our interviewees and what they experience
as offensive, we remain true to our commitment to attend to what is
offensive, to whom and in what context, without overlooking the social,
cultural and political character of these feelings. Theorising the complex
relationships between personal and political structures of feelings enables

Provocative Screens to contribute to a much needed nuanced discussion
of offence in the media that goes beyond reactionary notions of ‘media
effects’ that demonise particular images and audiences, while leaving
others undiscussed. Examining offensive content is important to our
understanding of the media because it reveals the complexities involved
in media regulation, the construction of social and cultural norms and
taboos and the limits and conventions of media forms and genres and
how these are challenged.
This book focuses on television audiences, even though our inter-
views spilt over into discussion of and examples from online media, but
future research will need to address this in more depth and as a mat-
ter of urgency, as new media penetrate further into the home, blurring
distinctions between public and private and rendering the obscene or
simply culturally unacceptable more easily accessible than ever (Attwood
et al. 2012). Future research in the area of offence studies will need to
explore how the development of new technologies disturbs established
ways of doing things, and how provocative content is created, sustained,
exploited, appropriated and enjoyed beyond the national audience. One
of the key areas for future research is therefore the exploration of these
very questions in relation to online media, where reception leaves traces
in the form of digital footprints.
Provocative Screens explores offensive television in a two-nation con-
text. Such a framework can be seen as problematic, especially at a time
when, due to transnational media conglomerates and globalisation, “tel-
evision is seen as prime evidence for the loss of national distinctiveness”
(Bonner 2003, p. 171). On television, programmes travel from one
country to another, usually with the USA as the (perceived) dominant
televisual culture entering other areas. We drew our line geographically
rather than politically: we interviewed people who lived and watched tel-
evision, at the time of the interview, in either Britain or Germany. Future
research could explore this question from a different angle, keeping in
mind that through new media the audiences become more and more
fragmented and hybridised. Media studies has by now developed a long
history of comparisons, and indeed a long interest in establishing simi-
larities and differences, which, in the context of cultures of tastes and
public attitudes, makes cross-national, comparative research even more
useful. Regulatory regimes doubtless vary across countries, and reflect
political regime changes, so historical investigations across time would
also, we suspect, lead to useful understandings of offence and taste cul-

tures within and across cultural and national contexts. Not all of this of
course needs to be the work of any single project—given the constraints
of funding on contemporary research, if projects can individually con-
tribute to the broader ‘project’, so to speak, this will be useful work.
References
Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke
University Press.
Attwood, F., Campbell, V., & Hunter, I. Q. (2012). Controversial Images: Media
Representations on the Edge. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Bonner, F. (2003). Ordinary Television: Analyzing Popular TV. London: Sage.
Kuipers, G. (2011). The Politics of Humour in the Public Sphere: Cartoons,
Power and Modernity in the First Transnational Humour Scandal. European
Kyrölä, K. (2015). Toward a Contextual Pedagogy of Pain. Lambda Nordica,
Bibliography
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and His World. New York: Wiley.

Billig, M. (2005). Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour.
London: Sage.
Bourdieu, P. (2010). Distinction. New York: Routledge.
Claessens, N., & Dhoest, A. (2010). Comedy taste: Highbrow/lowbrow com-
edy and cultural capital. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception
Studies, 7(1), 49–72.
Finding, D. (2010). Figuring Gender and Sexuality in Little Britain. In S.
Lockyer (Ed.), Reading Little Britain: Comedy Matters on Contemporary
Television. London: I B Tauris.
Friedman, S. (2011). The cultural currency of a “good” sense of humour: British
comedy and new forms of distinction. The British Journal of Sociology, 62(2),
347–370.
Graefer, A. (2014). “Charlotte makes me lafe [sic ] sooo much”: Online laugh-
ter, affect, and femininity in Geordie Shore. Journal of European Popular
Culture, 5(2), 105–120.
Graefer, A. (2014). White stars and orange celebrities: The affective production
of whiteness in humorous celebrity-gossip blogs. Celebrity Studies, 5(1–2),
107–122.
Gray, J. (2006). Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and
Intertextuality. New York: Routledge.
Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.
London: Routledge.
Kehily, M. J., & Nayak, A. (1997). “Lads and Laughter”: Humour and the produc-
tion of heterosexual hierarchies. Gender and Education, 9(1), 69–88. Available
at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09540259721466.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 127

