The Joke Is on Us

Politics and Comedy: Critical Encounters

Series Editor: Julie A. Webber, Illinois State University

This series brings scholars of political comedy together in order to examine the effect
of humor and comedy in a political way. The series has three main components. Politi-
cal Comedy Encounters Neoliberalism aims to look at how comedy disrupts or reinforces
dominant ideologies under neoliberalism, including but not limited to: forms of author-
ity, epistemological certainties bred by market centrality, prospects for democratic thought
and action, and the implications for civic participation. Political Comedy as Cultural Text
examines the relationship between the more bizarre elements of contemporary politics
and comedy, including but not limited to countersubversive narratives that challenge or
reinforce anti-democratic political authority and market thought, radical social movements
that seek to undermine it, and political comedy’s relationship to the cultural unconscious.
Lastly, the series welcomes proposals for scholarship that tracks the context in which com-
edy and politics interact. Political Comedy in Context follows the intersection of politics
and comedy in viral, mediated, and affective environments.

Titles Published
Political Satire, Postmodern Reality, and the Trump Presidency: Who are
We Laughing at? by Mehnaaz Momen
The Joke Is on Us: Political Comedy in (Late) Neoliberal Times, edited by Julie A. Webber
 The Joke Is on Us
Political Comedy in (Late)
Neoliberal Times

Edited by
Julie A. Webber

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 Table of Contents

Introduction: The Joke Is on Us: Political Comedy in (Late)

Neoliberal Times 1

PART I: THE TERRAIN HAS CHANGED 35

1 All They Need Is Lulz: Racist Trolls, Unlaughter, and
Leslie Jones 37
Viveca Greene
2 Brexit Irony on The Last Leg and Last Week Tonight with John
Oliver: Critiquing Neoliberalism through Caricature 65
Simon Weaver
3 What’s Wrong with Slactivism? Confronting the Neoliberal
Assault on Millennials 87
Sophia A. McClennen
4 Political Humor in the Face of Neoliberal Authoritarianism
in Turkey 105
Seçil Dağtaş
PART II: POST-NETWORK NEOLIBERAL POLITICS 131
5 From Irritated Hostages to Silly Citizens: Infotainment
Satire as Ludic Surveillance 133
Marc-Olivier Castagner and David Grondin
6 The Political Economy of Late-Night Comedy 159
Don Waisanen

v
vi Table of Contents

7 British Comedy and the Politics of Resistance: The Liminality

of Right-Wing Comedy 177
James Brassett
8 I Want to Party with You, Cowboy: Stephen Colbert and
the Aesthetic Logic of “Truthiness” after Campaign 2016 193
Aaron McKain and Thomas Lawson
PART III: NEOLIBERALISM AND SUBJECTIVITY 219
9 From Awkward to Dope: Black Women Comics in the
Alternative Comedy Scene 221
Jessyka Finley
10 Savage New Media: Discursive Campaigns for/against
Political Correctness 245
Rebecca Krefting
11 “An Actual Nightmare, but . . . Pretty Good TV”: Horror-comedy
in the Trump Era 267
Diane Rubenstein

Conclusion: “You’re Fired!” Neoliberalism, (Insult) Comedy, and

Post-network Politics 293
Julie A. Webber
Index315
Biographies of Contributors 333
 Introduction
The Joke Is on Us: Political Comedy
in (Late) Neoliberal Times

An Onion meme captures the futility of the current moment in politics:

“Breaking News: The Onion on the verge of collapse after not being able to
make up shit that is more idiotic than current reality,” (Onion 2018). Doubling
down, it seems the politics of the contemporary era, with each new political
“truth” questioned by an opposing side willing to stake its credibility on the
confirmation bias of its audience. In fact, as of this writing a new audience
designation appears: neoliberal “truthers” are a trope off of many kinds of
truthers who preceded them in the mediascape: birthers (those who doubted
the veracity of the forty-fourth president’s birth certificate) and Sandy Hook
“truthers” (those who doubted the mass attack on Sandy Hook Elementary
actually took place, positing that “paid actors” were on the scene to effect
the “reality” of a mass shooting. In the case of neoliberal truthers, trolls,
and other citizens attack academics and political actors who use the term to
describe the increasingly fast-paced, bean counting, algorithmic culture that
(with the generous help of Big Data) decides the fate of most citizens. These
“truthers” are many things: ungrateful, reactionary, academic, Democrats (!),
even conspiracy theorists for hire. As this new simulacrum of truth unfolds,
“neoliberalism,” as a critical term to describe political reality comes under
attack. Crisis after crisis erupts, yet the data keeps dripping out, and publics
keep responding. Lacking an overarching framework with which to appre-
hend these developments, political analysts turn to neoliberalism, which has
never been clearer than after Trump’s election. How can attending to the
premises of neoliberal thought help us to understand were comedy challenges
this ever-unfolding claim to “truth” that seemingly comes to rest only in the
next iteration of entertainment or scandal? To these misguided “thinkers” and
the brief history of this neoliberal experiment, I now turn.

1
2 Introduction

Recently, scholars have attempted to frame neoliberalism as an overarch-

ing ideology that originates in the West, as a direct response to and against
the rise of the positive state, or what some more commonly refer to as the
“welfare state.” This state sought to avert financial crisis through the redis-
tribution of wealth, the establishment of social protections and entitlements,
and, finally, the extension of education and suffrage to all citizens. This state,
informed by Keynesian economics, was conceived of as misguided by what
came to be known as the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Mirowski 2013),
a loose configuration of elites and academics working at think tanks across
Europe and the United States. Whatever the intellectual origins of neoliberal-
ism, most agree that the political debut of the economic philosophy occurred
somewhere after the recession inspired by then Federal Reserve Chief Paul
Volker’s attempt to curb inflation (Cooper 2017; Reed 2017). That puts the
time at Reagan in the United States, and Thatcher in Great Britain and squarely
in the middle of Latin American debt crisis touched off in Mexico in 1982
that ended with the first obvious neoliberal reforms to that government by
1985. Neoliberalism abhors government interference in the economy—unless
it is for corporate benefit. That this neoliberalism has an ideological compo-
nent is basically summed up in the thought that cutting taxes on corporations
and wealthy investor classes will stimulate the economy when these agents
invest in new jobs, technologies, and innovation. Better and more numerous
opportunities will arise from rewarding the private sector, the thinking goes,
than from taxing them and using the revenue to socialize risk for the rest of
the working population. Without social insurance, the basic idea of which is
that the government can subsidize the costs and innovation in various areas
across populations; that is, by socializing risk rather than individualizing it,
neoliberal proponents put the risk back onto the individual, buffered only by
a nuclear family, two highly prized actors in neoliberal politics. Social insur-
ance, by contrast, ideally would occur across all critical sectors upholding
human security: health care, banking insurance, public works, education, and
communication technologies. Neoliberalism ended any such romance with
these liberal projects by governments. As Thatcher famously noted, “There is
no such thing as society, only families,” or Reagan, “If fascism ever comes to
America, it will come in the form of liberalism.” By 2018, the one lingering
message of neoliberalism that remains is that “government” is bad whereas
feisty, colorful politicians who see real, salt-of-the-earth people and speak in
their name to help corporations “rule the world” (Korten 1995) are favored,
while their erstwhile competitors who invoke the efficiency of data-driven
public policy and common sense technological innovation through private
sector initiatives struggle to bring “deplorables” and “social justice war-
riors” together in a coalition that would make corporate America proud. This
battle for corporate love takes place all over the world, not just in the United
 Introduction 3

States. To say that neoliberalism is only operative in the United States is to

misunderstand the primary target. The target of contemporary neoliberalism
is not government1 (as a body that represents collectives, parties, or interest
groups) but the self.
Michel Foucault has recently been the subject of much interest because
the last of his lectures at the Collège de France and his much more brief
writings touched on the subject of neoliberalism. Some interpret this inter-
est as unfinished and therefore impossible to decipher in terms of motive.
Others write that Foucault actually engaged with neoliberalism as a counter
discourse to institutions and knowledges that had, since the Enlightenment,
disciplined subjects to a particular mode of rationality (Ewald 2017).2 Still
others want to force his work on governmentality and biopower into a mode
of critical inquiry that just doesn’t fit (i.e., you can’t use theories that debunk
the Enlightenment to further the project of modernity) (Behrent 2015). Rather
than taking a position for or against Foucault on neoliberalism, we can agree
that analytically Foucault’s focus on micro-mechanisms of power and his
concern for the excluded (prisoners, the mentally ill, and so on) makes his
work on the hermeneutics of the self particularly relevant for framing the
relationship most individuals have with power under neoliberalism (Zamora
2015). To say that it frames up this relationship nicely is not to say that it will
“liberate” or “emancipate” us from it. Neoliberalism is a mode of governing;
austerity measures bad-mouthing the “government” (but not the strong state),
bailing out corporations, tweaking the market, privatizing former public enti-
ties. It is also new kind of super ego, and in this it has a lot of help from the
self. As Foucault wrote,

I think that if one wants to analyze the genealogy of the subject in Western civi-
lization, he has to take into account not only the techniques of domination but
also techniques of the self. Let’s say: he has to take into account the interaction
between those two types of techniques—techniques of domination and tech-
niques of the self. He has to take into account the points where the techniques
of domination of individuals over one another have recourses to processes by
which the individual acts upon himself. And conversely, he has to take into
account the points where the techniques of the self are integrated into the struc-
tures of coercion or domination. The contact point, where the individuals are
driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves, is what we can call,
I think, government. (Foucault 1993, 203)

Since comedy mostly operates on a self, one who takes pleasure in asym-
metries, ironic presentations, ridicule of others, parodies of stereotyped iden-
tities, it might be appropriate to see where the effects of neoliberal politics
affect this subject, and if comedy takes that on. The most basic idea of neolib-
eralism—at the level of the self—is that it cajoles this self to monetize every
4 Introduction

aspect of life, to transform its attitude and identity to become more attractive
to the market. How this subject might feel about this has several important
ramifications for our understanding of politics and comedy’s role in mediat-
ing it. At the felt level, this self might be shipwrecked but not realize it. Unte-
thered from the structure provided by political liberalism, with its separation
of the profit motive from the sphere of rights and sovereignty, the individual
and their power and control no longer matter. The structure has imploded;
now each individual forms their own self-government, their own “structure.”
It is fitting that the pax Americana has led this charge as its own history with
self-help is unique in its own right (Cushman 1996). More recently, public
fascination with self-help figures from Jordan Peterson to Oprah signify the
lack of larger, social structures to which Americans and their fans can count
on inspiration. To that end, this volume tests whether or not political comedy
since the 2008 financial meltdown (a major crisis for neoliberalism) has chal-
lenged audiences to think critically about neoliberalism or not. While it is
silly to think that the term “neoliberalism” or any of its synonyms—market
ideology, libertarianism, privatization, capitalism, or more controversially
Americanization—will figure prominently in political comedy, it may erupt
symptomatically in many of the recurring themes we witness in the pages of
this book. Included here are essays covering political comedy from its basic
creative inception to its audience reception. This includes stand up, late night
television, film, Twitter, memes, podcasting, internet television, and political
protests. That comedy might stoke “the possibility of political consequences
at the level of form” (Holm 2017, 9) is worth pursuing, to say nothing of the
consequences more obviously pointed out in the elaboration of content in
comedic scripts. Thus, this volume examines where comedy takes hold of
the disequilibrium of self, identity, dialogue, audience, speech, craft, genre,
ideology, persona/impersonation, and so on that is inspired by neoliberalism.
In our current iteration of it, we hear many politicians celebrating “freedom”
and “liberty,” but these words are now imbued with new meaning that has
nothing to do with classical liberalism with its respect for privacy, introspec-
tion and lengthy, rational argumentation.
Liberty is for the market, not the citizen, a fictive entity mobilized by polit-
ical parties to maintain a basic level of state in the form of the repressive state
apparatuses whose ideologies create consent to the market, at the expense
of personal freedom. In fact, being monitored, monetized, and perpetually
unstable is part of the neoliberal playbook. The confusion that this state of
things invokes is particularly acute in a failed form of volition:

Neoliberalism, Ngai argues, takes root at a felt level in a “general state of

obstructed agency with respect to other human actors or to the social as such.”
That frustrated volition—that sense that our votes do not matter, that our
 Introduction 5

work (if we can find it) is meaningless, that activism is merely an endless set
of demonstrations that accomplish nothing—can easily become the charge that
animates us as we power up our laptops and go looking for fights. We seek a
way out of empathy, which is felt as paralyzing and castrating, in order to feel
the thrill of doing things.” (emphasis mine; quoted in Newman 2017)

Even being upset is the target of a market strategy. As Viveca Greene argues,
when one registers a complaint against a culture that harms, one is “invoking
a state that can’t exist anymore” in being upset (WPSA, conference proceed-
ings, 2017). What can one do? Work on the self. In a more generalized sense,
this precarity of the position of the subject is what motivates its consent to
such radically unstable life, career, and economic narratives, as well as the
wholesale sell off of the state infrastructure by smiling politicians. It is one
thing, Lauren Berlant writes, to agree to “resource shrinkage and a transfor-
mation of the fantasy of the state,” as happened after the 2008 financial crisis
with the emergence of the Tea Party in the United States and other austerity
narratives in Britain and Europe. However, her important point is that “fantasy
can’t be garbaged” in the same way that the state’s abandonment can.3 The
authoritarian state emerges and, through MSM and party ideology, attempts
to “reattach collective fantasy to the state’s aura as sovereign actor” (Berlant
2011, 1). This can happen through any number of ways. The “reattachment”
has more recently been concerned with “taking America back” in Trump’s
parlance and, admittedly, really only serves the fantasmatic purposes of about
one in six Americans. The rest of the country is fantasizing about impeach-
ment, building a wall, white supremacy, Russian influence, Xanax, and yoga.
Yet, for those who also notice the Trump administration is strengthening parts
of the state—mostly the policing and corporate functions—this authoritarian-
ism is an important element of neoliberal functioning. Mirowski explains the
incoherence of neoliberal logic with regard to reduction of government:

Strident demonization of some bugbear entity called “the government” is not

at all the same as rejecting “The State” tout court. That is because mature neo-
liberalism is not at all enamored of the minimalist night-watchman state of the
classic liberal tradition: its major distinguishing characteristic is instead a set of
proposals and programs to infuse, take over, and transform the strong state, in
order to impose the ideal form of society, which they conceive to be in pursuit
of their very curious icon of pure freedom. (Mirowski 2013, 40)

Hence, the new U.S. conservative neoliberal talking points in favor of

defunding “government schools.” Notice how “public” disappears?
“Mature neoliberalism” is interested in constructing a strong state with
intentions contrary to the classical tradition. As Karl Rove said in response
to a question about the reality-based community and how to govern them:
6 Introduction

“That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” He continued, “We’re
an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're
studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating
other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort
out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study
what we do.”4 Perhaps this aura of the strong state was more easily invoked in
the Bush and Blair era because of the license they could take with the Global
War on Terror (hereafter, GWOT) as an excuse to redistribute spending in
such a way that laid the groundwork for the strong, carceral state we could
not explain in the Obama era, and now witness in raw, unapologetic form in
the Trump one. The entire decade of the war on terror achieved this fantasy
more surely than any Third Way narratives conceived by their “liberal” pre-
decessors, although they had their seductive charms. As James Brasset argues
in this volume, the “global management state” that precedes the GWOT
provided great fodder for comedy, especially on the original Gervais’s The
Office. Elsewhere, I call this “Starbucks diversity” (Webber 2017). Tasked
with finding a “third space” that “that isn’t home or work” and would be
“constructed by culture,” but was instead was constructed by “consumption”
(Cottom quoted in Bouie 2018). Starbucks is now figured as the synechdoche
for commercial enterprise, and what used to be called “public space” or “civil
society.” As Cottom says apropos of the Philadelphia Starbucks arrest of two
African American businessman, “The Starbucks third space is a place where
white people can consume an idea that they’re being diverse in public” (Ibid).
Consumer and corporate cultures bred by neoliberal public planning exclude
people of color by assuming they do not consume, regardless of the diverse
window dressing. These spaces make it “safe” for whites through commodi-
fication of diversity as a product and rentier space that can be temporarily
purchased. Jessyka Finley’s chapter in this volume also addresses how the
audience to WNYC’s 2DopeQueens desire to consume a similar product.
This is an example of the social control aspects of neoliberalism where free-
dom to consume comes at the price of constructing a new racial order.5 It is
also a “soft power” approach to neoliberal conditioning.
The opposite seemed to happen in other regions, they just experienced it
earlier than in G-8 countries. As Yousef Khalil has argued, “In the Middle
East and North Africa, the death of politics and the triumph of the neoliberal
center have left a vacuum that culturalist ideologies, particularly Islamism,
rushed to fill. Islamism is nothing more than an inverted Eurocentrism, and is
incapable of dealing with the economic and political problems presented by
international capitalism” (Khalil 2015, 80). These regions’ “Arab Springs”
occurring in real time alongside the ineffectual Occupy movements in the
United States provided a small window for satire and political comedy to rush
in, only to be vanquished by the ascendancy of these “culturalist” ideologies:
 Introduction 7

in Syria (Wedeen 2013) and in Egypt (Youssef 2017; Webber 2013). At pres-
ent, we see this taking hold in Venezuela with international critics chomping
at the bit to overthrow the Madero government, even citing the take down
of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil as precedent. The fact that Rousseff’s party was
thought of as neoliberalism incarnate is telling for contemporary times. The
same was said of Clinton and the Democratic party, yet perhaps they were
not neoliberal enough paying lip service to reigning in the police state instead
of celebrating it (as Republicans do) and to so-called “rights” that do not
interfere but work with free market ideologies. These reactionary movements
are found everywhere in the present moment. It may be too soon to tell, but
it certainly seems that they are accelerationist in orientation, hoping to bring
down the “night-watchman” state tout court. Secil Dagtas’s chapter explores
how the Gezi protests in Turkey responded with satire and humor during the
occupation of park in the summer of 2013 providing a temporary bulwark
against the encroachment of neoliberal environmental and public destruction
in the name of urban “renewal.” In the United States, right neoliberals have
taken over the entire political establishment as if they are in opposition to
neoliberalism. Trump’s “insult comedy” may be the biggest con yet pulled on
the American people (Trevor Noah quoted in Vlessing 2017). This govern-
ment has been ushered in by a countercultural movement against the pace at
which neoliberalism has proceeded:

But to approach the big messy tent of the new retrograde right—the international
brigade of nativist-nationalists, tech-savvy anti-globalists, the porn-loving gen-
der traditionalists—as primarily a political movement is to wildly underestimate
its scope. Reactionary energy helped deliver all three branches of government to
a Republican Party in the grips of an alt-right-curious anti-PC-bomb-Thrower
the faithful called their “god-emperor” (or at least helped him along with last
year’s affirmative action for white people a.k.a the Electoral College). But at
no point during the campaign, even, could you have mistaken the truly unruly
energy on the right for anything so organized as a party or as purposeful as a
protest movement. It was—and is—a counterculture. One formed in opposition
to everything the existing Establishment stood for: globalist, technocratic lib-
eral elitism. The amazing thing is, in November, for the first time in American
electoral history, the counterculture won everything. (Van Zuylen-Wood 2017)

Yet, this counterculture’s audience is everywhere backward-looking and

necessarily fantasmatic; countercultural elites have managed to “garbage”
the fantasy for some. Simon Weaver’s chapter demonstrates how comedy
prior to the Brexit vote did just this by assuming the same old left-right con-
figurations. As a transatlantic movement, the alt-light packages the fantasy
of a world without women (except as mute, slavish), that is white, and based
in what Châtelet has called “the dreams of the methodological individual”
8 Introduction

(Châtelet 2014, 160–161). Each individual privileged self imagines itself held
back by liberal progressive government and social movements (when they
have traditionally been positioned as the agents of history, whether based on
race, gender, or a nebulous marker of “talent” that combines the previous two
through notions of inherent superiority). The government that this countercul-
ture thrives under is also the most baldly neoliberal governmental structure
yet, ironically, with Trump cabinet members exceeding the number of For-
tune 500 CEOs ever sworn in. The media continue to harrumph and guffaw,
presenting a new crisis of conduct on the part of the Trump administration
that they secretly don’t hope but feign will lead to impeachment. Why such
a confusing presentation of politics produces more comedy and satire should
not be a surprise. The question is, What does this comedy do? Does it assuage
feelings of depression in the midst of increasing inequality, or the lack of sus-
tained political recognition of it? As Mirowski claims, under neoliberalism,
no one ever “is really punished, but rather experiences a depreciation in their
human capital (or something like that)” (Mirowski 2013, 169), and as Chun
figures it, we are all “updating to remain the same” (Chun 2017). Another
way to think of it is that political comedy is a device that adjusts our expec-
tations for us. Is it, as Steve Fielding argues, “very much the neoliberal’s
friend?” (Fielding 2014). Even more perplexing is the way internet irony has
been co-opted by the alt-right to grow fascist followings in the wake of the
Trump victory. The Data and Society institute has directly blamed this form
of internet humor for the rise of fascism. By “weaponizing irony,” they argue,
alt-right trolls have been able to “disclaim a real commitment to far-right
ideas while still espousing them,” concluding “troll culture became a way
for fascism to hide in plain sight” (Wilson 2017). This is, of course, owing to
the ambiguity of irony where the performer’s intent can be difficult to assess
(Phillips 2017, forthcoming). Webber addresses the so-called “humor” in this
insult comedy in the concluding chapter.
Part of the reason for this confusion is that the political theater we witness
is designed to mime a classical liberal political order. Jodi Dean, in particular,
has argued that these “hopeful” remnants of democracy are merely the shor-
ing up of power using neoliberal communicative strategies—mostly target the
left in the United States and elsewhere (Dean 2009). Could Jon Stewart have
been read as the therapeutic version of this communicative neoliberalism
(i.e., Rally to Restore Sanity) or a “progressive pathos?” (Webber 2013). Or,
as we witness with Leslie Jones’s portrayal of Oprah during its winter 2018
season, Oprah is longed for (missed) as an example of good neoliberal ratio-
nality, especially the kind that can reign in white women who have erased
the gender gap by voting against women’s rights in favor of garden variety
conservatives, who continue to propose increasingly harsh bills against repro-
ductive rights. In Jones’s sketch, nostalgia looms large as the audience wishes
 Introduction 9

for Oprah to restore the balance to good, competitive neoliberalism. At other

levels, particularly with the dismantling of institutions Brown has argued, it
is a “governing form of reason” that “through the replacement of democratic
terms of law, participation, and justice with idioms of benchmarks, objec-
tives, and buy-ins that governance dismantles democratic life while appearing
only to instill it with ‘best practices,’” (Brown quoted in Shenk 2015). More-
over, it is profitable for those who “game” it since traditionally “non-wealth
generating spheres such as learning, dating or exercising” are construed “in
market terms,” (ibid, Shenk 2015).
We can see the way these overarching political economic norms become
embedded in our arts and culture, especially popular culture, through the shift
in preferred genres. It remains to be seen what ones will replace the earlier
dominance of political comedy, or if they can be rendered virally: horror
and comedy mixed, earnestness and nativism or as some believe “common
sense,” the Rupert Murdoch product. Since we have seen how many iterations
neoliberal governance has taken, it is now time to apply this knowledge to
the role comedy plays in managing the self-governance of subjects who live
it. Lauren Berlant’s idea of genre helps in this regard. A “genre is a loose
affectively-invested zone of expectation about the narrative shape a situation
will take.” The “waning of genre,” Jackson argues, provides an opportunity
demonstrated by Berlant to challenge “contemporary forms of recognition”
and thus, “communal investments in those forms of recognition (what Berlant
likes to call the ‘fantasies of the good life’)”. Like many of her earlier works,
Berlant’s interest in genre helps to explain why and how we maintain attach-
ments to objects that disappoint. Comedy has been one area where this human
need is routinely exploited for ratings (and, sometimes, laughs).
Tragedy is traditionally seen as comedy’s opposite. Both Berlant and Ngai
and Critchley have remarked that tragedy is increasingly not viewed as its
opposite; either one among many states that exist alongside it for selection, or
with comedy as the ironically intense form of tragedy itself (Critchley 1999).
However, neoliberalism seeks to stamp out tragedy altogether (i.e., unless,
it conforms to the ever profitable superhero genre). Comedy, especially
satire and parody, used to be a relatively stable genre, as long as the binary
held where tragedy was seen as its opposite. And, for a while there, Simon
Critchley’s distinction held, “Tragedy is insufficiently tragic because it is too
heroic. Only comedy is truly tragic. And it is tragic by not being a tragedy”
(Critchley 1999, 119). During the aughts, comedy came to be viewed as
heroic, at least on the left (think of how Jon Stewart is viewed). That view
is on the wane. Somewhere at the end of the Bush administration (or Dark
Times, for which a comedy volume explored its “dark humor,” Gournelos &
Green, 2011) and in the lead up to the Tea Party, humor went off heroism.
Or, as Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai argue in their introduction to a special
10 Introduction

issue on comedy entitled “Comedy Has Issues,” because of the intermingling

of comedy “as art and life” we have the sense that it “is no longer clear what
the “opposite” of comedy is. The go-to foil used to be tragedy” (Berlant &
Ngai 2017, 238). Morowski connects the death of the tragic genre to neolib-
eral functioning in that “The failed should accept the verdict of the market
without complaint or pleas for help. Insecurity is the incubator for risk-loving
behavior. The birth of actuarial tables is the death of tragedy” (Morowski
2013, 96). Comedy is not a progressive medium nor should we want it to
be. It should be critical—as in call into crisis—if it is to effect any kind of
change. Neoliberalism feeds off of progressive affective states: optimism,
resilience, fortitude, hope, and faith. Of American neoliberalism, as Foucault
once wrote, “It is a sort of utopian focus which is always being revived”
(Foucault 2008, 218). As Linda Hutcheon pointed out, the most famous uses
of satire came from performers who were parodying ministers, the establish-
ment that came before government. Comedy often asks us to stop and think
about what we are automatically responding to; neoliberalism wants to pro-
vide an affective orientation of progress that cannot be questioned, even when
its effects are detrimental to what might be actual social change. Neoliberal-
ism feeds off of reaction:

Liberalism remained slightly kinder than pure reaction—not quite so racist,

not so terribly brutal to the poor—but even these commitments were subsumed
by the ideology of pure competence. Bigotry wasn’t evil, it was just stupid, an
impediment to growth. Health care reform and the welfare state were not moral
necessities, they were the best means of keeping workers healthy and produc-
tive. The notion that knowledge asymmetries lay at the root of all political
conflict was quickly transmuted into the basis of policy itself. If liberals became
masters of the world due to their superior respect for facts, then education—not
redistribution—was the only hope for the dispossessed. If liberals believed in
climate change because scientists told them they should, then the trouble was
not the metastatic excesses of capital but the failure of reactionaries to bow to
empirical consensus. (Rensin, 2017)

SETTING THE SCENE

Most important for this discussion, Berlant and Ngai invite us to view com-
edy not only as a “genre” but also as “a scene of affective mediation and
expectation.” Setting comedy as “scene” makes it possible to discuss context,
history, and affect. You can also recreate the comedic scene that is always
set by comedians in order to more fully analyze what they are attempting to
accomplish via set, props, set up, timing, and audience. As they further note,
“This set of collapses, clashes, and boundary disputes is exactly what enables
 Introduction 11

us to have such spirited debates about comedy and in a way we don’t feel
as compelled to do for other genres” (ibid, 239). As Berlant and Ngai argue,
“Comedy suffuses so many genres that are not comedy that it is hard to draw
the line: porn, horror, melodrama” and they go on to name more, including
“varieties of social death” (ibid, 239). Duncan has identified one such genre
as “hate attribution,” on the right in the United States, at least, whereas the
left must always represent positive political aspirations, whether their poli-
cies and actions produce them or not. By contrast, our Trump supporters (and
“leavers” possibly as well) have taken the shackles off and are ready for a
no-holds barred “politically incorrect” fight with all others: they want to be
“winners,” even at the cost of exterminating others, and that is not the neo-
liberal way, which “doesn’t acknowledge that there can be winners and losers
in the neoliberal hyperspace” (Shivani 2016; emphasis mine). Neoliberalism,
in its ascendant, lefty form was more like Oprah: you get a car, and you get
a car, and you get a car! Until it wasn’t. This was what Berlant meant by
“cruel optimism” which is “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a
problematic object,” like capitalism, or democracy, or even comedy (Berlant
2007/8, 33). As for alt-right humor, it takes hold in ridicule, especially in its
online form. To ridicule particular audiences for their belief in free speech
(by doxing them when they exercise it in recognizable classical liberal or
even Leftist discourse), for their insufficient tech skills (as a critique of meme
culture; ridiculing and belittling those who take advantage of social media
communication without contributing to its ascendency or production), and,
especially, of “social justice warriors” anyone who believes that they can
escape the neoliberal stranglehold on present life. This is what Julie Wilson
calls “left neoliberalism” and describes as “the progressive horizon” of neo-
liberalism which encourages people to believe that neoliberalism is “com-
mitted to actively constructing a meritocracy where all have equal access to
competition” (Wilson 2017, 238). If they can improve themselves enough to
compete, then people (whatever their specific deficiencies, all of which have
market solutions) are seen as having an equal playing field. Comedy, it seems,
has the potential to demonstrate the futility of improvement as it traffics in the
humor of existential states. In terms of critical views on neoliberal themes,
certain genres have been preferred over the past decade, and certainly the
most controversy has surrounded comedy.
There are any number of genres that can take hold, and any number of
forms for them to filter through. Take earnestness. Earnestness once spent
time being hotly debated as irony’s opposite (and antidote) in the late 1990s
(Purdy 2000). Even earnestness has been co-opted by neoliberal algorithms to
produce streaming entertainment that simulates the politics of classical liberal
theory, or simply dumps content onto the screen, after polling viewers for
content. What Alan Kirby has called “digi modernism,” Joe Conway argues,
12 Introduction

operates in our present entertainment where it presents politics as the “end of

politics,” and it performs “as if there has never been any time except for the
immediately streaming now,” and “intensifies post-modern logic insofar as it
reinforces and augments ahistorical thinking” (Conway 2016, 185). Shows
like House of Cards or Veep, Conway argues, are examples of this trend to
perform the “end of politics” just like the “end of television.” While this may
be true in terms of consumption and production of popular culture and its
depiction of politics at the present moment, more interesting, I think, is the
way that such mediums may foreshadow “ends” but cannot definitively pro-
nounce them. It may be more useful to characterize such streaming content as
its own particular form, one among many offered, to generate a genre of ear-
nestness around (i.e., this is the way politics is “honestly done” so enjoy your
cynicism, not your symptom). For the record, House of Cards is not without
its comic moments; scenes where Kevin Spacey, the perfect neoliberal Hol-
lywood actor, pushes Chloe Barnes off the subway track into the oncoming
train or pushing the secretary of state down the stairs (a sign of our collective
yawn at “Gotcha!” journalism), or performs his narcissistic soliloquies that
ridicule sycophantic Washington D.C. This is just one example of how politi-
cal comedy can be rendered and read outside of its traditional scenes.
At the level of “integral reality,” however, it becomes increasingly impos-
sible to set a “scene.” Integral reality is not an overarching ideological
framework; it is cybernetic, existing in the minimization of every thought,
action, and intention that would challenge the market and public opinion that
favors it. As Diane Rubenstein writes, “In integral reality there is accelerated
circulation but low sign value. It is an enforced regime of compulsory read-
ability at every moment” (Rubenstein 2009, 155). Rubenstein’s application
of Baudrillard’s integral reality to the GWOT via the Bush administration
presents us with a problem, as Trump’s presidency functions along similar
lines. No longer able to set a scene, we are immersed in it. “Integral reality is
characterized by ‘immersion and umbilical relation, not a scene and gaze’. It
is the ‘embed’ and not the ‘hostage’ that becomes the figure of this new inter-
active world of ‘immersion, immanence and immediacy,’ (LP, 31)” (ibid,
Rubenstein, 155). Constant revelations, Tweets(!), deep-state insinuation,
images of shoving diplomats, murdered party operatives, golf (!), severed
head comedic art, alternative facts, press secretaries hiding in bushes, and so
on. The drip-feed of media continues, never allowing for a resolution or deci-
sion about how to read an event. The media and comedy follow along to catch
the drip and provide the relief. Conan O’Brien described covering Trump as
a comedian in this way, “Just trying to keep up with him, I mean . . . for any
other president, the [“shithole”] comment would have resonated for a couple
of weeks. He’s on a two-day cycle. It’s very hard to keep up with him,”
Conan O’Brien told host Jake Tapper last week on CNN. “It’s exhausting”
 Introduction 13

(Suebsaeng & Stein 2018). As Mirowski writes, “In practice, neoliberals

can’t let others contemplate too long that their peculiar brand of freedom is
not the realization of any political, human, or cultural telos, but rather the pos-
iting of the autonomous self-governed entities, all coming naturally equipped
with some version of ‘rationality’ and motives of ineffable self-interest, striv-
ing to improve their lot in life by engaging in market exchange” (Mirowski
2013, 61). As he later recounts, nothing in neoliberalism is a “life-changing
experience” (ibid). We can also see this in the widespread abandonment
of two prior neoliberal market mechanisms: marketing and policy-making.
For all the ink spilled and data stored in collective anger over a do-nothing
Congress in the United States, it makes perfect sense that no bills would be
written, read, or passed since the work of what used to pass for policy is now
handled in isolated human resources departments, food banks, and shelters.
As for congresses and parliaments, what passes for “bills” are really contracts
with corporate sponsors. Similarly, no need to ask (e.g., polling) a consumer
public (as publics also disappear) about their needs, wants, and desires, when
that data can be mined without human error or confirmation bias getting in
the way. Luckily, late night comedy has been there as entertainment along
the way.
Late night comedy seems to have flourished after the election of Trump,
and in the aftermath of the introduction of neoliberalism’s new—cruel—
mutation. The chapters by Aaron McKain and Thomas Lawson, as well as
Don Waisenan, cast a critical eye over the late night enterprise following the
2008 recession. Their concerns are echoed by other shows who have aban-
doned following presidential politics as closely. South Park, for example, has
foregone satirizing Trump saying in interviews that “we were really trying to
make fun of what was going on [last season] but we couldn’t keep up. What
was actually happening was way funnier than anything we could come up
with. So we decided to just back off and let [politicians] do their comedy
and we’ll do ours” (Guardian 2017). The function of late night comedy in
the present era is another one we seek to address in this volume, especially
the ways in which it reproduces the audience it needs to continue to make
ratings. There was significant outrage among women and people of color
when the announcements were made after Leno and Letterman retired as a
slew of straight, white men occupied not just those slots but had more created
for them. What can this mean? In spite of Lizz Winstead’s argument to “let
the dinosaurs have television” and that women can do comedy in new plat-
forms, what does it mean that not only patriarchy but also white supremacy
is assumed in this particular time frame, at this particular juncture in mature
neoliberalism? Moreover, what does the controversy over Jimmy Fallon’s
treatment of Trump (or, for that matter, the NYT, CNN, and PBS’s treatment
of the Trump campaign and administration) mean? Does this feed off of Seth
14 Introduction

Myer’s excessive criticism to produce the perfect effect of “controversy,” so

necessary to neoliberalism’s central goal of creating confusion? As Adolph
Reed has written about race and gender in the media, it is “telling” how neo-
liberalism has made it possible for Glenn Beck to appropriate Martin Luther
King, Jr. in order to label Obama a racist, and Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Ann
Coulter are able to claim sexism against the Democratic Party (Reed 2013,
49–50). Or, as Reed is quoted as saying, “Identity politics is neoliberalism”
(Reed 2009).
The role of race and gender as themes in political comedy that might chal-
lenge neoliberal narratives and mantras is the key to understanding how these
controversies keep popping up in the MSM. Scholars have diligently studied
the role of comedy in the upending of racial stereotypes with the cautious fear
that comics doing such bits might be reinforcing rather than exploding them.
As Glenda Carpio, who describes African American comedy that seeks to do
just this, as “conjuring” argues, “Both [Richard] Pryor and [Dave] Chappelle
have used their powers as conjurers to bring to life the fantasies created by
the racist mind—their own, their audience’s, the nation’s—as a way of con-
fronting the (im)possibility of redressing slavery. But is it possible, as one
of Kara Walker’s critics has asked, “To get inside the racist’s imagination
without adding to its power?” (Carpio 2008, 115). This has real relevance
to our discussion of genres initiated by Berlant and Ngai because if much of
critical race comedy seeks to confront these fantasies, what is blocking the
educational power of conjuring? Is it something in neoliberalism’s function
or is it the methodological error of ascribing a role to race that functions as
essential without a tie to political economic necessity. For example, if, as
many concede, race is not an inherent trait, but an “ascriptive” designation
that does work for those in power, maintaining actual segregation, ignorance
and works to “stabilize a social order by legitimatizing its hierarchies of
wealth, power, and privilege, including its social division of labor, as the
natural order of things” (Reed 2013, 49), then can we say that race is an
exclusive characteristic that can be conjured for humor outside its links to the
work it does for capital? Or, if looking at it on an even more microlevel, can
we say that it challenges stereotypes or educates audiences differently when
they have “emerged from self-interested common sense as folk knowledge:
they are ‘known’ to be true unreflectively because they seem to comport with
the evidence of quotidian experience”? (Ibid, Reed, 49). Reed’s analysis of
race with neoliberalism helps us give pause to the idea that deploying satire
and parody of slave narratives, for example, challenges racism as it works in
the present configuration. This kind of insight has been applied to analysis of
Black Lives Matter strategizing (as delinked from economic justice) as well
as Michelle Alexander’s critique of mass incarceration as the “new” slavery.6
Without an economic underpinning to explain why these tropes are effective,
 Introduction 15

such comedy can not expect to go far outside its own narrowcast audience;
it may even backfire when it is remediated into other sociocultural environ-
ments (McKain 2005). Gender can be included here as well. The “thing”
about Bridesmaids as a comedy was that it did have an economic angle
(even though its racial representation was lackluster compared to the actual
demographics of Milwaukee); it expressed class resentment and failure at the
promise made by one version of neoliberalism—George W. Bush’s promise
to bring back successful small business prosperity through the democratiza-
tion of credit, in an era dominated by big box marketing. This particular
instantiation of neoliberal policymaking, “the aspirational promise of credit,”
was, according to Cooper “neoliberalism’s only policy response to grow-
ing inequality,” that actually reinforced already existing divisions of wealth
(Cooper 2017, 157).
Conjuring and other forms of historical/educational comedy tend to work
better with the already initiated college-educated audiences. It may also serve
an important purpose in that it widens the stage for new actors to represent
themselves in comedy. As Jessyka Finley argues, comedy, when effective,
can make previously marginalized comedians “legible as an agent of politi-
cal speech,” something African American women, in particular, have been
excluded from, and not only in humor. Finley takes King’s argument about
how comedic speech becomes political as portending to “a moment when
comedians can finally claim the right to speak and be heard,” like white men
who are seen as rational agents who can soapbox (e.g., Louis C. K.) about
serious issues like racism. Analyzing Shirley Chisolm’s humor in congress
where she “created an audience” Finley goes on to analyze SNL performances
by Danitra Vance (1980s) and more recently, Leslie Jones. Both comedians
conjured up the specter of chattel slavery in the United States in their per-
formances. Jones was criticized for hers by the black community. Later, the
comedy was used against her personally by Milo Yannopoulis in a Twitter
attack that got him banned from the platform. His followers, however, were
more than happy to engage the satire Jones had presented as real. Jones’s per-
formance did not win her the audience she desired, unlike Chisolm. Vance’s
career on SNL lasted a year as she was “resented playing the maid” in every
sketch (Finley 2016, 247). Obviously, African American women’s satire is
an attempt to make representational space for them to soapbox, and perhaps
eventually undo many of the stereotypes that keep them marginalized in
American politics and culture. Finley speculates that black male comedians
have been able to soapbox after the representational progress made by hav-
ing Barack Obama assume the presidency. In terms of neoliberalism, then,
the question of satire’s theme and the nature of the parody is the key. Does
conjuring up chattel slavery give black women a representational platform?
Finley argues it does, in some cases, especially when it works through an
16 Introduction

affectation of disgust. We might ask if Chappelle’s performances prior to the

current ascendancy of white supremacy (from the Tea Party to the present in
the form of white male anger) might be replicated now with the same prob-
lems of reinforcement or whether they would be beset with new problems,
like the ones Jones faced? In other words, did the election of Obama really
make a difference? Does purely representational politics still matter in a time
of increasing economic inequality?
Neoliberalism assumes a few things about politics that are central to our
volume as it relates to the comedic genre:
It assumes that politics is operationalized through individuals who are
risk-takers (collective mobilization, organized bargaining by people is
policed, legislated against and decried as traitorous). No longer a passive
citizen who is subject to government’s sovereign decision-making, the
“risk-taker” is an active participant in his/her own self-government, as
identified by Foucault in the lead quote to this chapter. As Mirowski argues,
the “makeover of the worker/consumer into daredevil risk-taker” “helps
to refashion consumers to be able to manipulate their own balance sheets
through assumption of debt” (Mirowski 2013, 122). This also implicates
them in the financial crisis, allowing an argument to stand that, at least in
the media, can partially cushion the banks against criticism. Mirowski calls
this the “neoliberal blanket” (122). This was further irritated by the conceit
of the Tea Party and a new iteration of neoliberal ideology that forestalls
criticism of the establishment: “First it moves heaven and earth to induce
you to manage your own portfolio and assume more risk; then in demonizes
the victim when the entire structure comes crashing down, as it inevitably
must” (123).

Furthermore, this new identity of risk allows for more market opportunity:
“this asymmetry with regard to risk and identity is a characteristic symptom of
everyday neoliberalism,” the “misfires of risk” by these subjects turn them into
entrepreneurial opportunities. Been hacked? Get a credit protection service.
Mirowski explores the re-envisioning of FICO scoring as one example of this
trend. He labels this the “your debt is not my problem” mantra issued by the
NTC (Neoliberal Thought Collective). (Mirowski 2013, 132)

Other versions of the self are promoted under neoliberalism. The “plasticity
of the self” is essential in remaking the social amenable to capital and the
policing functions of the state. Here “one commits to a willingness to alter
one’s very quiddity in an ongoing adjustment of agency to the requirements
of social and physical adaptability to shifting market forces” (Mirowski 2013,
110). In recent work, scholars have identified how feminism has been put to
work in the service of this neoliberal self (Featherstone 2017; Gill 2007).
 Introduction 17

This so-called “feminist self” incorporates the gaze of patriarchy inside her-
self, transforming her outside to meet market-oriented feminine preferences.
When this is not possible, her exposure in the market is made manifest and
her “social death” is called for as justified, as in Gamergate, or in the Les-
lie Jones Ghostbusters affair covered in the first chapter in this volume by
Viveca Greene. A central tenant of the alt-right countercultural manifestation
of this is that women be reduced to attractiveness and fecundity. Women who
assert themselves in the mediascape or are seen to be trampling on male fan-
tasies (like Ghostbusters) become targets for ridicule, social extinction, and
death threats. Prior neoliberal manifestations of feminism urged women to
put their faith in a status that had market possibility, for example, the victim
of sexual assault, who can never “get over it” but can live a managed life
according to state-assisted corporate innovations in survivor therapy and life
skills (Bumiller 2008; Stringer 2014). This earlier recuperation of the wom-
en’s movement against violence operated outside the government in com-
munity shelters organized by active feminist principles based on reflection
of women’s lived experiences (Ibid, Bumiller 2008). Once institutionalized
in corporate shelters funded usually under the Violence Against Women Act,
a block grant from the Clintonian/Biden neoliberal congress, women were
commodified as perpetual victims. Furthermore, programs that fomented
“best practices” were inordinately funded under the VAWA over other more
community based ones. This confirms Brown’s analysis of “best practices”
as a code word for neoliberal policy (Brown 2015). Now, the current mani-
festation (primarily expressed by the courts and state policy establishment)
urges men to ignore women’s claims as baseless since sexual assault has
either been overblown or cannot exist since consent is seen as problematic,
another instance—to their way of thinking—of “social justice warrior” men-
tality. The new neoliberal self is tough, and takes it or goes away. Although
there is one other option. Diane Rubenstein explores a number of new ideas
in her chapter. One of which is the power of Valerie Solanas’s rehabilitation
in American Horror Story: Cult, a mixing of horror and comedy, and where
Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (as read in the show) might take us in the future
beyond the regressing gender and racial politics preceding and following the
Trump electoral victory.
It is widely understood that not much changed after the global recession of
2008. Generally speaking, neoliberalism is malleable. It can be repurposed to
fit any culture, national orientation but especially crisis. As one commentator
argued, neoliberal governance produces “localized neoliberal hybrids” (Ban
2016) that adapt to the larger price mechanism framework (austerity, tax
cuts, social welfare can all exist in some combination to effect the neoliberal
preference). The story of Egypt after the Arab Spring recounts this well. As
Bassem Youssef argues about the coup against the revolution in Egypt, it was
18 Introduction

another version of the neoliberal playbook. Addressing Americans directly

about Egypt he writes,

You have a more “chic” way of affecting the outcome of elections and rigging
political control. You have lobbies, complex interest groups, gerrymandering,
and Citizens United. For us, that convoluted system is too costly, so we use
religion, fake patriotism, and plain brutal force and oppression. We have no time
to hypnotize people with sports, sex, and entertainment. And our leaders are too
proud to give a margin of freedom so people can blow off steam and criticize
them. When I think of the military junta that controls the country now I don’t
think of them as generals or army officers who just want absolute power. I think
of them as a bunch of businessmen in military uniform who will protect their
economic interests with tanks and machines. (Youssef 2017, 277)

The onset of neoliberal policy in any given state also has different condi-
tions. Harvey points to the organized coups in Chile and Argentina as cause,
and in the United States and Britain it was achieved through democratic
means by popular leaders, Reagan and Thatcher, whose policy positions
“constructed political consent to [neoliberal principles usually through the
ideas of individual freedom] across a sufficiently large percentage of the
population to win elections” (Harvey 2005, 39). Individual freedom, Harvey
notes, is an important vehicle for forging consent to neoliberal principles (see
below).
Neoliberalism also requires certain structural conditions to flourish. Radi-
cal inequality is fundamental to its operation. Furthermore, acceptance of the
idea that anyone with social protection of any kind is elitist; this protection
is “denounced” as such, and then deleted from historical memory (Châte-
let 2014, 7). The working population is “bereft of communal identities”
(Mirowski 2013, 118). This is on evidence when the MSM look down upon
populations whose culture is seen an synonymous with their economic status,
such as Sarkozy’s appellation of Parisian rioters as “scum,” or in the United
States “trailer trash,” and these populations “never serve as a functional
economic category; rather they serve as a narrative place holder for people
who refuse to remake themselves into someone the market would validate”
(Mirowski 2013, 118). Reed expands this argument when he critiques the
possibility of identity politics, arguing that representation of race changes
depending on the needs of the powerful, and expands, perhaps to include all
members of the underclass, which, these days, includes almost everyone. A
careful analysis of how inequality functions by race is the key to understand-
ing the next phase of neoliberalism. As most commentators admit, the era
of overt racism was subsumed under code words in the 1980s and 1990s of
“underclass,” “lazy,” and “welfare queen,” all terms that expunged explicitly
racist attributions even though they gestured in a certain racial direction.
 Introduction 19

Now, these terms still exist but have been largely replaced by concerns by
politicians and policymakers about the underclass’s “dysfunctional” relation-
ship to growth. First, then, these populations must be “taught” to participate
in neoliberal governance by changing their patterns of living to be more ame-
nable to capital. This also occurs in the realm of gender, which is not distinct
from race, ethnicity, or religion by any means, more often than not it lays atop
it in social discourse.
And Cristina Scharff further confirms this of neoliberalism and gender, that
is, exclusionary:

There are stark contradictions between women’s hopeful positioning as subjects

of capacity on the one hand and intensifying forms of governmentality on the
other. This disjuncture raises a range of questions relating, for example, to the
exclusions that neoliberal subjectivities (re-) produce. As several researchers
have pointed out, the neoliberal self, closely tied to the ability to consume,
is distinctly middle class (Ringrose and Walkerdine, 2008). In addition, the
empowered, female neoliberal self is often constructed in opposition to alleg-
edly powerless ‘other’ women. When I conducted research on how a diverse
group of young, British and German women engaged with feminism and gender
(in-) equalities, I found that they often presented themselves as empowered and
that they did so by constructing the figure of the oppressed, “Muslim” woman
who was a passive victim of patriarchy (Scharff, 2011; 2012). I traced similar
dynamics in media and public engagements with feminism, particularly in Ger-
many (Scharff, 2011; 2013). Arguably, neoliberal subjectivity is formed through
processes of abjection (see also Tyler, 2013), which position empowered and
self-managing subjects as morally superior (Brown, 2003). The “other” of the
neoliberal subject—vulnerable, powerless, passive, and dependent—is often
constituted along all too familiar hierarchies of power. (Scharff 2014)

These “self-managing subjects” operating under “intensifying forms of

governmentality” present themselves as empowered but can only do so by
assuming and positing a disempowered other that they imagine and abandon.
This has great explanatory value for understanding the recent criticism many
women comics have faced in the media, including Amy Schumer, Kathy
Griffin, Lena Dunham (not a comic but certainly a humorist), and Samantha
Bee. Feminism itself has been labelled a self-serving (and therefore selfish)
standpoint in the media where equating an orientalist feminism with all femi-
nism is commonplace. The foolish “gaffes” made by a few of these comedi-
ans risk being blown out of proportion to the point where they indict not the
individual performer but the attributed causes for which she is said to stand.
Neoliberalism uses the state to launch its operations on behalf of corpora-
tions. As mentioned above, it is necessary to construct the state in order to
mold the ideal form of society under neoliberalism. Central to this society
20 Introduction

is “incentivized modes of subjectivity” (Sharpe 2009, 93). These modes are

most definitely “in-flux” as they organize and reorganize their selves in rela-
tion to the price mechanism:

Today one is no longer ever just unemployed, one is a jobseeker; one is not
a student or a patient, but a client; not a concerned parent, but a consumer of
education; and at the limit, not a homeless person, but a (voluntary) “rough
sleeper.” If subjects have not yet learned to do what they must, as it were, neo-
liberal government banks on our learning by doing it, making it increasingly
impossible for us to conduct our working or private lives except as “marketized
subjects “free to choose” everything but the possibility of organizing social rela-
tions except through the price mechanism. (Sharpe 2009, 94)

So we have two main subjective states: precarious or incentivized, and they

are really reactions to the same state of confusion and inequality neoliberalism
needs to maintain tacit consent. Often though, precarity breeds enthusiasm
for ethnocentrism, sexism, and religious affirmation. In these cases, it often
appeals to voting blocs that provide consistent support in favor of nativism.
Thus, finally—ideologically—neoliberalism tropes off of familiar nation-
alist rallying cries, for example, freedom. As a very problematic concept,
Mirowski argues that the neoliberal conception (and promotion) of freedom
differs from the “embedded liberal” one (Harvey 2005) and the libertarian
one in crucial ways. Freedom is conceptualized negatively, yes, but that is
where any overlap ends.

Freedom cannot be extended from the use of knowledge in society to the use
of knowledge about society, because self-examination concerning why one pas-
sively accepts local and incomplete knowledge leads to contemplation of how
market signals create some forms of knowledge and squelch others. Meditation
upon our limitations leads to inquiry into how markets work, and metareflection
on our place in the larger orders, something neoliberals warn is beyond our ken.
(Mirowski 2013, 61)

This dovetails with Gilles Chatelet’s reflections on methodological indi-

vidualism in that he predicted cybernetics would “succeed in fabricating
behaviors that will guarantee a watertight barrier against political intelli-
gence” (Chatelet 68). This we see recently with “fake news”7 (a phenomenon
the world over) and other deceptive information practices, but it has existed
for some time in policy practices like triangulation (coopting the other party’s
ideas as one’s own, as Clinton did with welfare reform). Or, at present the
Trump administration’s crocodile tears every time it blames an unfavorable
policy on Obama. This freedom is Colbert’s “free-dumb” or freedom from
thought. It relies on faith without “metareflection.”
 Introduction 21

Speaking of faith, Adam Kotsko has an interesting way of interpreting

this freedom, through a metareflection on the demonic. Stemming from the
problem of evil, Kotsko links failure in neoliberalism to evil and legitimacy.
Specifically, in the creation of the figure of the devil in the Hebrew Bible
earlier that morphs into Medieval Christianity as the “negative sweet spot.”
God is responsible for our misery but only insofar as it tests his believers’
faith in him and produces a more tight belief system. Now under neoliberal-
ism, God, in our case the market, “repeatedly takes credit for just the kind of
events that would normally undermine people’s faith in God” (Kotsko 2017,
501). The subjects of the market are left to feel guilty for not being up to
the challenge, not working hard enough, being faithful enough. Hence, each
market subject’s reaction to their neighbor’s poor circumstances is “it is your
own fault.” Environmental disasters are not even worthy of response unless
they provide a clear opening for profits to the wealthy, as we’ve seen with
Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, as well as earlier, less obvious but no less
egregious exploitation in the case of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. As a
clear explanation for the lack of social solidarity or even consciousness that
we witness in contemporary politics, this insight also bears witness to how
neoliberal governments routinely fail their citizens yet are voted back in ad
infinitum. This is perhaps the appropriate moment to turn to comedy with its
direct link to guilt and misery.

ENCOUNTERING COMEDY IN LATE

STAGE NEOLIBERALISM

This volume represents a concerted attempt to theorize the political and social
power of humor and comedy in relation to neoliberal narratives found in the
cultural landscape, as well as the architecture of the entertainment industry.
Mostly dubbed “infotainment” such media navigate the increasingly thin
line between entertainment and news, criticism and confirmation bias. As
with our earlier concern, these popular culture events and industries, moving
across platforms, forging audiences out of paratextual media (Twitter, reddit,
gaming, blogs, network television, film, live events, and anti-comedic stunts,
etc.) (Gray 2010).
In the first section “The Terrain Has Changed” the essays confront recent
controversies in comedy that are triggered by one of the more obvious
changes to the neoliberal landscape: the so-called technological revolution
or the ascendancy of “Big Data,” as well as changes to our understanding of
racism and right-left politics because of it.
In focusing on the controversy surrounding Leslie Jones’s humor on SNL
as well as the targeting of her person on Twitter, Viveca Greene’s essay
22 Introduction

“All They Need is Lulz” takes the reader on a detailed journey of the stakes
involved and the neoliberal pretensions expected of Jones and others tar-
geted by right-wing trolls for their comedy, especially when it disrupts the
fantasy space of fans, like the ones who condemned 2016s Ghostbusters
remake for having an all -female cast. The backlash against Jones came from
several fronts: first, other African American women who were offended
by her portrayal of herself as a successful slave (as a joke) on Colin Jost’s
Weekend Update in the spring of 2014, who felt she stereotyped African
American women and reminded white audiences of their prejudices against
them, perhaps reinforcing them. This was a failed “conjuring” that incited
controversy on Black Twitter to recap Glenda Carpio’s earlier point. This
was then exploited by the far right and subsequently Jones’s Twitter account
was attacked by trolls after conservative activist and then Breitbart editor,
Milo Yiannopoulos issued the first shot by slandering her performance in
Ghostbusters and her appearance generally. Greene’s chapter recounts all
these events while pointing out where the responsibility for protection largely
fell on either the individual victim, Jones, or the corporate mediator, Twitter.
The controversy, response, and outcome of the entire affair was neoliberal
to its core: generating media traffic based on the idea that some kind of
“primordial” hatred, a left-over remnant from some bygone era, racism was,
in reality, a reinvention along neoliberal lines: rather than “subordinating”
identities to a norm (white, heterosexual, bread-winner males) the new rac-
ism is about competition, and the “optimization of systems of difference”
(Cooper 2017, 164) where online trolls attack a black woman for her success
(in generating laughs) in order to attract their own followers in metric terms
(lulz). The entire affair proceeds as if we are living in a “post-racial” society
with the multicultural, liberal, politically correct (SJW) overlords in charge.
Cooper calls this period “post-normative” in that, as my old mentor used to
say, an open situation prevails where the norm is suspended so long as no one
looks closely at the actual outcome of the racial order. Without a norm, trolls
intuit, one victim may be substituted for another (white men have played this
card well in the Trump era). This is the construction of a new racial order,
in that the “optimization of systems of difference,” operating without a norm
to anchor and focus our analysis of power relations, allows for the routine
victimization and equalization of white supremacy.
Simon Weaver’s chapter, “Brexit Irony, Caricature and Neoliberalism,” is
analysis of “post-Brexit” discourse in Great Britain. Weaver uses two exam-
ples of “caricature” irony to warn readers about the liberties taken by come-
dians when ridiculing “leavers” (those who voted in favor of Great Britain
exiting the European Union and common market, itself an invention of early
phases of neoliberalism) and their purported spokespersons. Weaver points
out that much of the comedy that pointed fun at leavers was misconstruing its
 Introduction 23

target: while pointing out the illogic of the Leave Campaigns talking points
(leaving the Union would provide enough funds to save the beloved NHS,
or National Health Service) the comedians largely left untouched the true
core of the critique, and misrepresented point of leaving, which is not to stop
neoliberalism but to allow it to continue on domestic terms, that is, getting rid
of the Other in the form of immigrants to return to some nostalgic notion of
a British do-over of neoliberalism without the labor competition. Moreover
the far right “leave” position represented by Nigel Farage was the one mostly
ridiculed even though it was never his position but that of Boris Johnson,
Gisela Stuart, and Michael Gove, of the similarly named “Vote Leave Cam-
paign.” Weaver’s analysis is a warning shot to those who criticize neoliberal-
ism without ensuring they fall into its traps: relying on the old stereotypes
about conservatives and liberals, comedian’s jokes left the true neoliberals
(who are funny and fancy, much like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton in the
United States) untouched and blamed instead the often less attractive “real-
ist,” or conservative.
Sophia McClennen’s chapter, “What’s Wrong with Slactivism? Confront-
ing the Neoliberal Assault on Millennials,” gets right to the heart of the
neoliberal matter. Millennials, whose political participation is often derided
as ineffective or inauthentic because it doesn’t follow the standard political
efficacy scripts of older generations (and political scientists, for that matter)
but McClennen calls these claims out. Arguing that slactivists (“slacker” and
“activism”) those from younger generations (X, Millennials and on down
the line to Margerie Stone Douglas students, we might surmise) are better
prepared to meet the challenges posed by new technologies and Big Data.
Furthermore, McClennen argues that the criticisms of slactivists, which are
focused exclusively on metrics, polling, and traditional forms of participation
are neoliberal forms of argumentation used against younger political activ-
ists. If new generations are using digital technologies and their spin-off of
social relations to challenge neoliberal ways of assessing political efficacy we
should question the establishment media’s attempts to discredit them, along
with their sense of humor, which is often biting, satirical, and parodic. Rather
than assume that any politics outside of traditional frameworks is either nihil-
istic or lazy and non-existent, we should change our conceptual apparatuses
to match this newfound activism.
Secil Dagtas’ chapter, “Political Humor in the Face of Neoliberal Authori-
tarianism in Turkey,” follows up nicely with the emphasis on slactivism by
looking at protests in Gezi Park in Turkey against the Erdogan regime and
the authoritarian neoliberalism driving politics in the region. Recall that neo-
liberalism takes many forms. In this case, the government proceeded with
the destruction of a park in spite of the protests. During the protests, Dagtas
reports, leaders made “jokes” about the protesters age and urged their parents
24 Introduction

to teach them how to be appropriate citizens, echoing McClennen’s argu-

ments about older generations against Occupy activists. Dagtas’s chapter is
finely attuned to the way humor is implicated directly in politics during these
protests, how they are not without their problems and “far from being an
ephemeral addition to realist critique” the politics in Gezi grew out of a “site
of resistance” that expressed both solidarity and difference. She highlights
a number of examples of humor that parodied Turkish historical events to
resignify the contemporary activists’ practices.
James Brasset’s chapter, “British Comedy and the Politics of Resistance:
The Liminality of Right-Wing Comedy,” argues that beyond the stale contro-
versies over whether comedy has an impact on politics, moving in the direc-
tion of liberation or progress, we might view comedy as productive of politics
in a more Foucauldian way. From Ricky Gervais and Alexei Sayles on, Bras-
set argues that a form of right-wing comedy that is critical of political cor-
rectness (especially in its more knee-jerk forms) provided an opportunity for
right-wing politicians to incorporate humor into their speeches and rhetoric:
“By combining the (now) socially legitimate language of irony over political
correctness with a (more-or-less) strongly articulated moral agenda, the right
has been able to occupy comedy to political ends” (pages).
The second section “Post-Network Politics” champions particular aspects
of several late night comedic shows for their challenge to neoliberal themes
and problems. Living in the post-network era (Lotz 2007) brings forth the
challenges of post-network politics (Thompson, Jones & Gray 2009). These
politics have only become edgier since Jon Stewart left The Daily Show and
Stephen Colbert has moved to late night. The field has expanded, but the criti-
cal nature of late night comedy is hampered by corporate politics, as well as
issues regarding format and audience. The essays in this section have some
hope for late night.
David Grondin and Marc-Olivier Castagner’s chapter “A Silly Citizenship
Take on Infotainment Satire: The Medium of Televisual Political Satire as
Ludic Surveillance” provides a detailed overview of the strategies under-
taken by John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight (hereafter, LWT) to compete in
the network “culture wars” in the latest iteration, post—recession. As heir to
the Daily Show and Colbert Report dynasties, LWT’s strategies of “recog-
nition comedy” correspond to this time of increasing neoliberal defense as
“doubling down”:

Comedic containment achieves this by creating a situation where all of those

subjugated under neoliberalism the Stewarts’, the Colberts’, the Olivers’.
Once political drives are co-opted through this process of internalisation—the
ideological process through which we are led to believe that comedic recogni-
tion amounts to liberation—the structures of neoliberal subjugation need not
 Introduction 25

undertake the actions required to transform the current institutional and social
relationships. (Kingsmith 2016, 293)

Oliver’s distinction among “recognition/containment” comedy is that he

seemingly goes deeper than his predecessors, engaging in lengthy critique
of “industries” that portend to corrupt the public and environment through
their neoliberal strategems. Grondin and Castagner’s addition to this analysis
is to position LWT as a “parahesiac” intertext that stands in for the “average
joe” audience member, who goes from “irritated hostage” to “silly citizen,”
via Oliver’s management of contemporary political issues on the show. Oli-
ver’s lengthy format and HBO accessibility make him a noted improvement
over his predecessors who short shows and Comedy Central exclusiveness
made them less able to engage with deeper political ideas. Aaron McKain
and Thomas Lawson’s chapter, “I Wanna Party With You Cowboy: Stephen
Colbert and the Aesthetic Logic of ‘Truthiness’ After Campaign 2016,” goes
back in time to analyze why the old Colbert, of TDS and TCR (2005–2014),
was so much more effective at irony. McKain and Lawson use the notion
of an “ideal audience,” which they argue the old Colbert was able to bring
to life. Lastly, Don Waisenen’s chapter provides an overview and points to
some of the problems with late night comedy from the “industry” side of the
equation, which under neoliberalism are often difficult to separate. As the
conclusion to the volume shows, ratings and comedy are so intertwined that
new and innovative comedy that might contest contemporary forms of neo-
liberalism might never make it past the cutting room floor. Waisenen isolates
three main issues from the political economic perspective that haunt the com-
edy industry: institutional return (the role that corporate advertising plays in
nixing content), small revolutions (comedy’s tendency to return to the same
starting places for thought over and over do not lead to it being the most
revolutionary of genres), and finally, most importantly, cynical labor, which
shows how melancholia does not make for revolutionary content. Waisenen’s
piece looks for the larger picture rather than reading individual examples of
comedy for their insight or radical potential with audiences.
In the third section of the book, there are three essays and a conclusion
that center on the role of race, gender, and neoliberalism in several formats:
the HBO special, a horror-comedy television series, and an Adult Swim
comedy troupe cancelled in the wake of the election of Trump. These three
essays look at subjectivity in particular, foregrounding the ways in which
neoliberal politics, gender relations, and race are as much about the said as
the unsaid in forming a kind of dispositif that can be recognized in Trump’s
America—as well as providing the source of its detournèment. Several times
throughout this text, the phrase “doubling down” is addressed, which means,
when faced with apparent failure, the subject shakes off doubt, confidently
26 Introduction

asserts his or her position but increases the stakes at the same time. This word
has become symptomatic in late stage neoliberalism, especially while CEOs
largely “fake” success before a corporation crashes, to the point where this
performance has —to some—become comedic and a rich source of parody
(if it did not stand to ruin so many lives in the process). This phenomenon
is eerily similar to the way that Kotsko describes neoliberalism as a faith
in the God who lets one down—the only way to prove fidelity is to pledge
even more faith in the wake of such tragedy. In many ways the failures of
neoliberalism (in all the stages outlined by Harvey and Wilson) have inerred
us to the realization of true failures and finality in general. As is oft said, the
definition of insanity is repeating the same gesture over and over again and
expecting a different result. In the case of late stage American neoliberal-
ism, “doubling down” seems to serve this purpose except that it salvages the
insane while leaving supporters out in the rain to deal with the consequences
Jessyka Finley’s chapter “From Awkward to Dope: Black Comics in the
Alternative Comedy Scene” initially takes the reader on a brief and important
tour of both the strategies of success of “nerdy” black male comics and the
history of and limitation set upon black women comics in the United States.
These “alternative” comedians, like our Adult Swim comics who are featured
in the conclusion, find a kind of liberation from traditional stereotyped com-
edy by presenting audiences with sets and stunts that put them squarely in
the position of “nerd” or in the case of African American women, the space
of “awkwardness.” Finley frames the subjective problematic for African
American women comics through the analytic lens provided by the Duboisan
veil (audience inability to see and applaud African American women comics
without the reference to stereotypes and skin color which lead to double-con-
sciousness, the propensity, and compulsion to present oneself as the audience
wishes them to appear betraying a true self and perhaps even one’s roots in
social class). Finley first provides examples of successful trickster comedy
that upends audience stereotype while assessing the pros and cons of each
attempt. In the concluding section, she examines the neoliberal stakes in the
podcast (now HBO special) 2 Dope Queens as a vehicle for African Ameri-
can women to position themselves for recognition by mainstream audiences.
The social cost of recognition is mentioned in the concluding chapter to this
volume. Recognition is perhaps the air that neoliberalism breathes—its food
for fodder. A large part of celebrity culture thrives on mediated recognition,
the branding of personalities and “reach.” That 2 Dope Queens must shed its
more controversial material concerning the confluence of race, gender, and
class, for understanding the politics of black womanhood in the United States
is the direct outcome of neoliberal jostling for “mainstream” recognition.
Realizing that it is much more difficult for African American women to reach
such heights without the watered down pandering to audiences clamoring for
 Introduction 27

access to the “third space” of American culture created by neoliberal infra-

structural epistemologies alluded to earlier consumption. Finley’s analysis
of 2DQ traces out the contours of this space as it interacts with audience
subjectivity.
Rebecca Krefting’s chapter on “savage new media” explores the role that
new technologies and their use by audiences play in providing instantaneous
feedback (and, at times, outrage) to comedians presenting new, experimen-
tal material. The controversies that follow are often voiced in the familiar
American constitutional phrasing of “free speech” versus “political correct-
ness.” Krefting uses interviews with established comedians and newer ones to
show that sometimes the tired, old scripts of racial and gendered stereotypes
are not free in the sense of edgy, new thoughtful (or progressive material) but
instead “free” being a euphemism for uncritical; a safety net for all manner of
insensitivities couched in humor and leveled at historically marginalized pop-
ulations” (pages tbd). Krefting is also aware of and highlights the increasing
neoliberal use of the idea of “diversity” that can sometimes not only protect
a narrow and unthoughtful version of political correctness but also reflects
the kind of “equality politics” proffered by universities and corporations
identified by Lisa Duggan as a “narrow, formal, non-redistributive form of
‘equality’” that was the outcome of the culture wars of the 1990s (pages tbd).
Diane Rubenstein’s chapter, “‘An actual nightmare, but . . . pretty good
TV’: Horror-Comedy in the Trump Era,” provides a novel reading of a
redoubling of horror; no longer just comedy or just horror, this “post” genre
presents novel readings of gender, race, and sexual relations in the Trump era,
where audiences are largely cast as “extras in a reality show that we would
rather have no part in” (pages). By contrast, protagonists in such media as Get
Out! and Mother! confront the power structures still unremarked on in our
post-racial, post-feminist era. The television series examined in this chapter,
American Horror Story: Cult, on Rubenstein’s view, anticipates the return of
angry mothers and women with sustained attention to Rubenstein’s attention
to this new viral media: “comedy-horror.” As she calls it, comedy-horror is
a fascinating take on these two body genres and the ways in which they con-
front viewers with the contradictions (and sometimes victories) of neoliberal
feminism—especially in the Trump era. These phallic women examined in
the chapter, operating in the spectre of Valerie Solanas, confront the audience
with an interesting take on Solanas, once a reviled feminist figure, and at the
early stages of neoliberalism, a cautionary tale (what feminist theorist did not
disavow her as the “wrong feminism,” at least once?) becomes a sage for the
present.
By way of a conclusion, Julie Webber’s chapter, “You’re Fired! Neoliber-
alism (Insult) Comedy and Post-network Politics,” examines the first media
casualty of the Trump presidency through the lens of neoliberal politics,
28 Introduction

Million Dollar Extreme’s World Peace. It seems counterintuitive to say in

this era of late neoliberalism that because the networks have disaggregated
we live in a less structural time. However, as most of these chapters show,
audiences and citizens alike are largely controlled by structures that operate
as if they are self-imposed: be better, fix yourself, tone it down (!), and so
on. The tendency to solve most controversies in media (we might say “con-
tradictions”) in late neoliberalism tends to be resolved through cancellation
or firing. Webber looks at Roseanne Barr’s short-lived experiment, as well
as others to assess how exactly networks can address the “inner noise” of
the right and its supporters while doing so in the civil manner required by
television and disavowed by the internet. Finally, clues are offered as to how
one might go forward reading politics and comedy in this late stage (possible
collapse) of neoliberalism through lessons learned in each of these chapters
that have given some clue as to how audiences are responding to the current
manifestation of capitalism in crisis. Whether or not the “structures will take
to the streets”8 is unknown.

NOTES

1. Neoliberalism has already destroyed government. That people can no lon-

ger think of voting without it being a primary vehicle for their self-interest alone
proves this.
2. Ewald’s response: Recently there has been a heated debate about Michel Fou-
cault’s attitude toward neoliberalism. The sociologist Daniel Zamora accused Fou-
cault of adhering to neoliberal ideas. Do you agree?Let me tell you two things. First
of all, I am completely fed up with this entire discussion. Secondly, in terms of actual
evidence, the claim that Michel Foucault held neoliberal views is just so far-fetched.
Look, during those weeks in which Foucault was lecturing about liberalism at the
Collège de France, he also visited Ayatollah Khomeini at Neauphle-le-Château. The
Iranian Revolution happened shortly afterward and Foucault was particularly inter-
ested in the events in Tehran. He was fascinated by the fact that people were willing to
die for a religious idea in the streets of Tehran! But nobody would say that he became
a militant supporter of the Iranian Revolution. Based on the evidence it doesn’t make
more sense to say that Foucault was a closet neoliberal, either, (Ewald 2017).
3. Here, I think, is the rub. Can the fantasy be “garbaged?” and how do we sort
out the differences between fantasy secured by the positivist state and that found
elsewhere in popular culture and religion?
4. I think people got stuck on the wrong word in that quote in “empire.” More
ink was spilled trying to figure that out than looking at how it pointed to our present
conundrum: reality.
5. Many thanks to Adam Kostko for his review of our panel at the Western Politi-
cal Science Association meeting in San Francisco, in spring 2018, where he made this
point.
 Introduction 29

6. Reed surmises that the “analogy” of slavery (“regimes of explicitly racial sub-
ordination in the past”) stands in for evidence and argument. If the audience is left
without an explanation, such parodies may fall short simply for their lack of argu-
ment, and reinforce for their familiarity of stereotyped presentation. And yet, as we
know with satire, if it has to be explained, it’s not funny and has no effect. With satire
and parody, the explanation is subsumed in the incongruity of the performance but as
Weaver has argued, such reversals are always subject to “polysemic interpretations”
that may backfire on the comedian, as initially happened with Leslie Jones and the
black community. Also, in a condition of racial segregation, this makes ignorance of
the other and history all the more potentially dangerous for reinforcing stereotypes.
As the United States in particular, devolves into a less and less educated population,
especially in terms of the humanities (history, literature, music, etc.) (all of this a
result of neoliberalism as applied to education, that is, not for “life transformation”
but as the subject’s enhancement in terms of the market). So, lack of meaningful con-
tact and dialogue between whites and everyone else, and an increasingly diseducated
population; no longer schooled by school (Illich) but mediated by the media.
7. See Bassem Youssef’s musing on fake news in Egypt during and after the
revolution.
8. To Francois Ewald: And May 1968 in Paris was different?
Response: Yes, it was. Before May 1968 the atmosphere in France was very
depressing. The structuralists were claiming that we were all governed by configura-
tions that went far beyond any individual human being. They claimed that an indi-
vidual could hardly make a difference. Political activism seemed devoid of meaning.
You can imagine how stifling that felt for me, as a young man. The Marxists and
psychoanalysts were there to describe these structures. And then May 1968 came and
something changed. History was set in motion again. Somebody said to Lacan at the
time: “The structures had taken to the street.” And I suddenly had the feeling that
political activism made sense (Ewald 2017). Ban, Cornel. 2016. “Will Trump Bring
Neoliberalism’s Apocalypse or Merely a New Iteration?” Guardian, November,
2016. Accessed February 25, 2017. https​://ww​w.ine​tecon​omics​.org/​persp​ectiv​es/bl​
og/wi​ll-tr​ump-b​ring-​neoli​beral​isms-​apoca​lypse​-or-m​erely​-a-ne​w-ite​ratio​n.

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 Part I

THE TERRAIN HAS CHANGED

 Chapter 1

All They Need Is Lulz

Racist Trolls, Unlaughter, and Leslie Jones
Viveca Greene

The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and

misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from
the whites. “O, be respectable, write about nice people, show how
good we are,” say the Negroes. “Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t
shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will
pay you,” say the whites.
—Langston Hughes (1926)

If there’s one thing lulzier to a troll than tears, it’s rage.

—Whitney Phillips (2016)

Leslie Jones’s first on-camera appearance on Saturday Night Live (NBC

1975–present) took place on May 3, 2014, and was met with harsh criticism,
as some Black feminist writers accused Jones of reproducing stereotypes of
Black women as loud, sexually aggressive, and hostile, and of making light
of sexual violence inflicted on Black women (Lemieux 2014; Carroll 2014).
Two years later, in July 2016, Jones became the target of a separate online
racist harassment campaign. The harassment was a continuation of a coor-
dinated misogynist campaign against the reboot of Ghostbusters (2016) and
its four lead actresses, including Jones, which itself was preceded by another
coordinated campaign against women—in gaming and technology—known
as GamerGate. All of these attacks stem from the belief that the alleged ero-
sion of traditional white masculinity poses a catastrophic threat to the nation.
Jones is a comedian, Saturday Night Live (SNL) is a sketch-comedy show,
and Ghostbusters is an action/adventure/comedy film. But my focus in this
chapter is not the comedian, the television comedy, or the comedic film. As

37
38 Viveca Greene

humor scholar Giselinde Kuipers (2008) notes, “Humor theory is not very
good at (or interested in) explaining what happens when people are not
amused,” and suggests that humor scholars need “to carefully analyze the
variety of negative responses to humor” (33–34). Taking up this charge, in
this chapter I employ an untraditional approach to humor-related events by
looking at unlaughter, which Michael Billig (2005) describes as a deliberate
withholding of laughter as a form of resistance (7). Unlaughter is the rhe-
torical opposite of laughter. As Billig puts it, “Laughter and humour do not
stand alone, outside the normal or serious processes of communication,” and
thus “if laughter is rhetorical, so is the refusal of audiences to respond with
laughter” (179).
I present unlaughter as a critical frame to review the sociological nature
of racial and racist humor, as well as to deconstruct responses to—and
defenses of—it, examining unlaughter in two contexts: (1) that of a “Week-
end Update” SNL sketch in 2014 and (2) of racist trolling that began in 2016.
Both involve Jones but are also representative of much broader social and
cultural patterns pertaining to humor and white supremacy, which I seek to
challenge. These include: the tendency to focus on individual psychology at
the expense of systems of power; the victim-blaming and disavowal inherent
in defenses of racist humor and trolling; and the institutional and structural
racism that hides behind those justifications. These tendencies, as I argue, are
too often obscured by neoliberal ideology whereby the market is cast as the
paradigm of freedom, and democracy employed as a synonym for capitalism
(Davis 2012, 169). Although the racist humor and racism evident on Twit-
ter rely on tropes and defenses that predate it by at least two centuries, the
neoliberal ethos of endless competition, technological innovation, and market
responsiveness stokes new forms of racism and racist humor on new media
platforms.1

ACT 1: BLACK FEMINISTS, UNLAUGHTER,

AND THE BREEDING SLAVE

Early in 2014 SNL hired Leslie Jones as a writer, and later that year, promoted
her to cast member. One year earlier, the late night staple had drawn criti-
cism for having no Black women in its cast. Maya Rudolph, who was hired
in 2000, was only the fourth Black woman cast member ever, and her depar-
ture in 2007 left the show back at zero again.2 On May 3, 2014, Jones made
her first on-camera appearance on the show’s “Weekend Update” segment,
in which she responded to 12 Years a Slave (2013) actress Lupita Nyong’o
being named People Magazine’s 2014 “Most Beautiful Person” award by
joking with host Colin Jost about her own present-day desirability as a
 All They Need Is Lulz 39

six-foot tall, broad-shouldered Black woman (Michaels 2014). Although the

studio audience laughed, many Black feminists did not. Here in Act 1, I draw
on insight from Black feminist writers to the “Weekend Update” sketch, and
from African American humor scholars, as their insights speak to the signifi-
cance of researching unlaughter and antijokes in white supremacist societies.
They push back against the neoliberal fantasy that much of history—espe-
cially damaging histories (for some) of imperialism and crime (e.g., slavery,
wage slavery, and rape) carried out in the name of global capitalism and set-
tler colonialism—don’t matter.
Jones’s debut SNL sketch, which came to be known as the “Breeding
Slave,” was adapted from an earlier stand-up routine that Jones wrote and
performed at Los Angeles’s Laugh Factory; in the original version, Jones
noted that she was single, which was surprising, “’cause during slavery, I
would have been the head slave! Look at my teeth!” (as quoted in Antoine
2016, 42). With a slightly modified set-up, and the omission of the refer-
ence to her teeth, from behind the “Weekend Update” desk, Jones delivered
essentially the same monologue: “See, I’m single right now, but back in the
slave days, I would have never been single. . . . I mean, look at me, I’m a
Mandingo. . . . I’m just saying that back in the slave days, my love life would
have been way better. Massah would have hooked me up with the best bro-
tha on the plantation. . . . I would be the No. 1 slave draft pick.” The sketch
generated attention in the mainstream press and online sites, ranging from
the Washington Post (McDonald 2014) to The Root (Callahan 2015). Most
of the stories focused on the controversy around the sketch, and particularly
the response—the unlaughter—from Black feminist writers.
Billig (2005) defines unlaughter as “a display of not laughing when laugh-
ter might otherwise be expected, hoped for or demanded” (192). A related
concept is the antijoke; as Lewis (2006) explains, an antijoke “is deployed
in an effort to turn thoughtless mirth into grim reflection by insisting that the
subject treated humorously in a joke, joke cycle, comment, cartoon or com-
mercial is too serious, too dangerous, too depressing, or too urgent to laugh
at perhaps because laughing at it could intensify the danger or undermine
attempts to deal with the matter seriously” (13). An antijoke is not a style
of joking; it is a critique that draws attention to social, political, or historical
contexts that vacate a joke of its humor.
Critics blasted Jones for the issues she joked about as well as her delivery.
Writing for Ebony, Jamilah Lemieux (2014) censures Jones, noting her dis-
gust that “Jones dared make light of slave rape AND dismiss the significance
of The Lupita Moment all in one fell swoop.” Online discussions regarding
the nature of the joke—was it about rape or forced breeding or something
else?—ensued, as the semiotics of the monologue’s racial elements—refer-
ences to athletic drafts, slavery, forced breeding, and black celebrities such
40 Viveca Greene

as LeBron James and Sinbad (David Adkins)—made for an insensitive amal-

gam for many Black viewers (and especially Black women viewers). Jesskya
Finley (2016) notes, “Jones’s citation of black sports stars and entertainers
bitingly exposes how the underlying ideas about enslaved people as anoma-
lous physical specimens has carried through to how we think about black
bodies, labor, and desire today” (250). However, “Viewers, especially black
viewers . . . could not abide the citation of a brutal history of enslavement in a
comic fashion” (Finley 2016, 251). Some went so far as to ascribe animalistic
characteristics to her performance, employing language eerily similar to that
slave owners and other white supremacists.
Jones’s delivery did not sit well with Lemieux (2014), who took Jones to
task for “jumping and hollering like some sort of banshee,” and effectively
charged her with pandering to white supremacists and fueling the racist
imagination. “It was appalling,” Lemieux wrote, negatively imbing Black
American Vernacular, “to see this sister gleefully acting like she was audi-
tioning for Birth of a Nation 2: We’s Really Like Dis!.” Rebecca Carroll,
editor of xoJane, called Jones’s performance “coonery,” arguing that “Jones
was not only clowning about slavery (which is plenty bad enough), but about
being systemically gang raped” (2014).
As Naomi Zack (2012) argues in her discussion of Black woman crossover
comedy, “Comedy that is inflected by race and gender is a complex site of
multiple forms of oppression and freedom” (37). Performed at the Laugh Fac-
tory and before SNL’s live and televised audience, the sketch circulates in a
racist culture that can be brutally unkind to women who look like Jones. Was
Jones deliberately reproducing stereotypes to subvert them, or just trying to
own her tall sturdy frame, speak in her own voice, and do what many standup
comedians do: Tell jokes about their feelings of inadequacy?
In the “Weekend Update” sketch Jones is, on the surface, self-assured
and brash, boasting of her attractiveness (to white masters seeking to breed
their slaves); however, for a moment sorrow and vulnerability slice through
the bravado. Turning to her (white) co-host Jost, whom she refers to as a
“delectable caucasian,” she asks: “If you walked into a club and you saw me
and Lupita standing at a bar, who would you pick?” Jost responds with an
apologetic shrug and “well. . . .” Jones looks down, her jocular tone softens,
and she says, “I know. You would pick Lupita” (Ibid.). Writing for The Daily
Beast, Phoebe Robinson (2014) interprets the monologue as Jones attempting
to draw attention to “the pain that permeates her dating life, the pain from
society and its projection of the white standards of beauty, and the reality of
how her body would have been viewed and used during slavery.” In many
cases unlaughter and pointed antijokes were the response to Jones’s expres-
sion of pain.
 All They Need Is Lulz 41

Those who were more sympathetic to Jones and the sketch tended to focus
on the anguish underlying her performance. In African American expressive
culture, Glenda Carpio (2008) argues, “Grief often assumes a tragicomic
mode, best known through the blues,” and “this tragicomic mode also finds
stunning expression in black humor” (11). Defending herself against the
“Breeding Slave” attacks, in a series of Twitter posts on May 4, 2014, Jones
(@Lesdoggg) echoes Carpio’s point: “I’m a comic it is my job to take things
and make them funny to make you think. Especially the painful things. Why
are y’all so mad. This joke was written from the pain that one night I realized
that black men don’t really f--k with me and why am I single” (2014). Jones
appears genuinely perplexed about why anyone, and especially Black people,
would be angry with her, and she frames the sketch as a means of communi-
cating her pain through comedy, which she regards as a central aspect of the
comic’s job.
Writing for Time, Roxane Gay (2014) notes that she understands Jones’s
perspective and situates it within U.S. culture: “To be considered beautiful
as a black woman, you need to be exceptionally beautiful. You need to be
slender and smooth, with the sharp cheekbones of a Lupita Nyong’o. All too
often, you also need to be fair-skinned, which has made the darker-skinned
Nyong’o’s rise to such great heights so spectacular to see.” Seemingly imper-
ceptible to white/lighter-skinned or male audience members, and eclipsed for
some Black women by its style, there is a vulnerability and grief to Jones’s
performance, and a gendered and racialized hierarchy to which Gay rightly
calls attention. “I see pain. I see rage. I see a woman speaking her truth,” Gay
writes.
Offering one explanation of the unlaughter the sketch elicited from some
viewers, and the anger directed at Jones, Salon’s Brittney Cooper (2014)
argues the culture as a whole is uncomfortable with Black women’s pain:
“Black women’s assertions of desire often enrage people who think our mere
request to be seen, honored and cared for is an unreasonable demand.” As she
goes on to write, “Jones chose an extreme (and inappropriate) comparison
to demonstrate just how undesirable she has been made to feel.” As Cooper
notes here, though Jones’s artistic choices are unbefitting, her pain is real, and
yet perhaps it is too real for some viewers, and simultaneously imperceptible
to many others.
As Raúl Pérez (2013) documents, white male comedians often gain tacit
permission from their audience to make fun of people in other social cat-
egories by first engaging in a self-deprecating act of calling attention to a
shortcoming of their own (e.g., “I’m really bad in bed. . .”) and then laying
into others (“The thing about Asian women is. . .”); Jones does not take
that approach, however. Instead she makes herself the butt of her own joke,
42 Viveca Greene

navigating within a space where her parameters are diametrically different

from a substantial portion of the audience with whom she attempts to engage.
Jones’s pain—as well as what likely accounts, at least in part, for her
loneliness—is tied to slavery, as well as to colonialism, which has, as Tressie
McMillan Cottom (2014) writes on her blog, “exported a racial hierarchy,
gendered capitalism, and anti-black beauty structure to every single corner of
the world.” For all of the transgressive elements of the sketch, Jones’s humor
is also reactionary; her claim that her love life would have been much better
“back in the slave days” and trivialization of sexual trauma troubled some
writers. Deeply ambivalent about Jones’s performance, McMillan Cottom
openly wrests with it, as do other Black women writers, all-too-well aware
that they have been the butt of other people’s jokes for centuries.
McMillan Cottom also notes the “superior skill” required to invoke the
dehumanizing and violent history of slavery, “even when it is a part of your
inherited legacy, to move forward a critical comedic commentary.” And she
alludes to misogynoir (anti-Black misogyny), and the intersectional dimen-
sion of comic license, in which men are granted wider options. McMillan
Cottom describes the sketch as “painful as shit to watch,” concluding that
slavery is not a joke, but that Jones isn’t playing it as one: “Her pain, so
inextricably bound in the way enslavement shaped her social distance from
desirability and beauty in the here and now, couldn’t let her make it a joke
even if she intended to.” In other words, the pain is the product of structural
and historical violence.
In contrast, Katja Anotine (2016) argues that Jones’s live performance of
the monologue “negates the ideal of white femininity as she forces the audi-
ence to face her exclusion and devaluation in its shadow” (44). However, it
is unclear if such a move forces the SNL audience to face Jones’s exclusion
and devaluation. In his discussion of the crossover appeal of In Living Color
(Fox 1990–1994) and its ambivalent representations of blackness, Herman
Gray (1995) maintains that whereas for some scholars the show contests
“hegemonic assumptions and representations of race in general and blacks
in particular in the American social order; for others, it simply perpetuates
troubling images of blacks” (130). Similarly, some writers and scholars see
the “Weekend Update” sketch as making audiences think critically, whereas
others believe the performance does not demand a truly critical engagement
from the SNL audience.
As Gray (1995), Haggins (2007), Zack (2012), and other critical race theo-
rists who address the cultural politics of comedy maintain, crossover—racial
comedy performed by Black artists for predominantly white audiences—is
always a fraught act. Bambi Haggins (2007) explains, “The process of cross-
over—and the extension of both humor and influence beyond black com-
munal spaces—adds a problematic task to the already Byzantine task faced
 All They Need Is Lulz 43

by the African American comic: to be funny, accessible, and topical while

retaining his or her authentic black voice” (4). Intensifying the challenge is
the reality of racism, which ensures “the road for racial satire, regardless of
media outlet, will be arduous” (Haggins 2009, 248). As Haggins notes, in
2005 Dave Chappelle abruptly left his show because of his concern that it
was reinforcing rather than sending up stereotypes. For many mainstream
audience members, the stereotypes Jones employs, the history she invokes,
and the format of “Weekend Update” and SNL itself are such familiar fodder
and formats for jokes they can laugh easily and comfortably.
Jones wrote the sketch and, of course, has agency as a comic; she is also
performing for a mainstream comedy institution that was not designed for
her. Multiple forces of oppression—especially white supremacy and neolib-
eralism—limit comedians’ imaginations regarding what humor is and how to
enact it, as well as the ability to construct jokes outside historical systems of
oppression. As is evident in the somewhat varied responses described earlier,
Black feminist writers were able to explain their unlaughter with extended
antijokes articulating the seriousness of the subject matter and the danger of
joking about it as Jones did.
An antijoke asks rhetorically, “What’s so funny about. . .?” For Lemieux,
“slave rape” is not funny, for McMillon Cottom colonialism is not a topic
for humor, and nor are “racial hierarchy, gendered capitalism, and anti-
black beauty structure.” For Cooper, there is nothing funny about “the fact
that black racial entanglements with white supremacy routinely cause black
women such severe emotional pain.” To critically engage the politics of com-
edy entails going beyond study of how jokes operate at an individual level
to produce laughter; unlaughter and antijokes are often a good indication of
the social, emotional, psychological, and physical violence levied against
outgroups.
In taking humor acts seriously, recognizing their rhetorical significance,
noting their social and historical contexts, and calling attention to the ideo-
logical work they perform, Black feminists challenge what Angela Davis
describes as a key dimension of neoliberalism: “the flawed assumption that
history does not matter” (A. Y. Davis 2012). Pushing back against Dinesh
D'Souza’s claim that “the end of history” brought “the end of racism,” Davis
reminds us that race and racism are “profoundly historical” and regardless of
our recognition of as much “we continue to inhabit these histories, which help
to constitute our social and psychic worlds” (169). Despite some variation in
their responses, the aforementioned Black feminist writers are in agreement
with Davis, and their unlaughter and antijokes are the antithesis of the “just
a joke” meta-discourse of humor we will see in the next act. As we shall also
see, unlaughter is “a favourite target for the laughter of ridicule” (Billig 2005,
194) and is, in fact, the desired response.
44 Viveca Greene

ACT 2: TROLLING FOR LULZ

On January 27, 2015, The Hollywood Reporter announced the names of

the four actresses chosen for the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot: Kristen Wiig,
Kate McKinnon, Melissa McCarthy, and Leslie Jones (Kit). The follow-
ing day—and five months prior to formally announcing his candidacy for
President—Donald Trump released an awkward Instagram video in which he
fumed, “They're remaking Indiana Jones without Harrison Ford, you can’t do
that. And now they’re making Ghostbusters with only women. What’s going
on?!" (@realDonaldTrump). Although Trump did not individually single out
Jones, in the culture war that came to surround Ghostbusters (2016), Jones
became the target of particular vitriol. During this period, it was not Jones
who presented her physical appearance and desirability as fodder for comedy,
as jokes about her body circulated on social media that caused pain rather
than expressed it, released it, or reflected on its sources.
When Ghostbusters was released in July 2016, Jones fell victim to Internet
trolls, who posted inflammatory tweets under her account name, posted racist
comments and images, as well as sent the actress pornographic images. In the
2014 “Weekend Update” sketch Jones commodified her body—historically,
in slavery terms, and contemporaneously, through television viewership—
and later Jones’s aggressors commodified it as well, by stealing pictures of
her nude body, and spectacularizing it via social media. Some of the acts
against Jones were presented and defended as humorous, and others as anti-
joke reactions to her performance in the comedic film. Before delving into
humor-related issues, however, I review movements, forces, and tensions that
preceded and anticipated the attack on Jones.

