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ABSTRACT
Cem Yılmaz’s comedic persona is unique in interweaving Turkish film history and Anglophone popular culture across multiple media platforms. This persona has almost become synonymous with comedy in Turkey. Placing an emphasis on Yılmaz as a reflection of the nation’s transnational media consumption, the present article offers a closer look at how different media texts contribute to Yılmaz’s multimedia stardom.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. See, for example, Örsler and Croombs (Citation2020, pp. 760–763) for a brief discussion of Yeşilçam.
2. Yılmaz’s love life, which includes national beauty pageant contestants, and his car collection have long been a focal point for Turkish media: see, for instance, the news article by Akçaay (Citation2020) in that regard.
3. Arif’s surname (Işık) is an allusion to Sadri Alışık’s.
4. All translations from Turkish are literal, made by Mert Örsler and signalled by double quotation marks. For films and television series, brackets signal the title(s) in English, as indicated on the IMDb website.
5. According to (Higbee and Lim Citation2010, p. 11), the term transnational subsumes other related terms, namely the intercultural and multicultural.
6. All audience numbers come from the Box Office Türkiye website.
7. For Geçgin (Citation2018, p. 183), it is Yılmaz’s (early) stand-up performances that elevated him to the status of national celebrity. It might be worth noting that these performances are neither explicitly didactic nor overtly political.
8. It was first Turkey’s state-run TV channel TRT that broadcast these series, dubbed in Turkish, before the 1990s – when it held a monopoly over the airwaves.
9. See Örsler and Kennedy-Karpat (Citation2020) for a more detailed discussion of Turkish genre parodies; see also Suner (Citation2011, pp. 123–133) for the cultural moment in which these parodies arose.
10. Although Suner does not consider any stand-up shows, the Turkish encountering the non-Turkish gets satirised in his stand-ups such as CM101MMXI Fundamentals (2013). See Suner.
11. Ernek-Alan (Citation2016, p. 268) discusses the study’s results.
12. See Yeğin (Citation2016) for product placement in Yılmaz’s films.
13. Gön (Citation2016, p. 352) mentions Yahşi Batı among Yılmaz’s most successful films.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
M. Mert Örsler
M. Mert Örsler is a Ph.D. student in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada.