Joke Is on Us: Political Comedy in (Late) Neoliberal Times [Hardcover ed.] 1498569846, 9781498569842

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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. Political Comedy Encounters Neoliberalism aims to look at how comedy disrupts or reinforces dominant ideologies under neoliberalism, including but not limited to: forms of authority, 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 comedy 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

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN: 978-1-4985-6984-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-4985-6985-9 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Joke Is on Us: Political Comedy in (Late) Neoliberal Times PART I: THE TERRAIN HAS CHANGED

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1 All They Need Is Lulz: Racist Trolls, Unlaughter, and Leslie Jones Viveca Greene

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2 Brexit Irony on The Last Leg and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Critiquing Neoliberalism through Caricature Simon Weaver

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3 What’s Wrong with Slactivism? Confronting the Neoliberal Assault on Millennials Sophia A. McClennen

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4 Political Humor in the Face of Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Turkey Seçil Dağtaş

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PART II: POST-NETWORK NEOLIBERAL POLITICS

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5 From Irritated Hostages to Silly Citizens: Infotainment Satire as Ludic Surveillance Marc-Olivier Castagner and David Grondin

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6 The Political Economy of Late-Night Comedy Don Waisanen

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7 British Comedy and the Politics of Resistance: The Liminality of Right-Wing Comedy James Brassett

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8 I Want to Party with You, Cowboy: Stephen Colbert and the Aesthetic Logic of “Truthiness” after Campaign 2016 Aaron McKain and Thomas Lawson

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PART III: NEOLIBERALISM AND SUBJECTIVITY

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9 From Awkward to Dope: Black Women Comics in the Alternative Comedy Scene Jessyka Finley

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10 Savage New Media: Discursive Campaigns for/against Political Correctness Rebecca Krefting

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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 Julie A. Webber

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Index315 Biographies of Contributors

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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 apprehend 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

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Recently, scholars have attempted to frame neoliberalism as an overarching 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 redistribution 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 neoliberalism, 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 component 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 insurance, 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 warriors” 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

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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 interest 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 entities. 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 civilization, 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 techniques 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 structures 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 asymmetries, ironic presentations, ridicule of others, parodies of stereotyped identities, 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 neoliberalism—at the level of the self—is that it cajoles this self to monetize every

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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 mediating it. At the felt level, this self might be shipwrecked but not realize it. Untethered 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 challenged 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, introspection and lengthy, rational argumentation. Liberty is for the market, not the citizen, a fictive entity mobilized by political 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

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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 proceedings, 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 transformation 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 impeachment, 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 authoritarianism 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 neoliberalism 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:

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“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” predecessors, 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 commodification 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 freedom 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:

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in Syria (Wedeen 2013) and in Egypt (Youssef 2017; Webber 2013). At present, 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 government 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 gender 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 liberal 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 configurations. 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”

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(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 counterculture thrives under is also the most baldly neoliberal governmental structure yet, ironically, with Trump cabinet members exceeding the number of Fortune 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 sustained 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 expectations 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 shoring 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 rationality, 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 reproductive rights. In Jones’s sketch, nostalgia looms large as the audience wishes

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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, objectives, and buy-ins that governance dismantles democratic life while appearing only to instill it with ‘best practices,’” (Brown quoted in Shenk 2015). Moreover, 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 attachments 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

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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 neoliberal 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 establishment that came before government. Comedy often asks us to stop and think about what we are automatically responding to; neoliberalism wants to provide an affective orientation of progress that cannot be questioned, even when its effects are detrimental to what might be actual social change. Neoliberalism 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 productive. 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 comedy 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

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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 policies 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 neoliberal 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 neoliberalism which encourages people to believe that neoliberalism is “committed 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,

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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 pronounce 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 earnestness 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 Hollywood 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 political comedy can be rendered and read outside of its traditional scenes. At the level of “integral reality,” however, it becomes increasingly impossible 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 readability 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 interactive 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 decision 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”

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(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 positing of the autonomous self-governed entities, all coming naturally equipped with some version of ‘rationality’ and motives of ineffable self-interest, striving 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 abandoned 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 platforms, 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

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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 neoliberalism 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 challenge 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 confronting 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,

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such comedy can not expect to go far outside its own narrowcast audience; it may even backfire when it is remediated into other sociocultural environments (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 democratization 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 growing 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 political 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 performances. 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 performance 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 having 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

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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 problems 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).

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This so-called “feminist self” incorporates the gaze of patriarchy inside herself, 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 Leslie 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 fantasies (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 women’s movement against violence operated outside the government in community 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 manifestation (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” mentality. 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

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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 conditions. 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. Radical 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 (Châtelet 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 understanding 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.

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Now, these terms still exist but have been largely replaced by concerns by politicians and policymakers about the underclass’s “dysfunctional” relationship to growth. First, then, these populations must be “taught” to participate in neoliberal governance by changing their patterns of living to be more amenable 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 allegedly 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 Germany (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 feminism is commonplace. The foolish “gaffes” made by a few of these comedians 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 corporations. 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

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is “incentivized modes of subjectivity” (Sharpe 2009, 93). These modes are most definitely “in-flux” as they organize and reorganize their selves in relation 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, neoliberal 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 relations 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 nationalist 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 passively 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 individualism in that he predicted cybernetics would “succeed in fabricating behaviors that will guarantee a watertight barrier against political intelligence” (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.”

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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 neoliberalism, 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

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“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 targeted 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 racism 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 examples of “caricature” irony to warn readers about the liberties taken by comedians 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

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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 Campaign.” Weaver’s analysis is a warning shot to those who criticize neoliberalism 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 “realist,” or conservative. Sophia McClennen’s chapter, “What’s Wrong with Slactivism? Confronting 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 activists. 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 nihilistic 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 Authoritarianism 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 neoliberalism 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

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to teach them how to be appropriate citizens, echoing McClennen’s arguments 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 controversies over whether comedy has an impact on politics, moving in the direction of liberation or progress, we might view comedy as productive of politics in a more Foucauldian way. From Ricky Gervais and Alexei Sayles on, Brasset argues that a form of right-wing comedy that is critical of political correctness (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 critical 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 undertaken 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 “recognition 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 recognition amounts to liberation—the structures of neoliberal subjugation need not

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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. Oliver’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 neoliberalism might never make it past the cutting room floor. Waisenen isolates three main issues from the political economic perspective that haunt the comedy 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

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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 neoliberalism, “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 comedy 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-consciousness, 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 American 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

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access to the “third space” of American culture created by neoliberal infrastructural 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, experimental material. The controversies that follow are often voiced in the familiar American constitutional phrasing of “free speech” versus “political correctness.” 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 populations” (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 confront 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! Neoliberalism (Insult) Comedy and Post-network Politics,” examines the first media casualty of the Trump presidency through the lens of neoliberal politics,

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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 “contradictions”) 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 longer 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 Foucault’s attitude toward neoliberalism. The sociologist Daniel Zamora accused Foucault 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 interested 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 Political Science Association meeting in San Francisco, in spring 2018, where he made this point.

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6. Reed surmises that the “analogy” of slavery (“regimes of explicitly racial subordination 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 argument, 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 contact 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 configurations that went far beyond any individual human being. They claimed that an individual 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 coordinated 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 erosion 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

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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 rhetorical 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 “Weekend 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 Twitter 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 criticism 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 departure 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

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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 significance of researching unlaughter and antijokes in white supremacist societies. They push back against the neoliberal fantasy that much of history—especially damaging histories (for some) of imperialism and crime (e.g., slavery, wage slavery, and rape) carried out in the name of global capitalism and settler 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 reference 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 brotha 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 laughter 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 commercial 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 disgust 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—references to athletic drafts, slavery, forced breeding, and black celebrities such

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as LeBron James and Sinbad (David Adkins)—made for an insensitive amalgam 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 anomalous 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 auditioning 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 Factory 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 expression of pain.

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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 communicating 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 imperceptible 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 categories 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,

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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 dimension 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 audience 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 theorists 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 crossover—and the extension of both humor and influence beyond black communal spaces—adds a problematic task to the already Byzantine task faced

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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 neoliberalism—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 antiblack 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 comedy 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 ideological 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.

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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 following 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 antijoke 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 gamers 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

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sense of ownership over geek culture.” As one person commented on YouTube 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 particular 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 resemblance 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 Ghostbusters and Jones. Largely unknown in the United States prior to his involvement 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 communities 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

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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 Ghostbusters 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 Twitter 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. Yiannopoulos 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

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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, Yiannopoulos’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 platform. 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 outpouring 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 consequences 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 categories 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 dichotomous stereotypes of race and/or seeks to inferiorize an ethnic or racial minority” (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

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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 content 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 making, “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, including those couched as humor, and responded with unlaughter and antijokes. However, individual reactions to (or intentions behind) the language, images,

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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 conceptual 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 harassment 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 racist 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 categories 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.