GamerGate, Ghostbusters, and the Alt-Right

A notable precursor to the Ghostbusters and Jones attacks was what would
become known as “GamerGate”: beginning in August 2014, women gam-
ers and journalists were subjected to online abuse, including violent threats,
doxxing (researching and broadcasting personally identifiable information
about an individual), and personal online account hacking. The abuse came
from internet trolls who claimed that “Social Justice Warriors” (a pejorative
term used to refer to those who promote socially progressive views, including
feminism, civil rights, multiculturalism, and identity politics) were trying to
ruin video games with feminism and “political correctness” (Phillips 2016).
As Brianna Wu (2016), one target of GamerGate harassment, explains in
“Why the New ‘Ghostbusters’ is Gamergate’s Worst Nightmare,” the shift
in targets from female game designers (and scholars) to the female cast of
the comedy film was logical in that both efforts were based on “a toxic male
 All They Need Is Lulz 45

sense of ownership over geek culture.” As one person commented on You-

Tube in response to the Ghostbusters reboot trailer, “this movie made me
want to disown my childhood” and further declared, “There is never going
to be a Ghostbusters movie that will ever be good . . . so long as feminism
continues to draw breath.” Rather than respond with mirth, anti-feminist
unlaughter and antijokes characterized the responses of this viewer, as well
as of the man who would become the president.
As GamerGaters turned their attention to a new feminist enemy, the par-
ticular hatred for Black women surfaced: what Moya Bailey (2010) refers
to as misogynoir, “the particular brand of hatred directed at black women in
American visual and popular culture.” One Twitter user who railed against
three women GamerGate targets later tweeted that Jones bore greater resem-
blance to one gorilla than another. The racist Jones-as-gorilla comparison
was common on social media, undoubtedly fueled by news coverage of an
incident involving a slain silverback named Harambe at the Cincinnati Zoo
late in May 2016 (Phillips and Milner 2017).
Despite public acknowledgement that he had never played video games
prior to the hashtag campaign, British media personality Milo Yiannopoulos
became the figurehead of the GamerGate group, which, via Reddit, would
eventually lead (or at least join) the hate campaign directed at both Ghost-
busters and Jones. Largely unknown in the United States prior to his involve-
ment in GamerGate, Yiannopoulos’s related actions were a springboard for
his career, and likely led Steve Bannon, who led Breitbart at the time, to hire
him as a senior editor of the Breitbart News website. In September of 2014,
Yiannopoulos published leaked discussions from a mailing list for gaming
journalists on the Breitbart News website—which he regarded as evidence
of collusion among journalists and game designers not to cover details of
the targeted women’s personal lives—ratcheting up anger and accusations
among followers about “basic bitches” (women) involved in online gaming
(Yiannopoulos 2014).
Prior to leaving Breitbart to join the Trump campaign in mid-August 2016,
Bannon referred to the site as the platform of the alt-right (Posner 2016). That
some GamerGaters openly identified as alt-righters (white supremacists), and
went on to troll Ghostbusters and Jones, speaks to the existence of a series
of overlapping communities. As a Venn-diagram of these overlapping com-
munities suggests, to regard trolls as individuals is a mistake; they are active
members of groups. And prancing at the center of the three-ring circus was
Yiannopoulos who, on May 5, 2016, gleefully reported on Breitbart that the
trailer for Ghostbusters was the most disliked trailer in YouTube history, and
called the film “a feminist cash-in for angsty, blue-haired, Tumblr-obsessed,
pronoun-bothering cat ladies.” Fighting back with their own “user-generated
content,” a term that sounds democratic but invokes market values such as
46 Viveca Greene

ratings and ranking, Ghostbusters’ supporters responded by voting the trailer

back up on YouTube with “likes,” and encouraging women to see the film
(Zeisler 2015).
In response to the film’s release, Yiannopoulos wrote a review of Ghost-
busters on July 18, 2016 that kicked off the Twitter hate, as a number of
his followers and other alt-right white supremacists began to troll Jones. In
the review, Yiannopoulos argued that whereas in the original Ghostbusters
“the bad guys were the clueless bureaucrats in the government,” in the new
version “the enemy is all men” (emphasis in original), and that the film
“[pandered] to the kind of woman who thinks misandry is a positive lifestyle
choice” (2016). Referring to one cast member as “repellant and fat,” another
as “a clownish, lip-syncing drag queen,” Yiannopoulos saved his most
vicious critique for Jones, whom he referred to as “the worst of the lot” and
“two dimensional racist stereotype.” Further laying into Jones for her “black
stylings” and appearance (“spectacularly unappealing, even relative to the
rest of the odious cast”) and her character Patty, Yiannopoulos fed the trolls
and goaded them on by tweeting a link to the article.
What transpired on Twitter was far uglier, more racist, and sexist than the
article. In their harassment of Jones, people used Twitter, and Jones’s Twit-
ter handle (@LesDoggg), to tweet racist memes, words, and ideas: gorillas,
the n-word, and the like. The frequency of the racist tweets increased when
Yiannopoulos (@Nero) began tweeting at Jones directly: for example, on
July 19, 2016, “Ghostbusters is doing so badly they’ve deployed @Lesdoggg
to play the victim on Twitter. Very sad!,” which was “liked” by 1,309 people
and retweeted by 407 prior to Twitter deleting Yiannopoulos’s account. Yian-
nopoulos also shared fake tweets that appeared to be from Jones but were
not.3 Describing some of the harassment, on July 18, 2016, Jones tweeted,
“I have been called Apes, sent pics of their asses, even got a pic with semen
on my face. I’m tryin to figure out what human means. I’m out.” In the wake
of this, Yiannopoulos, with more than 380,000 Twitter followers at the time,
effectively invited followers to mock Jones with tweets such as “if at first you
don’t succeed (because your work is terrible), play the victim. Everyone gets
hate mail FFS [for fuck sake]” (July 18, 2016). The messages were retweeted,
liked, and commented on as an online crowd gathered to watch, taunt, and
support Jones as she responded to the attacks prior to her short departure from
Twitter.
In another tweet on July 18—the first day of the Republican National
Convention in Cleveland (where Yiannopoulos told a crowd that “political
correctness is a disease that is killing people”)—Yiannopoulos called Jones
“barely literate,” and in another referred to her as a “black dude,” playing on
demeaning stereotypes that position African Americans as mentally inferior,
and Black women as masculine. Jones tweeted back at attackers, notified
 All They Need Is Lulz 47

people she was reporting them, and demanded that the leadership of the social
media site do something: “Twitter, I understand you got free speech I get
it. But there has to be some guidelines when you let [hate] spread like that.
You can see on the profiles that some of these people are crazy sick.” As she
noted, “It’s not enough to freeze accounts. They should be reported” (July
18, 2016). Clearly at a breaking point, later that evening Jones announced via
Twitter that she would be leaving the site “with tears and a very sad heart. All
this cause I did a movie. You can hate the movie but the shit I got today. . .
wrong.”
The post was met with a mix of support and ridicule, as well as a message
from Jack Dorsey (@Jack), Twitter’s CEO at the time, on the evening of July
18, 2016, asking Jones to contact him directly. Several hours later, Yian-
nopoulos’s account—along with those of other instigators—was permanently
shut down. Social media and news media outlets discussed the events widely,
with a mixture of support for Jones, concern for free speech, and suggestion
that Jones had triumphed over trolls. Yiannopoulos celebrated his suspension
at an RNC rally: “It’s fantastic,” he told a journalist, “It’s the end of the plat-
form. The timing is perfect” (Penny 2016). After a three-day hiatus, on July
21 Jones announced her return to Twitter: “Welp. . . a bitch thought she could
stay away. But who else is gonna live tweet Game of Thrones!!”

Joke Tellers, Audiences, and the Logic of Lulz

Jones’s tenacity in withstanding the attacks is admirable, and she pushed back
against racist Twitter trolls with unlaughter and antijokes—as did an outpour-
ing of her Twitter followers. As I take up in the final act of this chapter, there
is a tendency to celebrate individual strength in struggles that are not simply
personal, and to overlook structural and social issues that warrant action and
collective action. However, it is imperative to examine the social conse-
quences of racist humor as well of the meta-discourse of online and offline
racist humor, and in the remainder of Act 2 I explore modes in which racist
humor operates in the online harassment directed at Jones, particularly on
Twitter. Online abuse of Jones was intersectional, to be sure, but beyond an
ability to recognize the intersectionality of racism with other salient catego-
ries like gender, there has been limited scholarship on racialized discourse,
or racist humor, on Twitter. As Sharma and Brooker (2016) note, “Little is
known about how the modalities of everyday racial expression play out on the
Twitter platform, and particularly practices of racism denial” (3).
I use the term “racist humor” to refer to “humour that draws on dichoto-
mous stereotypes of race and/or seeks to inferiorize an ethnic or racial minor-
ity” (Weaver 2010, 537) and I draw on critical humor theory to discuss racist
tweets, responses, and trolling itself in an attempt to connect these newer
48 Viveca Greene

forms of racist humor to older ones. The first and most basic mode of racist
humor I explore in light of such scholarship are the racist tweets and memes
of Twitter users targeting Jones, which we might find analogous to traditional
racist joke telling. The second mode includes comments or responses to the
aforementioned racist tweets that indicate someone is amused by racist con-
tent and in particular racist imagery or slurs; these comments and responses
are roughly the online equivalent of the laughter or applause of someone who
hears a racist joke. The third and final mode is the logic of trolling itself—
not unlike that of mockery or ridicule—or the pursuit of laughter through
unlaughter.

Posting Racist Jokes

The first mode of humor I explore involves Twitter users telling, or mak-
ing, “jokes” by mixing images of Jones and non-human primates in memes,
or using racial slurs. For example, on July 19, 2016, one user tweeted that
Jones should change her Twitter handle to the name of the slain Cincinnati
Zoo gorilla (Harambe), followed by “lol”; the text appears above an image
of the gorilla’s head superimposed on the body of Jones’s Ghostbusters
character.4 As the “lol” suggests, the user is amused with the suggestion that
Jones rename her handle Harambe, and finds the inclusion of the incongruous
primate-Jones character image clever. Here the joke-teller may not consider
himself racist; instead, as Freud might suggest, he may be repressing racist
sentiments so he is not aware of them himself.
Critical humor scholars have addressed the nature of racist humor, and its
relationship to racist attitudes and ideologies (Boskin 1987; Husband 1988;
Howitt and Owusu-Bempah 2005; Pérez 2013; Pérez 2016). Billig (2001)
and Weaver (2010) investigate white supremacists’ use of racist humor on
the internet, which is often defended (casually) as “just a joke.” Against
such claims, Billig and Weaver maintain that the circulation of racist jokes
sustains and spreads beliefs regarding racial superiority and inferiority. As
such studies of racist humor suggest, we should distinguish “between the
psychological nature of humour and its sociological consequences” (Billig
2005, 211). In other words, though the tradition in humor scholarship is to
focus on why individuals tell jokes or laugh at them, it is important to consider
the wider consequences of the jokes, especially for marginalized groups. As
Pérez (2016) argues, “Racist humor should be analyzed not only because it
is ‘offensive’ but also because racist humor continues to play a significant
role in affirming, supporting, and naturalizing dominant racial ideologies and
inequalities” (935). Jones, and others, took offense to the racist tweets, includ-
ing those couched as humor, and responded with unlaughter and antijokes.
However, individual reactions to (or intentions behind) the language, images,
 All They Need Is Lulz 49

and sentiments shared in those tweets, as Billig and Pérez suggest, should not
eclipse the extent to which racial and ethnic groups are impacted by the con-
ceptual systems that structure how people understand themselves, others, and
social issues—and how dominant ideologies justify racial inequality.
The use of non-human primates was a common trope in the Twitter harass-
ment of Jones, and that trope has been prevalent throughout the history of
U.S. humor as a means of presenting Black Americans in particular as not
only inferior but, in fact, subhuman (Boskin 1987; Lott 1995; Pérez 2016).
Although such imagery—racism in graphic form—is less common today than
in earlier periods of U.S. history in mainstream media, it persists, particularly
on social media. Apel (2009) addresses one example of racist imagery and
racism denial in her discussion of a political cartoon by Sean Delonas that
appeared in the New York Post in 2009 depicting a dead chimp, shot by police
officers, with a caption suggesting the chimp was Barack Obama. The Post
defended the cartoon as satirical, and as taking aim at presidential legislation
with no racial overtones or intent. As Apel argues, however, the intention
argument does not hold, “Even when made in good faith, since racism can
be so internalized and normalized as to efface itself quite effectively” (137).
Indeed, one does not need to be conscious of one’s racism to make a rac-
ist utterance. As Apel goes on to argue, the intent argument can be used to
excuse “nearly every racist tract and image that has ever been produced as
a ‘joke’ or ‘misreading.’” Despite beliefs to the contrary, “Meaning is not
anchored to intent; instead it is produced by the discourses that surround the
image in the arenas in which it circulates” (137).
Many of the discourses that surround such cartoons, memes, racial slurs,
and jokes are racist and—regardless of stated intention—dehumanize their
targets, be those targets individuals (e.g., Obama or Jones) or sexual, gender,
or racial/ethnic groups. And the arenas in which they circulate include not
only white supremacist groups, including the alt-right, or conservative news
sources (e.g., Breitbart, The New York Post, Fox News), but also educational,
judicial, political, and other media institutions. Even more fundamentally,
the neoliberal discourse of colorblindness, “The assertion that equality can
only be achieved when the law, as well as individual subjects, become blind
to race” (A. Y. Davis 2012), obscures the ideological and material effects of
racism in criminal justice, education, employment, housing, and education
(Bonilla-Silva 2013; Pérez 2013). Despite their denial of racist intentions,
or alleged colorblindness, racist joke tellers and trolls reproduce the catego-
ries and relations of racism and normalize them through laughter. The “just
joking” defense of racist humor is untenable given the reality of racism, the
persistence of racial inequality, and the extent to which racist ideologies have
played, and continue to play, a central role in U.S. history, institutions, and
cultural practices.
50 Viveca Greene

Finding Humor in Racist Tweets

Despite the suggestion that racist tweets/memes are not serious, or “just
jokes,” Moira Smith (2009) argues that the joke-teller seeks a response and
attempts to move a listener “from serious mode to humorous mode” (152).
The argument finds clear support in many of the “jokes” tweeted in response
to Jones’s expression of (serious) frustration and pain, in that they illustrate
“the joker’s unilateral switch into humor,” which, as Smith explains, “repre-
sents an invitation to others—the joker’s intended audiences—to join him or
her in the humorous realm” (152). In moving from racist joke tellers to audi-
ences, I address the implicit invitation Smith describes earlier.
On July 18, 2016, Jones shared a tweet sent to her: the post consisted of an
image of “Lanky Kong,” an orange orangutan from the Donkey Kong fran-
chise, with the text “@LesDoggg this is you not harambe. Don’t (sic) insult
him.” Above the shared tweet, Jones wrote “Reporting.” Jones’s response to
the repeated racial slur (“reporting”) signaled unlaughter: “The sentiment that
the joke should not have happened at all and that the laughter of the joker
(and those who support him) is inappropriate, even immoral” (Smith, 156).
Replying to Jones’s tweet, another user tweeted back, “Lol, you’re complain-
ing about people being genuinely funny. Yes, stereotypes are funny, too bad
you’re sensitive and butthurt.” In the response, we see someone implicitly
accepting the “Lanky Kong” joker’s invitation to laugh at the racist tweet.
Not only does this user begin the post with “lol” (laughing out loud) but he
argues that both the joker/joke-work and stereotypes are funny. He also goes
after Jones for her unwillingness to move from serious to humorous mode—
her unlaughter—in his accusation that she’s “too sensitive” and unjustifiably
offended.
Following De Sousa (1987), Billig (2001) argues that “jokes, especially
sexist and racist ones, express stereotyped assumptions about the nature of
the other. The person finding the joke funny is implicitly accepting these
stereotyped assumptions about the nature of the other” (Billig 2001, 277).
In the example above, the acceptance of stereotypes is explicit rather than
implicit: “Stereotypes are funny.” The Lanky Kong example also speaks to
the point “that groups tend to seek out material . . . that reinforces their view
of things and supports and validates their belief system” (Berger 1995, 21).
The person who finds the Lanky Kong tweet humorous is an individual as
well as a member of a group that delights in racist stereotyping and often
laughs openly at those who are “complaining about other people being genu-
inely funny.”
Laughter can be friendly (social) or hostile (antisocial): one can laugh with
and at others. Laughter can unite people and divide them, and as Billig (2005)
notes, “It can do both simultaneously when a group laughs together at others”
 All They Need Is Lulz 51

(192). In response to Jones sharing a tweet that began with her Twitter handle
and repeated a racial slur eight times, another user commented, “LOL KEEP
THEM ROLLING THESE ARE FUNNY AF [as fuck]” (July 18, 2016). The
user is laughing with the person who posted the the racial slur, and at Jones.
But the dynamic is not simply one taking place between individuals. As
John C. Meyer (2000) notes, “Devisive humor may serve to unite one group
against another” (323). Many people did align themselves with Jones and
anti-racist ideologies, as others aligned themselves with people who harassed
her and racist ideologies.
As Billig argues it is not laughter itself that accomplishes the uniting
and dividing, as laughter is contingent on the “wider rhetorical context of
humor” (2005, 192). However, the rhetorical context of humor does not
exist independently of humor itself. Humor is culturally constitutive and
plays a role in building and sustaining communities. To engage in joking
and laughter is to sustain a “we” and promote solidarity (Fine and Soucey
2005), often at the expense of an-out group or member of an out-group.
In cases that target an out-group, social boundaries are redrawn and rein-
forced as joking will “elicit differential responses—laughter from some,
and unlaughter from salient others” (Smith 2009). Thus the request that
Jones, or the user repeating the racial slur (who was eventually banned from
Twitter), continues posting racist content speaks to the communal aspect of
racist humor on Twitter, as do responses that criticized the defense of the
racial slur. Such harassment is a racial project (Omi and Winant, 1994), in
the sense that trolls are finding and contributing to a community premised
explicitly on whiteness. Some users participated in the community and
expressed their collusion with racism through laughter; others expressed
their resistance through unlaughter, refusing to laugh and responding with
antijokes.
Laughter is a physical reaction thought to express an emotional state (e.g.,
mirth, relief, or nervousness); unlaughter can likewise represent different
emotions (e.g., boredom, anger, fear). Neither is simply psychologocial nor
truly legible through the individual; both laughter and unlaughter are cultural
and informed by social forces. Laughter can signal that someone is part of
a group, and often unlaughter indicates that one is not—and does not want
to be. Fine and De Soucey (2005) note that in what they call “communi-
ties of practice,” people “make claims to shared emotion, enacted through
their speech acts” (15). In the tweets I reviewed above, we see communities
of practice at work, but the tweeters’ emotions presuppose those of their
unlaughing targets’ as much as their laughing supporters. The final section of
Act 2 explores the “meta-discourse” of trolling, and the twisted emotional,
social, and political logic of lulz-seeking.
52 Viveca Greene

The Meta-Discourses of Racist Humor and Trolling

The racist tweets and images I discuss earlier all fall under the broad category
of trolling, and trolling adheres to a convoluted logic that differs somewhat
from its offline joke-telling counterpart. In its modern sense, trolling emerged
on online platforms and image boards such as 4chan’s infamous /b/-board; it
is a term used to describe users participating in a form of referential, exploit-
ative, and offensive humor. Like humor, “trolling” is an imprecise term
used to refer to so many different types of behavior: some so abusive they
may warrant a stronger classification that Phillips and Milner (Phillips and
Milner 2017) suggest the term “trolling” be avoided (7–8).5 But as a general
term, it refers to online activities, many organized by tight-knit associations,
with a range of targets including groups, individuals, and associations. One
commonality is the “4 the lulz” explanation for trolling, whereby “4/for the
lulz” is a catchphrase “used to express that one carried out a specific action
for the sake of personal comic enjoyment” (“I Did It for the Lulz” 2006). It
is a derivative of lol (laughing out loud), but as Gabriella Coleman explains,
“Lulz are darker: acquired most often at someone’s expense” (2015, 31).
Racist trolling is intended to provoke, and the success of such trolling, or
lulz-seeking, is measured by unlaughter as much as laughter.
The belief that someone was “asking for it” is central to the logic of troll-
ing. Phillips explains that from the troll’s perspective, “If the target hadn’t
been so oversensitive about ‘harmless’ words, he or she wouldn’t have been
trolled; therefore it is the target’s fault” (97). In other words, trolling is delib-
erate provocation and amounts to victim blaming when individuals indicate
the very anger, frustration, or hurt the troll sought. For example, on July 18,
2016, one Twitter user responded to being called out for his harassment of
Jones, and to other users threatening to report him, by suggesting Jones was
effectively asking for it: “I was trolling her lol she is just dumb enough to
respond. [I] don’t hate black people.” Here, the user argues that Jones does
not understand what he is really doing and she is stupid to respond. The user
doesn’t “hate black people”—he claims—he’s just trolling. Further contrib-
uting to the user’s denial of meaning anything by what he has posted is the
“lol,” which suggests the user does not think his trolling should be taken seri-
ously. It is apparently just a joke.
Racism denial is central to racist Twitter trolling. As Phillips (2016) found
in her discussions with trolls, “Racist language might flow through them,
but according to many of the trolls I’ve interviewed, they aren’t being rac-
ist. They’re trolling, which to them is a different thing entirely” (97). The
intentionality defense (it was not my intention to offend) and “just a joke”
claim (I’m not racist but I think racial stereotypes and racist language is
funny) are thus twisted so that the intention is (allegedly) not to be racist but
 All They Need Is Lulz 53

to provoke overly sensitive people. The humor is dependent on the unlaugh-

ing person who responds, but when successful in provoking someone, trolls
do not accept responsibility for doing so; instead trolls blame their target. As
Smith (2009) contends, “Unlaughter is ridiculous to those that do not share
it” (166) and, as I would add, antijokes (talking/tweeting back, as Jones did in
responses that expressed emotion) are considered grounds for further provo-
cation under the logic of trolling and colorblind neoliberalism.
Among the responses criticizing Jones for her unlaughter, some Twitter
users chastise her for engaging with the trolls’ content at all; they seem to
believe that Jones isn’t savvy enough to know she should not respond to
trolls, and view her attempts to expose the online abuse as foolish. On July
18, Jones shared a screenshot of a tweet directed at her that read, “@Les-
Doggg Your Ghostbusters isn’t the first to have an ape in it” along with an
image from The Ghost Busters, a children’s television program from 1975
(unrelated to Ghostbusters films), of two white men and a gorilla. Above the
screenshot Jones wrote, “I just don’t understand.” In response, another user
tweeted back, “Most of these people arent really racist. They are ‘trolls’ and
you are falling for their bait and giving them shoutouts lol.” Jones and sup-
porters are thus baited with racist content, and in turn the baiters disavow the
racism laden in their tweets. It is not an isolated phenomenon. As Richard
Seymour (2016) argues, the radical right “has always been acutely sensitive
to the conative part of communication, the aspect that makes people act,”
noting that trolling is a form of communication guided by manipulation, and
thus “ideally suited to such a strategy.” The abusive prankster self-protective
ironic sensibility of trolling is one shared by the alt-right, which also fer-
mented in 4chan’s unfettered /pol/ and /b/ forums (Nagle 2017).
Users who criticize Jones’s responses to trolling, or indicate support for
those who do, act by endorsing the behavior of the trolls, simultaneously
downplaying the violence of the comments while placing the burden of
offense on the target. The user quoted above believes that these users aren’t
“really” racist despite the torrent of racial abuse they sent Jones’ way and
that their role as “trolls” absolves them of the racist rhetoric they’re trading
in; this user also sees Jones as “falling” for their bait and in this tweet, she is
positioned as less sophisticated than the trolls. The situation is entertaining
enough to the user—who, while not an active troll himself is participating
in a form of gaslighting (manipulating someone into questioning her own
sanity) against Jones—that it merits an “lol.” The user’s tweet generated 22
comments, primarily from people who objected that The Ghost Busters tweet
was racist, and 156 “likes,” presumably from people who agreed with the user
that most people posting racist imagery “arent [sic] really racist,” Jones was
(stupidly) “falling for their bait,” and the situation was worthy of an “lol.”
54 Viveca Greene

As this suggests, the hyperreal metric-based world of social media creates

an environment ripe for neoliberal entrapment, whereby victims are blamed
for their participation in that environment, especially as that participation is
understood as an exercise of freedom. In the modern world, “Freedom means
primarily blameworthiness—and sometimes, though only rarely, reward-
worthiness” and, as Adam Kotsko (2017) maintains, “Neoliberalism is the
social order that has most thoroughly grounded itself in freedom-as-blame-
worthiness, that has most completely entrapped its subjects into the negative
sweet spot of freedom” (506). There is no apparent recognition on the part of
the Twitter users cited above that Jones’s “freedom” to ignore racist trolling
is at odds with both professional and personal reasons to defend herself, or
that to allow them to silence her would be to give up the little agency she
has under the circumstances. But putting Jones in this bind may be precisely
what they want.
Unlike humor that takes place offline, joke-telling or trolling on Twitter,
which has 328 million active monthly users, allows for continuous and asyn-
chonous participation by a vast number of people who can not only laugh (or
not laugh) at racist jokes but who can tell their own racist jokes (or antijokes).
The audience can perform and participate in group performance larger than
any physical venue, and with no end to the set or the show as there is with live
or mediated comedy programming. Twitter users joined Yiannopoulos in this
colossal group performance taunting Jones with racist content. Jones and sup-
porters responded with anger, disbelief, and sorrow. Other users continued to
taunt her and, when Jones began to respond, users chided her for responding
to trolls and began policing her tone and responses to trolls (e.g., “Leslie,
that’s not nice,” to which Jones replied that the material people sent her,
including a video of lynching Black people, was not nice either). Although
a significant number of the interactions with the @LesDoggg account dur-
ing this period were positive and bore the #loveforlesliej hashtag in support,
abusive content continued (and continues to this day) to filter onto her time-
line, and trolls engaged in arguments with both Jones and her supporters. In
response to being banned by Twitter, Yinnopoulos both derided the ban and
celebrated the (assumed) effect, announcing, “We’re winning the culture war,
and Twitter just shot themselves in the foot” (as quoted in Ohlheiser 2016).
As these tweets and events suggest, the logic of trolling is that provocation
equals success. Trolls also position themselves as the only ones willing to
push back against what they consider restrictive political correctness and, in
their own way, speaking truth to power: they attempt to get lulz by deliber-
ately flouting social conventions. It is in this way that anyone demonstrating
unlaughter in response is socially deficient for being unable to comprehend
the humor, as well as positioned as less intelligent because of his/her inabil-
ity to see what a sham basic social mores are. Somehow if a troll reproduces
 All They Need Is Lulz 55

racist ideologies in a “humorous” style, supporters regard the substance of

the tweet as inconsequential. But if people (like Jones) respond to racist
tweets (or misogynoir) with seriousness (or unlaughter), that style invites
further racist trolling or harassment, and trolls blame them for their treatment.
Whereas trolls respond to comedic films such as Ghostbusters with serious-
ness—unlaughter, antijokes, and outrage—they employ (allegedly) unserious
joking to target women and especially women of color.
As twisted as the logic of this trolling is, it is consistent with what critical
humor scholars describe as the meta-discourse of humor: it’s just joking, and/
or a social corrective. As Billig (2005) notes, “Some acts of humour might
appear rebellious to the participants. Those who laugh might imagine that
they are daringly challenging the status quo or are transgressing stuffy codes
of behaviour” (212). Against this transgressive self-understanding, however,
Billig argues, “The consequences of such humour might be conformist rather
than radical, disciplinary not rebellious” (212). In this sense there is a con-
servative and disciplinary function to racist trolling, as there has always been
with racist humor, and, of course, racism itself. Racist humor and trolling
should not be understood as “an invitation to humorous fun,” as Pérez argues,
“but to white supremacist ideology” (2017, 11).

ACT 3: UNLAUGHTER, NEOLIBERALISM,

AND MISOGYNOIR

The Black feminist unlaughter and antijokes I shared in Act 1 appear to be

directed at Jones as an individual, but these responses are undoubtedly to
Jones as a member of a group (mis)representing a shared identity and history.
Jones’s intentions were not to perpetuate racist ideologies or stereotypes, to
perform divisive humor, or to seek lulz. As Finley (2016) argues, “Her intent,
respectable and worthwhile, was to hash out some uncomfortable truths about
the connection between chattel slavery, sexual violence, and the ongoing
struggle for black women to be valued on more than the utility and supposed
beauty of their bodies” (250). Nevertheless, individual intentions matter
little, even for the best-intentioned comedians, because, as Stuart Hall (2000)
notes, “They are not in control of the circumstances—conditions of continu-
ing racism—in which their joke discourses will be read and heard” (279).
Humor can reproduce the categories and practices of racism, can normalize
them through laughter, and harm those impacted by those processes. Through
unlaughter, antijokes, critique, and scholarship, Black feminist writers have
offered, and continue to offer, readers crucial insights into the intersection
of race and gender in this cultural context—and in so doing attempt to shift
attention from individual psychology to sociological consequences. But as
56 Viveca Greene

much as unlaughter offers us critical insights into the experiences of people

who live with the enduring effects of subjugation, unlaughter is, as Billig
(2005) maintains, “a favorite target for the laughter of ridicule” (194). As we
saw in Act 2, disparaging outgroups (and their members) through humor and
racism denial are hardly recent phenomena.
In this modern case racist trolls engaged in racist joke telling because,
despite their stated intentions, they found racism and thus racist joke-telling
funny—an assertion of superiority. As Phillips (2016) notes, trolls are aware
of and dependent on the power of racist language, but “often outright dismis-
sive of their role in replicating racist ideologies (the same racist ideologies,
it must be noted, they seek to exploit)” (97). Racist trolling and other expres-
sions of white supremacy are rewarding precisely because (and when) they
result in unlaughter. The logic thus combines that of racist humor with con-
temporary politics à la Trump: white supremacist ideology, denial of racist
intentions, and exploiting racist ideologies for attention-getting purposes. In
this final act, I address the larger media and political culture in which dispar-
agement humor, white supremacy, and misogynoir flourish.
Trump is, of course, an active participant in a culture of social media users who
disparage and mock women, as well as religious, ethnic, and racial minorities.
As Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott astutely contends, “Understanding social media
better than any of the chumps eating corn dogs in Iowa or tramping through New
Hampshire, Trump turned Twitter into his comedy-roast dais” (2015). The logic
of trolling—divisive humor, lulz seeking, victim blaming, social and symbolic
violence, white supremacy, and racist humor—is the very logic of a certain sec-
tor of contemporary politics, and targets Black women in particular.
The term “misogynoir”—the reality that Black women live with a racial
and gendered oppression, different from their male and white female counter-
parts—is unfamiliar to many people; perhaps this is because when racism is
investigated, the focus tends to be on the experiences of Black men as its tar-
gets, whereas sexism is generally approached as a white female phenomenon
(Crenshaw 1989; Macías 2015). It was not until the Ghostbusters trolling
began that Black feminist writers began employing the term “misogynoir” in
relation to Jones—long after the “Breeding Slave” sketch first aired. Notably,
when the white supremacist attacks on Jones arose, many Black feminists
came to her defense. As LaSha (2016) wrote on Ebony,

I’m not prepared to continue to hold Leslie Jones responsible for embracing ste-
reotypical roles when she’s faced with a world that refuses to allow dark skinned
Black women femininity, desirability and vulnerability. I’m unwilling to ignore
the fact that our community held the paint while white America drew the target
on her back. Until we’re ready to unpack the box of racism, which contains the
box of misogynoir which houses our colorism, the conversation is futile.
 All They Need Is Lulz 57

Unpacking that box of racism will require more than discussion and
debate, and finding solutions that don’t regress to neoliberal quick fixes such
as Twitter banning individual users, or developing new technology filters,
will be required; structural inequalities necessitate in-kind responses.
In the United States, much discussion of racism remains focused on
language, as tension remains between post-civil rights’ calls for respectful
language, on one hand, and “free speech” claims to the right to joke at those
who take themselves too seriously (marginalized groups) on the other. As a
Pew Center study found, 56 percent of Americans claim that many people
take offensive content online too seriously—a feeling that is typical among
men in general, and among young men especially: “73% of 18- to 29-year-old
men feel that many people take offensive online content too seriously” (Dug-
gan 2017). Notably, the Pew Center found that while only 3 percent of white
Americans have been the target of online trait-based harassment (harass-
ment based on political views, physical appearance, race or gender identity,
religion, or sexual orientation), one in four of African Americans have been
targeted because of race or ethnicity, as have one in ten Hispanics. Women
are about twice as likely as men to say they have been targeted as a result of
their gender: 11 percent versus 5 percent (Ibid.).
As these statistics suggests, women of color are the center of online harass-
ment crosshairs. In the United States, where white (hetero)masculinity is at
the heart of cultural norms, members of groups who speak out online and
offline against demeaning language and gender and racial harassment are
policed and considered killjoys by humorists and others. Feminists are said
to lack a sense of humor, those in ethnic/racial groups who challenge what
Feagin (2013) calls the “white racial frame” are considered too sensitive,
and Black women who speak out are commonly referred to as “angry black
women.” In this sense, the logic of racist trolling is hardly subcultural; it is a
modern feature of systems of patriarchy and white supremacy.
The parameters of what is socially permissible to say have changed in the
last decade and with the increase in social media usage. As David Simas, who
directed the White House’s office of political strategy and outreach under
Obama, told The New Yorker magazine, until recently older institutions—
religious, academic, and media—established the cultural parameters of what
constituted acceptable discourse. These institutions were the “night watch-
men” under liberalism. Today, however, through Facebook and Twitter, there
is a new permission structure, and “a sense of social affirmation for what was
once thought unthinkable,” which represents “a foundational change” (as
cited in Remnick 2016). The Overton window, or range of ideas tolerated in
public discourse, has opened to the extent that there is virtually no screen,
especially under neoliberalism, whereby metrics of support (measured by
likes, and viewerships, sponsors, etc.) govern speech; under the guise of free
58 Viveca Greene

speech white people can frankly say and post what many of them have long
been thinking.
Social media has further altered the permission structure for acceptable
discourse—and broadened support for racist ideologies—by playing a signifi-
cant role in setting the agenda for mainstream media outlets. When a story
such as the Twitter harassment of Jones “trends” it is regarded as “important
by popular acclaim, regardless of the relative significance of the content
of the story itself” (Mendes 2016, 71), and regardless of how coordinated
the effort was to lead a hashtag to trend (Marantz 2016). Trolls and Trump
employ the same strategy—tweeting incendiary content—to attract and
manipulate media coverage, and, when challenged, often use the same “just
joking” defense (Beauchamp 2016; Cillizza 2017).
As a review of headlines of the ten national print media news sources with
highest circulation suggest, corporate media coverage of Jones’s predation
tended to focus on four issues, all of which fit neatly with neoliberal values:
Yiannopoulos’s permanent suspension from Twitter, Jones triumphantly
returning to Twitter, Jones as victim, and Jones as a fighter. The articles
emphasize the conflict as one between individuals (Yiannopoulos and Jones)
at the expense of groups (white supremacists and Black women), and present
the Twitter ban as a potential threat to free speech (infringing on marketplace
of ideas). They suggest that private companies have the ability to stop the
dissemination of racist ideologies (through individual bans or the develop-
ment of new technology filters), and celebrate Jones’s personal “victory”
in returning to Twitter (earned through hard work and self-esteem with no
mention of untouched structural inequalities or racist and sexist ideologies).
Twitter wars between individuals such as Yiannopoulos and Jones “trend”
on social media (often through trolls’ manipulation of trending algorithms),
leading corporate media to cover them, providing the illusion of democratic
market responsiveness.
Twitter does allow individuals to connect with others who share identity
traits, personal interests, as well as political interests, and in so doing to build
community, disseminate information, raise awareness of issues, and organize.
Twitter provides individuals a chance to hold court and send their message to
the world, with retweeting and hashtagging signaling visible forms of accep-
tance. Indeed, as Sarah Jackson (2016) notes, “Hashtags and other forms of
situated knowledge arising from networked counterpublics and embraced by
a new generation of Black activists should be treated as important contribu-
tions to the democratic process” (378). But Twitter also allows the fiction of
equality: one person one account. Donald Trump and a young Black feminist
have the same accounts, and the only difference is the number of followers.
Success or failure is measured in quantified market terms, and the neoliberal
logic of “let the market decide.”
 All They Need Is Lulz 59

When one registers a complaint against a racist, neoliberal culture that

harms, as Jones did, one is invoking a state that does not exist. Instead of
political and judicial institutions addressing racist expression, its roots,
and its consequences, Twitter is in the position of arbitrating conflicts,
determining what constitutes acceptable speech, and meting out justice.
Under neoliberalism progressive concepts such as civil liberties in the
realm of speech have been appropriated for right-wing causes, whereby
persecutory speech is presented as “free speech.” Fueled by neoliberal
values and systems pertaining to freedom and free speech, competition,
technological innovation, and commercial media’s market responsive-
ness, Twitter wars between individuals such as Yiannopoulos and Jones
are racial spectacles: “displays of racial dominance that publically reas-
sert and reinforce racial hierarchies” (A. M. Davis and Ernst 2011, 133).
Racial spectacles both mediate and obscure social relations. And as
Davis and Ernst note, “White supremacy structures all politics—includ-
ing spectacles—in the United States” (135). As these debates play out in
mainstream media, both Jones and her attackers can accuse each other
of silencing (hate speech versus free speech), but what is really silent—
evident only in unlaughter and antijokes—are the broader debates about
exploitation, structural racism, misogyny, and the possibility of social
change.
Black female satirists including Leslie Jones are, as Finley (2016) argues,
“employing an embittered, disgusted satirical humor to undercut ideologies in
pop cultural media that are the brick and mortar holding structural inequali-
ties in place” (262). Similarly, Twitter hashtag campaigns “arising from
Black feminist politic . . . perform the two basic functions of counterpublic
discourse: reflect the experiences and needs of a marginalized community and
call on mainstream politics to listen and respond” (Jackson 2016, 377–8). The
audiences here differ, but comedy and Twitter are two spaces where Black
women, including Leslie Jones, attempt to draw attention to racist histories
and challenge their legacy in contemporary ideologies and structural inequali-
ties so as to nurture counterpublics.
However, we must consider the impact on the democratic process of
debates over the most important social issues taking place within privately
controlled corporations where, for the most part, the main form of pres-
sure is consumer boycott rather than citizens addressing public policies and
institutions. Neoliberalism holds up the ideal of multiculturalism, but sets
up a dynamic of competition and conflict between individuals and racial and
ethnic groups. Toxic, trolling, lulz-addicted neoliberalism seeks and rewards
individual resistance or expressions of “freedom,” which will do little to
challenge the structural and systemic patterns that racist trolling reveals and
extends in new cultural iterations.6
60 Viveca Greene

NOTES

1. Thank you to Adam Kotsko, who was the discussant for the “Garbaging the
Neoliberal Fantasy: Trump, Trolls, Toxic Masculinity and MAGA” panel at 2018
Western Political Science Association conference, for his valuable insights on this
chapter, and in particular neoliberal racism and online white nationalism.
2. Furthermore, as the mixed-race comedian reflects in Live From New York, “I
never, never thought of myself on the show as a black female, a black performer,
a black cast member, and I don’t identify myself that way” (as quoted in Miller &
Shales, 2014, 682–3).
3. For example, “uncleTom fag @nero needs to get his racist ass out of my men-
tions. Shit like dis make me think that we need to gase dese goddamn faggots to
death” (Screenshot Jones tweeted on July 18, 2016, noting that despite looking like
she had posted it, she had not). The fake Jones tweet was dated July 19, 2016, the day
before it was actually sent.
4. To avoid giving racist users additional attention, I refrain from supplying Twit-
ter user names in most instances.
5. While Phillips and Milner (2016) employ the term “subcultural trolling,” and
Mantilla (2015) “gendertrolling,” my focus is on racist trolling on Twitter directed at
Jones, which I see as neither entirely subcultural nor gender-based. Phillips and Mil-
ner and Mantilla clearly indicate that they regard trolling as inseparable from larger
cultural prejudices and ideologies, and that they do not regard women as the only
group that is targeted, but my project is of a smaller scope and relies on tweets with
decidedly racist imagery and language.
6. Many thanks to Allison McCarthy for her tireless research assistance, to
Rachael Clifford, Raúl Pérez, Chris Vials, Nancy Wadsworth, and Julie Webber for
their thoughtful feedback on this chapter, and to the Black feminist writers whose
reflections and articles on Leslie Jones were indispensable to my work.

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n/201​4/09/​17/ex​posed​-the-​secre​t-mai​ling-​list-​of-th​e-gam​ing-j​ourna​lism-​elite​/.
———. 2016. “Teenage Boys With Tits: Here’s My Problem With Ghostbusters.”
Breitbart (July 18, 2016). http:​//www​.brei​tbart​.com/​tech/​2016/​07/18​/milo​-revi​
ews-g​hostb​uster​s/.
Zack, Naomi. 2012. “Black Female Crossover Comedy: Freedom, Liberty, and
Minstrelsy.” In Philosophical Feminism and Popular Culture, edited by Cras-
now, Sharon and Joanne Waugh. Lanham: Lexington Books: 37–50.
Zeisler, Andi. 2015. “Why Feminists Have an Obligation to See ‘Ghostbusters’—LA
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oe-ze​isler​-ghos​tbust​ers-f​emini​st-ho​llywo​od-20​16052​0-sna​p-sto​ry.ht​ml.
 Chapter 2

Brexit Irony on The Last Leg and

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Critiquing Neoliberalism through Caricature
Simon Weaver

“Brexit means Brexit”

—Theresa May, June 30, 2016

“Brexit means breakfast”

—Nicola Sturgeon, and many others, shortly after June 30, 2016

Journalists and commentators have used the broadly comic trope of irony to
discuss aspects of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ire-
land’s (UK) vote to leave the European Union (EU) in the EU referendum
of Thursday June 23, 2016. These stories take in diverse issues that range
from the potential influx of foreign investors post-referendum (White 2016),
looming air traffic control safety issues (Smith 2017), to more general dis-
cussion of the state of the nation (Orr 2017). This seems to be a condition
where remain supporters and their arguments tend to point out irony whereas
leave supporters and their arguments do not. This suggests that irony, or the
analysis of it, may have a central role to play in either unpacking pro-Brexit
discourse (from now on I refer to this simply as Brexit discourse), or in
unpacking remain discourse.
This chapter addresses the former and examines Brexit discourse from a
sociological perspective with the aim of describing both the populist con-
struction of Brexit discourse and the existence of internal contradictions,
ambiguities, or incongruities in it that are accurately characterized as ironies.1
Because irony is a comic trope, the chapter examines Brexit irony in the con-
text of comedy studies and does so alongside comedic and satiric responses

65
66 Simon Weaver

to Brexit irony. Overall, Brexit irony is outlined, an example presented, and

then it is shown how comedians respond to this irony, particularly from the
starting point of the caricature of the Brexit politician. This involves examin-
ing the employment of a number of other comic devices that appear alongside
caricature.
The argument presented is that the “situational irony” of Brexit—one that
both presents and hides neoliberal tendencies—is reinforced by the various
“textual” or “postmodern ironies” of this discourse. Comedians respond to
the ironies of Brexit discourse and are predominantly anti-Brexit or highly
critical of Brexit politicians. These comedians use satire with the aim of pre-
senting rationality and unmasking absurdity. They attempt to “speak truth to
power.” The argument is premised on the idea that humor and comedy are
rhetorical in structure and thus able to convincingly communicate particular
messages, especially when those messages are constituted by, or address,
ambiguity, incongruity, incoherence, and/or irony. Thus, Brexit discourse is
rhetorically “worked on” in comedy.
As examples, the chapter focuses on a leave campaign bus that had written
on the side of it a claim about the cost of EU membership. Comedic responses
to the bus on the British Channel 4 political satire The Last Leg, presented
by Adam Hills, Alex Brooker, and Josh Widdicombe and the US Home Box
Office (HBO) political satire Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, presented
by John Oliver, are examined. The chapter employs rhetorical discourse
analysis as a method of analysis and the sample is purposive.
The chapter begins with a discussion of the central concepts of globaliza-
tion and neoliberalism, defines both, and places Brexit as a populist response
to aspects of neoliberal globalization. British campaigning to leave the EU,
and post-EU referendum Brexit discourse, have been discussed extensively
in relation to populism, as a protest of the masses against the elites. Racism,
in terms of the plausibility that leave supporters are motivated by racist or
anti-immigrant sentiment, has been extensively discussed in popular media
and has even been dismissed by some as a simplistic or incomplete critique of
leave supporters (see for example, O’Neill 2016; Saul 2017). Zygmunt Bau-
man’s concept of the “other” and the “other’s” place in global neoliberalism
is mobilized to show that Brexit political discourse that builds populist appeal
and a fixation on “control,” and control of borders, is dependent on a pejora-
tive concept of the “other” but uses a number of tropes—including irony—to
significantly confuse critical anti-racist readings of Brexit discourse. This
equates to a postmodern or ironic presentation of “othering” tendencies. In
contrast, the majority of comedy about Brexit seeks to ridicule Brexit politi-
cians, supporters, and discourse through harsh ridicule and absurdity, particu-
larly with reference to the caricatured depiction of the body and identity of
the politician. Significantly, the caricature of the body of Brexit politicians by
 Brexit Irony on The Last Leg and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver 67

comedians is provoked by and a direct response to the irony, ambiguity, and

untruths of some Brexit discourse. It is a method of simplifying, fixing, and
processing the ambiguity or irony of Brexit. The comic response is evaluated
for its potential to act as resistance humor. The use of caricature is described
as a technique of individualization that paradoxically expresses a key theme
of neoliberalism in its response to political discourse. Because of this, unless
it is coupled with other forms of critique that examine wider sociopolitical
issues, it is limited in its ability to critique the populism of Brexit. Both Brexit
irony and comic responses highlight the significance of the comic in public
understandings of Brexit, for both leave and remain supporters.

GLOBALIZATION, NEOLIBERALISM, AND

BREXIT POPULISM

Zygmunt Bauman illuminates the crises that beset citizens of the globe
through a dichotomy of dystopic/utopic images of, and contractive/expansive
reactions to, globalization (Bauman 2000; Featherstone 2013). For Bauman,
this is a neoliberal globalization. Kotsko (2017) neatly outlines some of what
neoliberals seek to deconstruct:

The term neoliberalism refers to the collection of policies that aim to dismantle
the postwar political-economic settlement . . . [of] strong government regula-
tions, powerful unions, and high taxes and social spending to create broadly
shared prosperity. (Kotsko 2017: 495)

These are some of the agitators of dystopic visions of globalization for Bau-
man. Thus, the problems of globalization are also the problems of neoliberal-
ism. Although Bauman states that “ours is a wholly negative globalization:
unchecked, unsupplemented and uncompensated for by a ‘positive’ counter-
part” (Bauman 2006: 96. Original emphasis), perceptions of it differ and are
polarized. There are those that view the expansive nature of globalization as a
utopia—for Bauman these are the rich, the tourists and those behind the gates
of the gated community. For the global majority, the view of globalization is
unsettling and dystopic, and leads to the urge to contract, for the process to
turn inwards—as Featherstone explains, “There is nowhere for this process
to go, but to turn back in on itself” (Featherstone 2013: 71). To link with the
ideas of Aronowitz (2000), this is a claustrophobic form of globalization in
which “exit” through increased social mobility is not an option. Therefore,
other forms of (Br)exit need to be sought. Some of these are politically popu-
list. Some are modes of psychologic projection. The have-nots of globaliza-
tion—the poor, the migrant, and the “other”—become the objects that fear is
68 Simon Weaver

projected onto and so enact a fantasy of responsibility for the various thefts of
the neoliberal, global world (Bauman 2016; 2016a). This includes the theft of
“exit” which is paradoxically viewed in the mobility of the migrant. Bauman
outlines this fear:

On a planet tightly wrapped in the web of human interdependence, there is

nothing the others do or can do of which we may be sure that it won’t affect our
prospects, chances and dreams. (Bauman 2006: 98. Original emphasis)

The “other” of Brexit is the migrant who both contributes and does not con-
tribute. It is the migrant that works (and steals jobs), does not work (and steals
benefits), that uses public services, and contributes to the metamorphoses of
communities and culture. The victory for the leave campaigns saw the emic
tendency—the urge to reject the “other” (Bauman 2000: 101)—translate into
a spike of reported incidents of race hate crime directly following the referen-
dum (Lusher 2016). The xenophobic and racist content of parts of the Brexit
discourse are both obvious and a key component of its populism. Moreover,
a continuum between racist discourse and violence is evident in this example.
This parallels the way in which violence has been described in neoliberalism.
Davies argues,

What I have characterized as the “violent threat” of neoliberalism has come to

the fore, whereby authority in economic decision making is increasingly predi-
cated upon the claim that “we” must beat “them.” (Davies 2014: 190)

For Davies, neoliberalism presents the perception and experience of unfair

competition. This directly connects with the sentiment of “othering” and the
view of the migrant as problematic. “They” are beating “us” and this leads to
a fixation on notions of control.
Brexit discourse and activism have been described as populist (e.g.,
Thompson 2016; Inglehart and Norris 2016) and there are a number of
accepted characteristics of populism that are present in Brexit discourse.
Taggart (2000) outlines a definition of populism that includes the following
characteristics: (1) an ambivalent attitude toward or suspicion of politics as
normal; (2) an idealized concept of the people and the territory; (3) an ideol-
ogy without core values; (4) a sense of crisis; and (5) internal, self-limiting
dilemmas (ibid: 2–3). The final point is followed-up later in the chapter
and linked with the irony present in Brexit discourse that is the focus of the
chapter. Populism as a direct response to the inequalities and uncertainties of
both globalization and neoliberalism is well documented (Thompson, 2016;
Inglehart and Norris 2016). Bauman (2016b; 2017) has argued that Brexit
populism is a direct expression of the dystopic, contractive and “retrotopic”
 Brexit Irony on The Last Leg and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver 69

process of globalization. In this case, Brexit may not explicitly be a demand

for a return to the post-war consensus but it is a call for a return to the zeit-
geist of that consensus—a society “decluttered” from the image and presence
of the “other.”
Individualism has regularly been asserted as a condition of neoliberalism.
As Tudor explains, “The economic structures of neoliberalism encourage
rugged individualism, [and] self-reliance” (2012: 333). This is usually jux-
taposed by the assertion that neoliberalism discourages identification along
class or group lines. It may be that Brexit is the assertion of the individual and
the nation as individual, away from the “other” and collective of Europe. A
second point on individualism is important for the chapter because neoliberal
individualism has a particular relationship to the body. Tudor explains,

This neoliberal individualism also reveals itself through the ubiquitous “self-
help” and self-transformation culture of beauty and health, which is another way
of expressing the postmodern emphasis on youth, desire, and beauty. (Tudor
2012: 334)

The neoliberal body is one of individual self-control and beauty. It is not

grotesque, and we know from Norbert Elias (1987) that the grotesque is
rarely a significant, positive, respectable characteristic of modernity. This
has not changed in the incarnations of late or post-modernity. Later, I detail
caricature as a response to Brexit irony. These, of course, focus on the body
of the Brexit politician, but, it is argued, do not significantly address the
ironies, ambiguities or incongruities of the discourse under attack. We might
say that these are responses that are heavily informed by the style of the neo-
liberal political sphere, of style over substance (or deep analysis), and thus
are unable to fully render critique at the door of neoliberalism or the Brexit
politician.

RHETORICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

AS METHODOLOGY

This section outlines the methodological principles employed in the analysis

that follows. These are principles drawn from the method of rhetorical analysis,
which are influenced by discourse analytic approaches, and applied to humor (see
Weaver 2015, for an extended discussion of the method). The task begins with
the acknowledgement of the rhetorical structures of humor and joking—or the
acknowledgement of the similarity between the structure of humorous incongru-
ity and the structure of rhetorical devices (Weaver 2011). From the acknowledge-
ment that humor can form convincing communication, I examine the context in
70 Simon Weaver

which a joke is told, or the speaker and audience positions involved in, respec-
tively, telling and receiving the humor. This can be achieved through employing
Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle as an analytic concept (see Richardson (2006) for
an earlier critical discourse analysis that uses this method). Aristotle’s rhetorical
triangle is formed by the speaker, the audience, and the content of the message
(the message is, in this case, the structure and content of the joke). Each of these
elements has a role to play in the creation of successful rhetoric and is the subject
of analysis. The approach acknowledges that meaning is never solely controlled
by the speaker and all utterances can be subject to polysemy.
Rhetorical analysis is concerned with mapping the “mode of persuasion”
used by the speaker or the way in which the speaker makes successful use
of ethos, pathos, and logos (ibid: 160). Ethos, or the ethotic argument, is the
creation of the character of the speaker (which aims in most cases to be good
character), or, the attack on the character of the target of the utterance. The
rhetoric of pathos is concerned with the emotions provoked by the speaker
with regard to their position and the content of the text, Finally, reason, truth,
or logic form the basis of logos, which is something that can be used to build
trust in the speaker (ibid). The analysis in this paper is principally concerned
with the interaction between irony and caricature, which are documented by
Berger (1995) as two of a list of forty-five rhetorical devices that are present
in humor. The sample used in the chapter is purposive. One instance of Brexit
irony is drawn upon and two comic responses are examined. These responses
employ caricature and other comic tropes. The two sections that follow out-
line irony and caricature respectively. Other humor tropes mentioned in the
chapter are drawn from the detailed list provided by Berger (1995).

BREXIT IRONY

Capturing the relationship between the components of Brexit discourse, glo-

balization, and neoliberalism is a complex task that is aided by a consideration
of irony. Definitions of irony are multiple but it is commonly understood to be
a text or situation that appears to mean one thing but in fact means something
else. It can also have, as Brigstocke explains, “greater complexity, becoming
not just an opposition between what is said and what is meant, but a way of
saying one thing at the same time as allowing for the possible validity of its
contrary” (Brigstocke 2014: 112). The highlighting of irony in this chapter is
focused on a critique of political tricksterism (Weaver and Mora 2016) but
at this stage it is not possible to ascertain if this is sophisticated mobilization
of irony as a strategy in its own right. In general, the different degrees of
certainty about an ironic message often govern the label given to the type of
irony—as “modern,” “postmodern,” or “blank,” for example (Bennett 2016).
 Brexit Irony on The Last Leg and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver 71

The irony in the relationship between Brexit populism and neoliberalism

that is presented in this chapter is best described as a “situational irony”
that reflects a “state of affairs in the world” (Giora and Attardo 2014: 397).
In this type of irony, the divergent intentionality of two very different posi-
tions is at odds with one another but this remains hidden unless the irony
unfolds. Giora and Attardo present an example of situational irony: “A
rescuer heroically saving someone from drowning only finds out that the
rescued person was his or her worst enemy” (ibid). (This example may
also be an appropriate analogy for Brexit.) The irony of Brexit is that the
discourse of political actors who support it, and mobilize a populism, has
a very different relationship to neoliberal, free market economics than that
implied or accepted in its populism. The populist message is that leaving
of the EU will see a closing down of free market economics and neoliberal
globalization, rather than further deregulation. It is therefore possible to
distinguish the political from the populist Brexit discourse. Thus a paradox
exists on “Brexit” because Brexit support is both a call for more and a call
for less neoliberalism. It is both political mobilization from the political
right in the direction of deregulation, where EU regulation is encapsulated
as a substitute, restrictive state, and it is a populist reaction that wishes
for a mass, contractive response to neoliberal globalization, particularly
free movement of labor and capital inside the EU. The utopian vision or
end-point of these positions contain many incommensurable parts and thus
there exists a central irony, internal contradiction, incongruity or ambiguity
in Brexit discourse. Taggart outlines how populisms contain “fundamental
dilemmas” that are “self-limiting” (2000: 2). This is the same contradiction
outlined by Webber (Introduction in this book) that sees Donald Trump
win power through a protectionist, contractive agenda before “finishing the
job of neoliberalism” (Webber, this book) via the appointment of the usual
(neoliberal) suspects to government.
We can describe Brexit as a “floating signifier” (Hall c. 1996) that is
inscribed with different meanings by different actors. Brexit is therefore
ironic in its mode of discursive enactment and neoliberalism exists as a
“trace” (Derrida 1976) in multiple positions, with a dichotomous, essential,
but not fully articulated presence. With Brexit presented as an ironic, floating
signifier in relation to neoliberalism, this chapter outlines some of the indi-
vidual “textual ironies” of Brexit discourse and how satirists respond to these
ironies. These textual ironies are of a type that resembles what is well known
as romantic or postmodern irony. Giora and Attardo explain this concept:

Romantic irony is an author’s playful attitude toward his or her text, often
related to metafiction. It is similar to postmodern irony, which is the destabiliz-
ing of the text in the very process of producing it. (Giora and Attardo 2014: 397)
72 Simon Weaver

Colletta (2009) outlines how “the irony of postmodernity denies a difference

between what is real and what is appearance, or what is meant and what is
said” (856). Although Colletta downplays the significance or impact of this
irony, I argue that in the context of Brexit it forms a significant and impactful
political strategy connected to the emerging populism. In the analysis that
develops, the “situational irony” of Brexit is shown to be expressed through
its various textual or postmodern ironies, with the latter providing sustenance
for the former as “on the ground” political expression. Some of the post-
modern ironies “enjoyed” by leave supporters, when contrasted with the ten-
sion between its populist, anti-immigrant stance, and the relative success of
post-colonial, anti-racist campaigning in highlighting anti-immigrant racism
can be seen as a pleasurable, affective, carnivalesque expressions of revolt.
Berlant and Ngai make a comment on “unlaughter” in a different context that
can be used to elaborate the affective dimension of the leave vote. We might
see it as

an aggravated sense of having been denied laughter or having had one’s plea-
sure disrespected or devalued. This also explains some of the rage at feminism
and other forms of subaltern political correctness that get into the wheelhouse of
people’s pleasures and spontaneity. (Berlant and Ngai 2017: 241)

Brexit irony is both a response to the internal contradictions of the Brexit

discourse, as free market, neoliberals present the discourse of a populist,
constrictive return to “better times,” and a defence mechanism, a mode of
communication that positions itself against the perception of a hegemonic
“political correctness” which is so often condensed into perceptions of
remainers (and perhaps the more pejorative “remoaner” captures this senti-
ment more fully).

CARICATURE AS POLITICAL SATIRE

This section outlines the second trope of importance to the chapter—carica-

ture. The genre of caricature has a long history as a form of political satire
and social commentary. Developing from the masks of Ancient Greece and
Medieval society, the history of caricature is one that is connected with both
critical satire that “speaks truth to power” and the mocking of the have-nots.
Caricature as satire is said to be able to capture the moral zeitgeist and con-
tribute to discourses of social change (Gatrell 2006). Klein describes two key
historical and influential examples of caricature. These connect caricature
with the categories of the carnivalesque and the grotesque, specifically in the
work of Rabelais and Rosenkranz:
 Brexit Irony on The Last Leg and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver 73

We can turn to François Rabelais’s book Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532)

to see where the concept of the glorification of obscenity took hold in the con-
sciousness of artists and writers, and how it continued throughout the Renais-
sance and into modern art history. In Karl Rosenkranz’s Aesthetics of Ugliness
(1853), he suggests that caricature is the embodiment of the ugly and repugnant
as well as the comic that is created not just through exaggeration but through
disproportion. (Klein 2014)

These examples elaborate the key tropes available to the caricaturist. It is also
relevant to highlight the form of media that caricatures are created through.
Klein explains caricature as

drawings, cartoons, and prints that include images of human faces and phy-
siques that are grossly distorted and exaggerated for the purposes of a satirical
or comic effect.” (Klein 2014)

Klein (2014) documents how the caricature uses the techniques of hyperbole,
disproportion, and hybridization, and that caricature can be used to “punch-
up” or “punch-down” through respectively, the carnivalesque motive or
through enacting superiority. It has developed a reputation as satire:

The humor associated with caricature is satire, biting witticism, parody, and
sarcasm and whose functions are to influence public perception about public
figures or social, economic, and political events and issues. (Klein 2014)

One important addition to the definition of caricature is that caricatures are

transportable—the same caricature of an individual and their body can be
used repeatedly in relation to many political events and situations. That said,
there are limitations—most political cartoons contain a limited amount of
text. It is the relationship between the body and the event that forms ridicu-
lous meaning in caricature. There is evidence that caricatures and cartoons
are frequently read differently by different audience groups who use their
identity and background to gain understanding (El Refaie 2011). This is true
of comedy more generally (Weaver and Bradley 2016). Cartoons are a com-
plex medium that require multiple literacies (El Refaie 2009). Moreover, the
lack of further explanation by way of text may mean that caricature is not
a genre where detailed political satire, in terms of it addressing discourse,
debate, ambiguity, and incongruity is formed. This may also explain why
individual identity markers are paramount in the interpretive process. There
is simply a limit on what can be “said” literally in caricature. Indeed, the term
“caricature” is often a synonym for a pejorative simplification in popular
discourse.
74 Simon Weaver

There are also potential limitations based on the nature of hyperbole

and the grotesque that are ubiquitous in caricature. Baudelaire’s distinction
between the “absolute comic” and the “significative comic” is useful here:

I shall refer to the grotesque as the absolute comic, in contrast to the ordinary
comic, which I shall call the significative comic. The significative comic speaks
a language that is clearer, easier for the common man to understand, and espe-
cially easier to analyse, its elements being obviously double: art and the moral
idea; but the absolute comic, coming as it does much closer to nature, appears
as a unity that must be grasped intuitively. There must be only one proof of the
grotesque, which is laughter. (Baudelaire 2017 [1855]: 206)

Leaving aside the critical observation that much grotesque caricature does
not produce laugher, and the elitism used to describe the caricature of the
consumer, there is an important observation in Baudelaire’s typology. The
grotesque does not rely on a clear expression of comic incongruity in the
manner of his significative comic. Baudelaire no doubt believed that this
was quite noble—yet we can remove the positive emphasis and use this as
an analytic point. It suggests that grotesque caricature may leave situational
and textual ironies largely unsaid in satire and thus “intuitively” condensed
in the caricature. Although there is evidence that harsh ridicule is effective as
a form of comic critique and resistance, that the satire is successful because
the brutal nature of the incongruity leaves the audience in little doubt, for
example, in the ridiculous comedy of Aristophanes (O’Regan 1992), and in
Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (2008 [1729]; although these were of
course “misread” by some), these notable examples develop text at length,
rather than relying more heavily on caricature. It may be that much caricature
is too reductive and short of text to form complex critique in and of itself.
What is more, and as I previously outlined, the individualizing, body-focused
construction of caricature creates grotesque images that reassert dominant
ideas on the “good” neoliberal body, do not seek wider discursive or class/
group based critique, or get to grips with the detail of the ironies of the dis-
course. They appear to be a mode of persuasion that is broadly complicit with
the object of critique.
On caricature, an additional theoretical intervention is possible through an
observation from semiotics. St Louis’s (2003: 76) description of the concept
of the “short-circuit sign,” from Christian Metz, is useful for elaborating the
impact of caricature:

The short-circuit sign . . . collapses the distinction between signifier and signified
and is an extremely powerful visual image that appears to best represent (social)
reality by dispensing with the distinction between primary and secondary orders
 Brexit Irony on The Last Leg and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver 75

of communication—an image or sound (signifiers) and its meaning (signifieds).

This conflation of image and meaning where signifier and signified “are nearly
the same: what you see is what you get.” (Monaco 2000: 420)

Although caricatures are of course open to polysemy, as any linguistic sign

is, I argue that the caricature acts as a short-circuit sign that is both image and
meaning—it circumvents the need for any further explanation. As we have
seen, this is, historically, a highly effective form of ridicule of the individual
and the body because the image of the body becomes an expression of char-
acter—it is at this point that the wider social and political issue is redirected
into corporal representation. This is a comic trope that addresses the presence
of external incongruity, ambiguity, or contradiction at the level of political
or populist discourse through “funnelling” it into a hyperbolic and distorted
representation of the individual and their body, rather than through a careful,
comedic unpacking of the ambiguities on offer. In addition, the polysemy of
the caricature allows some audiences to read complexity in the caricature but
this is by no means a didactic form of satire. In the rest of the chapter, this
observation will be examined in relation to Brexit discourse and the carica-
tured responses from satirists and comedians.
In this analysis, I examine both the images of Brexit politicians and the
use of the caricature in the verbal comedy of comedians. The relationship
between signifier and signified changes in verbal articulations of caricature
because emphasis is shifted onto the signified as essential in creating the
image of the caricature, which remains internal to the subject. This may lead
to a dilution of the image but this remains an almost unverifiable point.

A BIG RED BUS AND THE NHS—IRONY MEETS

CARICATURE IN THE EU REFERENDUM CAMPAIGN

The analysis begins with a controversial Leave Campaign bus and some
text on the side of that bus. During the EU referendum campaign the Leave
Campaign used a red “battle” bus with the following text written on the side:

We send the EU £350 million a week

let’s fund our NHS instead Vote Leave2

Importantly, the claim that this amount could be spent on the NHS post-
Brexit was repeated by left and right leaning leave campaigners on several
occasions, including Gisela Stuart (Reuben 2016) and Boris Johnson (Hart-
ley-Parkinson 2016). The figure has been shown by a number of independent
experts to be misleading and was clarified by media outlets including the
76 Simon Weaver

BBC and ITV news as a part of their fact checking process (ITV News 2016;
Reuben 2016). Indeed, recent elections, including the EU referendum, have
seen an increasing call for rigorous fact checking as a part of public service
broadcasting. Most assert that this is a gross figure and that the net figure is
much lower. Moreover, any post-Brexit figure available for health service
spending will depend on economic conditions at that time, for which there
are differing forecasts. There is evidence that the bus advert was effective
and that parts of the public believed the message, despite the claim being
widely debunked by independent experts (Stone 2016). In relation to the
situational irony of Brexit, what the advert offers is an increase in health
service spending that resonates with pre-neoliberal visions of the role of the
state. It contains a retrotopic fantasy that decoupling from the “other” (rather
than from neoliberalism) will provide resources for the nation. It is therefore
an advert that articulates the situational irony of Brexit discourse, in this
case by placing blame for perceived lack of spending on health services
at the feet of the EU, rather than elected national governments following a
broadly neoliberal, and in more recent times, austerity agenda. The irony
is, of course, that leaving the EU will in no way lead to an a priori change
of direction in relation to neoliberalism and healthcare spending, and could
actually signal the reverse, such an advert has none of the “guarantees” of a
manifesto promise, there is no way to predict that leaving the EU will create
economic resources for healthcare, or that elected governments post-Brexit
will share such a priority.
I now examine how the claim is responded to in comedy and political
satire. I do this by using examples from The Last Leg, broadcast on Channel
4, a UK terrestrial channel, and hosted by Adam Hills, Josh Widdicombe,
and Alex Brooker, and through the example of British comedian John Oliver
who hosts the political satire Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on the US
cable and satellite network HBO. In both cases there is the verbalization of
caricature, which is explained in advance.

“Frog Faced Arse Wipe”: Caricatures of Nigel Farage

The UK MEP Nigel Farage, at the time of the EU Referendum, was leader
of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), a right-wing party that is staunchly
anti-EU and anti-EU migration. A popular caricature exists on the former
UKIP leader that involves comparing his facial features to that of a frog or a
toad. Both frog and toad comparisons have been made in popular media. This
section describes the example in illustrated form, principally in newspaper
cartoons, before looking in detail at one example of its verbal articulation in
televised political satire. The use of the caricature in both cartoon and spoken
form is evaluated in relation to the ironies of Brexit discourse.
 Brexit Irony on The Last Leg and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver 77

It is unclear when the first depiction of Nigel Farage as a frog/toad

appeared.3 A non-exhaustive search by the author found several examples
in UK and international print media. A Dave Brown cartoon from 2012 uses
the image of a frog to represent Farage. Brown is a cartoonist for British
newspaper The Independent. In that example, a caricature of Farage’s face is
placed on the body of a frog. Former UK Prime Minister, David Cameron,
is depicted contemplating kissing the frog in order “to stay a handsome
Prince” (Brown 2012)—this is about appeasing voters who might move to
UKIP. In July 2016, the cartoonist Steve Bell, in The Guardian, depicted
Farage’s post-referendum resignation as leader of UKIP. Here he is a yellow
toad with purple spots (the UKIP party colors), lying on the top of a coffin
covered with the EU flag. Farage is smoking a cigar (Bell 2016a). Farage is
labelled “Toady” by Bell and the image is used extensively in caricatures of
Farage (see Bell 2016a; 2016b), although there are also Steve Bell cartoons
that depict Farage differently, in a non-amphibious manner. These examples
appear in centre and centre-left newspapers. Aside from newspaper cartoons,
the caricature has been used to create humor in other forms. In April 2015,
the US news and entertainment website BuzzFeed offered a pole to readers
on whether Nigel Farage “looks like a shiny frog” (Jewell and White 2015).
Ninety-three percent of voters agreed that he did (ibid).
The frog caricature has been used in televised political satire and in a
response to the advert on the side of the Vote Leave campaign bus. The exam-
ple comes from a monologue by comedian Adam Hills, the lead presenter of
Channel 4’s left-leaning The Last Leg. The episode was aired on Friday June
24, 2016, the day after the EU referendum, and although a part of a longer
critique of Nigel Farage, the monologue is a sequential and direct response to
a clip of Farage being interviewed by Susanna Read on ITV’s Good Morning
Britain that morning. What follows is the interview text as edited on The Last
Leg and the response from Hills:

Susanna Read: Can I ask about money? The three hundred and fifty million
pounds a week we send to the EU, which we will no longer send to the EU,
can you guarantee that’s going to go to the NHS?
Nigel Farage: No I can’t and I, and I would never have made that claim,
and that was one of the mistakes, I think, that the leave campaign made.
What I. . .
S.R.: Hang on a moment, that was one of your adverts.
N.F.: It wasn’t one of my adverts, I can assure you.
S.R.: Well that was one of the leave campaign’s adverts,
N.F.: It was. . .
S.R.: was that that money. . .
N.F.: it was. . .S.R.: was going to go to the NHS.
78 Simon Weaver

N.F.: and I think they made a mistake.

S.R.: That’s why people, many people have voted.
N.F.: They made a mistake in doing that but what I can tell you is that we have
a nice feather bed. . .
S.R.: You’re saying that after 17 million people have voted for leave. . .
N.F.: Yep. . .
S.R.: Based, I don’t know how many people voted on the basis of that advert
but that was a huge part of the propaganda, you’re now saying that’s a mistake?
N.F.: We have a 10 billon pound a year, 34 million pound a day feather bed,
that is going to be free money that we can spend, on the NHS, on schools, or
whatever it is. (Read and Farage 2016)

The Last Leg then cuts back to Adam Hills in studio:

Oh you lying frog-faced arse wipe [loud applause]. Arrrr. I know, I’m sorry, I
know I said I wouldn’t get angry but he didn’t even wait until 7am before he’s
admitting the basis of the leave campaign was a steaming pile of [bullshit]4,
[bullshit], [bullshit]. Not only has he lowered the level of politic debate in this
country to somewhere between Donald Trump and Mein Kampf, he didn’t even
ease us into the lie. If you’re gonna fuck us at least use some lube [loud applause].
This is a man who doesn’t think climate change is a problem, wants to scrap the
limits on power stations and has taken up smoking again because in his words,
“I think the doctors have got it wrong on this one”. Even if getting out of the EU
was the right thing to do, we followed the wrong man there. That’s like being lead
into Disneyland by Rolf Harris [applause]. You know what I mean? You might
have fun while you’re there but you don’t want him hanging around. (Hills 2016)

The advert contains the situational irony of Brexit discourse—it situates a call
for more public service funding (or less neoliberalism) as a potential outcome
of a vote for even more neoliberalism. This is something that is missed in most
debate over the accuracy of the bus advert. It is important to note that the advert
was created by the Vote Leave Campaign (which included key figures such
as Gisela Stuart, Boris Johnson, and Michael Gove) of which Nigel Farage
was not a part. UKIP, Nigel Farage, and their major funder, Arron Banks, ran
a separate campaign called Leave.EU, which had its own controversial post-
ers and campaign messages. It is arguable that in the Good Morning Britain
interview, Susanna Read conflates Nigel Farage with the claims of the Leave
Campaign on NHS funding. This is corrected by Farage. This is not picked
up on in Hills’ satirical monologue. Hills opens with the use of the caricature
of Farage as a frog through calling him “frog-faced,” which is coupled with
the pejorative, scatological epithet “arse-wipe.” This invokes the common
caricature of Farage that ridicules his physical appearance and, perhaps for
some audience members, connects to a wider critique of his character and
 Brexit Irony on The Last Leg and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver 79

thus presents a particular ethos on Farage. It is also a satire that implicitly

reinforces neoliberal images of the body—that the “slick” neoliberal, (indi-
vidualized) politician is of a certain look—that perhaps Cameron and Blair
were able to enact. The monologue is not detailed in that it does not discern
the Leave Campaign and its members from the Leave.EU campaign and its
members—it funnels caricature as a short-circuit sign so that a complexity of
issues and ambiguities are represented in insult. Hills adds to the scatologi-
cal references through the use of the show’s “bullshit” bottom, which first
appeared in an interview between Alex Brooker and the then Liberal Demo-
crat leader, Nick Clegg (Higgie 2017). This technique can also be described
as reductive because the scatological trope that combines techniques of the
grotesque, insult, ridicule, and repetition (Berger 1995) does not, in and of
itself, help to explain the ambiguities or ironies of the discourse under attack.
It does not provide information. It does give an attack on the ethos, or the
character of the speaker, that will resonate with a receptive audience but it
does not explain the situational or textual ironies of Brexit discourse.
The monologue continues with a number of other comic tropes. These are
comparison (“somewhere between Donald Trump and Mein Kampf”/“That’s
like being lead into Disneyland by Rolf Harris”), grotesque (“If you’re
gonna fuck us at least use some lube”), absurdity and ignorance (“doesn’t
think climate change is a problem,” “scrap the limits on power stations,” “I
think the doctors have got it wrong on this one”). Almost all of the com-
ments in the extract represent insult, which is an additional trope (Berger
1995). Again, all of the tropes attack the ethos of Farage or create a large
assemblage of verbal caricatures of his character. Farage as an individual
that lacks the values and slick presentation of the (neo)liberal actor is called
into question. His views on Brexit are critiqued through alignment with other
non-liberal views rather than through an examination of their internal coher-
ence. There is little by way of an unpacking of the political issues—indeed,
leaving the EU is not actually called into question—and thus the satire fails
to address Brexit irony.

“Ban Bam from the Flintstones”: Caricature

of Boris Johnson as Dishevelled
Boris Johnson, a prominent leave campaigner and Conservative Member
of Parliament is regularly caricatured. His physical appearance and hair are
the focus of the caricature, as generally scruffy with wild, poorly combed
blonde hair. This image is used extensively in political cartoons. A short
selection of such caricatures that relate to Brexit follows. Pre-referendum,
Oliver Schopf in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, depicts Brexit as
an overweight, wild-haired Johnson cutting a hole around the floor on which
80 Simon Weaver

David Cameron is standing (Schopf 2016). In October 2016, Ben Jennings’s

cartoon in The Guardian depicts Johnson with hair combed in several direc-
tions contemplating his position on the EU referendum. Two cherubs, one
whispering in each ear, offer different advice. The “in” cherub says, “Brexit
will be a disaster for Britain!,” the “out” cherub says, “It could be brilliant
for Boris” (Jennings 2016). These comment on one of the central individual
ironies of Brexit. A number of Brexit politicians, including Johnson, moved
from remain to leave positions after the referendum was included in the Con-
servative Party manifesto of 2015. Johnson’s decision was particularly last
minute. These examples present an uncertainty or ambiguity at the level of
the individual that is in sharp contrast with that displayed in Brexit discourse.
In July 2017, Steve Bell, in The Guardian, depicts Johnson as an overweight
John Bull with white hair covering his eyes as he “moons” at a train that has
the stars of the EU flag on it. Johnson says “Go whistle” while standing on
the track on which the train is approaching. It is not clear when these carica-
tures first appeared but they certainly were used to depict Johnson during the
referendum campaign.
John Oliver, on the HBO political satire Last Week Tonight with John Oli-
ver, uses the caricature of Boris Johnson in a discussion of Brexit just before
the referendum, on July 20, 2016. The broadcast of this episode was delayed
until after the referendum by Sky Television because it is unbalanced and
could have been in contravention of UK broadcast rules in election periods,
although HBO did make it available online (Lee 2016). In the clip, Oliver
employs the caricature of Johnson before dissecting the claim that 350 mil-
lion a week could be used to fund the NHS post Brexit.