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67907-5
128 Bibliography
Kotthoff, H. (2006). Gender and humor: The state of the art. Journal of
Pragmatics, 38, 4–25.
Kuipers, G. (2006). Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Kuipers, G. (2009). Humor Styles and Symbolic Boundaries. Journal of Literary
Theory, 3(2), 219–241.
Kuipers, G. (2002). Media culture and Internet disaster jokes: Bin Laden and the
attack on the World Trade Center. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 5(4),
450–470. Available at: http://ecs.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/1364942
002005004296. Accessed 20 Jan 2014.
Kyrölä, K. (2010). Expanding Laughter: Affective Viewing, Body Image
Incongruity and “Fat Actress.” In M. Liljeström & S. Paasonen (Eds.),
Working with Affect in Feminist Readings. Disturbing Differences (pp. 72–85).
London: Routledge.
Lockyer, S., & Pickering, M. (2008). You must be joking: The sociologi-
cal critique of humour and comic media. Sociology Compass, 2(3), 808–820.
Available at: https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/5599.
Mulkay, M. (1988). On Humour. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Pickering, M., & Littlewood, J. (1998). “Heard the One About the White
Middle Class Heterosexual Father-in-Law ?” Gender, Ethnicity and Political
Correctness in Comedy. In S. Wagg (Ed.), Because I Tell a Joke or Two:
Comedy, Politics and Social Difference (pp. 291–312). London: Routledge.
Sancho, J. (2003). Disabling Prejudice: Attitudes Towards Disability and Its
Portrayal on Television. London: BBC.
Stallybrass, P., & White, A. (1986). The Politics and Poetics of Transgressions.
London: Methuen.
Weaver, S. (2011). The Rhetoric of Racist Humour. London: Ashgate.
Index
A Ahmed, Sara, 9, 66, 116

The abject, 7, 35, 37 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), 2
Advertising, 14, 15, 39, 46, 106, 118 Amazon, 5
Affect, 5, 8–10, 13, 31, 37, 65, 73, Annals of the American Academy of
74, 80, 83, 109, 116, 120. See Political and Social Science, 76
also Disgust Anti-intellectualism, 55
‘affective solidarity’ concept, 73, 84 ARD, 4, 15, 103
affective publics concept, 73, 74, 85 Atkinson, Rowan, 47
and structures of power, 8, 12, Audiences
47–49, 56, 58, 60–64, 65, 73, and structures of power, 8, 12, 56,
79, 116 60, 62, 79
and taste, 41, 50, 56–59 avid viewership and simultaneous
gap between affect and discourse, 65 disdain, 34, 72, 115, 120
humour as powerful tool, 46, 56, 57 BBC review of tastes/standards
liminality of, 80, 85 (Livingstone & Das, 2009), 3,
moment of as transformational, 73, 91, 93
81 clips used with during research, 14,
‘naturalization’ through feeling, 10 15, 17, 19, 26, 32
offence as affective force, 9, 11, 15, cross-media references, 21, 38
17, 19, 20, 26, 27, 31, 36, 46, Dayan’s ‘atomized public’, 74
61, 64, 65, 72, 73, 78, 79, 82, othering of fellow viewers, 36, 41,
84, 86, 116, 120, 123 72, 85
othering of fellow viewers, 28, 36, own self as a ‘subject of value’, 42,
41, 72, 85 59, 74, 91, 93, 98, 100, 109,
theorizations of, 9, 11, 21, 73, 74, 117, 123
80, 81, 124
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 129

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67907-5
130 Index
porous border between ‘us’ and responsibility over comedy, 16