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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, “represents 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 audiences, 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 franchise, 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 complaining 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 genuinely 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”

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(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 reinforced 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 “communities 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.

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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, exploitative, 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 trolling. 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 deliberate 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 contributing 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 seriously. 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 racist. 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

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to provoke overly sensitive people. The humor is dependent on the unlaughing 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 provocation 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, “@LesDoggg 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 supporters 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 fermented 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.”

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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, rewardworthiness” and, as Adam Kotsko (2017) maintains, “Neoliberalism is the social order that has most thoroughly grounded itself in freedom-as-blameworthiness, 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 asynchonous 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 supporters 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 during this period were positive and bore the #loveforlesliej hashtag in support, abusive content continued (and continues to this day) to filter onto her timeline, 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 deliberately 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 inability to see what a sham basic social mores are. Somehow if a troll reproduces

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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 seriousness—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 conservative 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 continuing 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

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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 dismissive of their role in replicating racist ideologies (the same racist ideologies, it must be noted, they seek to exploit)” (97). Racist trolling and other expressions of white supremacy are rewarding precisely because (and when) they result in unlaughter. The logic thus combines that of racist humor with contemporary 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 disparagement 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 sector 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 counterparts—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 targets, 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 stereotypical 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.

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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” (Duggan 2017). Notably, the Pew Center found that while only 3 percent of white Americans have been the target of online trait-based harassment (harassment 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 harassment 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 watchmen” 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

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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 significant 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 development 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 acceptance. 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 contributions 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.”

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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 responsiveness, Twitter wars between individuals such as Yiannopoulos and Jones are racial spectacles: “displays of racial dominance that publically reassert 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—including 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 inequalities 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 inequalities 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 pressure 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

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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 mentions. 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 Twitter 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 Milner 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.

WORKS CITED Antoine, Katja. 2016. “‘Pushing the Edge’ of Race and Gender Hegemonies through Stand-up Comedy: Performing Slavery as Anti-Racist Critique.” Etnofoor 28 (1): 35–54. Apel, Dora. 2009. “Just Joking? Chimps, Obama and Racial Stereotype.” Journal of Visual Culture 8 (2): 134–42. https​://do​i.org​/10.1​177/1​47041​29090​08002​0203.​ Bailey, Moya. 2010. “They Aren’t Talking about Me. . ..” (March 15, 2010). http:​// www​.crun​kfemi​nistc​ollec​tive.​com/2​010/0​3/14/​they-​arent​-talk​ing-a​bout-​me/. Beauchamp, Zack. 2016. “Anyone Who Thinks Trump was ‘Just Joking’ about Shooting Clinton is Missing the Point.” Vox (August 9, 2016). https​://ww​w.vox​ .com/​2016/​8/9/1​24171​00/do​nald-​trump​-assa​ssina​te-hi​llary​-clin​ton-j​oke. Berger, Arthur Asa. 1995. Cultural Criticism: A Primer of Key Concepts. Vol. 4. Sage Publications.

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Billig, Michael. 2001. “Humour and Hatred: The Racist Jokes of the Ku Klux Klan.” Discourse & Society 12 (3): 267–89. ———. 2005. Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. 1 edition. London; Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications Ltd. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2013. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. 4 edition. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Boskin, Joseph. 1987. “The Complicity of Humor: The Life and Death of Sambo.” The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, edited by John Morreall, 250–63. Albany: State University of New York Press. Callahan, Yesha. 2015. “Leslie Jones’ ‘Weekend Update’ Slave Jokes on SNL Spark Outrage.” The Grapevine (May 5, 2015). http:​//the​grape​vine.​thero​ot.co​m/les​lie-j​ ones-​weeke​nd-up​date-​slave​-joke​s-on-​snl-s​park-​17908​85369​. Carpio, Glenda. 2008. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carroll, Rebecca. 2014. “Stand-Up Comedian Leslie Jones Goes Full On Coonery For SNL Slavery Sketch.” XoJane: Women’s Lifestyle & Community Site—XoJane (May 5, 2014). http:​//www​.xoja​ne.co​m/iss​ues/s​tand-​up-co​media​n-les​lie-j​ones-​ goes-​full-​on-co​onery​-for-​snl-s​laver​y-ske​tch. Cillizza, Chris. 2017. “Donald Trump Likes to ‘joke’ about a Lot of Things That Aren’t Funny.” CNN (August 1, 2017). http:​//www​.cnn.​com/2​017/0​8/01/​polit​ics/t​ rump-​jokin​g-pol​ice/i​ndex.​html.​ Cooper, Brittney. 2014. “‘SNL’s’ Cringe-Worthy Truth: Leslie Jones’ Slavery Sketch Was Shoddy—but Important.” Salon (May 6, 2014). http:​//www​.salo​n.com​/2014​ /05/0​6/snl​s_cri​nge_w​orthy​_trut​h_les​lie_j​ones_​slave​ry_sk​etch_​was_s​hoddy​_but_​ impor​tant/​. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 139: 139–67. Davis, Angela Y. 2012. The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers. Davis, Angelique M. and Rose Ernst. 2011. “Racial Spectacles: Promoting a Colorblind Agenda through Direct Democracy.” In Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 55, 133–71. Emerald Group Publishing Limited. https​://do​i.org​/10.1​108/S​ 1059-​4337(​2011)​00000​55009​. Duggan, Maeve. 2017. “Online Harassment 2017.” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech (blog) (July 11, 2017). http:​//www​.pewi​ntern​et.or​g/201​7/07/​11/on​ line-​haras​sment​-2017​/. Feagin, Joe R. 2013. The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing. Edition 2. New York, NY: Routledge. Fine, G. A. and M. D. Soucey. 2005. “Joking Cultures: Humor Themes as Social Regulation in Group Life.” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 18 (1): 1–22. Finley, Jessyka. 2016. “Black Women’s Satire as (Black) Postmodern Performance.” Studies in American Humor 2 (2): 236–65.

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Gay, Roxane. 2014. “SNL’s Leslie Jones Uses Slavery to Make a Point About Being Black and Beautiful.” Time (May 5, 2014). http:​//tim​e.com​/8813​0/snl​s-les​lie-j​ ones-​uses-​slave​ry-to​-make​-a-po​int-a​bout-​being​-blac​k-and​-beau​tiful​/. Gray, Herman. 1995. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for “Blackness.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haggins, Bambi. 2007. Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ———. 2009. “In the Wake of ‘The Nigger Pixie’: Dave Chappelle and the High Cost of De Facto Crossover.” In Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, edited by Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey Jones, and Ethan Thompson, 233–51. New York: NYU Press. Hall, Stuart. 2000. “Racist Ideologies and the Media.” In Media Studies: A Reader, edited by Paul Marris and Sue Thornham, Vol. 2, 271–82. New York: New York University Press. Howitt, Dennis and Kwame Owusu-Bempah. 2005. “Race and Ethnicity in Popular Humour.” In Beyond a Joke, edited by Sharon Lockyear and Michael Pickering, 45–62. Springer. Husband, Charles. 1988. “Racist Humour and Racist Ideology in British Television, or I Laughed till You Cried.” In Humour in Society: Resistance and Control, edited by Paton, George E., Chris Powell, Luciano Venezia, and Kelly Frailing, 149–78. London: Macmillan. “I Did It for the Lulz.” 2006. Know Your Meme. http:​//kno​wyour​meme.​com/m​emes/​ i-did​-it-f​or-th​e-lul​z. Jackson, Sarah J. 2016. “(Re)Imagining Intersectional Democracy from Black Feminism to Hashtag Activism.” Women’s Studies in Communication 39 (4): 375–79. https​://do​i.org​/10.1​080/0​74914​09.20​16.12​26654​. Kotsko, Adam. 2017. “Neoliberalism’s Demons.” Theory & Event 20 (2): 493–509. Kuipers, Giselinde. 2011. “The Politics of Humour in the Public Sphere: Cartoons, Power and Modernity in the First Transnational Humour Scandal.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 14 (1): 63–80. https​://do​i.org​/10.1​177/1​36754​94103​70072​. LaSha. 2016. “We Need to Talk About Leslie Jones and Colorism in Our Community.” EBONY (August 12, 2016). http:​//www​.ebon​y.com​/news​-view​s/les​lie-j​ ones-​color​ism. Lemieux, Jamilah. 2014. “Once Again, No One Is Laughing at ‘SNL.’” EBONY (May 5, 2014). http:​//www​.ebon​y.com​/ente​rtain​ment-​cultu​re/le​slie-​jones​-week​ end-u​pdate​-slav​ery-8​42. Lewis, Paul. 2006. Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict. University of Chicago Press. Lott, Eric. 1995. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Reprint edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Macías, Kelly. 2015. “‘Sisters in the Collective Struggle’: Sounds of Silence and Reflections on the Unspoken Assault on Black Females in Modern America.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 15 (4): 260–64. https​://do​i.org​/10.1​ 177/1​53270​86155​78415​. Mantilla, Karla. 2015. Gendertrolling: How Misogyny Went Viral. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger/ABC-CLIO.

