Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 A Troubled Paradise: Utopia and Transgression in Comedies of the Early 1930s
- 2 Working Ladies and Forgotten Men: Class Divisions in Romantic Comedy, 1934–1937
- 3 “The Split-Pea Soup and the Succotash”: Frank Capra's 1930s Comedies and the Subject of Class
- 4 Is Class Necessary?: Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks in the Early 1940s
- 5 Desperately Seeking Status: Class, Gender, and Social Anxiety in Postwar Hollywood Comedy
- 6 Is There a Class in This Text?: Woody Allen and Postmodern Comedy
- 7 Yuppies and Other Strangers: Class Satire and Cultural Clash in Contemporary Film Comedy
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
7 - Yuppies and Other Strangers: Class Satire and Cultural Clash in Contemporary Film Comedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 A Troubled Paradise: Utopia and Transgression in Comedies of the Early 1930s
- 2 Working Ladies and Forgotten Men: Class Divisions in Romantic Comedy, 1934–1937
- 3 “The Split-Pea Soup and the Succotash”: Frank Capra's 1930s Comedies and the Subject of Class
- 4 Is Class Necessary?: Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks in the Early 1940s
- 5 Desperately Seeking Status: Class, Gender, and Social Anxiety in Postwar Hollywood Comedy
- 6 Is There a Class in This Text?: Woody Allen and Postmodern Comedy
- 7 Yuppies and Other Strangers: Class Satire and Cultural Clash in Contemporary Film Comedy
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Do yuppies even exist? No one says “I am a
yuppie.” It's always the other guy who's a yuppie.
I think for a group to exist somebody has to
admit to be part of it.
Dez, in The Last Days of Disco
(Whit Stillman)For the “baby-boom” generation of the 1980s and 1990s, the figure of the “yuppie” – the young, urban, upwardly mobile professional – served as an iconic representation of the aspirations, tensions, and anxieties that characterized American socioeconomic life. The economic growth of the 1980s, and in particular the boom in financial markets and services, led to what David Harvey has identified as “a whole new Yuppie culture … with its accoutrements of gentrification, close attention to symbolic capital, fashion, design, and the quality of urban life.” Although yuppies represented only a fraction of the overall population of “baby boomers” born in the postwar era, they exercised an inordinate influence on cultural patterns of the 1980s and 1990s, both through their own buying power and through their influence on a larger number of would-be yuppies who attempted to imitate aspects of their lifestyles and consumption patterns.
For yuppies and pseudo-yuppies alike, the most important status symbols were cultural commodities rather than consumer products. Yuppies were urban rather than suburban in lifestyle and orientation, and they were generally well informed about current trends in culture and the arts.
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- Information
- Class, Language, and American Film Comedy , pp. 179 - 212Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002