‘them’, 33, 36, 41 Butsch, Richard, 11
roles as publics in society, 11, 13,
21, 80, 89, 100, 106, 109,
120, 124 C
sovereign audience/consumer myth, Carr, Jimmy, 3
20, 41, 118 Cartoons, political, 4, 93
speaking back to offensive content, Censorship
8, 13, 20, 26, 72, 75, 76, 85, free speech debate, 13, 20, 90,
120 96–98, 108, 115, 123
strategies used to avoid offence, 20, and media effects tradition, 8
26, 38, 41, 42, 60, 66 vision of heavy-handed regulators,
suspicion of study from German 94, 124
participants, 29 Charlie Hebdo attacks (2015), 54, 55
theorisations of, 5, 8, 11, 21, 72, Children and young people, 33, 93,
73, 89, 90 105
Austerity regimes, 41, 85, 97, 103, children’s television, 93
114, 121 Christlich Demokratische Union
(CDU), 95
Cindy from Marzahn (female German
B comedian), 59
Barbie (children’s programme), 78 Citizen Khan (television comedy), 46,
Barth, Mario, 16, 46, 57–59, 62, 64 56
BBC, 3, 80, 91, 93, 102–104 Citizenship, 12, 73, 74
Big Brother (television show), 105 theorizations of, 8, 11, 72, 73, 80,
Birmingham School, 76 89
Body genres, 7 Civic society, 12
Bohlen, Dieter, 64 Class
Böhmermann, Jan, 3, 16, 46, 95 and comedy/humour, 16, 46, 47,
Boyle, Frankie, 51 52, 57, 60
Broadcasters, 4, 15, 19–21, 39–42, and disgust, 28, 29
48, 103, 106, 107, 123. See also ‘Hartz-IV television’, 35, 36
Public service broadcasting in Indian society, 19
commercial/private, 20, 38–40, laughter as boundary-forming, 58
42, 92, 96, 97, 102, 103, 106, make up of study audience, 27
107, 118 neoliberal ‘subjects of value’, 38, 81
dislocation of responsibility for and offensive humour, 49
content, 64, 65, 81, 85, 91, 93, relations of power, 10, 11, 13
105, 107 stereotypes/classist representations,
oligarchic nature of, 80, 95, 97, 118 15, 19, 55, 56, 58, 61, 79, 82,
public perceptions of, 7, 21, 90, 98, 83
107 and taste, 20, 28, 41, 50, 57, 126
Index 131
tools of social distinction, 10, 46, Diversity and pluralism, 5, 42, 107
56, 67
‘Unterschichtenhumor’, 58
Comedy. See Humour and comedy E
Complaint procedures Embarrassing Bodies (television pro-
in Germany, 15, 92 gramme), 15
responses to complaints, 90, 93, Emotions, 8–10, 17, 64, 71–74, 76,
104, 120 79, 83–86, 108. See also Affect;
in UK, 13, 15, 18, 51, 105 disgust
Corner, John, 11 and class distinctions, 20, 33, 41,
Culpeper, J., 7 50, 54, 59
Cultural capital, 41 and humour, 20, 36, 46–48
and relations of power, 10, 49, 56,
66, 82
D Erdogan, President, 3, 46
Dahlgren, Peter, 12 European Union, 54
Daily Mail, 3
Dayan, Daniel, 74, 75, 86
Dean, J., 86 F
Deeply in Love (Schwer verliebt), 16, Facebook, 5
34 Family Guy (television programme),
Democracy, 3, 12, 76, 85, 101 16
and austerity measures, 3, 85, 95, Far-right politics, 2
103 Feminist writings, 8, 9, 81, 116
Dahlgren’s loose and open-ended concept of sexism, 66
talk, 12 and ‘women’s’ genres, 12
growing anti-intellectualism, 55 Financial crisis (2008), 41, 103
and multiculturalism, 3, 85 Fitna (van Zoonen et al. film, 2011),
and neoliberal ideology, 81, 90, 95, 75
107, 110, 118 Foucault, Michel, 60
social-democratic ideals, 90, 91, Free speech, 2, 3, 13, 20
93–95, 109 censorship debate, 13, 90, 94,
Derek (television programme), 83, 84, 96–98, 107, 108, 115, 123
104 and comedy’s ‘right to offend’, 2,
Der Polit-talk (talk show), 16 3, 47
Disability, 50, 83, 84, 102 ‘Freundinnen’ (ARD, 2016), 4
Disgust, 7, 20, 65, 72 Friedman, Sam, 57
and the abject, 37
and class, 36, 57, 59
and humour, 20, 35, 49, 50 G
and laughter, 55, 56 Gender
as socio-political and cultural cri- and Indian culture, 18
tique, 76–78, 84 patriarchy, 12, 13, 65, 82, 83
132 Index
popular discourses on women’s and real-life identities of actors, 51, 52

