Abstract
In August 2003, MTV Networks, a division of media giant Viacom, launched its newly formed network Spike TV. Touting itself as the “first network for men,”1 Spike TV offers a line-up of shows, movies, and reality programs geared to male viewers, including Star Trek, Most Extreme Challenge (MXC), CSI, and an extensive run of James Bond movies. It also offers a small selection of original programs that initially included Stan Lee’s Stripperella cartoon (starring the voice of Pamela Anderson) and the Ren and Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon. Its most popular early, original program was a reality program called The Joe Schmo Show. Debuting on 2 September 2003, the show garnered immediate attention from the press and on-line blogs, largely because it billed itself as a faux reality program. In fact, Joe Schmo is a parody of contest-based reality shows, created to appeal specifically to a male audience. While the parody in Joe Schmo generates humor, it surpasses comedy for entertainment’s sake to offer self-consciously, through metafiction, a critique of reality programs and their viewers. In blatantly exposing the mechanics of reality TV, the show draws attention to the fictionality inherent in all reality TV. Joe Schmo’s critical use of metafictional parody recalls Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century “Tale of Sir Thopas,” a parodic rendering of Middle English romance. Like the creators of Joe Schmo, Chaucer self-consciously employs metafictional parody as a means to critique a popular genre, in this case Middle English romance, and the consumers of such texts.
This essay argues that The Joe Schmo Show and Chaucer’s “Tale of Sir Thopas” use metafictional parody to “refunction” generic forms and critique stereotypes of masculinity.
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Notes
Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 22. Margaret Rose’s term “refunctioning,” in reference to formalist theories of parodic functions, is discussed below. See her Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 29 and 52.
Fred W. Householder, “ПAPΩIΔIA (Parody),” Classical Philology 39.1 (1944): 1–9; Rose, Parody, pp. 6–29.
John Corner, “Documentary Realism,” in The Television Genre Book, ed. Glen Creeber (London: British Film Institute, 2001), p. 127 [126–29].
Bernadette Casey et al., eds., Television Studies: The Key Concepts ( London: Routledge, 2002 ), p. 67.
Barbara Creed, Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality ( Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2003 ), p. 40.
Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox ( Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980 ), p. 1.
See Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction ( London: Methuen, 1984 ).
Andy Medhurst and Lucy Tuck, “Situation Comedy and Stereotyping,” in Television Times: A Reader, ed. John Corner and Sylvia Harvey (London: Arnold, 1996), p. 113 [111–16].
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. xix.
Alan Gaylord, “Chaucer’s Dainty ‘Dogerel’: The ‘Elvyssh’ Prosody of Sir Thopas,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 1 (1979): 101–02 [83–104].
Marian Salzman, Ira Matathia, and Ann O’Reilly, The Future of Men ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 ), p. 1.
Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991 ), p. 79.
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003 ), p. 82.
W. Skeat, The Complete Works of Chaucer, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894–97), 5:183.
John Conley, “The Peculiar Name Thopas,” Studies in Philology 73.1 (1976): 57–60 [42–61]. Conley gives a full summary of the various arguments that Thopas’s name primarily refers to chastity and refutes them.
Keith Taylor, “The Middle English Parody/Burlesque,” in Companion to Old and Middle English Literature, ed. Laura Cooner Lambdin and Robert Thomas Lambdin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), p. 319 [315–35].
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© 2007 Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly K. Bell, and Mary K. Ramsey
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Bell, K.K. (2007). Models of (IM)Perfection: Parodic Refunctioning in Spike TV’s the Joe Schmo Show and Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Tale of Sir Thopas”. In: Joy, E.A., Seaman, M.J., Bell, K.K., Ramsey, M.K. (eds) Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610040_2
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