Voicing the 'knacker' : analysing the comedy of the Rubberbandits.

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.