taste, 28, 32, 38, 75 and religion, 47, 52–55, 120
relations of power, 10, 11, 13, 36, and ‘right to offend’, 2, 3, 47, 55,
48, 49, 56, 61, 62, 66, 82, 96 58
romance novels, 12 as powerful affective tool, 46, 49
sexist humour, 7, 28, 31, 46, 50, as tool of social distinction, 33, 46,
60, 62, 64, 65, 121 56, 67
stereotypes, 15, 19, 54, 58, 79, 82, broadcasters’/regulators’ duty over,
83, 105 48, 108
the housewife, 64 clips used during research, 15, 16, 45
trans issues, 104 complexity of, 57, 59
women’s engagement with reality defining of ‘offensive humour’,
TV, 77 46–49, 52, 53, 56, 57, 60, 61,
Germany, 3, 4, 9, 10, 13–17, 20, 29, 67, 121
34, 40, 46, 48, 49, 53, 60, 64, delivery and style, 57, 65
79, 81, 82, 91–96, 99, 102–105, directionality of, 52, 121
110, 114, 122, 125. See also ‘fine line’ between humour and
Television in Germany offence, 46, 47
Berlin terrorist attacks (Christmas postmodern context, 121
2016), 2 potential to reinforce social inequali-
CDU government in, 95 ties and exclusion, 47
racial issues in, 2 sexist, 7, 28, 31, 46, 50, 60, 62, 64,
right-wing politics in, 2, 81 65, 121
‘offence culture’ in, 4 symbolic boundaries between social
Gervais, Ricky, 3, 16, 83, 104 groups, 7, 47, 49
Glas, Uschi, 4 ‘humour regimes’ governing, 52,
Grindstaff, Laura, 26 67, 121
Gullibility, 20, 27, 30–33, 37, 40 ‘Unterschichtenhumor’, 59
H I
Habermasian public sphere theory, 90 Illner, Maybrit, 16
Harindranath, Ramaswami, 11, 12 Immigration, 80, 81, 120
‘Hartz-IV television’, 35, 36 Impoliteness, 7
Hemmings, Claire, 9, 73, 81 The Inbetweeners (comedy pro-
Hermes, Joke, 74, 76 gramme), 16
Horror films, 7 Islam, 47, 54
Humour and comedy
acted out prejudices and stereotypes,
5, 55, 61, 80 J
and anti-intellectualism, 55 Jenkins, Henry, 58
and misunderstanding, 98 Journal of Moral Education, 6
Index 133
K Media and cultural studies, 6, 7, 33,