That is former London Mayor, Boris Johnson, a man with both the look and
the economic insight of Bam-Bam from The Flintstones [shows a caption box
with Boris Johnson and Bam-Bam pictured next to each other]. He, he is even
being driven around in a giant red bus for the last month with “we send the EU
£350 million a week” [caption of the red bus is shown] written on the side. But
that number has been thoroughly debunked. It’s actually about £190 million
a week when you consider a rebate the UK receives and other money the EU
sends back [caption with reference to The New York Times], on top of which,
if Britain does leave the EU, it may have to spend close to that amount, just to
access the common market. So, what the bus should really say is “we actually
send the EU £190 million a week, which as a proportion of our GDP makes
sound fiscal sense. In fact, considering the benefits we reap in return . . . oh
shit, we’re running out of bus! Okay, bye-bye!” [caption of bus with alternative
text]. (Oliver 2016a)

John Oliver begins by rightly connecting Boris Johnson, rather than Nigel
Farage, with the text on the red bus. This avoids the error of the interview
 Brexit Irony on The Last Leg and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver 81

and monologue previously described by connecting it to the Vote Leave

campaign, rather than the UKIP led Leave.EU campaign.5 The caricature is
presented through the comparison, verbally and in pictures, of Boris Johnson
and the character Bam Bam, from The Flintstones. Bam Bam is a cave-child
whose only spoken words are “Bam Bam.” Oliver overcomes the short circuit
of the caricature through the spoken word, as the image comes to represent
simplistic economic thinking. Oliver then gives a description of what is
wrong with the economic claim of the leave campaign, by listing facts. This
does employ comic tropes, specifically it uses literalness and speed (Berger
1995). Brexit discourse is cut through by straightforward explanation on why
the figure is wrong in a fast-paced manner not usual in news reporting but
acceptable in comedy. The extract finishes with a rewriting of the claim in
a way that does not fit on the side of the bus. This uses tropes of catalogue,
comparison, definition, imitation, literalness, and speed (Berger 1995) to
make the point that the issues are complex, and the Brexit discourse is a sim-
plification. The end result of this is political satire that builds on the limits
of caricature and fulfils the often-stated task of “speaking truth to power.” It
employs logos to critique the ironies of Brexit discourse. Oliver is present-
ing an ethos or character that is figured on rationality and the debunking of
fallacy. The pathos created for the receptive audience is one of ridicule and
incredulity of the claim presented on the side of the red bus.

CONCLUSION

It has been argued that Brexit contains a situational irony that is formed by
support for the neoliberal political motivation for deregulation and the mobi-
lization of populism that contains a very different, contractive, and dystopic
response to neoliberal globalization. These tendencies are very different
and so need to be disguised in Brexit discourse through a number of textual
ironies. The “other” is employed in much Brexit discourse as a simple scape-
goat—there is nothing new in this—but this is an “other” that encompasses
both the migrant worker and the other of Europe. One example of a textual
irony, the leave campaign’s NHS bus claim, is analyzed for the way it pres-
ents false information, was defended, was not defended, and was addressed
in comedic responses.
The irony of Brexit can be seen as the ambiguities, tensions and, in some
cases, untruths of Brexit discourse. These are responded to by comedians and
satirists. The chapter examines two responses that focus on the character,
body, and thus the caricature of the individual politician. It is argued that
this is the individualization (a key neo-liberal theme) of responses to politi-
cal discourse and is distinctly neoliberal. Unless coupled with other forms of
82 Simon Weaver

critique that examine wider sociopolitical issues, it is limited in its ability to

critique the populism of Brexit. Caricature is heavily informed by the style
of the neoliberal political actor—of surface style that may be criticized as
ugly. It is therefore not necessarily suited to critique the neoliberal or Brexit
politician.
We saw that Adam Hills and John Oliver both use different techniques in
addition to caricature but that Oliver’s focus on unpacking the information
provided by the leave campaign has an increased potential to “speak truth
to power.” Overall, both discourses highlight the significance of the comic/
ironic in public understandings of Brexit, for both leave and remain support-
ers, which may have wider implications for understandings of political com-
munication, especially in a political landscape where populisms (with their
usual, inbuilt dilemmas, contradictions or ironies) are in ascendance. Specifi-
cally for Brexit, if ironies are not called into question the process remains
obfuscatory for public understandings of the political. Comedy has a key role
to play in preventing that.

NOTES

1. Any ironies in remain discourse are not discussed here. The scope of this paper
is limited and detailing remain ironies is a task for a broader study.
2. The claim of having an additional £350 million a week to spend on public
services, including the NHS, remains on the Vote Leave website long after the refer-
endum (Vote Leave, 2017).
3. This is also a task that is beyond the scope of this chapter but will be returned
to in a larger study.
4. Adam Hills hits a button on the desk that produces the sound of co-host Alex
Booker saying the word “bullshit.”
5. It is not clear if this is a conscious separation because a clip in a later episode
does comment on the Farage/Read interview in a less clear manner (Oliver 2016b).

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n-a-w​eek-t​o-the​-eu-c​laim-​a7085​016.h​tml. Accessed July 22, 2017.
Swift, J. 2008. A Modest Proposal & Other Short Pieces Including a Tale of a Tub.
The Hazelton, PA: Pennsylvania State University Publication.
Taggart, P. 2000. Populism. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Thompson, G. 2016. “Brexit and the Rise of Populism.” Open Democracy UK. July
21st. https​://ww​w.ope​ndemo​cracy​.net/​uk/gr​ahame​-thom​pson/​popul​ism-b​igges​
t-win​ner-f​rom-u​k-ref​erend​um. Accessed June 9, 2017.
Tudor, D. 2012. “Selling Nostalgia: Mad Men, Postmodernism and Neoliberalism.”
Society, 49(4): 333–338.
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takec​ontro​l.org​/why_​vote_​leave​.html​. Accessed July 20, 2017.
Weaver, S. 2011. The Rhetoric of Racist Humor: US, UK and Global Race Joking.
Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.
———. 2015. “The Rhetoric of Disparagement Humor: An Analysis of Anti-Semitic
Joking Online.” HUMOR, 28(2) 327–347.
Weaver, S. and L. Bradley. 2016. “‘I Haven’t Heard Anything about Religion Whatso-
ever’: Audience Perceptions of Anti-Muslim Racism in Sacha Baron Cohen’s the
Dictator.” HUMOR, 29(2): 279–299.
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International Journal of Cultural Studies, 19(5): 479–485.
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Webber, J. (this book). “Introduction.” In The Joke Is on Us: Political Comedy in

(Late) Neoliberal Times, edited by Julie A. Webber. Lanham: Lexington Books,
1–33.
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Accessed July 21st, 2017.
 Chapter 3

What’s Wrong with Slactivism?1

Confronting the Neoliberal
Assault on Millennials
Sophia A. McClennen

By now most are familiar with the demonization of millennials as “slactiv-

ists.” The term, a portmanteau of slacker and activism, typically refers to
“actions performed via the Internet in support of a political or social cause
but regarded as requiring little time or involvement” (Millennial Activist
Project). One of the interesting features of these attacks is that they are two-
pronged: they come from both Bill O’Reilly-influenced Baby Boomers, who
think of this generation as lazy, stupid, and dangerous, and they come from
progressives who fail to appreciate the role of social media in contemporary
activism, and who miss the ways that this generation wants to make politics
pleasurable. This chapter unpacks these two tendencies to denigrate the activ-
ism of this generation and argues that, taken together, these attacks on mil-
lennial activism demonstrate the pernicious role of neoliberalism in shaping
political activity today.
Despite the constant attacks on the millennial generation it turns out that
they demonstrate extraordinary political promise: they vote at a higher per-
centage of their demographic than any of the preceding generations, and they
do more community service. What’s more, as a cohort, they have absolutely
no patience for the conservative, fundamentalist attacks on the rights of
women, immigrants, people of color, and the LGBT community. Even more
salient is that this is the generation that returned to the streets in protest in
a revised version of traditional forms of activism, as evidenced by Occupy
Wall Street (OWS).
OWS offers yet more proof of the attacks on millennials and the misun-
derstanding of the role of social media in fostering social change, since the
movement was repeatedly considered a failure; and yet, the fact that almost

87
88 Sophia A. McClennen

every voting age citizen is familiar with the phrase “the 99percent” certainly
suggests a profound success in spreading their message. An interesting fea-
ture of these attacks on millennial activism is the need to constantly measure
whether the activism made a difference. One might argue that that tendency
is a sign of neoliberal values that require political action to be measured in
quantifiable terms rather than in more holistic ways. In other words, the data-
driven analysis of these movements seems to reinforce neoliberal ways of
thinking.
Thus the second section of this chapter describes key features of this new
version of activism: its prevalence on social media, its combination of silli-
ness and seriousness, and its almost ubiquitous satirical tone. Following the
work of Stephen Duncombe, I argue that millennials are redefining citizen-
ship and political action by refusing to allow politics to be dry and heavy. I
refer to this activism as “satiractivism”—since it almost always combines
political activism with satirical commentary. What is noteworthy about
this new form of activism, though, is that it offers wholly new avenues for
political agency as millennials create memes, gifs, and tweets that can have
significant political impact. I hope to show that much of the critique of mil-
lennial activism is itself a form of political repression. It is also a form of
generational warfare—where the “elders” are the ones who really know what
true political action looks like while the youth are considered clueless and
naive. If academics are to take seriously their possibilities as political agents,
then they need to learn more from the existing activism of their students.

MILLENNIAL BASHING AND NEOLIBERAL IDEOLOGY

Let’s start with why millennials are the generation everyone loves to hate.
Is there a more badmouthed group of people today than millennials? Every-
where millennials turn, they are told that they’re lazy, entitled, narcissistic,
and clueless. They have even been called “the lamest generation” (Wurtzel
2013). Pundits like Bill O’Reilly call them “stoned slackers” who watch
The Daily Show because they don’t have the attention span for “real” news
(Fox News 2004). But it isn’t just the right that thinks that millennials are a
wasted generation of entitled losers. Millennials are slammed by those on the
left too. What’s interesting is that the critiques that come from progressives
tend to focus on the ways that millennials don’t live up to their ideals and
expectations of true political engagement. Think about it, the only folks that
even care about testing the political authenticity of millennials are those who
think they have a better grasp of what “real” political action means. It is worth
asking why progressives need a litmus test for authentic political action. Why
wouldn’t they focus on those that do absolutely nothing instead?
 What’s Wrong with Slactivism? 89

For instance, Micah White, a senior editor at Adbusters and an award-

winning activist, went after a specific form of slactivism—clictivism—in
a piece on the negative effects of MoveOn.org for The Guardian. White
doesn’t specifically equate millennials with clictivists—but the connection is
fairly common. In fact, even though Laura Bradley claims that “people don’t
hate millennials: they hate 21st century technology”—we all know that there
is a pretty clear public perception that millennials are the generation most
influenced by new technology. In the end, though, most critics of slactivism
merge disgust for the way millennials interact with the world with distaste for
the technology that they use to do it.
As White puts it,

A battle is raging for the soul of activism. It is a struggle between digital activ-
ists, who have adopted the logic of the marketplace, and those organisers who
vehemently oppose the marketisation of social change. At stake is the possibility
of an emancipatory revolution in our lifetimes. (Bradley 2014)

White begins his story by tracing the emergence of one of the most significant
forms of online activism today—the launch of MoveOn.org. MoveOn.org
was started by Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs
who sold a software company for $13.8 million back in 1997. Frustrated
with the Washington politics they witnessed during the meltdown of govern-
ment during the Clinton impeachment mess, they launched an online petition
to “Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the
Nation.” Within days they had reached hundreds of thousands of individu-
als. They created a new movement for social organizing that used marketing,
computer programming, and a savvy understanding of social media. But for
White, “The trouble is that this model of activism uncritically embraces the
ideology of marketing. It accepts that the tactics of advertising and market
research used to sell toilet paper can also build social movements. . . . Gone
is faith in the power of ideas, or the poetry of deeds, to enact social change”
(White 2010).
There are two flaws to this line of thinking: first, it assumes that being
savvy about marketing means you don’t have “faith in the power of ideas.”
Now, those on the left cringe at the use of a word like marketing: it is the lan-
guage of capital, after all. But it is important to pause here for a moment and
recognize the current landscape in which politics takes place. Thus the second
problem is that those who imagine a politics against capital imagine a space
of protest outside of it. But those days are long gone. Neoliberal capitalism
has eradicated the possibility of pristine spaces of resistance outside of the
market. The question we have to ask is whether any real political change can
happen without marshaling the force of the market? How many of us have
90 Sophia A. McClennen

sat around thinking about the just right slogan to put on a sign to carry in a
march? And how is that desire to reach someone—to market to them—so
different from what is happening online today? The problem isn’t marketing;
the problem is what is being marketed and how it is being marketed. From the
moment that printing presses were used to distribute political pamphlets, left
politics has seized on technological innovation to distribute ideas.
Another flaw in the attack on slactivists/clictivists is the assumption that
hitting “like” on Facebook is the endpoint of social engagement. But we have
ample evidence that that is patently untrue (Ebbitt 2015). Not only has social
media made social organizing for those marginalized possible in ways never
before imagined, but it also consistently leads to other more traditional forms
of on-the-ground organizing and action.
From examples like the Arab Spring to the Berkeley student protests over
Ferguson, social media offers protesters an opportunity to share information
and communicate with their peers (Eowyn 2014). Sure some activists do
nothing more than man their smartphones, tablets, and laptops, but in many
cases they are helping to coordinate meeting spots, alert protesters to police
blockades, and help keep the public eye on the events. Today the Internet
is an essential part of political mobilization. Do we really think political
action would be better today without the existence of MoveOn.org? Do we
really think we can raise public awareness of major political issues without
using Twitter? It may not be enough, and it may not be perfect, but there
seems little doubt that it has had an impact and that without it the message
and the struggle will go nowhere. As “slactivist” defender Kathleen Nebitt
puts it,

Social media is reinventing social activism. The traditional relationship between

popular will and political authority is being rethought, and it is now easier than
ever for the powerless to collaborate and give voice to their issues. Simply put,
slacktivism is a form of organizing that favors weak-ties over the strong-tie
connections. Social media is a way for people to organize and connect loosely
around shared interests. (Ebbitt 2015)

Nebitt reminds us that one of the reasons that the activism of millennials is so
constantly denigrated is because older generations have trouble recognizing
that change is not necessarily negative. Because social networking as it exists
today was not possible in the 1960s and 1970s, some critics of millennials
fail to recognize the various ways that these forms of activity lead to mean-
ingful political action. But as a 2013 Pew Research Center study of “Civic
Engagement in the Digital Age” shows, folks on social networking services
are more politically engaged than those who aren’t on those services (Smith
2013; Figure 3.1).
 What’s Wrong with Slactivism? 91

Figure 3.1  Gallup: “Political Engagement on Social Networking Sites.” Source: http:​//
www​.pewi​ntern​et.or​g/201​3/04/​25/ci​vic-e​ngage​ment-​in-th​e-dig​ital-​age/.​

They report that, while the national average for citizens to attend a political
meeting or work with fellow citizens to solve a problem in their community
is 48 percent, those on social networking sites (SNS) do these activities at a
rate of 63 percent. They further add that 53 percent of political SNS users
have expressed their opinion about a political or social issue through offline,
traditional channels—for example, sending a letter to a government official,
or signing a paper petition, but the national average for these activities is 39
percent, (Smith 2013). As the Millennial Action Project reports, there are
further studies that confirm these results, including one conducted by the
Harvard Institute of Politics that showed that survey participants, especially
millennials, who were actively engaged on social networking sites had higher
levels of political engagement and stronger partisan identity (Harvard Univer-
sity Institute of Politics 2013). They argue that “Slacktivism—as a form of
digital citizenship—is a stepping stone for deeper and stronger ties to political
involvement and participation. These Harvard and Pew Research Center stud-
ies reveal a legitimate connection between political participation and social
media” (Millennial Action Project 2015).
Now, we can agree that not all clictivism is of significant political value,
and we can be sure that some slactivists have been suckers for hoaxes. They
have maybe felt too morally pleased about their Facebook likes and hashtag
92 Sophia A. McClennen

use. Perhaps all they do is click, and they don’t do more. But any scholar of
activism will tell you that the degree of real political involvement and impact
has always varied. Not everyone who shows up at a rally is there for the
greater good. But not everyone who doesn’t show doesn’t care. So the point
is that sure, some slactivism is stupid, but the constant assault on this genera-
tion’s primary form of political involvement is a far deeper problem—one
that, I argue, has a far greater chance of creating disillusion and distance from
politics than any social media stupidity ever could. It is time to take seriously
the possibility that the constant denigration of millennial political action may
blowback into apathy and disinterest.
One of the reasons this is so is because millennials are not the naive, self-
involved idiots most critics make them out to be. Again, I find it noteworthy
that both the left and the right agree in the ways that they condemn the char-
acter of this generation. What this suggests is that this is more about genera-
tional bashing than political bashing.
Older generations have always demonized the young (Reeve 2013). Gen-
erational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe remind us that “at the out-
set of World War II, army psychiatrists complained that their GI recruits had
been ‘over-mothered’ in the years before the war” (Winograd and Hais 2012).
According to generation scholar Russell Dalton, a main feature of millennial
bashing is linked to the fact that millennials have a very different idea of citi-
zenship from Baby Boomers and their elders. He keys into the idea that the
younger generation is constantly blamed for all that is wrong in our nation:

A host of political analysts now bemoans what is wrong with America and its
citizens. Too few of us are voting, we are disconnected from our fellow citizens
and lacking in social capital, we are losing our national identity, we are losing
faith in our government, and the nation is in social disarray. The lack of good
citizenship is the phrase you hear most often to explain these disturbing trends.
What you also hear is that the young are the primary source of this decline.
Authors from Robert Putnam to former television news anchor Tom Brokaw
extol the civic values and engagement of the older, “greatest generation” with
great hyperbole. . . . Perhaps not since Aristotle held that “political science is not
a proper study for the young” have youth been so roundly denounced by their
elders. (Dalton 2008, 22–2, Kindle)

Dalton charges, though, that one of the key features of millennials and gen-
eration Xers is a redefined notion of citizenship: one that is not characterized
by duty, hierarchy, and respect for authority as it was for generations like
the boomers. He explains that the younger generations of Xers and Ys hold
a model of “engaged citizenship”: “Engaged citizenship emphasizes a more
assertive role for the citizen and a broader definition of the elements of citi-
zenship to include social concerns and the welfare of others” (Dalton 2008,
 What’s Wrong with Slactivism? 93

267–69). One of the key distinctions that Dalton points out is that under-
standing this new idea of citizenship requires recognition that civic involve-
ment itself is changing: “Engaged citizenship has a broader view of social
responsibility than the old norms of citizen duty” (Dalton 2008, 267–69). So
millennials may not vote, but they volunteer. They may care as much about
global issues as those in their own city. When polled, we find that millennials
score higher on “habits of the heart” like signing up to be an organ donor,
giving blood, and donating to charity than their elder counterparts (see Dalton
Figure 9.1). One key difference is that they may not obey laws that they think
are unjust, foolish, or biased. And while they have inherited the basic skepti-
cism of Generation Xers, millennials tend to distrust authority but have much
higher hope for change and a much greater belief in their ability to have a
positive social impact (Seaquist 2010).
They’ve also inherited a mess of a nation and a complex, conflict-driven
globe. They’re constantly under attack, especially millennials of color, who
are even more susceptible to the extreme policing tactics in our schools and
are way more likely to be incarcerated than their white peers. If they make it
to college, as tuition rises, they are buried under a mountain of student debt.
They are also working their way through school in record numbers with four
out of five college students holding jobs while in classes. And when they
do get meaningful jobs, they toil away at unpaid internships that will never
become full-time job offers (Baig 2013).
But all of this won’t keep even the most progressive-minded professor
from denigrating the millennial generation in the ubiquitous end-of-semester
Facebook rant about lazy, entitled students. Rare is it for a professor to
remember that the student might be scrambling to get work done because
they also worked a job all term or spent hours at the financial aid office try-
ing to figure out how to pay their tuition bills. And let’s not even talk about
the generational moralizing that suggests that it is only this young generation
that drinks too much, parties too hard, and stays up indulging in hedonistic
practices too late.
As if millennials were not bashed enough while they were in college, when
they graduate they are not likely to get a job. Despite recent news that the
job market is improving, millennials are still suffering disproportionately in
this economy. In fact, a 2014 study found that 40 percent of unemployed
workers are millennials (Fottrell 2014). While these numbers have improved
in the last few years, millennials are still a larger share of unemployed than
older generations (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018). But that doesn’t stop
the ongoing urge to millennial bash. Again and again, anecdotes of entitled,
spoiled, moody, “me, me, me generation” millennials dominate the media.
But it’s worse than that, since most of the anecdotes really only refer to a
highly select segment of millennials. For instance, anecdotes about helicopter
94 Sophia A. McClennen

parents do not apply to the vast majority of the millennial demographic,

which also includes first generation college students, students of single par-
ent homes, students of color, and students from lower income families. It is a
characterization of childhood coddling that completely ignores contemporary
challenges young people face due to social pressures related to race, socio-
economics, and existing parental support.
So how is it that all of the anti-millennial hype ignores the reality of this
demographic? The millennial generation is 43 percent non-white and has
to deal with all of the social pressures associated with racial tension (Pew
Research Center 2014). Approximately 25 percent of millennials were raised
by single parents and the numbers are growing.2 And about 66 percent of
single moms work outside the home (Lee 2018). Single working mothers do
not have time to do their children’s homework for them, much less harangue
their teachers for better grades. Based on these facts it’s odd to claim with any
credibility that this is a generation of spoiled, entitled kids.
Despite all this, we still have an onslaught of negative press about this
generation. The hype doesn’t match the numbers (Donegan 2013). The
attacks are not based on reality. Even though there is a range of conflicting
research on the degree of social involvement and civic engagement of this
generation, there still is significant research to show that this is a generation
that is indeed involved in politics and that has, without a doubt, extraordinary
political potential.
And yet, as Henry Giroux points out, the hope of this generation is all too
often squashed by the difficult realities in which they live. Writing in relation
to violent student protest, he explains, “Suffering under huge debts, a jobs
crisis, state violence, a growing surveillance state, and the prospect that they
would inherit a standard of living far below that enjoyed by their parents,
many young people have exhibited a rage that seems to deepen their resig-
nation, despair, and withdrawal from the political arena” (Giroux 2014). As
Zygmunt Bauman puts it, “The plight of being outcast may stretch to embrace
a whole generation” (Bauman 2012). There now seems conclusive evidence
that the millennial generation will suffer the hardships of neoliberalism at a
rate that far exceeds that of older generations.
But it gets worse. Millennials don’t just suffer from the economic reali-
ties of neoliberalism; they also suffer from its inherent pedagogy. As Giroux
explains, neoliberalism brings with it a whole way of life, one that abandons
a notion of the public good and replaces commitment to life with a commit-
ment to the market (Giroux 2011). One demographic highly vulnerable to
these attacks is the young. But Giroux warns that we have to be wary of the
inherent need of neoliberal ideology to demonize all youth as either crimi-
nals or idiots. In Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability
Giroux explains that, as the market demands the erosion of the social state,
 What’s Wrong with Slactivism? 95

youth become subject to a whole host of punitive measures “governing them

through a logic of punishment, surveillance, and control” (Giroux 2009, xii)
Giroux explains that this process is so effective because it is bolstered by a
culture that is not just complicit with this narrative but actually supportive of
it. He explains that educators are among the most important sources of poten-
tial pushback, but that they too rarely recognize that they have a crucial role
to play in the social demonization of youth. As he puts it, “There are too few
commentaries about how the media, schools, and other educational sites in
the culture provide the ideas, values, and ideologies that legitimate the condi-
tions that enable young people to become either commodified, criminalized,
or made disposable” (Giroux 2009, xii).
Giroux points out that the social inequities that disproportionately impact
the lives of young people have always been a part of US society; what is new
now, though, he claims, is the fact that these inequities do not spark even the
slightest degree of compassion or concern. Youth are not seen as at risk, as
in need of protection, support, nourishment, guidance, and encouragement:
“they are the risk” (Giroux 2009, x). What if the attack on slactivists has to be
read in light of the neoliberal attack on youth? What if the need to denigrate
millennial activism is a product of a neoliberal mindset that can’t imagine the
young as anything more than slackers or threats? Giroux explains that the fact
that the young are either coded as dangerous or stupid is revealing of a need
to describe them in ways that make controlling them essential. It also creates
a world where society owes them nothing. Their problems are not a public
crisis; they are the consequence of being lazy, coddled, thugs.
But here is where the real twist happens. Giroux explains that the neolib-
eral depoliticization of political problems has made it virtually impossible
to imagine a way to address social struggles via the public sphere. But, of
course, reclaiming the public sphere is exactly what is required if we are to
organize in ways that have the ability to advance any sort of real political
change. The problem, though, is how to define the public sphere in the social
network era when the sort of meaningful connections assumed necessary for
politics look radically different than previous eras.
Thus at the heart of the slactivist attack on millennials is the definition of
the public sphere and of how that space for politics connects with the private,
with markets, and with the lack of face-to-face contact. We can understand
how the right mindset is all-too-quick to privatize the problems of millenni-
als. They, after all, are fully in favor of the private replacing the public. But
the left has failed to grasp the political crisis of millennials because they have
failed to notice that for most millennials the public and the private no longer
operate as discrete spaces of existence. Giroux argues that “for many young
people and adults today, the private sphere has become the only space in
which to imagine any sense of hope, pleasure, or possibility” (Giroux 2003,
96 Sophia A. McClennen

144). But what if the most significant place for political mobilization is now
both private and public? It is that one angry tweet sent out late at night that
leads to thousands in the streets the next day. What if Twitter has replaced the
coffee shop? What if Twitter is even better than the public rec center because
it allows the “community” of those who care to not be bound by geography?
Taken together, we are now able to see how a range of issues has combined
to create the context for demonizing millennial political action. Technologi-
cal change and generational bias are just the surface. The deeper issue is the
degree to which those who criticize millennials have themselves internalized
the idea that the young are not able to be meaningful political actors. Such
prejudice has limited our ability to consider the ways that the social media
market is both of and against capital, usually simultaneously. It has held us
to our own naive contrasts between the public and the private. Even more
disturbing, it has convinced us that the market truly is everywhere, so much
so that when our own students are marshaling it for change we can’t celebrate
their successes and join in. Instead we look for what’s wrong with their strate-
gies and what’s missing in their hearts.

MILLENNIAL POLITICS AND THE

RISE OF SATIRACTIVISM

Combatting such a highly negative position is at the center of media scholar

and activist Stephen Duncombe’s work in Dream: Reimagining Progres-
sive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. What Duncombe explains is that political
engagement is activated through “people’s fantasies and desires through a
language of images and associations” (Duncombe 2007, 121). He insists that
“truth and power belong to those that tell the better stories” (Duncombe 2007,
8). The problem, though, is that the left has been lousy at inspiring vision
since it has been so dominated by negative critique, reluctant to offer utopic
vision, and overtaken by overtheorized worries about “the real.” Meanwhile
another set of fantasies has been on offer by the right. But Duncombe finds
in youth activism a wholly different tactic—one that offers great hope for
effective political action.
Duncombe works on the idea of an “ethical spectacle” and urges a return
to the sort of passionate engagement that fires up citizens to fight for causes
in which they believe. According to Duncombe, the ethical spectacle can
challenge the contemporary era of spectacle-heavy politics. Delving directly
into the world of social media and the sensational nature of news, Dun-
combe’s strategy makes political information both informative and fun and
takes away from the circus of distracting politics that is full of lies and mis-
information. He explains, “For spectacle to be ethical it must not only reveal
 What’s Wrong with Slactivism? 97

itself as what it is but also have as its foundation something real” (Duncombe
2007, 154).
It also must be pleasurable. Liesbet van Zoonen explains in Entertain-
ing the Citizen that entertainment is a central part of politics today, but it is
not equally useful for encouraging productive democratic participation. She
points out that those activists who shun pleasurable politics are nostalgic for
an era of politics long gone (van Zoonen 2005, 3). She proves that the presence
and relevance of entertainment in politics has only intensified over time—and
that the consequence is greater engagement in politics by the population. We
know, for instance, that 85 percent of millennials report that keeping up with
the news is important to them, that 86 percent consume diverse viewpoints on
news, and that 45 percent follow five or more “hard news” topics. But, unlike
older generations, they do this while on social media and not while reading
a print newspaper: “This generation tends not to consume news in discrete
sessions or by going directly to news providers. Instead, news and informa-
tion are woven into an often continuous but mindful way that Millennials
connect to the world generally, which mixes news with social connection,
problem solving, social action, and entertainment” (American Press Institute
2015). The key, then, is mobilizing entertainment, pleasure, and excitement
for political projects that are progressive and not reactionary.
Crucial to this, as I argue with my co-author Remy Maisel in Is Satire
Saving Our Nation?, is the role of political satire like that of The Colbert
Report and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.3 “One of the key ways that satire
is exercising influence over the public sphere is in its direct participation in
the reconstruction of what it means to be politically active. Satire, whether in
the form of Colbert’s satire TV or the Yes Men’s satire activism, is increas-
ingly attracting citizens to find ways to develop and act on political ideas
while enjoying themselves” (McClennen and Maisel 2014, 12). Central to
understanding this political development is breaking down the distinction
between fans and political participants. Van Zoonen argues that “fan groups
are structurally equivalent to political constituencies,” in which fandom is
linked to political citizenship through “affective identification” (van Zoonen
2005, 58). In one great example, Colbert encouraged fans to use the hashtag
#NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement to go after claims by Arizona Senator
Jon Kyl that lies he had spoken about Planned Parenthood were “not intended
to be factual statements.” The first night that Colbert announced the plan,
there were more than one million tweets per hour using the hashtag. Most of
them were savvy examples of political irony. Colbert called out the Senator
for lying, but then he asked fans to use Twitter to shame him with irony. His
fans jumped on board. And they were so good at it that Colbert read some
of their tweets on his show the next day. To some, that sort of activity might
seem like nothing more than slactivism, but I argue that engaged use of social
98 Sophia A. McClennen

media to ironically mock a gasbag with political power is, indeed, a signifi-
cant political act.
There are, of course, many examples of times when satirists have asked
their audience to go beyond their digital worlds and get involved in more
traditional ways. Think, for instance, of the way that Colbert encouraged
his fans to open their own Colbert-inspired super PACs. Surveying a range
of interviews with college students that opened ironic super PACs, Maisel
and I noted that all of them found that the experience had educated them on
campaign finance: they had not only enjoyed themselves while doing it but
also built meaningful alliances that allowed them to use political action and
irony to raise public awareness of a significant political issue.4 By the time of
the 2012 election, Colbert-inspired super PACs were 2.5 percent of all those
registered. That seems like more than just a stupid slactivist joke.
But, as we argue in the introduction to our book, political satire today is not
just dominated by satirical interventions instigated by professionals. In fact,
citizen-satire is a crucial form of political participation today. For example,
during the 2013 government shutdown, average citizens took to social media
to express their frustration, disgust, and outrage. The shutdown led to a
series of viral memes, hashtags, and other forms of social-activist media that
allowed U.S. citizens to express their frustration over the shutdown while
using satire, sarcasm, and irony. Hashtags like #Govtshutdownpickuplines
and #NoBudgetNoPants blended the satirical with the cynical. And Twitter
was not the only venue for citizen-satire activism; users engaged with Tum-
blr, Buzzfeed, Upworthy, and a host of other Internet venues to share their
outrage and create a community of dissent. Of course, much of this satirical
social media was created by older citizens—but it would be fair to say that
millennials played a major role.
In one example, millennial Matt Binder created the Tumblr page “Public
Shaming” where he retweeted hypocritical tweets from users that showed
their position on the shutdown as idiotic. As he explains, “I discovered that
as I would retweet these, my followers would start @replying these people
and let them know they were idiots. They would then delete their offending
tweet. Well, I couldn’t let that happen. So, I screenshot away” (Binder 2014).
Binder went on to repost tweets calling for Obama’s assassination, indicating
“p.s. The Secret Service is not furloughed” and that the tweeters should all
be expecting a knock on their door soon. Binder, who says he does “comedy,
politics, tech + web stuff” has 11,000 followers on Twitter and his Tumblr
page on the assassination tweets was liked by over 1,000 users. Binder shows
us how social critique of politics by citizens is able to reach more of us than
ever before, and his mix of comedy, techie skills, and social critique is a sign
of a new generation that blends citizen engagement with entertaining com-
edy. And yet, some would just dismiss him as a useless slactivist.
 What’s Wrong with Slactivism? 99

It is time to imagine what would happen if we offered a positive spin on

this new activism, one that recognizes both the power of social media as a
key feature of contemporary activism and the central role that satire now
plays in activism today. As Angelique Haugerud explains in her study of the
public satirical activism of the group Billionaires for Bush, this new version
of activism is just as politically motivated as ever: “A moral vision of a more
just future, not a romanticized vision of the past, inspires progressive ironic
activism” (Haugerud 2013, 13). Today’s activism is increasingly tied to satire
as a fundamental part of the way that it reaches a broad audience and inspires
progressive political action: my co-author and I call it “satiractivism.”
If we think of the major millennial-related political actions from student
debt protests to OWS to #BlackLivesMatter, we can note a series of common
features ( Figure 3.2).

Occupy Wall Street uses Twitter and irony to spread its message. (Occupy Wall
Street, 2014).

Many of the most well known millennial-related political actions have used
social media to advance the visibility of their cause. They have made par-
ticipation in political action pleasurable and they have also often used irony,
satire, and snark. Duncombe points out that one of the reasons why satire,
spectacle, and political action are so closely tied for millennials is because
satire combines passion with politics. Rather than shy away from the irratio-
nal, this new left politics remembers that any fight for the future must include
a heavy dose of dreaming and desire. Satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephen
Colbert brought their audiences together by creating a shared community
that “got” the joke and cared about the reality behind the joke. As Duncombe
explains, this new vision for left politics does not contrast the real with spec-
tacle; it understands that spectacle can play a central role in amplifying the
real (Duncombe 2007, 155). In this way, satirists and other left public intel-
lectuals can work together to create what he calls “ethical spectacles” that
contrast the unethical charades that characterize so much of the information
circulating in the public sphere (Duncombe 2007, 154).
But some naysayers, when they aren’t misunderstanding the political
potential of social media, will then say that snark and satire simply lead to
cynicism and apathy. Those criticisms miss the point. Both digital activism
and citizen-satire offer users a wholly redefined sense of political agency.
They require connection and engagement and critical thinking. One could
easily argue that anyone that claims that millennials are depoliticized, self-
ish dolts simply hasn’t been paying attention. Sure some users will just click
like and then look at a picture of a cute cat, but research proves that most do
much more than that.
100 Sophia A. McClennen

Figure 3.2  Occupy Wall Street Tweet. Source: https​://tw​itter​.com/​Occup​yWall​St/st​atus/​

43939​51663​99787​008.

The political sphere today is dominated by sensationalized media, by

incessant marketing, and by a severe breakdown in the distinction between
the public and the private. The public narratives of political crises are intense
battlegrounds framed all-too-often by the reactionary spin of Fox News
rhetoric. Out of this mess we have before us a generation that has not been
given the chance to be naive about politics, the economy, or race relations.
 What’s Wrong with Slactivism? 101

Millennials are one of the most skeptical generations in history (DeMaria

2014). They question government, media, and that spam email about bleach
in Red Bull their aunt sent them. Because they consume so much information,
they have a much higher bullshit meter than earlier generations as well. But,
as I explained above, this generation is also quite optimistic. They are hesitant
to trust, but have high hopes for their future (Irvine 2014).
This all means that millennials are poised to be the best generation of politi-
cal actors we have ever seen. I firmly believe that any chance those of us from
older generations have to advance progressive politics will come from building
meaningful alliances with millennial activists—ones that allow them to be our
peers rather than our protégés. In order to fully explore the potential for such
connections, the co-authored book mentioned earlier was written with a Penn
State undergraduate majoring in media studies. When I pitched the project to
her, I did so with the idea that we would each bring valuable insights, skills, and
experiences. When I met her she was launching her own Colbert-inspired super
PAC and we teamed up to write a few blogs together. I knew once we started to
work together that she had a sharp mind, a fiery political sensibility, a penchant
for sarcasm, and a deep understanding of the political possibilities among her
generation. She taught me as much as we worked on our project as I taught her.
The book made Penn State history as the first-ever academic monograph
written by a faculty member and an undergraduate. It’s worth pausing to
wonder how and why that could be true. It’s even more urgent that we think
about why such collaboration is rare if not non-existent. Is it possible that,
despite our outspoken commitment to political change, we are actually more
conservative than we want to believe? Is it possible that despite our progres-
sive defense of student rights, we don’t actually want to recognize their right
to be meaningful political actors? Sure writing an academic book on politics
and satire may not be the sort of political act that you would define as mean-
ingful. But, as I’ve argued in this piece, old-school rallies and sit-ins are not
enough to effect political change today. There are clearly a range of ways we
can team up with our millennial students—as peers—to engage in political
projects. The task before us now is to reconsider our knee-jerk participation in
millennial bashing while working to imagine ways for us to build politically
meaningful alliances. A first step might be to address our Facebook snark
towards the power elite rather than those we have the pleasure to teach.

NOTES

1. This chapter was previously published as: Sophia A. McClennen. 2016/2017.

“What’s Wrong with Slactivism? Confronting the Neoliberal Assault on Millennials,”
Works and Days, 65–68 (33–34): 373–87.​
102 Sophia A. McClennen

2. http:​//www​.pews​ocial​trend​s.org​/file​s/201​0/10/​mille​nnial​s-con​fiden​t-con​necte​
d-ope​n-to-​chang​e.pdf.​
3. Much of these arguments is also in the book Is Satire Saving Our Nation? (Pal-
grave 2014).
4. See chapter two of Is Satire Saving Our Nation?

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 Chapter 4

Political Humor in the Face of

Neoliberal Authoritarianism
in Turkey1
Seçil Dağtaş

Istanbul and many other cities across Turkey witnessed a widespread insur-
gency in the early summer of 2013. Gezi Park, a green area next to Istanbul’s
central Taksim Square, became the principal site and springboard of this
resistance. Following the violent eviction of a sit-in at the park that was being
conducted in protest of the park’s demolition as part of the government’s
urban development plan, a heterogeneous crowd with divergent agendas
filled the streets to counter the government’s neoliberal and increasingly
authoritarian policies. Among the protesters were groups with a long history
and experience of street resistance, including feminists, anarchists, socialists,
workers’ unions, environmentalists, and LGBTQ activists, as well as those
who found themselves protesting alongside these groups for perhaps the first
time: secularists, high school and university students, anti-capitalist Muslims,
Turkish “aunties”, soccer fans, nationalists, and shanty town dwellers (Arat
2013; Gürcan and Peker 2015; Yörük 2014).2
The absence of a coherent political agenda to animate the uprisings was
captured in a young protester’s graffiti from the early days of the resistance,
which became one of the most popular slogans of the Gezi protests. “Kah-
rolsun bağzı şeyler!” (“Down with some things!”) (emphasis added), the
graffiti read, misspelling the Turkish word “some” (bazı), and humorously
expressing rejection and criticism mixed with confusion and uncertainty, but
without articulating a specific target. Some thing was wrong with the way
things were, but one needed to go beyond the conventions of language and
reason to be able to address it. This necessity found its best expression in
satirical images, statements, and performances that inundated both streets and
screens at the time. In addition to sit-in protests, violent encounters with the
police, and commune-type gatherings in the occupied Gezi Park, the youth
105
106 Seçil Dağtaş

performed resistance through graffiti, banners, stencils, bodily performances,

and slogans in the streets; and shared images of these in cyberspace, along
with memes, Photoshopped images, and other social media based jokes.3
These performative acts targeted the police, the media, the government and
its supporters, as well as the protesters themselves. They drew heavily on
popular culture, and created a culture of public joy, lightness, and hilarity in
the midst of fear, distress, and anger.
Seizing on the political use of humor in Turkey’s Gezi protests, this chap-
ter explores the relationship between humor and power in contemporary
activist actions against neoliberal authoritarianism. Scholars have focused
on the fact that Turkish neoliberalism under the leadership of Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma
Partisi, henceforth AKP) has wedded economic policies of privatization,
deregulation, and free market capitalism to conservative religion, populist
nationalism, and heightened state control, leading citizens into new forms of
subjection and resistance (Bozkurt 2013; Lelandais 2014; Tuğal 2009). The
incongruous effects of this combination have been particularly identifiable
in the political economy of space; that is, the ways in which the AKP regime
extracted and accumulated capital through state investments in construction,
real state, and infrastructure (Demirtas-Milz 2013; Karaman 2013), as well
as rent generation and land appropriation in both urban and rural settings
(Boratav 2016).4 The urban poor who suffered under these new policies also
became absorbed into the new market economy and ideological axis of the
AKP regime.
The planned destruction and redevelopment of the city’s most centrally
located public park epitomized this phenomenon, and thus led to analy-
ses that emphasize the spatiality of the Gezi events (Erensü and Karaman
2017) as a revolt against the impoverishing consequences of neoliberal
urban renewal (Kuymulu 2013; Tugal 2013). Others have argued that
the forms of dispossession (brought to the forefront through the Gezi
resistance) have roots not only in the AKP’s neoliberal policies but also
in the discriminatory property regime, dispossession and state violence
against the minorities on which the Turkish nation state was founded
(Parla and Özgül 2016; Tambar 2016). What underpinned such violence
was a series of moral and affective investments beyond economic policies,
pointing to an ambivalent alliance between neoliberal and authoritarian
discourses (Gürcan and Peker 2015). Hence, although the aims and targets
of civic unrest became diversified by the addition of other messages over
time, the protesters were most vocal in their grievances against the AKP’s
implementation of conservative practices and oppressive interventions in
“lifestyles” (yasam tarzına müdahale), which only accelerated in the after-
math of the Gezi events. It was precisely at this level of moral and social life
 Political Humor in the Face of Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Turkey 107

that comedy operated while addressing “the AKP’s authoritarian-neoliberal-

Islamist machinery” (Erensü and Karaman 2017, 22).
Against a backdrop of social unrest, this paper examines comedy’s encoun-
ter with neoliberal authoritarianism in two different but interrelated registers.
The first concerns the various ways in which humor becomes a form of dis-
sent against hegemonic discourses, social inequalities, and the authoritarian
regimes surrounding neoliberal politics. I interrogate how humorous lan-
guage, images, and performances during the Gezi events expanded the range
of street politics and destabilized political targets in unexpected ways. In light
of recent commentaries on the aesthetics of new social movements and global
uprisings (Hart and Bos 2007; Haugerud 2013; Makar 2011; Wedeen 2013),
my analysis highlights not only the ideological and discursive aspects of
humor in the realm of electoral politics, but also its embodied manifestations
in moments of insurgency and immediacy. I further suggest that these mani-
festations are where the subversive potentialities of political satire against
neoliberal logic reside and, paradoxically, to which they are bound. This is
why we do not see the same political potency in social media based jokes
inspired by Gezi humor in the aftermath of the revolt.
Humor does not stand outside the existing power structures, authoritative
discourses, and social norms that it so often targets. The producers, perform-
ers, objects, and audiences of humor are all situated in particular cultural
contexts and relate to one another through multiple networks of power.
Like any form of social communication, humor can be both emancipatory
and disciplinary, a force for unification as well as exclusion and division
(Carty and Musharbash 2008, 214). Accordingly, this paper suggests that
the novel aesthetic forms of humorous activism that emerged with the Gezi
Park protests operated within and through—rather than against—existing
cultural expressions and political divisions, inseparable today from neolib-
eral techniques of governance. In particular, I discuss how (and when) this
activism entailed acts of symbolic violence that tended to reinforce, rather
than subvert, political conventions. By juxtaposing humor’s revolutionary
and oppressive capacities, we can see that humor is not epiphenomenal to
political discourse, but shapes in significant ways the kinds of political mes-
sages people align themselves with, the various modes of in- and out-group
interaction that these discourses take place within, and the tensions inherent
in neoliberal authoritarianism.
In what follows, I first contextualize Gezi humor historically and politi-
cally, using a critical review of studies on Turkish satire. I then examine
specific aspects of Gezi Park humor as examples of resistance, symbolic
violence, and sociality. In this section, I highlight the significance of humor’s
operational materialities, such as the context and means of its mediation, in
shaping the very relationship between humor and politics. I show how the
108 Seçil Dağtaş

material-aesthetic forms in which humor is performed reflect and reconfigure

the political practice of activism in its social embeddedness. Through these
examples, I foreground my argument that political humor in neoliberal times
simultaneously enacts and subverts the everyday relations of power in which
it is entrenched.

THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL SATIRE IN TURKEY

Although it has been unusual to witness humor as an embodied and digitally

mediated component of street politics in Turkish political culture until very
recently, Gezi Park humor did not emerge in a vacuum. Satire has a long
history in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey and has been popular-
ized through print media since at least the late nineteenth century. Studies on
Turkish humor, which have focused almost exclusively on political cartoons
and satirical magazines, have regarded humor as reflective of cultural ten-
sions, ideological divisions, pressures of the market, and the political aspira-
tions of the times of their publication (Apaydin 2005; Brummett 1995, 2007;
Göçek 1998; Öncü 1999, 2001). A language of binaries dominates these
works, while the content of such binaries has shifted along with the political
era under scrutiny.
Ottoman and Turkish cartoons of the early twentieth century, for instance,
have been analyzed in terms of their representation of gendered dilemmas
of modernization and secularization (Brummett 1995; Gencer 2013). Ayhan
Akman (1997) uses the term “cultural schizophrenia” to address the ambiva-
lences of identity along this gendered binary of East and West in Turkish
cartoons from the formative years of the Turkish Republic (1920–1950). It
is noteworthy that this period coincided with the years of single-party rule
and the violent repression of oppositional voices under the presidency of the
founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and his successor, İsmet İnönü. Accord-
ingly, the satire of the era included social realist perspectives along with
Occidentalist images. One significant example of the former is Marko Pasha,
a popular weekly satirical magazine published in the late 1940s (Cantek
2001). Referring to the fact that its writers were often sued and its content
frequently censored, the cover page of Marko Pasha would feature half-
humorous statements such as “published when not censored” or “published
when writers not in custody” (Dinç 2012, 333).
The social realism of Marko Pasha anticipated the didactic, moral, and
politicized language that dominated political satire after Turkey’s transition
to a multiparty regime in 1950. Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s witnessed
Cold War–related ideological divides and political unrest among politicized
youth, the rapid and uneven growth of its urban centers through waves of
 Political Humor in the Face of Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Turkey 109

immigration from rural areas, and the increasing power of a developmen-

talist-leftist ideology in the culture industry. In the context of these devel-
opments, the popular cartoon magazines reframed the topic of the national
identity crisis through the lens of class inequality in the cities. They mocked
corrupt right-wing politicians and openly unjust politics, while also criticiz-
ing American imperialism (Tunc 2006), and the immigrants from the Eastern
and Anatolian provinces of Turkey (Öncü 1999).
The military coup of 1980 led to the execution, arrest, and imprisonment
of many political figures and youth, as well a ban on critical media, including
some of the most popular cartoon magazines. Yet following Latin American
models, it also marked the beginnings of the first “golden age” of neoliberal-
ism buttressed by “an extreme version of the structural adjustment recipe of
the World Bank” both while under military rule and after (Boratav 2016, 3).
Pressured by both authoritarian rule and market forces, political humorists
faced the dilemma of being “as ambiguous as possible, to avoid lawsuits,
yet . . . explicit enough to guarantee . . . popularity among readers and reach
a wider community” (Dinç 2012, 333). As a consequence, the new humor
magazines that mushroomed during the post-1980 cultural environment
became increasingly involved in the representation of everyday life as distant
from—and even in opposition to—political issues (Apaydin 2005; Öncü
2001). They pushed the limits of taste and decorum through the use of sexual
imagery and coarse language.
Many of the Gezi Park protesters belonged to the so-called “apolitical
generation” (Pfannkuch 2013) who were born in the 1980s and 1990s, grow-
ing up in an era of neoliberal individualism, consumerism, and new com-
munication technologies such as television, cell phones, and the Internet.
They were considered to be tech-savvy but intellectually and ideologically
impoverished, although their childhood coincided also with times of new
political tensions and identity politics.5 For instance, the 1980s and 1990s
were also marked by the rise of Islamism in urban centers, on the one hand,
and, on the other, a Kurdish separatist movement that led to violent clashes
between Kurdish guerrilla forces and the Turkish military in the southeast
provinces.
The victory of the neo-conservative AKP in the general election of 2002
signaled a new turn in neoliberal politics and the state regulation of ethnic
and religious difference in Turkey, as well as in the content of political satire.
Forming Turkey’s first majority government since the 1990s, and then going
on to enjoy what was to become the longest unbroken run of power since the
pre–Second World War establishment period, the AKP ideologically posi-
tioned itself against the “secularist” Republican regime through a nostalgic
framing of the Ottoman Empire as an Islamic model of pluralism. The first
decade of AKP rule was marked by EU-led reforms in relation to minority
110 Seçil Dağtaş

and women’s rights (Babül 2015), neoliberal restructuring of politics and

economy in articulation with Islam-oriented populism (Boratav 2016; Tuğal
2009), and a short-lived peace process with the Kurds (Yavuz and Ozcan
2006; Yeğen 2007). Yet it was the Islamist-secular struggle over the symbols
of the nation that humorists and cartoonists turned their attention to most in
this process.
Cartoons in daily newspapers and humor magazines took an explicit politi-
cal stance on either side of the dichotomy in the context of the demise of strict
secularism through the removal of the headscarf ban in official contexts
and a series of trials against a group of upper-rank officers, journalists, and
lawmakers who were accused of being members of a secularist clandestine
organization called “the Ergenekon” (Dinç 2012; Kardaş 2012; Vanderlippe
and Batur 2013).6 In his study of the cartoons about Ergenekon trials in both
Islamist and secularist newspapers, Kardaş (2012) identifies two competing
political representations: “The critics for whom the suspects are [in Necati
Polat’s words] democratically minded, freedom-loving, secularist intellectu-
als, who merely have been images of opposition in the face of an increasingly
‘Islamo-fascist’ government” and the supporters who consider the accused
state elites as “dark forces bent on destroying democracy or the country’s
sociocultural fabric” (Kardaş 2012, 218).7 Vanderlippe and Batur’s (2013)
study of the use of the iconic images of the headscarf and the light bulb (the
AKP’s logo) in political cartoons of the 2000s presents a polarized view of
society along similar lines.
Indeed, the secularist/Islamist binary and its historical reference points
(urban/rural, modern/backward, leftist/rightist, etc.) have had concrete effects
on citizens’ images of themselves and their constitutive other. As shown by
recent analyses of contemporary humor magazines such as Leman, Uykusuz,
and Penguen, the new generation of cartoonists tends to present itself as
“outside the system”: as oppositional, anti-statist, anti-imperialist . . . anti-
fascist, anti-media, marginal, egalitarian, populist, and humanist” as well as
representing “the language of the street” (Apaydin 2005, 110; see also Dinç
2012). Yet many end up reproducing this binary regime of signification by
targeting not only the government but also its supporters as their object of
ridicule. While echoing a public anxiety of a particular group of people about
an Islamicized Turkey, their satire does not necessarily question the excessive
statism and authoritarian tendencies that have dominated both Islamist and
secularist politics in Turkey.
The political aesthetics of the Gezi Park protests were not free of this
binary regime of signification. Many middle-class Turkish protesters who
joined the uprising after the escalation of police violence adopted a Kemal-
ist/secularist stance. They framed their participation as one of defending
Atatürk’s nation from reactionary forces by explicitly invoking Turkey’s
 Political Humor in the Face of Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Turkey 111

“war of liberation” in the 1920s, as in the popularized Gezi slogan, “Mustafa

Kemal’in askerleriyiz” (“We are the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal”). Popular
critical humor magazines were among the significant actors of the process, as
well. Their content matter touched directly on the uprisings and the govern-
ment responses to them through their already existing satirical frames and
metaphors. They also postulated a physical presence in the park as part of the
spectacle (Figure 4.1).
Yet the Gezi resistance included many other instances and styles of protest,
both humorous and serious, that overturned and complicated binary repre-
sentations of politics (Yildiz 2013). In fact, it was the heterogeneous, plural,
and carnivalesque components of these instances and styles that motivated
scholars and protesters to insist on the existence of a distinct “Gezi spirit”
(Gezi ruhu), unprecedented in Turkish political culture and surprising in its
effects (Eken 2014; Erensü and Karaman 2017; Inceoglu 2014; Karakayalí
and Yaka 2014). In the next section, I discuss how the political agency that
emerged in this process relates to previous models of political satire both in
terms of its content and its form. I suggest that the shift of satire from the
circumscribed realm of humor magazines and political cartoons to the multi-
farious street politics and online publics demands an analysis that attends not
only to the effects of humor but also to its embodied and disembodied modes
of circulation.

Figure 4.1  Covers of Humor Magazines being Displayed in a Makeshift “Revolution

Museum” Set up between Taksim Square and Gezi Park. Photo credit: Can Altay, Istanbul
2013.
112 Seçil Dağtaş

HUMOR AS RESISTANCE

In the heyday of the Gezi uprisings, a photograph circulated around social

media depicting three protesters who had turned their backs to the camera,
wearing funnels on their heads as makeshift helmets (Figure 4.2). These fun-
nel helmets had handwritten “identification numbers” covered awkwardly
with water-bottle labels. The meaning of this performative act was not neces-
sarily intelligible to the general public. What was being referred to, however,
was clear to those who had seen images of, or who had directly witnessed,
police covering their helmets with labels during the protests in order to avoid
being identified while in action. Embodying the signs of police violence in
a ridiculous manner, the protesters were making a statement about the irony
that the primary agents of Turkish law enforcement were acting illegally in
their treatment of protesters.
Invoked in this statement was a motif associated with the works of a popu-
lar cartoonist from Penguen magazine, Yiğit Özgür. Özgür uses the image
of the funnel on the head to represent “mad” people and invert stereotypical
impressions of insanity in his drawings. These drawings often contain jokes
that emphasize the out-of-place yet intelligent actions of people who are
considered mentally ill according to social norms. Playing with the thin line
between “madness” and “intelligence,” his cartoons often expose the incon-
gruity of very serious moments of life as a source of amusement, power, and

Figure 4.2  Funnel Helmets. Source: http://www.turkhaberler.net.

 Political Humor in the Face of Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Turkey 113

laughter. The performative embodiment of the spirit of these cartoons on the

part of the Gezi protesters further politicizes this incongruity: it encourages
a mode of resistance that marks a denial of sanity when everything about the
state becomes utterly insane.
A similar form of resistance can be identified in another example from
around the same time. In a stencil placed on a wall during protests on one
of the busiest streets of Taksim, then–prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan was
depicted smiling and posing for protesters to take a photograph as “a memory
of the resistance” (Direniş Hatırası) (Figure 4.3). Inviting the protesters
to come under Erdoğan’s arm, the stencil mocked Erdoğan’s infamously
condescending and patronizing rhetoric in his public statements about the
protesters, in which he either scolded them and called them an “extremist
fringe,” or denied them agency (by calling on parents to take their children
off the streets and teach them how to be better citizens). In the funnel-helmet

Figure 4.3  Direniş Hatırası. Photo credit: Ersan Ozer, via http://twicsy.com/i/fYHGLd.
114 Seçil Dağtaş

example, the protesters’ satirical identification with oppressive power blurred

the difference between absurdity and reality. The portrayal of this friendlier,
patronizing act, on the other hand, located its humor in the very disjuncture
between the real and its impossible replica.
In both examples, parody serves as an aesthetic of wit, bemusement, and
playfulness modeled on the original (Marcus 1988, 71), yet overturning it by
calling its terms into question. As the young protesters laugh—and invite oth-
ers to laugh at the ridiculousness of the “real”—they also reveal the latter’s
objectionable nature. They “laugh,” in George Bataille’s words, “in passing
very abruptly . . . from a world in which everything is firmly qualified, in
which everything is given as stable within a generally stable order, into a
world in which our assurance is overwhelmed, in which we perceive that
this assurance was deceptive” (1986, 90). Mimicry in these cases does more
than express what has already been cultivated in other political domains. It
fosters a vocabulary through which the protesters are able to distinguish their
voice from that of the government, even when they convincingly imitate the
latter. While giving what they mock credence in some way, their humorous
moves also render the unexpected appearance of bodies in public impervious
to labeling, categorization, and appropriation by those in power.
The strategy of mimicking the “real” to highlight its absurdity is not unique
to Gezi humor. It resonates with recent forms of political satire that anthro-
pologists have studied in both Western and non-Western contexts, focusing
on the alternative spaces of expression opened up by news parody programs
and acts of mocking political and economic elites (Bernal 2013; Haugerud
2013; Klumbytė 2014; Molé 2013; Webber 2013). One pioneering example
is Boyer and Yurchak’s (2010) comparative analysis of “stiob,” a particular
genre of parody characterized by overidentification and hypernormalization
of the dominant political culture in late-socialist and late-liberal contexts.
Analyzing examples from late Soviet and contemporary American media
such as The Daily Show and The Yes Men, Boyer and Yurchak (2010, 183)
relate stiob’s emergence to the monopolization of media by markets and
government institutions, ideological uniformity of political news analysis,
and generic normalization of political representation. While providing insight
into the authoritarian underpinnings of both liberal and socialist polities, they
argue that stiob-style parody does not merely express sarcasm and cynicism.
Through its repetitive, imitative, and citational strategies, it exposes the
incongruity between the discursive and representational field of ideology and
“the real world relations that [such a field] sought to organize” (2010, 210).
Gezi humor emerged in a comparable context of increasing repression,
policing, and recursive formalization of the airwave and print media to the
point of severe restraints in the realm of “realist” critique. Unlike the Turkish
political cartoons that I briefly reviewed above, however, it also benefited
 Political Humor in the Face of Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Turkey 115

from the alternative digital media platforms, which have proliferated since
the late 1990s. Many participants of the Gezi protests, for instance, were
readers of satirical news websites such as Zaytung (the Turkish equivalent of
The Onion), which, like stiob, ironically adopted the language and format of
news media to emphasize the absurdity of the reality it pretended to portray.
Youth in particular were accustomed to mobilizing Facebook groups, Twitter
accounts, and crowd-sourced dictionaries (e.g., Ekşi Sözlük (Sour Diction-
ary)) to share jokes, funny videos, images, cartoons, and memes.8
Although primarily a source of entertainment, for at least a decade these
venues have provided an alternative space for accessing and express-
ing perspectives lacking in the mainstream media and news channels. As
Boyer and Yurchak (2010) suggested for contexts where news content has
become significantly more monopolized and strictly regulated, social media
has allowed for critical engagement not only with reality but also with the
very act of representing it, that is, the realm of misrepresentation, censor-
ship, and self-censorship. For instance, the protesters mobilized both social
media and street dissent to mock the decision of local channel CNN Turk
to broadcast a documentary about penguins while Taksim was inundated
with tear gas on May 31, 2013. Images of penguins superimposed on the
aggression in the streets (Figure 4.4) transformed an effort by the media
to conceal reality into a means of exposing this concealment. By inducing
laughter, the “resisting penguin” (Figure 4.5) destabilized the truth claims
of “real” news reportage.

Figure 4.4  Penguins in Gezi Resistance. Source: http:​//bia​net.o​rg/bi​anet/​toplu​m/148​

061-t​urkiy​e-bas​ka-bi​r-med​yayi-​umut-​ediyo​r.
116 Seçil Dağtaş

Figure 4.5  Resisting Penguin Stencil. Source: Via http:​//bir​gun.n​et/ha​ber/g​ezi-s​ureci​

nde-p​engue​n-yay​inlam​ayanl​ara-s​uc-du​yurus​u-450​7.htm​l0.

Several scholars have focused on the deployment of social media for

political activism in the post-2011 wave of global revolt, and discussed its
potentials and limitations in fostering political mobilization (Anagondahalli
and Khamis 2014; Juris 2012; Khamis and Vaughn 2013; Webber 2013).
Similar to the findings of studies on uprisings in Egypt and Greece, as well
as the Occupy movement, the Gezi protesters used social media for multiple
purposes: to provide logistical information; to document the police violence
that often went uncovered in the news; to spread political messages to wider
and diversified audiences, in order to increase national and international pres-
sure on the state—all the while also sharing jokes about the resistance. The
political influence of social media in the immediate growth and publicizing
of the movement was undeniable, so much so that Erdoğan called it “the
worst menace to society” in one of his early statements about the uprisings
(Letsch 2013).
The digital sphere of communication poses challenges for the resistance
as well. Its reliance on “communicative capitalism” (Dean 2009), as some
scholars have argued in the U.S. context, has a taming and distancing effect.
These new technologies tend to silence radical voices and create an illusion
of action in inaction, while also enabling a culture of “oddity, mischief, and
antagonism” (Phillips and Milner 2017). Aware of these challenges, some
Gezi protesters invoked the distinction between online activism and street
 Political Humor in the Face of Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Turkey 117

politics as a counterpart to the well-known dichotomy in Turkish political

discourses between the elites and ordinary people. For instance, responding
to Erdoğan’s accusation that the Gezi protesters did not represent the major-
ity of the Turkish people, one text in graffiti read, “Klavye başında değil,
meydanlarda varız! Marjinal grup değil, orijinal halkız!” (“We aren’t at the
keyboard, we are in the squares! We are not a marginal group, we are the
original folk!”)
This comparison between street politics and online activism is noteworthy
for a number of reasons. At one level, it is an attempted inversion that tar-
gets Erdoğan’s populism as its object of criticism. It invokes the culturally
rooted binary models that position the Westernized, educated, secularist,
modern citizens of Turkey against the traditional, authentic, Muslim people
symbolically aligned with the “East,” upon whose will Erdoğan’s regime
bases its authority. Instead of deconstructing the binary, the graffiti inverts it
and expresses the protesters’ claim to inhabit “the folk.”9 Yet we could also
read this graffiti as critical commentary directed at the protesters themselves.
By valuing the physical presence in the streets over social-media activism,
it incorporates the relatively more recent characteristics of modern lifestyles,
such as the pervasive use of computers and the Internet, into the familiar and
culturally circumscribed realm of signification concerning modernity and
tradition.
The hierarchy of actions suggested in these comparisons also poses the
materiality of resistance as the locus of its subversive potential. As the exam-
ples of the funnel-helmet and Direniş Hatırası (memory of the resistance)
show, certain humorous performances during the Gezi events were not merely
discursive, but instead operated within a realm of performativity, embodi-
ment, and affect. This was especially the case for the marches held regularly
during and in the aftermath of the protests. For instance, the Pride March of
2013, which took place shortly after the eviction of the Gezi encampments,
had the highest number of participants (40,000 people) up to that point. This
significant increase was accompanied by the use of various slogans, banners,
and spectacles that made direct reference to the Gezi resistance and its humor-
ous symbols—even the aforementioned penguin made a cameo appearance
(Figure 4.6).
The funnel-helmet has likewise become a recurrent motif in protest
marches to address the absurdities of political and economic governance in
post-Gezi Turkey. Members of the nurses’ union protesting the Ministry of
Health’s policy to increase their unpaid workload (Figure 4.7), environmen-
talists and inhabitants protesting against the municipality’s plan to institute
an incinerator facility in a district of Bursa (Figure 4.8), and university stu-
dents concerned about Turkey’s ongoing state of emergency since the failed
coup attempt in 2016 (discussed later) all used this motif to express their
118 Seçil Dağtaş

Figure 4.6  Gay Penguin’ from the Pride Parade, Istanbul, 2013. Source: Via http:​//
cdn​.list​elist​.com/​wp-co​ntent​/uplo​ads/2​013/0​7/onu​r-yur​uyusu​-2013​-yagm​ur-al​tinda​-yuru​
yen-g​ay-pe​nguen​.png.​

grievances in public (Figure 4.9).10 They mobilized the purpose and style
of their protest as a testimony to the departure, for both the regime and its
opponents, from the normal order of politics in Turkey and the expectations
that are inherent to this order.

Figure 4.7  Funnel Helmet Protest by the Nurses’ Union. Source: http:​//hab​ercin​iz.bi​
z/hem​sirel​erden​-mask​eli-p​rotes​to-vu​rur-y​uze-i​fades​i-yin​e-mi-​mesai​-bita​nesi-​36464​94h.
h​tm.
 Political Humor in the Face of Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Turkey 119

Figure 4.8  Funnel Helmet Protest by Environmentalists and Inhabitants of Bursa.

Source: Via http:​//www​.yeni​donem​.com.​tr/ga​leri/​bursa​-da-h​unili​-prot​esto-​232/.​

Anthropological studies of satire tend to locate humor in its discursive

genre, semantic elements or textual presence. The humor in these public
demostrations, however, depend heavily on the bodily repetition, recording,
and dissemination of jokes, the affective and sensorial domain of laughter

Figure 4.9  Funnel Helmet Protest by Students of Mersin University. Source: Via https​://
od​atv.c​om/so​nunda​-sahi​den-d​elird​ik-02​11161​200.h​tml.
120 Seçil Dağtaş

they induce, and the visual culture that is produced around them. Turning
the street (and politics) into a carnivalesque playground, they mark “a tem-
porary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order”
(Bakhtin 1984, 10). Yet this liberation has its social and political limits,
which often go unaddressed in Bakhtinian analyses of the Gezi events that
emphasize its alternative, participatory, material, and transgressive features
(Erensü and Karaman 2017; Görkem 2015; Karakayalí and Yaka 2014).11
As the previous examples from the Gezi protests attest, even in its most
subversive forms, humor does not stand outside the serious world that it
seeks to challenge and reverse, but instead emerges from, relies on, and
draws its power from it. On many other occasions, it simply sustains this
world through its disciplinary and differentiating mechanisms and turns into
symbolic violence.

HUMOR AS SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE

Much like the critics of online activism, some constituents of the Gezi resis-
tance found the lighthearted language of the youth who were involved in the
protests to be lacking direction, organization, and thus depoliticizing and
pacifying. “Yes, we laugh at these jokes. They lift the spirit,” one protester
told me in the tent of a Leninist organization in Gezi Park before being
evicted. “But their effect is ephemeral. We need more sustainable and serious
means in order to bring about change.” Feminist criticisms were concerned
less with the use of humor or its temporariness than with its content. During
the protests, feminist and queer groups painted over sexist and homophobic
swear words and jokes with purple spray paint. “These jokes reflect how nor-
malized sexism is in our society,” explained Nur, a self-identified anarchist
feminist. “You cannot expect people who are socialized into this culture to
have a sense of humor that is untouched by misogyny and patriarchy. If we
want transformation, we should start from ourselves, our own language and
habits.”
These two perspectives represent contradictory visions of politics, both of
which challenge the unconditional celebration of humor as “impossible in
ordinary life” (Bakhtin 1984, 16) and therefore subversive. Nur’s comments
echo the anthropological insight that humor is deeply embedded in the gen-
dered routines of everyday life (Carty and Musharbash 2008). It is a way of
inhabiting the ordinary and a means of establishing social ties among those
who share the joke at the expense of those who are subjected to it. From this
perspective, what some consider ephemeral may, in fact, be the very source of
continuity, an effective means of connecting the sense of extra-ordinariness
or interruption of the normal to ordinary means of communication that
 Political Humor in the Face of Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Turkey 121

structure the everyday. The crucial point is not to lose sight of the fact that
the everyday itself is no safe haven. It is organized around preexisting power
relations and social divisions along lines of gender, class, age, and religiosity.
Cyberspace is not free from these real-life boundaries either, since its users
are still members of society. Far from transgressing social boundaries, social
media often reflects, reproduces, and accentuates existing social divides
(Daniels 2009; Nakamura 2002; Phillips and Milner 2017) as it also creates
new digital divisions between those who have access to technology and those
who do not (Gurel 2015).
During the Gezi protests, sexist and homophobic jokes became addressable
through action and calls for self-reflexivity because such criticisms were part
of an already existing struggle on the part of feminist and LGBTQ activists
in Turkey. The forms of alignment and solidarity during Gezi opened up a
space for these activists to have their voices heard to an even greater degree.
The jokes could be problematized on the grounds that they prevented a poten-
tial solidarity between the diverse constituents of the Gezi resistance (for
instance, between feminist and LGBTQ activists and male-dominated soccer
fan groups). This was not so much the case for other forms of differentiation
registered by Gezi humor, such as those between supporters and opponents
of the resistance.
Perin Gurel (2015) has drawn attention to the persistence of gender and
class hierarchies in Gezi humor by analyzing what she calls “auntie humor.”
Auntie humor involves jokes that evoke the stereotypical Turkish “auntie”
(teyze), a “semiliterate and hopelessly provincial” motherly figure preoccu-
pied with food and domesticity (Gurel 2015, 3). The jokes appeared during
the Gezi events with the participation of self-proclaimed “mothers” in pro-
tests following Erdoğan’s patronizing call that parents should take their chil-
dren off the streets (see earlier). They featured images of mothers protesting
in the streets (Figures 4.10 and 4.11), preparing home-made antidotes from
lemon and milk, as well as satirical complaints about the “excessive pres-
sure” mothers used while offering their home-made food to young protesters
in the park (Gurel 2015, 16). In one Twitter message, a Photoshopped image
of lacework was placed on a picture of AKM (Atatürk Cultural Centre), the
iconic opera building in Taksim Square that was to be destroyed in the urban
renewal plan. The message read, “Mothers have arrived at the resistance.
Tomorrow morning when we get up, we may find AKM’s façade to have a
motherly touch.”
These stereotypical representations point to incongruity as the source of
laughter, shaped by the multifaceted relationship between the producers,
users, and objects of humor. In this context, what connects the makers and
users of humor is the fact that they share not only the joke but also the dis-
tance they establish, through the joke, between themselves and the object of
122 Seçil Dağtaş

Figure 4.10  Resisting Mother. Source: Via https​://ww​w.evr​ensel​.net/​haber​/3351​33/ge​

zi-pr​otest​olari​nin-s​apanl​i-tey​zesi-​tutuk​landi​.

Figure 4.11  V for Teyzetta. Source: As shared on Twitter by @sarpapak81.

 Political Humor in the Face of Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Turkey 123

ridicule. In other words, humor allows its actors to construct themselves as

true representatives of the resistance with the necessary means, education,
and language to produce the joke, while those who are laughed at supposedly
lack the cultural capital to understand them (Gurel 2015).
Following Gurel, one could suggest that auntie humor utilize the same
stereotypes and binary models that have informed the satirical portrayals of
AKP supporters since the early 2000s. However, whereas auntie humor drew
in-group boundaries among Gezi protesters by attributing a cute, harmless
naivety to its others-within, jokes about the AKP voters constructed them as
an out-group, “the ultimate other.” That is why they tended to be more openly
humiliating and offensive. On the one side, there were sympathetic represen-
tations of Gezi protesters who used “disproportionate intelligence” against
the disproportionate police force (Gurel 2015, 6); on the other were ranged
the supporters of the government whose slogans and banners during a pro-
AKP rally were characterized as banal and unimaginative, becoming a source
of laughter for that very reason.12 For instance, one of the popular slogans of
the 2013 Pride March was the nonsense word “hülooğğ,” which originated
from an exclamation of excitement and support for Erdoğan expressed by a
headscarf-wearing woman during the pro-AKP rally. The video-clip of this
moment circulated widely in social media and commented upon as a means
of exemplifying the ludicrousness and ignorance of AKP supporters. Build-
ing on the already existing frames of the secular/religious divide in Turkish
political satire, the exclusionary language of humor fostered the societal
polarization upon which the authority and power of the AKP government
depended.

CONCLUSION

Humor during the Gezi protests engendered a language that was unexpected
yet relatable, entertaining yet deeply political. Immersing the “ordinary”
into the “extraordinary” moments of violence and resistance, this language
compelled its users and audience—depending on the specific context in
which it was enacted and the material-aesthetic forms it took—to rework
existing social frameworks of political expression through mimicry, inver-
sion, subversion, and reproduction. Far from being an ephemeral addition to
realist critique, humor became politics itself: a micro-social, self-conscious,
embodied site of resistance that drew people together while demarcating dif-
ferences. Its context of production (e.g., street protests), modes of expression
(mimicry, irony, satire), forms of mediation (cartoons, slogans, graffiti), and
means of circulation (humor magazines, TV, social media) were all bound to
124 Seçil Dağtaş

the existing political divides as well as the emergent techniques of neoliberal

governance, subjectivity, and subjection.
Following the eviction of protesters from Gezi Park, gray paint—the color
of the state—covered up the slogans on the walls of Taksim. The spirit of
hope and dissent that emerged with the Gezi revolt soon was replaced by
new challenges, as Erdoğan’s Turkey gradually marched toward autocracy.
The urban renewal plans for Gezi Park did not materialize, yet the AKP
government furthered its neoliberal urban agenda as is evidenced by the
ongoing pressure on other green city spaces, the destruction of forests for the
construction of a third Bosphorus bridge and the new international airport,
and the privatization and redevelopment of public lands in Istanbul’s central
and coastal locations.
The political climate has also become increasingly repressive. Following
the election of Erdoğan as the twelfth president of Turkey in 2014, Turkey
witnessed two general elections in 2015 (the second restoring the AKP’s
parliamentary majority, which it lost after the first election), the end of the
peace process with the Kurds, and a referendum for a regime change from a
parliamentary to presidential system that would grant the president sweeping
executive powers. The referendum was held during an ongoing nationwide
state of emergency, declared in response to the failed coup attempt in the
summer of 2016, and has since enabled a series of purges and the imprison-
ment of thousands of journalists, academics, politicians, and public employ-
ees on the grounds of treason and terrorism. Since the Gezi events, the AKP
has also increased its control over print and airwave media, and actively
mobilized the “antagonistic and mischievous Internet culture” to quell dis-
sident voices on social media.13
Yet despite this crackdown, Gezi-inspired graphics and jokes have con-
tinued to prevail in other public venues that range from students’ university
graduation ceremonies to smaller scale rallies such as the Pride parade or
the funnel-helmet protests (described earlier) to social media campaigns
for elections and the referendum (Parla 2017). Along with the place-based
social movements and alternative political places also empowered by Gezi’s
pluralist politics (Erensü and Karaman 2017, 32), these jokes attempt to
articulate ways of being (and being with) which are rendered unspeakable
under neoliberal capitalism and the recurrent authoritarianism of the nation
state. They insist that not taking politics seriously can itself be a political act,
but one that is not devoid of tension, power, and violence. As such, humor-
ous activism testifies that politics is, in the words of Judith Butler (2012),
already in the ordinary, “in the home, on the streets, in the neighborhoods,
and in those virtual spaces that are unbound by the architecture of the public
square” (2012, 118).
 Political Humor in the Face of Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Turkey 125

NOTES

1. This chapter is a revised version of the article, “Down with Some Things!:
Humor as Politics and Politics of Humor.” Published in Etnofoor in 2016 [28(1):
11—34].
2. I borrow the term “aunties” from Perin Gurel (2015) to refer to traditional
domestic Turkish women.
3. The two modalities are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The anarchist
soccer fan group, Çarşı, for instance, presented a form of resistance that benefited
from both humor and guerrilla-type struggle. The overwhelming use of humor in the
protests, however, pointed for the most part toward a “non-violent” form of dissent
undertaken by a wider array of actors.
4. For similar examples of neoliberal urbanism elsewhere, see Smith (2002) and
Kanna (2012).
5. The frequency of spelling mistakes in Gezi graffiti as in the slogan “Kahrolsun
bağzı şeyler!” are commonly addressed as an indicator of this cultural and intellectual
impoverishment. Yet unlike the negative, reproving commentaries about them prior
to Gezi, commentaries during the events regarded such mistakes as the very embodi-
ment of the incongruity that humor relied on and revealed.
6. The Kurdish question is less visible in such magazines and also in scholarly
discussions on humor in Turkey. For an original study of how humorous video
sketches in Kurdish television channels play with and mock the stereotypical rep-
resentations of Kurds as bandits, smugglers, and terrorists in Turkish mainstream
media, see Çeliker (2009).
7. See Polat (2011: 4) for the quoted piece.
8. Ekşi Sözlük is a collaborative hypertext dictionary launched in 1999. It is one
of the biggest online communities in Turkey, with over 400,000 users, and has been
utilized for information-sharing on various topics ranging from politics, sports, sexu-
ality, and science, as well as communicating personal and political views on these
matters.
9. For an analysis of the relationship between secularism and populist politics in
Turkey during the rule of the AKP, see Tambar (2009).
10. To underscore their visual protest, university students made the following
statement: “We’ve finally gone crazy. We put an end to the rule of rationality in the
face of illogical actions of the AKP regime.”
11. According to Bakhtin (1984), the carnival is on the periphery of and opposes
official life. The sense of solidarity that emerges in carnivalesque contexts is not
based on the unifying sameness or commonality of already formed social identities,
described through Durkheim’s notion of “collective effervescence.” Instead, it cel-
ebrates the difference and heterogeneity in embodied forms and involves a temporary
suspension of and departure from social norms by invoking abundance, madness, and
mockery.
12. Organized at the time of the Gezi Park protests by the government, this rally
took place in the officially sanctioned demonstration area in the outskirts of Istanbul
and aimed to demonstrate a triumphant public appearance on the part of Erdoğan.
126 Seçil Dağtaş

Many Gezi protesters referred to it as an artificial event to which people were bussed
in, for which public transportation was provided free, and at which police were help-
ful and friendly.
13. The AKP regime formed a 6,000-strong team from its youth branches and
municipal administrations in September 2013, and hired media experts in the years
after for this reason. Meanwhile, another pro-AKP network of social media users—
known among the resistance circles as “the AK Trolls”—started a new mission of
intimidating online critics from anonymous accounts controlled by humans and bots.
The International Press Institute’s report on Turkey features the critics’ assertion
that “these ‘AK Trolls’ have become a de facto, online government army capable of
manipulating public opinion through anonymous accounts—an army that regularly
engages in harassment and intimidation” (Ellis 2015, 23).

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 Part II

POST-NETWORK
NEOLIBERAL POLITICS
 Chapter 5

From Irritated Hostages

to Silly Citizens
Infotainment Satire as Ludic Surveillance
Marc-Olivier Castagner and David Grondin

Difficile est satyram non scribere. (“It is hard not to write a satire”)
(Sloterdijk 1989, 199)

In the new paradigm of infotainment (Thussu 2007), satirical infotainers of

the likes of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert
Report, Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show and Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal,
gradually became not only trusted political commentators in the American
political landscape but “idiotic” watchdogs uncovering truths and sorting out
political “bullshit” and “fakeness” through irony. Some have gone, others
have arisen, but in terms of online and remarkable success, one has stood
out in the past three years: John Oliver. The British stand-up comedian who
started as “fake news” correspondent succeeding Colbert at The Daily Show
(when he launched The Colbert Report in 2005) and who admirably tem-
porarily served as summer replacement for Stewart in summer 2013 finally
obtained a chance to host his own show on HBO in 2014, Last Week Tonight
(hereinafter LWT).
Our chapter will look at the role and medium of televisual political satire
as political and media surveillance from the different masks worn by Oliver
as infotainer, culture warrior, journalist, (neo)kynic, parrêsiast, and, finally,
as silly citizen. In order to do so, we first explain, with Pierre Bourdieu,
Johann Huizinga, and Stuart Hall, the (tele)mediated context in which John
Oliver comes to evolve, that of the “culture wars,” characterized by ludic
and violent backgrounds and recurring (tele)visual media fights. The “culture
war” in which Oliver, like the other “fake” and “real” news anchors, is part
of, asks of all its actors not only to pursue strategic media visibility for their
133
134 Marc-Olivier Castagner and David Grondin

particular ideological positioning, but to control the production and diffusion

of symbolic systems in the U.S. society. Each polemicist ought to fight one
another to establish and enforce his/her own definition of the social world,
and mobilize his/her audience accordingly. As we will see, in order to ensure
their success as infotainers, each and everyone use the same basic (battle)
field tactic: speaking in the name of “middle America,” the “silent majority,”
or more generally, “Average Joe.” In this set, Oliver the infotainer, like his
antagonists, continually refers to Average Joe, who is simultaneously rea-
soned, sensitive, and moral. But he is not only referring to Average Joe: like
his antagonist, he performs, he pantomimes Average Joe. In our subsequent
reading based on Peter Sloterdijk (and to a lesser extent, Michel Foucault),
this conscious pantomime performance by the news clown is what we will
later refer to as “silly citizenship,” a truth-telling mode understood here as
“ludic surveillance” which is directly inspired from the Ancient cynic phi-
losophy tradition, and more specifically to the “dog philosophy” associated
with Diogenes of Sinope.1 It purposively seeks to promote earnestness, hon-
esty, and integrity in the political sphere and “see[s] dog philosophy for what
it is, democracy’s best friend” (Barcenas 2007, 102). In this order, frankly
speaking as the “irritated hostages” of the cultural wars in U.S. society, the
many American constituents always being spoken to and spoken for as tools
to be mobilized, Oliver reproduces both the infotainment game he is in and
deconstructs it at the same time. He performs his audience in order to negate
the infotainers their mimetic power emerging from their discrete imperson-
ation; he relays news to reveal the rules of the game of infotainment, and so
doing, negates its subtle violence while empowering the American citizenry.
After rendering visible the performance’s staging and artifices used by
Oliver as infotainer through isolating the three formatted segments of his TV
show structure, and referring principally to the second season (S02E01 to
S02E35) aired from February 8, 2015, to November 22, 2015,2 we will aim to
situate Oliver’s performance of silly citizenship as primal therapeutics in an
era of generalized (political, social, cultural) cynicism using Peter Sloterdi-
jk’s psycho-political arguments. Overall, the silly citizenship as performed by
Oliver will resonate as a call to fundamentally transform U.S. tele-mediated
democracy.

CULTURE WARS AND INFOTAINMENT BATTLEFIELDS

The context set for infotainment shows in the United States is certainly pecu-
liar and warrants a closer look to understand the performance and impact
of John Oliver as an infotainer. As many political observers have noted
throughout the years, U.S. society is prone, especially since the mid-1950s, to
 From Irritated Hostages to Silly Citizens 135

recurring “culture wars,” which are to be understood as reiterated attempts of

ideological polarization of U.S. society, propagated by and for the U.S. con-
servative movement(s) (Gagnon and Goulet-Cloutier 2010; Grondin 2012). If
the term itself is well present in the American political-media-landscape since
the Cold War, following Davidson (2016), we can understand the present
“culture war” as a product of both the neoliberal policies (hence conservative
economics and individualized responsibility) and the moral hazards (meaning
“progressive social policies”) that characterized the Clinton years, combined
with the rise of digital media, Internet, corporate TV deregulation, and the
birth of infotainment.
For Davidson, at the end of the 1990s, after years of “Clintonomics” and
political triangulation appealing to the swing voters, both the right and the
left were deeply unsatisfied: for the former, race riots, crack and AIDS “epi-
demics,” gay rights movements—both in and outside the military—the rise
of “trash” popular culture TV (Jerry Springer anyone?), the “glass-ceiling
shattering” and positive discrimination (“quotas”) moves by the administra-
tion, the Whitewater and Monicagate “scandals,” were all understood as
symptoms of a deeper moral decline; for the latter, unidirectional neoliberal
and globalizing economics, the fight against the deficit, NAFTA, deregu-
lation in telecoms—as well as enforced humanitarianism from Europe to
Africa—were seen as signs of the love affair between Washington and pow-
erful market-corporate elites. If the climate was tense, the war declaration
was made explicit as early as the 1992 GOP Convention in Pat Buchanan
well-known speech:

There is a religious war going on in this country . . . It is a cultural war as critical
to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself—for this war is for the
soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Clin-
ton [Bill and Hillary] are on the other side! . . . take back our cities, take back
our culture, and take back our country—block by block!! (Davidson 2016, 23)

From now on, every local issue were framed as national issues, every Repub-
lican and Democrat politicians were on a permanent campaigning mode, and
the U.S. polity in general was firmly polarized by a “Grand Canyon divides
between black and white, rich and poor, straight and gay, pro-choice and
pro-life, male and female” (2016, 26). No need to say that both subsequent
administrations—the “neo-conservative” Bush and the “Kenyan Commie”
Obama—would simply exacerbate the thing. Surely, this polemic climate,
found across a series of battlefields—political, social, cultural, economic,
judicial, and so on—invited itself to television shows produced by increas-
ingly concentrated private media networks looking for niche demographics,
and especially in infotainment television shows.
136 Marc-Olivier Castagner and David Grondin

The culture war performed in infotainment programs therefore features

polemicists and ideologues of all stripes, from Al Sharpton, Bill Maher, and
Jesse Jackson to Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Alex Jones, who act as
news anchors, experts, and pundits, and who aim to maximize their media
exposure on television (e.g., CNN, MSNBC, ABC, HBO, FOX News). To con-
strue the manifestations of the culture war in the battlefield of infotainment, and
identify the warriors in action, their tactics and the strategic goals, we propound
readers to, instead of revisiting Clausewitz, Machiavelli, or Sun Tzu, follow us
in a preliminary crossover between Bourdieusian sociology (Bourdieu 1977,
1994, 2001), British cultural studies (Hall et al. 1978), and the anthropology of
play and performance (Huizinga 1949; Turner 1982, 1988).
Inspired by Bourdieu, a (battle)field is defined by, for, and through its
actors all sharing the same dispositions (habitus) and competing one another
for the possession of the main capitals (symbolic, cultural, social, economic,
etc.)3 in such field. In Mark Salter’s words, “The field is a social space in
which actors compete, struggle, cooperate, and interact, according to particu-
lar ‘rules of the game’” (Salter 2013a, 3). Inside a field, the actors recognize
themselves as such through their positional consciousness (knowing their
location in the stratified field itself) and because they see themselves play-
ing the same game, following the same codes and rules, being part of the
same “intersubjective” universe. The field can be understood by analyzing
the internal hierarchies and the distribution of capitalizing resources circulat-
ing in the field—its “objective” dimension—as well as by analyzing actors’
perspective on the game and on their status—its “subjective” dimension.
On the one hand, the infotainment battlefield actors fight for specific inter-
convertible capitals (be they high ratings, budgets of production, media vis-
ibility, citations and fandom) which cannot be understood without seeing TV
production as intimately linked to quantifiable audience ratings (and hence-
forth, marketable time qua advertisement niches) (see, for instance, Lewis
and Miller 2002), especially since the acceleration of the deregulation in the
U.S. telecom industry, but more generally, as examples of neoliberal qual-
ity indexing through market mechanisms (see, for instance, Wendy Brown
(2011) analyzing the rise of neoliberal universities4). As Davidson recalls,
“As the media consolidated again and again under both Ronald Reagan and
Bill Clinton, local newscasts were under ever more pressure to deliver bigger,
better, faster, after one deregulated merger or hostile takeover or big buyout
after another. And that was just the beginning; the frenzy would go into maxi-
mum overdrive as the full impact of the Internet really hit” (2016, 101). In
the context of the culture war, the quest for niche marketable “demographics”
inevitably impacted on the game played. On the other hand, the fight in the
infotainment battlefield is governed by specific rules of the game performed
(inter)subjectively and that are not at first sight understood with reference to
 From Irritated Hostages to Silly Citizens 137

capitalizing on “demographics” alone, but with a look to the nature of the

(culture) war and the infotainment (battle)field, as a game itself.

