num_pages: 252
description: Unruly Audience explores grassroots appropriations of familiar media texts from film television stand-up comedy popular music advertising and tourism. Case studies probe the complex relationship between folklore and media with particular attention to the dynamics of production and reception. Greg Kelley examines how folk interventions challenge institutional media with activeoften publicsocial engagement. Drawing on a diverse range of examplespopular music parodies of The Colonel Bogey March jokes about Disneys Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs  touristic performance at Jamaicas haunted Rose Hall internet memes about NBCs The Office  childrens parodies of commercials and jokes about jokingKelley demonstrates how active audiences mobilize folklore to disrupt dominant modes of media discourse. With materials both historical and contemporary and compiled from print internet archives and original fieldwork Kelleys audience-centered analysis demonstrates that producers of media are not the sole arbiters of meaning. With folklore as an important tool unruly audiences refashion mediated expression so that the material becomes more relevant to their own circumstances. Unruly Audience foregrounds the fluid interplay between media production and audience reception and between forces of cultural domination and cultural resistance bringing new analytical insights to familiar folk practices. This carefully crafted book will speak to students and scholars in folklore popular culture and media studies in multidisciplinary ways. 
language: English
title: Unruly Audience: Folk Interventions in Popular Media
publisher: Utah State University Press