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 active—often public—social engagement. Drawing on a diverse range of examples—popular music parodies of “The Colonel Bogey March,” jokes about Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, touristic performance at Jamaica’s haunted Rose Hall, internet memes about NBC’s The Office, children’s parodies of commercials, and jokes about joking—Kelley 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, Kelley’s 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.

Greg Kelley's profile page

Greg Kelley holds a PhD in folklore from Indiana University and teaches in media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber, where he has been honored with multiple teaching awards. He has taught a wide range of courses and published broadly on folklore, folklore and literary relations, popular culture, humor, and the media.

“Kelley’s arguments are persuasive and his prose is enjoyable to read. This really is a wonderful book.”
—Mikel Koven, University of Worcester

“Beautifully written and illuminating.”
—Elizabeth Tucker, Binghamton University

“Witty, and at times hilarious, the book makes its cogent points largely through well-illustrated examples. This book would be an excellent addition to any graduate seminar on folklore, but also should be of great interest to anyone working in media studies or communication.”
—Journal of Folklore Research

“Greg Kelley’s new book is a spirited analysis of how, across the cultural and technological changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, people have taken the cultural resources supplied to them from elsewhere and reshaped them in unpredictable, almost capricious ways, leaving behind a trail of artifacts that represent an important object of study."
—Soundings

"A welcome addition to the folklorist's bookshelf on folk-popular dynamics, settling comfortably next to the volumes on poplore, folklorism, and folkloresque."
—Western Folklore

"An important extension of reader-response and reception studies, emphasizing the power of agency to at least partially resist the hegemonic efforts of mediated messages."
—Journal of American Folklore