Mondays and Popular Culture
Soph Laugh
Mondays and Popular Culture 2
Introduction
Mondays are a central feature within a seven-day period known as the week. Mondays occur during the workweek as opposed to the weekend, and occur in virtually every society - including parallel universes - in the world. While Mondays differ significantly from other days of the week, there are some common features and frequent phenomena that are both interesting and significant. The first and biggest problem faced in writing an overview of Monday and popular culture is trying to define it. Broad definitions, favored by supporters of Bart Simpson, for example, assert that they "hate" Mondays. Mondayologists see Mondays as an umbrella term for just about all aspects of everyday experience, including commonplace material culture such as processed foods, shotty
Mondays and Popular Culture 3
construction, graphic design of anti-Monday sentiments, t-shirts with anti-Monday inscriptions, street art depicting anti-Mondayism, and just about anything else that people use as they go about bad-mouthing Mondays. Narrower definitions often found in American studies and in popular culture studies in various disciplines in academic circles in the United States often tend to limit the definition to the popular arts and entertainments, such as unpopular literature, waste-of-time journalism, lame graphic arts, bad performances, and the hysterical mass media. The other areas that might be included as Monday popular culture are left for folklore/folk life studies, anti-Mondayism material culture studies, and Mondays as a social phenomenon
per se.
While Mondays can certainly be studied in every aspect of everyday life, there's more than enough to deal with in managing with Mondays than meets the eye. Take, for example,