Culture War as Elaborate Form of Playfulness

To speak of rules of the game in a (cultural) war implies assuming two things:
(1) on the one hand, a profound relationship between the ideas of “game” and
“war”; and (2) on the other hand, a close relationship between the produc-
tion/exchange of specific capitals and phenomena of violence (organized and
structured) that form the core of the tactics, and the prime effect, of this war.
Let us start with the first element: the close links between game and war, and
between the (“primitive”) highly ritualized forms of organized violence and
their modern cultural counterparts.
When he wrote Homo Ludens in the first half of the twentieth century,
Johan Huizinga understood play as the engine of culture: “Culture arises in
the form of play. . . . It is played from the very beginning. . . . By this we do
not mean that play turns into culture, rather that in its earliest phases culture
has the play-character, that it proceeds in the shape and the mood of play”
(1949, 46). With the “evolution” of culture/civilization, the play element was
sometimes magnified, other times absorbed (in cults of the sacred especially)
or camouflaged/denied (especially in “modern” war). But at the “start” of
Western civilization, with the Ancient Greeks especially, the element of
play remained visible in all the cultural formations, including war itself.
The Ancients had indeed two words for “play”: paideia, which referred to
the games and illusions of children; and agon, which elicited the organized
competitions among adults. Be it paideia or agon, Huizinga saw three basic
recurring features common to both: (1) it is voluntary, and not an imposed
task; (2) it is a serious attempt to escape, spatially and temporally, the ordi-
nary/empirical reality; (3) it is limited and circumscribed in an order that is
considered absolute and supreme.
In both cases, paideia or agon, “There is something at stake” that is always
more than simple material interests. “What is at stake” here can be studied
with reference to the many works in sociology, anthropology, or literary
studies, also interested in the primitive and modern “ritualistic” organiza-
tions of violence, which have resonance with part or whole of Huizinga’s
argument (see Turner 1982, 1988 on ritual “performances,” from theatre to
war-making; see also George Bataille (1957) on violence and sexuality as
games, or Bakhtin (1984) on the relationship between carnival and violent
re-orderings). In any “game,” what is at stake is the ritualized collective re-
production of order. At a minimum, for the players, this means the reproduc-
tion of the game itself. At a maximum, this means the re-creation of societal
order through their own play (their own competitive illusion).
138 Marc-Olivier Castagner and David Grondin

From order-recreation to impersonation of Average Joe

In Huizinga’s analysis of war/competition, “The agonistic element only

become operative when the war-making parties regard themselves and each
other as antagonists contending for something to which they feel they have
a right” (Huizinga 1949, 90). In other words, “equals” part of the same inter-
subjective out-of-this-world play-universe are motivated by something else
than material interests. They do not fight for “resources” or capitals, but for
the right to (re)produce order itself: their game, and culture at large. This is
the double “strategic” goal of the culture war played out in infotainment (for a
thorough overview, see Grondin 2012), which can be analyzed through Bour-
dieu and his discussion on the production of symbolic capital and violence.
For Bourdieu, symbolic systems are “structured and structuring instru-
ments of communication and knowledge” (Bourdieu 1979, 80) allowing
the legitimation of the domination of a class over another. In the spirit of
Bourdieu and Huizinga, the main strategic goal of the culture war would be,
beyond (quantifiable) media visibility for themselves in the field, the control
of the production and diffusion of symbolic systems in it and in the U.S. soci-
ety. The dominant actors, here the infotainers-ideologues, would harshly fight
one another to be able to establish their own definition of the social world
(i.e., the “common sense”) corresponding to their positional interests. As
reminds us Bourdieu, “The field of symbolic production is a microcosm of the
symbolic struggle between classes: it is by serving their own interests in the
struggle within the field that the producers serve the interests of the groups
outside of the field of production” (1979, 80). In other words, infotainers do
not fight only against each other for themselves, or for the survival of their
own infotainment universe, but they more or less directly participate, in this
battle, to the (social) movements of the fragmented U.S. society, inevitably
playing the role of what sociologists of cultural activism call “moral/cultural
entrepreneurs,” or what Gramscians call “organic intellectuals” for their
(respective) mobilized audience. They ought not only to capitalize on their
success, but to re-produce a specific form of order: their battle itself, and the
transformations any of its victors may enable in society.
On this aspect, Stuart Hall’s work and that of fellow researchers on the
social production of news (see Hall et al. 1978; Thompson 1998) provided
crucial explanations for the links between symbolic construction, popular
culture, media, and the (re)production of hegemony. One of the key elements
of their analysis, and a phenomenon that is so fundamental for the media
work of an infotainer, is the tendency of newscasters to assume, homogenize,
and generalize their audience as the general “public.” Henceforth, the very
process of news production would be a program of simplification, objectifica-
tion, normalization, and flattening of society, in which dominant actors tend
 From Irritated Hostages to Silly Citizens 139

to analyze an event from the view point of “common sense” (in a Grams-
cian sense, corresponding to the repository of accessible dominant cultural
sedimentations in a given society and put in practice by/for the (counter)
hegemonic forces). Speaking of/from “common sense” as if it were outside
class relationships, ideological polarization and niche demographics, describ-
ing events so they seem familiar to the “audience,” and constructing and
naturalizing the “audience” itself are all moves that help reproduce dominant
conceptions in society, thus stabilizing the dominant actors’ position in it,
while masking structural social tensions.
If the strategic goals of cultural warriors are linked to the monopoly over
“common sense,” their tactics, as infotainers fighting in the dominant neo-
liberal paradigm will be highly peculiar. Drawing not only on Bourdieu but
also on British cultural studies and Huizinga—while also resonating with
Foucault’s take on neo-liberalism—the main tactic used in the culture war
and played/performed on the battlefields of infotainment is the pantomime of
Average Joe. Infotainers everywhere constantly invoke “Middle America”
to encompass a homogenous group of individuals who are (paradoxically)
part of the “classless” middle class5: it is Average Joe, the average person,
the anonymous consumer, the silent majority, ordinary citizens, and so on.
Average Joe here becomes the ghostly archetype outside of the field of
symbolic production, insider-outsider to the game itself. Living symbol of
the (neo-liberal) common sense, Average Joe is an “autonomous” individual
deemed rational (able to see the truth after being presented with “objective”
facts), sensitive (able to perceive phenomena and the world), and above all,
moral (who embodies a system of values and may adjudicate judgments on
phenomena and facts). Average Joe quintessentially symbolizes, for any info-
tainer, his/her own vision of the “common sense” upon which he/she frames,
translates, and presents events of the world.
By keeping the playful element to the fore, infotainers are therefore best
understood if their practice on the battlefield is viewed as a performance that
combines both competition and illusion, where they act as both a ventriloquist
and a pantomime of Average Joe, with the objective of reproducing their own
play and the social order in general. If, from the start, their fight is play, in
speaking in the name of Average Joe, they come to subsuming Average Joe.
When it happens, infotainers abandon (once again) their serious role and the
normal rules of objective news casting—where they are supposed to act as
unbiased relays between distant worldly facts/phenomena and the conscious-
ness of their audience—to voluntarily enter the world of “representation,” a
“temporary” world, a world of comedy, of explicit ideology, of hyperbole,
where the rules of the game are explicitly relying on exaggeration—verg-
ing on the grotesque—and obvious polarization. Hence, the culture warrior
on the field of infotainment is always more than a simple journalist: at any
140 Marc-Olivier Castagner and David Grondin

point in his/her performance, s/he stands on the limen between seriousness

and play.
It becomes apparent here that the field of infotainment is far from an
exclusive and close bubble of symbolic “production”: as a war-game, it
is continuously in subtle transaction with its outside. Looking closer, the
parodic and pantomimic performance of the infotainer, to speak in the name
of the “average” neo-liberal individualized and autonomous body, does not
only serve a selfish process of capitalization inside the very game s/he plays,
or the only reproduction of the game itself. It is not only a competition for the
best representation of the order to create. In his/her performance, the culture
warrior is engaged with the outside. On one hand, he/she re-presents the neo-
liberal order of atomized rational individuals. On the other, through his/her
representation, the infotainer intends to have a clear pedagogical relationship
with his/her audience. As organic intellectual or cultural/moral entrepreneur
caught in the crossfire of the culture war, s/he seeks to convert by appealing to
the audience’s consciousness. But simple rationalizations and deliberation are
not the pedagogical way of infotainment: it is by parodying Average Joe that
infotainers apply a (mimetic) pressure on empirical audiences (the citizens),
inviting them to modify/normalize their praxis according to the particular
ideological frames enacted in the performance of the infotainer himself/
herself. Through their impersonation of Average Joe—just like a cult leader
impersonating a god—infotainers gain what might be related to Bourdieu’s
“symbolic power,” “a transformed—that is, misrecognizeable, transfigured,
and legitimated—form of the other forms of power” (Bourdieu 1979, 83).6
Again with Bourdieu, the result of the culture war/game might just be a form
of “symbolic violence,” “a gentle violence, imperceptible and invisible even
to its victims, exerted for the most part through the purely symbolic channels
of communication and cognition (more precisely misrecognition), recogni-
tion, or even feeling” (Bourdieu 2001, 2). At its core lies “the incorporation
of social hierarchies and structures of domination into the minds and bodies
of the dominated in the form of ‘durable dispositions’, with the result that
such social structures appear natural and immutable” (Von Holdt 2004, 115).
There is no better way to lead than to state that what guides you is the will of
the dominated; there is no better way to stay submitted than to believe that
the one leading you is you. And as Bourdieu further adds,

Symbolic violence is the coercion which is set up only through the consent that
the dominated cannot fail to give to the dominator (and therefore to the domina-
tion) when their understanding of the situation and relation can only use instru-
ments of knowledge that they have in common with the dominator, which, being
merely the incorporated form of the structure of the relation of domination, make
this relation appear as natural. (Bourdieu 2000, 170, in Von Holdt 2004, 115)
 From Irritated Hostages to Silly Citizens 141

Cultural warriors, in their pantomime of Average Joe, wish to speak in his/her

name—thereby arrogating the right to speak for the “common sense”—and,
in so doing, they invite Average Joe to follow their symbolic constructions on
what is truthful/logical about worldly events. Watching the news here seems
to be summarized to “Look Nicole, it’s me on T.V.! + Damn he’ right.” It is
in this role as pedagogical ideologue speaking in both a universalistic and a
very particular-personal/intimate tone, that the infotainer can gently (but vio-
lently) move his/her (assumed) audience, through a false consciousness and a
putatively arbitrary conversion, more or less in line with his/her agenda and
the frame from which s/he sees the world. Cultural warriors are, thus, violent
(re)presenters and (re)producers of social and moral orders: their subtle show
and the “hegemonic” order. The culture war played on the battlefield of info-
tainment in the U.S. society is therefore primarily a matter of controlling the
symbolic production means, trying to define and enforce the “common sense”
on their (respective) audiences, and, in so doing so, mobilizing them for their
cause. However, this mobilization, in order to function correctly on the battle-
field of infotainment where facts and fiction mingle, ought to pass through a
specific way: not, as the cultural/moral entrepreneurship model understands
it (rational deliberation on facts, conscious convincing and/or “socialization”
on the sense to give to events), but a subtle mixture of playfulness and seri-
ousness, the strange journalism + pantomime combination.
Here comes a very specific kind of equilibrist, explicitly surfing the inher-
ent fluidity of genres (see the work of Lauren Berlant). If infotainers are
hybrids mixing serious fact-giving and consciousness enhancing journal-
ism and playful entertainment, some, the “fake news anchors” such as Jon
Stewart or John Oliver, tend to assume more plainly and consciously their
wonky position, where seriousness and playful bacchanalia, war and game,
presentation and re-presentation criss-cross in (dis)orderly manner. By more
consciously and plainfully pantomiming Average Joe, John Oliver not only
mimics his antagonists, hence reproducing the game he is part of, but he does
so better and more openly—meaning less “secretly”—than all of his peers. In
this order, as his antagonists in the battlefield of infotainement, he thrives to
convert and mobilize audiences to his cause, to facilitate his control over the
symbolic production in U.S. society. But what particularly characterizes the
work of infotainers like John Oliver, it is that in performing, while playing
the culture war using both a playful and a serious mask, they become, by the
same token, agents of surveillance and critiques of the field itself. As David
Grondin concurred discussing The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, “Comedy
‘fake-news’ show is a clarion call for ‘silly citizenship’ action and has come
to serve not only as a trusted media source but as a site for rethinking demo-
cratic politics by ‘watching’ (in both senses of ‘safeguarding’ and ‘seeing’)
how media journalism works and how it could be improved, even though
142 Marc-Olivier Castagner and David Grondin

it inadvertently feeds the culture wars at the same time” (Grondin 2012,
355–356). Therefore, John Oliver not only participate in reproducing internal
logics of the field by playing the game, but performs Average Joe to make
visible to him/her the game itself, and this “treacherous move” dissolving the
illusio is exactly where his mobilization work takes on its full meaning. It is
also where the therapeutic work, in an era of generalized cynicism, is at its
best. Before continuing our discussion, we must first comment on the stage
of the performance itself, a weekly show of thirty minutes of infotainment
where Oliver displays his playful act.

LAST WEEK TONIGHT: THE STAGE OF

A CLOWNISH POLEMICIST

John Oliver’s Playful Act

On LWT, John Oliver does not only play the credible and balanced “journal-
ist” on screen, he also astutely plays the clown and satirist building on his
experience as stand-up comedian to intervene in the mediascape in a complex
manner. He does so through a polychromous critique—mixing objectivity,
rational argumentation, caustic humor, insolence and tawdriness, militancy,
and call for mobilization—attacking the journalistic and political habituses/
capitals, the production and consumption of popular culture, and the systemic
structures of oppression and exclusion and their (symbolic) violence.
As infotainer, because he flirts with different genres and transgresses
boundaries, Oliver occupies a particularly thriving position in the medi-
ated public space. But unlike other infotainers, Oliver plainly assumes his
in-between stance, his liminal status. By re-presenting televised news in the
infotainment era, he aptly performs the part of “not-being-quite-a-journalist”
and “not-being-quite-an-entertainer” through biting parody and witty politi-
cal journalism. And, as Grey, Jones and Thompson argue, “When parody
attacks the woodenness of debates or the news for poor performance and for
being more of a glossy show, it is by nature launching a satiric missive on
the nature of political process and our tolerance of the status quo” (2009, 18).
As aforementioned, the twenty-first century infotainer blurs genres, but
what sets Oliver apart from others is his willingness to consciously explore
the borderlines of both worlds, playing within and with the rules of each
through a resonating and outspoken style. In the same vein, this border-
ing stance allows him to “produce social scorn or damning indictments
through playful means and, in the process, transform the aggressive act of
rendering something ridiculous” (Gray, Jones, and Thompson 2009, 12–13;
original emphasis). Acting as, as we will see, a parrhesiastic kynicist, he can
 From Irritated Hostages to Silly Citizens 143

mobilize against, and through, a certain violence, and in the same token, be
a well needed therapist for contemporary citizenship and democracy in the
United States. In the end, “Satire provides a valuable means through which
citizens can analyze and interrogate power and the realm of politics rather
than remain simple subjects of it” (Gray, Jones, and Thompson 2009, 16–17;
emphasis added).

The Formatted Performance of LWT

John Oliver’s weekly HBO show follows a format structured around three
main elements: (1) the “quick recap”; (2) the Panopticon; (3) the “main
story.” Each of these segments give a special place to parodies (pantomime
of Average Joe, formal parodies of TV programs, advertisements, movie
trailers, etc.), where, in a pure parodic mode, the original re-presented will be
the source of laughs, the playful copy simply magnifying what lies beneath
the original, inverting the relation between seriousness and playfulness. This
cannot but appeal to his audience. Let’s have a quick look at them separately.

Quick Recap
“But that’s not the point. . .” (S02E17)

As soon as the last notes of the opening credits are done, when the public
applause is still audible, an impatient John Oliver thanks everyone and starts
his show without an opening monologue, with a “we just have time for a
quick recap of the week, and we are going to begin with. . . .” The “quick
recap” is normally composed of three or four news or major events of the past
week and is dealt quite rapidly (in two or three minutes each). It is in this
segment of the show that we best see—because it is so condensed—the work
of the hybrid infotainer-journalist-comedian. Here, as a good anchor would
do, Oliver delivers the news of the week in an “objective” and “impartial”
manner, using a permanent visual support in the left corner of the screen with
an efficient infographic work. LWT, at first sight, has the aura of legitimacy
and the professionalism of a great journalist (Figure 5.1).
But rapidly the traditional journalistic account devolves and is combined,
almost from the start, with a satiric or ironic punch line, like “North Korea, or
‘The best of Korea’ as stated in North Korea Magazine,” “Russia, prequel and
sequel of the Soviet Union,” or “The UK, Europe’s America.” In the same
line, this insolence is often aimed at the audience itself: the themes affect-
ing smaller states (from Uruguay to Wyoming) will invariably be followed
by the sentence “a country you know [care/thought] so little about that you
didn’t even see that this is not ___, but this is ___.” Here, Oliver, with the
144 Marc-Olivier Castagner and David Grondin

Figure 5.1  John Oliver in Constant Eye-Contact with Average Joe. Source: http:​//www​
.hbo.​com/l​ast-w​eek-t​onigh​t-wit​h-joh​n-oli​ver.

help of the infographic work of his staff, takes a malicious fun at destabilizing
the confidence of even the best geographers who may be disinterested from
certain regions of the world, and who often take for granted the visual and
infographic supports displayed on the news.
If the journalist selects a worldly event to convey the “facts” to an audi-
ence, Oliver and his team select their “raw material” not in the empirical
reality but in the mediasphere itself. John Oliver, like Jon Stewart and others
before him, acts mainly not as the presenter, but as the re-presenter, tinkering
with the news already processed in previous days on the major news networks
and on the Internet, assuming the editorial power to sift through the news
which he often justifies with a “but you need to know this . . . .” With some
hindsight on the news, because of the various framings by major networks
and the emphasis on some issues behind the event itself, it is not so much
the novelty of the event that entices the team of LWT as much as the inten-
tion to make visible the resonance of this “news” in the mediated politico-
journalistic world, its resonance in the battlefields of infotainment. In other
words, LWT relays news to reveal the rules of the game of infotainment. It is
thus hardly surprising that he consciously amplifies the mediaspheric pathos
of morbid curiosity and moralization. In effect, LWT, like all infotainers in
the era of “tabloid TV” (just think of TMZ, Maury, Crossfire, and the likes),
enjoys dealing with scandals, skandalon, that which René Girard (1982)
convincingly argues that attract and obstruct at the very same time. For
Davidson indeed, since the mid-1990s, there is a “newfound respectability of
‘outing’ private sexual and dependency/disease/abuse secrets in mainstream
 From Irritated Hostages to Silly Citizens 145

news” (2016, 116), something that “the need for content” + strict quantitative
demographic valuation + a neo-liberal individualized moral stance can quite
explain. But even then, the apparent sensationalism of Oliver is counterbal-
anced by his humor: to demonstrate the extent of the news/scandal presented,
and thus de-complexify global and domestic politics situations that are inher-
ently complex, he will constantly use analogies-translations (“it is like if. . .”)
followed by a short parody. Here, stand-up comedy will spring from not only
the everyday life of Average Joe (family, friendship, work, love, etc.) but
also—and more often than not—the artefacts of U.S. popular culture (from
music to cinema to Broadway musicals). By de-complexifying a situation via
a pantomime of the everyday and insolent interpretations of cultural products,
the observer of tele-journalism presents himself, also, as a form of (mimetic)
moral compass for his viewers, and quality control of popular culture.

Panopticon
“Where there is banality, there is evil” (S02E31)

Following the “quick recap” and before the “main story,” Oliver educates
viewers on the craft of journalism and TV production with a quick segment
entitled “and now, this,” which announces the diffusion of a pre-recorded
theme criticizing journalistic practice. The theme will vary from time to
time, but will aim at making visible to Average Joe the habitus of the news-
caster: “newscasters trying not to swear on TV,” “the adventures of the more
patient man on TV,” “the awkward moments of newscasters in Halloween
costumes,” “newscasters stretching the sense of the word exclusive,” “TV
personalities shit-talking about their producer,” and so on. This section, gen-
erally totalizing two to three minutes, follows fellow humoristic infotainment
programs and combines a patchwork of “gems” from the over-saturated and
textured landscape of U.S. television. The interest of this section is the fact
that it concentrates these elements in a block and under a theme, while taken
separately, they would probably have gone unnoticed. This effect of concen-
tration allows them to make visible the political and journalistic subtleties,
incoherencies, and hypocrisies. LWT therein acts as a news media’s watch-
dog, being able to unveil the artificiality of “official” news broadcasting and
reporting practices, revealing the habits of the infotainment game itself to the
public, laying bare the mechanics of the show (the mékanê, the illusion, the
artifice). Here, Oliver acts as (meta)supervisor, monitoring the work of the
“fourth pillar” (whilst also self-monitoring): this is ludic surveillance at its
best. Better yet, by revealing the rules of the game to the outsiders, Oliver
incites his viewers to reflect on the news coverage in their democracy and to
pursue, at home, his work of monitoring news media enterprises.
146 Marc-Olivier Castagner and David Grondin

Main Topic/Story
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” (S02E29)

The third section of LWT is visibly that which Oliver and his team prepare
for all week. Much in the same way an investigative journalist would do,
Olivier invites viewers to go deeper in an issue for ten to twenty minutes
(that varies from week to week) and which is not necessarily linked with the
news: structuring problems with the U.S. justice system contributing to the
rise of criminality, insurance exclusions highlighting close relations between
pharmaceutical companies and the medical profession, as well as the health
insurance industry, gangrenous corruption within FIFA, the economic exploi-
tation of student-athletes on the college circuits, the representation of mental
health in the media, the regulatory facilities obtained by the oil industry, and
so on. From the variety of subjects treated, a background quickly appears:
what makes a great topic for LWT is a “flawed system,” “good, but rigged,”
an “inadequacy,” a clear “insanity,” a critical need of “accountability,” and
so on.
Faithful to investigative journalism, the “facts” provided by Oliver are
most often corroborated by paper documentation “obtained” by his efficient
research team. The visual material is drawn from the investigative work often
done by other major networks (from CNN to PBS to Al Jazeera). As with the
“quick recap,” LWT freely uses material coming from the Web (mostly You-
Tube). On this, Oliver applies the same recipe of a media bricolage as other
(satiric) infotainers as a way to construct a narrative. As a fine documentarist
would do or as any proper public affairs show would, LWT will rely on tes-
timonies from real victims of procedural abuses or of structural oppressions
(“. . ., meet ___”), a method that will incidentally seek to “humanize” how
the topic is treated.
For the observer of such spectacle, it becomes evident that the “main topic/
story” is the major act of the performance, where the journalist and the sati-
rist, the outraged and the indignant, the warrior, and the player all collide.
Here, comedic artifices—the same used for the “quick recap” (analogies/
parodies/pantomimes, references to Average Joe and to pop culture, moving
infographics, etc.)—clearly contribute to amplify the seriousness of themes
that are addressed and to deconstruct the infotainment field. As with the “Pan-
opticon,” Oliver seeks to unveil the rules of the game of infotainment and the
visible flaws in conventional media coverage. The “main topic,” an investiga-
tive journalism effort seeking to open consciousness and entertain and make
laugh, is the moment when Average Joe is not only performed, but openly
and consciously invoked, as indicate these claims: “we’re gonna need [as a
society],” “everyone would agree,” “something you should know.” As his
 From Irritated Hostages to Silly Citizens 147

infotainment colleagues, he will invite Average Joe to continue the r­ eflection

at home, to participate to social media through the use of a #hashtag, and to
consult the Internet website of the show,7 to contact one’s representatives to
demand actions on the topic, and so on. In other words, the “main topic” is
the main act of the mobilizing performance of LWT, inviting the singular
obfuscated citizen to act.

CYNICISM, KYNICISM, PARRHESIA: FROM

IRRITATED HOSTAGES TO SILLY CITIZENS

“Every theory is anticipated in laughter.” (Sloterdijk 1983, 70)

John Oliver, like all his predecessors and colleagues, is both cultural warrior
and infotainer. He is also educator and pantomime, violently shooting/biting
everywhere: his infotainer colleagues, his audience, Average Joe, pop cul-
ture, political agents, corporations, society, himself. We now propose a com-
bination of the sociological/anthropological arguments inspired by Bourdieu,
Hall, and Huizinga with the psychopolitical arguments of Peter Sloterdijk.
Inspired by Sloterdijk, we locate the “culture wars” and the symbolic/cultural
violence, as well as the serious and comic performance of their actors, inside
the epistemological (and therefore, methodological) tensions to be found at
the heart of modern individualities, tensions that also contribute to the “civi-
lizing process” and “society” itself.
For Peter Sloterdijk in Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), individuals of
Western—hence American—contemporary societies, be they elites or masses,
oppressors, or oppressed, have a cynical consciousness, an “enlightened false
consciousness.” They do not only have a “false consciousness,” meaning
a consciousness constantly distorted by the dominant ideology. Modern
individuals do not want to get rid of illusions and distortions through facts,
proofs, and the unveiling of the Truth. They do not want to be emancipated
from false discourses. In the modern cynical era, individuals just do not care
as much or at all: in fact, many centuries of improvement in health sciences,
biology, or political-economy—many centuries of Aufklärung—transformed
modern individuals into self-alienating beasts: “Knowing that one is mistaken
but continuing all the same has become the cynic’s maxim for life” (Couture
2016, 11). Individuals believe in their “own falseness” (Couture 2016, 14).
Therefore, they are not done with illusion. On the contrary, this contempo-
rary “enlightened false consciousness” is a form of schizoid realism where
known (and often difficult) truths about life are constantly re-framed inside
an enhanced conventional morality that is kept artificially alive. Morality and
moral discourses—illusions then—become a cheap carnival mask naively
148 Marc-Olivier Castagner and David Grondin

covering the hard (known) reality. This argument is resumed in Eurotaoismus

(1989). Here, Sloterdijk argues that Modernity merged morality and physics
in what he calls “the kinetic utopia”: “When we speak of Progress, we think
of the fundamentally kinetic and kinaesthetic motives of Modernity that tend
towards freeing man’s self-movement from its limits” (Sloterdijk 1989, 33).
Be they Marxist social movements or globalized capitalism, Modernity is
the era of “mobilizations” (movements of actualization of known potentials),
supposed to “emancipate” humanity. But mobilization combined with cyni-
cism means that “enlightened false consciousness” is mobilized toward illu-
sion: it (falsely) believes being part of a progressive emancipatory movement,
while actively knowing s/he might/will end up crashing in a wall. Modern
individuals tend, therefore, to flee the harsh reality of the “post-metaphysical”
life in an accelerated and fragile world-making process, while actively hop-
ing that the catastrophic future events will finally change everything and set
things back on track (Sloterdijk 1983, 162).
In his opus Spheres, out of which we select just a few things, and especially
in his interrogation of modern capitalism, The Crystal Palace (2005), Sloter-
dijk argues moreover that this accelerated and illusory world-making process
had led to the construction of the bright skies of the capitalist world system
(what he refers to as “the Palace”) where nothing is really “outside,” mean-
ing new: everything is already known, commodified and processed by market
actors in order to be consumed as “novelty.” As the Palace is a synchronized
interior, lacking any kind of distances, “information” and “novelty” are
relayed anywhere at any time. For the (cynical-mobilized) individual, this
means that

the biggest part of his environment is either toxic or meaningless. He thus aims
at establishing himself within a personal zone of strictly selected things and
signals that are now coming up as his own circle of reference, as his personal
environment.” (Klauser 2010, 331)

At the same time, modern individuals are constantly swept by hard truths
(qua informations) circulating in the global mediasphere. But these ever-
coming truths, in order to be tolerable—or better, “actionable”—must be
already digested for them and framed through the symbolic constructions
given by the subject’s inevitable partners-in-being, the many pundits and
knowledgeable experts on which they must rely (see, for instance, the many
Foucaultian readings on the “conduct of conduct” and the famous “power-
knowledge” nexus).
This means that, in our view, individuals (“Average Joe”) are hostages on
two levels: as dwellers inside the Crystal Palace, and as secluded beings with
their own experts in symbolic world-making. Modern individuals may seem
 From Irritated Hostages to Silly Citizens 149

“free,” but freedom and autonomy in the Crystal Palace is nothing but pur-
chasing power and the selection of things already processed and sold for them
by market actors. This “hostage crisis” leads to two complementary mental
consequences: boredom, in an Heideggerian sense, and stress (irritability).
On the one hand, their situation as unconscious hostages means that they are
constantly in lack of ontological “critical cases”: something “really” new,
outside, a challenge. Their conduct being already conducted, they live in a
“peaceful” and “consensual” world—just think of your Facebook feed—that
cannot offer any sense of depth. They are, in one word, bored.
The other side of this boredom situation is irritability. The very fragility of
the permanent peace inside the Crystal Palace means that people are always
easily provoked, in a constant stress, always already-mobilized. They look for
scandals to make sense of this shallow peace, and they look for a “heavy”
cause to defend. The rise of “trash TV” and tabloid news, just like the many
(social, cultural, economic) activisms of “resentment,” might just be conse-
quences of that: for Sloterdijk, we assist everywhere in contemporary western
societies to the rise—and marketization—of what he calls “the aestheticiza-
tion of uncertainties.” Anyone reading Bauman, Giddens, or Foucaultian
“risk studies,” will be convinced. Therefore, what better than a (culture) war
to mobilize passions and tap on vital energies, through easy targets, cata-
strophic narratives (see Salvador and Norton 2011) and moralistic discourses
(see Critcher et al. 2013)?
John Oliver, as a culture warrior and an infotainer, is not immune to this
“mobilized enlightened false consciousness” and this “irritated hostage” situ-
ation that are characteristic of both his colleagues and of Average Joe. As a
journalist and a polemicist, the “facts” in his discourse are highly polarized
and generally framed in hyperbolic terms such as “terrifying,” “catastrophic,”
“terrible.” Unsurprisingly, he rarely finds “good” news in his screening of
the mediascape. And like his colleagues, he frames the “catastrophic” events
inside a strong moralistic narrative where, somehow, these events might also
be useful to teach and, hopefully, mobilize.
Luckily, following Sloterdijk in his début, we also seem to have at hand a
therapeutic alternative. In Sloterdijk’s view, broadly speaking, Plato’s ideal-
ism might just be at the root of the aforementioned pathos of Modernity, in
which the subject was to be set free from (false) sensible appearances only
through conversion/change of consciousness. This is, in Nietzschean terms,
the “optimistic” model of emancipation transmitted through the birth of
Aufklärung that both Marxist social movements and constructivist moral/
cultural entrepreneurship are built on, and what lies at the root of the profes-
sional journalistic stance (if ever followed). But for a cynical consciousness,
that is disinterested in emancipatory discourses and hidden in a false morality,
in illusion, this does not work. In order to undermine this epistemic dead-end,
150 Marc-Olivier Castagner and David Grondin

early Sloterdijk (as well as late-Foucault) took interest in Diogenes of Sinope

the dog (kynikos), the contemporary of Socrates. This “Mad Socrates”—in
the words of Plato himself—holds what Sloterdijk understands to be the real
materialist position, one that values what is below (i.e., the body, dirty mate-
rials, the animal level). Diogenes and the kynical philosophy “opposed these
models of a frugal, undomesticated life to the artifices of culture (nomos) and
the misfortunes of vulgar imbeciles or sophisticated philosophers who accept
the hold of social conventions over their lives and their bodies” (Couture
2016, 16). Instead of reproducing the intellectualist and moralizing pathos
of taking hypocritical distances from the body and life itself—a type of false
distance which is generally visible in any “scandal” management, where there
is morbid curiosity followed by moral indignation—kynicism follows the
ethics of proximity to decide where to piss, to take a shit, and to masturbate,
where the sovereignty of the body is assumed, where it is understood to be
holding more potentials for truth-seekers than the conventional thinking of
reasonable forms.
In this order, Diogenes’s reasoning cannot be done solely through peaceful
dialogues, through conventional “ethics of communication” which are both
the domain of idealism and Aufklärung. As Jean-Pierre Couture explains,
Diogenes’s reflection is done through materialist pantomime, “The speech act
of the clown who uses his or her body as a vehicule of satirical expression as
well as a criterion of truth” (Couture 2016, 17), able in this way to crumble
“fallacious revealed/hidden, clean/dirty, public/private dichotomy” (Couture
2016, 17). While reasonable dialogue and pantomime might appear polar
opposites, they both are, in their own way, in a dialectical relationship with a
public, an audience, a space of performance. Indeed, in kynicism, “To bring
to the public space what is low, separated, private, that is the subversion”
(Sloterdijk 1983, 145). Infotainment TV programs is just, like the carnival,
the perfect place for such an insolence.
John Oliver, (neo)kynical performer, stands at the crossroad of genres. His
argumentation is a specific combination of pacifying idealism (which is also,
reading Sloterdijk, highly cynical) and scandalous materiality, performing
at the same time both the reasonable educator who unveils (and codes) the
truths, and the biting kynical clown who acts to destabilize conventional and
hypocritical codes and conventions of what is considered good journalistic
presentation. He is at the same time both cynical and irritated, and conscious
of contemporary cynical and stressed ambience. And this is why he has such
a punchy way of unveiling the rules of the game he is part of. Like Stewart
and Colbert, Oliver encourages his audience to play with given truths, codes,
symbols, and to relativize scandals. His frank speech ought to reveal bullshit,
and, as Grey, Jones, and Thompson say, “Encourages viewers to play with
politics, to examine it, test it, and question it rather than simply consume it as
 From Irritated Hostages to Silly Citizens 151

information or ‘truth’ from authoritative sources” (Gray, Jones, and Thomp-

son 2009, 11).
At a minimum, as a good pacifying idealist would do, he refers and works
at the level of (heavily moralized) symbolism. In our overview of the second
season of the show, this ranged from criticizing the habits of misquoting on
TV and politics (see S02E31 on systematic misquoting in U.S. politics)—that
is, where the appearance is masking reality—to morally questioning the popu-
larity of Nazi symbolism in Thailand (S02E15) or the “swarm” metaphors in
contemporary coverage of migratory movements (S02E28). The same mode
of intervention is highly visible when he attacks contemporary popular culture
in general, and its dominant role in the definition of “common sense,” espe-
cially, throughout Season 2, with explicit regard to the links between justice
and morality. Under his marked disdain for the poor quality of pop culture
artefacts as masking reality—as “badly” representing it—lies an enlightened
understanding of their productive force in American society. For example, in
a document entitled “Torture” (S02E17), he links the “dangerous misconcep-
tions about torture”—propagated, indeed, by conservative ideologues—to the
popularity of Fox’s 24, where torture works because “it has to, it is a dramatic
device to move the plot along.” When Supreme Court Justice Scalia cites 24 as
“evidence that torture can be justified,” it only reinforces his beliefs that soci-
ety is driven by dangerous illusions covering habits of denigrating basic rule
of law principles. His critique, here, is itself a moral—and an idealist—one.
But a neo-kynicist goes beyond criticizing common definition and moral-
ity in the infotainment world, as well as the incestuous links between TV’s
illusion(s) and society’s everyday workings. Through his explicit material
emphasis on the low, he goes beyond a mobilizing critique of moral hypoc-
risies. Oliver the pantomime here emphasizes TV body language and their
material lapses: uncontrolled smiles, red face, unwanted farts. Consciously
unveiling the dirty, the private, the hidden of the game, he attacks the
modus operandi of the infotainment field that is hypocritically founded on
the perpetual revelation of the private and the hidden in order to mobilize
individual-moral-cynical-irritated Average Joe. Generally speaking, Oliver is
a materialist using crude language, conscious of the rules of the game, who
does not hesitate to say “motherfucker” or “that’s a fucking nonsense,” using
HBO’s uncensored language platform (while his colleagues from other TV
networks will zip their lips and bleep their says). However, in order to go
further, two examples taken in our materials of the second season ought to
be shared here. Both of them go beyond his own performance using crude
language, or his rational argumentation against the conventional (illusory)
moral positioning of popular culture artefacts. Both of them play with the
low as a mean to inform and mobilize. In S02E28, he has a visible fun dis-
cussing the controversy on the “allegations” about UK’s David Cameron.
152 Marc-Olivier Castagner and David Grondin

In this case, the media revealed that Cameron “might have” put his penis in a
dead pig’s mouth while taking part in some Oxford’s rituals many years ago.
Conscious of the rules of the game, Oliver here surfed on the waves of this
“allegation” which occupy, for him, “the perfect spot between the horrific
and the fantastic.” He understands, as we said earlier, the proper meaning of
a scandal, which, following Davidson (2016), the likes of the “Monicagate”
are absolutely central to the workings of contemporary culture war in the
United States. As a cynic journalist and performing Average Joe as irritated
hostage, he cannot but be “touched” by such things. But for the neo-kynicist,
the re-soundings of the scandal is much more interesting to study than the
scandal in itself, and it is the perfect situation to invert the idealist and the
materialist positions, the conservative moralistic discourse and the animal
life. At the end, he calls on his audience, he reaches toward Average Joe, but
here the rational argumentation (“Cameron’s loss in credibility”) is quickly
subsumed/completed by the performance of the materialist clown who invites
people to participate on #Respectfulinterspeciesfacefuck.
The second example here is S02E23, where he discusses the “scandalous”
events revealed by The Sun, about Lord Sewel shown consuming cocaine
with (and on) a prostitute. Here Oliver is not only excited about a British
peer shown to be extremely polite and mannered while snorkelling large
amount of drugs and while discussing with the prostitute how taxpayers are
contributing to his bacchanalia. What is especially interesting to unveil here
is the fact that Lord Sewel himself wrote the codes and rules of exclusion of
the Chamber, which, ironically, he will be the first peer to ever be kicked out.
“Glorious!” says Oliver, “It’s just so right!” If, rationally, this is a good time
to call, though the impersonation of the shocked citizen, and as others have
done before him, for a deep reformation of this central British political insti-
tution, Oliver the neo-kynicist is concentrated at celebrating this ridiculous
and very funny radical inversion of values at the top of the State. In Oliver’s
neo-kynicist reading, those who write morality and lament the lack of thereof
are basically the ones who are the less morally compliant.
The neo-kynicist pedagogical interventions (with his colleagues, with the
political actors, with Average Joe, etc.) are therefore quite different from the
“Platonist” one. Instead of having a clear hierarchy between the truth-teller
and the to-be-converted, between clear and defined notions of Good and Bad,
and where unveiling the truth is a mean for accelerating individual (self-)ref-
ormation movements (i.e., “know yourself” + mobilization), the pedagogical
relationship between the neo-kynicist and his public is focused on a parrhesi-
astic interest for the “care of self” (see late-Foucault on this). But

caring for oneself is not a completely solitary activity. It is often (and perhaps
best) undertaken by putting ourselves in relation to someone else: specifically,
 From Irritated Hostages to Silly Citizens 153

an individual who is willing to tell us with absolute earnestness some disagree-

able truths about ourselves. This brave individual is Foucault's parresiast: the
individual who is prepared to face retaliation on the part of his listeners (anger,
loss of friendship, violence); the individual who is motivated by the hope that
her frank speech will force her listeners to change their ways of life. Parrêsia is
thus at once a duty, a virtue, and a technique of truth-telling. (Bourgault 2011, 2)

Inside the parrhesiastic relationship, the one who says what is not supposed
to be said takes a specific double stance: it is both risky/dangerous (especially
if s/he speaks to the hegemon), and sovereign. The parrhesiast is therefore
the master of all inversions: s/he acquires a strange ascendancy with both the
dominant actors of society and within democratic society itself. By his/her
sovereign over-egalitarian gesture in the public space, s/he destabilizes both
normalized/symbolized structural oppression and the myth of democratic
egalitarianism (see Bourgault 2011). What comes out is a not-so-subtle mas-
ter-disciple relationship in which the master-clown is him/herself the example
one desires to imitate (see Sloterdijk 2011). This point is particularly impor-
tant to understand in order to view the alternative type of mobilization that
the neo-kynicist is fuelling: here truth-telling and conversion are completed
through the virtuous performance (or staging) to imitate in/through praxis.
“Average Joe” here does not look at a mirror when he/she sees the infotainer
at work: he/she sees an enhanced, resonating, sovereign, and immune version
of Self. From there, the irritated hostages of contemporary culture war played
on the (battle)field of infotainment can become, once the rules of the game are
revealed, empowered silly citizens.
This was particularly visible throughout his well-known interview with
Edward Snowden held in Moscow and shown in S02E08. In the first part
of the interview, without preliminary notice, Oliver radically and violently
destabilize his interviewee by pushing on conventional (and moralized)
questions, such as his mishandling of very sensible national security data
to journalists. These first minutes of the meeting were quite unsettling for
both Snowden and the viewer. Here Snowden, visibly uncomfortable, tries to
justify his work in the name of well-known and constantly reiterated popular
values/ideals, such as freedom and the right to privacy, the critical need for a
conversation on U.S. government’s activities, and so on, but Oliver does not
grant Snowden any time nor any space to continue his rhetoric. After the first
minutes, Oliver shares with Snowden the results of a vox pop held in Times
Square a few days before, where “Edward Who?” and positive valuation
of national surveillance programs were basically the only answers given in
front of the camera. Right after saying to Snowden “No one knows who the
fuck you are,” right after doubting that the American public has the capacity
to discuss such a complicated subject, and after comparing Snowden to an
154 Marc-Olivier Castagner and David Grondin

IT technician that no one wants to discuss technicalities with, Oliver hands

him a file (supposedly) containing Oliver’s “dickpic,” and shares with him
the second part of the vox pop. Instead of positive valuation, here the tone
is radically inverted. To a question that seemed to be “is it legitimate for
the government to obtain a copy of your dickpic?,” people are unanimously
opposed. Nobody considers it legitimate for a government to access people’s
dickpics. Some even claimed: “I want the dickpic program changed.” Edward
Snowden, renowned critic of mass government surveillance programs, finally
gets, after some long minutes of discomfort, after being poked and provoked,
what was wrong with his own idealistic reasoning and pedagogical mobiliza-
tion. From here on out, Snowden wilfully plays with Oliver on the possible
and eventual destination of Oliver’s dickpic inside the vast network of agen-
cies and data-centers. Through the means of play, of low-level conversation,
of simple bodily truths, Oliver shows to Snowden, to his audience, and to
Average Joe, that the serious conversation on mass government surveil-
lance programs ought to be translated to something people can relate to, like
the dickpics. No technicalities, no serious axiology, only “can they see my
dick?.” In the words of Snowden, “I guess I never thought about putting it in
the context of your junk.”

CONCLUSION

“We as a society we need to figure it out” (S02E31)

In closing, we previously mentioned the pedagogical inclinations of infotain-

ers, hoping that people will finally “realize” something can/needs to be done
about various societal and political issues. Oliver, like his colleagues, aims
to “problematize” (in the Foucauldian sense, i.e, make actionable) situations
that are often invisible to the mass public and to Average Joe—especially
what went missing in the complex mediasphere—and asks his audience to get
mobilized. But because he does so by making visible the rules of the game of
conventional journalism and their limits, he is able to use his liminal position
to uplift the power of journalism for Average Joe’s sake. His “inspirational
coach” parody, in S02E20—on the unequal relationship between U.S. cities
(chronically crumbling under debts) and the owners of major sports teams,
who takes advantage of this imbalance and the huge fan base for these
teams to force through blackmail the local governments to commit to new
stadiums paid by taxpayers—is noteworthy. Holding the mock speech of a
coach in a sports team’s locker-room, lifted by an epic soundtrack and under
a spotlight, he addresses the crowd of extras wearing sport jerseys (and, in
the end, addresses the camera, and reaches Average Joe): he/she is the one
 From Irritated Hostages to Silly Citizens 155

who has the power to refuse blackmail, who is in charge of finding collec-
tive identifications, who is in real charge of politics. At first sight, as for his
infotainer colleagues, the ultimate actor in politics is the (self-)responsible
individual. But framed in a neo-kynical performance, individual sovereignty
means much more.
Citizenship in a democracy is an eternal process of accessing a position
where our voice is heard out loud. It is also built on a courageous say against
“bullshit.” But in many respects, citizenship is fundamentally exclusive, as
is the parrhesiastic ascendancy. John Oliver’s performance thus constitutes
one interesting therapeutics for citizenship—one we qualify as “silly citizen-
ship”—and democracy in the infotainment era. As infotainer, Oliver aims to
speak for the common sense and embodies it with the symbolic pantomime of
Average Joe. By calling out “bullshit” as Jon Stewart did for so long on The
Daily Show, Oliver speaks for and as Average Joe, “Speak[s] as Everyman
and, in so doing, act as ‘proxies for the people themselves’” (Grondin 2012,
355). The playful journalist, conscious of his ascending position, thus clearly
assumes his proxy role. Proxy in this context is no mere official delegated
role, but it is a political and symbolic one, where Oliver speaks for those
who cannot be heard in the short term (Castagner and Grondin 2016). But
his pantomime is not only a truth-telling exercise, a bullshit filtering public
service, and public stances as an insolent and scathing proxy: it is a master-
class performance to imitate; it is an encouragement, a training, an alternative
mobilization on the mode of epistemological inversions between materialism
and idealism, cynicism and Platonism.
Ultimately, Oliver’s (neo)kynical performance becomes the performance
of a new type of citizenship, a silly citizenship (Grondin 2012, 355–356). The
“self-responsible” individual here is one that calls out bullshit and unveils the
rules of the (infotainment) game in the era of generalized cynicism and irrita-
bility; it assumes its ascending role in order to train others to follow its lead;
epistemologically it veers toward materiality, and it violently mobilizes not
(necessarily) for ideas or reason, but against hypocrisies and illusions. And
this might just be what people, hostages caught in the crossfires of contem-
porary culture war, need: Jon Stewart, his neo-kynicist mentor, was indeed
deemed one of the most trustworthy “journalism” source by Time magazine
in 2008.

NOTES

1. This echoes the appellation, at first pejorative, of Diogenes of Sinope given to

him by Socrates who called him “the dog”. Coming from the Greek name kunikos,
which means “dog-like”, cynism was then accepted as dog philosophy, and it was
156 Marc-Olivier Castagner and David Grondin

associated with parrhesia, that is the risky freedom to speak the truth, to which Fou-
cault added that it was the courage to speak truthfully. We thank Jean-Pierre Couture
from the University of Ottawa for introducing us to Diogenes and for pointing out the
link to Foucault’s parrhesia.
2. The second season was the only complete season available to study at the time
of the first draft of this chapter. Moreover, referring to the first complete season after
its first season allowed us to overview general tendencies visible on the show, while
distancing ourselves from the inevitable—and sometimes obvious—work of polish-
ing done by the production team (changing this or that, what in French we call “rod-
age” (run-in period).
3. “Cultural capital includes knowledge, experiences, and attitudes that command
cultural resources. Social capital includes networks, relationships, and memberships
that command social resources. Symbolic capital includes prestige, honour, and other
forms of recognition. Within any single field, different kinds of economic, cultural,
social, and symbolic capital are available, if subject to competition” (Salter 2013b,
85–86). Cultural capital can be translated/converted in symbolic capital, and so on.
4. A special thanks to Julie Webber for inviting us to clarify this issue.
5. It is indeed symptomatic of the general and subtle neo-liberalization of society:
an amalgam of atomized—hence classless—individuals. (There is no such thing as
“society”, Thatcher once said.)
6. Symbolic power is the “power to constitute the given by stating it, to show forth
and gain credence, to confirm or transform the world view and, through it, action on
the world, and hence the world itself, quasi-magical power which makes it possible to
obtain the equivalent of what is obtained by (physical or economic) force, thanks to
its specific mobilization effect – is only exerted insofar as it is recognized (i.e. insofar
as its arbitrariness is misrecognized)” (Bourdieu 1979, 82–83; original and added
emphasis).
7. While LWT is aired on HBO in the United States, it is available everywhere
online—for free in the United States, and for $20–30 in Canada though platforms
like YouTube. It must be underlined though that HBO—just like Comedy Central—is
quite reactive on any attempt of piracy, as one of the author experimented during the
research.

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 Chapter 6

The Political Economy of

Late-Night Comedy
Don Waisanen

This chapter explores the degree to which comedy can speak truth to power,
especially in a time when those in power use comedy to serve their own truths.
From a systemic and institutional perspective, I position late-night comedy
television shows in the overall political economy of media. Three insights are
generated about the challenges that comedians face at a neoliberal, structural
level: the expectation for institutional returns, the containment of comedy
as small revolutions, and the advance of a cynical labor that precedes and
informs modern comedy production. I conclude with some thoughts on what
late-night shows and their audiences might do to better serve the public inter-
est and counter co-optations by powerful figures and institutions.
Nearly two decades ago on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, a sketch called
“Conspiracy Theory Rock” delivered a blistering critique of NBC, its par-
ent company General Electric, media executives, and the overall concentra-
tions of “media-opoly” power in mainstream networks (Conspiracy 2011).
Although it wasn’t subtle about its targets, the show’s producers and other
vetters decided that the sketch’s comedic stylings were enough to land it a
prime time spot on national television. With a dose of institutional self-dep-
recation and a sense that the consequences would be as fleeting as the laughs,
the sketch aired, the show went on, and business continued—no harm done.
As this example points out, speaking truth to power is a tricky endeavor.
Speaking truth to power through comedy is even trickier. After the Brexit
vote and the election of Donald Trump to the highest office in the United
States (a result arguably attained through some comedic prowess [Bershid-
sky 2016]), media pundits asked a reasonable question: “Is late-night politi-
cal comedy useless?” (Crouch 2016). Night after night, joke after joke, our
political comedians take to the airwaves to deliver smart and hilarious barbs
at the forces that continue to devastate our environment, promote social

159
160 Don Waisanen

inequalities, and slash public services, among other issues. Given the ways
that politics and business as usual continue unperturbed, however, comedy
with the best intentions of social change can often seem like a molehill look-
ing up at a mountain.
In a trend that shows few signs of waning, we also increasingly see those
in power using comedy to serve their own political ends. Consider how can-
didates such as Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump have been
both made fun of and performed on shows like Saturday Night Live. Comedy
by the powerful has shifted from an informal tool to a formal expectation.
Even the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency now engages in satirical tweets
(Schwartz 2015; for some historical background, see also Waisanen 2015).
Emily Nussbaum (2017) notes how

by 2016 the wheel had spun hard the other way: now it was the neo-fascist
strongman who held the microphone and an army of anonymous dirty-joke dis-
pensers who helped put him in office. Online, jokes were powerful accelerants
for lies—a tweet was the size of a one-liner, a “dank meme” carried farther than
any op-ed. . . . Ads looked like news and so did propaganda and so did actual
comedy, on both the right and the left—and every combination of the four was
labelled “satire.” In a perverse twist, Trump may even have run for President as
payback for a comedy routine: Obama’s lacerating takedown of him at the 2011
White House Correspondents’ Dinner. (pars 1–2)

Comedy has always been porous in both form and content, but there are
now larger developments at hand. Nussbaum’s comment indicates that com-
edy’s boundaries have been collapsed in a swirl of players, platforms, and
policies. If anything, this suggests that scholars should be thinking more
about the higher, structural levels of influence in which political comedy
plays out.
Examining comedy in neoliberalism’s context is hence a timely endeavor.
Neoliberalism has been defined as “the defining political economic paradigm
of our time—it refers to the policies and processes whereby a relative handful
of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life
in order to maximize their personal profit” (McChesney 2008, 283–284). It
is “a philosophy viewing market exchange as a guide for all human action”
(Dean 2009, 51). Neoliberalism has invaded just about every sphere of mod-
ern life, from politics to religion to academia, circumscribing substance and
style to the range of what is profitable (McChesney 2008, 421). So it should
come as little surprise that comedy itself might be affected by the opaque
pressures of neoliberal structures.
While I’m generally supportive of political comedy, my previous work
has analyzed the problems with crossing politics and comedy from a textual
 The Political Economy of Late-Night Comedy 161

perspective, recognizing that all types of communication have limitations

and tradeoffs (e.g., comedy’s fixation with distortion and difficulties in
dealing with complexity) (see Waisanen 2013a). In this chapter, I use the
“political economy of media” as a perspective for thinking about how
comedy’s potential for social change can be thought about from a higher,
structural viewpoint, especially when positioned within neoliberalism’s
architectures and offshoots. Scholarly work on comedy more often than not
looks to single texts or audience reception to address how comedy works
and what it does (Becker and Waisanen 2013). A next step is to focus on
how neoliberalism affects political comedy, especially in late-night shows
that act as one of the main platforms for developing and repeating certain
systemic commitments.
Political economists of media tend to think about the role that systems
and institutions play in media and depoliticization (McChesney 2008, 12).
My goal here is less to examine the specifics of policies than to think more
structurally about political comedy as a heuristic lens for examining late-
night comedy shows. Ultimately, “The central question for media political
economists is whether, on balance, the media system serves to promote or
undermine democratic institutions and practices. . . . And equipped with
that knowledge, what are the options for citizens to address the situation”
(McChesney 2008, 12). With these questions in mind, I point toward “the
discourses of the social structure which clearly have an existence which is
in some measure at least independent of comic texts” (Palmer 1987, 59–60).
I only bring up examples from shows, particular jokes or bits, or other fea-
tures as illustrative of more general problems in comedy’s wranglings with
neoliberalism writ large. Part analysis, part thought experiment, I offer three
interlocking themes about late-night shows in the political economy of media
that would largely remain hidden without a structural criticism. I conclude with
thoughts on what comedy producers and audiences might do to better serve the
public interest and counter co-optations by powerful figures and institutions.

INSTITUTIONAL RETURN

Late-night shows answer to institutional profits. Amidst all the comedy writ-
ing and performance that carries through our airwaves, profit-making still
remains the core concern around which most work transpires. Although this
fact is seldom acknowledged, late-night shows drive profit for their respective
overlords, so much that any show that works against that mission will quickly
be cut. Just ask Larry Wilmore, whose short-lived show on Comedy Central
experimented with pointed debates and continually focused on U.S. race
162 Don Waisanen

relations, leading to low viewerships and an eventual cancellation (Littleton

2016).
This isn’t to judge the quality of late-night shows and their writing and
performance skills, but rather to highlight how the institutional constraint of
profit-making limits the types of comedy we’re even able to see. Scholars
now underscore how “strong hegemonic elements” can exist within programs
like The Daily Show, creating a “paradox of sociopolitical comedy” (Ander-
son and Kincaid 2013, 1). As much as late-night television shows lambaste
public foolishness at every level, they are still part of many of the same insti-
tutional structures they critique.
If there’s any fault in modern comedy studies, it may be that we’ve been
too forgiving of how, for example, Stephen Colbert relies on advertising dol-
lars to keep his show going. Our political comedians generally do a masterful
job of working within those structures and pushing the boundaries of what
can be thought and said. To Colbert’s credit, he has gone from late-night
cable to a mainstream channel and increasingly amped up his political cri-
tiques, especially of the Trump administration (Reilly 2017).
Yet the elephant in the room still remains corporate advertising as a neces-
sary condition to continued success. Ultimately, many corporate sponsors are
happy for the jokes, sketches, and other comedic elements to fly thick about
political figures each evening. They know that at the end of the day adver-
tisers will still pay up, pockets will be filled, and portions of these monies
will still flow from their media organizations to those same representatives,
who won’t get in their way when it comes to creating media policies and
regulations.
An objection could be made that these steps are too removed from the
day-to-day operations of late-night shows. But this is precisely where think-
ing about political comedy from a higher, neoliberal, and structural level
becomes useful. We can certainly look to the compelling comic strategies and
effects that these shows manifest with viewing audiences (Becker, Xenos,
and Waisanen 2010), and how they promote divergent thought in an environ-
ment where our corporate and governmental leaders would rather citizens
focus on short-sighted or error-filled narratives (Waisanen 2011). If it’s the
case that the funding that keeps shows like Colbert’s or even Samantha Bee’s
Full Frontal in place trickles up to decision-makers who have no interest in
the social and political changes these shows implicitly and explicitly assert,
however, it’s more than a thought experiment to argue that the sum of these
efforts may be as much about neoliberal perpetuation as radical insight.
Although it may seem like a glum prognosis, to get accurate about
the comedy’s conditions of possibility, it’s worth targeting how comedy
speaking truth to power is dwarfed by the larger neoliberal players and struc-
tures who have the last word on political decisions. In the “commedification”
 The Political Economy of Late-Night Comedy 163

of the public arena (Szakolczai 2012, 4), armies of writers and performers
produce cutting-edge, hilarious material that makes important contributions
to the public discourse at the cost of sustaining powerful actors whose jobs
are defined by profit and loss statements. There’s a common saying in com-
edy that “you’re only as good as your last joke” (Carr and Greeves 2006,
n.p.). With neoliberalism in mind, perhaps a clarification is order—“you’re
only as good as your last joke’s ability to fund this institution and its network
of influence.”

SMALL REVOLUTIONS

George Orwell once said that jokes are “tiny revolution[s]” (Orwell 1968,
284). Looked at from a purely textual viewpoint, this comment suggests that
Trevor Noah’s or Jimmy Fallon’s nightly prods at politicians play a small but
significant part in fomenting incremental rebellions. Yet, when thought about
less as a matter of formal properties and more in terms of comedy’s structural
milieu, the phrase unlocks another idea: that jokes are tiny contributions to
subversity. What’s worse, using another meaning of “revolution” (Waisanen
2013b), they may only bring all of us full circle, revolving to the same condi-
tions we started with.
This idea is worth taking seriously. Among the national and global flows
of finance, the widening gaps between rich and poor, and corporations’
influence on governments (some find the whole point of neoliberalism is not
just corporate influence but to eliminate politics altogether [Brown 2015]),
nightly monologues by Seth Meyers look very small indeed. That the jokes,
sketches, parodies, and more may only bring us all back to exactly where we
began—comedy as a peripheral revolution around a neoliberal axis—lessens
the stakes for late-night shows in the political economy of media further.
There’s good reason to position late-night shows in terms of small revolu-
tions. In the United States, as a whole, late-night shows are relentless. Neolib-
eralism is little without the offer of endless choice and competition (Kotsko
2017), so not only are there many choices to watch at around the same
time—an impossible task—but most shows run just about every week night.
The sheer volume of comic material and choices has its own effect: none of us
can take it all in. Even when a particularly insightful or funny segment from
Jimmy Kimmel goes viral, it’s all in the knowledge that another show will be
produced tomorrow—not because we need it, but because relentlessness is
the condition upon which most late-night shows are premised.
A late-night segment might get us to think momentarily about counter-
factual political possibilities, but systemically, these shows keep bringing us
back to their same starting points the following day. John Oliver’s Last Week
164 Don Waisanen

Tonight is one exception to this trend that further focuses the problem. Hav-
ing at least a week between airings has allowed Oliver to create something
more reflective and investigative than what a lot of other shows offer. It also
airs on a channel whose content is less directed by advertising dollars and,
most important, in a Sunday night spot when there are few other late-night
comedy options. At a minimum, by operating off the beaten schedule, Last
Week Tonight offers viewers a bit less paralysis and more distinction in the
overall political economy of media.
That said, a fragmented media landscape only compounds the problem of
late-night comedy as small revolutions. The audiences for these shows are
still small and skewed in the younger, liberal direction. In a national U.S.
poll, the Pew Research Center revealed that 24 percent of those surveyed
found cable news the most helpful source for learning about the presidential
election, compared to only 3 percent for late-night comedy shows (Gottfried
et al. 2017, “Beyond,” par 7). Overall, the

level of usage differed notably by political party identification for late night
comedy shows. They are a source for three-in-ten Democrats, but only 16% of
Republicans and a quarter of independents. About a third of those ages 18-29
(34%) learned about the campaigns and candidates from late night comedy
shows, higher than any other age group. (par 7)

If late-night comedy influences political thought in the United States, it’s

mostly constrained to a niche portion of the population who are already sym-
pathetic to its politics.
Additionally, although there have been spikes in viewership for the more
politically oriented shows, such as Colbert’s and Bee’s during the Trump
administration (Nededog and Gould 2017), the least political of the shows,
such as Fallon and Kimmel, tend to skew more moderate (The Political 2016).
If late-night shows that generally engage in political critiques are leftist “echo
chambers” (Jamieson and Capella 2008), rarely preaching to the unconverted,
then the problem of small revolutions becomes even more acute—those
watching the comedy shows always end at the same place they started.
It’s not just about leftists only hearing what they want to hear, however.
It’s what the other side hears and does on a systemic level with these shows
that makes these revolutions even tinier. Caitlin Flanagan (2017) makes the
case directly: “Though aimed at blue-state sophisticates, late-night comedy
shows are an unintended but powerful form of propaganda for conserva-
tives.” In essence,

When Republicans see these harsh jokes—which echo down through the morn-
ing news shows and the chattering day’s worth of viral clips, along with those
 The Political Economy of Late-Night Comedy 165

of Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers—they don’t just see a
handful of comics mocking them. They see HBO, Comedy Central, TBS, ABC,
CBS, and NBC. In other words, they see exactly what Donald Trump has taught
them: that the entire media landscape loathes them, their values, their family,
and their religion. (par 7)

This isn’t simply the opinings of a reporter from The Atlantic. Conservative
media are replete with these sentiments (Crouere 2017). While many conser-
vative critiques reduce to the “why can’t we get Johnny Carson back” variety,
and this certainly isn’t an argument for Samantha Bee to stop her scathing
assessments of her political opponents, it does beg the question of whether
these shows do much at all in politics. In the political economy of media, if
they are as much a foil as a source of relief, then in a real sense they may
be as much about neoliberal reinscription as anything else. Comedy as small
revolutions is a snake biting its own tail, so to speak.
Contrary to popular beliefs that comedy can be revolutionary, practitioners
even underscore how comedy is really “small, logical leaps of absurdity”
from extant human realities, rather than farcical material that runs the risk
of leaving audiences unable to identify with a topic undergoing humorous
treatment” (Lynn 2004, 10). In this light, it’s worth thinking about how much
comedy is up against given neoliberal concentrations of power. For instance,
between 1981 and 2002 Martin Giles and Benjamin Page looked at around
1,800 policy decisions in the U.S. government and came to the conclusion
“that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests
have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while
mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent
influence” (as cited in McChesney 2014, 14).
Rabelais said comedy could bring down feudal orders, and there is evidence
that jokes can play a role in gradually undermining state regimes (McLeod
2014, 12; Riley 2008, 69). In essence, “Social change can be nurtured, over
decades, by means of rather simple (low-tech, low-cost), everyday com-
munication activities . . . in most of the world speech is, in fact, all that the
majority of people possess in terms of persuasive or political power” (Riley
2008, 311–312). Yet even with the broadcast media platforms that late-night
comedians use, which can certainly generate important political talk that sets
in motion social change, we shouldn’t lose a sense of scale here.
As Peter Sloterdijk (1988) highlighted, we’re dealing with “highly armed
centers of private reason, conglomerations of power bristling with weapons
and science-supported systems of hyperproduction. None of them would even
dream of bending to a communicative reason; rather, under the pretense of
communication, they want to subjugate the latter to its private conditions”
(544). In the political economy of media, late-night shows may have the
166 Don Waisanen

recursive potential to innovate upon the ground from which they stand, but
they are goaded to incorporate and return to that ground at every juncture.

CYNICAL LABOR

Comedy doesn’t often get thought about as labor. Late-night shows may
seem like all fun and games, but the products we’re presented with involve
a tremendous amount of work. It’s common to hear comedians say that they
had to write ten (or more) jokes just to find one that’s effective. In this sense,
there’s a lot of hidden labor that also goes into producing, say, Bill Maher’s
monologues every Friday night. And that’s before all the testing that goes on.
Comedians and their teams adhere to data analytic protocols: did the audience
laugh or not, what worked and didn’t, and so on. These are useful yardsticks
for just about any endeavor, but take on a different look when positioned with
neoliberalism’s endless drive toward accountability, measurement, ranking,
and so on. In this larger sense, we should think both about the labor of com-
edy production and the labor that viewers are expected to perform.
Before getting a job on a late-night show, those who become writers, per-
formers, and others involved in comedy production perform immense labor at
a variety of institutions. Comedians coming from improv and sketch comedy
backgrounds typically put in countless hours at organizations like The Second
City in Chicago, the Groundlings in Los Angeles, or the Upright Citizens
Brigade (UCB) in New York City and L.A. Each of these institutions has sig-
nature emphases, such as The Second City’s focus on doing political satire, or
the Groundlings character-behavioral comedy (Lynn 2004).
The joy of working in the craft and the communal structures that support
it generally offer some rewards for all the time spent perfecting material and
performances. But much of this labor is freely given, often for paying audi-
ences, which has occasionally become a full-blown national controversy in its
own right. One of the founders of the UCB commented that “I don’t see what
[improvisers] do as labor. I see guys [sic] onstage having fun. It’s not a job”
(Zinoman 2013, par 21). Trying to get a job in an area where authority figures
tell you this isn’t a job highlights a structural cynicism toward comedic labor
itself—a desire to occlude the actual work of comedy as work.
Although it’s more of an individualistic craft, those coming from stand-up
comedy backgrounds perform a great deal of community labor by writing and
traveling in teams to a variety of institutions, such as the Improv stand-up the-
aters all over the United States. This labor also involves many jobs at low or
no-pay for a long time period. There’s more institutional support for paying
gigs in stand-up in general, a fact that some argue has led to more diversity in
the comedic sub-field than in others (Zinoman 2013, pars 24–25). Once one
 The Political Economy of Late-Night Comedy 167

finds “success” in industry (if ever) on late-night shows, among other routes
for a comedy career, this kind of labor is only intensified greatly in the service
of advertising and corporate returns.
While there’s much to praise about the supportive organizations and net-
work that can be built in a comedy career, what’s critical to highlight from
a systemic viewpoint are the habits and routines that have taken place over
the course of that long labor period. If, as Kenneth Burke (1984) (referencing
Thorsten Veblen) reminds us, we all face the danger of “trained incapacity”
(7) in any profession (i.e., any line of work habitually commits us to acting
and thinking in certain ways to the exclusion of others), then one danger of
comedy as neoliberal labor is its commitment to a constant negativity. At the
core of modern joking is slamming every topic, event, or person that it can
with a negative attitude (Carter 2001). While it’s never talked about in this
way, constantly applying a lens of “this is stupid” or “what’s weird or unusual
here” (see Besser, Roberts, and Walsh 2013) are the horse blinders of com-
edy, which are elevated to an incessant level by late-night shows.
Neoliberalism works on a subjective level by having individuals internal-
ize a certain “interpretive repertoire” of response, such as entrepreneurial
approaches that seek to compete with and reject others as a matter for routine
performance (Scharff 2016, 111, 107). Neoliberalism also operates by trying
to get citizens to believe that there simply are no alternatives to the present
conditions, with its attendant ways of being, thinking, and acting (Fisher
2009). People step into spaces that are already constituted in certain ways
(Charland 1987), so trained incapacity becomes especially relevant to a neo-
liberal, systemic view of late-night political comedy as limiting alternative
ways of operating.
As scholars have highlighted, negativity can be incredibly important for
critique, but it can also easily devolve into a relentless, detached cynicism
unmoored from political action or affirmation (Waisanen 2013a; Hart and
Hartelius 2007). With an endless cynicism, comedy’s ambivalence can be a
problem for getting political footing and structures for governance (Waisanen
2018). In the name of institutional returns, we are bid to never stop produc-
ing, never call it a day, and never stop laughing as much as possible. This is
partly why we have so much comedy flooding every conceivable space now,
so that even the powerful can’t just tell an occasional joke, but must increas-
ingly labor as entertainers. Hillary Clinton’s appearance on Between Two
Ferns breaks records but still becomes a routine matter as cynical labor (she
initiated the performance, after all) (Jarvey 2016, 7).
Organizational communication scholars have highlighted the idea of “emo-
tional labor” or “jobs in which workers are expected to display certain feel-
ings in order to satisfy organizational role expectations” (Miller 2015, 73).
Although a waiter or waitress may not feel like it, being “forced” to smile on
168 Don Waisanen

the job can be considered emotional labor. Similarly, there’s emotional labor
in working on a late-night show through the pressure to view any and all top-
ics through a negative lens. Since laughter is the sine non qua of the industry,
laborers must produce or be subjected to laughter as a condition for the job.
If “an essential aspect of power is that it only likes to laugh at its own jokes”
(Sloterdijk 1988), one also has to wonder how much a hierarchy of laughter
is forced upon those who would rather not laugh in acts of everyday labor. As
Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai (2017) underscore, “It may be that we hold
our pleasures closer than our ethics. . . . Enjoyment, as the psychoanalytic
tradition has always told us, is a serious thing” (242).
There’s also a cynicism about the labor of these shows and their effects
built into the media industry’s structure. Many still assume that there should
be hard distinctions between news and entertainment in a new media environ-
ment better seen in terms of hybrid features and functions (Williams and Delli
Carpini 2011). In terms of late-night shows, Matt Carlson and Jason T. Peifer
(2013) highlight the “boundary maintenance” that media and other powerful
institutions continue to draw in these matters (333). Neoliberal actors and
organizations love late night shows to the extent that they can be consigned
to a separate, cynical, ineffectual space through news and entertainment
distinctions.
As James Caron (2016) adroitly states, moreover, “The postmodern condi-
tion exacerbates the dilemma of ethical ridicule that has concerned Western
thought for centuries: its apparent lack of centering norms or standard values
for making comic judgments inevitably complicates the contemporary pro-
duction and reception of satire”; it is “comic political speech, but it is not
political speech” that can fit within the “realm of the serious speech acts of
policy statements and civic actions” (157). One thinks about Stephen Col-
bert’s testimony in character before the U.S. Senate (Adams 2010)—what of
it, in the end? Inherent to the form and propelled by neoliberal institutions,
“Because satire is structured as both—and neither—serious and nonserious,
it falls prey to being understood as one or the other, as political speech or as
mere entertainment” (Caron 2016, 165).
What starts out in comedy theaters as unpaid labor propelled by an axiom
that “this is for fun, it’s not a job” is perpetuated at a systemic level as cyni-
cism about the labor itself. Studies of the effects of political comedy show
that audiences often “discount” jokes and other humorous textual devices
(Nabi, Moyer-Gusé, and Byrne 2007), but a cynical discounting of late-night
in general presents an additional challenge to the political potential in such
work. And, “The more a modern society appears to be without alternatives,
the more it will allow itself to be cynical. In the end, it is ironical about
its own legitimation” (Sloterdijk 1988, 112). Lacking legitimation sets the
stage for the growth of other political platforms; governments aren’t spaces
 The Political Economy of Late-Night Comedy 169

willing to remain without anyone or anything in charge, at the end of the day.
According to Andres Huyssen, for instance, “The growth of cynicism during
the 1970s actually provided the cultural soil for the revival of the ideological
conservatism of the 1980s” (as cited in Sloterdijk 1988, xii).
Despite the teams that go into producing late-night shows, an additional
fact remains: these shows are still mostly presented to viewers through
their individual hosts. Whether it’s Conan O’Brien or John Oliver, almost
every night viewers are implicitly asked to view political comedy’s political
potential in terms of a great person narrative that focuses on an extraordinary
person rather than citizens’ collective capabilities (see Mathews 2014, xvi).
Along these lines, Peter Sloterdijk (1988) argues that “cynicism” as an
“enlightened false consciousness, has become a hard-boiled, shadowy clever-
ness that has split courage off from itself, holds anything positive to fraud,
and is intent only on somehow getting through life” (546). It’s the difference
between “buffoonery” and “good old nasty satire,” the kind that Diogenes
exemplified as a “distance-creating mocker, as a biting and malicious indi-
vidualist who acts as though he needs nobody and who is loved by nobody
because nobody escapes his crude unmasking gaze uninjured” (89, 4). The
distinction between a toothless cynicism and a productive kynicism remains
useful to thinking about how to speak truth to power. Yet under neoliberal-
ism’s terms one fault in this line of thought becomes apparent—it still pres-
ents the extraordinary individual rather than movement as the natural loci of
influence for anything comedy can and should do.
Finally, the labor of comedy cannot be separated from its invitations and
interactions with actual audiences. It may seem too obvious, but these are late
night shows, likely the time of day when audiences are least willing or ready
to think about politics in much other than quick, shallow, ethereal ways. The
day is done, so late-night bids for the path of least resistance, made material
by laughs signifying that there’s not much energy to be spent. After all the
labor of putting late-night shows together, viewers are too left with a cynical
warrant: “Don’t labor too much about all this yourselves.” The comedy and
laughter might be useful supplements or inspiring antidotes to political activ-
ism, but it may be too little labor for neoliberalism’s challenges, highlighting
a problem that Lilie Chouliaraki (2013) has developed at length: we become
“ironic spectators” and little else.
The system urges us to be “well-off and miserable at the same time, this
consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its false-
ness is already reflexively buffered” (Sloterdijk 1988, 5). At the same time,
as much as modern laughter is “the shock of dislocation when mediation is
revealed” (Hariman 2008, 262), the revealing of mediation can also serve to
relocate and reinscribe one into the same picture again. Like the paradoxes
built into Cecily Strong’s character on Saturday Night Live, “The Girl You
170 Don Waisanen

Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party” (Coggan 2016),

viewers consistently receive the same message: it’s time to put labor into
being preachy about politics, but whatever happens, don’t put labor into being
preachy about politics.

TOWARD COLLECTIVE CHEEKINESS

Examining late-night comedy shows from a neoliberal viewpoint allows us

to see a great deal that would remain hidden otherwise. To this point, crit-
ics have seldom addressed the ways that mandates for institutional returns
guide decision making and influence what can even happen in this industry.
The institutional and systemic pressures that make late-night comedy small
revolutions are occluded by discourse highlighting “the power of comedy,”
riddled with questionable assumptions as it is. Nor have we much addressed
the cynical labor that goes into comedy careers, makes its way into institu-
tions, and has become a way of life for many writers, performers, and even
the audiences watching late-night comedy shows.
Raising these challenges is not meant to undermine the many positive
characteristics late-night comedy shows offer public discourse. Amber Day
(2011) reminds us that much comedy provides sympathetic audiences with
motivation and an opportunity to incrementally build opposition to powerful
forces. A stultifying joylessness is no answer to political dogmatism. But tak-
ing a high-level perspective on late-night shows allows us to see what range
of possibilities may exist for radical social critique. In this spirit, I’d like to
offer some thoughts on how late night shows and audiences might become
less limited by the systemic constraints discussed in this chapter.
For the time being, late-night comedy television programming isn’t going
anywhere, so I explore the following to find fissures for social change that
might blossom into something more along the way. Given her finding that
“corporate and anticorporate rhetorics do not oppose one another so much
as feed off and respond to one another. . . . The market is able to mutate in
response to adversity,” Christine Harold (2007) underscores that a productive
“pranking” of all sorts should address “the patterns of power rather than its
contents” (xxxii, 112). It may be the case that “neoliberalism maintains its
influence on political culture in large part because of its deep embeddedness
in political language” (Onge 2017, 1), but it’s undoubtedly in the systemic
patterns and forms of public life that that deep embeddedness thrives. Since
“contemporary commercial culture is dependent on consumers having some-
what routine responses to words and images” (think cynical labor), truly bold,
jarring, and more complex responses not easily reinscribed into present con-
ditions should be invented (Harold 2007, 107). In Harold’s terms, productive
 The Political Economy of Late-Night Comedy 171

responses to hegemony mean “no longer working against, but rather working
with” and “taking the cultural logics of late capitalism so seriously that they
begin to undo themselves” (162).
Against a paradigm that reduces human beings to atomistic competitors,
one hope for late-night producers and audiences may be to focus on a “collec-
tive cheekiness” capable of critique, realistic assessments of the larger struc-
tural challenges comedy faces, and an optimism about the possibilities for
many people to construct a common voice around what society most needs.
I construct this suggestion as a counter not only to the pressures identified
above, but also in line with scholarly thought in these areas. In response to the
reproduction of neoliberal policies that isolates and rules via blameworthiness
(like cynical labor), Kotsko (2017) argues for a “conscious collective agency”
and efforts to emerge as a “meaningful ‘we’” (493, 497–498, 500, 506–507).
At the same time, Sloterdijk (1988) argued for “a source of enlightenment
in which the secret of its vitality is hidden: cheekiness (“Frechheit,” a word
whose meaning lies somewhere between cheekiness and imprudence)” (99–
100). Cheekiness once had a positive connotation as “a productive aggressiv-
ity, letting fly at the enemy: ‘brave, bold, lively, plucky, untamed, ardent’”
(103). Examples of a politically productive cheekiness in history include
Martin Luther (who signaled frivolity in “here I stand . . .”), the carnival (“a
substitute revolution for the poor”), the Bohemians, and above all, Diogenes,
who generated forms of argumentation “respectable thinking does not know
how to deal with” (117, 101). Just as pompous, sublime war rhetoric can be
brought down to earth through comic rhetorical devices like “bathos” (Gil-
bert and Lucaites 2015, 382, 386), strategies for boldness against neoliberal
recitations can surely be found within comic traditions.
Diogenes, of course, was a loner with little time for others, so we should
remain conscious about putting into play cooperative public campaigns. We
also need to recognize how the presidency of Donald Trump has put Diogenes
on the national stage. Trump is an earthy, pretentious, pleasure-seeking, “go
it alone” individualistic mocker in power par excellence. This turning of Dio-
genes on his head was once characterized as a “master cynicism” or “cheeki-
ness that has changed side,” as in Marie Antoinette’s sick joke, “why don’t
they eat cake” (Sloterdijk 188, 111–112). A way through these conditions
is to draw attention to the patterns of power at play, “approach unchecked
fantasy with caution” (McLeod 2014, 284), and above all, leave our media
cocoons for collective mobilizations.
To get beyond the problem of comedy as small revolutions, citizens’
voices need to mean more than isolated laughs in safe settings. Attempting
to build a common voice, the historic efforts of groups like ACT-UP mani-
fest a collective cheekiness that was hard to miss and forwarded significant
social changes (Christiansen and Hanson 1996). Many anti-Trump protest
172 Don Waisanen

signs created at marches around the United States too rise to the level of an
embodied, public, “collective cheekiness” that laughs, shouts, and speaks
truth to power in real geographical spaces that are hard to ignore (Kurtz-
man 2017, 4). In terms of late-night, Stephen Colbert’s intervention into the
White House Correspondent’s Dinner during the Bush administration—and
the forming of a satirical Super PAC to draw attention to ridiculous campaign
finance laws—were exceptional moments that set in motion further forms
of collective cheekiness among many viewers and Internet audiences (see
Waisanen 2018).
Crossing multiple platforms with such cheeky comic strategies also
appears to hold promise for countering neoliberal strongholds. Myles McNutt
(2017) has found that late-night show segments distributed throughout the
Internet prioritize a “collaboration common in the YouTube community at
large,” with sketches and all manner of content now “being ‘re-ritualized’ for
online audiences, disconnecting the segments from their linear broadcast con-
text and reframing them for nonlinear audiences in light of this once second-
ary space of distribution [for late night shows]” (569). At a minimum, new
media provide some opportunities to break beyond vertical media structures
so citizens can repurpose and build horizontal momentum for criticality while
on their computers, tablets, or phones.
Like the other authors in this collection, I have sought to advance scholarly
discussions about neoliberalism and comedy. These are topics easily swept
under the rug for the sake of laughs, careers, and as this chapter highlighted,
to reinforce distinctions between the serious and nonserious that too eas-
ily return us to the status quo. They are difficult subjects to navigate, but
as election results continue to indicate, they’re now central to how politics
gets done. Ultimately, examining the political economy of late-night shows
reveals that comedy faces many systemic obstacles, challenging us to be
bolder, cheekier, hold more in common, and above all, think more deeply
about the systems in which we are all caught.

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 Chapter 7

British Comedy and the

Politics of Resistance
The Liminality of Right-Wing Comedy
James Brassett

THE RISE OF RIGHT-WING COMEDY

Recent years have seen a generalization and intensification of the proposi-

tion that comedy has an important role to play in politics. Against a view
of comedy as a form of entertainment, that comedy is “just joking,” a range
of global events and political arguments have promoted the idea that com-
edy and satire matter. Beyond this broad point, however, it is still unclear
“how”—exactly—comedy is supposed to matter for politics.
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, world leaders came together
in a grand media spectacle to re-state their commitment to free speech and
to defend the role of satire in political life. In a European context this served
as an update of the previous and ongoing defence of the right of Danish
satirists to draw pictures of the Prophet. While some, like Will Self (2015),
sought to problematize the easy association between satire and free speech
by recommending that satire should “trouble the comfortable to the benefit of
the afflicted,” a popular moment of solidarity—Je Suis Charlie—was seem-
ingly confirmed when the French state moved to underwrite production of
the magazine. More recently, the role of comedians and satirists has come to
the fore in U.S. politics as the media attempts to grapple with the causes and
implications of a Trump presidency. While satire is again defended in a U.S.
context, because of its association with free speech, the fact of the Trump
victory has led many to question the actual “impact” of shows like Saturday
Night Live (SNL) and the Daily Show (Coleman, 2016). Either such satire is
accused of preaching to the choir, or, more problematically, as the makers
of Spitting Image previously discovered, it can normalize the role of certain

177
178 James Brassett

politicians by making them seem familiar (Schaffer, 2016). Indeed, respond-

ing to Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of Trump on SNL, the lead singer of REM,
Michael Stipe, directly accused Baldwin of contributing to the ascendancy
of Trump by making him seem funny. Conversely, Trump has sought to
distance himself from U.S. satire and has refused to attend the White House
correspondents’ dinner, an event where the President normally engages in
some spirited self-deprecation.
Across the board then, comedy appears to be regarded as both an important
element within, indeed a crucial expression of political life, and yet somehow
it is also commonly criticized for failing. Historically speaking of course,
such a proposition is not unusual. The oft repeated quip that satire is dead,
speaks to a perception of the declining ability of satirists to really affect a
political world that seems to outmaneuver them. In a British context, the
satire boom of the 1950s was criticized for “selling out” its radical promise
by focusing too much on advertising and Hollywood (Wagg, 2002). Indeed,
as Judith Butler argues, the subversive potential of jokes can be diminished
“through their repetition within commodity culture where ‘subversion’ car-
ries market value” (Butler, 2006, xxii). However, at least one novel element
in the current predicament can be discerned, in terms of the changing subject
position of “who” is telling the joke. Beyond accidental notions that politics is
funnier than satire, or cooptive critiques that satire is good business, the cur-
rent period has been marked by an increasing crossover between politics and
comedy. Politicians themselves now commonly appear on satirical shows like
the Daily Show and Have I Got News for You. Whereas the politician used to
embody a certain character, with a seriousness of purpose, there is a growing
mood to reflect their “down to earth” nature, that they can take a joke, and
more importantly, tell one (Higgie, 2017; Wood et al. 2017). And it is here, I
think, that the failure of satire seems most acute.
Recent years have seen an outpouring of debate on the political worth
of comedy that questions whether satire might actually be centrally
involved in the decline of principles like truth and fairness in public life
(Denby, 2010; Fielding, 2014; Flinders, 2013; Iannucci, 2016). For some,
an emergent culture of subversion has perpetuated a safe camouflage for
politicians like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson; that they use comedy and
self-deprecation as a way of insulating themselves from critique (Coe,
2013). In this vein, Stewart Lee (2014) has described Boris Johnson as a
self-satirizing politician:

Johnson's trademark tuck-shop wit makes him a formidable political orator.