Katz, Elihu, 5, 75, 76 76
Kebekus, Carolin, 16 Media effects model, 7, 31, 125
Kepplinger, Hans-Martin, 105 Menninghaus, W., 30
Kuipers, Giselinde, 49, 50, 52 Merkel, Angela, 3
Kyle, Jeremy, 28, 34, 41 Mills, Brett, 48
Millwood Hargrave, 5
Moral panics, 7
L Moral philosophy, 7
Liberal society, 2, 3, 47, 53 Morley, David, 76
Liebes, T., 75, 76 Multiculturalism, 3, 85, 120
Little Britain (television programme), Musikantenstadl (Bavarian folk music
16, 29, 46, 51, 60, 83, 104 show), 16
Livingstone, Sonia, 5, 11, 12, 75, 76,
85, 90–93, 96
Lockyer, Sharon, 49 N
Lorde, Audre, 81 Nation-state, 95, 96
Lucas, Matt, 51 Neoliberal ideas, 38, 94, 95, 118
Lunt, P., 75, 76, 85, 90–93, 96 audience member as ‘sovereign
consumer’, 20, 38, 118
‘subjects of value’, 26, 38, 41, 42,
M 67, 115, 117
Media, 1–9, 11, 14–18, 20, 20, 25, Neo Magazin (talk show), 16, 39, 42
26, 28–33, 36, 38–42, 46, 47, Netflix, 5
65, 72, 73, 75–78, 80, 82, 85, News reporting and imagery, 7, 15,
89–98, 100–103, 105, 107–110, 28, 40, 42
114–116, 118, 120, 121, 123–
125. See also Television; Television
in Germany; Television in UK O
and free speech. See Free speechneed Ofcom, 14, 15, 18, 92–94
for further research on online British Broadcasting Code, 92, 93
media, 125 Offence
neoliberal deregulation of, 38, 41 as affective force, 6, 9, 11, 20, 26,
news material from mobile-phone 37, 38, 61, 65, 82, 120, 123
cameras, 15 as attractive subject for academics, 7
news reporting and imagery, 7, 15, audience expectations of institu-
28, 30, 40, 42 tions, 21, 101, 103, 107, 108
oligarchic nature of industry, 38, avid viewership and simultaneous
118 disdain, 34, 72, 115, 120
populist, 2, 3 buying into ‘intended’ affective
trans-media nature of contemporary structures, 26, 41, 72
environments, 3, 5, 8
134 Index
and Charlie Hebdo attacks (2015), Petry, Frauke, 2

55 Phillips, Trevor, 2
critical, and even resistant, Pickering, Michael, 47, 49
moments, 20, 71, 82 Political correctness, 2, 4, 9, 18, 96
dictionary definition, 6 Polt, Gerhard, 59
embedded within cultural dis- Pop Idol (Deutschland sucht den
courses/practices, 7 Superstar), 64
media effects tradition, 8, 125 Populist sentiment, 2, 3, 81, 96
‘naturalization’ through feeling, 10 and political correctness, 2, 4, 9,
need for further research on online 18, 96
media, 125 Pornography, 7
need for nuanced understanding of, Public service broadcasting, 3, 91, 92,
3, 125 103
as not always articulated, 119 broadcasting councils in Germany,
philosophical debates on, 6 103
policymakers’ concerns, 93 regulatory expectations of public,
postmodern context of humour, 121 94, 95, 104, 114
and real-life identities of actors, 51,
52
as resistant to clear definitions, 7 Q
responsibility-allocation, 64, 96 Queer writings, 9
right wing rejection of ‘political cor-
rectness’, 2
socio-political and cultural critiques R
emerging from responses, 76, Racial issues, 2, 7, 13, 50
78 and comedy, 3, 46, 48, 102, 121
strategies of displacement, 20, 41, relations of power, 48
42 and religion, 47
strategies used to avoid, 48, 62 and right wing populism, 2
and taste, 28, 126 Radway, Janice, 12
UK and German cultures of, 3 Rape and sexual violence, 7, 64
viscerally sensate nature of, 118, Reacting to Reality Television (Skeggs
119. See also Disgust and Wood, 2012), 9
and wider ‘structures of feelings’ in Reality television, 9, 15, 16, 26, 28,
society, 8, 12, 39, 60, 64, 79 30
The Only Way is Essex (television as cheap television, 39
programme), 46 women’s engagement with, 73
Regulation
and list of ‘red flags’, 8, 108, 109
P audiences looking to media produc-
Papacharissi, Zizi, 73, 74, 80 ers, 89, 101, 103, 105, 106,
Pegida movement, 2, 81 108, 109
Index 135
audiences seeking institutional inter- RTL (German channel), 46

