This chapter discusses mediated representations
of voice in the performances of the Rubberbandits, a comedy duo from Limerick
in Ireland. Limerick is a city with a national reputation for social disadvantage
and criminal gangs, and the Rubberbandits’ particular brand of satirical and
musical comedy is based on the inner-city urban identity of Limerick. They
appropriate and localise rap and hip hop genres to the context of Limerick city
in their original music, and a strong element of the
absurd runs through their other comedy performances. A kind of sociocultural heteroglossia surrounds
their performances: the real-life voices of the Rubberbandits are radically
different to the alter-egos they inhabit as part of their performance. However,
although their actual identities are known, the Rubberbandits always appear
incognito, with plastic bags covering their faces, and when interviewed stay in
the characters of their alter-egos, Mr Chrome and Blind Boy Boat Club.
Their comedy, we argue, is a site where engagement and management of
social relations are evident, and where hegemonic discourses surrounding voices
from the margins of Limerick city are challenged, particularly in their
dismantling/challenging of the vaguely defined social construct, knacker – a construct which is very
roughly analogous to chav in the UK. The humour of the
Rubberbandits can be read in terms of ideologies of class distinction and their
deliberate lampooning of aspects of working class Limerick has the potential to
amend misinformed or misrepresented ideas of Limerick city. We examine the
linguistic and semiotic resources the Rubberbandits draw on to voice the
‘Limerick knacker’ and use corpus tools combined
with theoretical frameworks from contemporary sociolinguistics to deconstruct
and interpret the performances.