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This thesis analyses stunts in the public life of late nineteenth-century New York, where 'stunt' developed as a slang term. Addressing stunts as a performative and discursive practice, I investigate stunts in popular newspapers, sports, politics and protest and, to a lesser extent, theatre and film. Each chapter focuses on one form of stunt: bridge jumping, extreme walking contests, a new genre of reporting called 'stunt journalism', and cycling feats. Joseph Pulitzer's popular newspaper, the World, is the primary research archive, supported by analysis of other newspapers and periodicals, vaudeville scripts, films, manuals and works of fiction. The driving question is: how did stunts in public life enact conceptions of value? I contextualise stunts in a 'crisis of value' concerning industrialisation, secularisation, recessions, the currency crisis, increased entry of women into remunerative work, immigration, and racialised anxieties about consumption and degeneration. I examine the ways in which 'stunt' connotes devaluation, suggesting a degraded form of politics, art or sport, and examine how such cultural hierarchies intersect with gender, race and class. The critical framework draws on Theatre and Performance Studies theorisations of precarity and liveness. I argue that stunts aestheticised everyday precarity and made it visible, raising ethical questions about the value of human life and death, and the increasingly interdependent nature of urban society. Stunts took entrepreneurial idealisations of risk and autoproduction to extreme, constructing identity as commodity. By aestheticising precarity and endangering lives, stunts explored a symbolic and material connection between liveness and aliveness, which provokes questions about current conceptualisations of liveness and mediatisation. I argue that while stunts were framed as exceptional, frivolous acts, they adopted the logic of increasingly major industries, such as the popular press, advertising and financial markets. Stunts became a focal point for anxiety regarding the abstract and unstable nature of value itself.

There are three parts to this thesis, which explores how politicians, the public and broadcasters were affected by ‘antiestablishment’ BBC comedy between 1939 and 1973. ‘The Establishment’ is understood not just as the holders and loci of power, but something with social dimensions, too. Part one explores the immanent anarchy of humour by looking at controversies stirred by radio comedy before 1960. Key studies are ITMA and The Goon Show, two programmes at times concealing ‘antiestablishment’ attitudes. The chapter also discusses a BBC file, ‘Jokes Against Government’, which shows that listeners were detecting satirical intent and so-called political bias in variety as early as 1932. The implication is: if relatively innocuous comedy can disturb, those programmes which intentionally attack politicians may have quite some power. Such programmes are the focus of part two, which dedicates a chapter each to That Was The Week That Was; Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life and BBC-3. These were televised revue shows with much satirical, topical content. All three were produced by Ned Sherrin and all three, it is argued, had sustained political impact. The archival material presented suggests a worry by many politicians, both Labour and Conservative, about television’s role in political culture. This theme continues in part three. What were the Sherrin trilogy’s long-term effects? The contention is that the irreverence towards politics that marked out these shows was subsumed into some more ‘serious-minded’ BBC programming. One example offered is the 1971 documentary Yesterday’s Men, which examined the fortunes of the Labour Cabinet defeated in the 1970 general election. The presentational techniques of Yesterday’s Men, sometimes described as ‘satirical’, led to a row between the BBC and some of the documentary’s interviewees, analysis of which leads to some conclusions about the value of archival research into satire.