Brutal spoons and cheesy gloves

Abstract

Abstract In its long presence on television and the internet, the genre of the cooking show has changed and diversified significantly. The initial principally instructional character has given way to more entertaining sub-genres, including parodic ones, that is, ‘spoof cooking shows’ on the internet. The presentation of self (Goffman 1959) takes on many forms in everyday life, but the possibilities of publicly managing one’s own impression have enormously increased on the largest stage in the world, the internet (cf. Shulman 2017). The blurring of the Goffmanian concepts ‘front-’ and ‘backstage’ are important here in the presentation of self as ‘fake’ or ‘real’ person on the web. This article looks at the diversification of the genre of the cooking show in its transition to the internet, first by investigating strategies of formality or informality (Irvine 1979, 2001), then by exploring a particular spoof show, Cooking with Paris, as an example of how genre conventions are manifested by undermining.