Johnson is like an iron fist encased in an iron glove, but on the knuckles of the
iron glove are tiny childlike drawings of ejaculating penises at which even the
son of a Marxist intellectual cannot help but smirk.
 British Comedy and the Politics of Resistance 179

In the post-Brexit/Trump era, it is not just that satire is “failing,” but that
it has become a constituent element in “the problem.” The very role and
function of “political satire” has been called into question for its failure to
communicate beyond the “echo chamber” of liberal opinion. Rather than
contributing to “genuine” political critique, it has been conjoined to a social
media entertainment complex that privileges mugging down a camera in ele-
vated tones of outrage (Coleman, 2016). Not only does this approach speak
primarily to an audience that already agrees with the basis of the joke, but
its smug repetition can be exclusionary for people who disagree. We are left
then with a potentially fatal image: comedy and satire are no longer capable
of holding politicians to account. Instead, a norm of subversion within the
public sphere has actually become a part of a larger, postmodern, process of
“hollowing out” within political life (Flinders, 2013).
Symbolism and image have triumphed over substance and engagement,
such that joking becomes more of a comfort blanket than a critical foil.
Drawn together the mood seems to be as Will Davies (2016) surmises, that far
from contesting politics, comedy has become the unwitting servant of certain
(right-wing) politicians:

The willingness of Nigel Farage to weather the scornful laughter of metropolitan

liberals (for instance through his periodic appearances on Have I Got News For
You) could equally have made him look brave in the eyes of many potential
Leave voters. I can’t help feeling that every smug, liberal, snobbish barb that
Ian Hislop threw his way on that increasingly hateful programme was ensur-
ing that revenge would be all the greater, once it arrived. The giggling, from
which Boris Johnson also benefited handsomely, needs to stop.

Across a broad range of argument then, question marks keep arising as to

whether comedy is just entertainment, whether it has a political purpose,
whether it can fulfil that purpose, or whether, in a tragic reversal, the form
of its commodification rather serves to embolden the chances of right-wing
politics. A kind of “post-truth” malaise emerges whereby politicians—most
notably Boris Johnson—are able to profit from an increasingly symbiotic
relationship with comedy. The previously cutting edge of satire is not only
blunted, but actively turned to the ends of a de-politicized, spectacular form
of politics where gesture and humour, replace truth and accountability (Bras-
sett and Sutton, 2017).
For students of comedy then, these are interesting and somewhat baffling
times. So often regarded as primarily a frivolous past time, a “bit of fun,”
comedy and satire have been catapulted into global political consciousness
as variously, the epitome of universal values of free speech, the key criti-
cal foil in political democracy, an egalitarian force capable of troubling the
180 James Brassett

comfortable to the benefit of the afflicted, or, on the other hand, another fail-
ing niche of consumer culture; a normalizing discourse of power that lays the
groundwork for the contemporary resurgence of right-wing politics.
While such grand claims may be symptomatic of a certain media friendly
presentism in the current discussion of comedy, they also reflect a wider set
of analytical conflations between comedy and resistance, and between resis-
tance and ethics, that require unpacking (Brassett, 2016). To wit, comedy
is often portrayed as a form of popular resistance that can have a positive
(read: emancipatory) impact upon the world of politics (Orwell, 1970). By
this I mean to suggest that a certain vision of resistance-as-ethical, that is, as
oriented to the cause of the marginal or powerless, has imbued satire with a
popular set of associations with critical and, more latterly, left-wing politics.
At its most elaborated, this is an analytical vision that is typically abhorred
by, or even incredulous toward, the very idea of right-wing comedy, seeking
instead to diagnose it as a “failure,” a “deception,” a “danger,” or, most dev-
astatingly, as “just not funny.”
While this form of critical language about comedy and resistance may
serve an important role in forming judgments and making interventions
within current political debates, in this chapter I will argue that it precludes
from a more productive account of comedy and resistance as generative of
politics. Simply put, we must foreground how resistance works as a produc-
tive element within power, rather than some (automatically ethical) outside
of power. On this view, we can begin to comprehend the role of comedy and
resistance as less “oppositional” and more “productive” within the everyday
politics of market life. In order to do this, the chapter will develop an account
of the emergence of right-wing comedy in a British context as part of a wider
problematization of the—apparently necessary—association between com-
edy and left-wing politics. While this argument can take the tragic “sting”
out of the use of comedy by right-wing politicians, it nevertheless opens an
important question as to how the rise of right-wing comedy might contribute
to the fashioning of a new political consensus over time?
A genealogy of right-wing comedy:

There was a Year Zero attitude to 1979. Holy texts found in a skip out the back
of the offices the London listings magazine Time Out tell us how, with a few
incendiary post-punk punchlines, Alexei Sayle, Arnold Brown, Dawn French,
and Andy de la Tour destroyed the British comedy hegemony of upper class
Oxbridge satirical Songs and Working-Class Bow Tie-Sporting Racism. Then
with the fragments of these smashed idols and their own bare hands, they built
the pioneering stand-up clubs The Comedy Store and the Comic Strip. In so
doing they founded the egalitarian Polytechnic of Laughs that is today’s comedy
establishment. (Lee, 2010: 2–3)
 British Comedy and the Politics of Resistance 181

In order to understand the relationship between British comedy and right-

wing politics it is necessary to reflect on the rise of alternative comedy in the
late 1970s and 1980s. While the “satire boom” had fostered a certain irrever-
ence toward the establishment, the concern was more with imperial fascina-
tions, corrupt judges, and assorted upper-class twits. Alternative comedy, on
the other hand, comprised an altogether more critical range of targets, and
came to celebrate diversity in both content and production. How we under-
stand this narrative of alternative comedy, and the various conflicts and divi-
sions that it contained, is an important point of departure for understanding
the resurgence of right-wing comedy.
Alternative comedy represented a step change from the satire boom. Gone
was the Oxbridge review format—the clever wit and the “bon mots”—to
be replaced by an altogether more aggressive aesthetic. A range of young
comedians from across social classes, from different regions and ethnic back-
grounds developed a form of comedy that directly questioned British social
attitudes. While satire and self-deprecation remained in the mix, programs
like the Young Ones, and The Comic Strip sought to recreate elements of
the tradition, such as the comic novel and the sitcom. For its part the Young
Ones, with writers like Ben Elton, was the most politically attuned, including
a hippy, an anarchist, a punk, a yuppie, and a Marxist (Alexei Sayle): a group
of “wide eyed, big bottomed anarchists.” A key driver in this rephrasing of
British comedy was the new inspiration of “stand-up,” which provided a
more dynamic anti-racist, anti-sexist, but equally more aggressive artistic and
free form version of humor, for example, for some period Keith Allen would
finish routines by either throwing darts into the audience or stripping naked,
or both (Sayle, 2014).
While some portray alternative comedy as a “movement” with a clear set of
(left-wing) political attitudes, it is perhaps more accurate to think of a looser
combination of political arguments, associations, and conflicts. Alternative
comedians openly contested the dominant form of popular humor at the time,
which commonly traded in a set of nationalist, racist, and misogynistic tropes.
Such comedy operated as part of a reactionary trend in Thatcher’s Britain
that was adjusting to rapid changes associated with de-industrialization and
immigration. Indeed, Alexei Sayle took aim at Bernard Manning, precisely
for the racist elements of his work:

To placate whatever frazzled part of their mind acts as a conscience, Manning

and his kind always draw some arbitrary line that they swear they won't cross,
like an alcoholic telling himself that his drinking is under control as long as he
stays off the barley wine. I seem to remember Bernard stating that though he
might use terms like “nigger” and “coon” in his act, he would never, ever tell a
joke about “disabled kiddies.” You could hear the self-regarding tremor in his
182 James Brassett

voice as he said this, as if he was reluctantly admitting to being a humanitar-

ian of similar stature to Nelson Mandela, Noam Chomsky or Aung San Suu
Kyi. He always denied being a racist, claiming that he made fun of everybody,
equally—“politicians, bald-headed people, people with glasses on, the lot. I
have a go at everybody and that's what makes everybody roar with laughter.”
I notice he left “nigger, coon and Paki” out of his list, though. Those were the
words people objected to him using; I can’t remember much of a furore about
his specky four-eyed barbs.

In this way, it’s clearly possible to associate alternative comedy with the
critique of right-wing attitudes and the social legitimation of a certain set
of values; equality between races and sexes, freedom of expression, moder-
nity and progress in a critical liberal vein. Superficially, alternative comedy
provided the basis for the promotion and eventual normalization of black
comedians on British TV through shows like the Lenny Henry Show, and
later, the longest running black sitcom Desmonds. But the cultural success
of alternative comedy was by no means straightforward, or unitary. Indeed,
while it is commonplace to refer back to Alexei Sayle as the chief proponent
and eventual cultural victor, Sayle himself was (and is) far from comfortable
with the idea. If alternative comedy promoted a sense of pluralism in main-
stream society, its success was also arguably a failure, expounding the values
of a newly emergent liberal class, what Sayle (2016) refers to as the “Habitat
shoppers.” Much like the satire boom that preceded it, we might question
whether the ideals of alternative comedy are really met by a few successful
careers, or whether it did little more than foster a social consensus around
identity politics and political correctness?
In good communist fashion, Sayle (2014) has attributed this apparent fail-
ure to splits “within the movement,” including the alliance between alterna-
tive comedy and the “Oxbridge set,” as well as the “selling out” of Ben Elton.
But equally problematic is how—despite the recognition of these failures by
comedians, and indeed, the historical record of contest and diversity within
alternative comedy—the dominant narrative of a progressive revision of the
liberal consensus seems to persist (Hardy, 2017). On this view, “splits within
the movement” might rather speak of a lost narrative, of contest and critique;
that in fact comedians like Sayle were just as concerned with satirizing the
left:

One of the weird things about the left is their obsession with slogans, writ-
ing slogans on the wall, you know, slogans like “jobs not bombs,” as if Mrs
Thatcher’s gonna be walking up Wigan high street [in high pitched voice] “Oh
jobs not bombs, oh ok!.” For a start she wouldn’t have a clue where Wigan was:
Mrs Thatcher has special compasses made with the North taken off. I do a lot
of Left wing benefits and one of the weird things about Left wing audiences
 British Comedy and the Politics of Resistance 183

is that you tell a joke and then there’s a five second delay in which the joke is
politically vetted and then they laugh. Like you say, Stalin was a bit of Looney
wasn’t he, and they go [pretentious intellectual voice] “Stalin was a bit of a
looney, hmm, yes I’ve got definite disagreements with Satlin’s collectivisation
of the gulags, yes, Hahahahaha.” And they’re really worried in case you say
anything suspect, you know, like you say, these two women go into a shop
right, and they go “Oh my god he’s mentioned women, he’s gonna say their
lesbians in a minute, we’re gonna be laughing at lesbians, oh no! He’s gonna
say their black and we’re gonna be laughing at black lesbians, oh my god oh
my god no no no!” Honestly, that is not my style. Anyway, these two black
lesbians go into a shop.1

This teasing out of tensions in the British Left is crucial to understanding

the awkward fit between Sayle’s form of resistance and the more common
narrative of British progress associated with alternative comedy. In his sat-
ire of both Left sloganeering and political correctness, Sayle retains a more
clearly Marxist focus on the problematic of the state form of British politics.
This in turn allowed Sayle to explore some difficult subjects in the emerging
consensus over neoliberal governance that arguably anticipated the eventual
capitulation of labor to social democracy and the Third Way:

[An idyllic blond family leaving a suburban house] Narrator: Walter Schmidt:
his family dropped bombs on this area for the Luftwaffe, but we don’t mention
that now because his firms come to Milton Spingsteen New Town. [A Japanese
businessman playing golf] Narrator: Akio Takashiota: his father bombed Pearl
Harbour, invaded Singapore, and strung up living skeleton’s by their thumbs for
sadistic pleasure, but that’s all forgotten now because his company’s relocated
to Milton Spingsteen New Town. [A Sikh man] Narrator: Mehar Singh Gupta:
his family fought and died for Britain in two world wars, but that’s all forgot-
ten now because with the new nationality laws, if he wants to come to Milton
Springsteen New Town, he can just Sod Off. If he wants to live in Britain now,
he’ll have to bring a factory with him. Britain: where the past’s been well and
truly forgotten.2

If the dominant narrative of alternative comedy suggests a progressive move-

ment to culturally legitimate liberal pluralism, the career of Alexei Sayle
invites a more complex reading. In a recent interview, Sayle (2014) recounted
how a good proportion of the audience for his live shows were actually
members of the police and army, who didn’t really care about his politics,
they just enjoyed the violence. This is comedy that is hard to pin down then.
Indeed, his materialist critique of immigration policy—that it failed to reflect
the contribution of Indian soldiers to British history—might bear special rel-
evance in the current post-Brexit world? While such tensions are commonly
excluded from the dominant narrative of mainstream comedy as progressive,
184 James Brassett

interestingly, they did not disappear, but were rather elevated in the next
phase of comic innovation.
The rise of 1990s irony seemed to combine elements of alternative comedy
with a more commercially savvy period of sharp writing and bold characters.
While 1990s irony can be associated with the swagger of acts like the Mary
White House Experience and the Lad Mag hubris of Loaded, it also ushered
at a period reflexivity to the importance and limits of popular culture. Here
the early work of Stewart Lee and Richard Herring is an important illustration
of the radical potentials of a more everyday satire. Well versed in the cultural
tropes of the period, yet seeking a form of critique that worked within their
logics, this was not a simple sneer at Tories, nor a rejection of capitalism.
Such comedy sought to directly inhabit the object of its satire, that is, popu-
lar culture. It was partly format based, part subversion of the media through
shows like This Morning with Richard but Not Judy, and their earlier combi-
nation with Iannucci and Brooker, in the Day Today. This “everyday irony”
over the limits of cultural experience in mediatized society generated a new
form of satire in the work of Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci. Rather than
engaging in the straight satire of politics, such comedy draws on the everyday
experience of British political life as itself a subject of media relay (Brassett
and Sutton, 2017).
Here the emergence of Ricky Gervais—who first came to prominence
along with Ali G on the 11 O’Clock Show—is an important point in the
discussion of comedy and right-wing politics due to his preoccupation with
satirizing liberal values. Time and again Gervais returns to the subjects
of race, gender, physical, and mental disability to nurture his acute irony
over how liberal values hold together in everyday life. Indeed, The Office is
perhaps the seminal comedy of the irony period running through the early
2000s. The mockumentary style considers the experience of some increas-
ingly desperate, bored, and tragic figures who work in a paper company.
While the set up recalls the existential tone of earlier satires on the repetition
of working life—for example, Pete and Dud’s ball bearing factory, or Fawlty
Towers—the show magnifies the everyday irony of the period to challenge
the liberal consensus of Third Way Britain. Gervais’s intense personal dep-
recation nurtured a form of social pain, partly a social pain of being British,
and partly the pain of surviving a post-political Britain. If the economy was
the center of politics, then The Office was the appropriate stage for examin-
ing the dearth of social values. Thus, the merger between “Slough” and the
“Swindon lot” is the tragic context within which Brent looks (increasingly)
bad, first for promising to protect jobs (he can’t), and then adding salt to the
wound, when the Swindon manager is elevated through his social charm and
charity work. While Brent’s famous dancing scene is socially painful, the
joke portrays a humanist intent; that in the post-Fordist reality, managers are
 British Comedy and the Politics of Resistance 185

required to have the people skills and social attributes that Brent does not.
Most fundamentally, this brutal irony allowed Brent license to explore older,
more reactionary themes in British comedy, with the perpetual reflexive ques-
tion over where each joke had landed:

Brent: This is Sanj, this guy does the best Ali G impression, Aiiieee. I can’t
do it, go on, do it.
Sanj: I don’t, must be someone else
Brent: Oh sorry, it’s the other one. . .
Sanj: The other what? . . . Paki?
Brent: Ah, that’s racist.3

Thus, while there is a tendency to portray elements of 1990s irony as part

of a reactionary turn toward misogyny—as embodied in programs like The
Mary Whitehouse Experience and Top Gear, or the rise of “postmodern ironic
reconstructions of masculinity” through lad mags like Loaded—there is a
sense in which this form can be politically productive. Indeed, I would argue
that a liminal product of this ironic turn can be found in Ricky Gervais.
The rise and decline of alternative comedy belies a set of themes and ten-
sions in British politics that are poorly reflected in the dominant narrative of
comedy as a straightforwardly resistant (read: progressive) force in politics.
Far from a happy marriage between “right-on” identity politics and social
democracy, the work of Alexei Sayle and Ricky Gervais reveals a funda-
mental problematization of this vision of comedy. In that sense, there may be
continuities between alternative comedy and everyday irony on the one hand,
and the rise of right-wing irony over political correctness, on the other. While
there are clearly two distinctive political arguments at hand, there is at least a
spectrum of conversable topics that have—in recent years—been occupied by
the right to bolster their critique of the center (or what the world terms left)
of politics. Instructive here is Ricky Gervais’s most recent contribution for
Comic Relief with the comedian/rapper, Doc Brown, called Equality Street.
This short vignette of “political music” sets up a certain multicultural vision of
racism as a problematic element in progressive politics. Or as Brent defends
the project to Doc Brown: “It’s perfect, cos its mega racial, but anti-racist”:

Brent: Let me take you down Equality Street, you never know the people you
meet, at the end of the street is a golden gate, let in love, it don’t let in hate, no.
Walk with me down Equality Street, do unto others and life is sweet, books have
no covers just look right in, you’re judged by the words not the colour of your
skin. / Day-o, day-o, me say day o, biddlee bidlee bong yo!
Doc Brown: Yo, I’m like John Lennon, except I do imagine there’s a heaven,
somewhere everyone is welcome, all my multicultural brethren. Where hate is
outdated, today, love’s the word, even for people from Luxemburg, or maybe
186 James Brassett

like some other countries that you might ignore, Tonga, never thought of in my
life before, but if I met a guy from Tonga then we’d stop and we’d speak, in
fluent Tongalese on Equality Street, yep acceptance! See that Kenyan guy with
mental eyes, he might be totally normal you can’t generalise, Black People
Aren’t Crazy, Fat People Aren’t Lazy, And Dwarves Aren’t Babies! You can’t
just pick em up, they got rights, and anyway don’t assume you could, they’re
not light! I learned the hard way. . . . Don’t give a damn if you’re Russian or
Spanish, comrades, compardres, you can be a half gay woman with a dark
face, one leg, no legs, long as you got a heart hey! Transgender, gay, straight,
lesbians, whatever who ever, [to a gay skinhead] hey mate, let’s be friends, but
just friends. I want you to be, where you’re properly free, obviously its equality
street, believe, you know the deal there, everything is real fair, take a ride on my
equal opportunity wheel chair.4

Such excerpts perform an acutely uncomfortable critique of multiculturalism;

that the attempt to define identity as the basis of ethics enters into a world that
is oddly reminiscent of the racist vision of difference; that just as its strange
to value someone less because of their color, it is also potentially strange to
value them for it. Such liminality has been both a comic success and a failure
for Gervais, who has more recently been accused of straying too far into the
racist vision itself. In wider terms, however, this problematization of identity
politics has provided a route into the mainstream for right-wing comedy.
Here I think of the way Jeremy Clarkson has used Top Gear and his various
newspaper columns for a kind of “political correctness gone mad” agenda.
Such positions commonly draw ire from the left, and comedians like Steve
Coogan (2017), in particular, have sought to critique their use of irony as a
defense, arguing that “real” comedians:

Justify their comedy from a moral standpoint. They are laughing at hypocrisy,
human frailty, narrow-mindedness. They mock pomposity and arrogance. If I
say anything remotely racist or sexist as Alan Partridge, for example, the joke is
abundantly clear. We are laughing at a lack of judgment and ignorance. There is
a strong ethical dimension to the best comedy. Not only does it avoid reinforc-
ing prejudices, it actively challenges them.

But even here, while I somewhat share Coogan’s point of view, it neverthe-
less endorses the terrain for engagement. While we might challenge the use
of identity politics as a basis of comedy if it is humiliating or hurtful, we are
surely also required to engage the moral dimension of certain jokes/argu-
ments? And here I think lies the basis of the right-wing move to comedy:
by combining the (now) socially legitimate language of irony over political
correctness with a (more-or-less) strongly articulated moral agenda, the
right has been able to occupy comedy to political ends. In a speech to the
 British Comedy and the Politics of Resistance 187

Conservative Party Conference (2012), Boris Johnson played for laughs and
national pride:

When they watch Gangnam style on their televisions in Korea, as they do . . .
by the way the Prime Minister and I danced the Gangnam style the other day,
you’ll be shocked to discover . . . when they watch Gangnam style on their TVs
in Korea, do you know they watch it on TVs with the use of aerials made in
London, in Wandsworth, absolutely true, the Dutch ride bicycles made in Lon-
don, the Brazilians use Mosquito repellent that is made in London, Every Single
Chocolate Hob-Knob in the World is made in London!

To think of Boris Johnson as a comedian implies a rich hybrid. He presents

as a bumbling, upper-class twit persona, in the mould of Jeeves and Wooster.
While his increasingly ill-fitting suit and straggly hair references a social
misfit type, he has a tendency to twirl his hair and pat his head, in the vein
of a dominant stand up, able to control the room with his distinctive and (for
some) powerful oratory. The material is not ground breaking, clearly, but it
is playful, cheeky and sometimes rude. If not always inspirational, it carries a
live, on the hoof, feel, as per a Leave campaign speech in an underwear fac-
tory: “When you look at the EU now, it reminds me, it makes me think of . . .
walking round this wonderful underwear factory, it makes me think of some
badly designed undergarment that has now become too tight in some places,
far too tight, far too constrictive, and dangerously loose in other places.”5
Boris plays in an area of ambiguity: while his context is serious politics,
he understands that serious politics is often quite dull, and so he uses the
perceived dullness as a set-up, to highlight the cut of the joke, the irrever-
ence, and, thus, his own renegade persona. In this sense, he has acquired
an intuitive ability to find ways of sending himself up as a kind of loveable
oaf—getting stuck on the zip wire, knocking over a small child playing
rugby, and so on. However, a more divisive theme that runs through Boris’s
comedy is national identity. In line with irony over political correctness, he
attempts to bring a playful, self-deprecating style to issues of national com-
parison that works in a light relief to the dry nature of diplomacy: “Ping-pong
was invented on the dining tables of England in the 19th century, and it was
called Wiff-waff! And there, I think, you have the difference between us and
the rest of the world. Other nations, the French, looked at a dining table and
saw an opportunity to have dinner; we looked at it and saw an opportunity to
play Wiff-waff.”6
Much like irony over political correctness in the work of Gervais, however,
this kind of riff is often criticized for going too far, or simply reflecting under-
lying racist views, for example, inter alia highlighting the ancestry of Barak
Obama. Equally, it is unclear if the joke always translates to an international
188 James Brassett

audience as when, for instance, he likened a post-Brexit trade deal to a ques-

tion of asking Italian Prosecco manufacturers if they want access to British
drinkers; or more controversially, when he won the Spectator’s President
Erdogan Offensive Poetry competition, with the limerick: “There was a
young fellow from Ankara, Who was a terrific wankerer, Till he sowed his
wild oats, With the help of a goat, But he didn’t even stop to thankera” (Mur-
ray, 2016).

TOWARD A PRODUCTIVE ACCOUNT

OF RIGHT-WING COMEDY?

The recent reemergence of right-wing comedy seems commensurate with a

set of themes and tensions that run throughout the emergence of alternative
comedy in the UK. Against those who would like to pour scorn on the form of
comedy that politicians like Boris Johnson employ then—as if it were distinct
from the cultural form of British political discourse—there is arguably room
for nuance. The social legitimacy of irony over political correctness means
that we are required to at least exercise judgment in relation to what is said;
questioning after a moral position, or a critique, and assessing the capacity
for humiliation in any joke. For all Boris’s buffoonery, he nevertheless seeks
to bring national attachments and values “back in” to politics. Clearly, this
is part of his everyman vernacular quality, that plays well politically. But it
can also be a conduit for liberal comment. Unfashionable as it may be, his
limerick about Erdogan was both targeted at an issue of free speech in soli-
darity with numerous journalists and satirists that the president of Turkey had
arrested, and a statement about defending European values; a move directly
targeted at the German decision to initiate legal proceedings against Jan Boh-
mermann, a satirist who had also targeted Erdogan. Johnson thus animates
national attachments and liberal values through a, no doubt, imperfect appro-
priation of British comic discourse.
A more difficult element in this argument is the currently popular debate
over the rise of alt-right comedy (Wilson, 2017). Godfrey Elfwick is the Twit-
ter persona of what might be described as an alt-right satirist of mainstream
liberal multicultural sensibilities. Self-described as a “Genderqueer Muslim
atheist. Born white in the #wrongskin,” Godfrey Elfwick sets out to portray
an extreme version of what the alt-right deride as social justice warriors. In
short, his Twitter feed “Filters life through the lens of minority issues.” At
one level, Elfwick clearly attaches to the kind of argument that is reflected in
Gervais’s Equality Street, his own pinned tweet reading: “Imagine being so
ignorant that you’d ignore a person’s gender, ethnicity, or sexual preference
and just treat them the same as everyone else.” At another level though, the
 British Comedy and the Politics of Resistance 189

nature of his trolling arguably takes the potentials of alt-right satire in a new
direction, managing to get interviewed on the BBC talking about the racial
discrimination of Star Wars—“The main bad guy—what’s he called, Dark
Raider?—is black, he has a deep voice, he listens to rap music—it’s just a
really bad racial stereotype” and, more critically, claiming to have written
an anonymous article in the Guardian. In this sense, Elfwick seeks to let his
satire “play out” in unpredictable ways, which can be both comic and re-
assuring for one or other view point.
The Anonymous (2016) article “Alt-right” online poison nearly turned me
into a racist,” charts a story of online radicalization: “I voted remain in the
referendum. The thought of racism in any form has always been abhorrent
to me. When leave won, I was devastated.” So he decided to investigate why
people voted leave: “Surely they were not all racist, bigoted or hateful?”:

I watched some debates on YouTube. Obvious points of concern about terror-

ism were brought up. A leaver cited Sam Harris as a source. I looked him up:
this “intellectual, free-thinker” was very critical of Islam. Naturally my liberal
kneejerk reaction was to be shocked, but I listened to his concerns and some
of his debates. This, I think, is where YouTube’s “suggested videos” can lead
you down a rabbit hole. Moving on from Harris, I unlocked the Pandora’s box
of “It’s not racist to criticise Islam!” content. Eventually I was introduced, by
YouTube algorithms, to Milo and various “anti-SJW” videos (SJW, or social
justice warrior is a pejorative directed at progressives). . . . For three months
I watched this stuff grow steadily more fearful of Islam. “Not Muslims,” they
would usually say, “individual Muslims are fine.” But Islam was presented as
a “threat to western civilisation.” . . . At the same time, the anti-SJW stuff also
moved on to anti-feminism, men’s rights activists—all that stuff. I followed a lot
of these people on Twitter, but never shared any of it. I just passively consumed
it, because, deep down, I knew I was ashamed of what I was doing. I’d started
to roll my eyes when my friends talked about liberal, progressive things. What
was wrong with them? Did they not understand what being a real liberal was?
All my friends were just SJWs. They didn’t know that free speech was under
threat and that politically correct culture and censorship were the true problem.
On one occasion I even, I am ashamed to admit, very diplomatically expressed
negative sentiments on Islam to my wife. Nothing “overtly racist,” just some
of the “innocuous” type of things the YouTubers had presented: “Islam isn’t
compatible with western civilisation.” She was taken aback: “Isn’t that a bit . . .
rightwing?” I justified it: “Well, I’m more a left-leaning centrist. PC culture has
gone too far, we should be able to discuss these things without shutting down
the conversation by calling people racist, or bigots.” The indoctrination was
complete. (emphasis added)

In conclusion, the rise of right-wing comedy—both the use of comedy by

right-wing politicians and the move to irony and satire by certain alt-right
190 James Brassett

activists—is clearly commensurate with the historical development of Brit-

ish comedy. At one level, the chapter draws out how the progressive vision
of alternative comedy is problematic in terms of substance, that is, there
was simply more divergence and conflict within the political life of British
comedy. On this view, comedy embodies a wider set of political faultiness
in British politics; the conflict within the left, and how it was accommodated
into a somewhat saccharine consensus on political correctness and social
democracy, that is, the Third Way. Here I make the claim that Gervais’s
Office can be read in terms of a critique of post-Fordism; that by locating the
dearth of multicultural ethics in the fulcrum of global management culture,
Gervais incites a tragic, indeed critical vision of irony. At another level,
however, the chapter has identified a long tradition of irony over political
correctness that has served as a ready language for right-wing politicians
and alt-right satirists to occupy. In this sense, I argued that there is a liminal
quality in right-wing comedy, that we can’t judge the jokes on form alone
since they seem legitimate within the emergent context. Thus, the productive
dimension of right-wing comedy must be read in terms of the substance of
the joke. Beyond the casual racism of Clarkson, it was suggested that a moral
component can be read into the comedy of Boris Johnson. The move to bring
the national and the liberal dimension of politics together as an element in
his self-deprecating persona is palpable. Furthermore, an emergent critique
of liberalism has percolated through Gervais and, arguably, consolidated in
the comedy of Godfrey Elfwick. Indeed, Elfwick’s elusive satire of liberal
hysteria is productive of a feeling on the right that some liberal, multicultural
hegemony has worked to delegitimate their jokes almost before they are told.7
In this sense, much like Sayle and Gervais, right-wing comedy contests the
attempt to recuperate comedy within the value system of liberalism. While
we might, of course, question the veracity of any such “liberal hegemony,”
it is fair to suggest that the perception of it among right-wing comedians has
been productive of a new form of politics—itself utterly resistant and con-
flictual—that repays analysis. Unpicking the politics of these different forms
of comic resistance is not, I would argue, a question of success or failure, but
of questioning how they might work to perpetuate a new political consensus
over time.

NOTES

1. Alexei Sayle on Politics: https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=vDA​JQY5F​MIw

(accessed March 29, 2017).
2. Sketch from Alexei Sayles Stuff which ran for 3 series on the BBC between
1988–1991. Dowloaded from https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=H5o​sSmOt​9TU
(Last Accessed July 27, 2018).
 British Comedy and the Politics of Resistance 191

3. Excerpt from The Office, available at https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=Cir​

05JyE​sV0 (Last accessed July 27, 2018).
4. Downloaded from https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=XmT​V62mE​1PA&g​
l=GB&​hl=en​-GB (Last Accessed, July 27, 2018).
5. Boris Johnson speech during Leave Campaign, available at https​://ww​w.you​
tube.​com/w​atch?​v=N-5​YcGT2​iV8 (Last downloaded, July 27, 2018).
6. Boris Johnson Olympics Speech, available at https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​
v=7ut​I_jdR​fZw (Last accessed July 27, 2018).
7. Recent events can be noted to both qualify and re-inforce this idea. While God-
frey Elfwick always claimed to have written the Guardian article, this was never con-
firmed by the paper and Elfwick’s evidence—screenshots of the original document
with time stamp—was disputed by some. However, it is interesting to note that sev-
eral right wing organisations ran with the hoax line regardless, for example, Breitbart,
Guido Fawkes. As such, we are reminded of the difficulty of attributing an original
voice to a medium that is by definition anonymous and ambiguous. Regardless Doyle
(2018) argued, “Elfwick’s brand of satire depended on this kind of ambiguity. Those
who took his posts seriously were inadvertently enhancing the impact of the joke. . . .”

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//www​.news​tates​man.c​om/po​litic​s/uk/​2016/​06/tr​ump-b​oris-​i-wou​ldn-t​-writ​e-thi​
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://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=EIV​ZbxjH​92s (Last accessed July, 27, 2018).
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12/bo​ris-j​ohnso​ns-aw​ard-w​innin​g-ent​ry-sp​ectat​ors-p​resid​ent-e​rdoga​n-off​ensiv​
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Journal of Politics and International Relations, online first.
 Chapter 8

I Want to Party with You, Cowboy

Stephen Colbert and the Aesthetic Logic
of “Truthiness” after Campaign 2016
Aaron McKain and Thomas Lawson

“I apologize for being perfect.”

—“Stephen Colbert.”

“I think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong. . . I will

absolutely apologize, sometime in the hopefully distant future, if I’m
ever wrong.”
—Presidential Candidate Donald J. Trump.

Sometimes even heavyweight champions lose title bouts.

Even without media coverage pronouncing him the loser, it was nearly
impossible for viewers not to see that in their first interview match-up (on
The Late Show, September 22, 2016) then candidate Donald J. Trump got
the best of host Stephen Colbert (Garber 2017). From the start, Colbert was
off his game. An early round rope-a-dope attempt to convince Trump to act
human—“I’ve said some things about you that you wouldn’t say in polite
conversation. . . . Do you want to apologize to anyone?”—was blocked and
countered by Trump’s simple “no” (Trump 2017). Round Two saw Colbert
come out of his corner aggressively, role-playing the future president’s border
wall negotiations with the Mexican government. Again, a flurry of punches
with nothing connecting against Trump’s, thoroughly in character, pledge
to build a “beautiful door for legal immigrants.” (And Colbert lost technical
points for awkwardly adopting a meaningless Chicano accent to anemically
squeak: “ay, mi corazon.”) The Third Round was even worse: An elaborate
193
194 Aaron McKain and Thomas Lawson

bit of late night talk show footwork by Colbert (a game to have Trump guess
whether he or Colbert’s right-wing Colbert Report persona made a prepos-
terous conservative remark) that ended in Trump not only attributing nearly
every ridiculous quote correctly, but thoughtfully. (Trump’s only miss—“It’s
freezing and snowing in New York. . . . We need global warming!”—is subtly
analytically parsed by the future president with “I think it’s you, but it’s close
to being me.”) Trump even gets the trick question right: “The real strong
have no reason to prove it to the phonies” turns out to be neither Trump’s
Campaign 2016 persona nor Colbert’s former arch-conservative cartoon, but
Charles Manson. Knockout. Game over.
What happened? Where was the Colbert that spoke literal truth to power—
trolling President Bush—at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2006?
The Colbert that testified before Congress on immigration before running
outside to fundraise for his Super PAC? The Colbert whose avant-garde perfor-
mances became a scholarly cottage industry Unto itself itself? The Colbert that
was so terrifying to the politicians, pundits, blowhards, and cranks that domi-
nate our politics and news-cycles that even Democratic Party strategists started
advising candidates to stay away, lest they be made a fool (Grieve 2007)?
Colbert’s tap out concession to now President Trump—“you know you
very well,” the host sighs—speaks volumes about what was lost as a comedic
critique and political voice when Colbert retired his persona (and all of his old
fighting moves) and traded the groundbreaking political aesthetics of Comedy
Central’s The Colbert Report for the relatively pedestrian confines of The
Late Show. We will always have to wonder if the old Colbert—who reminds
Trump that “for many years, I played an over-the-top conservative character;
not as long as you”—would have helped us keep our national course during
the post-fact, digital media shitshow of Campaign 2016. This is not hyperbole
or wishful thinking. Post-Campaign 2016’s pernicious collision of neoliberal
ideology, digital politics, and postmodern political performance art is pre-
cisely the crisis that Colbert presciently satirized—and offered an aesthetic
remedy against—a decade ago. Which is why, in the political precarity of the
post-Trump era, we need to map out exactly which rhetorical jabs and parries
were lost when “Colbert” reverted back to Stephen Colbert. In doing so, we
can then figure out how to implement the stylistic and comedic principles of
The Colbert Report and use them to move forward as citizens and journalists.
To let us see how we can all become more “Colbert-y” in our political
life, this chapter’s argument centers around three theoretical claims. First,
“Colbert,” above all, offered a re-calibration of our political ethos more in
keeping with the controversies of the post-digital era, specifically the post-
fact society’s unraveling of shared reality and the new neoliberal regime of
digital surveillance (and subsequent collapse of privacy norms). Second, as
evidenced by Colbert’s failed interview with President Trump, the appropria-
tion of Colbert-esque political aesthetics by the alt-right and White House
 I Want to Party with You, Cowboy 195

(specifically “Truthiness” and the metafictional performance of political

character) begs the question of whether the postmodern aesthetics of Ameri-
can political comedy have finally become superfluous as a form of critique
in a technological and political culture that presumes and programs them in.
Third—and most importantly—we argue that Colbert’s aesthetics can be
operationalized, and put into interpretive practice, via an updated model of
rhetorical judgment based upon a decidedly old-school way of thinking about
rhetoric (which, like Colbert, has a new resonance in our post-Trump, post-
digital world of American politics): The “Chicago School” model of narrative
communication.

I. HE IS COLBERT (AND SO CAN YOU!):

COMEDY, ETHOS, AND THE IMPLIED AUTHOR

“He’s playing a character. He is a performance artist.”

Alex Jones’s attorney Randall Wilhite to
District Judge Orlinda Naranjo

“Your reputation is amazing . . . I will not let you down.”

President Donald Trump to Alex Jones on Infowars

“I’m far realer than Sam Brownback, let me put it that way.”
“Stephen Colbert” to Tim Russert on Meet the Press

So answered “Stephen Colbert,” two weeks after announcing his candidacy

for president of the United States in 2007 and in response to Meet the Press
host Tim Russert’s inevitable, and fairly reasonable, question: “So, are you a
real candidate?” (Russert 2007). “Realer,” as it turns out, is the key word. By
raw mathematics alone, the Comedy Central star was already arguably a more
viable contender for the White House than a number of his fellow Republican
primary competitors: Ahead of Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, and Bill Rich-
ardson in the polls, holding a respectable 13 percent in a hypothetical match-
up against Rudy Giuliani, and with a Facebook group—1,000,000 Strong for
Stephen Colbert—that was then the fastest growing in the social network’s
history (Klein 2007). But “realer” gets at something more deeply ingrained
in our dilemma of how politicians (and people) present themselves in the
post-Trump, post-digital age. For if “are you real”—are you your authentic
196 Aaron McKain and Thomas Lawson

you, to quote Russert—has remained our default, though entirely paradoxi-

cal, interpretive question about character in our contemporary political and
digital environments, then the success of Colbert—political satirist, improv
art-project, bona fide presidential candidate, or whatever he or it was—may
help us to see forward to a new rhetorical real: Past the tired binary of real/
fake that the post-Campaign 2016 political era has rendered moot and that
social media and the “algorithmic society” (to use Yale law professor Jack
Balkin’s phrase) render untenable as a mode of representative politics (or life)
(Balkin 2018).
Though numerous studies of Colbert’s comedic persona exist, taking a cue
from Marcus Paroske, who argues that we should avoid importing “wholly
textual theories of satire that miss the relations between actors within discreet
spaces” when analyzing Colbert’s “participatory” parodic performances, we
begin to see the most critical, and usually missed, aspect of the comedian’s
performance (Paroske 2016, 210). What “Colbert” did, he did not do alone.
We—the audience, the politicians and pundits and reporters who acted along
with him—were a crucial part of the joke. And the joke was on us. A quick
detour into a weird bit of often overlooked literary theory (the implied author
“IA”, which is a key component of the “Chicago School model” of narrative
communication) helps us to see the truly remarkable way Colbert’s satire
was enacted and why, in the neo-liberal, post-postmodern, post-digital age,
Colbert’s performance can still be usefully employed by the rest of us as a
prescient interpretive attitude with regard to digital ethics.

A Implied Author 3.0

Coined by literary critic Wayne Booth in the 1960s, the IA was Booth’s
attempt at preserving a special interpretive/aesthetic status for writers,
poets, and novelists by splitting the difference—and fighting against—the
then dominant schools of narrative interpretation: Intentionalism (which
opens up any scrap of information—drafts, diary pages, biographies, medi-
cal records—as allowable “evidence” of an author’s intentions) and Post-
Structuralism (which, via reductive readings of Roland Barthes and Michel
Foucault, ignores the author’s intentions and grants readers/audiences carte
blanche in interpretation) (Barthes 1967; Booth 1961; Foucault 1977). Dis-
tinct from either the flesh-and-blood “FB” author—or the “character” or
narrator in a work of fiction—the IA, for Booth, was a more ethereal phenom-
enon: The assumptions, beliefs, norms, and meanings of a text or, as he put
it, the “sum” of an author’s choices (Booth 1961, 73). For narrative theorist
James Phelan, the IA is the audience’s “intuitive apprehension of a completed
artistic whole,” the “capacities, traits, attitudes, beliefs, values, and other
properties that play an active role in the construction of the particular text”
 I Want to Party with You, Cowboy 197

(Phelan 2005, 45). Fifty years and thousands of academic pages later, Booth’s
concept of the IA remains, frankly, unpopular (and infuriating), not least
because it is (logically) impossible (Kindt and Mueller, 2006). Where, from
a methodological perspective, does the IA exist? In the text? In the reader’s
imagination? Is it a person or Is it an it? Does my IA look like your IA? Or
is the whole thing a moving target, a shell game championed by Booth to
promote his old school version of literary criticism: A last ditch effort to cling
to his literature professor pretend-world where we conveniently forget Robert
Frost was an asshole, Faulkner was a drunk, Plath died with her head in the
oven, and Stephen Colbert was a failing comedic actor whose most famous
pre-Daily Show CV lines were the Amy Sedaris cult comedy Strangers with
Candy and Mr. Goodwrench ads?
Though difficult for narrative scholars to properly theorize, seen through
the lens of Colbert’s exchange with Russert on Meet the Press what Booth
was after is clear and can be re-articulated as a simple, albeit unfashionable,
principle of rhetorical judgment: Interpretive restraint. Rather than ask the
Comedy Central star about his early work on Exit 57 (or how he dealt with the
trauma of losing his father and brothers in an airplane crash), Russert instead
engages Colbert as the character he presents. And while this is a seemingly
minor rhetorical move, it holds significant interpretive—and ontological—
consequences. First—and as a way to rethink the IA apart from literary
theory—what the IA immediately invokes, to put it in legal terminology, is
an evidence exclusion rule: A determination by the audience that, despite the
known availability of potential interpretive evidence (which, in the digital
era, includes everything from emails to social media posts to search engine
histories), they have chosen (for ethical, practical, aesthetic, and/or political
reasons) to exclude and ignore this data. Second, invoking the IA as an inter-
pretive standard necessarily brings it, and six other (ontologically distinct)
audience/speaker positions, into existence via the narrative model of com-
munication. Sketched out, the “Chicago School” narrative communication
model—and its order of operations—looks something like Figure 8.1.
This rhetorical model—and this crude diagram of how the IA triggers it—
takes a bit of unpacking. First, by fiating the existence of an IA, an audience
concedes the existence of some rhetorically actionable entity beyond the FB
author and their media character “MC”. It then opens up, logically and meth-
odologically, three corresponding audience/speaker communicative axes,
which are highlighted by the Russert-Colbert exchange: FB Stephen Colbert
and FB Tim Russert (i.e., the actual biological entities); MC Russert (journal-
ist) and MC Colbert (fake conservative blowhard); and the IA Colbert and its
rhetorical counterpart, the “Ideal Audience” Russert (Rabinowitz 1977). The
Ideal Audience, and its relation to the IA, is key here. All works of fiction/
communication are designed, or so the narrative model argues, rhetorically
198 Aaron McKain and Thomas Lawson

Figure 8.1  Narrative Model of Political Communication.

for a particular hypothetical, “Ideal” audience. In the case of comedy, this

rule becomes obvious: The Ideal Audience is the audience that “gets” the
joke, understands all the ironies, recognizes the references and punchlines,
and, ideally, has the affective response of laughter. Therefore, to “play”
along with Colbert—to allow the FB actor Stephen Colbert to transform into
his MC—Russert not only has to violate journalistic conventions by ignor-
ing available biographical evidence but has to actively join Colbert’s Ideal
Audience: The audience that recognizes not only the fictional nature of the
MC Colbert, but also the IA Colbert who orchestrated it, an IA that exists in
contradistinction to both the FB agglomeration of Colbert’s life choices and
the pixelated fiction on the television screen. Each of the narrative model’s
three communicative axes—speakers and audiences interacting at the FB, IA,
and MC levels—invites particular questions of interpretation and judgment.
And the trick to the IA/Ideal Audience axis is that IAs and Ideal Audiences
don’t really exist but they are “realer” in the sense that they are what is
rhetorically acted upon. Particular IAs—whether “you” or “me” or “Hillary
Clinton” and “Donald Trump”—cannot exist but for the audiences that cre-
ates them, and vice versa. IAs are never the sole product of a FB initiator (the
speechwriter, the candidate, the comedian) but are summoned into existence,
co-actively, by their FB audiences agreeing—via interpretive restraint—to
join the author’s ideal audience.

B. Losing Interpretive Arguments for Ethical Gains:

The IA as Ethos
For Booth, who was never shy about ethics, restricting interpretation to the
IA/ideal audience axis produces a “better,” more aspirational version of the
 I Want to Party with You, Cowboy 199

author, one divorced from their grubby daily dealings in our “shit-laden
world” (Booth 2005, 77). But “better” or “worse” are too simplistic as cat-
egories when thinking about post-digital comedy or politics. Instead, what
evaluations of an IA signal, to our mind, is the classic rhetorical concept
of political discourse: Ethos. Quintilian’s ancient notion of the “good man
speaking well,” ethos is ultimately a judgment about a speaker’s character.
Moreover, our judgments of ethos—especially in the high-visibility world
of presidential politics and stand-up comedy—are epideictic (to use Aris-
totle’s term): They are declarations of a community’s attitudes and values,
a commemoration and demonstration of the collective rhetorical norms and
rules of the game—the landscape of “available” means of persuasion—that a
particular interpretive/political community upholds, rebels against, or acqui-
esces to (Perlemen and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, 52). How we judge how we
want to allow IAs (as a standard of ethos) to come into being—that is, what
interpretive data (including, as we’ll see in a moment, Big Data) we want to
exclude when calculating character—creates the conditions for how future
IAs (including our own) can come into being as well.
Viewed through the lenses of ethos and the IA, the true satiric beauty—
and prescience—of Colbert’s appearance on Meet the Press comes to light:
Illuminating the illogical paradox of audiences still clinging to authenticity
as a metric of political character in contemporary American politics. Though
famous for being a caricature of a right-wing pundit, it wasn’t the styrofoam
political personalities who crowd Sunday morning talk shows or bluster their
way through campaign trail Q & A’s (spouting platitudes about authenticity
and ideological purity) that was Colbert’s target. Rather, his exchange with
Russert allows him to take aim at the millions and millions of us who tune
in each week to watch Russert, or his journalist-brethren, prod and poke to
elicit more and more scripted, which is to say inauthentic, answers to the
fundamentally unanswerable rhetorical question of ethos: Are you real? What
is extraordinary about Colbert being grilled by an NBC reporter is not that
Russert plays along with “fake” candidate Colbert (asking him ostensibly real
questions about policy and campaign strategy), but that Russert plays along
with—by treating deathly seriously—all the other quote-unquote real can-
didates: The handled, spun, scripted, and ghostwritten Trumps and Obamas
and Clintons, candidates who (with relentless, almost pathological, tenacity)
Russert—and the pundit class—tries to expose as fakes, which is to say,
handled, spun, scripted, and ghosted. The performance of ethos that Colbert
brings to life—as the IA/Ideal Audience axis makes clear—is not his, but
ours: Whether through our Fourth Estate proxies or by our simple acquiesce
in these rituals of “authentic” political performance.
This, in a nutshell, is our schizophrenic relationship with contemporary
ethos as political character: Our full knowledge of the machinations, manipu-
lations, and strategems of presidential campaign politics standing alongside
200 Aaron McKain and Thomas Lawson

our stubborn refusal to let go of authenticity as a measure of political char-

acter, if only because we have no other way to keep score. And what Colbert
(as an IA par excellence) represented—and what the IA could still represent
(if we chose to treat more political figures, and each other, like Colbert)—is
a means to operationalize a realignment of the critical aesthetics of political
comedy, one more in keeping with, and potent against, the post-postmodern,
digital era. This is where we turn next.

II. ROBOTS DON’T HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR:

THE IA AND COLBERT AS POST-DIGITAL ETHOS

“Our lives would be disastrous, hour by hour, if everyone swore to be

‘sincere’ at every moment.”
—Wayne C. Booth

“It’s the duty of a comedian to find out where the line is drawn and
deliberately cross over it.”
—Gilbert Gottfried

The question that the IA ultimately asks is: What evidence do we want to
allow to be excluded when interpreting a rhetorical act? In the realm of com-
edy—to say nothing of politics—this is a thorny ethical exercise. Stand-up
comedians, Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock chief among them, have long
complained that cell phone surveillance in comedy clubs are an intrusion
into a semi-sacred private space where veterans feel free to try out unvetted
material and jokes—taken in or out of context—violate the ethos, and free
speech expectations, of performers (Rife 2015). More problematically, the
last decade has seen many of comedy’s most revered figures exposed for truly
horrific acts, public and private: From Seinfeld star Michael Richards’s infa-
mously shouting “nigger” at a group of hecklers to Daniel Tosh’s jokes about
rape to Louis C. K. admitting to long-standing rumors about sexual miscon-
duct. Perhaps the most interesting recent debate on comedy and privacy—a
literal debate—was between Stephen Colbert and Jerry Seinfeld on The Late
Show in 2017 on whether they can still listen to Bill Cosby’s albums after
revelations of years of predatory behavior. Despite claiming that Cosby’s
records “saved [his] life” after the loss of his father, Colbert (ironically, given
his long career as a persona) insists that he can no longer listen. (“I can’t
separate” the public and private behavior, Colbert argues, “because there’s
love there.”) Seinfeld pushes back: “But should we separate the art or work
from the man?” Especially given that “there’s a lot of tragedy in comedy.”
 I Want to Party with You, Cowboy 201

“No,” Colbert replies, because “you can’t talk someone into thinking a joke
is funny. It’s an emotional response” (Seinfeld 2017). After the commercial
break, Seinfeld changes his mind, and agrees with the case of Cosby, but asks
the logical question: Can you still listen to Bill Clinton?
Comedy—at its heart—is about reconfiguring our ethos and aesthetically
enacted “community of sense,” including the difficult question of where, and
when, to draw the public/private line (Ranciere 2009). And, as Lauren Berlant
and Sianne Ngai argue, the shifting paradigms of post-digital, post-Trump
America (e.g., the rise of the alt-right and #MeToo “call out” culture) have made
comedy “freshly dangerous” again: Helping “us test or figure out what it means
to say ‘us.’ Always crossing lines, [comedy] helps us figure out what lines we
desire or can bear” (Berlant and Ngai 2017, 235). The IA—refigured via Col-
bert’s Colbert Report persona—offers no explicit guidance on how to make
difficult ethical judgments about privacy and evaluating the personal lives of
politicians and performers. But it does model the rhetorical processes involved
in making them and necessarily calls attention to, and acts as an aesthetic rem-
edy against, an unforeseen consequence of our judgments of ethos—of what
counts as public and private, or as comedy or irony—in the neoliberal age: The
rise of Big Data and Silicon Valley’s economy of surveillance. In our newfound
digital culture, do we need to more readily offer the protections of the IA to each
other? Should we judge our digital selves, collectively, more like Colberts?

A. Dangerously Unfunny Bedfellows: Privacy and Neoliberalism

In 2017, the dangers to privacy inherent in the digital surveillance economy are
likely no longer news to anyone. From Facebook outing gay teens (to therapy
advertisers) via their page “likes” to Cambridge Analytica (President Trump’s
Big Data team) harvesting social media information for psychologically targeted
political advertising to civil service employees losing their jobs for following
(sincerely or not) the Insane Clown Posse online, there is a sense of an inevi-
table march toward China’s Orwellian “social credit” scores, a system which
your worth as an employee, citizen, or potential mate is judged by the positivity
of your digital media presence (Denyer 2016; Doyle 2017; Lapowsky 2017).
But what is often under-explored is the underlying ethos that drives and justi-
fies the data-industry’s intrusion into daily life: Neoliberalism. As articulated by
Wendy Brown, neoliberalism is the “economization of political life and of other
heretofore noneconomic spheres and activities” and the reduction of the human
to homo oeconomicus, where “all domains are markets and we are everywhere
presumed to be market actors” (Brown 2015: 19, 36). The precarity, and mental
distress, of this omnipresent digital regime in our fraught economic times nec-
essarily, as William Davies neatly summarizes, “produces a chronic sense of
self-blame, unease, anxiety, and self-recrimination” which ultimately leads to
202 Aaron McKain and Thomas Lawson

“a society without any sanctuaries from economic competition” (Davies 2017).

The seemingly inescapable, connections between ethos, neoliberalism, and pri-
vacy are nowhere more apparent—ironically—than in the digital age’s default
rhetorical “solution” to the crisis of surveillance: Brand You. Made famous
by business writer Dan Schwabel back in the early days of Colbert—and now
taught to a generation of college students—the chilling effects of Brand You’s
regime of rhetorical judgment (“always think of yourself as a brand”) on social,
comedic, and political communication are obvious. Moreover, Schwabel him-
self is a perfect metaphor for how the precarity of neoliberalism encourages us
to rat each other out to make a buck rather than exercise interpretive restraint
to carve out a sphere—via ethos—for personal or political life outside of the
economic. Case in point, Schwabel bolstering his own “brand” in Time Maga-
zine by painting a digital scarlet letter on the—cute, harmless, and reasonably
funny—2011 viral video “Joey Quits”, which showed the guitarist of punk
group Downtown Boys bringing a marching band to accompany his early
morning resignation from his shabby hotel job (Schwabel 2011). Joey’s crime?
His joke’s violation of the rhetorical edict of personal branding. That is, that is,
that you should always be policing your presentation of self in the digital realm
with a communicative eye toward, as Schwabel gleefully warns us, one of your
unknown, hypothetical “sixteen” future employers (Schwabel 2009).
Comedy and sophomoric viral pranks may seem like an anemic starting
point to re-configure our ethos against the creep of the algorithmic society
into our personal and political lives. But comedy does help us zero in on two
aspects of ethos, and public rhetorical performance, that are, on the one hand,
under threat of being “programmed out” of post-digital American life and, on
the other hand, offer resistance against algorithmic logic precisely because
they can’t be programmed in: Irony (which, because it is double-voiced, can’t
be understood by robots) and rhetorical exchanges between IAs and Ideal
Audiences (because both of them are “realer”—and rhetorically acted upon
by humans—but don’t quantitatively exist). As usual, Colbert (“as Colbert”)
presciently captured this danger of Big Data, and the possibility of push-back,
in an exchange with Google CEO Eric Schmitt back in 2013:

Colbert: You famously said—and I completely support this—that someday

young people, instead of having privacy, for the things they put up on Face-
book . . . that one day they will just erase their histories and change their
names and be scott free.
Schmitt: That was a joke. It just wasn’t very good.
Colbert: I guess that’s too hip for the room. I was on board. (Schmitt 2013)

The irony of Colbert recontextualizing Schmitt’s remark—turning a joke

into an earnest declaration—isn’t lost on anyone. Except, perhaps, for
Schmitt, insofar as it points to an Achilles heel of Big Data’s approach to
 I Want to Party with You, Cowboy 203

evaluating ethos. Wayne Booth long ago rooted the messy interpretation of
irony—which he taxonomized as “stable” (i.e., ultimately knowable) versus
“unstable”—in audience understanding, or as Eleanor Huchtens explains it:
“The complexity of the potential interactions between interpreter, ironist, and
text in making irony happen has to be a part of any consideration of irony
and the ‘performative’ happening that it is” (Hutcheons 1960; Booth 1974).
Taken out of context, all jokes—and particularly irony—are interpretively
unstable: An unnatural divorce between IAs and Ideal Audiences. (For
instance, Colbert reframing what Schmitt said in jest as an earnest declara-
tion. Also consider the social science research that quantitatively demon-
strates how Colbert’s irony was lost on conservative audiences; both liberals
and conservatives viewed him as equally “funny” but conservatives believed
that he was actually attacking liberal ideology [LaMarre 2009].) In theory,
the radical algorithmic recontextualizations of our communications by the
digital ethos industry—where, in theory, all of your data (emails, Facebook
posts, financial records, search engine records) circulate endlessly, divorced
from their original rhetorical situations in order to be forever re-calculated
to determine your ethos and past interpretive intentions—would lead to the
sensible, and ethical, interpretive judgment that all past rhetorical acts are
“unstable.” In practice, and by definition as a business model, Big Data has to
claim to stabilize all communications (including humor and irony) as literally
interpretable and discernable, smashing complex rhetorical acrobatics into
arhetorical data points to sell a quantitative picture of who we are via reified
(and increasingly, deified) algorithmic guesses about what we meant to say.

B. Protecting the Trolls to Protect Ourselves:

Irony as Algorithmic Resistance
In her work on the “quantitative self,” Phoebe Moore correctly identifies that,
in the post-privacy culture of our algorithmic society, “universal communica-
tion” is demanded, “but only in quantified terms, and thus, anything that can-
not be quantified and profited from is rendered incommunicable—meaning
that it is marked and marginalized, disqualified in the circulation of human
capital, and denied privilege, including employment”(Moore 2017, 2774).
All true. But what Moore misses is how comedy—and irony—allow us to
stake out, and aesthetically argue for, aspects of ethos that cannot (ethically,
logically, or politically) be subjected to Big Data’s machinations. It is here—
as seen and enacted via the comedic practices of Colbert—that the IA’s chief
methodological disadvantages in interpreting literature become its primary
strength in monkey-wrenching the neoliberal regime of the digital: Like
ethos, IAs are impossible to algorithmically program, and they demand that
audiences ignore available data—in contradistinction to the social media sur-
veillance industry’s quest to sell our “true” neo-liberal identities (as patients,
204 Aaron McKain and Thomas Lawson

students, citizens, sexual partners, and employees) to the highest bidder—in

order to mutually construct (and play along with) an author/performer/come-
dian/politician’s character.
Given the rise of the alt-right—and the landslide of sexual assaults that
have come to light in the wake of Harvey Weinstein and President Trump—
we hold no illusions that using the IA to rethink comedy, ethos, and privacy
in the digital era is an easy sell. (Though, again, the IA makes no a priori
determinations about what should be kept private. And one wonders if Face-
book’s automated attempts to police offensive speech, via algorithmically
surmised “local standards,” could distinguish between the hateful “grab them
by the pussy” and permutations of the serio-comic political aesthetics of
“pussyhats.”) So, in an effort to build consensus for the IA, we want to focus
on an outer-limit case that we believe we can marshal wide support for: The
relationship between comedy, irony, and trauma. We turn, quickly, here to
an under-examined figure in this history of American political comedy (who
deserves more than a paragraph of analysis), former Weekend Update host
and coiner of the phrase “fake news,” Norm MacDonald.
A revered—David Letterman, who pioneered television irony, invited
MacDonald to be his final Late Show comedian and dubbed him the “funniest
man in the world”—but fringe figure in comedy (trolling followers on Twit-
ter, destroying celebrity interviews on talk shows), MacDonald’s approach to
comedy and ethos has always been to make his personal life—and political
views—so thoroughly incoherent as to make interpretive biographical clues
impossible. Long rumored to be queer, ill, a Xanax addict and an alcoholic
(with contradictory interviews and testimonies which speak to both sides of all
of these issues), MacDonald—who won’t even admit to his true age—embod-
ies the aesthetics of comedy that the IA necessarily fiats (like Colbert, but
without the costume) by making his deep irony both inscrutable and impervi-
ous to appeals to personal information in interpretation. Nowhere is MacDon-
ald’s use of unstable irony in the name of privacy more apparent than in the
2016 promotional tour for his “fake” autobiography Based on a True Story:
A Memoir. Expressing (mock? sincere?) frustration in interviews that his
New York Times bestseller is placed in the non-fiction section of bookstores,
MacDonald’s hybrid novel/memoir is most notable for a shocking—and ter-
rifyingly narrated—biographical detail that nearly every reviewer willfully
ignored: The recounting of a childhood assault on his family farm in Canada,
a key piece of interpretive data that is never again referenced and which
would, obviously, color how audiences perceive his career and years of troll-
ing, personal obfuscations, and dark comedy (MacDonald 2016a). Whether
it was MacDonald’s comedic ethos—and the desire to preserve his IA—that
kept critics (and fans) quiet is impossible to prove. But, more importantly,
even this interpretive Rosetta Stone is thrown off balance both by the book’s
 I Want to Party with You, Cowboy 205

(internet-proof) unstable irony and the new (equally impossible to interpret for
certain) comedic frame MacDonald started offering during his press interac-
tions. Here is one, indicative, exchange with talk show host Conan O’Brien:

MacDonald: If this were a memoir, I’d put in juicy things from my own life.
O’Brien: Like what kind of things would you put in there that nobody knows?
MacDonald: Well I guess the biggest thing that nobody knows about me is
I’m a deeply closeted gay man.
Conan (stunned): What? I mean, that’s . . . that’s . . . you’re a gay man?
MacDonald: I’m not gay. I said I’m deeply closeted. I’m a straight as
an arrow.
Conan: So you’re a gay man who won’t admit it?
MacDonald: No, no. Do you know what deeply closeted means? It means a
man who will not acknowledge that he is gay. So I’m telling you I’m not gay
(MacDonald 2016b).

True? Not true? Serious? A joke? It’s impossible to know for certain and—
more importantly—it is impossible to program in the correct answer: Binary
code can’t account for saying (or, in this case, not saying) one thing to mean
another. (Just as Facebook’s algorithm can’t, for certain, determine whether a
single page “like” makes a teen queer, but that doesn’t stop the company from
micro-targeting adolescents based on this shaky rhetorical evidence [Gayo-
mali 2013].) Neither stable nor unstable irony, what MacDonald presents is
the necessity of the IA to configure all possible interpretations. In our neolib-
eral, digital age, this is perhaps the deferral to human judgments of ethos—to
give each other the interpretive benefit of the doubt with all of our jokes and
potential failures of communication—that we all should demand, and that
Colbert pioneered aesthetically nearly a decade ago. But far from simply pro-
tecting comedy and irony for their own sake in the digital era—which is itself
a noble task—it must be remembered that ethos, the ways we are allowed to
speak, drive much larger ethical concerns. Comedy, after all, is tragedy plus
time. (As Colbert himself argues to Seinfeld with regard to Cosby: “Don’t
most comedians have tragic lives?”) And, as theorists of trauma and storytell-
ing have long told us, and here we will use Leigh Gilmore, counter-narrative,
counter-memory—acts of “remembering the past differently, through rogue
confessions, scandalous memoirs, and an unofficial archive of protest”—is a
critical element of self-definition and survival (Gilmore 2001, 34). In the con-
text of our precarious digital moment, perhaps even ethos and the fall of despi-
cable figures in politics—like Milo Yiannopoulos, the self-proclaimed “King
of the Trolls,” who tormented college campuses during Campaign 2016—are
worth re-examination. Rather than being dethroned for his grotesque xenopho-
bia, islamophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or online harassment of Saturday
206 Aaron McKain and Thomas Lawson

Night Live actress Leslie Jones, Yiannopoulos was fired from Breitbart when
he was doxxed—using years-old audio footage from an obscure podcast—for
joking (wrongly and poorly but arguably ironically) about the age of teen-
age consent in gay relationships. As a child abuse survivor, Yiannopoulos,
in his press conference, testified that “gallows humor” is what helped him to
survive his trauma, and asked (perhaps correctly, in terms of ethos and the
IA) whether he’s “not afforded the same freedom [in joke telling] because the
media chooses to selectively define me as a political figure in some circum-
stances and a comedian in others” (Nash 2017).
Again, the IA offers no judgment of particular rhetorical acts, by come-
dians or politicians. But—as a theory of interpretive restraint—it does force
us to always at least ask the question: In the name of carving out a sphere of
privacy (or in the name of protecting the possibility of ironic comedic acts,
including the self-narration of trauma) should we extend its unprogrammable
modes of interpretation, its extension of the “Truthier”/Colber-ier ethos? (Put
bluntly, for the IA, or Colbert, to exist, evidentiary information about inten-
tion has to be excluded, and vice versa. By using the narrative model, you
are “always/already” acquiescing to a conversation about privacy, ethos, and
post-digital ethics.) Today, the perils of humans acquiescing to neoliberal
robot logic in analyzing comedy occur daily, as is made clear from breaking
news as we complete this chapter: MSNBC firing liberal comedian, and for-
mer Air America host, Sam Seder for a satiric 2009 tweet against rape culture
(“Don’t care re Polanski, but I hope if my daughter is ever raped it is by an
older truly talented man w/a great sense of mise en scene” [Grim 2017]).
There is a delicious, Colbert-caliber irony that, after Seder’s tweet was pub-
licized by a conservative activist to cost him his job, it was Yiannopoulos’s
media company and the alt-right blogsphere who came to their nemesis’s
defense and helped get him get reinstated. These cross-partisan alliances
against the algorithmic society—these collective judgments of comedy and
ethos—are likely crucial to our digital survival as neoliberal subjects. And
they lead us to our next reason for using Colbert, and the narrative model of
communication, in our post-digital politics: Combating the political polariza-
tion (and reality devouring powers) of the post-Truth society.

III. I AM AMERICA (AND SO CAN YOU!):

POLITICS IN THE POST-TRUMP
THEATER OF TRUTHINESS

“[To] acknowledge a fake as a fake contributes only to the triumph of

accountants.”
—Werner Herzog
 I Want to Party with You, Cowboy 207

“I want to party with you, cowboy.”

—Stephen Colbert, interview with Werner Herzog

While the “post-Truth” society finally hit mainstream attention in Campaign

2016—an election where 67 percent of Americans received “some” of their
news from social media, and where Post-Truth became the Oxford English
Dictionary’s international word of the year—this crisis of “Truthiness” was,
of course, what Colbert worried about, and comedically predicted, on the
debut of The Colbert Report back in 2005 (Shearer and Gottfried 2017).
Addressing the “nation,” Colbert introduced “Truthiness” as his raison
d’être—and soon to be Webster’s word of the year for 2005—in his inaugural
Colbert Report broadcast:

“I don’t trust books. They’re all facts, no heart. And that’s exactly what’s pull-
ing our country apart today. ‘Cause face it folks: We are a divided nation. Not
between Democrats and Republicans, or conservatives and liberals, or tops and
bottoms. No, we are divided between those who think with their head, and those
who know with their heart” (Colbert 2005).

Today, of course, “Truthiness”—combined with the reality-warping power

of the digital filter bubble—is the logic behind the Trump administration
and alt-right’s daily claims of “fake news” and the widespread discrediting
of both intellectual expertise and “mainstream media” journalism that has
polarized American politics. And, in 2017, even mainstream diagnoses of
the crises of the “post-fact” society accurately point to the collision between
digital technology—which, as Eli Pariser and Farhad Manjoo warned us
about in the previous decade, trap us in to our own, subjective and ideologi-
cal, digital realities—and postmodernism’s critique of epistemology (which,
as even Newsweek is hip to [see, for example, “The Truth About Post-Truth
Politics”]) has finally reached red-state America, after being taught to mul-
tiple generations of underemployed humanities majors (Pariser 2011; Manjoo
2005; Calcutt 2017). But what has been under-analyzed are the inherent aes-
thetic connections between our electorate’s newfound comfort with “alterna-
tive facts” and the reified postmodern stylistics of political discourse that both
enable them and have been “locked in” (to use Silicon Valley ex-pat Jaron
Lanier’s phrase) to digital media itself (Lanier 2011).
Unsurprisingly, Colbert himself is ahead of the curve on this nexus of aes-
thetics and post-digital politics, as was apparent in the most controversial—
and Tweeted about—moment of his 2017 gig hosting the Emmy’s: Inviting
disgraced White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer to the stage to have
Spicer parody his own ethical culpability in alternative facts and Truthiness
when he reported on the size of President Trump inauguration crowd:
208 Aaron McKain and Thomas Lawson

Colbert: Of course, what really matters to Donald Trump is ratings. He’s

got to have the big numbers, and I certainly hope we achieve that tonight.
Unfortunately, at this point, we have no way of knowing how big our audi-
ence is. I mean, is there anyone who could say how big the audience is?
Sean, do you know?
(Former White House Spokesman Sean Spicer comes out onto the stage
on a simulation of the Press Room podium.)
Spicer: “This will be the largest audience to witness an Emmys, period. Both
in person, and around the world.”
(Camera cuts to shocked celebrities, including Saturday Night Live
­producer Lorne Michaels and a horrified Melissa McCarthy, whose SNL
parody of Spicer reportedly infuriated Trump and led to Spicer’s dismissal.)
Colbert: Wow, that really soothes my fragile ego. I can understand why
you’d want one of these guys around. Melissa McCarthy everyone, give it
up! Beautiful (Primetime Emmy Awards 2017).

While Spicer’s performance of his performance was troubling for many—as

the local news here in Minneapolis reported: “Some laughed, some were
shocked, some were outright disgusted” by Colbert allowing Spicer to “mock
the SNL satire” that was seen as a victory for political comedy—rather than
letting Spicer off the hook via a mea culpa, what Colbert actually provided
was an aesthetic coup de grace against the postmodern aesthetics that paved
the way to the post-Truth age: Comedic metafiction (Breaking the News
2017). As Jacques Rancière notes, aesthetics are a political “redistribution
of the sensible,” a creation and recalibration of shared common sense and
thus politically “what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has
the ability to see and the talent to speak” (Rancière 2004, 2). And, as we
have previously argued, for forty years—with The Daily Show as perhaps
its zenith point—the comedic aesthetics of political critique (against both
politicians and the media) have been overwhelmingly deconstructive and
metafictional (McKain 2012). From the New Journalists—Norman Mailer,
Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion chief among them—through The
Daily Show, showing the puppet strings and biases of American political
news coverage has been the, often hilarious, means of revealing the jour-
nalistic and political construction of quote-unquote “Objective” reality. At
the height of mass-media age deception—exemplified by the run-up to the
Iraq War—it is little surprise that The Daily Show’s nightly critique of the
epistemological construction of right-wing propaganda (and Fox News) made
Jon Stewart the “most trusted name in news” (Poniewozik 2015). But, as
we prophesized back in 2005, it was only a matter of time before, structur-
ally, The Daily Show’s satiric critique of the news became the aesthetics of
news—and politics—itself (McKain 2005). After Campaign 2016, what now
 I Want to Party with You, Cowboy 209

confronts comedians attempting to challenge the post-Truth society is the

quixotic superfluidity of postmodern comedy’s obsession with exposing the
artificiality of politics and “the news” when facing off against a neoliberal
regime, and American presidency, that deploys metafictional de-construction
as its primary aesthetic. (To cite three obvious examples: President Trump’s
perpetual Twitter-trolling of CNN [and insistence that he thinks of the
Presidency as a self-aware, metafictional “reality show” he plays against the
media and his enemies]; Alex Jones’ conspiracy swamp InfoWars [which to
his millions of listeners is a master class in Colbert-esque performance art];
and White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci’s [actually
pretty funny] Hunter S. Thompson-style takedown of a National Security
Advisor in the New Yorker [“I’m not Steve Bannon. I’m not trying to suck my
own cock.”] [Haberman, Thrush, and Baker 2017; Lizza 2017]). What is the
point—aesthetically or politically—of metafictionally revealing the media
construction of reality when the POTUS, and his audiences, already presume
this epistemological truth about Truthiness?
Woefully ahead of his time, Colbert provides us an aesthetic remedy to the
post-Truth world of “Truthiness” that he already, back in 2005, knew we were
drowning in. (As media scholar Geoffrey Baym has argued—against hordes of
academics who saw Colbert as a postmodern figure par excellence—Colbert’s
Comedy Central persona had little in common with the cynical, deconstructive
worldview of postmodernism proper [“a sea of doubt and indeterminacy”] but
rather was a “neomodernist” figure “using postmodern techniques to affirm
the basic principles of liberal democracy” [Baym 2007, 370].) Continuing our
argument about the utility of the narrative model of communication in our
post-digital, alternative facts environments, we turn now to how to operational-
ize The Colbert Report’s comedic aesthetics as a post-postmodern “theater” of
deliberative politics to better serve citizens, journalists, and comedians—and
re-start epistemological conversations across political ideologies—in our polar-
ized and reality-challenged American democracy.

A. Improv as Post-Fact Political Deliberation

Though often theorized as utilizing a Socratic approach to political comedy,
Colbert’s explicit training and influences—the role-playing game Dun-
geons and Dragons and Second City improv—provide a more useful guide.
Improv—and its primary rule of always saying “yes, and” and acting “as if”
when confronted with your teammates’ comedic twists and turns—are cer-
tainly the guiding principles of The Colbert Report’s interview segments and
live-action interactions. One of the more telling interviews—which puts the
pedagogy and politics of acting as if in its best light—is with Texas School
Board member, avowed creationist, and dentist by trade, Don McLeroy.
210 Aaron McKain and Thomas Lawson

McLeroy, back in 2012, was on The Report to “promote”—and if this isn’t a

bit of post-Truth era weirdness, nothing is—Revisionaries, the documentary
that represents him as a “radical” in charge of rewriting Texas textbooks to
better suit his anti-evolution and revisionist historical worldviews. Follow-
ing the blueprint of improv, Colbert lets his guest make the first move and
set the parameters of the game, the foundational premise of the world they
are creating. McLeroy starts by making the familiar post-Truth claims about
epistemology and knowledge (which comes from both the Lyotard-loving
postmodern intellectual left and the evangelical right) that “somebody has
to stand up to the experts.” But how Colbert (“C”) navigates the rules of the
reality he and McLeroy’s (“M”) are co-creating is instructive:

1. C: How do things get into textbooks? Because I imagine that experts

decide, but, in fact, it is voted on?
M: [explains process of establishing state standards by consensus and
acknowledges that those standards dictate the content of nationally mar-
keted textbooks]
C: I have always been a fan of reality by majority vote.

2. C: You have removed references to Thomas Jefferson.

M: That’s not true.
C: Actually, I say it is.
M: That’s not true.
C: No, I have personally chosen that it is true (McLeroy 2012).

Unlike his failed 2016 Late Show interview with President Trump, McLe-
roy is clearly checkmated by Colbert. And the key difference is the aesthetic
shift of attention—from the postmodern critique of epistemology to consider-
ations of ontology—that makes Colbert’s target neither Leroy nor his ideas,
but simply the logical workability of the “rules” of the fictional world that
Leroy is promulgating and the Colbert Report host is attempting to play along
with. (As Colbert himself explains, “Jon [Stewart] deconstructs the news,
and he’s ironic and detached. I falsely construct the news and am ironically
attached” [Colbert 2006].) Once again, narrative theory helps to make Col-
bert’s comedic innovation clear and show how it can be easily implemented,
beyond the narrow confines of improv comedy, as a post-postmodern aes-
thetic for deliberative politics. Narrative theorist James Phelan’s taxonomy
of how audiences experience fiction quickly illuminates these connections.
Fictional works—as Phelan explains in Experiencing Fiction—act upon us
on three, co-existing, dimensions: The mimetic (“an audience’s interest in the
characters as possible people”), the synthetic (the characters as artificial con-
structs), and the thematic (the allegorical level; the “ideational function of the
 I Want to Party with You, Cowboy 211

characters . . . the cultural, ideological, philosophical, or ethical issues being

addressed by the narrative”) (Phelan 2005, 6). Acts of interpretation, which are
always acts of politics, are thus really expressions of how we choose to juggle
and negotiate these variables: Whether we opt to be absorbed into the fiction as
a form of reality (mimetic), whether we resist it via a distanced appreciation of
its craft and machinations (synthetic), or whether we decide to read a work of
art allegorically (thematic). Seen through these lenses, what Colbert offers are
not postmodernism’s (or The Daily Show’s or the post-fact society’s) obsession
with the synthetic construction of journalistic or political reality. Rather, The
Colbert Report’s interviews aesthetically block synthetic experience in favor
of the thematic (i.e., the level of politics) via the mimetic. As Colbert explains,
his only instructions to his guests are as follows: “I am a well-intentioned idiot.
Honestly disabuse me and we will have a good time” (Weingarten 2009).
“Honestly,” for Colbert, means not breaking the narrative/improv frame he is
imposing (i.e., don’t call attention to the synthetic nature of the exercise) as he
and his guests play along. The result is a pedagogy of deliberative politics—a
particular use of the mimetic as a satiric take-down of the thematic—that any
teacher, or law student, immediately recognizes: The pedagogy of play, of tak-
ing a person’s beliefs to their next, and then next, and then next, logical conclu-
sion until they find that they cannot live with (at least publicly admit to) their
beliefs any longer. (As Colbert tells Leroy, the D.D.S., to put his anti-expertise
bias in a rhetorical box: “I don’t recognize dentistry. . . . I don’t believe the
science is in on cavities” [McLeroy 2012].)
Neither dialectic or Socratic, what Colbert offers is something much more
valuable in the post-digital, post-fact society: A critique of fundamentalist
ideological purity that neither scolds, nor offends, but forces—dialogically—
both parties to publicly own, and take responsibility for, the world their
ideas are creating. Political scientist Phillip Converse once defined political
literacy as the ability to see, logically, how one held position necessarily
entails another. Colbert, who is above all else a gamer, takes this a step fur-
ther: Could your character, he is asking his co-players, live in the world that
you are creating, and that our characters are now inhabiting? Or are you—to
invoke Booth’s phrase—a “hack,” an author (and to Booth’s mind, a shitty
one) who profits from fictional worlds that you couldn’t actually live a day
in, let alone logically maneuver? (Booth 1961). It is no coincidence that these
are the very questions (about the thematic ethics of a work of fiction via
interrogation of its mimetic logic) that the narrative model of communication
asks. And, with Colbert as a guide, it becomes easy to see how citizens and
journalists who don’t have a hit TV show on Comedy Central can enact his
aesthetic approach to post-fact political deliberation.
Recognizing that the experience of fiction requires a reader to simulta-
neously accept both the “true” and “untrue,” the narrative model starts by
212 Aaron McKain and Thomas Lawson

trifurcating the audience positions that any reader must (again, simultaneously)
occupy and strategically toggle between the Flesh-and-Blood audience, Ideal
Audience, and Media Character audience. Sketched out for clarity, they
look like:

Figure 8.2  Narrative Model: “Theater of Political Deliberation.”

While the IA/Ideal Audience axis (as we saw in our discussion of digital
privacy in section 2) involves (synthetic) questions about ethos, identity, and
rhetorical acumen, the MC and FB levels encourage thematic and mimetic
questions about the fiction itself and invoke political considerations by invit-
ing the FB audience to decide whether they should or should not—logically
or ethically—join in or acquiesce to the proposed fictional world. (Narrative
theorist Peter Rabinowitz helpfully frames these ethical questions as: “What
sort of reader would be implied if this work of fiction were real? Or even bet-
ter, ‘What sort of person would I have to pretend to be—what would I have
to know and believe—if I wanted to take this work of fiction as real?’” (Rabi-
nowitz 1977: 214).) While developed explicitly for the reading of fiction,
the narrative model easily enacts a roadmap for The Colbert Report’s post-
postmodern aesthetic frame for political debate, whether you are a participant
or spectator. As Colbert makes clear in his debate with Leroy, in a balkan-
ized post-digital world where there is often no agreed upon “reality” (where
citizens, literally, live in different factual realms) why bother, after all, end-
lessly butting heads with a creationist (or a scientist) over “facts” when you
can (strategically) engage your opponent/interviewee as a co-equal on the
MC level—and meet them “where they are” via Colbert’s oddball “Reverse
Dungeon Mastering”—to tease out baseline ethical standards for rebuild-
ing a workable, and livable, shared reality? Likewise, why continue—à la
­­Colbert’s failed rhetorical boxing match with President Trump—to attempt
to expose the constructed nature of an already thoroughly metafictional pub-
lic persona when you can (again, using the MC level as a distinct aesthetic
realm of politics) simply act as if political debate is already a fictionalized
form of “deliberative theater.” (And, as Colbert does with Leroy, steal away
the other side’s rhetorical appeals to postmodern epistemological concerns
about “fake news” and ideological bias and instead compel them to defend
their ideas, thematically and mimetically, as MCs who have to try to abide by
the rules of the fictional world they are establishing.) In both cases, the chief
 I Want to Party with You, Cowboy 213

advantage of the narrative model (and Colbert’s comedic approach) is mov-

ing beyond the epistemological concerns that drove the New Journalism and
postmodern comedy to make room for the ethical, ontological concerns of
post-postmodern comedy and politics. And—if you are occupying the posi-
tion of the FB audience—you’re able to use the ultimate heckler’s veto on
the “new” rules of post-fact reality: The natural breaking point (which would
be true in any improv exercise or role-playing game) when the fictionalized
reality being co-created becomes (literally) too stupidly hilariously illogical
to seriously consider joining it, let alone voting for it. Colbert’s definition of
“Truthiness” was right—truth is in the gut—but he just shifted the gastro-
nomical emotion: Laughter (versus “facts”) as a check on post-Truth reality
claims.

B. Laughing All The Way to a New Reality Bank

It was never The Colbert Report’s ability to beat up on particular lunatic
ideas or fringe figures (like Leroy) that made Colbert a political force to be
reckoned with, but rather his ability to take on the thematic rhetorical and
aesthetic strategies of formidable opponents across the political aisle by
appealing to mimesis and the comedic value of the hack. And so to conclude
on an optimistic note—and show the particular value of enacting Colbert’s
theater of politics in our neo-liberal age—we turn to one of Colbert’s finest,
and under-heralded Colbert Report performances: Tripping up the godfather
of American conservative orthodoxy, Grover Norquist.
The inventor and guardian of Americans for Tax Reforms’ infamous neo-
liberal “no taxes pledge”—which strong-armed scores of Republican candi-
dates for decades—Norquist was, in essence, the purest embodiment of the
ideological rigidity that has come to define digital America’s post-Truth poli-
tics. (The idea for the tax pledge came to Norquist when he was thirteen—as
the Nixon enthusiast loves to tell horrified journalists—when he learned that
politicians cannot be trusted: They say one thing to one group and then another
to another. They change their mind. They don’t do the things they promised
you that they would do. The “only way to have a conversation,” Norquist
concluded, was to “stop rhetoric” [Norquist 2011a].) What is notable about
Norquist’s 2011 Colbert Report appearance is that, in typical interviews, he
is a nearly impervious nut to crack. (Terry Gross, of NPR’s Fresh Air, tries
to press Norquist on his inflexibility of his tax pledge and he tells her, with a
straight face, that taxes are equivalent to the Holocaust [Norquist 2003].) But
put in an aesthetic theater of politics—and given an interlocutor, an ethos, a
MC, that he has to play along with—Norquist immediately becomes realer
à la Colbert: Willfully trifurcating himself as a MC (Tax reform zealot), IA
(oddly charming Machiavelli), and FB person (middle-aged guy with a weird
214 Aaron McKain and Thomas Lawson

beard in a funny chair). Working with Colbert, they both enter, as equals and
co-players, the MC level of communication:

Colbert: I’m going to ask you a trick question, I hope you have the right
answer. Is there any time and any circumstance under which raising taxes
would be the right thing to do?
Norquist: No.
Colbert: Good Answer. Now let’s amp it up a little bit. Terrorists have kid-
napped all of our grandmothers. They’ve got them in a subterranean burrow
. . . and all of our grandmothers have been slathered with honey . . . and they
are going to release fire ants into this burrow who will bite our grandmoth-
ers to death. Their only demand is that we increase the marginal tax rate on
the top 2% of Americans . . . do we increase the tax rate, or do we let our
grandmothers die by ant bite?
Norquist: I think we console ourselves with the fact that we have pictures
. . . and memories. (Audience groans)
Colbert: (Laughing) No, that’s the right answer. The man signed a pledge.
Grandmothers be damned, he signed a pledge (Norquist 2011b).

