Humour as a Nonviolent Resistance Strategy in Murdoch Mysteries TV Series
Humour as a Nonviolent Resistance Strategy in Murdoch Mysteries TV Series

Summary/Abstract: Humour holds a significant role in our lives, making spirits bright and enabling people to overcome the obstacles of their plain daily existence. As a communication phenomenon that embraces countless forms and shapes, humour is widely believed to possess properties of releasing tension and creating good mood. It also operates like some kind of “ice-breaking” tool meant to relax and entertain people, being also connected with interpersonal attraction. For many people who have the capacity of finding humour even in the darkest details of their life, this is an efficient weapon to fight monotony, interpersonal confusion, aand misery (Shibles 1997). Moreover, humour is also a successful nonviolent strategy of resisting injustice and oppression. Thus, mocking the enemy as a way of fighting back has turned into a historic tradition materialised in the public exposure to caricatures, anecdotes, jokes, stand-up sketches in addition to the classic jestering and satire (Sorensen 2008).Exploited by both the mass-media and the film industry, especially in TV series, humour has the potential of responding to the audience’s need to either recognize themselves and their destiny in the fictional characters and plot or to escape from the daily pressures of their unfulfilled lives. Some TV series facilitate access to some performance that is liable to help spectators/viewers to forget about the quotidian worries or they inspire ways of fighting themselves against oppressive situations through humour. Dedicated mostly to youngsters and adapted from a literary work, Murdoch Mysteries TV series fulfils both roles by providing varied samples of humorous language and situations that that can approached from both traditional and modern, up-to-date perspectives. In line with the topic proposed for this paper, we will further review the main theories of humour to the purpose of projecting it as a social tool of resistance to different kinds of oppression.

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