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Marantz, Andrew. 2016. “Trolls for Trump.” The New Yorker (October 24, 2016). https​://ww​w.new​yorke​r.com​/maga​zine/​2016/​10/31​/trol​ls-fo​r-tru​mp. McDonald, Soraya Nadia. 2014. “Leslie Jones of ‘SNL’ Defends Her Jokes about Forced Breeding during Slavery.” Washington Post (May 5, 2014), sec. Morning Mix. https​://ww​w.was​hingt​onpos​t.com​/news​/morn​ing-m​ix/wp​/2014​/05/0​5/les​lie-j​ ones-​of-sn​l-def​ends-​her-j​okes-​about​-forc​ed-br​eedin​g-dur​ing-s​laver​y/. McMillan Cottom, Tressie. 2014. “Here, A Hypocrite Lives: I Probably Get It Wrong On Leslie Jones But I Tried.” Tressiemc (blog) (May 6, 2014). https​://tr​essie​mc.co​ m/unc​atego​rized​/here​-a-hy​pocri​te-li​ves-i​-prob​ably-​get-i​t-wro​ng-on​-lesl​ie-jo​nes-b​ ut-i-​tried​/. Mendes, Amy E. 2016. “Digital Demagogue: The Critical Candidacy of Donald J. Trump.” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 6 (3/4): 62–73. Meyer, John C. 2000. “Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication.” Communication Theory 10 (3): 310–31. Michaels, Lorne. 2014. “Weekend Update.” Saturday Night Live. NBC. http:​//www​ .nbc.​com/s​aturd​ay-ni​ght-l​ive/v​ideo/​weeke​nd-up​date-​lesli​e-jon​es/27​79226​. Nagle, Angela. 2017. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right. Winchester, UK; Washington, USA: Zero Books. Ohlheiser, Abby. 2016. “Twitter Bans Conservative Writer Milo Yiannopoulos for Good, While Cracking down on Abuse.” Washington Post (July 20, 2016). https​ ://ww​w.was​hingt​onpos​t.com​/news​/the-​inter​sect/​wp/20​16/07​/20/t​witte​r-ban​s-mil​ o-yia​nnopo​ulos-​for-g​ood-w​hile-​crack​ing-d​own-o​n-abu​se/. Penny, Laurie. 2016. “My Night out in Cleveland with the Worst Men on the Internet.” The Guardian (July 26, 2016), sec. US news. http:​//www​.theg​uardi​an.co​ m/us-​news/​2016/​jul/2​6/my-​night​-out-​in-cl​evela​nd-wi​th-th​e-wor​st-me​n-on-​the-i​ ntern​et. Pérez, Raúl. 2013. “Learning to Make Racism Funny in the ‘Color-Blind’ Era: Standup Comedy Students, Performance Strategies, and the (Re)Production of Racist Jokes in Public.” Discourse & Society 24 (4): 478–503. https​://do​i.org​/10.1​177/0​ 95792​65134​82066​. ———. 2016. “Racist Humor: Then and Now.” Sociology Compass 10 (10): 928–38. ———. 2017. “Racism without Hatred? Racist Humor and the Myth of ‘Colorblindness.’” Sociological Perspectives 60 (5): 956–74. https​://do​i.org​/10.1​177/0​73112​ 14177​19699​. Phillips, Whitney. 2016. This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Reprint edition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Phillips, Whitney and Ryan M. Milner. 2017. The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. 1 edition. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity. Posner, Sarah. 2016. “How Stephen Bannon Created an Online Haven for White Nationalists | Politics & Government | The Investigative Fund.” (August 22, 2016). http:​//www​.thei​nvest​igati​vefun​d.org​/inve​stiga​tions​/poli​ticsa​ndgov​ernme​nt/22​65/ ho​w_ste​phen_​banno​n_cre​ated_​an_on​line_​haven​_for_​white​_nati​onali​sts/.​ Remnick, David. 2016. “Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency.” New Yorker (December 17, 2016).

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Robinson, Phoebe. 2014. “The ‘SNL’ Race Controversy: Why Leslie Jones Can Say What She Likes.” The Daily Beast (May 6, 2014), sec. entertainment. http:​//www​ .thed​ailyb​east.​com/a​rticl​es/20​14/05​/06/t​he-sn​l-rac​e-con​trove​rsy-w​hy-le​slie-​jones​ -can-​say-w​hat-s​he-li​kes. Seymour, Richard. 2016. “Schadenfreude with Bite.” London Review of Books (December 15, 2016). Sharma, Sanjay and Phillip Brooker. 2016. “# Notracist: Exploring Racism Denial Talk on Twitter.” In Digital Sociologies, edited by Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillan Cottom. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, University of Bristol. https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Sociologies-Jessie-Daniels/dp/1447329015 Smith, Moira. 2009. “Humor, Unlaughter, and Boundary Maintenance.” Journal of American Folklore 122 (2): 148–71. Weaver, Simon. 2010. “Developing a Rhetorical Analysis of Racist Humour: Examining Anti-Black Jokes on the Internet.” Social Semiotics 20 (5): 537–55. Wolcott, James. 2015. “How Donald Trump Became America’s Insult Comic in Chief.” Vanity Fair (November 6, 2015). https​://ww​w.van​ityfa​ir.co​m/cul​ture/​ 2015/​11/wo​lcott​-trum​p-ins​ult-c​omic.​ Wu, Brianna. 2016. “Why the New ‘Ghostbusters’ is Gamergate’s Worst Nightmare.” The Daily Dot (blog) (July 13, 2016). https​://ww​w.dai​lydot​.com/​parse​c/gho​stbus​ ters-​gamer​gate-​criti​cal-r​eview​-cris​is/. Yiannopoulos, Milo. 2014. “Exposed: The Secret Mailing List of the Gaming Journalism Elite.” Breitbart (September 17, 2014). http:​//www​.brei​tbart​.com/​londo​ 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 Crasnow, Sharon and Joanne Waugh. Lanham: Lexington Books: 37–50. Zeisler, Andi. 2015. “Why Feminists Have an Obligation to See ‘Ghostbusters’—LA Times.” Latimes.Com (May 25, 2015). http:​//www​.lati​mes.c​om/op​inion​/op-e​d/la-​ 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 Ireland’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 discussion 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 construction 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 context of comedy studies and does so alongside comedic and satiric responses 65

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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 examining 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 presenting 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 globalization 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 Bauman’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 pejorative 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 politicians, supporters, and discourse through harsh ridicule and absurdity, particularly with reference to the caricatured depiction of the body and identity of the politician. Significantly, the caricature of the body of Brexit politicians by

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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 regulations, 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 Bauman. Thus, the problems of globalization are also the problems of neoliberalism. Although Bauman states that “ours is a wholly negative globalization: unchecked, unsupplemented and uncompensated for by a ‘positive’ counterpart” (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 populist. Some are modes of psychologic projection. The have-nots of globalization—the poor, the migrant, and the “other”—become the objects that fear is

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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 contribute. 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 referendum (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 predicated 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 ideology 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”

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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 zeitgeist 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 juxtaposed 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 “selfhelp” 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 neoliberal 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 incongruity and the structure of rhetorical devices (Weaver 2011). From the acknowledgement that humor can form convincing communication, I examine the context in

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which a joke is told, or the speaker and audience positions involved in, respectively, 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 outline 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, globalization, 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).

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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 positions 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 individual “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 destabilizing of the text in the very process of producing it. (Giora and Attardo 2014: 397)

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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 postmodern ironies “enjoyed” by leave supporters, when contrasted with the tension 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 pleasure 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 sentiment more fully). CARICATURE AS POLITICAL SATIRE This section outlines the second trope of importance to the chapter—caricature. 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 contribute 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:

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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 consciousness of artists and writers, and how it continued throughout the Renaissance 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 physiques 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 “punchup” 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 ridiculous 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 complex 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.

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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 especially 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 discourse. 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

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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 character—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 caricatured 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 postBrexit was repeated by left and right leaning leave campaigners on several occasions, including Gisela Stuart (Reuben 2016) and Boris Johnson (Hartley-Parkinson 2016). The figure has been shown by a number of independent experts to be misleading and was clarified by media outlets including the

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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.

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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 example 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.