Comedy, as Amber Day argues in Satire and Dissent, has political potency
through its ability to create “oppositional counterpublics,” spaces outside of
adopted political wisdom where citizens can better see the ideologies they are
tacitly asked to acquiesce to (Day 2011, 41). And given the recent shortage
of possibilities for navigating the deadlock of neoliberalism, new media’s “no
holds barred” context collapse, and the alt-right’s MAGA-fied postmodern
media skepticism, we hope to have demonstrated how this reassessment of
the Colbert Report’s rhetorical and political aesthetics can help us begin to
live (or at least imagine) civic life in these precarious times. Indeed, perhaps
we will never know precisely what American politics lost when Stephen Col-
bert gave up on “Colbert.” But his ability to use comedy to take on, and take
down, intractable giants of American politics—like Norquist—and reveal
the laughable unworkability of neoliberal ethics, should give some hope that
continuing to apply Colbert’s tactics provides us at least one path forward
in our post-Trump, post-Truth moment. As applied to American political
rhetoric, the separate ontological levels that the narrative model of communi-
cation provides—protections of privacy and ethos at the level of the IA and a
theater of post-fact deliberative politics along the MC/FB axis—signal a post-
postmodern approach to political comedy that helps us rhetorically refigure
our political aesthetics in the spirit of Colbert. Allowing us to embrace ethical
versions of “Truthiness”—at a time when we are stuck in the Twilight Zone
world that The Colbert Report warned us of nearly a generation ago—and
stuck with New Journalism-era comedic sensibilities that hold little traction
against the dominant political aesthetics of our digital era, the narrative model
 I Want to Party with You, Cowboy 215

provides some interpretive hope for comedy and politics. Technologically

and politically, it’s finally “morning in Colbert-ica,” as Stephen Colbert once
heralded. It is time to take seriously, and actually follow through on, his
(now) prescient instructions for living through his world.

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 Part III

NEOLIBERALISM AND
SUBJECTIVITY
 Chapter 9

From Awkward to Dope

Black Women Comics in the
Alternative Comedy Scene
Jessyka Finley

On the eve of Dave Chappelle’s pop cultural resurrection as the host of

NBC’s Saturday Night Live in November 2016, Dave Schilling mused in
The Guardian about the state of African American stand-up comedy in the
twenty-first century remarking, “Black comedy is seeing the same sort of
divide between alt-comics and club comics that fundamentally altered the
white comic landscape in the 1990s and 2000s” (Shilling 2016). Schilling
noted the shifting terrain of black stand-up in the past twenty years or so.
Comics like Hannibal Burress, Donald Glover, Ron Funches, and Wyatt
Cenac are bringing more eccentric and absurdist approaches to their stand-up
acts. Stand-up is big business, and by some accounts a new comedy boom
is upon us. The online streaming service Netflix has released dozens of new
stand-up specials between 2015 and 2017. “Comedy is being taken more
seriously now. Top-billing stand-up comedians are treated as public intel-
lectuals,” writes Elahe Izadi (Izadi 2017). From podcasting and web series,
to Instagram and Twitter comedy, it is safe to say that comedy is indeed in a
golden age, enabling more people to engage in and consume various comedic
art forms, and pursue comedy as a professional career.
Given the ubiquity of stand-up comedy and the popularity of black men
comics, the conspicuous absence of black women among the Netflix specials
(spoiler alert: there are exactly zero black women comics with original Netf-
lix specials as of July 2017) is both telling and disheartening. Only a handful
of hour or half hour-long filmed stand-up specials of black women comics
have been released by other outlets in 2016–2017. The marginalization of
black women comics is not new. However, it is newly troubling that even
with an explosion of the comedy industry in the past decade, black women

221
222 Jessyka Finley

have found it difficult (relatively speaking) to reap the benefits of this boom.
Black women comics have always been performing their craft, expressing
unique and distinctive cultural material, and getting paid to do it, however
unrecognized this labor might have been. In light of the stand-up comedy
boom in general, and a division between more traditional black comedy acts
who engage with old methods and material, and the new heads on the cutting
edge, my interest lies here: Who are some of the new head black women com-
ics on the cutting edge, and what are they up to? This chapter explores some
of the aesthetics and sensibilities taken up by black women performing in the
alternative comedy scene, and how their comedic material has the potential
to foster more nuanced understandings of black women’s identities, experi-
ences, and perspectives—perspectives that have historically been elided,
trivialized, or, perhaps, worse—universalized.
After briefly defining “alternative comedy” and giving a quick overview
of black comedians struggles to break into the mainstream, I will explore the
contours of the comedy of black women who perform in the alternative com-
edy scene, laying out the cultural, aesthetic, and stylistic terrain. I will pay
close attention to the ways the Du Boisian condition of double-consciousness
manifests, and is resolved in the comedic material of black women in the
alt-scene—which highlights anxiety, bitterness, and a propensity for speak-
ing in multiple voices as crucial elements. In the course of performing, black
women comics metaphorically lift the DuBoisian Veil to reveal gaps between
perceptions and reality, and shed light on the fallacy of the homogeneity of
black women’s experiences and comic sensibilities.
Finally, I will discuss the popular WNYC podcast 2 Dope Queens (2DQ).
While 2DQ is a site where we can grasp how black women’s humor is reach-
ing new audiences, I will also critically engage with the ways the podcast,
and its hosts, Jessica Williams and Phoebe Robinson, at times problemati-
cally (re)produce neoliberal rhetorics that construct “a feminist subject who
is not only individualized but entrepreneurial in the sense that she is oriented
towards optimizing her resources through incessant calculation, personal ini-
tiative and innovation” (Rottenberg 2014, 422). Their audience is fluent in the
constellation of signifiers 2DQ relies on to construct a deeply classed notion
of being politically conscious, while at the same time “living your best life.”
Indeed, this audience is also structured as a community of laughter based on a
notion of individual freedom, consumerism, and an investment in the idea of
“diversity” as a stand-in for the material dismantling of structures of inequal-
ity that is a barrier, for many “diverse” people to “live their best life.” In
other words, I am interested in the paradox of black women’s comedy in the
neoliberal age, and some of the promises and perils of navigating the terrain
of this “new” diversity and visibility, what one journalist jokingly nicknamed
“the intersection of cocoa butter boulevard and woke way” (King 2016).
 From Awkward to Dope 223

BLACK (ALTERNATIVE) COMEDY

“If you, as a comic who is Black, don’t perform that [Def Comedy
Jam] kind of comedy then you lose your Black title and you’re called
alt-comedy.”
—Amanda Seales (Anderson 2017)

“Black alternative comedy” is twenty-first-century nomenclature, but the

tradition of black comic misfits is long. Scholars have chronicled the struggle
for black humorists to both create and perform content that is not only in
their own voices and in keeping with their particular cultural experiences, but
that is also marketable and accessible to audiences beyond communal black
spaces. Yvonne Orji commented in the documentary All Jokes Aside: Black
Women in Comedy (2017), “I want to . . . almost be all things to all people . . .
let’s figure out a way to connect” (All Jokes Aside 2017). Jessie Fauset’s for-
mative essay “The Gift of Laughter” (1925) pays tribute to the richness and
versatility of black folk humor in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Fauset documents the sheer effort required of black comic actors to gain a
foothold in “legitimate” theater in dramatic roles, to move beyond the com-
mon roles of shuffling, mindless buffoons—roles they were often forced
to perform during an era when blackface minstrelsy was the most popular
comedic genre in the United States. “The Gift of Laughter” is remarkable,
not least because it sheds light on the long quest of black humorists to move
into what Fauset called “universal roles” (Fauset 1925, 164), those unbound
by racial caricature, or reduced to simple buffoonery. There is a long tradition
of black comedians attempting to move beyond traditional representations of
blackness and black life; however, a difficult conundrum was on the horizon
when, until the mid-1950s, mainstream (white) audiences only accepted black
comedic performances that reinforced long-established stereotypes. When
black comics have dared to produce and perform outside of stock roles and
scripts, there has been a risk, ironically, of not being taken seriously, and
perhaps like Amanda Seales, being cast out from black cultural identity.
Mel Watkins’s encyclopedic On the Real Side (1994) is a pivotal text that
traces both the long history and elements of African American humor. Wat-
kins carefully describes black folk humor, which includes the sonic resonance
of the laugh itself; the use of black folk cultural expressions and African
American English (AAE); the ritual of insult, also known as the dozens;
trickster tales, known as lying and/or signifying; and a gestural repertoire
in the form of bodily movements, posture, body language, and recognizable
expressions reflecting the particular styles of working-class black people
(Watkins 1994). Many people now use the term “urban comedy” to refer to
both black comedy acts whose style and performative aesthetics take up these
224 Jessyka Finley

elements, and the spaces where this style of comedy is performed. The names
that come to mind when I think of traditional and/or “urban” black stand-up
comedy: Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy,
Chris Rock, Bernie Mac, Martin Lawrence, Dave Chappelle, Monique, Adele
Givens, Tracy Morgan, Kevin Hart, and Luenell.
In the mid-1950s, a societal push for integration gained steam, but stand-
up comedy remained segregated. White comics like Lenny Bruce and Mort
Sahl began addressing more serious themes in their performances, taking on
politics, government, and race and speaking to their audiences without the-
atrical pretense. At this point, satire became part of the American stand-up
comic tradition, marked by the kind of postmodern comic soapboxing I dis-
cuss another essay (Finley 2016). Acts like Godfrey Cambridge and Nipsey
Russell followed their lead, and for the first time in American history black
comics performed before mixed audiences, dressed in suits and ties, speaking
standard English instead of AAE, and retooling their material with its racial
and black folk elements so that white audiences could understand it and be
entertained by it.1 Indeed, as Watkins demonstrates, several black comics of
this era like Godfrey Cambridge, Nipsey Russell, Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby,
and Flip Wilson would successfully break into the mainstream because of
their ability to use topical humor that was thoughtful, tempered, topically
relatable, and, most importantly, any racial hostility was downplayed in the
tamping down of old ideas of how black comics act.
In leaving behind much of the linguistic style, references to black folk
culture and traditions that historically undergirds so much of black humor,
the cross-over comics from the 1950s and 1960s became commercially suc-
cessful, playing to aesthetics and sensibilities that were eminently palatable
to white audiences. Other black comics though, like Redd Foxx, Richard
Pryor, and Jackie “Moms” Mabley, whose routines were more raunchy and
irreverent, pitched their comedy more to black working-class audiences, and
their comedy was steeped in black folk language and culture. Bambi Haggins
makes an important point on black cross-over comedy. She argues, “The
process of crossover—and the extension of both humor and influence beyond
black communal spaces—adds a problematic twist to the task faced by the
African American comic: to be funny, accessible, and topical while retain-
ing his or her authentic black voice” (Haggins 2007, 4). Indeed, Haggins’s
insight speaks directly to the paradoxical nature of black cultural producers
like Amanda Seales, who seek mainstream acceptance and success, while
also keeping intact their black cultural identities.
David Gillota describes the “black nerd” as a new comic persona in
the landscape of twenty-first-century American comedy, arguing that they
constitute a class apart from “contemporary African American humorists
[who] tend to reinforce their ties to black communities and concepts of black
 From Awkward to Dope 225

authenticity by aligning themselves with recognizable signifiers of black

culture” (Gillota 2013, 21). Black (male) nerd comics are emerging in the
mainstream, many of whom can be located in the highly educated black
middle class, with “new” styles, aesthetics, and source material. The humor
of these black nerd comics “contrasts sharply with the hip, loose, and stylish
visions of black masculinity that are most often represented in popular cul-
ture” (Gillota 21–23). The cool and the intellectual collide in the black nerd
comic persona, a sort of reconciliation of the classic Du Boisian condition of
double-consciousness, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the
eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on
in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a
Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ide-
als in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn
asunder” (Du Bois 1903, 3). The black nerd comic is the ultimate embodi-
ment of intelligent, black middle-class cool; the divided experience of being
both black and American are finally united, the metaphorical Veil lifted via
African American alternative comedy—two-ness become one—precipitated
by the ascension of President Barack Obama, argues Gillota. Black men who
perform in the alt-scene work against the Veil of stereotypes of what Gillota
characterizes as “the violent, hypersexualized ‘black buck’ or the comic,
lazy ‘coon,’” (Gillota 17) while black women comics raise the Veil of deeply
held cultural beliefs that black (funny) women are endowed with bottomless
reserves of strength, resilience, and indignant self-assurance—the specter of
the “sassy black woman.”
This condition of double-consciousness manifests itself differently for
black women comics; it lacks the neat resolution we see for black men in
the figure of the black nerd. If the Du Boisian Veil can be understood in the
words of Judith R. Blau and Eric S. Brown as “the color line that divides and
separates . . . an essential aspect of perceptions and communications between
those divided” (Blau and Brown 2001, 221), we might say for the purpose
of thinking about black women comics, that the Veil materializes as the web
of stereotypes, images, representations, and discursive assumptions about
“authentic” black womanhood. As will become clear, it is this web of signifi-
ers that come under fire in the routines of contemporary black women comics
in ways that can work paradoxically to upend hegemonic ideology that circu-
lates around what it means to be a black woman—and at the same time, these
routines might buttress the idea that there are good and bad black people.
The rejection of the “sassy black woman” in the routines, which I will
discuss later, effectively produces, for black women comics performing in
the alt-scene, a particular kind of reconciliation of Du Bois’s condition of
double-consciousness. As he put it in 1903, “Leaving, then, the world of
the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view
226 Jessyka Finley

faintly its deeper recesses” (Du Bois 1). Let me be clear, I am arguing that
like Du Bois—black women comics who work in the alt-scene may be gifted
with “second sight,” by virtue of a subject position and critical perspective as
black people, and also invested with the perspective of what the promise of
American identity can mean, by virtue of elite education and membership in
the middle class. Black women comics in the alternative scene, like Du Bois,
are cultural articulators who use their craft to skillfully navigate between
multiple worlds (Blau and Brown).

BLACK WOMEN IN THE ALTERNATIVE SCENE

Black women have always been underrepresented in the comedy industry,

but the alternative bent to black women’s comedy has always been present.
Moms Mabley and LaWanda Page were relatively well known in the 1970s,
but it was not until the 1980s that more black women began to see comedy as
a viable career. In the groundbreaking documentary I Be Done Been Was Is
(1984), the first film to chronicle the struggles and triumphs of black women
comedians, director Debra Robinson presents a discourse of black women’s
subjectivity in I Be, without homogenizing their experiences. Instead, she
lets the four women guide a narrative of difference. Each of the four comics,
Marsha Warfield, Jane Galvin-Lewis, Alice Arthur, and Rhonda Hansome
perform before racially mixed crowds in nightclubs, bars, and even at a public
park. Jane Galvin-Lewis remarked in the film, “I’ve never had an all-black
house” (I Be Done Been Was Is 1984). There were very few “black rooms”
in the 1980s where black stand-ups could showcase their talent to black audi-
ences, so most worked white or mixed rooms.
Thea Vidale is another comic who began performing in the 1980s, honing
her act before mostly white audiences in Texas before gaining mainstream
success on her eponymous sitcom Thea (ABC, 1993–94). Vidale became a
headlining stand-up act at “hotels, bars, anywhere I could get up. And they
paid me, so that made it better” (Vidale 2012). She crafted her act in ways
that distanced her, before the eyes and consciousness of her white audiences,
from stereotypical images of black womanhood, which you could argue was
a strategy for succeeding in a mostly white profession. One thing she learned
was that “you don’t have to holler to get your point across” (Vidale). Onstage
at the first Females in Comedy Association convention in Los Angeles in
2012, Vidale sat in a chair approaching her audience not from above, but
almost at their level. She rarely raised her voice, and almost never moved
beyond gesturing with her hands for emphasis. Vidale’s stillness and non-
theatricality were acts of what Signithia Fordham terms “gender passing,”
 From Awkward to Dope 227

employed by black women in the academy in order to “be taken seriously,”

thereby increasing their chances of academic success (Fordham 1993, 10).
I am not arguing that Vidale intentionally played down her womanhood or
her blackness, but that her quiet and still stage presence can be read as “an act
of defiance, a refusal on the part of high-achieving females to consume the
image of ‘nothingness’” (Fordham 10). In her performance, Vidale worked
hard to avoid being pigeonholed and forced into a ready-made mold. “Men
bookers think all black women comics are angry, fussy, busy, brassy. Some
of us are not like that. Some of us are quiet and still. Some of us are uplifting
and Christian. Some of us are gay. Some of us are straight. Some of us are
diff-er-ent. (carefully enunciating each syllable). But the people that’s mak-
ing the choices, they label us. And you can’t label a whole group of people”
(Vidale). Vidale’s assessment calls attention to the struggles contemporary
black women comics face in terms of gaining legitimacy, while producing
and performing comedy that reflects their particular experiences without the
intervention of gatekeepers of the status quo.
Black comedy boomed in the 1990s on the heels of successful network
stand-up showcase programs like Russell Simmons’ Def Comedy Jam and
BET’s Comic View, which engendered and mainstreamed a black working
class, urban comic sensibility that was the modern epitome of the elements of
black folk humor described above. Today, there is a network of black women
comics who appreciate, and are literate in styles and are aesthetics of tradi-
tional tropes of black humor, but also exceed the boundaries of the genre, aes-
thetically and politically. Some of these comics, who I will later argue cannot
be simplistically divided into urban/alternative camps, include Michelle
Buteau, Chloe Hilliard, Calise Hawkins, Gina Yashere, Zainab Johnson, Rae
Sanni, Dulce Sloan, Amanda Seales, Yvonne Orji, Issa Rae, Jessica Williams,
Phoebe Robinson, Naomi Ekperigin, Marina Franklin, Sasheer Zamata, and
Nicole Byer. Along with others, these comics are producing and perform-
ing innovative, self-reflexive comedy in alternative spaces like dive bars,
random apartments2: The Upright Citizen’s Brigade (UCB), and Union Hall
in Brooklyn, NY. Yet it would be naive and ill-advised to cast them outside
of the realm of the black comic tradition. Indeed, one of my goals is to dem-
onstrate that there is no easy distinction between black women’s urban and
alternative comedy, no essential bifurcation between the cultural production
of urban and alternative black women comics. However, the aesthetic and
stylistic elements of black women’s alt-comedy is worth exploring because
we can find important insights regarding how black women are engaging in
performance practices that lay bare the heterogeneity of their experiences,
and, more importantly, black women’s universal desire to be regarded as
complex, complicated, and thinking human beings.
228 Jessyka Finley

For the purposes of this chapter, when I use the term “alternative com-
edy,” or “the alt-scene,” I am referring to the alternative comedy scene in the
United States since the mid-1990s, and not the alternative scene that emerged
in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s. UnCabaret, a weekly comedy show-
case that takes place at Au Lac in downtown Los Angeles launched in 1993,
and claims to be “the first alternative comedy show.” UnCabaret’s website
characterizes alternative comedy as “soul baring, mind bending, intimate,
conversational, idiosyncratic comedy” (UnCabaret n.d.), a style of comedy
associated with comedy stars like Patton Oswalt, Kathy Griffin, Margaret
Cho, David Cross, Janeane Garofalo, Andy Dick, and many others (UnCaba-
ret). As Emily Hertz puts it, alternative comedy “denote[s] comedians that
challenge the boundaries of the field through innovation, pastiche and reflex-
ive provocation” (Hertz 2010, 21). E. Alex Jung described the aesthetics of
the new wave of black male alternative comics in an April 2015 article in
Vulture. “Their jokes are oddball and sometimes experimental, occasionally
detouring into the self-referential and the surreal, and they have popularized
a more playful, introverted version of black masculinity” (emphasis added)
(Jung 2015). We could extend these descriptors to black women comics in
the alternative scene, but I would like to go further and discuss how much of
their comedic material embraces individuality, celebrates awkwardness, and
rewards racial transgression.
This style of comedy is making enormous strides in terms of bringing vis-
ibility to what Ytasha Womack calls the “seen but unseen” highly educated
black middle class (Womack 2010 quoted in Gillota 18). Alternative comedy,
however can insidiously share some of its crucial features—the embrace of
individuality and a penchant for almost continuous innovation—with neolib-
eralism where “creativity . . . isn’t about self-expression or making art; it’s
about creativity understood as a business good” (Deresiewicz 2017). 2DQ
often reference their middle-class status (which I will discuss more later), but
in discussing this status, they avoid mentioning the lower classes on which
their middle-class existence depends. Their “exceptionality” within the tradi-
tional black representational matrix of strippers and welfare queens is fodder
for jokes. While accessing the money and renown that neoliberalism affords
“creative go-getters” they also take advantage of, and are deafeningly silent
on, its capitalist exploitation of black Americans who are marginalized by
this same system. As black alt comedy comes to the fore, and awkwardness is
usurped by the cool as it inevitably is, it becomes clear that the conditions of
neoliberalism require a divide in black expressive culture. This divide mani-
fests as a smart/ignorant, or black alternative/urban stand-up split in order to
(re)brand, package, and sell cultural products. After closely reading a few
routines by Marina Franklin, Sasheer Zamata, and Nicole Byer, which read
as twenty-first-century black women’s satire, I will examine the neoliberal
 From Awkward to Dope 229

aspects of the podcast 2DQ, how black girl awkwardness as an identity is sup-
planted by the confident, quirky, and cool dope queen—purportedly feminist
and “woke,” but palpably incorporated into the status quo.

SHAKE-A-DANG-DANG!

The Awkward Comedy Show (2010) is a documentary produced and directed

by Victor Varnado, showcasing the comedic talents and experiences of five
African Americans who consider themselves alternative comics: Varnado,
Hannibal Burress, Eric André, Baron Vaughn, and Marina Franklin. The
comics are described as “nerds who don’t need any revenge, just a mic and
an audience who cares about smart comedy from a personal perspective. . . .
The Awkward Comedy Show will show the world doofy jokesters are to be
laughed at on their own terms” (Varnado 2010). From the outset, the black
comedians attempt to draw some distance between themselves, their styles
and sensibilities and those of other African American stand-ups. The trope
of naming black comedy that does not “fully” embrace traditional tropes and
aesthetics as “smart,” “nerdy,” and “intelligent,” is problematic given that
this division assumes “traditionally black” comedic production, its producers
and audiences do not possess those qualities. However, given the pervasive
stereotypes associated with blackness and black comedy, it is quite under-
standable that comics would want to mitigate confining categories and brand
their acts in ways that intelligibly locate them in categories that powerfully
disavow deeply held ideas about black people as ignorant and black humor
as simplistic. Using the labels “Smart,” “nerdy,” and “intelligent” performs
some of that work. Marina Franklin, the lone woman spotlighted in the film,
discusses the tension and anxiety of being a black woman comic and subject
to a set of aesthetic and stylistic expectations. “When I first started,” Franklin
explains, “I tried to go into what someone said was a ‘Sheniqua voice.’ I
would end every joke with that ‘Mm hmm.’ It actually worked for me. They
seemed to like it. [Eric André chimes in, “For a white audience?”] Yeah,
I was doing more of it than I did in front of a black audience” (Varnado).
Franklin immediately goes into a bit about rejecting the expectation of play-
ing the “sassy black woman,” a bit that has become a staple of her live show.
As the headliner at The Vermont Comedy Club in Burlington, VT on
June 3, 2016, Franklin sets up the joke by providing the audience with some
context. “I’m from Chicago,” she reports, “I grew up in Highland Park, a
white neighborhood. I was the only black kid in a white school. . . . Then we
moved to the South Side. But it was too late. I was white. I didn’t have any
skills. I didn’t know how to fight. I didn’t know double-dutch.” She moves
through a series of bits about getting beat up by an ugly girl, and discusses
230 Jessyka Finley

some of the ways her grandmother kept her close to her black cultural roots,
despite having been raised in mostly white spaces, setting up her “sassy black
woman” joke.

I’m not, like, a sassy comic onstage . . . some people like that from a black
female comic. They like that “Mmh! Mm hmm! Yeeah! Mm hmm! Shit! Hell
yeah motherfucker! Mm hmm! Shit! Shake-a-dang-dang! [swiveling her hips].
I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted. It’s too much work. I put that on my Weight
Watchers as an activity. Being a sassy black woman for half a second. And
now I can eat cake. . . . When I first started doing comedy I would do that, and
I would just say the wrong thing. Cause you know, if you’re not being yourself
you’ll mess it up. So I would get up there and I would be like, “I got a big
pussy!” [Raucous laughter] “Who got a big pussy?!” That’s not really a compli-
ment (Franklin 2016).

Onstage, Franklin’s liminal status is clear, as is the anxiety and bitterness

wrought by her awareness of a supposedly authentic black subject, and the
comic sensibilities expected of “black female comics.” She expertly cites,
and then symbolically punishes the “sassy black woman” image. Franklin’s
accurate representation of the stereotype, in word and gesture, signifies her
literacy in traditional tropes of black women’s expressive culture. At the
beginning she faithfully mimics the stylistic elements of the “sassy black
woman,” “Mm hmm, yeah!” She rolls her eyes, swerves her hips, and looks
her object up and down. However, Franklin’s awkward and grossly carica-
tured tagline, “Shake-a-dang-dang!” reminds her audience that just in case
they had been fooled by the accuracy of her “sassy black woman” impression,
she is something of an impostor, in spirit if not in gesture.
Franklin’s commentary on the evolution of her comic sensibility confirms
the underlying anxiety, and ultimate revelry in racial transgression that
marks black women’s alternative comedy. In other work, I have discussed
the trope of “black girl awkwardness,” and the ways contemporary black
women satirists are using new media (web series in particular) to create
content that engages broader, more nuanced narratives than regularly seen
across popular media. Regina N. Bradley argues that “black girl awkward-
ness” is a particular identity that black women have laid claim to in order
to move beyond tired stereotypes. In particular, Bradley discusses Issa
Rae’s mobilization of “black girl awkwardness,” how enacting and cel-
ebrating this postmodern subjectivity “humanizes, visualizes and pushes
back against standard performances of (comedic) femininity.” Furthermore,
“Awkwardness signifies the shifts in how black women in twenty-first
century popular culture spaces navigate interlocking discourses of race and
gender that dictate our day-to-day lives” (Bradley 2015, 149). I agree that
the trope of “black girl awkwardness” does indeed signal some of the ways
 From Awkward to Dope 231

black women work within and beyond established norms of blackness and
femininity.
It is important to add, however, that we must not downplay the role of eco-
nomic class when we think about the work “black girl awkwardness” does,
and the way Franklin’s “Mm hmm”s, her expletives, vulgarity, and rejection
of the “sassy black woman” identity, signifies a will to punish, if not purge
a distinctly working-class image of black women that in popular culture, can
be easily reduced to a roll of the eyes, a sucking of the teeth, and a swivel
of the hips—and Franklin’s off delivery of “shake-a-dang-dang!” The “sassy
black woman” is a one-dimensional representation that can be understood in
this context as the Du Boisian Veil Franklin is working to pull back to reveal
black women as thinking, feeling human beings as opposed to expressive
objects for “a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (Du Bois 3).
Franklin comes to embrace her “black girl awkwardness,” and uses this
misfit status as a primary source of humor. For example, when I saw Franklin
perform live in Vermont, the punch line of her joke about the altercation with
ugly (and sassy) girl ended with Franklin getting beat up, thereby symboli-
cally punishing herself for not conforming to conventional norms of working-
class black womanhood. In The Awkward Comedy Show, however, it is the
ugly girl who is punished as the school principal comes to Franklin’s rescue,
enabling Franklin to employ some trickster tactics of racial transgression. In
the latter version, Franklin tells the audience, “I’m bilingual. I’mma use my
white voice,” and with an accent that skillfully indexes a white valley girl, or
what sociolinguist Penny Eckert calls the “Northern California shift” (Eckert
2008), Franklin reports to the principal, “I don’t really know what happened.
Oh my god. That Negro hit me!” Franklin is a black woman, yet in this ver-
sion of her joke the performative distinction between the ugly “Negro” girl
and herself, sets up Franklin’s multi-voicedness as both a tactic of racial
transgression, and a comedic embrace of “black girl awkwardness,” with all
the contradictions and irony it entails—embodied in her skillful alternation
between multiple discursive registers.

DO SOME IMPRESSIONS

Sasheer Zamata is currently a repertory player on NBC’s Saturday Night

Live, and the first black woman to ascend to that status since Maya Rudolph
left in 2007. Zamata got her start doing long form improv at the University of
Virginia, and regularly performs stand-up comedy in both clubs and alterna-
tive spaces. She has hosted a comedy/variety show “Sasheer Zamata Party
Time!” at established alternative spots like Union Hall and The Bell House
in Brooklyn, and has also performed in the Brooklyn Comedy Festival, which
232 Jessyka Finley

bills itself as “NYC’s Premier Alternative Event.”3 Along with SNL Zamata is
known for her comedic impersonations clips on YouTube. I caught a stand-
up show of hers at Vermont Comedy Club in 2016 and one joke stood out
as it seemed to typify the aesthetic and stylistic qualities performed by black
women in the alt-scene—the tendency toward irony, absurdist techniques,
self-reflexivity, bitter emotional affect, and multi-voicedness. Zamata’s joke
was about becoming a well-known comic, and how suffocating it is for black
women comedians to be expected to be able to “do black womanhood” on
command.
Zamata began the joke speaking directly to the mostly white audience,
remarking that many of them may know of her because of her role in the cast
of SNL, to which there is some applause. A woman comes up to her after a
show at a comedy club and says to Zamata, “Aw, I was hoping you’d do some
impressions . . . maybe Michelle Obama or Beyoncé.” Zamata replies,

Maybe next time . . . but what I should have said was [with a mocking, nasally
tone] “Aw, I was hoping you’d do some impressions.” That was my impression
of you. That’s what you sound like. [Same mocking tone] “Aw, I was hoping
you’d do some impressions.” Tell your friends this is how you sound. [Even
more nasally and shrill] “Aw, I was hoping you’d do some impressions.” [Mim-
icking chasing the woman as she walks to her car] “Where are you going, I’m
not done yet! “Aw, I was hoping you’d do some impressions!” [Woman]: “Get
outta my car!” Zamata: [Almost incomprehensibly screeching] “Aw, I was hop-
ing you’d do some impressions! (Zamata 2016)

Zamata subverts the woman’s call to do an impersonation of a universalized

black womanhood embodied in Michelle Obama and Beyoncé, refracting
that call back on the white woman who initiated the call itself. Her mockery
showcases her expertise at performing impressions, but instead of mimick-
ing an idealized image of black womanhood, Zamata performs an incisive
caricature of the white woman that, in form and content, lays bare the anxiety
and bitterness of what it feels like to be a black woman comic, and continu-
ously be expected to embody not oneself, but an idea of who one has become
legible as in American cultural discourse. Chasing the white woman with a
shrill, nasally impression of her own self, Zamata captures for her audience
the effect of being subject to a shallow representational pool—it gets more
and more annoying as it is cited and reiterated. The humor is borne of the
sense of being chased figuratively by the specter of “black womanhood,”
and now literally as Zamata’s subversive fantasy plays out. Repetition is the
key when it comes to how the humor functions here. Citation and recitation
bring out the absurdity inherent in the kind of tired racial script played out
in the joke—and ostensibly, as a fixture of everyday life when black people
interact with people who see blackness as a monolith. Instead of performing
 From Awkward to Dope 233

what is expected of a “sassy black woman,” like Franklin’s anti-sass char-

acter who got beat up by the ugly “Negro,” Zamata remains awkward in the
“real” interaction, evidenced in her response, “Maybe next time.” Strikingly,
what seems to be a salient trope in both women’s comedy is a politics of
racial transgression where we see them embracing, and expertly enacting
their black cultural identities, while at the same time comically lifting the
dusty Veil of stereotypes to demonstrate to their audiences that black people,
though perhaps “bound by ties of blood,” are often “separated by training and
tradition” (Fauset 164).

BE BLACKER

In other work, I have argued that black women’s postmodern satire is cita-
tional and marked by personal experience and emotion, and this is particu-
larly true when contemporary black women comics like Franklin and Zamata
cite and then reject the “sassy black woman” character. In this dynamic pro-
cess, the goal is not the repudiation of black womanhood per se, but a will on
the part of the comics to enact one’s individuality, without being reduced or
pigeonholed into roles that reify black women as aggressive, overly expres-
sive simpletons whose humor shakes out (pun intended) to mere buffoonery.
Nicole Byer is a comic whose cultural production spans multiple media, from
a web series with Sasheer Zamata (Pursuit of Sexiness), to a scripted comedy
on MTV that was canceled after one season (Loosely, Exactly Nicole), to
improv appearances at the UCB, along with many stand-up comedy perfor-
mances. Byer performed in the UCB sketch “Be Blacker,” for YouTube that
exemplifies this process of citation and rejection of the “sassy black woman”
image.
The sketch begins with a director—a young white woman with thick red-
rimmed glasses and bright pink lipstick, fashionably draped with a scarf—
welcoming Byer to an acting audition. An assistant—a young white man with
a Justin Beiber-style swooped haircut acts as Byer’s reading partner and foil,
and the producer instructs Byer to “play everything to him.” “LaShwanda, did
you get those clams I asked for?” the assistant asks. Byer quickly responds in
a style and diction consistent with standard English, “Ooh child, I got them
clams,” dismissively, but pleasantly gesturing with her hand, “I got every-
thing on that list you gave me.” This is a mundane scene that does not appear
to have or need any particular reference to black life or culture, beyond
identifying that the actress will be played by a black woman because of the
name. Yet it becomes clear that the “sassy black woman” has become the
only legible persona for black women comics, a Veil of stereotypes through
which society views and expects Byer to conform, despite her first reading for
234 Jessyka Finley

the part, seemingly as her authentic black self. The director stops Byer in the
middle of the read, “Ok great, I love what you’re doing. I love what you’re
doing. I have an adjustment if that’s ok.” Byer nods awkwardly. “How can I
say this? Um, I need you to be more urban.” Byer chuckles, cocking her head
perplexedly, “Um, what?” “This role calls for a really urban, ethnic black
person,” the director insists, “Can you be that for me?” (UCB Comedy 2013).
The role is predicated on the existence of racial difference, but Byer’s ver-
sion of black womanhood is insufficiently legible as such, and must be forc-
ibly heightened to play up the supposed fact of that racial difference. Indeed,
she is called upon to engage in an act of racial transgression to inhabit “the
sassy black woman,” which suffuses every part of her being as she makes
adjustments to her performance—in word, gesture, and attitude—which
subsumes her personality, reducing it to a completely absurd caricature. The
assistant begins again, “LaShwanda, did you get those clams I asked for?”
In the second read, Byer’s response includes exactly the same words, but she
affects a guttural voice quality and sing-song cadence that harkens back to
Mammy scolding Scarlet for not eating when she’s trying to fit into a corset
in a famous scene from Gone with the Wind (1939). Her neck rolls, and her
body shimmies with each syllable.
Byer’s switches between “the sassy black woman” representation and
her true voice between the reads, enacting once again Du Bois’s double-
consciousness. This is most noticeable in the commentary between reading
the scene, where she raises the Veil “that you may view faintly its deeper
recesses” (Du Bois 1). The director stops her once more, “Hey Nicole, I need
you to be blacker. Do you understand what I mean when I say blacker?” Byer
responds with an awkward smile, “No, I’m sorry I don’t.” In this moment,
Byer’s authentic voice serves to materialize that which is within the Veil, her
true voice that deviates from normative assumptions of how black people
should (be able to) talk, and in her speaking back to the woman in her own
voice, bookended between her readings as the “sassy black woman,” she at
once cites and rejects the trope, a humorous reconciliation of double-con-
sciousness that lays bare the fallacy of an essentialized notion of authentic
blackness. “Do you know how to be, [snaps finger to the side] sassy?” the
director asks. Nicole responds by repeating the snapping gesture, shaking her
head to indicate that she is willing to give it a try.
In the penultimate reading, Byer repeats her response snapping now
with each syllable, dancing with deep, boisterous movements, “Ooooh
chile, I got them clams! I got everything on that list you gave me!”
“Blacker,” the director insists, entreating Byer to give her Spike Lee, In
Living Color, Steve Urkel, and Oprah. In the end, Byer moves back into
what seems like her authentic voice and asks the director, “Sooo, did I
get the part?” (UCB Comedy), and the director informs her that she is
 From Awkward to Dope 235

being considered as an option among many, but assures Byer that she feels
good about her performance. This sketch indicates a capacity on the part
of Byer to demonstrate her literacy and rootedness in black culture (by
way of accurate performance of the “sassy black woman,” and mastery of
black pop cultural references), as well as her ability to transgress racial
norms in ways that are equally authentic. Indeed, this juxtaposition of
styles is ultimately a desire for reconciliation of the enduring condition of
double-consciousness.

FROM AWKWARD TO DOPE

Next, I want to discuss the cultural production of two of the most prominent
black women comics working in the alternative scene—Phoebe Robinson and
Jessica Williams—who are using their wildly popular podcast, 2DQ, to lift
the Veil even further to offer a view of black women’s multifarious identities
to the mainstream. I would also like to venture a critique of some of the neo-
liberal aspects of the podcast, especially regarding its unashamed investment
in a particular kind of materialism, and its celebration of individual agency
and tastes—neoliberal projects that run up against current notions of anti-
racist politics seeking to dismantle the structures of racial domination.
Debuting on the radio station WNYC April 4, 2016, and now in its third sea-
son, 2DQ has become one of the most popular comedy podcasts with millions
of downloads and a loyal fan base, both virtual and those who regularly attend
their live recordings at Union Hall in Brooklyn, NY, and elsewhere across the
nation. Former Daily Show correspondent Jessica Williams and staff writer for
MTV’s Girl Code Phoebe Williams both got their starts performing in vari-
ous comedic genres, and their podcast features a hip, at times cacophonous
vibe of conversations about race, sex, pop culture, and politics with a mix of
quick-witted banter, and guests who perform stand-up comedy. Coming from
the UCB improv tradition, Robinson and Williams use the podcast medium
to push and blur the boundaries of what black women’s comic performance
sounds like, and have tapped into the podcast as an alternative comedy space
for their brand of humor. The duo has described their vision as having a show
that showcases and celebrates a diverse array of voices and experiences, espe-
cially people of color and LGBTQ people. For example, in a Glamour maga-
zine interview Jessica Williams discussed the surprising popularity of 2DQ,
which just showed there was like a hunger for new stories because we have alternative
comics on our show that wouldn't normally be featured on, like, a white guy's comedy
show. We like to have a lot of women and women of color. We like to have people
of different sexual orientations. I was, for some reason, surprised by that popularity.
I don’t know why I was. The old stories are boring. (Mahaney 2016)
236 Jessyka Finley

2DQ, both the podcast and the comics themselves, demonstrate the emi-
nently political nature of these “new stories” in terms of how black women’s
voices (both literally and figuratively) have been (under)represented in popu-
lar media.
Several black women comics are featured guests on 2DQ, including
Naomi Ekperigin, Calise Hawkins, Michelle Buteau, Sam Jay, Jean Grae,
and Rae Sanni: women who work (although not exclusively) in the alterna-
tive comedy scene. Not only are Williams and Robinson engaging in cut-
ting-edge comedic production as podcasters, they are also giving a platform
to a cohort of other black women comics who are bringing “alternative”
styles and sensibilities to the mainstream. Vince Meserko explores the
contours of what he calls the “the UCB alternative comedy scene,” noting
the ways new technological mediums like the podcast enable alternative
comics whose material “navigates along the periphery of mainstream sen-
sibilities” (Meserko 2015, 28), helps them to build broad (and virtual) com-
munities around that style of comedy. We are not only living in a golden
age of comedy, but we also a “golden age of podcasting” (Nelson 2016),
that is enabling women, minorities, and otherwise traditionally marginal-
ized folks to get their voices out in the internet airwaves in new and excit-
ing ways. Indeed, Phoebe Robinson was featured as a guest on the WNYC
podcast Note to Self in a segment “about how digital media is changing
political discourse,” which lauded a feminist politics of podcasting, “giv-
ing women a special kind of platform in media to express their ideas, their
perspectives, and have a place to be unfiltered. To quite literally, be heard.
And there is real power in that, particularly for black women like Phoebe
Robinson” (Robinson 2016).
Williams and Robinson come off as trendy and friendly, and they (and their
guests) tell meandering and entertaining stories about twenty-first-century
millennial living. They use Lyft and Uber; they shop at Anthropologie; they
drink rosé; and sometimes refer to themselves as “Khaleesis.”4 They often
discuss their privileged upbringings. In one episode they mused,

[PR]: If you are a black person, if you grow up in a middle class or an upper
middle class situation, you have to learn about white shit. Like, I have to
know what a keratin treatment is. We have to know about Barre class.
[JW]: You’ve gotta get the canon shit for white people. (Robinson and
­Williams 2017)

By way of being featured on WNYC, 2DQ pitches its humor to “discerning

listeners” those who are “educated, affluent, and culturally active.”5 Stylisti-
cally, 2DQ has been described as “irreverent, goofy, incisive, and unapolo-
getically black and female” (Davis 2016). Robinson and Williams’s humor
 From Awkward to Dope 237

is more complicated than simply offering a black and female perspective,

though. Yes, Williams and Robinson bring a black woman comedic perspec-
tive, but race, gender, and class give shape to their identities and their brand.
The two comics offer material that is deeply imbued with a middle-class,
neoliberal orientation—sensibilities and aesthetics that are performatively
borne out in the constellation of products, everyday experiences, pop cultural
references, and registers of connection by which they communicate with
their audience. As George Scialabba puts it, neoliberalism in culture “means
untrammeled marketing and the commoditization of everyday life, including
the intimate sphere” (Scialabba 2017). In a Vulture article about black male
nerd comics, Robinson discusses some of the stylistic and thematic differ-
ences between black comedy of old and contemporary material. “Back in the
day I think there was a lot of ‘white people do this and black people do that’
jokes, which has been done to death a million times over. . . . There’s more
that we can talk about” (Jung 2015). The implication here is that black people
can also do the things white people do, and use it for joke fodder, too.
The queens are up on the latest Coachella performances, shop on Amazon.
com, “try to get bottle service at the fucking Tao,” make zoodles (zucchini
noodles), love the band U2, and talk obsessively about their sexual attraction
to Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau. Robinson and Williams share
the experiences of their everyday lives with their audience in a way that
facilitates a mood of intersubjectivity, and in the neoliberal gestalt, those
experiences and perspectives become products. Not only are they objects for
consumption but this sense of being “of one” also at times engenders a kind
of racial absolution for both the comics and some of those in their audience.
In other words, the comic duo gains access to whiteness (or, recognition as
human beings) by virtue of their literacy in, and sharing of cultural material
consistent with middle-class whiteness, which solidifies their individuality or
diversity. And white audiences members get to pat themselves on the back for
not being like the fantasies of “bad” white people played out by the comics.
Let me use an example to further elucidate this argument.
On the last episode of season two, “Who Is Jeff Tweedy?” Williams and
Robinson open with a back and forth about the anxieties of getting their hair
done at photo shoots, how vulnerable it makes them feel to have their bod-
ies subject to people who may not be schooled in the art of doing black hair.
Throughout each season Williams and Robinson use stories about their hair
as a synecdoche for their rootedness in black culture, talking about styling it,
and its sometimes “unruly” texture. The experience of having their hair styled
by white people is comedic fodder, even though Williams describes her expe-
rience at photo shoots as “soul crushing and horrific” (Williams and Robinson
2017). The audience laughs at this description for reasons that are unclear to
me—perhaps responding to the tone in which the line is delivered, rather than
238 Jessyka Finley

Williams’s psychic pain. The duo then moves into a conversation about the
moment they enter the photo shoot. It is like the AMC drama Breaking Bad as
the stylists anxiously shuffle around wondering, “What’s the formula, how do
I get it exact?” Robinson relays a story about a positive experience of having
her hair styled by a white person, an exemplary moment of potential racial
transcendence. “My edges are jacked,” she explained, and “[the stylist] knew
what edges are!” (Robinson and Williams 2017).
This interaction is a moment where we can once again understand a rec-
onciliation of double-consciousness. What is more interesting though, is
how Williams and Robinson give their audience permission to laugh at a
fantasy of racial transcendence whereby white folks in the audience get to
participate in seeing themselves as not of a piece as the ignorant white people
trying to figure out how black bodies work. This banter about white hands
in black hair projects a fantasy of what “bad, racist” white people are—they
are willfully ignorant, or do not care enough to learn how to interact with
black hair textures and styles. In blackface minstrelsy there was a projection
of fantasies of blackness for white consumption, and in this bit we can see
a marked projection of fantasies of whiteness for white consumption. The
laughter at these kinds of fantasies of whiteness signifies a white disiden-
tification with this type of “bad” (clueless, ignorant, racist) white person.
The communal aspect of a “community of laughter” gets hijacked into the
individualism that is the salient, meaning-giving feature of neoliberalism.
By engaging in this laughter, the audience is “free” to pursue their otherwise
remunerative and neoliberal pursuits, exculpated from the worries of being
part of the suffocating and inescapable structures of racial domination that
constrains and circumscribes certain people’s position and opportunities in
society. Wendy Brown sums this exchange up beautifully, “Neoliberal sub-
jects are controlled through their freedom—not simply, as thinkers from the
Frankfurt School through Foucault have argued, because freedom within an
order of domination can be an instrument of that domination, but because of
neoliberalism’s moralization of the consequences of this freedom” (Brown
2005, 44).
“This is how the show flows,” writes Allison P. Davis, “two friends flip-
ping from the dire (Black Lives Matter) to the ridiculous (the technicalities of
FaceTiming your BFF during anal sex) to the sublime (Michael Fassbender).
Sometimes they pelvic thrust in unison. Sometimes they get serious. On this
occasion, they did all that in the first seven minutes of the show” (Davis
2016). However, while historical racial injustice is a regular topic on the
show, it is often drawn to an ironic distance via jokes that highlight the deeply
individualistic, neoliberal orientation that their podcast takes up, where
“there is no mention of collective solutions to historic injustices: indeed, the
 From Awkward to Dope 239

neoliberal feminist subject is divested of any orientation toward the common

good” (Rottenberg 11). During the opening set of the “Thank You, Harriet
Tubman” episode, the pair generate some intrigue by claiming, “This show
is gonna get political. We’re gonna make the case for reparations.” Williams
goes into a story about using the Internet to find a home organizer to come to
her apartment to help de-clutter her life. “I got a home organizer to come to
my place last week,” she says.

I’m like a hoarder-lite . . . so I found these ladies online, and then get this: these
two older white ladies showed up to my apartment and they re-did my whole
apartment! [PR]: Yooo, that’s reparations right there! [JW]: I was like, this is
what we did it for! [PR]: Yaaas! [JW]: Thank you Rosa! [PR]: Thank you, Har-
riet! [JW]: Thanks Sojourner! . . . This other white lady was like, folding my
clothes, like my intimate underwear, she was folding everything . . . at one point
I hit a wall and I was like, ugh, I’m tired. And she was like, why don’t you go sit
down and like, order some food for yourself and I’ll just take care of this. And
I was like, wait, really? She was like yeah, just go ahead. And I was like damn,
this is definitely my reparations. (Robinson and Williams 2016)

In another episode a white audience member hits on their guest Kevin Bacon,
an infraction with which Robinson and Williams were none too pleased.

[JW]: What did you say? You tryna get in . . . Cause this is already taken.
[PR]: So just, fuckin’, nope.
[JW]: Mmm, you respect what we puttin’ down up here.
[PR]: Back off. This is reparations, back off.
[JW]: We earned this! Rosa Parks did that for this! Harriet Tubman did it so
we could do this ignorant shit up here! (Robinson and Williams 2016).

Can there be anything less oriented toward the common good of racial
justice than a couple of white ladies coming to the houses of black people,
rocking out to Fleetwood Mac while folding up their underwear, or having
exclusive sexual access to a white male actor? Racial justice manifests here
as the domain of each private individual who is free to choose what justice
means and looks like. Political consciousness in 2DQ has a neoliberal echo,
often resembling that of the “Fearless Girl” metal statue on Wall Street, “It is
a cynical testament to elite striving and the desire to be recognized symboli-
cally without resisting materially” (Nair 2017). This recognition I fear, has
the unfortunate potential to usher in a particular (and narrow) ideal of black
women comics into mainstream culture at the possible expense of marginaliz-
ing those black women comics who are deemed traditional, less “innovative,”
and whose comedy is less palatable to mainstream audiences.
240 Jessyka Finley

CONCLUSION

Although its hosts come from black middle class backgrounds and the 2DQ
podcast appeals to a middle and upper-middle class audience,6 like so-called
“urban” black comedy acts, Williams and Robinson often make use of
traditional tropes of black humor, especially when it comes to discussing
experiences of white racial discrimination. For example, in an early 1990s
routine on HBO’s Def Comedy Jam, Adele Givens joked about the frustra-
tion of shopping while black—or, being followed around in stores and being
assumed to be a thief. “I love to shop,” Givens told her audience, “cause
ladies like to shop, don’t we girls? But don’t you hate the bitches following
you around in the store asking you stupid shit. Trying to keep you from steal-
ing and shit.” After taking several items into the fitting room and having the
clerk knock and suspiciously ask, “How do those fit?” Givens offers a jab
that both exposes and turns the situation on its head. “Gee, they fit perfect
but my purse won’t zip up now bitch. Do you have a bigger bag I could use?”
(Givens n.d.).
On an episode entitled “Get Outta My Window Seat,” Jessica Williams
recounts a story about buying a first-class Amtrak ticket and having a white
ticket-taker question whether or not she was in the correct place. “[PR]: Like
are you sure? This is for you? [JW]: And I was like yes bitch, this is Amtrak!
Fucking, the only difference here is I’m gonna get like, two bags of peanuts
instead of one!” (Robinson and Williams 2016). Although Givens may be
considered an urban act and 2DQ is more in line with the alt-scene, both
routines have the same premise, which is that no matter the economic class,
black access is always restricted, questioned, and heavily policed. However,
Givens’ joke has a subversive, satirical edge. On 2DQ, there is a tone of, “all
we wanted to do was get on the train, leave us alone,” whereas Givens simply
abandons the system wholesale and makes a mockery of it.
Along with establishing the contours of black women’s alternative comedy
and taking seriously the cultural production of black women comics, I have
tried to demonstrate that the division between “alternative” and “urban” black
comics is in fact an artificial bifurcation that rewards and is invested in a
kind of neoliberal materialism that monetizes a toothless way of being “at the
intersection of cocoa butter boulevard boulevard and woke way” (King 2016)
and is thoroughly palatable to white audiences. Being palatable to white
audiences is fine. Who am I to tell comics what to talk about or how to do
it? My point is that rather than buying into (figuratively and literally) trendy
labels that do little more than imbue black cultural products and its potential
consumers with neoliberal illusions of “choice” and “diversity,” we would
do better to critically discuss how ideas about “creativity” and “innovation”
can reify and perpetuate notions of good (intelligent, cultured, transgressive)
 From Awkward to Dope 241

black comics versus bad (ignorant, one-dimensional, vulgar) black comics.

Perhaps we should follow Amanda Seales’s lead and make an effort to “break
down these limitations of what a black comedian is supposed to be and to
open up a space” (Anderson 2017) that expands the boundaries of the black
comic tradition instead of fragmenting it (and its subjects) into marketable,
neatly circumscribed categories.
2 Dope Queens has been praised as a necessary intervention in the pop
cultural landscape, helping to break down the representations which have
so often pigeonholed and marginalized black women. Phoebe Robinson and
Jessica Williams are rightfully lauded for their more complex portrayal of
black women and black life, and for opening the door for other entertainers
to follow suit. Indeed, 2DQ has been labeled a feminist podcast,7 and both
Williams and Robinson have embraced the feminist tag, especially the ways
in which the podcast medium enables a particular kind of feminist ethic to
flourish. “I’m just really jazzed about the future,” Robinson said in 2016
interview for the blog The Ringer. “I really am just, like, focusing on it just
being equal. I’m not necessarily thinking about, like, ‘Oh, we got to get rid of
the guys.’ It’s more like, ‘Oh, we got to bring more women to the forefront
and more people of color to the forefront’” (Davis 2016). Robinson’s state-
ment lays bare an important paradox of the proliferation of black women’s
alt-comedy in that it (un)wittingly embraces a neoliberal (feminist) orienta-
tion which “is predominantly concerned with instating a feminist subject who
epitomizes ‘self-responsibility,’ and who no longer demands anything from
the state or the government, or even from men as a group; there is no longer
any attempt to confront the tension between liberal individualism, equality,
and those social pressures that potentially obstruct the realization of ‘true’
equality” (Rottenberg 11).
Perhaps “insecurity” is a constitutive condition of black women’s neolib-
eral subjectivity in ways that remind us of double-consciousness—the two-
world condition Du Bois theorized as the ontology of blackness in 1903—as
both a reiteration and something new. In 2DQ in particular, insecurity plays
out as “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”
(Du Bois 8), the tension of striving for recognition as black and American
that manifests in their humor. This neoliberal insecurity is the fulcrum of a
politics of incorporation, which in neoliberal conditions, is seductive. The
consistent performance in shows like 2DQ and Insecure, of black women
striving toward the economic rewards of incorporation into the mainstream,
and at the same time toward a cultural sense of individuality and creativity—
is a hallmark of a neoliberal cultural marketplace that thrives on insecurity.
If podcasts like 2DQ and television series like Issa Rae’s Insecure signify a
broader set of representations of diverse and distinct narratives of black wom-
anhood, and are supposed to give audiences more “freedom” and “choice,”
242 Jessyka Finley

in their consumption of images of black life and culture, why does it seem
like black womanhood is narrowly confined to a version of the fly, quirky,
confident middle class black woman? The answer is likely that the Awkward
Black Girl on the original web series was merely a springboard for becoming
Insecure, before ascending to the mainstream throne of a Dope Queen.

NOTES

1. See Watkins On the Real Side chapter twelve, “The new comics . . . what you
see is what you get,” for a full discussion on black comics crossing over in the 1950s
and 60s.
2. “Live @ the APT” is a stand-up comedy web series recorded in an East Village
NYC apartment, and according to their website “an unexpectedly ideal place for an
indie comedy show,” wrote The New York Times. http://www.liveapt.tv/about.
3. https://bkcomedyfestival.com.
4. A “khaleesi” is a queen in the fictional Dothraki language on HBO’s Game of
Thrones.
5. New York Public Radio Media Kit, Q2 2014, http:​//www​.nypu​blicr​adio.​org/m​
edia/​resou​rces/​2014/​Jun/2​4/NY_​Publi​c_Rad​io_Me​dia_K​it.pd​f.
6. The New York Public Radio Media Kit elaborates on what they mean by “afflu-
ent” in describing trends of their core audience: their listeners are more than twice as
likely to have incomes in excess of $250K and investments of more than $1 million.
http:​//www​.nypu​blicr​adio.​org/m​edia/​resou​rces/​2014/​Jun/2​4/NY_​Publi​c_Rad​io_Me​
dia_K​it.pd​f.
7. Isabelle Khoo, “Feminist Podcasts That Will Leave You Feeling Empowered,”
Huffpost, March 13, 2017, http:​//www​.huff​i ngto​npost​.ca/2​017/0​3/13/​femin​ist-p​odcas​
ts_n_​15336​944.h​tml.

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 Chapter 10

Savage New Media

Discursive Campaigns for/
against Political Correctness
Rebecca Krefting

Comedy helps us test or figure out what it means to say “us.” Always
crossing lines, it helps us figure out what lines we desire or can bear.
—Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai 2017

Popular discourses capture varied responses to the most pressing social and
political issues of the day. They reflect who we are—though not always or
ever a collective “we”—our beliefs, fantasies, and fears. The most common
popular discourses circulating over the past several years in the world of
stand-up comedy are: those lauding the Internet as a democratizing force that
levels the playing field by rewarding comics with the best comedic content—
this is usually evinced with sayings like “Content is king!”1, others consider
ownership of comic material and images in this online sharing culture, and
other chatter involves how women comics have outed fellow male comics
for sexual harassment and assault—one side argues that use of social media
makes visible the abuse of women in the industry that has always existed and
that women have the right to document and defame their perpetrators, while
the other side believes that a comic’s reputation should not be determined
in the court of public opinion based on tweets and posts.2 Another robust
popular discourse in the comedy world takes on political correctness when
it comes to crafting and telling jokes; indeed, this discourse and those just
listed are kissing cousins and at times difficult to separate. In a profession
that profits from poking fun at others, playing with the taboo, and pushing
the proverbial envelope, demands from fans for political correctness are not
exactly welcomed by all comics. It is important to note that the popular dis-
courses surrounding political correctness are not new or fresh or symptomatic

245
246 Rebecca Krefting

of social media, although at times it certainly feels like social media has exac-
erbated the debate because so many voices are able to chime in.
From Dennis Miller to Bill Burr to Daniel Lawrence Whitney (aka Larry
the Cable Guy), spates of comics are bemoaning the infringement on their
freedom of speech wrought by fans overly sensitive and attuned to issues
of political correctness. Even Jerry Seinfeld, made famous for his harmless
observational patter, voiced objections on Late Night with Seth Meyers say-
ing: “There’s a creepy PC thing out there that really bothers me” (Gorenstein
2015). He specifically alludes to a joke wherein he dons a stereotypical gay
male affect that hasn’t been going over too well with audiences. He maintains
this is a funny joke, but audiences are too afraid to laugh for fear of being
misidentified as insensitive, or worse: a bigot. While some among those ranks
are comics of color like Chris Rock and Russell Peters and a few are even
women like Lisa Lampanelli, queen of shock comedy, those most vocal about
this are, by and large, white male comics (there may also be an argument here
that white male comics constitute a sizeable portion of the comics performing
professionally). Ultimately, tensions surrounding political correctness reflect
the struggle over who gets to decide what is funny. A male sense of humor
has long stood in as humor genera but with the advent of social media like
Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, and Instagram, fans have myriad avenues
for challenging the presumption of a shared comic sensibility—one that often
takes potshots at the disenfranchised. This chapter uses a dual-method quali-
tative approach drawing from ethnography (interviews with agents, industry
executives, digital media experts, comic entertainers, and writers) and critical
feminist discourse analyses of popular media, for example, stand-up com-
edy, print media articles, blogs, documentaries, public commentary, tweets,
YouTube videos, and television programming, to interrogate conversations
surrounding political correctness when it comes to stand-up comedy.

SITUATING THE DEBATE

Changing political climate and cultural contexts inform the sensitivities of

the audience—meaning what was offensive in the 1930s is not likely to be
the same as that which we bluster about in the current Zeitgeist. In “Comedy
Has Issues,” Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai (2017, 234) write that “What
we find comedic (or just funny) is sensitive to changing contexts. It is sen-
sitive because the funny is always tripping over the not funny, sometimes
appearing identical to it. The contexts that incite these issues of how to man-
age disruptive difference do not just emerge through cultural comparisons,
either: a laugh in one world causing sheer shame in another, say.” Competing
and contradictory interpretations exist within any given cultural moment,
 Savage New Media 247

across cultures, and over time. For instance, when a comic’s joke is called
into question, you can track polarized reactions from fans and comics; and,
the only evidence needed for how jokes can fail from one culture to another
is the sharp inhalation of breath, sucking of teeth, or dead silence that falls
after delivery of the joke. The Hays Code (Motion Picture Production Code)
instituted in 1930 reflected public sensitivity toward what was seen as mor-
ally questionable, that is, lewd or sexual content, profanity, or interracial
relationships. Today, that content would make few shudder let alone motivate
minions to storm the castle. Gilbert Gottfried—the former voice of the famed
Aflac duck who was unceremoniously dumped after he made an inconsiderate
joke following the 2011 tsunami in Japan—warns that “People like to pick
and choose what to get offended by” and fellow comic Jim Norton points
out that “We’re all offended by whatever violates our comfort.” Yesterday’s
sexual innuendo has given way to current sensitivities that tend to crystallize
around perceived bigoted, sexist, and racially insensitive humor.
The ephemeral nature of what we find offensive means that when it comes
to discussions of political correctness we must be careful to neither conflate
nor generalize across culture and over time. It is problematic to make com-
parisons, for instance, between the legal persecution of profanity or obscenity
on stage to the public’s feedback on the perpetuation of racist/homophobic/
sexist stereotypes. Yet such comparisons are being made, casting comic con-
temporaries as persecuted in the same ways as Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory,
George Carlin, or Richard Pryor. This is evident in Can We Take a Joke?
(2016), a film focusing on censorship battles throughout the history of stand-
up comedy, wherein journalists, scholars, lawyers, and comics offer personal
anecdotes and historical and contemporary case studies to reflect on public
and legal attacks on stand-up comics. This is also the case in Sascha Cohen’s
(2016) “How the Marginalized Invented Politically Incorrect Comedy,”
whose central conceit proffers that the politically progressive and radical
comics of the 1960s and 1970s like Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce were the
progenitors of what was then politically incorrect. Theirs was a fight meant
to take on Goliaths like Christianity, racism, homophobia, and American
exceptionalism that pervaded political and social institutions and Americans’
collective consciousness. The substance of their jokes revealed the hypocrisy
behind outlawing crass language while introducing all manner of atrocities
and human rights violations in Vietnam and Korea. Fans aligned with said
comics in opposition to the law/political authorities and to conservative and
bigoted lines of thinking because they found the campaign a laudable one.
While Cohen acknowledges that there are different kinds of line-crossing
going on if one compares Lenny Bruce to someone like Daniel Tosh, linking
these two different discourses around political correctness obfuscates that
invested parties are now fighting for the right to say hateful things (that none
248 Rebecca Krefting

of the aforementioned comics would have said) rather than fighting for
the right to decry the same. The documentary and Cohen’s article reflect
a discursive trend that links current opponents of political correctness to
admirable avengers of free speech throughout history despite incongrui-
ties between their motives. Adam Carolla’s adamant stance for free speech
and what he accomplishes with this hard-won liberty simply cannot be
compared to Richard Pryor’s. It is as crucial to avoid such pitfalls as it is
to contemplate how early debates surrounding multiculturalism and the
sedimentation of neoliberalism shape these discourses.
While the focus here is on the comedic cultural form of stand-up
comedy, there are many ways in which debates on political correctness
are congruent across cultural forms and social/political institutions, for
example, debates surrounding multiculturalism in education that began
in earnest in the 1990s. These debates circulated around what was seen
as the introduction of politics into liberal education that placed primacy
on knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Conservative arguments asked for a
separation and/or excision of teaching that was political in favor of apoliti-
cal content. But, as Christopher Newfield (1993, 316), points out, critics
were hard pressed to actually develop examples of curriculum or explain
why teaching about the role of colonialism in Shakespeare’s The Tempest
is political, while teaching about fifteenth-century English history is seen
as “disinterested” (his examples). Liberals countered by arguing that all
knowledge is political. Multiculturalism was initially derided as “commu-
nist militarism” and summarily discounted alongside any outcries in the
academy from students and faculty voicing discontent about microaggres-
sions aimed at their otherness (Newfield 1993, 317). For those opposing
such conversations, attention to diversity, whether through multicultural
education, lawmaking, or in entertainment, signaled a threat to a unified
vision of America, a force that could fracture and divide Americans,
threatening U.S. sovereignty and the nation’s reputation on the interna-
tional front. According to Newfield, “The opened mind, for the nineties
Right, would produce not just a political orgy but a race orgy, a recipe for
social collapse” (Newfield 1993, 318). Such conversations aroused deep
fears around national identity and security. Indeed, in 1991, Alice Kessler-
Harris’s presidential address at the American Studies Association meeting
tackled the heated debate surrounding multiculturalism in education. She
argued that those opposing multiculturalism fear a loss of a venerable
shared national identity imposed by curriculum inclusive of minority his-
tories and honest discussions about our legacy of imperialism and white
supremacy (Kessler-Harris 1992). This connected to related fears of being
scrutinized and criticized not just for the content but the manner in which
folks delivered that content.
 Savage New Media 249

Just like those opposing political correctness in comedy, opponents of mul-

ticulturalism don’t take kindly to being monitored for speech and behavior
deemed politically incorrect. However, Alice Kessler-Harris points out that
protestations surrounding political correctness have less to do with people
wanting to say “whatever they want whenever they want” and moreso an
effort to protect the status quo, safeguarding the very essence of who we
think we are as a nation. In her address, Kessler-Harris (1992, 337) said:
“At the heart of the attack on multiculturalism lies a concern not for rights
but for community. To its opponents the idea of what constitutes America
seems to be at stake.” But, disunity has and will continue to be more accurate
a description of the nation. Christopher Newfield (1993, 336) writes: “Our
national ‘disuniting’ began with our inception, and it's not too soon to get
over our regret about this. Our ‘pluralistic,’ ‘consensual’ union, however
one feels about it, has always rested on a divided, antagonistic multiplicity
of cultures whose overlap has been sporadic, conflictual, or incomplete.”
Similarly, the debate around political correctness calls into question a shared
comic sensibility, at the core of which is a matter of communal and national
identity. Hegemonic consent to sexism or racism or any -ism functions to
obscure the ways these ideologies shape our laws, institutions, and cultural
traditions. For comedy, the risks lie in the unmaking of our collective notions
of what constitutes something as humorous—if we no longer found sexism
funny, imagine how that could change the substance and stylings of stand-up
comedy. Because investments around these ideas run deep, it raises vocifer-
ous arguments on either side of this complex debate, a debate simultaneously
shaped by neoliberalism.
It is impossible to discuss political correctness without considering the
impact of neoliberalism on the conversations we are having (or can have) on
this topic. Lisa Duggan, in the Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural
Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (2003), writes a reasoned and thorough
treatise on neoliberalism, describing the many phases necessary for neolib-
eralism to become cemented in political thought and public opinion as it did
in the 1970s and 1980s. Central to the outcomes of neoliberalism and most
important to the current debate on political correctness is the belief that social
equality has been achieved and thus any failing on the part of individuals to
succeed or obtain the American Dream signals a personal failure rather than
impugning institutions that favor certain identity categories like whiteness,
maleness, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness, and so on. Adam Kotsko (2017,
498) echoes this when he writes: “The nature of competition, of course, is that
someone is going to have to lose. From the neoliberal perspective, however,
that is a feature, not a bug. A well-designed market will seek out and reward
merit and punish laziness and ineptitude.” Privileging ideologies like compe-
tition and independence over egalitarianism and community breeds contempt
250 Rebecca Krefting

for anyone unable to rise above poverty (despite overwhelming evidence that
this is a Herculean task) and the policies put in place to support those in need
of assistance. For example, neoliberal politics informed the overhaul of the
welfare system under the Clinton administration from Aid to Families with
Dependent Children (instituted in 1935) to Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families (implementation began in 1997), which offered skimpier benefits
to fewer people for less amount of time and sought to quell growing public
contempt for perceived abuses of the system and its beneficiaries. Neoliberal
policies and practices appear to set people up for success in a free-market
capitalist economy but, in practice, obscure and reproduce existing inequali-
ties. In the late 1990s and into the early aughts, neoliberalism did to initiatives
directed at multiculturalism what it does so well. Efforts aimed at multicul-
turalism that were initially resisted by educators and political authorities on
the Right were subsumed by state and corporate interests, offering a diluted
version that invests in tokenism, assimilatory social practices, and limitations
on professional upward mobility and financial success for women and minori-
ties. Duggan (2003, 44) describes this as follows:

the rhetoric of ‘official’ neoliberal politics shifted during the 1990s from
“culture wars” alliances, to the superficial ‘multiculturalism’ compatible with
the global aspirations of U.S. business interests. “Culture wars” attacks and
alliances did not disappear, but they receded from the national political stage
in favor of an emergent rhetorical commitment to diversity, and to a narrow,
formal, nonredistributive form of ‘equality’ politics for the new millennium.

A diluted form of multiculturalism reflects the general consensus that com-

panies and universities should mirror the ethnic and racial diversity of the
country, but it would be preferable if you would leave your yarmulkes, hijabs,
or dashikis at home.
The impact of neoliberalism on debates broaching political correctness
functions to narrow the conversation and maintain the status quo, particularly
when concerns revolve around specific terminology versus the ideologies
upholding problematic beliefs about Others. Those opposing the imperative
of political correctness claim that free speech provides a catalyst for pub-
lic debate and that public outcry and backlash stifles this very freedom. In
defense of controversial shock comics like Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice
Clay performing in the 1980s, Sascha Cohen (2016) writes: “Although the
jokes were distasteful, the backlash they caused provoked larger conversa-
tions about homophobia during the decade. In this way, even crude, deroga-
tory comedy can be valuable as a barometer of the national mood, and an
opportunity to bring up dicey issues that are otherwise repressed or ignored.”
Other academics are making similar observations. Having written three
 Savage New Media 251

books on the topic of political correctness, Howard Schwarz’s arguments

are prolific and I do not always (or often) agree with his analyses, particu-
larly when he dismisses the entire field of scholarship on microaggressions
as unfounded beliefs lacking sufficient evidence. That said, his long-term
inquiry into the topic bears mentioning and in his book, Political Correctness
and the Destruction of the Social Order: The Rise of the Pristine Self (2016,
6), he uses psychoanalytic phenomenology to argue that many social issues
we confront like bullying and the subsequent anti-bullying movement is an
“avatar of political correctness.” By this he means that we structure debates
around the anti-bullying movement and political correctness so as to vilify
anyone voicing opposition to either—stifling dialogue rather than generating
it. According to Schwartz (2016, 3), we have become inculcated with a sense
of self-importance, what he calls the “pristine self,” that if threatened in any
way, ushers forth a volley of public attention on how to not make people feel
badly about themselves. For him this is the core issue for those campaigning
against political correctness. In other words, we have created a culture in
which no person should be subject to any speech or image that violates their
sense of self.
Popular media communicates similar arguments, for example when Greg
Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt published “The Coddling of the American
Mind” in The Atlantic (fall 2015), describing current efforts aimed at politi-
cal correctness on college campuses as “vindictive protectiveness,” causing
a dust-up on social media between those with clashing ideas on the matter.
Celebrated comic performers Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele (2014,
31–2) frame the same argument in this way:

To not make fun of something is, we believe, itself a form of bullying. When
a humorist makes the conscious decision to exclude a group from derision,
isn’t he or she implying that the members of that group are not capable of self-
reflection? Or don’t possess the mental faculties to recognize the nuances of
satire? A group that’s excluded never gets the opportunity to join in the greater
human conversation.

Their arguments, however, inflict further injustice by suggesting that humor-

ous targeting of the nation’s most vulnerable populations offers useful oppor-
tunities for building character, self-reflexivity, and an acumen for satire. In a
neoliberal rhetorical flip, comics and fans advocating for political correctness
become the bullies and cast as unenlightened and/or condescending. Key and
Peele also neglect to account for their own status as revered, successful comic
actors and positionality as biracial men; both standpoints give them greater
licensure to speak on the topic at all, lending gravitas to their arguments, that
is, coming from a white person may make these arguments more dodgy.
252 Rebecca Krefting

Like Schwartz and Cohen, Key and Peele argue that unfettered joking
expands the conversation and, curiously, so do those advocating for politi-
cal correctness. How can such diametrically opposed camps imagine they
are accomplishing the same thing and is one side or the other delusional?
Under neoliberalism, claims on either side are problematic. Most commonly,
a breach in political correctness appears that the problem has to do with a
single person—the jokester—which quickly devolves into accusations such
as: that guy is racist or that guy is homophobic. The polemics of political
correctness (on both sides) seldom discuss these issues as endemic to our
institutions and social interactions; rather, we cite abuses as stemming from
individual behaviors and beliefs. It is far more comforting to imagine some-
one’s indifference to rape as singular or an anomaly versus that such insouci-
ance has become naturalized. And, so, our conversations focus on how we
might penalize the individual for their insensitivity, versus the ubiquity of the
beliefs that informed the jokes in the first place. What looks like “change”
as a result of consumer feedback does not often accomplish the changes that
fuel the outcry in the first place by those desiring to participate in creating a
more socially just world.
Another issue specific to this debate in an increasingly technocratic world
are the ways social media has made us clumsy in our discussions when more
context, not less, is imperative. With comedy, much can be lost in translation.
Jokes and those imparting the jokes can be misunderstood when divorced
from the larger context of the performance and reception of any joke cannot
be definitively controlled by the comic. Historically and especially today in
the midst of media engines and social platforms vying for our (un)divided
attention, it is easy for consumers to make uninformed judgments about a
joke that may resonate differently if they attended the comedy show in ques-
tion or if they consulted additional media sources. This is a perfect recipe for
producing what comedian Karith Foster (2016) calls the “outrage phenom-
enon” or what comedian Gilbert Gottfried (Can We Take a Joke? 2016) calls
the “outrage mob,”—a swath of the public who, according to their political
proclivities, jump on board to whatever issue is trending without doing the
necessary reconnaissance to understand the particulars of the issue or accusa-
tions being leveled. This is further compounded when the same joke draws
appreciation for completely different reasons, variances that are quite difficult
for comics to control. Berlant and Ngai (2017, 246) put it this way: “Without
actually unifying or bringing the different kinds of laughers together into a
consensus about racism or political correctness, without even trying to do this
or needing to, the unleashing of the racist joke ends up being enjoyed by the
entire audience, including those who enjoy it exclusively because it destroys
the white person’s alibi.” Questions of authorial intention plague comics as
they craft and deliver their jokes. Dave Chappelle (2017) recounts being
 Savage New Media 253

misunderstood by a vocal female audience member as indifferent to rape,

after telling a series of jokes involving Bill Cosby and a superhero whose
powers were only activated upon touching a woman’s vagina but who is so
unattractive that he is forced to rape women in order to save the day. Chap-
pelle reaches the crescendo of the joke, concluding that the superhero “saves
way more than he rapes, and he only rapes to save.” When the frustrated
audience member yells: “Women suffer!” his response earnestly repeated
is two words: “I know. I know. [pause] I know.” Weaving this account of
that altercation into his later performances allows him to continue telling the
same jokes while clarifying his position on the matter of violence toward
women. These two conditions—context and reception—that give rise to
misunderstandings and miscommunication often lead to wholesale dismissal
of the concerns raised by the offended parties, another tragic conversation-
stopper working in the service of neoliberalism. Historic and contemporary
approaches to multiculturalism and neoliberal politics fashion and inform the
polemics of political correctness. And this is where we turn next, the argu-
ments waged around political correctness in comedy—for and against.

THE DEBATE IN STAND-UP COMEDY

Advancement of social media platforms has been a game changer in the

twenty-first century, a democratizing force for consumers facilitating public
engagement with formerly untouchable persons of celebrity status in myriad
ways. New technologies allow the public to voice their discontent and chal-
lenge the ascendant strain of humor historically produced by heterosexual
men. In an article titled: “Twitter is terrifying!” journalist Latoya Peterson
(2015) interviews five comics, among them Aamer Rahman creator of the
solo show: “The Truth Hurts” and an international feature comic. Rahman
describes this evolving social contract between audience and performer as
being not “just accountable to the person in the room, but also the people who
will eventually encounter the material. And this is changing whether come-
dians like it or not.” New means of accessing comic performers who tend to
maintain high visibility on social media platforms has resulted in a cavalcade
of criticism aimed at comics expressing homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, or
misogynist world views. The announcement of Trevor Noah as Jon Stewart’s
replacement for The Daily Show sparked controversy when members of
the public brought Noah under fire for a handful of anti-Semitic and sexist
tweets posted several years ago. Shots were fired from multiple camps and
for a while Twitter felt like the beaches of Normandy. Before that it was
Daniel Tosh’s abhorrent treatment of a fan who vocalized dissatisfaction with
one of his rape jokes and before that it was Tracy Morgan and before that
254 Rebecca Krefting

Michael Richards. I could go on. This trend lead writer for The New Yorker
Ian Crouch (2014) to ask: “Is social media ruining comedy?” In the article,
he takes a strong stance for the fans, the consumers of comedy pushing back
against bigoted jokes and the comics that tell them.

Standup has always been about thinking while being watched, and it can be a
bit grating to hear celebrity comics like [Chris] Rock, Louis [CK], and [Bill]
Burr gripe about feeling powerless in a fight against an army of hecklers on the
Web. (For every critical voice, there are hundreds of fans hanging onto their
every word, and who have no problem laughing at a little casual racism or
misogyny.) . . . These complaints about the Web’s restrictive atmosphere are
being made by well-established straight men in a field that has, until recently,
mostly been the province of straight men. Contemporary audiences are more
attuned to social power dynamics in comedy: the high-profile controversies
involving comedians in recent years have all started with a straight man making
a joke about a less-empowered segment of the population.

As Crouch points out, make no mistake about it, people do want to continue
to laugh at casual racism, to continue to laugh at how weird queers are and
aren’t women silly little ol’ things. Social media is helping to crack this egg
wide open and those defending comics in this discourse surrounding politi-
cal correctness do so based on the right to free speech, the intent of the joke/
jokester, the distinctive characteristics of stand-up comedy as a cultural form,
and comedic authenticity, for example, if I saw it happen then I should be
able to reproduce it on stage with impunity.
Most commonly, opposing arguments to political correctness rally around
the first amendment right guaranteeing freedom of speech. For comics, this
is especially important because of the nature of the craft—it is creative and
most crucially, it must be funny. In other words, comedy should not be held
to the same standards as other entertainment or political punditry because it is
comedy. Comedy locates itself as a humorous mode of discourse rather than
a serious mode of discourse, thus, this discourse should not have to abide by
the same rules and fans should allow for greater creative licensure and flex-
ibility. To address these arguments, Aparna Nancherla, as brilliant a comic as
she is hilarious, asks: “Does the freedom of all speech mean one never needs
to reflect on or even stop to reconsider anything one says? And what exactly
do the Internet-termed ‘outrage’ crowd want in terms of concrete goals? If it’s
just to start a conversation, who is that hurting? Besides the status quo? Social
change doesn’t occur through pretending biases and power structures don’t
exist in society” (Peterson 2015). She, like many other comics and fans, are
not opposed to free speech. They are opposed to “free” being a euphemism
for uncritical; a safety net for all manner of insensitivities couched in humor
and leveled at historically marginalized populations. This is another hallmark
 Savage New Media 255

of neoliberalism, the valorizing of loosening of strictures and celebration

of freedoms (in the name of capitalism; put differently: bigoted comedy is
profitable) that serve to legitimate hate speech. Where Nancherla sees fertile
opportunities for conversation about the content of humor, comics angered
by public feedback see their creativity being stifled. Some comics welcome
those conversations. For example, Hari Kondabolu, whose comedy tackles
issues of racism, sexism, classism, and xenophobia, regularly engages with
public criticism of his comedy and changes his jokes as a result. He does
not consider himself above reproach, demonstrating the value he places on
the exchange between creator and consumer (Krefting 2014). Other comics
would rather not have that conversation with fans for a variety of reasons.
First, a few voices of opposition seems minute compared to the thousands
who have found the same joke funny. Second, questioning their comic mate-
rial may require further introspection of the worldviews that inform it. And
third, some comics maintain staunchly held beliefs in the superior ability to
gauge what is actually funny (pace: Jerry Seinfeld’s insistence on the hilar-
ity of his gay joke). Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai (2017, 234–5) capture
such attitudes among comics when they write: “It is as though in the current
moment of social claims-making some comedians have become the butts of
their own jokes, exiled to the outside of where they used to feel sovereign.
It is as though comedy is freshly dangerous.” However comics elect to pro-
ceed—change their humor to satisfy public complaints or defend their right
to joke in this way—put them in danger of losing fans. Ironically, comics
poopooing political correctness maintain that changing their jokes violates
their integrity as a comic. As a segment of the fans see it, there is nothing
integrous about those jokes or their defense of them.
Freedom of speech is a frequent flyer at this airport, but so are arguments
centered on comic intent. According to Canadian comic Russell Peters, if the
intent is to be funny, not harmful, then comics should have a right to say it
(Silman 2015). The subjective nature of humor (why we laugh at what we do,
even if that guy next to us isn’t) and impossibility of controlling for recep-
tion makes this an onerous argument. How can you ensure that each audi-
ence member knows the intent of the comic performing? Can’t intent be as
carefully crafted as the joke itself? Sociologist Raúl Pérez (2013) confirmed
this to be the case when he took stand-up comedy classes at a reputable
club in Southern California. As a participant-observer, he noted distinctly
different coaching practices administered to white people versus people of
color. Coaches encouraged comics to invoke racial stereotypes if they were
themselves racial minorities because the public enjoys this humor and gives
comics of color greater latitude in developing race-based humor. On the
other hand, coaches encouraged white comics, particularly men, to approach
similar topics far more cautiously. They suggested a variety of rhetorical
256 Rebecca Krefting

strategies to do so, including self-deprecatory humor, claiming to be an

“equal opportunity offender,” and donning characters of “Others” for come-
dic effect—what I call modern-day minstrelsy, comedy teachers describe
as being a savvy “dialectician” (Pérez 2013, 493). All of these are “racial
commonsense strateg[ies], that is, acknowledging the pitfalls of engaging in
discourse ‘about a group you don’t represent’,” and bookending such humor
with disclaimers situating the comic as anti-racist and knowledgeable about
the legacy of racism, even as they make racist jokes (Pérez 2013, 488).
Clearly, these strategies are meant to disarm audiences into laughing at what
would otherwise be inappropriate. Offering disclaimers may appear to dem-
onstrate that the comic means no harm, yet comedy can always fall back onto
timeless bromides, for example, “it’s just a joke” or “I was only kidding,”
dismissing any suspicion about comic intent.
Citing comedy as an exceptional artistic craft, a special snowflake when it
comes to cultural forms, continually comes up as rationale for why a come-
dian’s comic material should not be the target of public ire. While having
breakfast with Jerry Seinfeld on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (2014),
Bill Burr rejects the notion that viewers can surmise his intent saying: “Just
because you took what I said seriously doesn’t now mean I mean it. What
you’re in my head and know my intent? Like if I’m saying something and
I’m joking. I’m joking.” Burr refers back to the play frame in which com-
edy is situated that simultaneously serves to exonerate comics and renders
impotent any offense taken at the joke. His take, and Seinfeld appeared to
agree, is that stand-up comedy is precisely the forum wherein no one should
have to apologize for anything they say on stage. Furthermore, other artists
like musicians, painters, and writers can workshop their content in a studio
or on the page before airing it for public consumption, whereas comics are
more vulnerable to public scrutiny because the business of comedy neces-
sitates a visible online presence and no joke is a good one until it has been
workshopped and tested multiple times. Chris Rock and Patton Oswalt pub-
licly complain that it is difficult to work out new material on stage in front
of a live audience when that material is likely to be uploaded to YouTube by
the end of the night (Rich 2014). Ian Crouch (2014) puts it this way: “Every
performance has become a de-facto national set, even the ones in which a
comedian is riffing or failing through new material.” This wholly changes
the creative process that any comic undertakes to develop strong material and
according to some, may result in comics self-censoring their work to avoid
public outrage or backlash. Chris Rock forecasts that this will “lead to safer,
gooier stand-up. You can’t think the thoughts you want to think if you think
you’re being watched” (Rich 2014). It is a false presumption that safer com-
edy is unfunny comedy, but on the latter point, Rock is right; watchful fans
may disrupt and destabilize our longstanding shared comic sensibility, one
 Savage New Media 257

that has historically protected the most powerful. Leela Ginelle (2015), writer
for BitchMedia, states: “Personally, I find it easy to believe that a comedy act
free of sexism, racism, and anti-queer jokes would be an improvement over
the status quo.” Voices, like Ginelle, are not asking for comics to stop mak-
ing jokes, they are asking for comics to think, to be mindful when it comes
to producing humor that punches down. And powerful people are listening.
Public responses can impact hiring decisions (you may not get hired if you’re
too controversial) and writing choices (some comics may reconsider jokes
that may be insensitive or politically incorrect).
A flurry of articles published in the summer of 2015 capture this upset
in higher education entertainment—that is, the demand for comics who are
conscientious about what comes out of their mouths.3 Jerry Seinfeld says he
is avoiding the college circuit, though he does not stand to suffer financially
for this decision. Seinfeld has many other lucrative offers but for those for
whom college gigs are a main source of income, they will have to find new
ways of making audiences laugh or find new audiences altogether. Clearly,
status can make you either vulnerable or impregnable to public demands for
political correctness. Established comics like Jim Jeffries, Bill Burr, Lisa
Lampanelli, Michael McDonald, Gilbert Gottfried, and Daniel Tosh revel in
thumbing their noses at political correctness and audiences familiar with their
style of humor happily pay to hear more. By and large, for these comics, criti-
cism of their comedy will not dramatically alter their existing fan base that
flocks to these comics because they like this “equal-opportunity offender”
style of humor (Peterson 2008, 149). Comics harrumphing criticism of politi-
cally incorrect jokes rarely reflect on status—having it, functions like a suit
of armor, protecting and maintaining profitability. However, for most comics,
especially less established folks, with the advent of social media the public is
able to broadcast breaches in political correctness to an international audience
potentially impacting revenue and fan base composition in a global market.
This means that comics can and do export more than their comedy to other
countries; more dangerously, they export ideas about who we are regardless
of the veracity of those ideas, raising the stakes in these conversations about
how we represent and depict “Others.”
Sascha Cohen (2016) describes another oft-supplied reason for why you
should be allowed to say un-PC things: “The it’s-ok-to-say-it-if-it’s-true
defense of politically incorrect comedy may be a simplistic one. But it’s
a defense that has prevailed for a reason: It’s made for some of the most
celebrated humor in modern American comedy.” Cohen infers that political
incorrectness in comedy is the only way to be at the cutting edge of perfor-
mance and eligible to become a comedy legend. It is problematic to position
politically incorrect comedy as automatically radical or cutting-edge; taking
potshots at women and minorities is neither edgy nor new. The opposite is
258 Rebecca Krefting

true. These are hackneyed subjects as tired as the stereotypes they reinforce.
White stand-up comic Heather McDonald recounts some negative feedback
given about a series of jokes that she does about her Vietnamese step-daughter
like how great it is to always be able to get her nails done and get massages
every day. Because, of course, all Vietnamese women work in nail salons or
massage parlors. In one of the jokes, she dons an “Asian” voice, what I call
yellow-face minstrelsy, to impersonate the mother of her step-daughter who
calls to check in about her daughter’s health and well-being. There is no humor
in the joke other than the imitation of the “Other.” While reflecting on this in an
interview, she defiantly defends keeping this joke in her sets. For one, it works
because audiences are laughing. Secondly, it is a true story and she is merely
imitating real life. She bemoans the time producers told her she couldn’t per-
form as a white girl talking like a Latina gang member, even though she had
seen the same on a television talk show and thought it was hilarious (Can We
Take a Joke? 2016). Using comedy to punch-down, to traffic in commonly
held beliefs about minorities, these are hallmarks of much stand-up comedy,
not radical performances that should be protected in the same way the public
supported protection of free speech in the 1960s and 1970s. There are enough
comics out there whose objectives are to get the laugh, no matter the cost,
making it essential for viewers to operationalize the avenues available to voice
discontent, though I suggest that fans have equal responsibility to be conscien-
tious and thoughtful in their objections, in part because many comics, though
not all, are working hard to talk about tough issues thoughtfully.
The comics issuing opposition to the policing of stand-up comedy for
political correctness are not necessarily the ones you might suspect based on
the content of their humor. They are folks like Chris Rock, Jim Norton, and
Patton Oswalt, all of whom publicly support advancement of civil liberties in
word and deed. Some of the most vocal opponents identify as progressives,
liberals, Democrats, and advocates for social justice, which demonstrates just
how complicated this debate has become. In an interview with David Daley
of Salon, Patton Oswalt, known for being a champion for social justice on and
off stage, argues vehemently that a comic’s voice should not be restricted.
Oswalt recapitulates all of the central claims vocalized by those opposing
arguments for political correctness, which makes for a strained conversation,
in part because both men are so clearly in favor of social justice and equality
and yet both adamantly adhere to their respective camps. At one point, Daley
(2015) interjects: “But just as the comedian has the right to make a joke, any
of us have the right to speak up about it. And I believe in empowering voices
that aren’t 40-something white guys like the two of us to say, ‘Wait a second,
maybe there’s something being said here that we should all talk about, or
another way of thinking about this.’” Daley illumines Oswalt’s privileged
position as a white, male which informs his perspective on this matter.
 Savage New Media 259

Americanist scholar Jessyka Finley (2016), who examines black women’s

satire—from Shirley Chisolm’s subversive congressional politicking to the
comic performances of Danitra Vance and Leslie Jones—argues that progres-
sive white male comic mouthpieces like Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart
take as a given that society is “fractured and unequal” (239) and yet their
privilege means they do not have to experience that fracturing.

