Girls strike back : the politics of parody in an indigenous TV comedy

Abstract

The diversification of the media has opened up new spaces for performances that seek not only to evoke laughter but also to voice social critique. One example of this development is the TV comedy show Märät säpikkäät/Njuoska bittut, created by two young women belonging to the indigenous Sámi people living in Finland. This paper focuses on one particularly critical sketch in the show: a counter-parody of a popular parody of the Sámi presented by two Finnish male comedians. The original sketch was a parody of ethnicity. As they strike back, however, the female presenters consciously foreground the categories of gender and class, thereby introducing a completely new figure: a white, urban, underclass woman. In this paper we draw on intersectionality and indexicality to analyse this multidimensional performance and its intertextual links to the original sketch. We ask, what do these insurgent discursive practices mean in terms of critique? What do they do under cover of laughter?