Comedy’s commercialization, political role, and media domination mark its American evolution. Initially, humorists like Mark Twain reigned. But comedy’s move into mass media emphasized anarchic energy and gags until1920s radio and movies incorporated sound to expand humorous storytelling, witty dialogue. From these developments appeared the sitcom, a genre seized upon by early TV. Vaudeville’s comedic legacy also infiltrated TV variety shows that, by the 1960s, incorporated more provocative humor. Late-night talk shows emerged as a “gateway” for stand-up comedians. TV comedy became better known for expressing changing American values in Norman Lear’s 1960s sitcoms and Saturday Night Live’s 1975 parody sketches. Although most movie and TV comedy was not socially engaged, The Simpsons and other 1990s prime-time animation refashioned cultural parody while The Daily Show popularized the satirical newscast. Contemporary comedies embrace wider diversity highlighting gay, non-White, and female characters and narrative experimentation now that digital media compete for audiences.

Visual popular culture flourished in the nineteenth century. Museums began democratizing to include wider audiences, even to the extent that some hosted exotic objects, live people, and animals. These sensationalist or “dime” museums were best represented by P. T. Barnum’s American Museum (1841–1865) and its dioramas and panoramas, objects, illusions and stunts, and animal and human performances. Popularization of visual culture also occurred in the commercial growth of book and magazine illustrations as well as in wall art print reproductions, all of which admitted the fine arts into middle-class parlors. Photographs and daguerreotypes, especially portraiture and landscapes, became fashionable. Outside the home, an increasingly urbanized environment admitted new visual elements in a landscape of sensory overload. Broadsides, billboards, and wall posters all contributed to democratizing spectatorship, and visual spectatorship itself became an essential component of urban living. New visual culture reshaped both who could see and who was seen.

Initially a hobby of amateurs, radio evolved into a national broadcast industry in the 1920s. Radio’s Golden Age (1920s–1940s) constructed a shared aural culture supplanting newspapers and vaudeville for news and entertainment. Amos ‘n’ Andy became radio’s most popular show, its Black characters perpetuating the racist dialect and style of the minstrel show. Other programs catered to diverse audiences through dramas, westerns, mysteries, science fiction, and children’s shows. Soap operas, a form developed by writer-producer Irna Phillips, targeted women. Norman Corwin produced World War II dramas that demonstrated radio’s role for wartime unity. When television assumed radio’s social functions in the 1950s, radio reinvented itself (”Top 40” format) promoting popular music to a new youth culture. But by the 2000s, radio again had to transform as digital technologies lured youth audiences to other modes for music listening, and radio found new life by adapting for digital distribution via podcasts.

American morality standards traditionally dictated restrictions on erotica featuring nudity and sex. Early twentieth century pornography only circulated in marginal spaces — brothels and all-male gatherings. But the new Kodak camera fueled amateur pornography, and, despite Hollywood’s self-censorship, adult “exploitation” films grew. In postwar America, pornography emerged from the shadows. Obscenity laws and their enforcement weakened, and Hollywood relaxed its censorship as acceptance of sex imagery grew. Porn bookstores and foreign or “art” films featuring nudity increased in downtown sex districts. Risqué novels, Playboy, and beefcake magazines addressing gay subculture became popular. Sexually explicit films starting with Deep Throat (1972) achieved notoriety and commercial success. By the 1980s, however, urban renewal gentrified porn districts while videotape and cable TV shifted pornography to homes and privacy, increasing pornography’s audience. The Internet merely proliferated at-home pornography. As pornography expanded, so did public opposition in a feminist anti-pornography movement allied with Christian conservatives

More than 1,500 turn-of-the-century US amusement parks were popular new sites of commercial leisure entertainment featuring thrill rides, dance halls, roller-skating, band concerts, movie houses, disaster shows, live acts, food, and swimming. Park architecture was a fanciful, exotic backdrop. On the outskirts of developing cities, parks helped to define new urban modernism by celebrating motion and speed, industrial technologies, and the experience of the crowd. While scholars initially called these metropolitan parks “laboratories of mass culture,” this chapter shows they were more importantly crucibles for new social issues and conflicts regarding urban influxes of young women, immigrants, and African Americans. More often, they bolstered class, racial, and ethnic divisions. American-style parks, many started by American ride manufacturers, also appeared throughout Europe and other parts of the world and may be understood within early practices of exporting American popular culture around the globe.