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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 posters 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

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thus presents a particular ethos on Farage. It is also a satire that implicitly reinforces neoliberal images of the body—that the “slick” neoliberal, (individualized) 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 scatological references through the use of the show’s “bullshit” bottom, which first appeared in an interview between Alex Brooker and the then Liberal Democrat 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 comments 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 coherence. 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

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David Cameron is standing (Schopf 2016). In October 2016, Ben Jennings’s cartoon in The Guardian depicts Johnson with hair combed in several directions 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 Conservative 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 caricatures 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 Oliver, 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 million 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

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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 simplification. 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 presenting 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 mobilization 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 scapegoat—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 presents 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 political discourse and is distinctly neoliberal. Unless coupled with other forms of

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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 supporters, which may have wider implications for understandings of political communication, especially in a political landscape where populisms (with their usual, inbuilt dilemmas, contradictions or ironies) are in ascendance. Specifically 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 referendum (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).

WORKS CITED Aronowitz, S. 2000. “Essay on Violence.” In Stephanie Urso Spina (ed.) Smoke and Mirrors: The Hidden Context of Violence in Schools and Society. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 211–27. Bauman, Z. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2006. Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2016a. Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2016b. Europe’s Adventure: Still Unfinished? Public lecture at the Bauman Institute, University of Leeds. October 5, 2016. ———. 2017. Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Baudelaire, C. 2017. “On the Essence of Laughter.” In M. Romanska and A. Ackerman (eds.) Reader in Comedy. An Anthology of Theory & Criticism. London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 201–207. Bell, S. 2016a. “Steve Bell on Nigel Farage’s Resignation.” The Guardian. July 4th. https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​isfre​e/pic​ture/​2016/​jul/0​4/ste​ve-be​ll-on​ -nige​l-far​ages-​resig​natio​n-car​toon.​Accessed July 15, 2017. ———. 2016b. “Steve Bell’s If ... On Toady Nigel Farage’s Full English Brexit.” The Guardian. December 8th. https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​isfre​e/pic​ture/​ 2016/​dec/0​8/ste​ve-be​lls-i​f-on-​toady​-nige​l-far​ages-​full-​engli​sh-br​exit.​ Accessed July 15, 2017. ———. 2017. “Steve Bell on the UK’s EU Divorce Bill—Cartoon.” The Guardian. July 11th. https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/po​litic​s/com​menti​sfree​/pict​ure/2​017/ j​ul/11​/stev​e-bel​l-on-​the-u​ks-eu​-divo​rce-b​ill-c​artoo​n. Accessed July 26, 2017. Bennett, J. 2016. “The Critical Problem of Cynical Irony Meaning What You Say and Ideologies of Class and Gender.” Social Semiotics, 26(3): 250–264. Berger, A. A. 1995. Blind Men and Elephants. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. Berlant, L. and S. Ngai. 2017. “Comedy has issues.” Critical Inquiry, 43: 233–249. Brigstocke, J. 2014. The Life of the City. Space, Humor, and the Experience of Truth in Fin-de-siècle Montmartre. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publications. Brown, D. 2012. “No title.” The Independent. http:​//www​.voxe​urop.​eu/fi​les/D​ave-B​ rown-​kiss-​the-f​rog.j​pg. Accessed July 17, 2017. Colletta, L. 2009. “Political Satire and Postmodern Irony in the Age of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart.” The Journal of Popular Culture, 42(5): 856–874. Davies, W. 2014. The Limits of Neoliberalism. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC: Sage Publications. Derrida, J. 1976. Of grammatology. Trans. G. Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Elias, N. 1978. The Civilising Process. Vol. 1. The History of Manners. Oxford: Blackwell. El Refaie, E. 2009. “Multiliteracies: How Readers Interpret Political Cartoons.” Visual Communication, 8(2): 181–205. ———. 2011. “The Pragmatics of Humor Reception: Young People’s Responses to a Newspaper Cartoon.” HUMOR, 24(1): 87–108. Featherstone, M. 2013. “‘Welcome to the Hotel California’: Bauman and Virilio on Utopia, Dystopia and Globalization.” In M. Davies (ed.) Liquid Sociology. Metaphor in Zygmunt Bauman’s Analysis of Modernity. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publications, 67–84. Gatrell, V. 2006. City of Laughter. Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London. London: Atlantic Books. Giora, R. and S. Attardo. 2014. “Irony.” In S. Attardo (ed.) Encyclopedia of Humor Studies. Volume 1. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 397–402. Hartley-Parkinson, R. 2016. “Boris Johnson Stands by £350 Million Vote Leave Bus Message.” Metro. April 27th. http:​//met​ro.co​.uk/2​017/0​4/27/​boris​-john​son-s​tands​ -by-3​50mil​lion-​vote-​leave​-bus-​messa​ge-66​00240​/. Accessed July 22, 2017.

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Hall, S. 1996. Race, the floating signifier. The Movie. Produced, directed and edited by S. Jhally. Northampton: Media Education Foundation. Higgie, R. 2017. “Public Engagement, Propaganda, or Both? Attitudes Towards Politicians on Political Satire and Comedy Programs.” International Journal of Communication, 11: 930–948. Hills, A. 2016. “Adam’s Farage Rant” The Last Leg.” Channel 4. June 24th. https​:// ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=xnN​eWQlp​jso&f​eatur​e=you​tu.be​. Inglehart, R. F. and P. Norris. 2016. “Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash.” Harvard Kennedy School Faculty Research Working Papers Series, 1–52. ITV News. 2016. “Fact check: ‘EU membership costs Britain £350 million a week.”” ITV News. http:​//www​.itv.​com/n​ews/u​pdate​/2016​-06-0​9/fac​t-che​ck-eu​-memb​ershi​ p-cos​ts-br​itain​-350-​milli​on-a-​week/​. Accessed July 21, 2017. Jewell, H. and A. White. 2015. “The People Have Spoken and Nigel Farage Looks Like A Shiny Frog.” BuzzFeed. April 2nd. https​://ww​w.buz​zfeed​.com/​hanna​ hjewe​ll/ri​bbit-​ribbi​t-rib​bit-i​mmigr​ants?​utm_t​erm=.​yvdm4​K7VR#​.ywB9​MEAaK​. Accessed July 15, 2017. Jennings, B. 2016. “Ben Jennings on Boris Johnson’s Brexit Column—Cartoon.” The Guardian. October 16th. https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​isfre​e/pic​ture/​ 2016/​oct/1​6/ben​-jenn​ings-​on-bo​ris-j​ohnso​ns-br​exit-​colum​n-car​toon.​ Accessed July 26, 2017. Klein, S. R. 2014. “Caricature.” In S. Attardo (ed.) Encyclopedia of Humor Studies. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 103–105. Kotsko, A. 2017. “Neoliberalism’s Demons.” Theory & Event, 20(2): 493–509. Lee, B. 2016. “Sky Confirms that it Postposed John Oliver Brexit Episode Due to Ofcom “Broadcast Restrictions.”” Digital Spy. June 22nd. http:​//www​.digi​talsp​ y.com​/tv/u​stv/n​ews/a​79872​3/sky​-conf​i rms-​john-​olive​r-bre​xit-e​pisod​e-pul​led-o​ fcom-​broad​casti​ng-re​stric​tions​/. Accessed July 26, 2017. Lusher, A. 2016. “Racism Unleashed: True Extent of the ‘Explosion of Blatant Hate“ that Followed Brexit Result Revealed.” The Independent. July 28th. http:​ //www​.inde​pende​nt.co​.uk/n​ews/u​k/pol​itics​/brex​it-ra​cism-​uk-po​st-re​feren​dum-r​ acism​-hate​-crim​e-eu-​refer​endum​-raci​sm-un​leash​ed-po​land-​racis​t-a71​60786​.html.​ Accessed June 6, 2017. Oliver, J. 2016a. “Brexit.” Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. HBO. June 19th. https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=iAg​KHSNq​xa8. Accessed July 20, 2017. ———. 2016b. “Brexit Update.” Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, HBO. June 27th. https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=nh0​ac5HU​pDU. Accessed July 26, 2017. O’Neill, B. 2016. “Brexit Voters are not Thick, not Racist: Just Poor.” The Spectator. July 2nd. https​://ww​w.spe​ctato​r.co.​uk/20​16/07​/brex​it-vo​ters-​are-n​ot-th​ick-n​ot-ra​ cist-​just-​poor/​. Accessed July 24, 2017. O’Regan, D. 1992. Rhetoric, Comedy and the Violence of Language in Aristophanes” Clouds. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orr, D. 2017. “What is there to Rejoice About? Britain has just Voted for Irony.” The Guardian. June 10th. https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​isfre​e/201​7/jun​

