The Poetics and Politics of Invective HumorVituperation, disparagement, and debasement seem to have become part of the mainstream discourse in contemporary US American media culture. Zooming in on a distinct televisual comedy genre, Katja Schulze explores the formal principles, media specific realizations, and the cultural work of disparagement in contemporary female led situation comedies. Subsequently, larger patterns of (gender based) invective strategies and conventions that define the