ventions, 95 Rundfunkstaatsvertrag (Interstate
BBC review of tastes/standards Broadcasting Agreement), 95
(Livingstone & Das, 2009), 3,
91, 92
expectations of public, 89, 90, 94, S
96, 102, 107 Sat. 1 (German channel), 46
fieldwork definition of, 92 Schwer Verliebt (Heavily in Love),
individual-led and monitored 41, 46
approach, 97 Sexuality
in Germany, 13, 14, 92, 95, 96, 99, Daffyd in Little Britain, 51
105 hetero-normative cultures, 10
in UK, 90, 91, 93, 98. See also homophobia, 50, 83
Ofcom public service broadcasting, 102,
Lunt/Livingstone definition, 85 103
need for nuanced understanding of queer writings, 9
offence, 3, 123, 125 trans issues, 104
perceived simplicity of, 109 The Simpsons (cartoon comedy), 55
public misunderstandings/confu- Skeggs, Beverley, 6, 9, 27, 29, 72, 77,
sion, 98, 106, 123 78
public perceptions of, 7, 21, 90, 98, Snog Marry Avoid (television pro-
107 gramme), 16, 46
responses to complaints, 92, 104, Social-democratic visions of state, 90,
108 91, 93, 94
theorizations, 20, 81, 89, 108 Social media, 3, 73–75
vision of as heavy-handed censor- South Park (cartoon comedy), 16
ship, 94, 95, 97–101, 107, Sozialdemokratische Partei
123, 124 Deutschlands (SPD), 95
Religion, 47, 52–54, 120 Spencer, Frank (1970s comedy char-
attendant notions of culture, herit- acter), 56
age and ethnicity, 19 Stemmers, Jeanette, 5
Research methodology, 19, 114, 115 Stop Funding Hate campaign, 3
Revolting (BBC comedy show), 47
Riemann, Katia, 4
Right wing politics, 2, 81 T
‘fightback’ against ‘political correct- Talk shows, 13, 39, 42, 85
ness’, 2, 18 Tatort (German detective story), 82
in Germany, 2, 81 Television
populist, 2, 3, 81 as affect-laden private space, 8, 9,
‘Role modelling’, notion of, 31, 32, 13, 75
38 forecasts of demise of, 5
Romance novels, 12 genres and platforms, 5, 7, 12
136 Index
imported US entertainment pro- Conservative government in, 95

gramming, 4 populist media in, 2, 81
looking through, 35 ‘offence culture’ in, 4
and ‘loss of national distinctiveness’,
125
top-down model of public funding, V
40–42 Van Zoonen, Liesbet, 75
‘trashy’ quality of programmes, 60 Victim blaming, 64
Television in Germany Violence, screen, 7, 9, 11, 12, 30, 55,
audience offices 66, 109
(Zuschauerredaktion), 15 Vulnerability, 17, 19, 26, 31, 33, 37,
broadcasting councils, 91, 103 41, 62
complaint procedures, 14, 15, 93
public service broadcasting, 3,
39–41, 77, 85, 91, 92, 102, W
103, 109 War reporting, 8
regulatory frameworks, 15 Wife Swap (Frauentausch), 16, 27–30,
reliance on imports, 31 46
state media authorities Wikipedia, 3
(Landesmedienanstalten), 15, Williams, Linda, 7
94 Wood, Helen, 9, 28, 29, 72, 75, 77
Television in UK The World’s Strictest Parents (Die
complaint procedures, 14, 15, 18, strengsten Eltern der Welt), 16
51, 104, 105
exports, 4
public service broadcasting, 3, 91 Y
and political correctness, 2 Yiannopoulos, Milo, 2
regulatory framework. See YouTube, 5
OfcomTerrorism, 2, 84 Ytre-Arne, 75
Top Gear (television programme), 48
Top Model (television programme),
32, 79 Z
‘Trashy’ quality of programmes, 60 ZDF, 3, 15, 91, 92, 102, 103, 105,
Trump, Donald, 2 109
Tyler, Imogen, 29
U
United Kingdom (UK), 3

Provocative Screens: Offended Audiences in Britain and Germany

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Provocative Screens: Offended Audiences in Britain and Germany

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

SCREENS

ISBN 978-3-319-67906-8 ISBN 978-3-319-67907-5 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952835

