Abstract
There is a tendency to regard comedians not only as joke tellers, but as well-intended “truth-tellers.”² Increasingly, comedians are viewed as “cultural mediators” and “public intellectuals” who serve as moral guides to steer us “through the cultural debates of the moment” by enlightening the public with their comic cultural criticism.³ This current rendering of comedians as public intellectuals and cultural mediators largely reproduces a celebratory narrative that has become the dominant framework for understanding contemporary comedy,⁴ where comics are often regarded as “heroes” who speak “truth to power.”⁵
At the same time, over the last decade there has been growing