American sports became culturally prominent in the nineteenth century as cities developed and as leisure and work became increasingly distinct. Many were recreations of a specific class, immigrant group, and/or gender. By century’s end, sport was also identified with healthfulness and manliness or femininity. Sports became both commercially professionalized and an integral part of colleges and high schools.Two sports especially grew: boxing and baseball. Professional boxing’s players achieved new mass celebrity, first Irish American John L. Sullivan then African American Jack Johnson, who became a symbolic threat to White superiority in the early twentieth century. Baseball evolved into a network of professional players and teams, institutionalized with standardized rules and excluding women and African Americans. But baseball became America’s leading spectator sport and the one most associated with Americanness, a truth driven home when the 1919 Black Sox Scandal over World Series game-fixing outraged the nation.

An American genre whose origins lie in Black musical traditions, country music got national exposure when a 1920s budding record industry and radio broadcasts made it available to mass audiences. The Grand Ole Opry helped to spread the sound and launched similar barn dance radio programs. An evolving music shaped a new culture – “honky-tonk” – that addressed postwar changes: male artists mourned the loss of mythologized domesticity, and women artists responded about their changing identities. Simultaneously, country music competed with and incorporated the new forms of rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues, often resulting in “outlaw” country music that expressed rebellion and alienation. In the 1960s–1970s, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, and Dolly Parton became legendary figures bringing a gendered element to lyrics and performances. Country music dynamically continues through today, incorporating greater diversity and musical styles while playing out a duality of expressing and appropriating Black music.

America’s Depression-era world’s fairs promised an optimistic future. Chicago, New York, and San Francisco fairs heralded technological and industrial innovation as keys to future prosperity. American imperialism was an unwavering tool of progress, and African Americans and women remained “invisible” except in marginalized entertainment zones. After World War II, another world’s fair did not occur until 1958. The Brussels Universal Exposition’s US pavilion met Cold War anxiety with cheerful consumerism. Following Brussels’ success, the United States resumed hosting world’s fairs. At Seattle’s Century-21 Exposition (1962), outer space was the new frontier and America the world leader of scientific and technological advancement. The 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair replayed these themes, adding a bright future steeped in consumerism. Subsequent fairs, however, failed financially and convinced many that the form was obsolete.

World’s fairs or international expositions occurred regularly in the United States between 1876 and 1916. These seasonal spectacles exhibited American national progress, technological development, and industrialization. Women and non-Whites, however, were relegated to subordinate roles, although their opposition and protests are equally part of the story of this period’s fairs. The fairs also generally consigned entertainment to specific zones. The expositions of this period – especially the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, the 1901 Buffalo Pan-American Exposition, the 1904 St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the 1915–1916 San Francisco Panama–Pacific Exposition, and the 1915–1916 San Diego Panama–California Exposition – attracted millions of tourists while photos, postcards, and other souvenirs informed millions more about them. They were international stages that wove popular culture into ideological displays about American empire and technological progress and were originators for several types of twentieth-century popular culture.

African American popular culture celebrates identity and resistance while also serving White commodification and stereotyping of Black experience. In the 1920s, Black popular culture centered on new urban identities, creating a nightlife culture of song, dance, and movies. Black music grew so that by the 1950s a Black-owned music industry expressing racial pride and optimism provided the nation’s chief pop sounds. In the late 1960s, however, cohesive, socially conscious Black popular culture fragmented. “Blaxploitation” movies addressed Black urban experience but invented a fantasy world of racial stereotypes that best represents this era’s commodifying of Black culture. In the 1970s, hip-hop sparked a Black pop music revival, encouraging optimism that a new Black pop culture had arrived although it too underwent White appropriation. However, since the Black Lives Matter movement, African American popular culture has reasserted its political agency, seeking not only racial justice but reimagining American society’s structures.

Theme parks are a post-World War II refabrication of the old-fashioned amusement park for middle-class family leisure. Walt Disney’s Disneyland in Anaheim, California (1955), was the model for subsequent theme parks and zoological or animal theme parks that have flourished in American suburbs as well as in vacation destination zones. They bear similarities to shopping malls and borrow the scale and extravagance of world’s fairs. These tourist sites, especially Disney World and Universal Studios parks, often celebrate fantasies of immersion in modern movies and TV. One scholar labels them “utopias of leisure,” offering a cleansed homogeneity and managed social control. Disney and other park companies have also brought the media fantasy vacation to Asian and European cities while generating imitation by sites like the Las Vegas strip, now a commercial mix of entertainments that simulate exotic and fantasy locales and incorporate animal habitats, thrill rides, and overwhelming electrified visual effects.