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/10/g​enera​l-ele​ction​-noth​ing-t​o-cel​ebrat​e-bre​xit-s​till-​happe​ning-​tory-​gover​nment​. Accessed July 21, 2017. Read, S. and N. Farage. 2016. “Interview on Good Morning Britain” Good Moring Britain.” ITV. June 24th. https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=0Kq​vr6eG​yYs. Accessed July 17, 2017. Reuben, A. 2016. “Reality Check: Would Brexit mean Extra £350m a Week for NHS?”. BBC News. April 15th. http:​//www​.bbc.​co.uk​/news​/uk-p​oliti​cs-eu​-refe​ rendu​m-360​40060​. Accessed July 21, 2017. Richardson, J. E. 2006. Analysing Newspapers. An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Saul, J. 2016. “Brexit: Resist the Simple “Racism” Narrative.” Huffington post. June 28th. http:​//www​.huff​i ngto​npost​.com/​jenni​fer-s​aul/b​rexit​-resi​st-th​e-sim​ple-_​ b_107​02820​.html​. Accessed July 21, 2017. Schopf, O. 2016. “Brexit!!.” Der Standard. February 22nd. http:​//www​.poli​tico.​eu/ar​ ticle​/worl​ds-ca​rtoon​ists-​on-th​is-we​eks-n​ews-b​rexit​-refu​gees-​trump​-cart​oon-c​arous​ el/. Accessed July 26, 2017. Smith, O. 2017. “Article 50 meant UK LOST Control!“ Gina Miller MOCKS Brexiteers Handing over Power to EU.” The Daily Express. May 10th. http:​//www​ .expr​ess.c​o.uk/​news/​uk/80​2803/​Gina-​Mille​r-Bre​xit-v​ote-G​enera​l-Ele​ction​-EU. Accessed July 21, 2017. St. Louis, B. 2003. “Sport, Genetics and the “Natural Athlete’: The Resurgence of Racial Science.” Body & Society, 9(2): 76–95. Stone, J. 2016. “Nearly Half of Britons Believe Vote Leave’s False “£350 Million a Week to the EU” Claim.” The Independent. June 16th. http:​//www​.inde​pende​nt.co​ .uk/n​ews/u​k/pol​itics​/near​ly-ha​lf-of​-brit​ons-b​eliev​e-vot​e-lea​ves-f​alse-​350-m​illio​ 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. Vote Leave. 2016. “Why Vote Leave.” Voteleavetakecontrol. http:​//www​.vote​leave​ 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 Whatsoever’: Audience Perceptions of Anti-Muslim Racism in Sacha Baron Cohen’s the Dictator.” HUMOR, 29(2): 279–299. Weaver, S. and R. A. Mora. 2016. “Introduction: Tricksters, humor and activism.” 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. White, A. 2016. “The Big Brexit Irony: Foreign Property Buyers will Pile into the UK if We Vote to Leave.” The Telegraph. June 13th. http:​//www​.tele​graph​.co.u​k/pro​ perty​/comm​ercia​l/the​-big-​brexi​t-iro​ny-fo​reign​-prop​erty-​buyer​s-wil​l-pil​e-int​o-the​/. 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 “slactivists.” 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 twopronged: 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 activism of this generation and argues that, taken together, these attacks on millennial 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 percentage 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 misunderstanding 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

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every voting age citizen is familiar with the phrase “the 99percent” certainly suggests a profound success in spreading their message. An interesting feature 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 datadriven 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 silliness and seriousness, and its almost ubiquitous satirical tone. Following the work of Stephen Duncombe, I argue that millennials are redefining citizenship 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 millennial 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? Everywhere 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?

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For instance, Micah White, a senior editor at Adbusters and an awardwinning 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 activists, 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 government 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 individuals. 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 language 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

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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 meaningful 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).

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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 University 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 studies 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

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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 generation’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, selfinvolved 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 character of this generation. What this suggests is that this is more about generational bashing than political bashing. Older generations have always demonized the young (Reeve 2013). Generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe remind us that “at the outset 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 citizenship 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 generation 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 citizenship to include social concerns and the welfare of others” (Dalton 2008,

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267–69). One of the key distinctions that Dalton points out is that understanding this new idea of citizenship requires recognition that civic involvement 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 skepticism 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 trying 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

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parents do not apply to the vast majority of the millennial demographic, which also includes first generation college students, students of single parent 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, socioeconomics, 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 resignation, 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 realities 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 commitment 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 criminals or idiots. In Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability Giroux explains that, as the market demands the erosion of the social state,

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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 potential 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 conditions 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 neoliberal 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 millennials. 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,

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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. Technological 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 strategies 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 Progressive 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, Duncombe’s strategy makes political information both informative and fun and takes away from the circus of distracting politics that is full of lies and misinformation. He explains, “For spectacle to be ethical it must not only reveal

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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 Entertaining 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 information 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 increasingly 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

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media to ironically mock a gasbag with political power is, indeed, a significant 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 Tumblr, 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 comedy. And yet, some would just dismiss him as a useless slactivist.

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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 participation 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 irrational, 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 spectacle; it understands that spectacle can play a central role in amplifying the real (Duncombe 2007, 155). In this way, satirists and other left public intellectuals 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, selfish 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.

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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.

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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 political 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 progressive 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 meaningful. 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.​

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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? (Palgrave 2014). 4. See chapter two of Is Satire Saving Our Nation?

WORKS CITED American Press Institute. “How Millennials Get News: Inside the habits of America’s first digital generation,” American Press Institute, March 16, 2015, http:​ //www​.amer​icanp​ressi​nstit​ute.o​rg/pu​blica​tions​/repo​rts/s​urvey​-rese​arch/​mille​nnial​ s-new​s/. Baig, Mehroz. 2013. “Unpaid Internships for Graduates Now the New Norm?” Huffington Post. September 12, https​://ww​w.huf​fingt​onpos​t.com​/mehr​oz-ba​ig/un​ paid-​inter​nship​s-for​-gr_b​_3908​475.h​tml. Matt Binder, “Public Shaming: Tweets of Privilege,” Blog, accessed June 6, 2014, http://publicshaming.tumblr.com/about. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2012. “Downward Mobility is now a Reality,” The Guardian, May 31, 2012, http:​//www​.theg​uardi​an.co​m/com​menti​sfree​/2012​/may/​31/do​ wnwar​d-mob​ility​-euro​pe-yo​ung-p​eople​. Bradley, Laura. 2014. “People Don’t Hate Millennials,” Slate, December 26, 2014, http:​//www​.slat​e.com​/arti​cles/​techn​ology​/futu​re_te​nse/2​014/1​2/you​_don_​t_hat​e_ mil​lenni​als_y​ou_ha​te_21​st_ce​ntury​_tech​nolog​y.htm​l. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2018. “Household Data Seasonally Adjusted: A-10. Unemployment Rates by Age, Sex, Marital Status, Seasonally Adjusted,” U.S. Department of Labor, August 3, 2018, https​://ww​w.bls​.gov/​web/e​mpsit​/cpse​ ea10.​htm. Dalton, Russell J. 2008. The Good Citizen: How a Younger Generation is Reshaping American Politics. SAGE Publications, Kindle edition. DeMaria, Meghan. 2014. “Study: Millennials are more Skeptical of Government than Previous Generations,” The Week, September 4, 2014, http:​//the​week.​com/ s​peedr​eads/​44691​6/stu​dy-mi​llenn​ials-​are-m​ore-s​kepti​cal-g​overn​ment-​than-​previ​ ous-g​enera​tions​. Donegan, Ryan. 2013. “The Numbers Behind Why Millennials are ‘Generation Frustration,’” Huffington Post, September 24, 2013, http:​//www​.huff​i ngto​npost​ .com/​ryan-​doneg​an/mi​llenn​ials-​gener​ation​-frus​trati​on_b_​39771​45.ht​ml. Duncombe, Stephen. 2007. Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. New York: The New Press. Ebbitt, Kathleen. 2015. “In Defense of Slacktivism,” Global Citizen, February 3, 2015, https​://ww​w.glo​balci​tizen​.org/​en/co​ntent​/in-d​efens​e-of-​slack​tivis​m/. Eowyn, Dr. 2014. “UC Berkeley Student Protest against Ferguson Police Violence Turns Violent,” Fellowship of the Minds, December 7, 2014, http:​//fel​lowsh​ipoft​ hemin​ds.co​m/201​4/12/​07/u-​c-ber​keley​-stud​ent-p​rotes​t-aga​inst-​fergu​son-p​olice ​ -viol​ence-​turns​-viol​ent/.​

