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Prof. Dr. Katja Kanzler: ›Veep‹: Presidential Power, Gender, and Modes of Televisual Imagination

Veep (2012-2019) was arguably HBO’s most high-profile comedy in the early twenty-first century. A somewhat loose adaptation of the British comedy The Thick of It, it focuses on the character of Selina Meyer, Vice President, and for a short period of time also President of the United States, along with her team. While the show, in its storyworld, frames Meyer as the first female Vice President and President, it largely refrains from foregrounding the character’s femininity—as showrunner Armando Iannucci put it in an interview: “Let’s make her a woman, but let’s not have the show be about being a woman in D.C.” (Wilmore 2012). What makes Veep stand out is a distinctive brand of comedy, which has typically been described as satiric, with the show painting a humorous, often absurd picture of Washingtonian politics as a world governed by narcissism, hypocrisy, and incompetence. This paper will explore how the particular formation of the comedic that Veep uses shapes its imagination of a female (Vice) President. In a first step, I will take a closer look at the show’s comedic conventions and the ways in which they resonate with discourses and dimensions of gender. Against this backdrop, I will trace, in a set of exemplary readings, how the show’s comedic modality configures its portrayal of femininity in power. In so doing, I hope to shed light on the specific affordances of the comedic for a critical imaginary that addresses the nexus of institutionalized power and gender.