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: © saulgranda/Getty

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Communication Association conference in 2014, amongst others, in

1 The Slippery Terrain of Offensive Television 1

2 Producing the Imagined Audience of Offensive Screens 25

3 Just Kidding! Negotiating the Line Between Humour

4 Audiences Speak Back: Re-Working Offensive Television 71

5 Audiences’ Expectations of Regulators and Producers 89

6 Provocative Screens 113

The Slippery Terrain of Offensive Television

Abstract This chapter complicates offence as a term and presents

Keywords Offence · Affect · Television · Publics · Controversy

In popular discussions, offensive media content is often described as

© The Author(s) 2017 1

I delight in offending people. I think that the grievance brigade, victim-

blueprint for Germany’s public broadcasting system after the Second

has influence on stereotyping, fear of crime and other reality-defining

2001), as well as war reporting (Thussu and Freedman 2003; Hoskin

Affect-Laden Publicness in the Reception

In this section, we bring together theorisations of affect in feminist writ-

individual, or to be treated (solely) as a problem, for this space may well

that even though feelings and emotions can move us in contradic-

Silke’s negative responses to depictions of queerness on German televi-

queerness as deviant, as a ‘disorientation’ (Ahmed 2006) that must be

them in various overlapping communities. As Peter Dahlgren says, “the

If we are serious about feminist politics and committed to reformulating

we must also understand that some romance readers’ experiences are

definition of ‘working-class’ does not translate directly into the German

she was—performing; and, in addition, new identities were ascribed to

In Chap. 5, we present our analysis of public perceptions of broad-

Producing the Imagined Audience

Abstract This chapter explores how audience members tend to distance

Keywords Media effects · Television · Third person effect

Despite a few members of the audience who seemingly took pleasure

© The Author(s) 2017 25

Offence and the Subject of Value

Sometimes I think, well sometimes I wonder, why is this interesting to

Pete’s interview illustrates how people sometimes distance themselves

Also our German participants referred often to feelings of bodily dis-

These shows disgust me, because it is really sad [meaning pathetic] to

There is by now a rich body of literature that investigates the links

In this interview segment, Egon, who sees himself as a well-educated and

In Gert’s comment, recent events that happened in his usually quiet

I feel genuinely concerned about the children in my school. Their mums

(more on this in Chap. 5), but it also helps with self-enhancement, as the

Here, Judith portrays young women as easily influenced and gulli-

So was Judith wrong in her assumption about television and young

The Porous Border Between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’

Matthias: Grins and leans in.

The interview with Matthias is interesting because it shows the ambi-

Another example of the porous border between ‘us’ and ‘them’, is

Hm… actually I can sometimes enjoy these so-called Hartz-IV TV

Throughout this, Heidi, as a member of the middle classes, slips in and

arguable viewing pleasure became messy when our interviewees realized

Offence and Consumer Choice

I’m always astonished, because everyone says, oh my God, how horrible.

by introducing cheaply produced formats such as reality television that

That makes me really go nuts. Recently I am wondering what this

Egon’s comment highlights the importance of consumer choice in ques-

The Slippery Terrain of Offensive Television

Abstract  This chapter complicates offence as a term and presents

Keywords  Offence · Affect · Television · Publics · Controversy

Affect-Laden Publicness in the Reception

Abstract  This chapter explores how audience members tend to distance

Keywords  Media effects · Television · Third person effect

Offence and the Subject of Value

(more on this in Chap. 5), but it also helps with self-enhancement, as the

The Porous Border Between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’

Offence and Consumer Choice

Abstract  This chapter investigates how people experience and negotiate the

Keywords  Humour regime · Television · Anger · Taste

The Link Between ‘Humour Regimes’ and Offence

Offensive Humour as a Tool of Social Distinction

Abstract  This chapter addresses audiences’ questioning of what they

Keywords  Reception · Television · Provocation · Action · Affect

This Public is Not Condemned to Silence

It’s Easy to Punch Down Somebody Worse off Than You’:

Audiences’ Expectations of Regulators

Abstract  This chapter explores the expectations audiences articulate