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Fottrell, Quentin. 2014. “40percent of Unemployed Workers are Millennials,” MarketWatch, June 7, 2014, https​://ww​w.mar​ketwa​tch.c​om/st​ory/4​0-of-​unemp​loyed​ -work​ers-a​re-mi​llenn​ials-​2014-​07-03​. Fox News. 2004. “Jon Stewart and Undecided Voter Connection,” Fox News, September 20, http:​//www​.foxn​ews.c​om/st​ory/2​004/0​9/20/​jon-s​tewar​t-and​-unde​ cided​-vote​r-con​necti​on.ht​ml. Giroux, Henry A. 2003. “Youth, Higher Education, and the Crisis of Public Time: Educated Hope and the Possibility of a Democratic Future,” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 141–168. Giroux, Henry. 2009. Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. Giroux, Henry A. 2011. “Beyond the Limits of Higher Education: Global Youth Resistance and the American/British Divide,” Campaign for the Public University, November 7, 2011, http:​//pub​licun​ivers​ity.o​rg.uk​/2011​/11/0​7/bey​ond-t​he-li​mits-​of-ne​ olibe​ral-h​igher​-educ​ation​-glob​al-yo​uth-r​esist​ance-​and-t​he-am​erica​nbrit​ish-d​ivide​/. Giroux, Henry A. 2014. “Protesting Youth in the Age of Neoliberal Cruelty,” Truthout, June 18, 2014, http:​//www​.trut​h-out​.org/​news/​item/​24437​-prot​estin​ g-you​th-in​-an-a​ge-of​-neol​ibera​l-sav​agery​. Harvard University Institute of Politics. 2013. “Survey of Young Americans’ Attitudes toward Politics and Public Service,” Harvard University Institute of Politics, 24th Edition: October 30–November 11, http:​//www​.iop.​harva​rd.ed​u/sit​ es/de​fault​/file​s_new​/Harv​ard_T​opLin​eData​Fall2​013.p​df. Haugerud, Angelique. 2013. No Billionaire Left Behind: Satirical Activism in America. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Irvine, Martha. 2014. “Study: Millennials Less Trusting than Gen X Was,” The AP, September 4, 2014, http:​//big​story​.ap.o​rg/ar​ticle​/stud​y-mil​lenni​als-l​ess-t​rusti​ng-ge​ n-x-w​as. Lee, Donna. 2018. “Single Mother Statistics,” July 5, https​://si​nglem​other​guide​.com/​ singl​e-mot​her-s​tatis​tics/​. McClennen, Sophia and Remy M. Maisel. 2014. Is Satire Saving Our Nation? New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Millennial Action Project. 2015. “The Millennial Slacktivism Debate: A Political Perspective,” Millennial Action Project, April 29, 2015, http:​//www​.mill​ennia​lacti​ on.or​g/blo​g/mil​lenni​als-s​lackt​ivism​-poli​tics.​ Occupy Wall Street. 2014. Twitter Post, February 28, 2014, https​://tw​itter​.com/​Occup​ yWall​St/st​atus/​43939​51663​99787​008. Pew Research Center. 2010. “Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next,” Pew Research Center, February 2010, 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​. Pew Research Center. 2014. “Millennials in Adulthood,” Pew Research Center, March 7, 2014, http:​//www​.pews​ocial​trend​s.org​/2014​/03/0​7/mil​lenni​als-i​n-adu​ lthoo​d/. Reeve, Elspeth. 2013. “Every Every Every Generation Has Been the Me Me Me Generation,” The Atlantic, May 9. https​://ww​w.the​atlan​tic.c​om/na​tiona​l/arc​hive/​2013/​ 05/me​-gene​ratio​n-tim​e/315​151/.​

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Seaquist, Carla. 2010. “Hope for reversing America’s Decline: The Millennial Generation,” The Christian Science Monitor, September 24, 2010, http:​//www​.csmo​ nitor​.com/​Comme​ntary​/Opin​ion/2​010/0​924/H​ope-f​or-re​versi​ng-Am​erica​-s-de​ cline​-the-​Mille​nnial​-Gene​ratio​n. Smith, Aaron. 2013. “Civic Engagement in the Digital Age,” Pew Research Center, April 25, 2013, http:​//www​.pewi​ntern​et.or​g/201​3/04/​25/ci​vic-e​ngage​ment-​in-th​ e-dig​ital-​age/.​ White, Micah. 2010. “Clicktivism is Ruining Activism,” The Guardian, August 12, https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​isfre​e/201​0/aug​/12/c​lickt​ivism​-ruin​ing-l​ eftis​t-act​ivism.​ Winograd, Morley and Michael D. Hais. 2012. “Millennial Generation Safe at Home,” New Geography, April 15, http:​//www​.newg​eogra​phy.c​om/co​ntent​/0027​ 74-mi​lenni​al-ge​nerat​ion-s​afe-h​ome. Wurtzel, Elizabeth. 2013. “From Led Zeppelin to Breaking Bad: The Lamest Generation,” The Daily Beast, September 29, 2013, http:​//www​.thed​ailyb​east.​com/a​ rticl​es/20​13/09​/29/f​rom-l​ed-ze​ppeli​n-to-​break​ing-b​ad-th​e-lam​est-g​enera​tion.​html.​ van Zoonen, Liesbet. 2005. Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

Chapter 4

Political Humor in the Face of Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Turkey1 Seçil Dağtaş

Istanbul and many other cities across Turkey witnessed a widespread insurgency 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. “Kahrolsun 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

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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 chapter 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 analyses 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 aftermath of the Gezi events. It was precisely at this level of moral and social life

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that comedy operated while addressing “the AKP’s authoritarian-neoliberalIslamist machinery” (Erensü and Karaman 2017, 22). Against a backdrop of social unrest, this paper examines comedy’s encounter with neoliberal authoritarianism in two different but interrelated registers. The first concerns the various ways in which humor becomes a form of dissent against hegemonic discourses, social inequalities, and the authoritarian regimes surrounding neoliberal politics. I interrogate how humorous language, 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 manifestations 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, performers, 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 neoliberal 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 messages 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 politically, 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

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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 popularized 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 tensions, ideological divisions, pressures of the market, and the political aspirations 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 ambivalences 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. Accordingly, 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 halfhumorous 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

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immigration from rural areas, and the increasing power of a developmentalist-leftist ideology in the culture industry. In the context of these developments, 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 criticizing 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 neoliberalism 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, growing up in an era of neoliberal individualism, consumerism, and new communication 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 positioned 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

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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 political 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 intellectuals, 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 . . . antifascist, 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 Kemalist/secularist stance. They framed their participation as one of defending Atatürk’s nation from reactionary forces by explicitly invoking Turkey’s

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“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 government 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 representations 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 multifarious 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.

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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 funnel helmets had handwritten “identification numbers” covered awkwardly with water-bottle labels. The meaning of this performative act was not necessarily 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 popular 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 incongruity of very serious moments of life as a source of amusement, power, and

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

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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.

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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 others 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 anthropologists 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

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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 Dictionary)) 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 expressing 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, censorship, 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.

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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 pressure 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

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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 majority 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 targets 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 examples 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, embodiment, 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 humorous 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), environmentalists and inhabitants protesting against the municipality’s plan to institute an incinerator facility in a district of Bursa (Figure 4.8), and university students concerned about Turkey’s ongoing state of emergency since the failed coup attempt in 2016 (discussed later) all used this motif to express their

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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.

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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.

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they induce, and the visual culture that is produced around them. Turning the street (and politics) into a carnivalesque playground, they mark “a temporary 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 resistance 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 normalized 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 gendered 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

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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 potential 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 preoccupied with food and domesticity (Gurel 2015, 3). The jokes appeared during the Gezi events with the participation of self-proclaimed “mothers” in protests following Erdoğan’s patronizing call that parents should take their children 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 pressure” 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 distance they establish, through the joke, between themselves and the object of

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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.

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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 representations 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 proAKP 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. Building 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, inversion, 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 differences. 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

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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 imprisonment of thousands of journalists, academics, politicians, and public employees 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 dissident voices on social media.13 Yet despite this crackdown, Gezi-inspired graphics and jokes have continued 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, humorous 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).

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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 embodiment 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 representations 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, sexuality, 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 celebrates 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.

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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 helpful 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 temporarily 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

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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 reasoned, 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 philosophy tradition, and more specifically to the “dog philosophy” associated with Diogenes of Sinope.1 It purposively seeks to promote earnestness, honesty, 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 impersonation; 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 Sloterdijk’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 peculiar 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

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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. conservative 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 “epidemics,” 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 administration, 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, deregulation in telecoms—as well as enforced humanitarianism from Europe to Africa—were seen as signs of the love affair between Washington and powerful 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 Clinton [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 Republican 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 increasingly concentrated private media networks looking for niche demographics, and especially in infotainment television shows.

