Page 49 Comedy taste: Highbrow/lowbrow comedy and cultural capital Nathalie Claessens & Alexander Dhoest, University of Antwerp, Belgium Volume 7, Issue 1 (May 2010) Abstract Drawing on Bourdieu’s theories about taste and class, this paper investigates how viewers with different levels of education evaluate different forms of comedy. Following up on the research by Giselinde Kuipers, who connected Dutch taste cultures in television comedy to levels of cultural capital, we interviewed Flemish viewers about their appreciation of an exemplary lowbrow, middlebrow and highbrow comedy TV series. We found clear patterns in the knowledge and evaluation of these series, related to the interviewee’s level of education. Quite predictably, the lower educated respondents have a better knowledge of and prefer relaxing lowbrow comedy while the higher educated better know and appreciate complex middle- and highbrow comedy. These divergent readings can be related to cultural knowledge, as the lower educated do not notice many of the layers and social references in highbrow comedy, only commenting on the easier (often visual) elements of humour. Keywords: TV comedy; taste; highbrow/lowbrow; level of education; Flanders. Introduction Television comedy may have evolved from an ‘unworthy’ form of culture (Attalah, 1984) to an academically (more) respectable object of research, nevertheless it does remain quite low on the ‘moral hierarchy’ of television programmes (Alasuutari, 1992). As a genre, it still suffers from a low cultural status particularly in its more popular forms (Mills, 2001: 61; Seiter, 1999: 1-6). Scholarly writing has tended to focus on its socio-political meaning, criticising its conservative ideology or commenting on its subversive potential (e.g. Marc, 1997; Mills, 2001). Television comedy is indeed, essentially, social comedy, dealing with (the breaching of) social norms and conventions, which explains why class is such a central theme in its humour (Woollacott, 1982; Attalah, 1984; Bazalgette et al., 1982; Wagg, 1998). In this paper, we want to investigate how ‘class’ (to be further defined) also plays a role in the appreciation