Such detachment from the general racial situation, in that their whiteness and
maleness privileges and protects them, when paired with their frank confronta-
tions of the problems plaguing American society, is a striking juxtaposition of
the rational comic persona and that which refuses to conform to rational under-
standing . . . . This posture could not be in greater contrast with black women’s
marginal location in American society. When life is constrained and limited by
the social and political forces with which postmodern theory tries to reckon, the
escape hatch of rationality is not as easy to access. (239)

Finley and Daley are in accord here, both arguing that minorities have nar-
rower ways of intervening in these conversations in the first place and so to
circumscribe their voices in the interests of free speech, regardless of good
intentions, reinforces and operationalizes existing privilege. Daley firmly
believes, as I do, that comics have the right to say what they want to, but fans
also have the same rights to flex these newfound muscles in virtual spaces.
Finley reminds us that even with an invitation and avenue with which to
speak freely, critiques arising from the marginalized may be stifled, misinter-
preted, and misused.
Veteran comic Jim Norton (2015) argues that we are addicted to outrage,
to being offended at all the wrong things. In a country where less than 50
percent of the population show up to vote in elections, we are spending our
time raging about matters that are inconsequential like jokes told by com-
ics. As he puts it: “Upsetting ourselves on purpose is exactly what we are
doing. I choose to believe that we are addicted to the rush of being offended,
the idea of it, rather than believing we have become a nation of emasculated
children whose only defense against an abyss of emotional agony is a trigger
warning.” Norton has gone on record about these matters many times and
he makes some astute comments in Can We Take a Joke?. His beliefs in a
nutshell—he wants comics to be able to say what they want without profes-
sional penalties for doing so; in other words, the feedback from fans is not
nearly as problematic as the financial repercussions that can take place as a
result of unsavory jesting. In practice, Norton (like Oswalt) appreciates smart,
thoughtful comedy and does his own work to be informed and politically cor-
rect on stage. His comedy special Mouthful of Shame (2017) reveals that he
dates transwomen but that it has been difficult joking about this life choice,
260 Rebecca Krefting

in part because producers ask him not to, assuming that any joke on the topic
will be offensive. His response echoes Key and Peele’s points made earlier:
“Just because you’ve been marginalized doesn’t mean you’re removed from
the humor spectrum.” Stated differently: because you occupy a minority sta-
tus or certain issues are rubbing up against public comfort does not mean that
the topic or persons deserve to be shelved. Nevertheless, whether he means
to or not, his statement about a swath of the public being addicted to outrage
puts defenders of political correctness into a double bind—they are either not
tough enough, not man enough to handle the joke, or self-righteous, humor-
less, whiners fiending for their next emotional high. As so many of these
discourses demonstrate, there is more nuance than this to the debates.
Patton Oswalt expresses a different kind of problem with “outrage culture”
because it promises a false sense of empowerment. He suggests that the real
power lies in laughter and mockery aimed at bigotry.

I don’t want any voices silenced, no matter how repellent, no matter how racist
or homophobic. I want to hear them. I don’t like this policing of language so rac-
ists, homophobes and misogynists just think of more clever and obscure ways
to get their hatred out there. Let people say nigger and faggot. I want to know
where those people are . . . . The messiness is what will save us. The politeness
will not save us. Politeness, the policing of words, let it all fucking out there
and then if someone says something racist, just fucking laugh at them. Dude,
really? Make fun of that shit. We used to be the guys that fucking say it all, and
now we are policing shit and I don’t like it. That’s going to hurt us. That’s going
to hurt progressivism in this country. (in Daley 2015)

He, like Norton, expresses frustration that fans have taken their participatory
role as consumers to newfound extremes that have consequences—financial,
professional, personal, and so on. Moreover, he is concerned that comics will
start doing one of two things: steer clear of certain subject matters for fear of
being misunderstood even though they are, like him, progressive and well-
meaning or learn how to be politically correct, adapting to this new rhetorical
footwork while advancing conservative agendas or bigotry. In his comedy
special, Talking for Clapping (2016) he makes this plea to his viewers on the
matter:

My brain’s fucking going. It is. And it’s really hard now because. Look, I could
not be a more committed, progressive, feminist, pro-gay, pro-transgender per-
son but I cannot keep up with the fucking glossary of correct terms, goddammit
[clapping]. I’m trying [clapping]! I want to help, but holy fuck [clapping]!
It’s like a secret club password. They change it every week and then you’re in
trouble. “That’s not the word we use!” Fuck! It was last week [laughter]! I have
 Savage New Media 261

hemorrhoids; my ass is falling out [laughter]. I wanna help! I know I’m a cis,
old, white, motherfucker [laughter] but don’t give me shit because I didn’t
know the right term. Fucking RuPaul. RuPaul got into shit for saying the
word tranny. Ru-fucking-Paul [slamming the mic stand for emphasis on each
syllable amidst laughter and clapping]. RuPaul, who, she laid down on the
barbed wire of discrimination throughout the 1970s and 80s so this new gen-
eration could run across her back and yell at her for saying tranny [laughter
and clapping]! What the fuck [clapping, cheers, and whistles]!? I will always
change. I will always try to learn the new term. But you gotta give me some
fucking wiggle room. Alright? My ass is falling out. I’m trying. I’m trying.

Oswalt and Norton welcome the conversation surrounding these touchy

matters but remind viewers of the pitfalls of those advocating for political
correctness like not being aware of how a joke in questions fits within the
larger context of the performance or how we latch on to the use of certain
terms and anyone using such terms becomes the villain despite the sub-
stance of their work—onstage and off. Unless conversations surrounding
political correctness grapple with the chief promoters of inequality (and
some do), larger institutional forces and ideologies that shape and sustain
white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, and so on, we are all missing the
point and the opportunity to truly shift our shared comedic sensibility
toward something that looks and sounds more egalitarian.

CONCLUSION

Viewers and comics alike exhibit a range of reactions to the polemics of

political correctness. Some comics opposed to policing for political cor-
rectness value the conversation but disapprove of consequences being
meted out based on the sentiments expressed during a performance. Other
comics reject the conversation altogether and rue the advent of social
media that threatens a humor genera that has been circulating since black-
face minstrelsy. To that effect, Australian comic Aamer Rahman says:
“The fear of the ‘PC police’ is basically this—it’s ‘I used to be able to say
horrible things about minorities, but now if I do that, they all have Twitter
accounts and they can spam my mentions’” (in Peterson 2015). Another
segment of comics desires the conversation and welcomes audience feed-
back on their work and especially on the work of comics using the stage
as a platform for dispensing bigotry. Huffington Post writer Maureen Ryan
(2015) offers an optimistic view of how these conversations may impact
our culture in the future.
262 Rebecca Krefting

What if ever-larger numbers of people have become more aware of the perni-
cious nature of biases, demeaning speech and prejudice, and are trying to do
something about it? I’d like to think these incidents are not examples of “politi-
cal correctness” (a phrase that translates as: “I’m stomping my feet because I
can’t say whatever I want to whomever I want”), but evidence of the world
becoming a more egalitarian and compassionate place.

Ryan presents the possibility that we reassign such conversations, not to the
category of political correctness, but to social change. Smart lady. Such a
rhetorical shift may prevent us from comparing apples to oranges like early
battles for free speech predicated on speaking truth to power being compared
to contemporary debates on the same that justify comics’ right to incorporate
stereotypes and abusive epithets into their comedy. It can also foment deeper
conversations examining larger engines sustaining inequality rather than
targeting individuals as the sole sources of systemic racism, sexism, hetero-
sexism, and the like. In turn, more nuanced conversations may transform the
substance of what we find funny leading to smarter comedy that lets more
people in on the jokes and leaves us sharing yuks versus bracing ourselves
for an attack.

NOTES

1. We explore this particular discourse further in the following article: Rebecca

Krefting and Rebecca Baruc, “A New Economy of Jokes?: #Socialmedia #Comedy.”
Comedy Studies (Fall 2015): http:​//dx.​doi.o​rg/10​.1080​/2040​610X.​2015.​10831​65.
Even greater explication of this discourse can be found in Rebecca Krefting, “Dueling
Discourses: The Female Comic’s Double-Bind in the New Media Age,” in Trans-
gressive Humor of American Women Writers, edited by Sabrina Fuchs (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
2. The following popular news pieces document the ways in which women are
using social media to document sexual harassment; these are just a sampling of the
articles that have been published on the topic: Kate J. M. Baker, “Standing Up To
Sexual Harassment And Assault In L.A.’s Comedy Scene,” Buzzfeed, January 14,
2016, accessed January 15, 2016, https​://ww​w.buz​zfeed​.com/​katie​jmbak​er/st​andin​
g-up-​to-se​xual-​haras​sment​-and-​assau​lt-in​-las-​comed​y-s?u​tm_te​rm=.h​cyeed​Lbn#.​
gq1VV​0kO5;​Ed Cara, “A comedian has been accused of sexual assault – and women
are speaking out,” Mic, August 17, 2016, accessed August 20, 2016, https​://mi​c.com​
/arti​cles/​15182​6/com​edian​-aaro​n-gla​ser-h​as-be​en-ac​cused​-of-s​exual​-assa​ult-a​nd-wo​
men-a​re-sp​eakin​g-out​#.DYX​9l4Kv​h; Jason Molinet, “Margaret Cho tackles sexual
violence with social media hashtag #tellyourstory,” New York Daily News, November
4, 2014, accessed April 6, 2015, http:​//www​.nyda​ilyne​ws.co​m/ent​ertai​nment​/marg​
aret-​cho-t​ackle​s-sex​ual-v​iolen​ce-so​cial-​ media-hashtag-article-1.1998256; Sarah
Stewart, “Exposing Sex Abuser is the Best Use of Social Media Ever,” The New York
 Savage New Media 263

Post. January 22, 2016, accessed January 30, 2016, http:​//nyp​ost.c​om/20​16/01​/22/e​

xposi​ng-se​x-abu​sers-​is-th​e-bes​t-use​-of-s​ocial​-medi​a-eve​r/.
3. For op-ed pieces documenting political correctness on the college circuit, see:
Leela Ginelle, “College Students Don’t Want to Hire Racist or Homophobic Come-
dians. Why Is That a Problem, Exactly?” BitchMedia August 17, 2015, accessed
August 20, 2015, https​://bi​tchme​dia.o​rg/ar​ticle​/coll​ege-s​tuden​ts-do​nt-wa​nt-hi​re-ra​
cist-​or-ho​mopho​bic-c​omedi​ans-w​hy-pr​oblem​-exac​tly; Emanuella Grinberg, “Why
Some Comedians Don’t Like College Campuses,” Fox2Now June 10, 2015, accessed
June 12, 2015, http:​//fox​2now.​com/2​015/0​6/10/​why-s​ome-c​omedi​ans-d​ont-l​ike-c​
olleg​e-cam​puses​/.; Anna Silman, “10 Famous Comedians on How Political Correct-
ness is Killing Comedy: ‘We Are Addicted to the Rush of Being Offended,” Salon
June 10, 2015, accessed July 1, 2015, http:​//www​.salo​n.com​/2015​/06/1​0/10_​famou​
s_com​edian​s_on_​how_p​oliti​cal_c​orrec​tness​_is_k​illin​g_com​edy_w​e_are​_addi​cted_​
to_th​e_rus​h_of_​being​_offe​nded/​; Lindy West, “What Do the Politically Correct Brain
Police Have Against Venerable Man Comedians Like Jerry Seinfeld?” The Guardian
June 9, 2015, accessed June 14, 2015, http:​//www​.theg​uardi​an.co​m/com​menti​sfree​
/2015​/jun/​09/po​litic​ally-​corre​ct-je​rry-s​einfe​ld-co​medy-​margi​nalis​ed-vo​ices.​

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 Chapter 11

“An Actual Nightmare, but

. . . Pretty Good TV”
Horror-comedy in the Trump Era
Diane Rubenstein

My title refers to a review of “The Bachelorette” finale. For non-followers

of this reality television show, Rachel Lindsay (the first black bachelorette)
did not choose the person that she had obvious chemistry with, Peter from
Wisconsin, but Bryan, who was able to propose within the requisite temporal
frame (six weeks). The finale thus consisted of compulsory live viewing of
Peter and Rachel’s break-up before the insistent interpolations of host Chris
Harrison and a studio audience. Bryan in turn had to view his ‘fiancée’s’
heartbreak over another suitor. It was this peculiar combination of a traumatic
break-up with enforced spectatorship that undergirded Emily Yahr’s charac-
terization as a “literal nightmare. But again a very entertaining three hours of
TV” (Yahr, 2017). This episode with its ambivalent and troubling valences
was, for me, an apposite way of characterizing my affective relation toward
Trump’s presidency. How many of us feel as if we have been cast as extras
in a reality show that we would rather have no part in? How many of us feel
like televisual (or otherwise mediated: newspaper, radio, twitter, Facebook)
hostages—as opposed to the “embeds” of the W administration?
In my 2008 book, This Is Not a President: Sense, Nonsense and the
American Political Imaginary, which tracked the presidencies of Reagan
through W-Bush in a much slower real time, I noted how different presi-
dencies “spawned” bizarre movie genres that symptomatically condensed
aspects of their semiotic or psychoanalytic logics. To take two examples,
during the Reagan administration we witnessed a proliferation of yuppie-
vampire movies—“lost boys,” feeding on capitalism’s excess. GHW Bush’s
single term offered two genres: the male masochism-amnesia film (Shattered,
Regarding Henry, The Doctor). Here, formerly high functioning white male

267
268 Diane Rubenstein

professionals (architect, lawyer, doctor) suffered a traumatic injury, regressed

to a pre-Oedipal relation to language and most importantly, became better
human beings. The other pertinent genre was a subject’s unawareness of their
own death, types of—ghosts—as found in films such as Reversal of Fortune
(narrated from the point of view of Sunny von Bulow in a coma) Flatliners,
Ghost or Jacob’s Ladder. Questions raised by both genre iterations raised
salient psychoanalytic stakes of the first Bush administration: “Am I a Man or
Woman?” (hysteria) “Am I alive or dead?” (obsessional neurosis) Heroes of
these Bush era films hovering between life and death, I argued, were emblems
of a presidential subject who, in Avital Ronell’s words “can live neither in
time nor in introjection” (Rubenstein, 2008, 100).
How can one best critically address an administration that doubles down
on fake news and fictionality, or otherwise demonstrates, in Jared Sexton’s
extremely apt formulation: “the collapse of any notion of an adjudicated ref-
erent, the hallmark of the so-called post-truth era”? Can the critical-comedic
approach of Stewart/Colbert/Trevor Noah/John Oliver stand up to the implo-
sive insanity, the “permanent ‘kill or be killed rivalry’” of the imaginary
realm, “where the point is not to think, much less to understand, but to win
and to win at all costs”? In other words, “when the troll and the target are
two sides of the same coin,” this is symptomatic of the “dominance of the
imaginary in social life” (Sexton, 2017c, 62). Is political comedy/satire the
most pertinent critical genre?
It is a bit early to write on the Trump era’s cultural formations—in the
past I would not proffer any interpretations until at least the mid-term elec-
tions. For the purposes of this chapter, I will experiment with a provisional
hypothesis: comedy-horror is the hybrid genre of the Trump era. In the years
leading up to the election of Trump and in the first year of his presidency,
there has been a “boom” in films designated as “post-horror” or critically self-
aware horror films (Rose, 2017; Fineman, 2017; Zinoman 2018). In France,
Slack Bay (Ma Loute), a cross class and gender queer comedy of manners
about a demented bourgeois family and its lower-class cannibal neighbors
won the 2016 César (the equivalent of the Oscar.) Raw (Grave) was a 2016
Franco-Belgian horror about a vegetarian veterinary student turned cannibal
in a hazing rite. The international proliferation of films includes Brazil: “Kill
me, please” (2015); Australia—Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014)—a
mother-son story, as well as a meme and gay icon1; Trey Edwards Shults’
post-apocalyptic and Kubrickian inflected It Comes at Night (2017), A Ghost
Story (2017) with the unnerving Casey Affleck in a white sheet with two
holes for eyes—as if he did not have enough #metoo problems! Steven Rose
sees this as a minimalist condensation: “He’s basically a human emoji of a
ghost.” A post-Charlottesville American viewer would read this image as
a re-apparition of the Klan. Other relevant examples of this genre include
 “An Actual Nightmare, but . . . Pretty Good TV” 269

The Witch (US-Canada co-production, 2015) and It Follows (US—a self-

aware presentation of rape culture, 2014). Amityville: The Awakening (US,
2017); the “woke” version has female leads—Bella Thorne and Jennifer Jason
Leigh. Spike Lee’s horror-comedy BlackkKlansman competed at this year’s
Cannes Film festival and Justin Simien (of Dear White People) is developing
a horror-comedy about a killer weave. (Nayeri, 2018, Ugwu, 2018).
It is the critically acclaimed and 2017 Oscar winning (Peele-best original
screen play) Get Out and Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017) that I consider
paradigmatic films of the Trump presidency. (Roane, 2017; Scott and Morris,
2017; Sexton, 2017d; Smith, 2017; Yuan and Harris, 2018; Zinoman, 2018)
One distinguishing characteristic of “post-horror” is the centrality of female
roles; no longer restricted to the passive “final girl” victim, women are active
heroines. The new horror films are the exception to the GD-IQ (Gena Davis
Inclusion Quotient—a product of machine learning as opposed to the Bechdel
test) where men are heard and seen twice as often as women. Women seen
as monstrous or otherwise responsible for misfortune are dangerous beings:
teenage girls (Thomasin in The Witch) or mothers who voted for Jill Stein in
Michigan (American Horror Story: Cult). Mothers, widows (The Babadook),
young women (daughters, sisters, lesbians) challenge the authority of hege-
monic masculinity and the heteronormative family (Andrei, 2017).

WHY PRIVILEGE HORROR: GENDER

AND (POST-)HORROR

Horror, along with melodrama and porn are “body genres,” eliciting strong
affect: tears for melodrama, sexual arousal for porn and fear for horror (Wil-
liams, 2003). Horror in particular traffics in the Kristevan “abject”: waste,
feces, blood, urine, pus, and the ultimate abject object, the corpse (Kristeva,
1980). The opening televisual titles on American Horror Story: Cult offer
a visual inventory of such objects. In this revisionist reading of horror, the
“abject fear may be gendered feminine” but these films can be “reclaimed by a
feminist reading” (Clover, 1992, 93; Creed, 1996). From the earliest theoretical
literature, horror has been read according to a psychoanalytic model where the
monster figures as the return of the repressed. Robin Wood’s inaugural article
of the late 1970s links spectator apperception to Roland Barthes’ definition
of the petit bourgeois as a “man who is unable to imagine the Other” (Wood,
1979). For Wood, the genre operates by repression and disavowal of a subject’s
desire and projection onto an Other figured as monstrous. John Woo recounts
how these monsters serve as “allegorical stand-ins for what scares us” and
offers as an example the 1943 film, “I Walked with a Zombie”—an updating of
Jane Eyre, seen through a racial lens of the slave trade and voodoo practices (of
270 Diane Rubenstein

Santeria). Woo, whose family is of Caribbean descent identifies with the film’s
ambient fear and what it attempts to repress (Fineman, 2017). The golden age
of horror prior to the present was in the sixties and seventies: The Shining, The
Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby. One possible tie toward today’s films lies with the
uncanny child,2 who possesses capacities that appear to come from neither par-
ent’s gene pool (unless one claims Satan as dad.)
Considerations of context and audience are foregrounded in ways that hav-
ing a more universal demon does not; this reflects a political context where
some cannot agree whether it is worse to be a pedophile or democrat. What
reassures as “normal” and thus a suturing point to some—a white middle-
class family in their suburban home or a pastoral woodsy landscape—posi-
tions others in a hyper-vigilant state of anticipated dread. “Growing up as
a black kid in Chicago, my idea of scary was a quiet street in suburbia”
(Fineman, 2017). Contemporary horror film has mostly moved away from
locating scariness in the supernatural or in gothic settings, reorienting it in
mundane, quotidian objects and everyday locations—the tract home, its lawn,
its kitchen (indeed, anywhere with plumbing-bathrooms, basements). These
banal settings for the abject underscore the idiomatic horror and vernacular
violence endemic within American middle-class life, as they attest to the fact
of polarization. For example, Zadie Smith juxtaposes the opening images of
Get Out—a woodland scene and Chris’ urban still photographs, “The shots of
the woods and those of the city both have their natural audience, people for
whom such images are familiar and benign. There are those who like to think
of Frostian woods as the pastoral, as America the Beautiful, and others who
see summer in the city as, likewise, beautiful and American” (Smith, 2017).
Zadie Smith situates the genius of Peele’s film in the “reversal of these
constituencies,” revealing two “separate but unequal planets of American
fear” (Smith, 2017). Get Out enjoins the reversals/inversions found in the
operation of comedy (“the emotional roots of the joke”) to a “compendium
of black fears about white folks”:

White women who date black men. Waspy families. Waspy family garden
parties. Ukuleles. Crazy younger brothers. Crazy younger brothers play-
ing ukuleles. Sexual psychopaths, hunting, guns, cannibalism, mind control,
well-meaning conversations about Obama. The police. Well-meaning conver-
sations about basketball. Spontaneous roughhousing, spontaneous touching of
one’s biceps or hair. Lifestyle cults, actual cults. Houses with no other houses
near them. Fondness for woods. The game bingo. Servile household staff, sexual
enslavement, nostalgia for slavery, slavery itself. (Smith, 2017)

Zadie Smith situates the comic as a return-reversal of quite reality-based

feelings of dread. She reads it in the film’s comic ending where disbelief is
suspended to allow for an ending that replaces the anticipated cop arriving
 “An Actual Nightmare, but . . . Pretty Good TV” 271

at the scene (of dead white bodies and one bleeding black live man) with a
black TSA agent (Chris’ friend Rod). Peele’s genius lies for her in replacing
these quite commonplace fears with pernicious ones that derive from over-
proximity and love, with affects that lead to the Other’s “cannibalization.”
Her presentation accords with a hermeneutic reading of the relation between
comedy and horror where an even more disturbing reality subtends an appar-
ent reversal of desire and disgust.3
I concentrate in this chapter on horror and its implication for Trump era
gender anxieties as its sustained inflection of the comic appears new in contrast
to modes of satire during the W-Bush administration.4 For the moment, I note
that the relation between comedy and horror is to be figured as a “parallax”:
“a constant shuttling between perspectives that can not be synthesized” (Ngai,
2017, 469 fn 57). One shifts between economic and aesthetic orders of value
that we hold together (perhaps in a mode analogous to that of our software like
Windows) in a mode of intimate propinquity and suspension. Alenka Zupancic
notes an additional aspect of contemporary comedy that addresses its alleged
liberating and critical use; today’s comedy insists on “the surprising absence
of surprise,” thus purported strategies of de-familiarization prove less useful in
the context of a “kind of funny, irritating re-familiarization” (Ngai, 2017, 501).
Re-familiarization works by repetition, which increasingly appears as a
strategy of doubling down. For Mladen Dolar imitation strikes back; com-
edy is a reenactment of its mechanism, updating the Benjaminian distinction
between aura and mechanically reproduced works of art: “Aura? Let’s make a
copy of it but within the artwork itself. This is the basic instinct of comedy”5
(Dolar, 2017, 580). Basic Instinct is itself an en abyme-or interior reduplica-
tion of parallax; for the ambiguous ending-is Catherine or Beth the killer—
cannot be resolved as there are two simultaneous story-lines, each with its
own fade-out. Depending upon the narrative one follows, one can argue for
either ending but not both. The self-reflexivity of this neo-noir thriller is itself
an example of comic mimesis. How can one not laugh when the icepick re-
appears in the second fade-out? The heroine of Cult can be read as a femme
fatale—killing her wife, instigating murders of other cult members, including
the leader Kai—and aligning herself with feminist killer theorist Valerie Sola-
nas. Dolar asks a most pertinent question: “Can one die of mimesis?” (Dolar,
2017, 575). Are the critical stakes of today’s horror comedies tied to gender
(horror) or genre (comedy)? Or like their French cognate, both at once?

CULTS

The three examples that most resonated with Trumpian horror-comedy genre
all contained cults: In Aronowsky’s mother! the house is invaded by the
272 Diane Rubenstein

author’s fans who profess to having been “saved” by his pre-trauma writing
(prior to the destruction of his home). The male protagonist writer’s block
is broken instantaneously upon learning of his incipient fatherhood. This
affinity with the recovering hero/ writer of The Shining—who also inhabits
a desolate location underscores the importance of Kubrick for the Trump era
horror film and situates The Shining as the ur-text for Get Out as well (Jared
Sexton, 2017d).6 Him (the male protagonist and only character with His name
capitalized) “creates” a new poem and immediately reads it over the phone to
His agent. A saturnalia in the home ensues, hijacking the celebratory dinner
planned by the female protagonist (mother). The festivities are punctuated
by the birth of His son, the destruction of His home (painstakingly rebuilt by
mother) and concludes with the newborn’s cannibalization by fans.
Get Out presents a lobotomizing cult, which is generalized; eventually one
comes to see the white normative middle-class family as a cult—especially in
its annual garden party enactment. This is set off visually against what Smith
calls a “deeper seam” focalizing on suffering black faces, trapped behind
masks, whether a hypnotized Chris in the “sunken place” or the grandparents
imprisoned in the bodies of domestic workers. Sarah Valentine describes
the grandmother, Georgina’s struggle as “the horror of being internally sup-
pressed by whiteness at the hands of people who are supposed to care about
you, in a well- appointed suburban home where everything looks perfect from
the inside” (Fineman, 2017).
The example I focus on in this chapter is American Horror Story: Cult. In
the age of a reality show president I am privileging a television series over
film. The show revisits cults such as that of Manson, (a “night of the 1000
Tates” planned attack on pregnant women), David Koresh and Jim Jones (a
Kool-Aid loyalty test for the militiamen7), and Andy Warhol. One might also
include Jesus (Christians-cult in its religious, ritual sense) as all of the above
were played by the same actor, Evan Peters who stars as Kai, the leader of
the misogynist militiamen. Cults have proliferated in televisual true crime
mid-nineties necrospectives (OJ, the Unabomber, Versace, Waco-Branch
Davidians).8 American Horror Story: Cult is an attempt to directly address
the “horror” (terror as fright or shock)9 of the Trump victory (and the ela-
tion among pussy grabbing Trump supporters) in the battleground state of
Michigan. I approach the series through its lead protagonist, Ally Mayfair-
Richards, her role as biological mother of Oz and as wife to Ivy Mayfair-
Richards. This series underlines the gender dynamics and anxieties also at
play in Get Out and Mother!
Much of the gender discussion during the Trump administration has looked
at toxic masculinity and #metoo. Cult similarly foregrounds one narrative
line in a “Pussy grabbing incident.” But I would argue that we would be
remiss to not notice the cautionary tales provided by looking at the mothers
 “An Actual Nightmare, but . . . Pretty Good TV” 273

in these horror tales—whether mother-earth in Aronowsky’s film or the

hypnotist/psychiatrist in Get Out.10 And not just the mother, but the mother-
baby couple; to trope off Winnicott, there is no such thing as a mother unless
you consider the mother-baby dyad. (“Baby” is mother!’s first word.) These
mothers are all “failed”—either overinvolved or dead (Chris); or in the case
of mother-earth who finally goes to sleep after giving birth during a home
invasion, neglectful. It is not obvious which maternal performance fares
worse for their masculine children. Kai Anderson’s abused mother kills her
husband and then herself and is kept covered in lime, decomposing, propped
up on the bed in the family house. This was the psychiatrist brother’s (Dr.
Rudy Vincent) idea! And it stages a narrative primal scene where a pattern of
murders disguised as suicide ensues as well as staged assassinations followed
by suicide.
The first episode, eponymously entitled “Election Night”11 opens in a
Michigan suburb—Brookfield Heights, where neighbors have convened to
watch the election returns and celebrate the anticipated victory of the first
woman president. The familial scene is comprised of Mayfair-Richards: Ally
and Ivy, their son Oz and his Latina nanny, and their neighbors, the Changs.
Tom Chang is a city council member whose wife did not vote that day.
Brookfield, as suburb, works as a “reparative wish fulfillment” for its liberal,
Trump averse spectators, combining “racist white violence” (directed at the
immigrant—mostly Latino—workers), “liberal white patronage and white
solidarity” (Sexton, 2017b). Michigan is also a “stand your ground state”
which comes in handy when Ally shoots a restaurant worker, Pedro, who
came to aid her during a power outage. It is a state that Hillary Clinton lost
by 10,000 votes and where Green Party candidate, Jill Stein garnered 40,000
votes. One of the running gags or “gimmicks”12 is Ally’s vote for Stein.
Ally is an avatar of what Angela Mc Robbins denotes as a “neoliberal
intensification of mothering.” These mothers are “perfectly turned out,
middle class, mainly white with perfect jobs, perfect husbands [sic] and
marriages and a permanent glow of self -satisfaction.” (Rose, 2014; 2018,
17–18, 78) What Mc Robbie denotes as the “perfection dispositif” is a form
of visual- media governmentality which emerges when, “after a long period
of castigation and disavowal, feminism makes a comeback” in the cultural
sphere. (McRobbie, 2013, 122; McRobbie, 2015, 4) Attendant on the analy-
sis by Foucault in the bio-politics lectures, it is the development of human
capital that is emphasized which is in turn undergirded by a visual strategy:
“displaying the virtual good life.” (Foucault, 2008; McRobbie, 2015, 5)
Neoliberal maternity interpellates the affluent/professional/white mother as
a responsible, respectable, sexually active subject. Her body bears a consid-
erable burden: slims, groomed and toned, the maternal gym body must live
up to the aspirational life style which it inhabits or evokes whether by good
274 Diane Rubenstein

self-governance or careful financial planning. (McRobbie, 2013, 130: Puar,

2012, 153) Moreover, in the highly individuated forms of neoliberal public
life the body must act as its own “social structure.” (Bauman, 2000) Perfec-
tion reposes upon technologies of continual self-assessment: “How did I do
today? Did I manage to eat fewer calories?. . . . Did I get to the gym? Did I
achieve what I aimed to achieve at work? Did I look after the children with
the right sort of attention? . . . Did I ensure that my family returned from
school and work to a well-appointed and well-regulated home? Did I main-
tain my good looks and my sexually attractive and well-groomed body?”
(McRobbie, 2015, 9).
The neoliberal drive to perfection characterizes the over invested narcissis-
tic mother who “leans in”; entrepreneurship is its idealized form. The single
poor (raced) single mother with a low wage job and several dependent chil-
dren with different fathers, inattentive to grooming and decidedly not slim,
is its abjected obverse. Like a corporate team, the “perfect” family resembles
a “partnership of equals.” Decisions such as having children, refinancing a
home, purchasing or running a restaurant are “team decisions” which means
that they can be “easily reversed.” (McRobbie, 2013, 130) Ally and Ivy
Mayfair-Richards are the successful owners of a restaurant, The Butchery on
Main13; it is the only one in town where one can get a decent espresso. Ally
is the “beautiful front of the house;” Ivy is the cook and otherwise appears
to do most of the heavy lifting. This is keeping with the role of the afflu-
ent (white) mother as “stage manager of the family enterprise,” attentive
to its success. (McRobbie, 2013, 131) Ally is responsible for the finances-
doing the books—and home management. This necessitates having access
to a privatized form of “good help”—not a collective daycare situation or
crèche—but hiring a suitable low-wage nanny (McRobbie, 2013, 128, 134).
Before the Trump victory, this role of caregiver is fulfilled by a Latina nanny
who is either deported or goes into hiding, but is never seen again after the
initial election night scene (even in the many flashbacks.) She is replaced by
Kai’s sister, Winter, a queer Vassar humanities student who has dropped out
to work for the Hillary campaign.
The Mayfair-Richards same-sex marriage reflects neoliberalist queer
familiar arrangements which will not be put into question under the new
Trump administration. Ally and Ivy reassure their son Oz that they will
continue to be legally married and that their lives in crucial ways will not
radically change. As mentioned above, this is not the case for their Latina
nanny. McRobbie avers that “the granting of marital and parental rights to
lesbian and gay couples, while important and just, has consolidated a kind of
hermetic ideal of family life” (McRobbie, 2013, 128). Indeed, as Jasbir Puar
argues in Terrorist Assemblages, forms of “homonationalism” shore up the
neoliberalist project (Puar, 2007).
 “An Actual Nightmare, but . . . Pretty Good TV” 275

Ally and Ivy conform to the image repertoire of the perfection dispositif
not only by their bodily inscriptions but in their joint investment to ensure
their son Oz’s future membership in the middle class. Even when Ivy moves
out with Oz to a motel, this is experienced as an “adventure,” not a marginal
quasi homeless lifestyle as was seen earlier when Meadow and Harrison are
evicted from their first home or as poignantly depicted in a film such as The
Florida Project. Lesbianism, in Cult, is aligned with consumer capitalism,
operating as its emblem. Their new neighbors Meadow and Harrison Wilton,
(a straight woman who married her gay best friend) are delighted that they
live next to lesbians, who bring up real estate values. They were as noted
above, evicted from their prior home and were only able to buy a new one
as this was the recent scene of the Chang clown serial murders (or alleged
murder-suicide.) When a power outage terrorizes their suburb, Harrison utters
the series’ sole cross-identificatory cry: “Lesbians, we’re under attack!” The
aspirational life style on display is ambivalently poised as popular fantasy
(i.e., the great home-especially the holy housing trinity of master bedroom,
bathroom and kitchen) as a form of Berlant’s “Cruel Optimism.” But it can
also be read as a “neoliberal spreadsheet” (McRobbie, 2015, 9–10).
Cult’s narrative trajectory tracks Ally’s transformation from maternal
neoliberal “prop” to a subversive form of femininity. This signals a departure
from her initial exemplification of the “post-feminist masquerade”—one of
the two bio-political and commodified feminine stylizations, along with “the
phallic girl” (or “phallic lesbian”) adumbrated in The Aftermath of Feminism
(McRobbie, 2008). The post-feminist masquerade theoretically borrows from
Joan Rivière and Judith Butler notions of compliance and compensation to
enforced gender norms. Mary Ann Doane contributes a feminist recuperation
of Freudian sublimation to the mix. What makes this “post” feminist is the
new context where feminism is at once both assumed and simultaneously
disavowed. The “perfect” is masquerade 2.0: unlike Rivière’s woman who is
aware of and compliant with male domination, the new form of masquerade
“translates” this recognition into “an inner drive, a determination to meet
a set of self-directed goals.” As in a branding exercise, one “personalizes”
one’s own feminism. This is nothing less than “the cultural appropriation of
feminism such that it becomes part of everyday governmentality” (McRob-
bie, 2015, 13, 16). Ally and Ivy, as well as television anchor Selena Belinda
(the black reporter, Beverly Hope’s rival for an anchor position) all evince
this modality.
Winter exemplifies the second possible enactment—the “phallic gay girl”
who can swagger and inhabit male norms of excessive drinking, violence,
sexual exhibition with seeming impunity. Winter introduces Oz to the “dark
web” to instruct and desensitize him to violence. She seduces Ally and posts
the soft core bathtub video on the web (where Oz and Ivy will discover it.)
276 Diane Rubenstein

Contra Butler’s phallic lesbian (and Lacan): “the phallic girl is able to be a
lesbian without the pretext of her visibility being just for men” (McRobbie,
2015, 8). Lesbian couples, with children and childless, abound in popular
culture and on social media. Gay rights bearing subjects are welcomed into
this new visual governmentality. Forms of femininity s/exiled from the per-
fection dispositif are older, less attractive women who have “given up” such
as Meadow and angry “raced” women such as Beverly Hope, deemed crazy.

PHOBIA

While Ally’s slim body, glowing skin and hair, and stylish maternal dress
conform to neoliberal “perfection,” her psyche does not. She is not suffering
from what Teresa Brennan called new maladies of affective contagion-fibro-
myalgia, attention deficit disorder, co-dependency, chronic fatigue syndrome,
or (a just plain vanilla) anxiety or depressive disorder (Brennan, 2004).
Ally suffers from phobias. Her first symptoms appeared in the aftermath of
September 11 and reappear in intensified form after the Trump victory. Her
individual tics thus partake of a national body. (Berlant, 1993) Ally’s phobias
provide key narrative substrata. In a later episode after Ivy joins Kai’s cult,
we learn that they are specifically targeted (i.e., her trolling by clown serial
killers). Kai, the cult leader is the brother of Ally’s psychiatrist; he breaks
into the psychiatrist’s files to better exploit her neuroses (as well as other
of his brother’s patients.) After Ally breaks down, Ivy can get sole custody
of Oz as Ally is his biological mother. This is Ivy’s pact with Kai when she
joins the cult at Winter’s urging. Ally’s phobias—to clowns, to blood and to
holes—provide a context for and motivate much of the plot. But phobia is
crucial to the gendered political logic of Cult. Why is the central character of
Cult—Ally Mayfair-Richards—a phobic?
For Lacan, phobia is “the most radical form of neurosis.” Fink adds that
Lacan (In Seminar VI) also sees it as neurosis’s “simplest form” (Fink,
1997, 266, fn. 84). As elaborated in Seminar VIII and Freud’s famous
case history of Little Hans, phobia is a “response to a problem with the
establishment of the paternal metaphor.”14 Both the hysteric and the obses-
sional neuosis presuppose its existence, thus enabling the mechanisms of
primary and secondary repression. However, the phobic can “instate the
paternal metaphor only by cancelling out the mother with something other
than the father’s ‘No!’ or name”15 (Fink, 1997, 163). The paternal metaphor
and the father’s name/No! are fundaments of the symbolic order and are
aligned with law. In the first episode, before we are aware of her phobias,
we witness Ally’s attachment to law and its representatives. Ally’s disbe-
lief in Trump’s electoral victory causes her to uncontrollably sob, “Merrick
 “An Actual Nightmare, but . . . Pretty Good TV” 277

Garland? What will happen to Merrick Garland?” repeating the name of a

failed Supreme Court nominee.
The phobic’s objects—clowns, blood, holes—or in the case of little Hans,
horses—are strategies the subject uses to shore up a crucial element of the
Other. The phobic object is “an all-purpose signifier for supplementing (or
plugging up) the Other’s lack (or lack in/of the Other” (Fink, 1997, 266,
fn.85). It is a recognition of the Other’ precarity. Phobia is less about fear,
castration anxiety, or other narcissistic dangers than the threat of existential
annihilation. “What the subject is afraid of encountering is a sort of desire
linked to certain privileged developments in the subject’s position vis-à-vis
the Other, as in the case of little Hans’ relationship to his mother-that would
immediately make all signifying creation, the whole signifying system, fall
back still further into nothingness” (Fink, 163, Lacan, 1994,305, my empha-
sis). Phobia is an attempt to put some other form of being—in the case of
little Hans, it was a certain type of horse; in the Babdook, it is a monster—
into the father’s place between mother and child. Phobia attests to the need
to name the mother’s desire, to provide an answer to the question: “what are
we wanted for?” (Fink, 1997, 199). It is important to note that we are talking
about a symbolic and not a biological function here. The father’s purpose is
to represent, embody, and name something about the mother’s body as well
as her sexual difference—to provide for its metaphorization.
Little Hans’ father accorded all procreative power to the mother and to
God. (God always seems to go along with what Hans’ mother wants.) Hans/
Oz comes to believe that he is the product solely of his mother’s desire.16 In
Cult Ally cynically doctors evidence that Kai is Oz’s father in order to insure
Oz’s safety even as she murders Ivy with poisoned food. Oz’s jubilant reac-
tion to the possibility that Kai is his dad is far more convincing than when he
answers Winter’s initial query. He gives a rehearsed answer that all families
are different and special and that he no longer remembers which mother is his
biological one. We learn that Ally’s “demand” (as opposed to desire) for Oz
and her obstacle to his separation is in fact the cause of the marital discord
and the reason for Ivy’s wish to drive her wife mad (so as to get full custody).
It turns out that Ivy’s endometriosis did not enable her to carry a baby; Ivy
has a bad case of “womb envy” (Stevens, 2005). She is thwarted by Ally to
even give a bottle of pumped breast milk to Oz: “No rubber nipple will touch
the lips of my son!” Oz is breast-fed for three years (which is pretty much
normal for Ithaca). One of the jobs of the neoliberal perfect mother is to keep
environmental toxins away from their offspring; in Get Out the psychiatrist/
hypnotist mother appears less upset that Chris is a smoker than that his behav-
ior exposes her progeny to risk. (“Do you smoke in front of my daughter?”)
This propensity to put one’s own children first—the “dire consequences of
parental exclusivity . . . the damage it does to the social fabric” was addressed
278 Diane Rubenstein

by Virginia Woolf on the cusp of German fascism and it links “state autoc-
racy” to the bourgeois family, especially its overweening egotism: “my boy,
my girl . . . . But they’re not interested in other people’s children . . . . Only in
their own; their own property, their own flesh and blood . . .” (J.Rose 79–80).
Cult’s neoliberal hermetic family doubles down on the “overweening egotism
of the bourgeois family” in Ivy’s fight for sole custody occasioned by Ally’s
overly proprietary relation to Oz as birth mother and breast-feeder. For Ally,
Ozzie can never be over-weaned.

GOT MILK?

These examples of neoliberal maternity reflect what Elisabeth Badinter has

called “new essentialist feminism,” an ecological update of motherhood
recast as “innate, essential, non-negotiable.” Rather than a relentlessly pro-
tective lioness and her cub amid other humans and animals—some friendly,
some predators, here the mother-child bond itself constitutes the entire world.
Breastfeeding is central to this project. Consider the statistics afforded by
the La Leche League (LLL) which tracks the rise of breastfeeding from a
minority practice of 38 percent in the late forties to 60 percent in the mid-
eighties to 75 percent in 2011. The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding (an LLL
book) sold more than two million copies. Or one can heed the imperative of
the Alternamoms’ website: “I am the milk of your breasts; You shall have
no other form of infant nutrition in your house” (Badinter, 2013, 73). Ally’s
three-year breastfeeding of Oz appears an understatement when compared
to the standards of “attachment parenting” which recommends its non-stop
practice.17 Breast feeding is another way of shaming inadequate mothers;
one member of an attachment parenting group targeted Pulse mass shooter
Omar Mateen’s mother as “negligent”: “Breastfeed or your child will become
a mass murderer” (Rose, 2018, 86.). My analysis here differs from that of
Jacqueline Rose and Elisabeth Badinter only in that my concern is not with a
reactionary or retro return to home but rather with the constitution of a her-
metic neoliberal family in which breastfeeding appears as one of many “best
practices” in childrearing.
Milk products figure prominently in Cult. The Mayfair-Richards re-bond
in a “family night” after Pedro’s shooting (and ensuing traumatic events)
over eating ice cream that Ivy has made in the restaurant. Ally and Oz concur
over their preference in flavors over Ivy’s exotic mint green tea. Ally agrees
to try it and to be spoon-fed by Ivy in what is the most sensuous act we have
witnessed between the couple. Mint green tea ice cream metonymically
replaces Ivy after her death at Oz’s birthday celebration with a reconfigured
family of Ally and her new girlfriend and Beverly Hope as family survivor/
 “An Actual Nightmare, but . . . Pretty Good TV” 279

friend. It is over the shared pleasure of eating ice cream on family night
that Ally tells Oz that he can keep the guinea pig offered by the neighbors,
Harrison and Meadow—even if the goodness of ice cream cannot protect
said guinea pig from suffering one of the worst cinematic pet deaths since
Fatal Attraction. Like the film example of Basic Instinct, this is no gratu-
itous intertextual reference; for the pet murderer (played by Glenn Close) is
a psychotic woman—until her weekend affair evincing the post—feminist
masquerade—who claims to be pregnant; the bunny that is killed is itself a
figure for pregnancy before the rise of home testing sticks. As with the genre
of contemporary horror, both killings happen in suburbia, in the domestic
space of a kitchen—and by home appliances—stove top burner or the more
time efficient microwave—that conventionally are used to nourish the family.
(Pet) death reinscribes the close proximity between pleasure (eros) and
death. The breast, its milk, and its confections and the pleasure of feeding
loved ones can easily flip over into revulsion—whether at horrific forms of
(microwaved) death or disgust over breastfeeding in public. The moral panic
over Tammy Duckworth’s arrival as a new and the first breastfeeding Senator
to vote and bring her newborn to the Senate floor (and not the cloakroom) is
a recent case in point. Duckworth even took the precaution to dress the baby
girl in clothes that did not violate the Senate floor dress code—a cute jacket
covering her onesie. Focalization was not upon Duckworth’s amputated
limbs from war injuries in Iraq (her titanium wheelchair was welcomed on
the Senate and earlier, House floor) but rather on her breast and what might
possibly leak out of it. Jacqueline Rose cautions that we should be suspicious
whenever any maternal practice is overly idealized that more complicated
affects are “silenced or suppressed” (J.Rose 86). Milk, like blood, is a fluid
that maternal body emits and it is one that Ally can ingest. If there is one way
that Ally does appear to depart from the caricatures of perfectionist mother-
hood is that she does not appear to have any food aversions (apart from her
phobias); she is not lactose intolerant, she eats and cooks both gluten and
meat (even when she is not making a “Manwich” for Kai.)

GENRE/GENDER: WOMEN AND HORROR

The sympathy between women and monsters is a theme in the critical writing
on horror. The monster’s “being toward death” is a recognition of women’s
analogous status as threats to masculine sovereignty, both as a warning as
well as an exorcism of feminine sexuality (Williams, 1980, Creed, 1996).
Vampire films ally blood sucking with the sapping of a vital life fluid,
sperm, which is in turn analogized with a “female milking a man’s sperm
during intercourse.” The vagina is displaced onto the breast and life-giving
280 Diane Rubenstein

nourishment is reversed into death. Underlying identification of the fear

provoked by the monster with the same fear engendered by the mother in
particular (vampire films) and of the woman in general reverses gendered
theories of spectatorship (Williams, 1980, 63, 65; Mulvey, 1975). The big-
gest difference in the new post-horror might reside less in the strong roles
accorded to women but in revised looking relations. If as Mulvey argued,
classic cinema leaves a woman little to pleasurably identify with. Doane
enlarged the space for a woman’s “investigating” look, but this was from the
perspective of heroines that were good girls in the woman’s melodrama or
in horror films. In both of these instances, a woman’s gaze—her active look-
ing—was an exercise of self- punishment. Exchanging sadistic voyeurism for
a masochistic identification with one’s own victimization did not seem like a
transformative perspectival shift (Doane, 1984, 1987).
Feminist readings of classic horror monsters or co-dependent monster
couples—Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, King Kong, Dr.
Jekyll, and Mr. Hyde, Beauty and the Beast—do not find much for the male
viewer to pleasurably identify with either. The monster body is not seen as
an eruption of unrepressed sexuality and brute force immune to civilizing
pressures of modernity. Rather, like the fetishism that inheres in classic spec-
tator theory, the monster body is freakish—either too much or too little. Lon
Chaney’s Phantom has the nose of Michael Jackson—insufficient flesh makes
it resemble two holes: “He had no nose!” “Yes, he did, it was enormous!”
The monster is a figure of castration (no nose) or excess (“enormous”). A
normal male would be expected to recoil from a view of castration and feel
inadequate to the monster’s endowment. Indeed, at the end of the film, the
Phantom “restages the drama of the lack he represents to others” (Williams
63). The monster in the classical horror film is a figure of sexual difference
not so much from women but from normative masculinity.
This difference recalls another scene of feared potency and castration–the
“dark continent” of female sexuality. It acts as a further affinity between
the woman and the monster; it also differentiates the look of horror for men
and women. The male look of horror in genre films expresses a fear that is
normative and conventional. Recalling Robin Wood’s inaugural article, the
monster’s body is that of an Other, even and especially if it is gendered male.
The women’s look is different for she recognizes herself in the monster’s
difference. In a quite pertinent aside, Linda Williams states that “there is not
that much difference between an object of desire and an object of horror as far
as the male look is concerned.” Whatever difference exists concerns the age
of the female star; Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are both post-menopausal
horrors (they can no longer give birth) in the Robert Aldrich “hagspoitation”
film, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? In the spring of 2017, yet another
Ryan Murphy anthology television series, Feud turned to these two iconic
 “An Actual Nightmare, but . . . Pretty Good TV” 281

nasty women. Hagsploitation films are an example of horror turning comic as

they slide so effortlessly into camp, whether Bette Davis in the later Aldrich
“Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte,” or Joan Crawford in the eminently forgettable
Strait Jacket and Trog.
Feminist theorizations of the alignment of monster and mother reorient
the locus of fear away from the horror of castration to the difference from
a phallic norm. The mother is feared by the male child not because she is
mutilated but because of “her power-in- difference” (Williams, 65; Lurie,
1980). The male child (or vulnerable male) fears the mother’s “power to
mutilate and transform him.” Susan Lurie challenges the conventional psy-
choanalytic theory linking fetishism and castration, namely that the sight
of the mother’s body suggests to the male child that his mother has already
undergone castration. For Lurie, “the real trauma is not that the mother is
castrated, but that she isn’t.” She obviously does not look as he would if his
penis were cut off. Indeed, the notion of woman as a castrated male is more of
a “comforting wishful fantasy” intended to defend against “what his mother’s
very real power could do to him. This fantasy is aimed at convincing himself
that women are what men would be if they no longer had penises- bereft of
sexuality, helpless, incapable” (Williams, 66 fn. 13). Or in the words of Val-
erie Solanas, as voiced by the actress Lena Dunham in Cult: “a turd, a lowly
abject turd.”

NAMING THE MOTHER’S DESIRE: SOLANAS

Cult portrays the trajectory of Ally Mayfair Richards from a neoliberal les-
bian mom to a newly elected Michigan Senator. At the start of the series she
is extremely vulnerable and dependent—both on her spouse for psychic sup-
port (seen in Ivy’s coaching her on special breathing) and on her psychiatrist
Dr. Rudy that the couple has on speed dial. Her phobias accelerate for the first
half of the season, culminating in her arrest for murdering Meadow who has
staged an assassination attempt on Kai which generates sufficient publicity
for him to achieve national notice. This is the only suicide that is staged as a
murder reversing the pattern of murders staged as suicides. Ally is arrested
and interned in a psychiatric hospital, marking her nadir and the start of Kai’s
ascension; both occur in episode 7.
Kai is elected as City Councilman and the national spotlight attracts a cult
following among white misogynist militiamen, who recall in certain respects
the Michigan militia movements of the nineties. Episode 7, “Valerie Solanas
Died for your Sins, Scumbag” is the first of four episodes (7–10) that time
travel to cults such as the Zodiac killers (7), Warhol’s factory (7), a deranged
pastor who kidnaps and tortures women (8), Jim Jones (9), and Charles
282 Diane Rubenstein

Manson (10) The concluding episode 11 “Great Again” inverts episode 7—

now Kai is imprisoned after Ally has turned FBI informant. Kai escapes from
his maximum security prison to arrive the night of the first televised debate
between Ally and her male opponent. She has become famous due to her role
in Kai’s capture and the taking down of the militia. Just as Kai’s initial assas-
sination attempt was the result of a prior manipulation of Meadow with Ally
in the position of structural blindness, here roles are reversed and Ally is the
manipulator of Kai’s escape and his “live” assassination on television during
the debate. Both staged assassinations come off brilliantly like a scripted real-
ity show during sweeps week. Kai is spewing a misogynist rant as he has a gun
up against Ally’s head but it turns out he is shooting blanks. The white misogy-
nist is then shot on television by the black reporter and former cult member,
Beverly Hope. This is quite a revenge fantasy, one worthy of Solanas.
Episode 7 is pivotal, whether one identifies the lead protagonist as Kai,
who is the cult leader, or with Ally, his counterpoint. And it features the only
elaboration of a cult that is led by a woman, Valerie Solanas, portrayed by
Lena Dunham. This casting is perverse as for many feminist commentators
such as McRobbie and Roxanne Gay, Girls is a fraught exemplar, exhibiting
in Lena Dunham’s im/perfection a confirmation—not a critique—of neolib-
eral post-feminism in its resolute whiteness (Gay is dumbfounded that the
girls in Girls have no blipster friends) and in the class cronyism and entitle-
ment of the actresses who are all children of famous parents (Brian Williams
of Allison Williams also in Get Out, David Mamet and Laurie Simmons).
But for some women, most notably Winter, the high point of her life is when
Lena Dunham “re-tweeted” one of her pro-Hillary campaign messages. Lena
Dunham functions like Ngai’s gimmick and according to the logic of comic
mimesis elaborated by Dolar.
One of the things that the episode gets right by this casting is to index how
funny Solanas was.18 For Mary Harron (author with Daniel Minahan, of I
Shot Andy Warhol) was surprised by her humor upon reading Solanas’ Scum
Manifesto; this motivated her book and film project. SCUM is an acronym for
“society for cutting up men.” The untranslatability of its very title in French
(L’Unique et son ombre) eliminates the link to comedy in “cutting up”—not
only “castrative glee” but “other semantic possibilities . . . laughter, montage,
editing” (Ronell, 6, 11). Harron notes that “as comedy was a second nature to
her, even her hate letters had a satiric edge” (Hammon xxvii). Solanas’ screed
combined multiple comic modalities. The opening of the Scum Manifesto
is beautifully deadpan: “Life in this society being at best, an utter bore and
no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-
minded, responsible thrill seeking females only to overthrow the government,
eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the
male sex” (Solanas, 35).
 “An Actual Nightmare, but . . . Pretty Good TV” 283

The manifesto’s style is “icily logical, elegantly comic, a strange juxtaposi-

tion, as if Oscar Wilde had decided to become a terrorist” (Hammon, viii).
Solanas’ literary qualities earned her the accolades of many writers and theo-
rists—the “Robespierre of feminism” (Norman Mailer)—feminism’s “Joan
of Arc” (B. Ruby Rich). “She was part of the girl gang of Ovid’s Heroides
or her name was Medusa, Medea, Antigone, Lizzie Borden, Lorena Bob-
bitt, Aileen Wournos, Christine and Lea Papin, Solanas” (Ronell 25). This
is quite a lineage of Greek heroines, murderous mothers, subversive sisters
and daughters, parricides, female serial killers who have inspired literary,
cinematic, and psychoanalytic representations. Avital Ronell gives Solanas
the high theory treatment “somewhere on the existential corner of 1968,”
hanging with Derrida writing on “The Ends of Man.” Valerie’s exhortation
to male genocide was a bit more literal. In a psych ward at Bellevue during
the summer of 1968, her thoughts turn to another interned activist writer and
sexual outlaw, Jean Genet. “There was a French track running in her head and
it wasn’t chirping Edith Piaf” (Ronell, 6).
But Ronell also aligns Solanas with the nineties’ male axis—Koresh and
the Unabomber, “vagabond, unmoored and alone with their inscriptions”
(Ronell, 9–10). Ronell and Hammon concur in her “untimeliness”: a “comic
strip lesbian avenger in the summer of ’68” (Ronell. 9). “Even as a celebrity
assassin, she was in the wrong time, now she would have a book contract; her
case would be debated on talk radio and daytime television talk shows; and
she would be interviewed by People magazine” (Hammon, x). These imagin-
ings date from 199519—during the Clinton years and the media possibilities
have only escalated—like Leslie Jones, she would also very likely been
trolled. Hammon speculated that had she attended university during a more
congenial time of the Kennedy era rather than the conservative Eisenhower
fifties, “she might have survived to become a more apocalyptic Camille
Paglia” (Hammon, xiii).
How has Solanas become inadvertently timely in the Trump era? We
are now celebrating the fifty-year anniversary of May 68, the 2017 episode
similarly marks the golden anniversary of the Scum Manifesto. Why would
someone like Ryan Murphy who is so in tune with the cultural zeitgeist
accord such a pivotal role to this figure, apart from some superficial coinci-
dences—Valerie Solanas was born and raised in Atlantic City in the shadow
of the Trump Taj Mahal? (Harron xi). To paraphrase the title of Badiou’ book
on Sarkozy, of what is Solanas the name?
The final image of Ally is at her mirror. She has just tucked Oz into bed and
discussed her electoral victory with him. He wonders if she will be the “boss”
of the people she has been elected to represent; she replies that she will be
“leading” them. As she is set to leave home, we note that she is wearing a sar-
torial metonym of Solanas, the green cape that we saw her acolytes wearing
284 Diane Rubenstein

in episode 7. Bebe Babbitt (played by Frances Conroy, the mother in Six Feet
Under) is Valerie’s’ lover and she tells the story of how the Zodiac killer
hijacked the SCUM murders. Babbitt is always dressed in the green cape.
I have been tracing the way Ally Mayfair-Richards evolves from a neolib-
eral maternal prop to a more subversive feminine identification with Solanas.
Ally is now a self-described empowered Nasty Woman, “the only thing
that is more dangerous than a humiliated man,” she whispers to Kai before
he is shot. The initial gimmick or joke of the series was her vote for third-
party candidate Jill Stein, seen as irresponsible in light of Trump’s margin
in Michigan. Ally is now their elected Senator. Where she was once quite
vulnerable and phobic, she appears confident and in control. But if there is
an affinity with Solanas, it is not based upon a shared comic sensibility. One
constant is Ally’s humorlessness.20 She does however embody the description
of the SCUM women (as opposed to the Daddy’s girl): “Dominant, secure,
self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-
wheeling, arrogant” (Solanas, 70).
In an earlier part of this chapter, I commented upon the significance of
Ally’s phobias in relation to the paternal metaphor. Solanas “inhabits the
no, the non bound by the nom as Lacan would say.” Solanas is “non-liberal”
and most importantly for neoliberal contestation, she is “nonmarketable”
and “non bourgeois” (Ronell, 23). Solanas wrote a play, Up Your Ass which
was the exciting cause of shooting Warhol who misplaced or lost her sole
copy of it. “It’s about how sleazy and disgusting men are. It’s a comedy. At
the end, a mother kills her son” (Harron and Minahan, 60).21 Solanas radi-
cally revises Freud from the ground up, looking not to Oedipus but Medea.
Women don’t suffer from penis envy; “men have pussy envy.” Man is an
“incomplete female”—“the y gene is an incomplete x gene”; maleness is a
“deficiency disease” (Solanas, 37, 35). As the male is incomplete, he tries to
become female and claims her strengths (courage, integrity, vitality, emo-
tional strength, depth of character, “grooviness”) as his own and projects his
male traits—“vanity, weakness, triviality onto her” (37–38). Woman is not
allied with lack, it is man, “trapped in his pernicious projection booth,” who
is engaged in the disavowal of lack and is death driven, “necessarily poised
as your corner suicide bomber”—or school shooter (Ronell, 19).
Solanas’ manifesto rhetorically performs a quite devastating critique of
the neoliberal perfection dispositif. On the hermetic family: men seek to
isolate women and move them to the suburbs, defined as “a collection of
self-absorbed couples and their kids” (48). Neoliberal maternal best practices
such as breastfeeding and natural childbirth are an abasement of women
to animals, especially those “most backward segments of society,” that is,
“privileged educated middle class women grooving on labor pains and lying
 “An Actual Nightmare, but . . . Pretty Good TV” 285

around in the middle of the twentieth century with babies chomping away at
their tits” (46). SCUM women decidedly do not “lean in”: “they are too child-
ish for the grown-up world of suburbs, mortgages, mops and baby shit, too
selfish to raise kids and husbands” (61). They opt out of good self-governance
and control society.
Sexuality has been replaced by technological reproduction—women have
many affirmative functions to perform (“relate, groove, love . . . crack jokes”);
the only one for men is to “produce sperm. We now have sperm banks” (47).
“The answer is laboratory reproduction of babies” (68). Recently, Rachel
Bowlby described this as an achieved feminist utopia: advances in new repro-
ductive technologies displace the assumption that children are the result of
“two parents, of two sexes, that once had sex” (Bowlby, 114; J. Rose, 64).
Ozzie Mayfair-Richards is the denizen of this world as is the new baby of
Senator Duckworth.
Solanas’ text also prophesizes affirmative transgendered possibilities. She
is not after eliminating all men, and creates a Male Auxiliary of men who are
“diligently working to eliminate themselves” and who work on constructive,
not war-driven scientific research, for example. Effeminate gay men who are
de-manning themselves by their “shimmering, flaming example” and men
who “give stuff away” also have a place. In episode 7, we see gay members in
a “turd session” of asserting their abject status which is rewarded by attending
a meeting with SCUM members (72). Solanas acknowledges that progress
is on the side of the feminine and that more men are “acquiring enlightened
self-interest,” which means that they identify with female interests and can
only see their own future through the female (67).
She becomes an advocate for transgender in the next paragraph: “If men
were truly wise they would seek to become really female, would do intensive
biological research that would lead to them, by means of operations on the
brain and on the nervous system, being able to be transformed in psyche, as
well as body into women.” Andrea Long Chu in an inspired reading of the
manifesto is astounded by Solanas’ “vision of transsexuality as separatism,”
in how m-to-f transition is not “just disidentification with maleness but disaf-
filiation with men” (Chu, 6).
The full story of Ally’s transformation in Cult is from Freud’s “witty
butcher’s wife,” foregrounding the role of “identification in desire” (Chase
989) to Solanas’ doubling down on disidentification and disaffiliation with
normative masculinity, to a separatism that is inclusive of non-lesbians and
raced women such as Beverly. She tells her son Oz on the way out the door
of her suburban home that she is on her way to a meeting “with empowered
women.” Whether this portends a horrifying or comic outcome in 2018 or
2020 is an open question.
286 Diane Rubenstein

CODA: NOSFERATU

Fun fact: According to Stan Brakhage, the word nosferatu means splashed
milk. As Romanian legend recounts, Dracula terrified a servant who then
attacked him by “splashing” him with a pitcher of milk (Williams, 1980,
fn.14).

NOTES

1. Although Jennifer Kent’s film was made in 2014, the cult status of the Baba-
dook emerges, like President Trump, in late 2016. “For the LGBT community that
is what it feels like to be in your own family sometimes,” Professor Karen Tongston
avers. Babadook as gay icon has been widely disseminated. Miles Jai, a LBGT you
tube personality who made a runway entrance at the season finale of Rue Paul’s Drag
Race concurred that his family was always “trying to put me back in the closet.” One
might be tempted to read this figure allegorically as one of not just queer resistance
but resistance to Trump tout court: whatever attempts to destroy him only makes him
come back stronger! The racial politics positions the Babadook against the white sub-
urban (Australian) family). Director Jennifer Kent’s next film is “Alice and Freda,”
a nineteenth century lesbian love story which she claims is “only a horror film in the
sense that it is a pretty horrific world right now.” (Hunt, 2017; Orbey, 2017.)
2. A Quiet Place (2018) recalls aspects of these films as it also makes a pregnant
mother and her imminent birth giving a central place as threat (death) and life. It is
directed by and stars a comic actor, John Krasinski.
3. Smith lauds Peele for finding a “concrete metaphor for the ultimate unspoken
fear” and highlights the way fear and desire is articulated today: “Our antipathies are
simultaneously a record of our desires, our sublimated wishes, our deepest envies.
The capacity to give birth or make food from one’s body... But in the place of the old
disgust comes a new kind of cannibalism...” Smith is alluding to cultural appropria-
tion here but the films such as mother! and Raw (as well as the Santa Clarita Diaries
tv series) might argue for taking cannibalism either more literally or more allegori-
cally. (Smith 2017, emphasis mine).
4. One could look at the Freudian investment in the comic in ways that would
supplement the gendered readings here, see Kofman 1986; Bergson, 2005; Chase,
1987; Freud, 2008). To take just one example, the question of a woman’s sexual-
ity and desire is seen in the exemplary Freudian joke- “How is a woman like an
umbrella? After a while, one takes the bus!.”
5. For the cinematic reader, Basic Instinct connotes a neo noir (nineties) thriller
with a killer lesbian or bisexual and unresolved ending.
6. Kubrick’s The Shining was the ur-text for 2018 fashion weeks in the col-
lections of Calvin Klein (a blood splashed white dress and one Shelly Duvall like
outfit), Marco de Vincenzo’s needlepoint purse of the twins in their blue dresses, and
especially Undercover’s Jun Takahaski who sent out all his models by twos as twins
 “An Actual Nightmare, but . . . Pretty Good TV” 287

and had a pair dressed in co-ordinated baby doll dresses recalling those of the film.
(Yaeger, 2018).
7. “Charles (Manson) in Charge” (episode 10; first aired November 7, 2017;
Written by Ryan Murphy and directed by Bradley Buecker) and “Drink the Kool-
Aid” (episode 9; first aired October 31, 2017; written by Adam Penn and directed by
Angela Bassett.)
8. For true crime shows of the nineties, here are just some examples: The Emmy
winning, The People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story (2016, F/X.) Sarah
Paulson who is Ally Mayfair Richards plays Marcia Clark; “Manhunt: Unabomber,”
(2017 Miniseries, Discovery Channel; six part WACO series (2018, Paramount);
American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace (2018, F/X).
9. Jacques Lezra tracks terror back to its Freudian genealogy as “fright” in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and the Three Essays on Sexuality. (Lezra, 2010,
24–29; 235 fn 43, 45.)
10. Sarah Kofman (1986) distinguishes between two types of hypnotism- one is
that of a male leader, as seen in Freud’s Group Psychology and the other is more
insinuating and feminine. The mother in Get Out corresponds to this latter depiction.
11. “Election Night” was written by the show’s creator, Ryan Murphy with Brad
Falchuk and directed by Bradley Buecker; it first aired on September 5, 2017.
12. Ngai examines the “gimmick” as a singular aesthetic category, situated within
capitalist economic systems and adumbrates how comedy heightens its aesthetic
importance as well as its ambivalence. Her reading in the latter part of the essay of
Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods is suggestive of the way the gimmick perversely
functions in a neo-liberal workplace; one of the intendant ironies for this chapter is
its relation to contingent female labor, the other side of neoliberal perfection. (Ngai,
2017, 476, 493, 497–505).
13. For a reading of Ally Mayfair-Richards as a neoliberal remake of Freud’s “The
Witty Butcher’s Wife”- (la belle bouchère or in Lacan, bb or la bébé), Cynthia Chase
(1987) remains the ultimate reference.
14. For the relationship between Lacan’s concept of “paternal metaphor” and the
American Presidency, especially as it relates to the Bush family romance, see Ruben-
stein 2008.
15. There is a homonymic slippage between ‘non’ and ‘nom’ in the French laca-
nian tradition. Fink explicates the “supplementarity” of the paternal function- for the
psychotic, there is alienation; for the phobic, separation. (Fink 1997).
16. However, Rose reminds us that bringing up a child to believe he is a miracle can
deny him finding a place in the world. Too much attention turns the child into a narcis-
sistic object, a mirror. One needs maternal recognition, but not too much (or one becomes
a monster) and not too little (“the chances are you will not enter a fully human world.”
(Rose 76) One suspects that Oz will not grow up to be a monster but perhaps a version of
the Alice Miller “false self” exemplified by Al Gore. Oz appears compliant not with his
mother Ally’s demands but with her inner world- he identifies with her electoral victory
as “dominance” while she prefers the word “leader.” (‘Great Again”/Episode 11).
17. Attachment (or ‘pure’) parenting was started by fundamentalist Christians
(William and Martha Sears.) Its requirements of wholescale maternal devotion result
288 Diane Rubenstein

in women leaving the job track for home. Rose points out the class and racial bias of
this as not everyone can opt out of the workplace. (Rose 85-6).
18. B. Ruby Rich (2013) notes how casting can be deployed as a means of “writing
a film’s (here: television’) meaning beyond the screen play.” 205.
19. One of the topics engendered by this chapter and that warrants further analysis
is the recurrence of Clinton and W-Bush pop cultural forms for the Trump era.
20. On humorlessness the definitive text- at least until her book comes out- is L.
Berlant 2017.
21. According to Dr. Ruth Cooper, Solanas’ psychiatrist at Bellevue, all her prob-
lems derived from her mother’s rejection and not from her father’s sexual abuse. Her
drive to prove men inadequate was a cover for her desire to be male, as a way of win-
ning her mother’s love. Cooper sees her as a “victim of sexual confusion” and gives
her the diagnosis of “Schizophrenic Reaction, paranoid type with marked depression
and potential for acting out.” (Harron xxvi). Although Harron notes Dr. Cooper’s
obvious sympathy and warmth for Valerie, this assessment demonstrates the inability
of diagnostic categories to capture her form of prophetic genius.

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 Conclusion
“You’re Fired!” Neoliberalism, (Insult)
Comedy, and Post-network Politics
Julie A. Webber

The Trump Emotion Machine is delivering feeling ok, acting free.

Being ok with one’s internal noise, and saying it, and demanding that
it matter. Internal Noise Matters. The reason white people can be so
reactively literal-minded about Black Lives Matter, reeling off the
other “lives” that matter too, isn’t only racism. It’s that in capitalism, in
liberal society, in many personal relationships, they feel used like tools,
or ignored, or made to feel small, like gnats. They feel that they don’t
matter, and they’re not wrong.
(Lauren Berlant, “Trump, or Political Emotions”)

In the primary season and aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, ques-
tions about the one-sided nature of comedy and entertainment come to the
foreground as groups who previously felt excluded now had a platform and
a candidate (they thought) who could safely cover them as they expressed
their “internal noise” as political ideals and entertainment. And yet, in a
small corner of the entertainment world one show on Adult Swim Million
Dollar Extreme: World Peace was cancelled shortly after the election, media
reported, due to its offensive content. Questions arose as to whether or not
the show was giving certain ideas a platform that were identical to those of
what would come to be known as the “alt-right.” It seemed the similarities
between the show’s “anti-comedy” approach and the so-called alt-right’s
strategies for disrupting liberal narratives—online and in the mainstream
media (hereafter, MSM)—overlapped in uncomfortable ways. Anti-comedy,
known for its realism, tends to have this problem. As humor it has features
that overlap with those of a particular type of comedy, anti-comedy. It has
emerged as a way to counter what has been seen as the prominence of politi-
cally correct speech and policy but its Achilles heel is that it cannot claim—as
293
294 Conclusion

many comedians accused of telling offensive jokes these days do—that it was
“just a joke” accusing the audience of humorless. In order for anti-comedy
to work, it must never break character, even in an effort to explain or justify
itself. “Anti-comedy,” as Jeffrey Sconce notes, “is explicitly about the art of
comedy itself, a foregrounding of its expectations, conventions and execu-
tion” (Sconce 2014, 75). World Peace seemed to follow all of these comedic
conventions. It presumed a set of norms predominantly “liberal”—by a Fox
News definition: elite, college-educated, feminist, environmentally friendly,
sensitive to the disabled, minority race conscious, and civil. If we take the
long view of neoliberalism, however, it becomes difficult to fathom just how
“liberal” things really were anywhere in the world, post-Obama or otherwise.
As a project of over four decades, the neoliberal experiment is just coming to
its conclusions, one blip of celebrity-backed, corporate-sponsored “progress”
seems to have hardly set it back.
In the following year or so, while the rest of the world burned, we would
witness all kinds of hand-wringing over the idea of whether or not free speech,
long a valued U.S. constitutional (and controversial) right was under siege.
This debate raged in the streets of Charlottesville and beyond in Portland and
elsewhere, but the main focus tended to be in the comedic sphere: on televi-
sion and Twitter. On all sides, comedians worried and criticized each other
and the corporate establishment each one pointing a finger at the other accus-
ing them of threatening freedom of speech, or, alternatively, not being able to
“take a joke.” My focus in this conclusion will be on the ideas and controver-
sies that the World Peace cancellation (along with that of Roseanne) evoked
because they are emblematic of a political environment that is saturated with
neoliberalism. Roseanne and World Peace1 were both shows that were on the
air to attempt to give voice to that “internal noise” albeit in a manner fit for
corporate consumption. Here we might think of James Brasset’s insights about
managerial liberalism of the nineties and aughts via The Office where racism
and sexism is overt, but the characters who display it are seen as pathetic
losers who work at a paper company. Unimportant, boring, and seemingly
harmless, the employees’ faults at Wernham Hogg (or Dunder Mifflin in the
U.S. copy) were seen as part of this internal noise but kept on mute, never
finding true political expression in the electoral sphere. In the previous decade,
however, as inequality increased throughout the world, and the middle class
has been hallowed out through cuts to virtually every social service and tax
break that supported it, people had anger but no one to direct it at. In come the
politicians to direct it: nearly all of these chapters demonstrate that neoliberal-
ism has definitely occluded people’s ability to see their interests and who’s
maligning them. The centrality of technocracy as a measuring system allows
people to believe that meritocracy still functions—even though the conditions
in which they work and live are increasingly hostile to their needs.
 Conclusion 295

My sense is that two things go wrong with jokes, or humor, that are
demonstrated in the chapters throughout this book. First, as long as humor
is seen as mindless fun, perhaps even getting at larger truths about politics
and social life, if it fails to provoke seriousness, it isn’t working. As I write
this, cartoonists who take aim at the U.S. federal government’s detention of
minor children at the U.S. border are routinely being fired for covering the
issue. Second, comedy that punches down is simply cruelty, as another com-
edy special, Nanette critically, demonstrates. However, figuring out where
the “norm” is at any given moment difficult due to neoliberalism’s metric
measurement system. As we argued in the introduction, the “optimization of
differences” becomes the new standard; even if by ethical and philosophi-
cal standards, one’s political positions in comedy are garbage, they can still
“win” as long as they don’t get “fired.” Metrics replace norms. As metrics
are always changing, it is difficult to assess where one might transgress the
bounds of decency, which brings us back to Million Dollar Extreme (MDE):
World Peace, a fairly ugly show.
The kind of audience sought by World Peace was after the feeling of a self-
righteous glee that was not dissimilar to the rewards that online trolls seek:
the kind that antagonizes users who unselfconsciously participate in online
community interaction as if it were a form of progressive politics (e.g., the
“streets”). Trolls profess to believe such actions should take place IRL (in real
life), and that online SJW (social justice warriors) should be properly heckled
off social media, a domain they have neither the expertise nor the critical
understanding of to warrant their participation. Trolls are reactionaries in the
truest sense that they borrow from their opposition the tools and idioms of
their progressive adversaries in media to siphon off new followers. They also
imitate reactionary leaders in that they effect a sense of superiority that they
can confer and reflect back on to their fans; Trump supporters feel elevated
by his racism and bravado, someone “sees” them. Trump managed to use
a kind of trolling on the campaign trail and in debates when he ditched the
usual civil tone and opted for outright incivility, personal attacks, and obvious
lying. For many who voted for Trump, his appeal was his ability to “tell the
truth” and cut through “garbage.” For others, too cynical to bear the reality
of Clinton, it was his “insult comedy,” that they enjoyed. As of this writing,
the Trump presidency has provided cover for all kinds of political and social
maneuvering on the far right. Obvious political support from Fox News and
Breitbart, networks that sought to sanitize real acts of terror committed by
white supremacist and patriarchal groups and individuals, provided even
further cover for Trump. Trolls, working on line in subreddits and elsewhere
attempted to disrupt the flow of common knowledge about such groups by
preempting the flow of objective truths about violent events.
296 Conclusion

Anti-comedy and trolling have similar motives: to take apart the self-
righteous seriousness of political and establishment claims to authority. Sam
Hyde’s career prior to the election (and the show on Adult Swim) was less
controversial simply because the skits he deployed were aimed at culture,
never equated with support for a presidential or other candidate. Through a
shocking deployment of incongruity, Hyde’s public exploits and web-based
television scripts, disrupted the seeming complacency of TED talk “leaders,”
Clinton supporters, Jon Oliver fans and Ivy-league elites. His target tended
to be the “left neoliberalism” (Wilson 2017) discussed in the introduction by
reference to meritocracy. However, his take on this repeats the unfortunate
misconception that only liberals are elites. Like Roseanne Barr, he partici-
pates in media framing that mistakes a psychological attitude (liberals think
they are “better than” everyone) with material reality. Liberals may be ass-
holes, that’s for sure, but they are not winning. The only winners in this stage
of neoliberalism are the elites across the board. As for Hyde, when watching
his comedy, one imagines he was going for the humor and audience of Team
America: World Police (Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s sendup of Hollywood
politicos and the Global War on Terror [GWOT]), but missed the mark
entirely. Had Clinton won the electoral college, Hyde’s show might still be
on Adult Swim. People might even be laughing at it.

THE ALT-RIGHT AND HYDE: THE MATERIAL

EFFECTS OF COMEDIC CHANGES

First, how did this happen? Where did the alt-right come from such that
Hyde could be associated with them? My argument is that through a series
of conjunctural events (in the Althussian sense of changes to the material
reality and not changes to our mode of analyzing it)2 a loose configuration of
groups lingering in the “manospere” largely unknown to each other, seizes
the moment of Trump’s victory (as well as the preceding moments of fake
news delirium produced by Facebook and other apps) in order to make what
was perhaps a vague counterculture appear as a coherent interest group.
“Alt-right” became the official designation of this disorganized expression of
anger. The Southern Poverty Law Center now designates them as an official
hate group. But the official naming of the alt-right happens to have been pro-
voked by online pranking during the 2016 presidential cycle at several key
points. While I will not examine all of those here, two key points are identi-
fied by Chava Gourarie: Hillary Clinton’s August speech which named the
group and moved it “into the spotlight” on CNN, which online pranksters, or
trolls, considered a victory. Second, it was when editors at Breitbart claimed
it as their own, and gave it an ideological bent in an “online explainer”
 Conclusion 297

(Gourarie 2016)3. Reinforcing this latter claim, Steve Bannon, chief editor at
Breitbart, later told Mother Jones, it was the “platform of the alt-right,” and
shortly thereafter, he became the CEO of Trump’s campaign (Gourarie 2016).
These events “confirmed” for the public the existence of a stable entity with
a seemingly coherent ideology as the “alt-right.” That this entire drama was
instigated purposely by online trolls did not seem to matter. Thereafter the
media would continue to discuss this term as a stable entity with a coherent,
albeit far-right, white nationalist identity. What was perhaps once a bunch
of annoying (out of work) young people in front of computers amusing
themselves at the expense of adults and other clueless actors, under Trump
became a rallying cry for those disaffected with neoliberalism but blaming it
on Hillary voters and immigrants. The irony is, as Simon Weaver’s chapter
points out, those “disaffected”—not unlike Leavers in the UK—only got
half the message from comedy. While late night talk show hosts (and Hillary
Clinton) were certain the polls would predict her win, Trump voters imagined
a different America, pre-George W. Bush (I suspect) that would bring back
the prosperity that Obama did not (it must be said). This has, in the past two
years, breathed new life into a once seemingly dead culture war.
As Andrew Hartman argues, the culture wars are over, but what has
happened in the aftermath (not much, he suspects) is that racial divisions
continue, and are now reinforced by class disaffection. As he points out the
largest predictor of life chances in the United States is college education, and
those without it (or those still paying loans for it) are liable to feel shut out of
the neoliberal prosperity we keep hearing about. As he writes, “It may well
be, for instance, that in lieu of the traditional culture war uprisings against
the various gate keeping institutions presiding over our common life, we’re
seeing a new brand of identity-themed insurgency, one that might prove more
sinister and abiding than the former mobilization of cultural conflict on the
left and right flanks of our politics” (Hartman 2018). He further speculates
that “class conflict” overlaps with race to inform these insurgent politics.
It is important to recall from the introduction that neoliberalism does away
with the “nightwatchmen” of neoliberalism. We could perhaps speculate that
these gatekeepers to which Hartman alluded (folks like William F. Buckley,
for example) are now replaced by the corporation and its CEOs. As institu-
tions have largely been cracked open and “reformed” by neoliberal logics
and administrative agencies (Webber 2017) the role of gatekeepers, as public
intellectuals, no longer seems necessary. The barometer or metric used to
determine what the public will be exposed to is not on the plane of ideas
(something we can trace back to the humanities) but that of data, ratings, out-
rage, and so on. Viveca Greene’s chapter on Leslie Jones’s battle with Yian-
nopoulos (among other trolls) demonstrates the lack of protection afforded on
the internet and Twitter. As well, Rebecca Krefting’s chapter and its focus on
298 Conclusion

the politics of “free speech” as a foil for much thornier issues about content
and political civility that in other times would probably not be tolerated, much
less celebrated as free speech is relevant here. The lack of nuance in judg-
ing a person’s speech (or simply ignoring it) also comes up in McKain and
Lawson’s chapter where the nostalgia for a Colbert parody demonstrated that
something like an “ideal audience” could be conjured on television.
So what happened to Hyde and World Peace is that an anti-comedy internet
television show on Adult Swim was canceled after outcry by other actors on
the network, in the wake of Clinton’s surprising loss. What did we see in the
case of Hollywood and Hyde’s show? Did Adult Swim wait for the debate
over the show to play out in the pages of the New York Times, or some other
contemporary opinion-shaper? No, the industry executives responded to
criticism by cancelling MDE who because of low ratings, and, I think, the
threat that Hyde’s comedy posed to the Adult Swim brand. That nearly two
years later this overlapping of class and culture would send Roseanne back to
network television (something no one thought would ever happen) this time
defending the “freedom of speech” of those who see only decline in their own
lives, as they are relegated to the “gig” economy (Roseanne, the character,
now drives for Uber). This short-lived experiment in freedom of speech was
soon ended when Roseanne Barr, the person, went on a Twitter bender, writ-
ing, “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.” “VJ” stood
for Valerie Jarret, President Obama’s former White House advisor. The
experiment lasted two months, one season. Which brings me to my title for
this conclusion: once again Trump had inaugurated a cultural shift years prior
in The Apprentice, where viewers came to trust not only his judgment about
candidates on the show and their business savvy (even though he has filed
bankruptcy numerous times) but the idea that people who are judged to have
failed (whether fair or not) should be fired. This social reality of neoliberal-
ism—that not having a job—equals social death was pointed out by Berlant
when she explained people’s love for Trump. No longer excluding persons
from institutional and legal protection (we all have a chance to win, or lose;
the real crime is in not trying, even though the terrain is rigged and unfair)
by institutional means or policy, it is now done through the game, which,
like The Apprentice or any other gaming show that graces our neoliberal
mediascape, always has a loser who gets fired.
It seems fitting to ask, then, given that MDE: World Peace became col-
lateral damage in the alt-right arc of success in the fall of 2016, how can we
assess humor in this late stage of neoliberalism? We have already briefly
mentioned the new environment that allows “winners” to thrive, a corporate
enforced media space where popularity (like profits) drive all so-called rea-
sonable decision-making, and where decisions are made by corporate leaders.
The overall question is whether this comedy has a future in American cultural
 Conclusion 299

life, especially given that it was cancelled amid criticism from the liberal
comedy establishment at the network. Were these liberal celebrities protect-
ing viewers from a white nationalist hate show or were they inadvertently
protecting liberal comedy’s long reign as preferred medium of straight, white
masculinity that is recuperated for leftist neoliberal politics, in other words,
the corporate status quo? Keeping a job is largely about playing the game,
and the game has been rigged, even in the midst of all this talk of diversity.