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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 construe 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 particular ‘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 playing 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 circulating 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 interconvertible capitals (be they high ratings, budgets of production, media visibility, citations and fandom) which cannot be understood without seeing TV production as intimately linked to quantifiable audience ratings (and henceforth, 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 quality 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 maximum 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

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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 production/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 ordinary/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” organizations 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 reproduction of order. At a minimum, for the players, this means the reproduction of the game itself. At a maximum, this means the re-creation of societal order through their own play (their own competitive illusion).

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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 intersubjective 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 Bourdieu and his discussion on the production of symbolic capital and violence. For Bourdieu, symbolic systems are “structured and structuring instruments 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. society. 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, objectification, normalization, and flattening of society, in which dominant actors tend

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to analyze an event from the view point of “common sense” (in a Gramscian 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, describing 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 neoliberal 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 infotainer, 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 consciousness 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—verging on the grotesque—and obvious polarization. Hence, the culture warrior on the field of infotainment is always more than a simple journalist: at any

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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 neoliberal 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), recognition, 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 domination) when their understanding of the situation and relation can only use instruments 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)

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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 violently) 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 infotainment 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 battlefield 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 seriousness, the strange journalism + pantomime combination. Here comes a very specific kind of equilibrist, explicitly surfing the inherent fluidity of genres (see the work of Lauren Berlant). If infotainers are hybrids mixing serious fact-giving and consciousness enhancing journalism 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 democratic politics by ‘watching’ (in both senses of ‘safeguarding’ and ‘seeing’) how media journalism works and how it could be improved, even though

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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 “journalist” 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 mediated 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 political 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 bordering 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

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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 affecting 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

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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 audience, 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 intention to make visible the resonance of this “news” in the mediated politicojournalistic 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

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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 counterbalanced by his humor: to demonstrate the extent of the news/scandal presented, and thus de-complexify global and domestic politics situations that are inherently 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 newscaster: “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, generally 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 concentration allows them to make visible the political and journalistic subtleties, incoherencies, and hypocrisies. LWT therein acts as a news media’s watchdog, 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.

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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 exploitation 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 YouTube). 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 testimonies 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 satirist, 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 “Panopticon,” Oliver seeks to unveil the rules of the game of infotainment and the visible flaws in conventional media coverage. The “main topic,” an investigative 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

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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 culture, political agents, corporations, society, himself. We now propose a combination 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 “civilizing 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 contemporary “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

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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 cynicism means that “enlightened false consciousness” is mobilized toward illusion: 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 hoping 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), Sloterdijk 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,” meaning 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 evercoming 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 “powerknowledge” 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

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“free,” but freedom and autonomy in the Crystal Palace is nothing but purchasing 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 consequences of that: for Sloterdijk, we assist everywhere in contemporary western societies to the rise—and marketization—of what he calls “the aestheticization 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, catastrophic 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” situation 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 idealism 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 professional 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,

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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 materials, 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

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information or ‘truth’ from authoritative sources” (Gray, Jones, and Thompson 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 popularity 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,” especially, 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 misconceptions 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 society 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 morality 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 hypocrisies. 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 discussing the controversy on the “allegations” about UK’s David Cameron.

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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 institution, 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-)reformation movements (i.e., “know yourself” + mobilization), the pedagogical relationship between the neo-kynicist and his public is focused on a parrhesiastic 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,

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an individual who is willing to tell us with absolute earnestness some disagreeable 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 master-disciple relationship in which the master-clown is him/herself the example one desires to imitate (see Sloterdijk 2011). This point is particularly important 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

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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 mobilization. From here on out, Snowden wilfully plays with Oliver on the possible and eventual destination of Oliver’s dickpic inside the vast network of agencies 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 surveillance 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 infotainers, 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

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who has the power to refuse blackmail, who is in charge of finding collective 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 citizenship”—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 masterclass 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 irritability; 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 contemporary 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

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associated with parrhesia, that is the risky freedom to speak the truth, to which Foucault 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 polishing done by the production team (changing this or that, what in French we call “rodage” (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.

WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barcenas, Alejandro. 2007. “Jon the Cynic : Dog Philosophy 101,” in Holt ed., The Daily Show and Philosophy: Moments of Zen in the Art of Fake News. Malden: Blackwell, 93–103. Bataille, Georges. 1957. L’érotisme. Paris: Minuit. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. “Sur le pouvoir symbolique.” Annales, Histoire, Sciences sociales 32(3): 405–411.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. “Symbolic Power.” Critique of Anthropology 4(13–14): 77–85. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1994. Raisons pratiques: Sur la théorie de l’action. Paris: Seuil. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2001. Langage et pouvoir symbolique. Paris: Fayard. Bourgault, Sophie. 2011. “Putting Bullshit on Trial: The Closing Chapter of Michel Foucault’s Voyage to Antiquity.” Theory and Event 14(1). Brown, Wendy. 2011. “Neoliberalized Knowledge.,” History of the Present 1(1): 113–129. Castagner, Marc-Olivier and David Grondin. 2016. “Le médium de la satire politique télévisuelle comme surveillance démocratique: une pratique citoyenne idiote,” in Dufort and Oliver Humour et politique: de la connivence à la désillusion. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 139–177. Couture, Jean-Pierre. 2016. Sloterdijk. Cambridge: Polity Press. Critcher, Chas, Jason Hughes, Julian Petley, and Amanda Rohloff. 2013. Moral Panics in the Contemporary World. New York: Bloomsbury. Davidson, Telly. 2016. Culture War: How the 90s Made Us Who We Are Today (Whether We Like It or Not). Jefferson: McFarland & Co. Gagnon, Frédérick and Catherine Goulet-Cloutier. 2010. “Exorcistes américains : la Heritage Foundation, la guerre culturelle et la sauvegarde du mariage et des valeurs familiales traditionnelles.” Canadian Review of American Studies 40(3): 327–350. Girard, René. 1982. Le Bouc émissaire, Paris: Grasset. Gray, Jonathan and Jeffrey Jones, Ethan Thompson (eds.). 2009. Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era. New York: New York University Press. Grondin, David. 2012. “Understanding Culture Wars through Satirical/Political Infotainment TV: Jon Stewart and The Daily Show’s Critique as Mediated ReEnactment of the Culture War.” Canadian Review of American Studies 42(3): 348–370. Hall, S., C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke, and B. Roberts. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: MacMillan. Huizinga, Johan. 1949. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. ­London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Klauser, Francisco. 2010. “Sprintering spheres of security: Peter Sloterdijk and the contemporary fortress city.,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(2): 326–340. Lewis, Justin and Toby Miller (eds.) 2001. Critical Cultural Policy Studies: A Reader. Cornwall: Blackwell. Salter, Mark B. 2013a. “Introduction,” in Salter and Mutlu ed., Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1–23. ———. 2013b. “The Practice Turn: Introduction,” in Salter and Mutlu ed., Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routled, 85–91. Salvador, Michael and Todd Norton. 2011. “The Flood Myth in the Age of Global Climate Change.” Environmental Communication 5(1): 45–61. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1983. Critique de la raison cynique. Paris: Christian Bourgois. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1989. La Mobilisation Infinie. Paris: Christian Bourgois.

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Sloterdijk, Peter. 2005. Le Palais de Crystal: À l’intérieur du capitalisme planétaire, Paris: Maren Sell. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2011. Tu dois changer ta vie. Paris: Maren Sell. Thompson, Kenneth. 1998. Moral Panics. London: Routledge. Thussu, Daya Kishan. 2007. News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment. London: Sage. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications. Turner, Victor. 1988. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications. Von Holdt, Karl. 2012. “The Violence of Order, Orders of Violence: Between Fanon and Bourdieu.” Current Sociology. 61(2): 112–131.

