ABSTRACT
It's clear that strong symbolic boundaries separate different comedy tastes. However, the power of these boundaries is not just determined by their strength but also by the legitimacy of the tastes on both sides of the divide. After all, to comprise a meaningful form of cultural capital, tastes and aesthetic styles must constitute what Lamont and Lareau (1988: 152–159) term ‘widely shared status signals’. Traditionally, such cultural consecration has come from two main channels: via the state and from the authority of certain cultural intermediaries (see Chapter 3 for more detail). In the case of British comedy, the first of these agents — the state — remains aloof, assigning no public funding and largely omitting comedy from school and university curriculums. But the influence of cultural intermediaries is arguably much stronger.