Late nineteenth-century Wild West shows mythologized the conquest of the American West. Aided by modern publicity techniques, they theatricalized fantasies of an “authentic” West that celebrated racial genocide and American nationalism. They dovetailed with contemporary dime novels and newspaper stories sensationalizing the West, their legacy continuing in Hollywood westerns. Best known was “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” show, created by William Cody in 1883 and featuring sharpshooter Annie Oakley and Lakota Sioux leader Sitting Bull. Cody’s troupe also traveled to Europe, where the show’s popularity was an early configuration of American foreign imperialism through popular culture. Significantly, the shows relied on Native American performers, resulting in complex politics about containment and resistance. Sitting Bull and others played roles that supported tales of manifest destiny while their careers as “actors” provided their best means for employment and preserving Indigenous cultures when the government had relegated them to reservations and prisons.

Rock music is identified with postwar affluent youth subculture’s revolt against politics, consumerism, and social rules. The 1950s emergence of rock ’n’ roll was initially a celebration of Black culture’s charisma in opposition to Jim Crow politics. But, during the 1960s, rock ’n’ roll yielded to styles identified more with White musicians. “Rock” became more than just entertainment: The Beatles’ “invasion” from Great Britain signaled new cultural predominance; Bob Dylan’s infusion of folk music signified youth culture’s bohemianism and alternative lifestyle; Black soul and “hippie” acid rock rounded out a socially resistant counterculture. This revolt climaxed at the 1969 rock music festival Woodstock. But, in 1970, three tragedies – the Charles Manson cult’s mass murders, a killing at California’s Altamount Music Festival, and the National Guard ‘s killing of antiwar protesters at Kent State University – marked the end of the era. Yet, rock assimilated new lasting values into American society.

Steeped in African American traditions, jazz frequently invites conversations about race, Black artistry, and White commercialization of Black culture. To illustrate jazz’s slippage between art and the popular, this chapter considers jazz’s characterization and definition in advertising, movies, and popular music. These categories represent jazz as a cultural form through the embodiment and performance of jazz musicians. Companies like Nike, Honda, and Apple Computers intertwined a cultural aura around jazz with their merchandise. Hollywood movies in the post-World War II era conferred new authority on White swing musicians and erased anxiety about appropriation of Black culture by offering both White and Black jazz musicians’ performances. Late twentieth-century musicians — Steely Dan, Sting, Joni Mitchell — explicitly engaged jazz and jazz musicians for albums that aspired to artistic status rather than that of pop music. Throughout, definitions and separations between jazz as art and as the popular get blurred and remade.

Sports and the media first became co-dependent when Thomas Edison made boxing spectacle integral to early cinema’s success. In the 1920s–1930s, sports journalism’s dramatic storytelling made it key for both newspapers’ and radio’s popularity. When 1950s television added a visual dimension, sports industry leaders worried that TV was competition for live attendance. But professional football, a marginal sport, used the medium to create a fan base. ABC-TV developed a dramatic, intimate televisual style exemplified in their 1964 Olympics broadcasts, an unparallelled media spectacle and commercial success. ABC’s major role continued through Monday Night Football, coverage of the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attack, and other events. With cable TV’s arrival in the 1980s, all-sports channels like ESPN made coverage available 24/7, a strategy recently extended by digital platforms that now supply sports entertainment on-demand.

The American Dream and its utopian “America” are tropes that transcend US geographical boundaries. They distinguish between a nation-state and a myth that can be interpreted differently around the world. American popular culture has relied on this myth as a global export, a form of corporate imperialism attempting to Americanize the world – best exemplified by the Hollywood film industry. Recently, however, the global media landscape is more diversified and fragmented due to social media, digital platforms, and streaming services. The transnational success of South Korean popular culture, MTV Europe, and Netflix illustrate how contemporary cultural differences are recognized and absorbed in American-modeled popular entities. For example, the global TV talent shows Pop Idol, American Idol, and The Voice deliver American identification regardless of country of production. Another recent example of unstated “Americanness” as a global phenomenon is singer Taylor Swift, whose worldwide popularity is connected to an explicit cultural identity