Adult Swim
The place to begin is at Adult Swim itself a “post-network transmedia brand”
that has been able to use savvy techniques to draw in and “couch its address
to young, white men within discourses of alternative subculture,” while at
the same time it “alternately profits from and disavows white-male privilege
by promoting this structurally dominant and highly valued group as a cult-
ist, oppositional, and counterhegemonic fan base” (Elkins 2013, 597). Like
The Daily Show, which never revealed its audience demographics, but was
presumed to be primarily made up of white-male college graduates, as well
as The Colbert Report who drew equal numbers of conservative and liberal
identified viewers, Adult Swim, with its panoply of enticements (games,
blogs, commercials, music, mobile apps, films, etc.), is able to draw in small,
like-minded audiences through narrowcasting, as well as by exploiting the
idea that its taste culture transgresses PC political culture, good taste, and
mass cultural sameness (ibid, 597). Moreover, Adult Swim continues the cor-
porate trend in media of drawing the “nerd” into the category of “hegemonic
masculinity,” as if it were a subculture. Among its shows, the closest to Sam
Hyde might be the Eric André Show, although only in form, not content. As
Adam Forbes contends, “Eric Andre’s style inheres to the Dadaist themes of
sending up dominant institutions (by interviewing celebrities without giving
them preparation for his pranks), attempts spontaneous pranks using “public
statements of provocation” (Forbes 2017, 211–212). Moreover, like Dada-
ists, André’s “lack of morality and sensitivity” creates comedy by “oppos-
ing everything that was institutionalized,” in order to compose an “anarchic
attack upon hegemony” (Ibid, 213). However, unlike The Daily Show (TDS),
which has been described appropriately as “comedy of recognition,” by A. T.
Kingsmith, where the interview technique (think of Bee and Colbert but also
Stewart’s mash-up of clips at the start of the show that demonstrate the end-
less proliferation of talking points ruthlessly adhered to by Republicans and
conservatives when confronted with contradiction) acts as a “strategy of neo-
liberal containment,” allowing the viewer to separate those clownish, earnest
culture warriors from a “permanently disenchanted elite of ‘better-thinking’
Americans who claim to be assailed on all sides by the embarrassing crazies
300 Conclusion

and religious crusades of the class of gullible dopes and hillbillies” (King-
smith 2016, 293). This critique is central to my understanding of Hyde’s com-
edy, and the hegemony of late night comedy and its neoliberal implications.
If late night and “comedies of recognition” work to create an establishment
(neoliberal) and their audiences come together through feelings and thoughts
of superiority, doesn’t that in some way make Hyde’s claim to be criticizing
institutions relevant? How is his Dadaist intervention different from Eric
André? According to Hyde, and his supporters, his politics and examples of
his work later deemed questionable had been online for executives at Turner
and Adult Swim to see for years. It was only after Trump was elected, and he
was known to have declared his support for him, that higher ups at Turner,
responding to criticism from within the network, cancelled the show.
Adult Swim’s Million Dollar Extreme Present: World Peace was desig-
nated an alt-right show before the end of its first season in the fall of 2016.
Amid criticism that the show’s creator, Sam Hyde, was a full-fledged member
of the suspected and dubbed “hate” group, and in concert with criticism from
celebrities, most notably Brett Gelman (who quit Adult Swim in protest of
both the show and the network’s lack of women creators), it was cancelled
after the election of Trump to the presidency. Hyde and one of his collabora-
tors, Don Jolly, writing in The Daily Caller, claimed the network cancelled
it because “he voted for Trump.” But his justification for this goes even fur-
ther, as he claims that pressure from network executives (at Turner, a parent
company) and other high-profile comedy producers, like Judd Apatow) were
hypocritical in calling for the end of his show, based on his past work and
the show’s content. According to him, other shows on the network (as well
as comics associated with the network) were just as politically incorrect, they
just served their comedy up in favor of the democratic or progressive estab-
lishment, while he, a Trump supporter, was punished for doing the very same
“transgressive” things (more on this later).
After the election and cancellation of the show (which premiered in
August and aired its final first season episode on September 1) Hyde visited
many far right media shows in order to defend it. He appeared on Gavin
McInnes’s online show. (McInnes was fired from Vice for writing an article
about “transphobia” in a positive light.) Hyde clearly states that it was anger
over Clinton’s loss that motivated her supporters to investigate his show and
find in it a convenient scapegoat. All of his arguments are meant to show
the hypocrisy of Adult Swim concerning the shows it continued to support
and the lack of difference between their content and his, save for political
affiliation. As Hyde recounts, in one sketch, a character on the show appears
with his face “brownish” and goes by the name “Peanut Arbuckle,” as Hyde
argued, to “make him seem stupid.” Yet, he argues, Sarah Silverman appears
on Bret Gelman’s podcast for Adult Swim, after she had “spent an entire year
 Conclusion 301

of her life episode” of her Comedy Central show in blackface. So, he says,
“They’re allowed to be crude. It’s for the greater good. They are, at least
implicitly, #WithHer” (Hyde and Jolly 2016). It is hard to say whether Hyde
actually believes anything he presents on YouTube (in his early comedy as
part of a collective known as Million Dollar Extreme) or recently, as the cre-
ator of World Peace. Hyde often actively participates in the very dramas he is
cast in by internet users, or trolls. This makes his comedy of a piece with the
lulz competition. Unsure if Hyde is looking for laughs, but perhaps lulz, the
remainder of this paper seeks to sketch out how lulz might stretch the genre of
comedy, even while staying within the alt. right ideological framework (more
on this below). Looking at the comedy that precedes the show, the objects he
chooses to satirize are clearly political, and thematically they coincide with
many cultural flashpoints that became polarizing political issues, especially
the one that become the target of mediated coverage (or excessive cover-
age) in MSM. Critics have compared Hyde’s style to that of Tom Green,
the mid-1990s comedian whose humor largely focused on playing jokes on
unsuspecting people. This would make sense too since, like Green, Hyde (and
his collaborators, of which he seems the spokesperson) trick unsuspecting
participants in his comedy into believing his character is real, though often,
obnoxious. This realism is found in nearly all of the work online, just prior to
World Peace, where, by contrast, most participants are paid actors in on the
joke. It is not dissimilar to so-called progressive comedian’s tactics, like Sas-
cha Baron Cohen or even Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, whose antics inter-
viewing real people Kingsmith describes as being as fair as “fish- in –a- barrel
blasting” (Kingsmith 2016, 292). Such real-world interview encounters are
designed to “punch down” against the ignorance of the “real” America. Some
of Hyde’s sketches, by contrast, could be viewed as “punching up” against
the hegemony of elite college students (the name of one sketch is “Yale Lives
Matter” (the end of racism) (free college) and features Hyde and associates
gleefully announcing in the midst of a rally for Clinton on Yale’s campus that
they voted for Trump. To add insult to the injury, Hyde claims to have placed
a bet on Trump winning the election and won $25,000. At another point he
claims he is disappointed and will leave the country, “I’m gonna leave this
country. I was going to go to Mexico but now I’ll think I’ll go to Canada.
I dunno, it’s just got a better vibe” (Hyde). Here we see Hyde gesturing at
neoliberal racism, which always acts as a disavowal of racism, at the same
time it criticizes it in particular formations. Elite college students who support
Clinton against Trump because of his vulgarity and racism threaten to move
to Canada (but never Mexico). This is reminiscent of the widespread move
to Canada by Americans following Bush’s second election in 2004, (Chan
2016) and all of the Americans (mainly celebrities) threatening to move to
Canada if Trump were somehow elected. The discourses of the inevitability
302 Conclusion

of winning that surrounded Clinton’s candidacy was probably the main target
of Hyde’s comedy during this time. That Clinton’s team relied almost exclu-
sively on polling data and metrics (the same silly strategy she used to lose
the primary in 2007) and eschewed campaigning in important battleground
states, like Michigan, would make this sting even more for Trump haters (see
Rubenstein’s chapter, this volume). Recall our earlier mention of the lack of
institutional gatekeepers; rather, there are only the metrics used by network
executives to cover over any controversy. Before making a judgment though,
it is perhaps necessary to delve into Hyde’s comedy a bit more as it was too
close for comfort on the troll side.
Hyde’s early comedic work includes satirizing “thought leadership” at
a TED Talk at Drexel in 2013,4 and the co-creation of a fake character on
YouTube, Connor Jace, who posed as a stalker of Brianna Wu, one of the
game developers attacked by trolls on subreddits. Jan Rankowski and Hyde
created the online persona, they claim, to troll the trolls following Gamergate,
letting them believe they were goading a psychopathic “former and future
Marine” into stalking Wu, among other activities. The character brandished
a knife on screen often, with Semper Fidelis scrawled on it with a Sharpie.
Rankowski dubbed the stunt “Wupocalypse” and said he came up with the
idea after crashing his car. As the headlines read, “Man Who Terrorized Bri-
anna Wu for Months: Just Kidding!” An important point here though is that
Gamergate (and any trolling or shitposting around it) tended to reinforce the
already existent belief that women were a problem in gaming and should be
harassed off of the internet. Considering the very real context in which this
comedy “sketch” takes place, it is difficult to separate a creative act from a
literal stalking. Moreover, Gamergate trolls continued their activities into
the future waging a campaign on “SJWs (Social Justice Warriors),” namely,
who, to them, is anyone who would defend or promote progressive views,
like the idea of women in gaming. Hyde was also the subject of an ongoing
meme project, “Sam Hyde is the shooter” (usually attributed initially to fake
Bill O’Reilly twitter accounts). This prank, which he played along with, is
part and parcel with his anti-comedy stance. As one commentator put it, “He
seems to fits into the now-familiar profile pattern of lone white gunman, who
more times than not, is racist” (Eordogh 2016). Finally, there is some contro-
versy around Hyde’s actual popularity. Some claim the first episode of World
Peace had a million viewers (and better ratings than many other Adult Swim
shows). Others claim that over the nine years he maintained the YouTube
collective Million Dollar Extreme, his ratings were low, if steady.
After cancellation, the online buzz surrounding the show seemed to imply
that Adult Swim might relent in the future and green-light more episodes.
When a cherub-faced teen boy asked Milo Yannipoulous about the future of
 Conclusion 303

Figure C.1  “Sam Hyde Is the Shooter” Meme.*

the show (clad in a Christmas sweater displaying an elf wearing a dress) at a

December talk featured on YouTube, he opined,

This period in culture is coming to an end very soon. We’re going to see studios
emboldened to loft the SJW (social justice warriors) off the face of the planet.
Why? Because Trump won and these people aren’t stupid and ultimately care
about money. They’re going to see that Trump’s victory has demonstrated that
there is a colossal market out there for people who really don’t like feminism,
political correctness, social justice and all the other “cancers” that have infected
American public life.

As of this writing, Yannipoulous has been doxed (he lost his book deal and
job at Breitbart over earlier defenses of pedophilia he made in an interview),
Bannon has also been fired from the White House and Richard Spencer, a
white nationalist who also supported Trump, is now begging supporters for
money to support his legal fees. Clearly, Milo’s prophecy did not come true
about Hyde’s show. However, many young people still view it online. Other
figures, seemingly more benign but no less dangerous for their ideas have
arisen to replace them. Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, and others are making
the rounds with their pseudo academic theories about gender and race.
Hyde denied that he was affiliated with the alt-right and pointed out the
limits of Adult Swim’s sense of humor. On the cancellation, Hyde and
co-author Don Jolly wrote at The Daily Caller, “According to a certain
*
Here’s the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtCNu5XYo_Y.
304 Conclusion

Blockhead who is currently at Buzzfeed: ‘World Peace [was] one massive

in-joke designed to signify to a group of people online for whom the limits
of irony have been misplaced and forgotten,’ the so-called ‘trolls’ that helped
elect Donald Trump. Sounds a little paranoid to me” (Hyde and Jolly 2016).
At first glance, it might have seemed that the loose and unaffiliated group-
ing designated as alt-right—largely by the MSM—did not have a sense of
humor, given the serious consequences of their performances, particularly
their online behavior. They continue to harass minorities and women online
and in real life drawing upon the larger narratives of white, male supremacy
they glean from far right corners of the manosphere and white supremacist
parties and organizations across the North American and the European con-
tinent. At the time of Trump’s election, they professed to despise the global
trading order supported by neoliberal economic and political policy: free
markets, corporate diversity, open borders, tolerance for the sake of economic
openness, and so on. Over one year into the Trump presidency however, they
witness left social movements who attempt to forge grassroots campaigns
in favor of the dispossessed workers and students largely abandoned by the
Trump administration’s leadership. Instead of siding with these social move-
ments, whose stance they might have taken on only a year earlier, they have
taken to labeling anyone who critiques neoliberal policy as “crisis actors”
(not to be confused with the same crisis actors portrayed by Alex Jones’s
InfoWars immediately following the Sandy Hook mass shooting). These
“neoliberal truthers” now defend the current capitalist system as beneficial to
all, accusing “academics” and “intellectuals” who use the term of being lazy
ingrates who can not see how this corporate order where politics and moral-
ity are largely decided by the price mechanism provides them with the very
time and space to “mentally masturbate” about such things as exploitation
(Hayward 2017). What can explain these sudden turns in culture and politics?
Trolling and other indigenous fake news developments may indeed chal-
lenge the idea of “mass media,” as Wendy Chun has argued. Instead of being
a “mass,” that is, a monolithic group that receives a one-way message as in
broadcast media, we are now dissolved as individuals into Big Data’s data
streams; our activity defines who we are only as our activity correlates with
others’. In the gap between disaffection with contemporary politics and par-
tisanship and media coverage of it, we find a profound sense of unhappiness
in American life, only to be remedied by comedy. What kind of comedy
will prevail remains the question—Simon Weaver’s chapter on Brexit irony
is an affable warning about allowing comedy to take political liberties with
the truth. His example of caricature would become prescient in the months
following both Brexit and Trump’s election as memes of all sorts presented
half-truths about politics in order to satisfy left-leaning neoliberals: Clinton
supporters and uncritical EU fans. The most telling being the photograph of
 Conclusion 305

Donald Trump attributing to him words he never spoke ostensibly in People

Magazine, “If I were ever to run for President I would run as a Republican.
They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country.” is how the meme goes.
One thing we can be certain of: the alt-right’s tactics are funny, to a certain
demographic.5 Another certainty has been the confusion over the nature of
satire itself: with many unable to read it at all, unless it remains confined to a
provincial world view, is produced by an echo chamber whose contours and
shades of meaning with which they are familiar. For others, this inability to
read satire among large swathes of the mass media public, is an opportunity
to exploit their ignorance and affective reactions in order to persuade them
to vote and support conservative views (as with fake news, and more gener-
ally right-wing media, television and radio). In the case of shootings, the
“Sam Hyde is the shooter meme” is popular initially because “the trolls and
bots know it, and they’re able to game the algorithms,” he said. “Until the
algorithms have something that has some credibility to fill the void, they’ll
just fill it with anything” (Bromwich 2017).The persons most often fooled
by this meme come from the so-called “liberal” media. Even at the time of
this writing, six years after the initial meme of Hyde at Sandy Hook, a Texas
democrat, Vicente Gonzalez, was apparently passed the misinformation
before a CNN phone interview as the Texas church shooting was unfolding
(Bromwich 2017). Indeed, Hyde’s show was reclaimed and defended as a
“free speech” issue by conservative news outlets, like Fox and Breitbart, even
though Adult Swim is a private company and can cancel whatever shows it
wants for any reason. What is often lost in discussions over free speech on
left and right is the fact that “night watchman” of the classical liberal state
who once weighed in to protect things like speech is now wholly owned by
its corporate sponsors.
In the recent past, though, comedy came to be viewed as heroic (think of
how Jon Stewart is viewed). That view is on the wane. Somewhere at the
end of the Bush administration [or Dark Times, for which a comedy volume
explored its “dark humor,” (Gournelos and Green 2011)] and in the lead up
to the Tea Party, humor went off heroism. If comedy becomes the vehicle
for institutional critique, as Forbes’s Dadaist interpretation of Adult Swim
contends, then Hyde’s humor presents a critique of left-leaning (or, we might
say “left-feigning”) neoliberalism, that centrist complacency with corporate
power that Davies has exposed as a cultural phenomenon. Absent any criti-
cism of how left-leaning neoliberalism’s politics might actually function we
are left believing, according to the dominant media stance, that network com-
edy is salvation, rather than a potent construction of consent forged through
media. Although most comedy theorists do not speculate about comedy as it
is performed on the internet in trolling (or depending on one’s view cyber-
bullying that portends to ridicule and cruelty), but we might try to read these
306 Conclusion

“confrontations” on social media and elsewhere, especially as performed by

self-identified communities of trollers, or Hyde’s performances, as a cer-
tain kind of scene. As they further note, “This set of collapses, clashes, and
boundary disputes is exactly what enables us to have such spirited debates
about comedy and in a way we don’t feel as compelled to do for other genres”
(ibid, 239). I realize the idea of looking at “alt-right” humor6-if it even is such
a thing-as a “scene.” Furthermore, as “comedy” it might seem a stretch, but it
might be helpful to stretch the theory a bit and see where it goes. As Berlant
and Ngai argue, “Comedy suffuses so many genres that are not comedy that
it is hard to draw the line: porn, horror, melodrama” and they go on to name
more, including “varieties of social death” (ibid, 239). Duncan has identified
one such genre as “hate attribution,” where the left must always be seen as
positive and the right as negative, using ‘hate” effectively against the fake
optimism of democrats (e.g., “hope”). The point of the anti-humor of Hyde
is that it is perfectly suited to the integral reality we now inhabit, as outlined
in the introduction to this volume. We may see these kinds of comedic epi-
sodes as a troping off of detournément7; indeed, bloggers and bots seek to
disrupt any kind of media narrative that sets a coherent scene for the viewer
to casually (nostalgically) slide into that which “recognizes” them, much like
the leavers that Weaver speculates would like to return to “pre-Other, pre-
migrant” Britain in order to have neoliberalism in that nostalgic space.
Chun has argued “the internet is filled with vitriol and coercion, and the
conflation of diversity of opinion with democracy has led to a bizarre situ-
ation in which hate speech becomes evidence of democratic engagement”
(Chun 2016, 367). Although this is not the way self-proclaimed alt-right
trolls (hereafter shitposters) would define it. Rather, they see trolling and
meme creation (as a form of vitriol and coercion) as an important form of
policing “to disrupt people’s rosy vision of the internet as their own personal
emotional safe space that serves as a proxy for real-life interactions they are
lacking” (Phillips 2011, 71). They also view it as “controversial and trans-
gressive humour,” as “they do so to garner what many trolls refer to as ‘lulz’
a particular kind of aggressive, morally ambiguous laughter indicating the
infliction of moral distress” (Phillips 2011, 69). It is not intersubjective; trolls
admit that it is one-sided, and that they themselves may also suffer from an
inability to have real-life interactions” (ibid, 71). Yet, why do it? What is this
moral distress and why provoke it? Some have argued in defense of other
forms of alt-right humor that function in the same way as trolling in that they
are situationist or punk attempts at disrupting or revealing as fake the promise
of democratic engagement that Chun mentions. One way of interpreting what
they do is interrupt what Berlant has earlier called “cruel optimism” that is
the “condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object” (Berlant
2007, 33). In this case, the object is democratic engagement, and possibly
 Conclusion 307

optimism for the future, or nostalgia for a past: “Make America Great Again.”
These two ideals, while touted by neoliberal doctrine and found in many of
the idioms that structure everyday life along the lines of monetization (Brown
2015), are also deeply compromised. Not only could one argue that such
beliefs lead to an undoing of the very democratic institutions and ideals that
sustain the fantasy spaces of this cruel optimism but they lead perhaps even
further on into a kind of realism about capital (Fisher 2009).
This so-called “alt-right” meme-generation throughout the last election
was perhaps purposeful, and “magic.” As activists interested in generating
a wedge between American Muslims and the LGBT community argued,
“Meme magic is real boys, so spread this meme. Drive this wedge” (Lyons
2017). The implication of this was that support for Trump did not mean liking
the guy; it meant supporting his candidacy through extreme online versions of
his campaign rhetoric and performance. Trump could serve as a foil to bring
down the system that protected women, minorities, and immigrants. He could
be considered the alternative to “her.”
Perhaps this humor is nihilist? Ludic? It would depend on how we parse
the ideological and political field in which it operates (there’s too much
misinformation and anonymity to do that at present). Some trolls might be
in it for the spiteful nature of the activity (i.e., it just makes them feel better
to interrupt someone else’s fantasy space, however boringly constructed).
Another way to see it is that it provides cover for more hyper-racist, sexist,
and homophobic performances, the scenes of which are on display in more
elaborate detail in Million Dollar Extreme: World Peace. For example, one
episode, widely cited, has Hyde and another actor having an argument at
a couple’s wine party in a living room. The actor, playing Hyde’s brother,
attacks his (Hyde’s) wife. Hyde’s character seems to be working through his
relationship to his wife with the other actor, who is an asshole and is attack-
ing her. In a weirdly Socratic form of transferential recognition, a kind of
“brocade” Hyde’s character realizes that she is “his” wife and that she is out
of place when she is talking, drinking wine, and having her own opinions
at the party. As one commentator describes what happens next, “Rochefort
tripped Hyde’s ‘field hockey wife’ into a glass table and quickly convinced
him that the woman was to blame” (Weigel 2017). As she lays there with
blood all over her face, staring at them with disbelief, there is no “wink” or
break in character, as with other parodies that signify to the audience some
form of disagreement or critical intervention. Instead, this “anti-comedy” is
seemingly deadly serious. The lulz this scene might have provoked serve only
to reinforce a kind of male superiority that is derived from hating a certain
type of woman (e.g., independent, outspoken, perhaps even, emasculating).
So it would seem the interplay between these dynamics in American soci-
ety are propelling this vitriol forward into a kind of comedic space where
308 Conclusion

it seems like, as the Chun quote earlier revealed, it’s a kind of “democratic
engagement.”

Rather than being unified around a coherent politics, the “alt-right” is more easily
identified by a common cultural shorthand: a thick stew of memes, inside jokes,
and recurring phrases like “shitlord,” “fashy goy,” and “cuckservative” that
satirize liberals, conservatives, and even themselves. The “alt-right” may have
gained attention for its association with a newly ascendant reactionary populism,
but the online movement is really a product of an older internet culture that revels
in the political nihilism that online anonymity permits. (Malmgren 2017, 11)

Phillips could not agree more, and argues that two main things complicate the
relationship between Trump and these platform activities. First, she argues
that the MSM, especially in this case of Trump, Fox News, the difference
between them is not that one is more “earnest” than the other, but that the
message of Fox News is more “toxic” (Phillips 2015, 107).8

Indeed, the assertion—most conspicuously forwarded in Dale Beran’s widely

shared “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump” article—that there
exists a fundamental continuity between the 4chan and Anonymous of today and
the 4chan and Anonymous of ten years ago is complicated by just how much
progressive activism has been undertaken by Anonymous since 2008. Contrary
to Beran's account, which grossly minimizes Anonymous’ role in Occupy Wall
Street, the Anonymous of 2008-2015 displayed an ever growing commitment to
social justice issues. (Phillips, Beyers & Coleman 2017)

As Phillips argues, shitposting on /r/the_Donald (Trump supporter reddit) did

help raise the profile of the alt-right, but not only through its platform alone
but through the “cybernetic feedback loop” between such platforms and their
amplification in MSM in various forms: on Fox News, Hillary’s Clinton’s
denouncing of the alt-right itself in her August speech referencing “deplora-
bles” and Pepe the Frog, and Bannon’s embrace of it as his own. In this case,
then, Adult Swim’s sardonic “anti-humor” could be thought of in two ways:
one, as a continuance of the humor tradition where humor does not provoke
engagement but provides relief and forms of guilt-free disengagement or two,
anti-humor is precisely the opposite in that its effect is to stimulate engage-
ment through disgust. Often called “cringe-worthy” such comedy provokes a
reaction in its onlookers.
Critics agree that Hyde’s work and show is not comedy but anti-comedy:
“Intrinsic to AdultSwim’s brand—that is, humor that seems to make a delib-
erate effort to not provide laughs, to make its audience uncomfortable, and to
challenge them with horrifying imagery and themes” (Sims 2016). Does this
anti-comedy seek to replace comedy, which, as we’ve seen has been accused
 Conclusion 309

of being liberal and of policing all other forms of expressive discontent with
the current neoliberal moment? There is also the issue of location of dissent: is
this elite-driven “astroturf” populism or is it truly a grassroots phenomenon?
It is clear that supporters on the right are better at it than those on the left:

Even though the “meme magic” narrative has been grossly oversold, it’s worth
considering just how seriously the right takes its shitposting, and how impotent
the left's attempts to engage in meme warfare have been. In talking to some
members of Trump’s meme army, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with
Ryan Milner, author of The World Made Meme who wrote his Ph.D disserta-
tion on memetics. “The clarity of focus, the clarity of vision, the clarity of what
you're playing with and the message you're getting across—the right tends to be
a little better at that,” Milner said. “With memes, there's the sense of spreading
an idea and working to circulate that and seeing if it resonates, which is some-
thing that on thedonald happens really well. You need this lingua franca so that
the memes don't have to come from the top down, they can come from the bottom
up.” (Koebler 2017, emphasis mine)

It is worth bringing the recent success of Roseanne 2.0 back into the discus-
sion. Like Hyde, Roseanne claims to have voted for Trump. The difference
is that Roseanne Barr is celebrated for this (or at least was not punished by
networks). Could it be that by using the old story line and set which told a
story of progressive working class values is now the scene for another kind of
“bottom up” lingua franca? Was Roseanne Barr’s recent show funny or was
it comic relief? Wasn’t Roseanne Barr always a kind of anti-comedian who
brought realism to the forefront of her show with a beer drinking husband (he
drinks a lot of beer on that show), the exact same house (with little improve-
ment) and a still humorless (often deadly serious sister) who embodies all
that the right claims is wrong with feminism? Which brings me to the subject
of humorlessness, recently theorized by Lauren Berlant. Humorlessness is a
genre of comedy that seemingly takes hold during this historical juncture.
Might we place anti-comedy in this category? If so, what is at stake for neo-
liberalism, with its commitment to positive thoughts about social and political
life, its “cruel optimism,” and its insistence that comedians, while allowed
to broach subversive, edgy territory, must wink or provide some other form
of tacit disagreement with the ridicule it inflicts on its subject? As Duncan
argued, liberalism (often the territory of the Left) must be positive, must teach
some lesson of tolerance, respect, or even love. In humorlessness, “the come-
dian tries to structure within life’s ongoing disturbance surplus contingency,
surprise, and troublesome knowledge to the audience who must enjoy it out
of pity, empathy, rage and/or love” (Berlant 2017, 339). Could we add here,
in the case of Hyde, and others who exploit the current political situation for
profit, out of spite?
310 Conclusion

What this volume has demonstrated is largely two-fold: audiences (of both
politics and comedy) yearn to keep parts of neoliberalism that still promise
prosperity, while ditching the parts that politicians and corporate executives
have told them blocks such progress (immigrants, minorities, elites, SJW’s,
government, human rights, women as equals, etc.). Second, in the era of
post-normativism, Big Data allows comedy and humor to reach audiences at
unprecedented rates and quality. Nevertheless, it also allows for the equaliza-
tion of all content, regardless of threats to basic human decency, civil rights,
and environmental sustainability. What is missing is perhaps morality.

NOTES

1. I make no claim that Turner (and Adult Swim) had any idea about the content
of MDE. I assume that they green-lit the show before they even vetted its content,
using only the group’s metrics and audience ratings as a way to decide on airing its
first season, a truly neoliberal process. Once a “controversy” arises, the network must
reconsider because another imperative of neoliberal functioning is to be as “tonally
neutral” as possible. See Viveca Greene’s comment mentioned in the introduction;
passion and feeling is a liability.
2. “Each of the participants are there as particular structural effects of the conjunc-
ture.” In the election, Hyde is there as an effect of the conjucture. See The Philosophi-
cal Conjuncture and Marxist theoretical research*, in The Humanist Controversy and
Other Writings, Ed. F. Matheron (Verso, London 2003, 1–18). Notes taken by Erik
Empson for www.generation-online.org—November 23, 2003, found at: http:​//www​
.gene​ratio​n-onl​ine.o​rg/p/​fpalt​husse​r5.ht​m.
3. Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari (March 2016).
4. see: https​://ww​w.buz​zfeed​.com/​charl​iewar​zel/t​his-c​omedi​an-hi​jacks​-a-te​d-tal​
k-and​-basi​cally​-make​s-a-f​ool?u​tm_te​rm=.e​fkegr​A8D#.​abK3a​2wOe.​
5. If we use 4chan’s demographics—loosely—as a representation of this demo-
graphic, as Evan Malmgren does, as he writes, “as proxy” then they are “70 percent
male, primarily aged 18–34, the majority of whom attended or are currently enrolled
in college” (Malmgren 2017, 12).
6. I also realize it is problematic to lump all these different political spaces together
under the term “alt-right,” however, for the purposes of this conclusion (and to pro-
voke discussion) I will use the distinction among right-wing discourses (far right)
drawn by Matthew Lyons, “for most Alt Rightists race is the basis for everything
else,” alongside, he argues, the sexism they encountered in the “manosphere” (most
pronounced in the Gamergate scandal, covered widely on MSM) where they have
“embraced an intensely misogynistic ideology, portraying women as irrational, vin-
dictive creatures who need and want men to rule over them and should be stripped
of any political role,” and they have also, in the past few years, through offline and
online networking, “followed the European New Right lead and focused on a ‘meta-
political’ strategy seeking to transform the broader culture.” This is the central point
 Conclusion 311

I want to get at here in focusing on the alt-right or alt.Light (as some spinoffs became
known prior to and during the Republican primaries in support of Trump). It’s not
that, as many have argued (myself elsewhere and media scholars) the popularity
of Trump was amplified by meme culture simply because people viewed memes
and other content on social media as convincing (or, confirming of their hidden,
but strongly held, views) but because the alt-right trolls generated memes that took
much of their content and inspiration from MSM ideas that could not be proclaimed
outright. As Whitney Phillips has argued, it’s the difference between “inferential rac-
ism” (Fox News, most often, but others too) and overt racism. Trolls use overt racism
to confirm the inferential racism of the MSM. Also, they use these memes (and the
media’s coverage of them) to open these ideas (racist and sexist) up to the public for
consideration. While the MSM is seemingly shaming such discourses, their repeated
coverage has an effect on those who might tacitly agree. This is why the online activ-
ism during the primary and campaign season actually helped Trump: the Leslie Jones
Twitter attack (Greene’s chapter), the attack against cuckservatives, (“combining the
words ‘conservative’ and ‘cuckhold’ means a man whose wife has had sex with other
men,” Lyons again), and the campaign against immigration. Lyons further explains
that the term is explicitly racist, quoting Joseph Bernstein, “referring to a genre of
porn in which passive white husbands watch their wives have sex with black men,
it casts its targets as impotent defenders of white people in America” (Lyons 2017).
So, think here of Trump’s inferential targeting of his primary opponents and Clinton,
slight versions of the meming online. So, the media loop is complete: the online activ-
ism of the alt-right (brazenly racist and sexist), combined with the less so obvious
Alt. Light (Breitbart, etc.), combined with the coverage of all this in the MSM, (Fox,
MSNBC, and CNN), and finally, Trump’s own, brazen, up against the line, public
declarative statements and Tweets (boldfaced lies, references to Pepe, and ugly asper-
sions cast on republican primary rivals: “Little Marco” and Jeb Bush’s “low energy”).
As a meme following Youtube clips of debates between Jeb Bush and Trump ends
the segment, a Shepard Fairey copy with Trump’s face appears with the message:
“Donald Trump,” “Fuck your feelings.” Seen here: https​://ch​iefdo​naldt​rump.​com/w​
p-con​tent/​uploa​ds/20​16/03​/fuck​-your​-feel​ings-​trump​-meme​.jpg.​
7. Contrary to the claim made by Angela Nagle, that the left is at fault for going
too far in its cultural strategies of critique, we would do well to remember that a
strategy of the evangelical and far right has always been to copy the aesthetics of the
left. Corey Robin explained this about reaction quite some time ago: “If conservatism
is a specific reaction to a specific movement of emancipation, it stands to reason that
each reaction will bear the traces of the movement it opposes,” and further on, “not
only has the right reacted against the left, but in the course of conducting its reaction,
it also has consistently borrowed from the left” (Robin 2018, 30).
8. Here we might think of Alex Pareene’s recent essay, “The Long, Lucrative
Right-wing Grift is Blowing Up in the World’s Face,” Fusion. August 5. Fount at:
http:​//fus​ion.n​et/th​e-lon​g-luc​rativ​e-rig​ht-wi​ng-gr​ift-i​s-blo​wing-​up-in​-t-17​93944​216 .
How is a part of the alt-right machine (the more pronounced one, Spencer, or the alt.
light counterpart, not a new attempt to instantiate this grift, except the grift will not
be “old white men” but young ones?
312 Conclusion

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 Index
2 Dope Queens, 6, 26, 222, 235–36
12 Years a Slave, 38
absolute comic, 74
abuse, online, 44–47
activism, 68;
citizen-satire, 97–99;
digital, 97–99;
humorous, 107;
millennial, 87–88, 90;
online, 89, 117;
political, 29, 88, 116, 169;
portmanteau of, 87;
prevalence on social media, 88;
as satiractivism, 88;
social media in, 98–99;
youth, 96–97
Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP),
106–7, 109, 123
Adkins, David, 40
Adult Swim comics, 25, 26, 293, 298,
299–310
Aesthetics of Ugliness, 73
aesthetics politics, 207–15
Affleck, Casey, 268
African American:
alternative comics, 229;
comedy, 14, 43;
comics, 26, 224;
as mentally inferior, 46–47;
315
stand-up comedy, 221–22;
women, 15, 22, 26
The Aftermath of Feminism, 275
agon, 137
Air America, 206
Akman, Ayhan, 108
AKP. See Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi
(AKP)
Aldrich, Robert, 280, 281
Alexander, Michelle, 14
Ali G, 184
Allen, Keith, 181
All Jokes Aside: Black Women in
Comedy, 223
alternative comedy, 222, 223–42;
from awkward to dope, 235–39;
“Be Blacker,” 233–35;
black comedians in, 182, 222;
black women in, 226–29;
impressions, 231–33;
as movement, 181;
with right-wing, 182;
rise of, 181;
“Shake-a-dang-dang!,” 229–31;
success, 182
alt-right, 11, 46, 49, 188, 201, 204, 293,
296–310
American Horror Story: Cult, 17, 27,
269, 271–76
Amityville: The Awakening, 269
316 Index

Anderson, Kai, 273 The Babadook, 268, 269, 277

André, Eric, 229, 299 Baby Boomers, 87
angry black women. See black women Bacon, Kevin, 239
Anotine, Katja, 42 Badinter, Elisabeth, 278
anti-black beauty structure, 42, 43 Bailey, Moya, 45
anti-comedy, 293–96 Baldwin, Alec, 178
antijokes, 39, 43; Banks, Arron, 78
Black feminist, 55–59; Bannon, Steve, 45, 297
Twitter trolls with, 47 Barnes, Chloe, 12
Antoinette, Marie, 171 Barr, Roseanne, 28, 296, 298, 308
Apatow, Judd, 300 Barthes, Roland, 196, 269
Apel, Dora, 49 Based on a True Story: A Memoir,
apolitical generation, 109 204
The Apprentice, 298 Basic Instinct, 279
Arab Spring, 6, 90 Bataille, George, 114, 137
Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle, 70 Batur, Pinar, 110
Aronofsky, Darren, 269 Baudelaire, C., 74
Aronowitz, S., 67 Bauman, Zygmunt, 66, 67–68, 94
Arthur, Alice, 226 BBC news, 76, 189
Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, 108, 111 “Be Blacker,” 233–35
Ataturk Cultural Centre, 121 Beck, Glenn, 14
The Atlantic, 164, 251 Bee, Samantha, 19, 133, 162, 165
Attardo, S., 71 Bell, Steve, 77, 80
audiences: Berger, A. A., 70
black, 226; Berlant, Lauren, 5, 9, 10, 11, 14, 168,
college-educated, 15; 201, 246, 255
conservative, 203; Beyoncé, 232
counterculture, 7; big box marketing, 15
ideal, 25, 197–98, 202; Big Data, 21, 23, 199, 202, 203, 304
liberals, 203; Billig, Michael, 38, 39, 49–51, 55, 56
with motivation, 170; Binder, Matt, 98
and performer, social contract birthers, 1
between, 253; BitchMedia, 257
technologies and, 27 black comedy, 26, 221–42
Aufklärung, 147, 149, 150 Black feminist unlaughter, 55–59
auntie humor, 121–23 black folk humor, 223
authoritarianism, 5, 23–24; black girl awkwardness, 230–31
neoliberal, 107; BlackkKlansman, 269
in Turkey, 105–24 Black Lives Matter, 14
Average Joe, 134, 138–42, 142–49, black male comics, 26, 221, 224–25
151–55 Black men, 56
The Awkward Comedy Show, 229, Black Twitter, 22
231 black womanhood, 26, 225, 226, 231–
awkwardness, black women, 230–31 34, 241–42
 Index 317

black women, 15, 37, 38–39; and right-wing comedy, 177–90;

in alternative scene, 226–29, 235–39; and stand-up comedy, 181
awkwardness, 230–31; Brooker, Alex, 66, 76, 79
comedy, 26, 221–42; Brown, Arnold, 180
crossover comedy, 39–42; Brown, Dave, 77
discourse of, 226; Brown, Doc, 185
gendered oppression, 56; Brown, Eric S., 225
as masculine, 46–47; Brown, Wendy, 136, 201, 238
network of comics, 227; Bruce, Lenny, 224, 247, 248
postmodern satire, 233–35; Burke, Kenneth, 167
racial oppression, 56; Burr, Bill, 246, 256, 257
sassy, 225, 229–35; Burress, Hannibal, 221, 229
slavery, 39–42; Bush, George W., 15
subjectivity, 226; Buteau, Michelle, 227, 236
urban versus alternative comedy, 227 Butler, Judith, 178, 275
Blades, Joan, 89 Byer, Nicole, 227, 228, 233–35
Blau, Judith R., 225
Booth, Wayne, 196–99, 203, 211 Cambridge, Godfrey, 224
Bourdieu, Pierre, 133, 138, 140 Cambridge Analytica, 201
Bowlby, Rachel, 285 Cameron, David, 77, 151–52
Boyd, Wes, 89 Can We Take a Joke?, 247, 252, 258,
Boyer, Dominic, 114, 115 259
Bradley, Laura, 89 capitalism, neoliberal, 11, 38, 89
Bradley, Regina N., 230 caricature, 22, 66;
Brakhage, Stan, 286 of Brexit politicians, 66–67;
branding, 202 definition of, 73;
Brasset, James, 6, 24, 294 in EU referendum campaign, 75–81;
Breaking Bad, 238 examples of, 72–73;
breastfeeding, 278 of Farage, Nigel, 76–79;
Breeding Slave, 39, 41 genre of, 72;
Breitbart News, 45 of Johnson, Boris, 79–81;
Brennan, Teresa, 276 as political satire, 72–75;
Brexit discourse, 65–82; as short-circuit sign, 74–75;
in comedy, 66–82; use of, 67
contradictions of, 72; Carlin, George, 247
as floating signifier, 71; Carlson, Matt, 168
as populist, 68; Carolla, Adam, 248
situational irony of, 76, 78 Carpio, Glenda, 14, 22, 41
Brexit irony, 65–67, 70–72, 304 Carroll, Rebecca, 40
Brexit populism, 67, 68–69, 71 cartoons, 73;
Bridesmaids, 15 about Ergenekon, 110;
Brigstocke, J., 70 Ottoman, 108;
British comedy, 24, 177–90; Turkish, 108, 109–10, 112–13
and politics of resistance, 177–90; Castagner, Marc-Olivier, 24, 25
318 Index

Cenac, Wyatt, 221 innovative, 25;

Chang, Tom, 273 job, 41;
Chappelle, Dave, 14, 15, 16, 43, 200, labor of, 166–70;
221, 224, 252 late night, 13;
Châtelet, Gilles, 7–8, 20 material effects of, 296–310;
cheekiness, comedy, 170–72 as mediation, 10–21;
Chisolm, Shirley, 15, 259 in neoliberalism, 21–28, 160;
Cho, Margaret, 228 political, 2, 4, 8, 160–62, 168, 195,
Chomsky, Noam, 182 200, 204, 208, 209, 214, 268;
Chun, Wendy, 304, 306, 308 race, 39–43;
citizen-satire activism, 97–99 recognition, 25, 299–300;
citizenship, 88, 92–93 right-wing, 24, 177–90;
Clarkson, Jeremy, 186 stand-up, 221–22, 224, 226–29;
Clay, Andrew Dice, 250 style of, 55, 228, 234, 236, 257;
Clegg, Nick, 79 trickster, 26;
clictivism, 89–90 urban, 223–24
Clinton, Bill, 23, 136 Comedy Central, 25, 156, 161, 194,
Clinton, Hillary, 167 195, 197, 209, 211, 301
Cohen, Sascha, 247, 250, 252, 257, 301 comedy-horror, 27, 268
Colbert, Stephen, 24, 97–98, 99, 101, Comedy Store, 180
133, 150, 162, 164, 165, 168, It Comes at Night, 268
172, 193–215, 259, 268, 298, Comic Relief, 185
299, 301 The Comic Strip, 180, 181
The Colbert Report, 24, 97, 133, 194, Comic View, 227
201, 207, 210, 213, 214, 299 commodification:
Coleman, Gabriella, 52 comedy, 179;
Colletta, L., 72 of diversity, 6
colonialism, 39, 42, 43, 248 common sense, 138, 139, 141, 151
Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, 256 communicative capitalism, 116
comedy, 9–10; communist militarism, 248
African American, 14, 43; community, 58, 96;
black, 221–42; black, 15, 29;
black women, 39–42, 222–42; breeds, 250;
Brexit discourse in, 66–82; of dissent, 98;
British, 24; gated, 67;
cheekiness, 170–72; labor, 166;
containment, 25; of laughter, 222, 238;
controversies in, 21–22; LGBT, 87, 307;
educational, 15; marginalized, 59;
enslavement and, 40; political, 199;
as expectation, 10–21; reality-based, 5–6;
gender, 40; of sense, 201;
as genre, 10–21; shared, 99;
historical, 15; YouTube, 172
horror, 267–86; containment comedy, 25
 Index 319

Conway, Joe, 11, 12 Dear White People, 269

Coogan, Steve, 186 Def Comedy Jam, 227
Cooper, Brittney, 41, 43 de la Tour, Andy, 180
Cooper, Melinda, 15, 22 Delonas, Sean, 49
Cosby, Bill, 200, 224, 253 democracy, 11, 38
Coulter, Ann, 14 Desmonds, 182
Couture, Jean-Pierre, 150 Dick, Andy, 228
Crawford, Joan, 280, 281 Didion, Joan, 208
crime, 39 digi modernism, 11
Critchley, Simon, 9 digital activism, 97–99
Critique of Cynical Reason, 147 Direniş Hatırası, 113, 117
Cross, David, 228 divisive humor, 55, 56
Crouch, Ian, 254, 256 Doane, Mary Ann, 275
The Crystal Palace, 148, 149 Dodd, Chris, 195
cults, 271–76 Dolar, Mladen, 271
cultural schizophrenia, 108 domination, techniques of, 3
culture wars, 24, 133–34; Dorsey, Jack, 47
analysis, 138; double-consciousness, Du Boisian
infotainment and, 134–42; condition of, 222, 225
moral hazards and, 135; doxxing, 44
neoliberal policies and, 135; Dream: Reimagining Progressive
order-recreation to Average Joe, Politics in an Age of Fantasy,
138–42; 96
as playfulness, 137; D'Souza, Dinesh, 43
rules of game in, 137 Du Boisian:
cybernetics, 12, 20, 308 condition of double-consciousness,
cynical labor, 25, 166–70 222, 225–26;
cynicism, 12, 99, 114, 134, 142, 148, Veil, 222, 225
155, 166–71 Duckworth, Tammy, 279
Duggan, Lisa, 27, 249, 250
Dagtas, Secil, 7, 23–24 Duncan, Pansy Kathleen, 11
The Daily Caller, 300, 303 Duncombe, Stephen, 88, 96, 99
The Daily Show, 24, 88, 97, 114, 133, Dungeons and Dragons, 209
162, 178, 208, 211, 253, 299 Dunham, Lena, 19, 282
Daley, David, 258–59
Dalton, Russell, 92 earnestness, 11–12
Davidson, Telly, 135, 136, 144, 152 Ebony, 39, 56
Davies, Will, 179 Eckert, Penny, 231
Davies, William, 201 economic norms, 9
Davis, Allison P., 238 economic philosophy, 2
Davis, Angela, 43 economy, 2
Davis, Bette, 280, 281 educational comedy, 15
Day, Amber, 170, 214 Ekperigin, Naomi, 227, 236
Day Today, 184 Ekşi Sözlük, 115
Dean, Jodi, 8 Elfwick, Godfrey, 188
320 Index

Elias, Norbert, 69 feminist self, 17

Elton, Ben, 181 Feud, 280
emotional labor, 167–68 Fielding, Steve, 8
end of politics, 12 Fink, B., 276
engaged citizenship, 92–93 Finley, Jessyka, 6, 15, 26, 40, 55, 259
Entertaining the Citizen, 97 Flanagan, Caitlin, 164
entertainment, 97 Flatliners, Ghost or Jacob’s Ladder,
epistemology, 207 268
equality politics, 27 flesh-and-blood (FB) author, 196, 197
Equality Street, 185, 188 The Florida Project, 275
Erdoğan, Tayyip, 106, 113 It Follows, 269
Ergenekon, 110 Forbes, Adam, 299
essentialist feminism, 278 Fordham, Signithia, 226
ethical spectacles, 96–99 Foster, Karith, 252
ethos, 70, 79, 81; Foucault, Michel, 3, 10, 16, 196
digital, 203; Fox News, 49, 100, 208, 294, 295, 296,
evaluation, 203; 308, 308
IA as post-digital, 200–206; Foxx, Redd, 224
implied author (IA) as, 198–200 Franklin, Marina, 227, 228, 229–31
EU referendum campaign, caricature in, freedom, 4, 6, 18, 20, 38, 54
75–81 free-dumb, 20
Eurocentrism, 6 French, Dawn, 180
Eurotaoismus, 148 Full Frontal, 133, 162
Exit 57, 197 Funches, Ron, 221
The Exorcist, 270 funnel helmets protest, 112–14, 117,
Experiencing Fiction, 210 118;
extremist fringe, 113 by environmentalists and inhabitants
of Bursa, 119;
Facebook, 57, 90, 201, 246 by nurses’ union, 118;
fake news, 20, 29, 133, 141, 204, 207, by students of Mersin University,
212, 268, 296, 304 119
Fallon, Jimmy, 13, 163
false consciousness, 147–49 gallows humor, 206
Farage, Nigel, 23, 76–79, 179 Galvin-Lewis, Jane, 226
Fatal Attraction, 279 GamerGate, 17, 37, 44–47, 302, 310n6
Fauset, Jessie, 223 Gangnam style, 187
Fawlty Towers, 184 Gargantua and Pantagruel, 73
Feagin, Joe R., 57 Garofalo, Janeane, 228
Featherstone, M., 67 Gay, Roxane, 41, 282
feedback, 27, 247, 252, 255, 258, 259, Gelman, Brett, 300
261, 308 Gena Davis Inclusion Quotient (GD-
feminism, 16–17; IQ), 269
essentialist, 278; gender, 15, 19;
neoliberal, 27; comedy, 40;
neoliberal manifestations of, 17; horror comedy, 269–71, 279–81;
as self-serving, 19 in media, 14;
 Index 321

in political comedy, 14; Gottfried, Gilbert, 247, 252, 257

and race, 55; Gourarie, Chava, 296
role of, 25 Gove, Michael, 23
gendered capitalism, 42, 43 Grae, Jean, 236
gender passing, 226–27 Gray, Herman, 42
General Electric, 159 Gray, Jonathan, 142, 150–51
Genet, Jean, 283 Green, Tom, 301
genre, 9, 10; Greene, Viveca, 5, 17, 21, 22
body, 269; Gregory, Dick, 224, 247
of caricature, 72; Griffin, Kathy, 19, 228
comedy as, 10–21; Grondin, David, 24, 25, 141
earnestness, 11–12; grotesque, 69, 72, 74, 79, 139
hate attribution, 11; The Guardian, 77, 80, 89, 189,
helps, 9; 221
humorlessness, 284, 309; Gurel, Perin, 121, 123
stiob, 114 GWOT. See Global War on Terror
Gervais, Ricky, 24, 184, 185, 186 (GWOT)
Get Out, 269, 270, 272–73, 282
Gezi Park, Turkey, 105 Haggins, Bambi, 42, 43, 224
Gezi protests, in Turkey, 7, 105–24 Haidt, Jonathan, 251
Ghostbusters, 17, 22, 37, 44–45, 55 Hall, Stuart, 55, 133, 138
The Ghost Busters, 53 Hansome, Rhonda, 226
A Ghost Story, 268 Harold, Christine, 170
Giles, Martin, 165 Harrison, Chris, 267
Gillota, David, 224, 225 Harron, Mary, 282
Gilmore, Leigh, 205 Hart, Kevin, 224
Ginelle, Leela, 257 Hartman, Andrew, 297
Giora, R., 71 Harvard Institute of Politics, 91
Girard, René, 144 Hashtags, 58
Girl Code, 235 Hasselbeck, Elisabeth, 14
Girls, 282 hate attribution genre, 11
Giroux, Henry, 94–95 Haugerud, Angelique, 99
Giuliani, Rudy, 195 Have I Got News for You, 178, 179
Givens, Adele, 224 Hawkins, Calise, 227, 236
Glamour magazine, 235 Hays Code, 247
globalization: Herring, Richard, 184
negative, 67; Hertz, Emily, 228
neoliberal, 66, 67–69, 71; higher education entertainment, 257
as utopia, 67 Hilliard, Chloe, 227
global management state, 6 Hills, Adam, 66, 76, 77, 78
global neoliberalism, othering in, 66 Hispanics, 57
Global War on Terror (GWOT), 6, 12 historical comedy, 15
Glover, Donald, 221 Homo Ludens, 137
Gone with the Wind, 234 homonationalism, 274
Gonzalez, Vicente, 305 homo oeconomicus, 201
Good Morning Britain, 77–78 Hope, Beverly, 275, 276, 278
322 Index

horror comedy, 267–86; anti-racist, 51;

cults, 271–76; culturalist, 6–7, 95;
gender, 269–71, 279–81; free market, 7;
phobia, 276–78; political, 209;
post-horror, 269–71; in pop cultural media, 59;
Solanas, Valerie, 281–85; privileging, 249;
and women, 279–81 racial, 48, 49, 51, 55, 56, 58;
House of Cards, 12 white supremacist, 56
Howe, Neil, 92 imperialism, 39
Huchtens, Eleanor, 203 implied author (IA), 196–98;
Huffington Post, 261 as ethos, 198–200;
Huizinga, Johan, 133, 137, 138 as post-digital ethos, 200–206
human security, 2 individualism, 20, 69
humor, 8; inequality, radical, 18–19
activism, 107; infotainers, 133, 134, 138–44
alt-right, 11, 46, 49, 188; infotainment, 21, 133–34;
auntie, 121–23; birth of, 135;
black folk, 223; culture wars and, 134–42;
divisive, 55, 56; modus operandi of, 151
gallows, 206; InfoWars, 209
Gezi Park, 107–8, 114–15, 121; In Living Color, 42, 234
meta-discourse of, 47, 52–55; İnönu, İsmet, 108
and power, 106; Insane Clown Posse online, 201
racist, 38–43, 55. See also racist Instagram, 221, 246
humor; institutional profits, late night comedy
as resistance, 112–20; and, 161–63
rhetorical context of, 51, 69–70; insult comedy, 7
sense of, 23; integral reality, 12
style of, 55, 228, 234, 236, 257; intentionalism, 196
as symbolic violence, 120–23; Internet, 90, 245
theory, 38; irony, 65, 203;
in Turkey protests, political use, as algorithmic resistance, 203–6;
106–24; Brexit irony, 65–67, 70–72, 304;
Turkish, 108 definitions, 65, 70;
humorlessness, 284, 309 everyday, 184;
Hutcheon, Linda, 10 over political correctness, 188;
Huyssen, Andres, 169 postmodern, 71–72;
Hyde, Sam, 296–309 romantic, 71–72;
situational, 71, 72, 76
Iannucci, Armando, 184 irritability, 149
I Be Done Been Was Is, 226 I Shot Andy Warhol, 282
Ideal Audience, 25, 197–98, 202 Islamism, 6
identity politics, 14, 18, 44, 109, 182, Is Satire Saving Our Nation, 97
185, 186 ITV news, 76
ideologies: Izadi, Elahe, 221
 Index 323

Jace, Connor, 302 Kingsmith, A. T., 299, 301

Jackson, Jesse, 136 Kinison, Sam, 250
Jackson, Sarah, 58 Kirby, Alan, 11
James, LeBron, 40 Klein, S. R., 72, 73
Jane Eyre, 269 Kondabolu, Hari, 255
Jay, Sam, 236 Koresh, David, 272
Jeffries, Jim, 257 Kotsko, Adam, 21, 26, 54, 67, 171, 249
Jennings, Ben, 80 Krefting, Rebecca, 27, 297
“Joey Quits,” viral video, 202 Kucinich, Dennis, 195
Johnson, Boris, 23, 75, 79–81, 178–79, Kuipers, Giselinde, 38
187 Kyi, Aung San Suu, 182
Johnson, Zainab, 227 Kyl, Jon, 97
jokes: kynicism, 147, 150, 169
during Gezi protests, 121;
racist, 48–49; Lacan, J., 276
rhetorical context of, 69–70; La Leche League (LLL), 278
as tiny revolution, 163; lamest generation. See millennials
on Vietnamese women, 258 Lampanelli, Lisa, 246, 257
Jolly, Don, 300, 303 “Lanky Kong” joker, 50
Jones, Alex, 136, 209 LaSha, 56
Jones, Jeffrey, 142, 150–51 The Last Leg, 66, 76, 77, 78
Jones, Jim, 272 Last Week Tonight (LWT), 24–25, 66,
Jones, Leslie, 8, 15, 17, 21–22, 37, 44, 76, 80, 133, 142–47, 163–64;
259; formatted performance of, 143–47;
attacks to, 44–45; main topic/story, 146–47;
criticism, 37–42; Panopticon, 145;
Internet trolls to, 44–55; quick recap, 143–45
online racist harassment campaign late night comedy, 13, 25;
against, 37, 45–47, 49, 52, 58; cheekiness, 170–72;
pain, 41–42; cynical labor and, 166–70;
racist Twitter trolls against, 45–47, institutional profits and, 161–63;
49, 52, 58 political economy of, 159–72;
Jost, Colin, 22, 38 as small revolutions, 163–66
Jung, E. Alex, 228 Late Night with Seth Meyers, 246
Justice and Development Party, 106 Late Show, 193–94, 200, 204
laughter, 38, 50–51
Kardaş, Tuncay, 110 Lawrence, Martin, 224
Kent, Jennifer, 268 Lawson, Thomas, 13, 25
Kessler-Harris, Alice, 248, 249 lazy, 18–19
Key, Keegan-Michael, 251, 252, 260 Leave.EU campaign, 23, 78, 81
Keynesian economics, 2 leavers, 22
Khalil, Yousef, 6 Lee, Spike, 234, 269
Kimmel, Jimmy, 163, 164 Lee, Stewart, 178, 184
kinetic utopia, 148 left neoliberalism, 11
King, Jr., Martin Luther, 14 Leigh, Jennifer Jason, 269
324 Index

Leman, 110 McClennen, Sophia, 23–24

Lemieux, Jamilah, 39, 40, 43 McDonald, Heather, 258
Lenny Henry Show, 182 McDonald, Michael, 257
lesbianism, 275 McInnes, Gavin, 300
Letterman, David, 204 McKain, Aaron, 13, 25
Lewis, Paul, 39 McKinnon, Kate, 44
liberalism, 4, 10 McLeroy, Don, 209–10
liberation, 120 McMillan Cottom, Tressie, 42
liberty, 4 McNutt, Myles, 172
Limbaugh, Rush, 136 Mc Robbins, Angela, 273
Lindsay, Rachel, 267 Meet the Press, 195, 197, 199
Loaded, 184, 185 Meserko, Vince, 236
localized neoliberal hybrids, 17 meta-discourse of humor, 47, 52–55
logos, 70, 81 #MeToo, 201
Louis, C. K., 259 Meyer, John C., 51
ludic surveillance, 134 Meyers, Seth, 164
Luenell, 224 Michaels, Lorne, 208
Lukianoff, Greg, 251 migratory movements, 151
lulz, 22, 37–59 millennials, 23, 88;
Luther, Martin, 171 activism, 87–88, 90;
LWT. See Last Week Tonight (LWT) attacks on, 87–88, 95–96;
bashing, 92–94;
Mabley, Jackie, 224, 226 citizenship, 88, 92–93;
Mac, Bernie, 224 generation, 93–94;
MacDonald, Norm, 204–5 and neoliberal ideology, 88–96;
Maher, Bill, 136, 166 politics, 88, 96–101;
Mailer, Norman, 208, 283 and satiractivism, 87, 96–101;
Maisel, Remy, 97, 98 slactivist attack on, 95–96
Mamet, David, 282 Miller, Dennis, 246
Mandela, Nelson, 182 Million Dollar Extreme: World Peace,
Manjoo, Farhad, 207 293, 300
Manning, Bernard, 181 Milner, Ryan M., 52
marketing, 13, 89–90 mimetic, 210–13
Marko Pasha, 108 mimicry, 114
Mary White House Experience, 184 Mirowski, Phillip, 5, 8, 13, 16, 20
The Mary Whitehouse Experience, 185 misogynoir, 42, 45, 55, 56
mass incarceration, 14 mobilizations, 148
mass media, 304 modernity, 148–49
maternity, neoliberal, 278–79 A Modest Proposal, 74
mature neoliberalism, 5–6 Monique, 224
Mayfair-Richards, Ally, 272–75, 281, Moore, Phoebe, 203
284 moral discourses, 147–48
Mayfair-Richards, Ivy, 272–75 morality, 147–48
Mayfair-Richards, Ozzie, 285 Morgan, Tracy, 224, 253
McCarthy, Melissa, 44, 208 Morris, Chris, 184
 Index 325

mother!, 269, 271 left, 11;

Mouthful of Shame, 259 mature, 5–6;
MoveOn.org, 89 multiculturalism and, 59;
multiculturalism, 59, 248, 250 as overarching ideology, 2;
Murphy, Eddie, 224 political, 3–4, 16;
Murphy, Ryan, 280, 283 political correctness and, 249–53;
Muslim woman, 19 privacy and, 201–3;
Myer, Seth, 13–14 progressive horizon of, 11;
role of, 25;
Nancherla, Aparna, 254, 255 self, 3–4, 16–17;
National Health Service (NHS), 23 social control of, 6;
nativism, 20 as social order, 54;
Nazi symbolism in Thailand, 151 state and, 19–20;
NBC, 159 structural conditions, 18–19;
Nebitt, Kathleen, 90 synonyms, 4;
neoliberal: Turkish, 105–24;
authoritarianism in Turkey, 105–24; violence in, 68
blanket, 16; Neoliberal Thought Collective, 2
body, 69, 74, 79; Netflix, 221
capitalism, 89; Newfield, Christopher, 248, 249
feminism, 27; The New Yorker magazine, 57, 254
globalization, 66, 67–69, 71; Ngai, Sianne, 9, 10, 11, 14, 72, 168,
governance, 9; 201, 246, 252, 255, 282, 306
identities, 204; NHS. See National Health Service
ideology, 16, 88–96; (NHS)
marketing, 13; The Nightly Show, 133
maternity, 278–79; Noah, Trevor, 163, 253
and millennials, 88–96; Norquist, Grover, 213
mothers, 273–74; Norton, Jim, 247, 258, 259, 261
policy-making, 13, 15, 17, 18, 250; nosferatu, 286
reforms, 2; Note to Self, 236
truthers, 1 Nur, 120
neoliberalism, 1, 4–5, 11, 13, 19, 66, Nussbaum, Emily, 160
67–69, 167; Nyong, Lupita, 38
American, 10, 26; Nyong’o, Lupita, 41
authoritarianism and, 5, 23–24;
and Brexit populism, 71; Obama, Barack, 15, 23, 49, 160, 225
British do-over of, 23; Obama, Michelle, 232
comedy in, 21–28, 160; O’Brien, Conan, 12, 169, 205
communicative, 8; Occupy movements, 6, 87–88
definition, 160; Occupy Wall Street (OWS), 87–88, 100
economic structures of, 69; 11 O’Clock Show, 184
failures, 21, 26; The Office, 6, 184, 294
as faith in God, 21, 26; Oliver, John, 24, 25, 66, 76, 80, 133,
government and, 2–3, 5; 141, 142–47, 163–64, 169
326 Index

online: Peterson, Latoya, 253

abuse, 44–47; Pew Center study, 57
activism, 89, 117; Pew Research Center, 90, 164
activities, 52; Phelan, James, 196, 210
personal account hacking, 44; Phillips, Whitney, 52, 56, 211,
racist harassment campaign, 37, 308
45–47, 49, 52, 58; phobia, 276–78
trait-based harassment, 57 Pinker, Steven, 303
On the Real Side, 223 policy-making, 13, 15
Oprah, 8–9 political:
optimism, 11 activism, 29, 88, 116, 169;
O’Reilly, Bill, 87, 88, 136 comedy, 2, 4, 8, 9, 160–62, 168, 195,
Orji, Yvonne, 223, 227 200, 204, 208, 209, 214, 268;
Orwell, George, 163 correctness, 24, 27, 44, 46, 54, 72,
Orwellian social credit scores, 201 183, 185–90, 245–62;
Oswalt, Patton, 228, 256, 258, 260–61 deliberation, 209–13;
othering, 66; economic norms, 9, 25;
of Brexit, 68; economy of media, 159–72;
in global neoliberalism, 66 efficacy, 23;
OWS. See Occupy Wall Street (OWS) engagement, 96;
Özgur, Yiğit, 112 liberalism, 4;
literacy, 211;
Page, Benjamin, 165 mobilization, 71, 90, 96, 116;
Page, LaWanda, 226 neoliberalism, 3–4;
paideia, 137 resistance, 24, 177–90;
Palace, 148–49 satire, caricature as, 72–75;
Palin, Sarah, 160 theater, 8
paratextual media, 21 political comedy, 4, 8, 9;
Pariser, Eli, 207 example, 12;
Paroske, Marcus, 196 gender in, 14;
parrhesia, 152–55 race in, 14
pathos, 70, 81 Political Correctness and the
patriarchy, 13, 17, 19, 57 Destruction of the Social
pax Americana, 4 Order: The Rise of the Pristine
Peele, Jordan, 251, 252, 260 Self, 251
Peifer, Jason T., 168 politics:
Penguen magazine, 110, 112 aesthetics, 207–15;
penguins in Gezi resistance, 115, 118 entertainment in, 97;
Penn State, 101 identity, 14, 18, 44, 109, 182, 185,
Pérez, Raúl, 41, 48, 49, 255 186;
perfection dispositif, 273, 275, 284 post-digital, 207–9;
personal online account hacking, 44 in post-Trump theater of truthiness,
Peters, Evan, 272 206–15;
Peters, Russell, 246, 255 of resistance, 24, 177–90;
Peterson, Jordan, 4, 303 satire role in, 177
 Index 327

populism, 68 social consequences of, 44–48;

portmanteau: trolling, 52–55, 52–59;
of activism, 87; white supremacists on, 48
of slacker, 87 racist tweets, 45–46
positive state. See welfare state radical inequality, 18–19
post-digital politics, 207–9 Rae, Issa, 227
post-horror comedy, 269–71 Rahman, Aamer, 253, 261
postmodern irony, 71–72 Rancière, Jacques, 208
post-network politics, 24 Rankowski, Jan, 302
post-normative period, 22 Raw (Grave), 268
post-structuralism, 196 Read, Susanna, 77
post-Truth, 207–15 Reagan, Ronald, 136
power: reality-based community, 5–6
and humor, 106; recognition, 26
soft, 6; recognition comedy, 25
symbolic, 140; Reddit, 45, 246
truth to, 159–60 Reed, Adolph, 14
privacy, 201–3 resisting penguin stencil, 115–16
Pryor, Richard, 14, 224, 247, 248 Reversal of Fortune, 268
Puar, Jasbir, 274 Revisionaries, 210
rhetorical discourse analysis, 69–70
quantitative self, 203 Rich, B. Ruby, 283
Richards, Michael, 200, 254
Rabelais, François, 73 Richardson, Bill, 195
Rabinowitz, Peter, 212 right-wing comedy:
race, 14, 18–19, 21–22; productive account of, 188–90;
analysis of, 14; rise of, 177–88
comedy, 39–43; Right-Wing Comedy, 24
and gender, 55; risk-taker, 16
in graphic form, 49; Rivière, Joan, 275
in media, 14, 49; Robinson, Debra, 226
in political comedy, 14; Robinson, Phoebe, 40, 222, 227, 235–39
role of, 25; Rock, Chris, 39–42, 224, 246, 256, 258
sociological nature of, 38 romantic irony, 71–72
racial hierarchy, 42, 43 Ronell, Avital, 268, 283
racism: Rose, Jacqueline, 278, 279
language, 57; Rose, Steven, 268
and violence, 68 Roseanne, 294
racist humor, 38–43, 55; Rosemary’s Baby, 270
meta-discourse of, 47, 52–55; Rosenkranz, Karl, 73
modes of, 48–55; Rousseff, Dilma, 7
nature of, 48; Rove, Karl, 5
racist jokes posting mode, 48–49; Rubenstein, Diane, 12, 17, 27
racist tweets, finding humor in, Rudolph, Maya, 38
50–51; Rupert Murdoch product, 9
328 Index

Russell, Nipsey, 224 plasticity of, 16–17;

Russert, Tim, 195, 196–99 techniques of, 3
Ryan, Maureen, 261–62 Self, Will, 177
self-help, 4
Sahl, Mort, 224 self-managing subjects, 19
Salon, 258 self-reliance, 69
Salter, Mark, 136 sense of humor, 23
Sandy Hook, 1 sexism, 14
Sanni, Rae, 227, 236 Sexton, Jared, 268
sassy black woman, 225, 229–35 sexual assault, 17
satiractivism: sexuality, 285
activism as, 88; sexual violence, 55
attack on, 89–90; Seymour, Richard, 53
as digital citizenship, 91; Sharpton, Al, 136
and millennials, 87, 96–101; Shattered, Regarding Henry, The
rise of, 96–101 Doctor, 267
satire: The Shining, 270, 272
and free speech, 177; significative comic, 74
political, 177–79; silly citizenship, 134
radical potentials of, 184; Silverman, Sarah, 300
in U.S. politics, 177 Simas, David, 57
Satire and Dissent, 214 Simien, Justin, 269
Saturday Night Live (SNL), 37, 159, Simmons, Laurie, 282
177, 221, 231 Simmons, Russell, 227
Sayle, Alexei, 24, 180, 181–83, 185 situational irony, 71, 72, 76
Scaramucci, Anthony, 209 Six Feet Under, 284
Scharff, Cristina, 19 Slack Bay (Ma Loute), 268
Schilling, Dave, 221 slacker, portmanteau of, 87
Schmitt, Eric, 202 slactivism, 23
Schopf, Oliver, 79 slactivists, 23, 87, 95–96
Schumer, Amy, 19 slave rape, 39, 43
Schwabel, Dan, 202 slavery, 14;
Schwartz, Howard, 251, 252 black women, 39–42, 55;
Scialabba, George, 237 and sexual violence, 55
Sconce, Jeffrey, 294 Sloan, Dulce, 227
Scum Manifesto, 282, 283 Sloterdijk, Peter, 134, 147, 148, 165,
Seales, Amanda, 223, 224, 227 169, 171
Second City improv, 209 Smith, Moira, 50
Sedaris, Amy, 197 Smith, Zadie, 270
Seder, Sam, 206 SNL. See Saturday Night Live (SNL)
Seinfeld, Jerry, 200–201, 246, 256, 257 Snowden, Edward, 153, 154
self: SNS. See social networking sites
feminist, 17; (SNS)
identity, 4; social inequities, 95
neoliberalism, 3–4, 16–17; social insurance, 2
 Index 329

social justice warriors, 17, 44 symbolism, 179

social media, 58, 90, 253–54; synthetic, 210–13
abuse of women and, 245;
in activism, 98–99, 116; Taggart, P., 68, 71
activism prevalence on, 88, 90; Talking for Clapping, 260
for critical engagement, 115; Tapper, Jake, 12
culture of, 56; techniques:
Gezi protesters and, 116; of domination, 3;
Occupy movement and, 116; of self, 3
offers protesters, 90; technologies, 27
for political advertising, 201; The Tempest, 248
race on, 14, 49 Terrorist Assemblages, 274
social networking, 90–91 Thea, 226
social networking sites (SNS), 91 theater of political deliberation,
social protection, 18 212–13
soft power, 6 thematic, 210–13
Solanas, Valerie, 17, 27, 281–85 third space, 6
sophomoric viral pranks, 202 This Is Not a President: Sense,
Sousa, De, 50 Nonsense and the American
South Park, 13 Political Imaginary, 267
Spacey, Kevin, 12 This Morning with Richard but Not
Spencer, Richard, 303 Judy, 184
Spheres, 148 Thompson, Ethan, 142, 150–51
Spicer, Sean, 208 Thompson, Hunter S., 208, 209
Spitting Image, 177 Thorne, Bella, 269
stand-up comedy, 221–22, 224, 226–29, thought leadership, 302
248, 253–61 Time Magazine, 202
Starbucks diversity, 6 Time Out, 180
Stein, Jill, 269, 284 Top Gear, 186
Stewart, Jon, 8, 24, 97, 133, 141, 208, Tosh, Daniel, 200, 247, 253, 257
253, 259, 301 tragedy, 9–10
stiob, 114–15 transatlantic movement, 7–8
Stipe, Michael, 178 trickster comedy, 26
Stone, Rosetta, 205 Trog, 281
stoned slackers. See millennials trolling, 52, 295–96;
Strait Jacket, 281 modern case, 56;
Strangers with Candy, 197 racist, 52–59
Strauss, William, 92 Trudeau, Justin, 237
street politics, 117 Trump, Donald, 44, 56, 58, 159,
Stuart, Gisela, 23, 75 160, 177–78, 193–94, 204,
The Sun, 151 304
Swift, Jonathan, 74 truthers, neoliberal, 1
symbolic power, 140 Truthiness, 207–9, 213
symbolic systems, 138 Tudor, D., 69
symbolic violence, 140 Tumblr, 246
330 Index

Turkey: Veep, 12
authoritarianism in, 105–24; Vidale, Thea, 226–27
Gezi protests, 105–24; violence:
humor: in neoliberalism, 68;
political use in protests, 106–24; police, 112–16;
as resistance, 112–20; and racism, 68;
as symbolic violence, 120–23 symbolic, 140;
neoliberalism, 105–24; symbolic, humor as, 120–23;
political satire history in, 108–11 threats, 44
Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Violence Against Women Act, 17
Cultural Politics, and the volition, 4–5
Attack on Democracy, 249 Volker, Paul, 2
Twilight Zone, 214 Vote Leave Campaign, 23, 77, 78, 81
Twitter, 21, 22, 38, 57–59, 221;
fans, 246; Waisenen, Don, 13, 25
harassment of Jones, 45–47, 49, 52, Walker, Kara, 14
58; Warfield, Marsha, 226
jokes, 48–49 Warhol, Andy, 272
Watkins, Mel, 223
UK Independence Party (UKIP), 76 Weaver, Simon, 7, 22, 304
UKIP. See UK Independence Party Webber, Julie, 27
(UKIP) “Weekend Update,” 38–39, 204
UnCabaret, 228 Weinstein, Harvey, 204
underclass, 18–19 welfare queen, 18–19
Union Hall, in Brooklyn, NY, 227 welfare state, 2
universal communication, 203 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, 280
unlaughter, 38, 53; white:
Black feminist, 55–59; masculinity, 37, 57;
definition, 39; racial frame, 57;
racist humor and, 38–43; supremacy, 13, 16, 22, 40, 56, 59
and sociological nature of racial, White, Micah, 89
38–43; Whitney, Daniel Lawrence, 246
Twitter trolls with, 47 Widdicombe, Josh, 66, 76
Upright Citizen’s Brigade (UCB), 227 Wiig, Kristen, 44
urban comedy, 223–24 Williams, Allison, 282
Urkel, Steve, 234 Williams, Brian, 282
Uykusuz, 110 Williams, Jessica, 222, 227, 235–39
Williams, Linda, 280
Valentine, Sarah, 272 Wilmore, Larry, 133, 161
Vance, Danitra, 15, 259 Wilson, Flip, 224
Vanderlippe, John, 110 Wilson, Julie, 11
Vanity Fair, 56 Wilton, Harrison, 275
van Zoonen, Liesbet, 97 Winstead, Lizz, 13
Varnado, Victor, 229 The Witch, 268–69
Vaughn, Baron, 229 Wolcott, James, 56
 Index
Womack, Ytasha, 228
The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, 278
women:
African American, 15, 22, 26;
black, 15, 37, 38–42, 46–47, 56;
of color, 57;
comedy on, 39–42;
and horror comedy, 279–81;
movement against violence, 17;
Muslim, 19;
slavery, 39;
Vietnamese, 258;
Violence Against Women Act, 17
Woo, John, 269–70
Wood, Robin, 269, 280
World Peace, 294–95, 298, 301
Wu, Brianna, 44, 302
331
Yahr, Emily, 267
Yannopoulis, Milo, 15, 22, 302–3
Yashere, Gina, 227
Yiannopoulos, Milo, 45–47, 205–6
Young Ones, 181
Youssef, Bassem, 17
youth activism, 96–97
Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy
or Disposability, 94
YouTube, 45, 46, 146, 172, 189, 232,
233, 246, 256, 301, 303, 311n6
Yurchak, Alexei, 114, 115
Zack, Naomi, 40
Zamata, Sasheer, 227, 228, 231–33
Zaytung, 115
Zupancic, Alenka, 271
 Biographies of Contributors

Dr. James Brassett is Reader in International Political Economy at the

University of Warwick, UK. He is currently writing a book entitled British
Comedy, Global Politics: The Everyday Practice(s) of Resistance, which
explores the political role of joking and humor in the British experience of
globalization.

Marc-Olivier Castagner is currently a PhD candidate in Political Sci-

ence at the University of Ottawa (Canada), specializing in critical security
studies. His current thesis aims to understand the relation between musical
events (more specifically, electronic dance music events known as rave),
space, (chemical) technologies, radical subjectivities, and conflictual politics,
with Michel Foucault, Peter Sloterdijk, and Wolfgang Dietrich as his main
theoretical influences, and Western societies as his principal area of study.
Previously, he presented and/or published on (radical) environmental sub-
jectivities, humor and play, media, and international organizations, as well
as being part-time professor at St. Paul University (Ottawa) teaching conflict
resolution of violent conflicts to undergraduate students.

Seçil Daǧtaş is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of

Waterloo (Canada) and a research fellow at the Collegium de Lyon (France).
She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Toronto, an MA
in Social Anthropology from York University (Canada) and a BA in Sociol-
ogy from Bogaziçi University (Turkey). A sociocultural anthropologist, she
specializes in the anthropology of religion, political ethnography, and gender
studies. Her main research interests lie in understanding how people make,
cross and surpass religious boundaries with a particular focus on the relation-
ship between Islam and secularism, the Islamic conduct with Christian and

333
334 Biographies of Contributors

Jewish communities, and the legacy of the Ottoman regime of diversity in

the Muslim world. She published articles on gender politics and the secular
governance of diversity (in Feminist Studies and Anthropology of the Middle
East), humorous activism (in Etnofoor), hospitality (in the International
Journal of Middle East Studies), and nationalism (in Dialectical Anthropol-
ogy). Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humani-
ties Research Council of Canada, Connaught Fund, and the Regional Studies
Association. Her work was also recognized with a Sakip Sabanci Interna-
tional Research Award in 2015 for its contributions to Turkish Studies.

Jessyka Finley teaches courses focusing on expressive culture, black feminism,

and popular culture. She received her BA from Hampshire College and her MA
and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in African Diaspora Stud-
ies. She has published essays in The Journal of Popular Culture and Studies in
American Humor, and is currently working on a book manuscript that engages
a cultural history of black women’s sass. Specifically, this project is concerned
with how humor has come to be a site where black women challenge and
expand traditional narratives of resistance, redress, and feminist politics.

Viveca Greene is an assistant professor of media studies at Hampshire Col-

lege in Amherst, MA. She is coeditor (with Ted Gournelos) of A Decade of
Dark Humor: How Comedy, Irony, and Satire Shaped Post-9/11 America
(University Press of Mississippi, 2011) and her work has appeared in Social
Semiotics, In Media Res, and The Nation. Viveca teaches courses in popular
culture, audience research, comedy and cultural politics, and media stud-
ies. Her research explores how humor, irony, and satire both challenge and
uphold systems of power.

David Grondin is an associate professor in the Department of Communi-

cation at the Université de Montréal, where he teaches international com-
munication, media studies, political communication, surveillance, digital
technologies, and popular culture. He is a regular researcher at the Inter-
national Centre for Comparative Criminology and a research fellow at the
Montreal Centre for International Studies. His current research brings to
the fore new forms of surveillance enacted by the security/mobility nexus,
media infrastructures, and big data in the digital era. His research coalesces
around three main areas of inquiry: (1) the surveillance of mobility, algorith-
mic security, and technopolitical infrastructures policing North American
borderlands; (2) the militarization of everyday life, the surveillance society,
and the culture of the US national security state; and (3) US popular culture
and media cultures, with a special focus on humor and infotainment media
as media practice.
 Biographies of Contributors 335

Thomas Lawson is a PhD student in English at the University of Pittsburgh.

His research interests include digital rhetoric, sound studies, narrative theory,
and the attention economy.

Rebecca Krefting is an associate professor in the American Studies Depart-

ment, affiliate faculty for Gender Studies, Intergroup Relations, and Media
and Film Studies at Skidmore College. Her monograph All Joking Aside:
American Humor and Its Discontents (Johns Hopkins UP) charts the his-
tory and economy of “charged humor” or stand-up comedy aimed at social
justice. She is a contributing author to many edited collections including:
The Laughing Stalk: Live Comedy and Its Audiences (Parlor Press, 2012),
Hysterical!: Women in American Comedy (University of Texas Press, 2017),
Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers (Palgrave Macmillan,
2017), and Taking a Stand: American Stand-up Comedians as Public Intel-
lectuals (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). She is a member of the editorial
board for Studies in American Humor and serves on the series editorial board
for Penn State’s Humor in America Series. Beck has been invited to speak
about her research at colleges and universities domestically and internation-
ally. Current research includes analyzing feminist comedy studies, the impact
of new media on the business of stand-up comedy, and prepper/survivalist
subcultures. She is currently working on a new book project that focuses on
twenty-first-century preppers/survivalists. It’s not that funny.

Sophia A. McClennen is professor of international affairs and comparative

literature at Penn State University, founding director of the Center for Global
Studies, and Associate Director of the School of International Affairs. She
studies human rights, satire, and politics, with two recent books on related
topics Is Satire Saving Our Nation?, coauthored with Remy Maisel, and
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights, coedited with
Alexandra Schultheis Moore. She also has a column with Salon where she
regularly covers politics and culture.

Aaron McKain (PhD, MSL.) is a rhetorical theorist and social practice artist
whose research focuses on the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of digital media
and post-digital American culture. His work on comedy, media, and post-
postmodernism has appeared in The Journal of American Culture, The Missouri
Review, PopMatters, the edited collection Narrative Acts (Hampton Press,
2012), and the local news in Minneapolis. His textbook on civic engagement
in the post-fact society (Commonplace: A Citizen’s Guide to Persuasion for an
Age that Desperately Needs One, McGraw-Hill, 2008) was the curriculum for
Ohio State’s First Year Writing Program from 2008 to 2012. His media appear-
ances and public installations on digital ethics can be found at aaronmckain.com.
336 Biographies of Contributors

Diane Rubenstein is professor of Government and American Studies at Cor-

nell University. She is also in the French Studies program there. Her research
and teaching addresses the critical interaction between continental theory
(primarily French, German, and Italian) and contemporary manifestations of
ideology in Franco-American political culture. Her research focus is political
rhetoric and she has investigated the media disclosure of the covert operation
in France (Rainbow Warrior—Greenpeace) and American (Iran—Contra),
which have been published in anthologies. She is the author of What’s Left?
The Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Right, University of Wisconsin Press,
1990; This Is Not a President: Sense, Nonsense, and the American Political
Imaginary, New York University Press, 2008 and coeditor of Michael A.
Weinstein: Action, Contemplation, Vitalism, Routledge, NY, 2015.

Don Waisanen is an associate professor in the Baruch College, CUNY

Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, where he teaches courses
and workshops in public communication—including executive speech train-
ing, communication strategy, and seminars on leadership and improvisation.
All his research projects seek to understand how communication works to
promote or hinder the force of citizens’ voices. Previously, Don was a Coro
Fellow and worked in broadcast journalism, as a speechwriter, and on politi-
cal campaigns. He is the founder of Communication Upward, an adjunct lec-
turer at Columbia University, and received a Ph.D. in Communication from
the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School.

Simon Weaver is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications in the

Department of Social and Political Sciences at Brunel University London.
His research focuses on the rhetorical nature of humor and joking. This has
included the rhetorical nature of racial, racist and other forms of offensive
humor. He is currently studying the representation of Brexit in comedy. This
takes in a number of areas that include: the body in caricature; the represen-
tation of the ‘other’, migrant and racialized in political satire; the changing
nature of taboo and transgression in UK society; and the relationship between
irony and Brexit. He has published extensively in international journals,
including the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Ethnic and Racial
Studies, Sociology, and Social Semiotics. His 2011 book The Rhetoric of Rac-
ist Humour: US, UK and Global Race Joking (Ashgate) significantly contrib-
uted to debates on racist humor and joking. His work has been discussed in a
variety of international media, including on BBC Radio Four.

Julie A. Webber is professor of politics and government at Illinois State

University and core faculty in the Women and Gender Studies program. She
is the author of The Cultural Set Up of Comedy, Beyond Columbine: School
 Biographies of Contributors 337

Violence and the Virtual and Failure to Hold: The Politics of School Vio-
lence. She is the editor of the series Politics and Comedy at Lexington Books.
Webber’s work addresses mass forms of violence in spaces of civil society
(schools, military complexes, parks, universities, concerts, etc.) and explores
them as expressive forms of violence that are transpolitical in nature. Her
work also addresses comedy as a form of politics in an era transfixed by neo-
liberal and counterrevolutionary ideologies. At Illinois State, Webber teaches
political theory, including gender and political theory, gay and lesbian and
queer political thought, contemporary, modern and American political and
social thought.