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 interest 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 parent company General Electric, media executives, and the overall concentrations 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-deprecation 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 [Bershidsky 2016]), media pundits asked a reasonable question: “Is late-night political 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

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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 looking 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 candidates 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 dispensers 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 comedy’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 modern 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

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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 latenight 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 features 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 writing 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

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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” (Anderson 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 institutional 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 dollars 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 critiques, especially of the Trump administration (Reilly 2017). Yet the elephant in the room still remains corporate advertising as a necessary 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 advertisers 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 thinking 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 environment 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 structures who have the last word on political decisions. In the “commedification”

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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 comedy 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 conditions 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 revolutions. In the United States, as a whole, late-night shows are relentless. Neoliberalism 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 counterfactual political possibilities, but systemically, these shows keep bringing us back to their same starting points the following day. John Oliver’s Last Week

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Tonight is one exception to this trend that further focuses the problem. Having 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 sympathetic 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 conservatives.” In essence, When Republicans see these harsh jokes—which echo down through the morning news shows and the chattering day’s worth of viral clips, along with those

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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 conservative 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 communication 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

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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 comedy production and the labor that viewers are expected to perform. Before getting a job on a late-night show, those who become writers, performers, 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 signature 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 audiences, 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 theaters 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

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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 network 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 comedy, which are elevated to an incessant level by late-night shows. Neoliberalism works on a subjective level by having individuals internalize 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 neoliberal, 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 producing, 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 increasingly 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 “emotional labor” or “jobs in which workers are expected to display certain feelings 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

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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 topics 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 environment 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 condition 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 production 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 Colbert’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 cynicism 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

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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 cleverness 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 individualist 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 neoliberalism’s terms one fault in this line of thought becomes apparent—it still presents 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 activism, 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 falseness 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

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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, critics 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 institutions, 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 taking 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 somewhat routine responses to words and images” (think cynical labor), truly bold, jarring, and more complex responses not easily reinscribed into present conditions should be invented (Harold 2007, 107). In Harold’s terms, productive

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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 “collective cheekiness” capable of critique, realistic assessments of the larger structural 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 aggressivity, 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” (Gilbert 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 Diogenes on his head was once characterized as a “master cynicism” or “cheekiness 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 manifest a collective cheekiness that was hard to miss and forwarded significant social changes (Christiansen and Hanson 1996). Many anti-Trump protest

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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 (Kurtzman 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 context and reframing them for nonlinear audiences in light of this once secondary 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 easily 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. WORKS CITED Adams, Richard. “Stephen Colbert packs Corny Punch in Testimony before Congress.” The Guardian. September 24, 2010. www.t​hegua​rdian​.com/​world​/rich​ard-a​ dams-​blog/​2010/​sep/2​4/ste​phen-​colbe​rt-co​ngres​s-imm​igrat​ion-c​span-​corn.​ Anderson, James and Amie D. Kincaid. “Media Subservience and Satirical Subversiveness: The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, the Propaganda Model and the Paradox of Parody.” Critical Studies in Media Communication (2013): 171–188. Becker, Amy and Don J. Waisanen. “From Funny Features to Entertaining Effects: Connecting Approaches to Communication Research on Political Comedy.” Review of Communication 13 (2013): 161–183.

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Becker, Amy, Michael A. Xenos, and Don J. Waisanen. “Sizing up The Daily Show: Audience Perceptions of Political Comedy Programming.” Atlantic Journal of Communication 18 (2010): 144–157. Berlant, Lauren and Sianne Ngai. “Comedy Has Issues.” Critical Inquiry 43 (2017): 233–249. Bershidsky, Leonid. “Trump Won the Stand-Up Competition.” Bloomberg View. May 5, 2016. www.b​loomb​erg.c​om/vi​ew/ar​ticle​s/201​6-05-​05/tr​ump-w​on-th​e-sta​ nd-up​-come​dy-co​mpeti​tion.​ Besser, Matt, Ian Roberts, and Matt Walsh. The Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual. Comedy Council of Nicea, 2013. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984. Carlson, Matt and Jason T. Peifer. “The Impudence of being Earnest: Jon Stewart and the Boundaries of Discursive Responsibility.” Journal of Communication 63 (2013): 333–350. Caron, James E. “The Quantum Paradox of Truthiness: Satire, Activism, and the Postmodern Condition.” Studies in American Humor 2 (2016): 153–181. Carr, Jimmy and Lucy Greeves. Only Joking: What’s So Funny about Making People Laugh? New York, NY: Gotham, 2006. Carter, Judy. The Comedy Bible. New York, NY: Fireside, 2001. Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebecois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 133–150. Chouliaraki, Lilie. The Ironic Spectator. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Christiansen, Adrienne E. and Jeremy J. Hanson. “Comedy as Cure for Tragedy: ACT UP and the Rhetoric of AIDS.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 157–170. Coggan, Devan. “Saturday Night Live: The Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started A Conversation With at a Party Returns.” Entertainment Weekly. March 6, 2016. http:​ //ew.​com/a​rticl​e/201​6/03/​06/sa​turda​y-nig​ht-li​ve-ce​cily-​stron​g-wee​kend-​updat​e/. Conspiracy Theory Rock by Robert Smigel. Youtube. January 6, 2011. www.youtube. com/watch?v=z3JLKw0q4kY. See also Kim LaCapria, “Saturday Night Skive,” Snopes, www.s​nopes​.com/​snl-c​onspi​racy-​theor​y-roc​k/. Crouch, Ian. “Is Late Night Political Comedy Useless?” The New Yorker. November 10, 2016. www.n​ewyor​ker.c​om/cu​lture​/cult​ure-d​esk/i​s-lat​e-nig​ht-po​litic​al-co​ medy-​usele​ss-el​ectio​n-tru​mp-be​e. Crouere, Jeff. “The Vast Wasteland of Liberal Late Night Comedy.” Townhall. March 11, 2017. https​://to​wnhal​l.com​/colu​mnist​s/jef​fcrou​ere/2​017/0​3/11/​the-v​ ast-w​astel​and-o​f-lib​eral-​late-​night​-come​dy-n2​29742​7. Day, Amber. Satire and Dissent. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Dean, Jodi. Democracy and other Neoliberal Fantasies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative? Hants: John Hunt, 2009. Flanagan, Caitlin. “How Late-Night Comedy Fueled the Rise of Trump.” The Atlantic. May 2017. www.t​heatl​antic​.com/​magaz​ine/a​rchiv​e/201​7/05/​how-l​ate-n​

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ight-​comed​y-ali​enate​d-con​serva​tives​-made​-libe​rals-​smug-​and-f​ueled​-the-​rise-​of-tr​ ump/5​21472​/. Gilbert, Christopher J. and John Louis Lucaites. “Bringing War Down to Earth: The Dialectic of Pity and Compassion in Doonesbury’s View of Combat Trauma.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101 (2015): 379–404. Gottfried, Jeffrey, Michael Barthel, Elisa Shearer, and Amy Mitchell. “The 2016 Presidential Campaign—a News Event That’s Hard to Miss.” Pew Research Center. February 4, 2016. www.j​ourna​lism.​org/2​016/0​2/04/​the-2​016-p​resid​entia​ l-cam​paign​-a-ne​ws-ev​ent-t​hats-​hard-​to-mi​ss/. Hariman, Robert. “Political Parody and Public Culture.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94 (2008): 247–272. Harold, Christine. OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Hart, Roderick P. and E. Johanna Hartelius. “The Political Sins of Jon Stewart.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24 (2007): 263–272. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall and Joseph N. Cappella. Echo Chamber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Jarvey, Natalie. “Hillary Clinton’s Appearance on ‘Between Two Ferns’ Breaks Records for Funny or Die.” The Hollywood Reporter. September 23, 2016. Kotsko, Adam. “Neoliberalism’s Demons.” Theory & Event 20 (2017): 493–509. Kurtzman, Daniel. “Best Donald Trump Protest Signs.” ThoughtCo. June 22, 2017. www.t​hough​tco.c​om/be​st-do​nald-​trump​-prot​est-s​igns-​40023​94. Littleton, Cynthia. “Larry Wilmore’s “Nightly Show” Cancelled at Comedy Central.” Variety. August 15, 2016. http:​//var​iety.​com/2​016/t​v/new​s/lar​ry-wi​lmore​-nigh​tly-s​ how-c​ancel​ed-co​medy-​centr​al-12​01837​298/.​ Lynn, Bill. Improvisation for Writers and Actors. Colorado Springs, CO: Meriwether Publishing, 2004. Mathews, David. The Ecology of Democracy: Finding Ways to have a Stronger Hand in Shaping our Future. Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation Press, 2014. McChesney, Robert W. The Political Economy of Media. New York: New York University Press, 2008. McChesney, Robert W. Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-First Century. New York: New York University Press, 2014. McLeod, Kembrew. Pranksters. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2014. McNutt, Myles. “Classroom Instruments and Carpool Karaoke: Ritual and Collaboration in Late Night’s YouTube Era.” Television & New Media 18 (7) (2017): 569–588. Miller, Katherine. Organizational Communication: Approaches and Processes, 7th ed. Stamford, CT: Cengage, 2015. Nabi, Robin L., Emily Moyer-Gusé, and Sahara Byrne. “All Joking Aside: A Serious Investigation into the Persuasive Effect of Funny Social Issue Messages.” Communication Monographs 74 (2007): 29–54. Nededog, Jethro and Skye Gould. “Who’s Winning and Losing Late-Night TV under Trump.” Business Insider. March 10, 2017. www.b​usine​ssins​ider.​com/l​ate-n​ight-​ show-​tv-ra​tings​-unde​r-tru​mp-20​17-3.​

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Nussbaum, Emily. “How Jokes Won the Election.” The New Yorker. January 23, 2017. http:​//www​.newy​orker​.com/​magaz​ine/2​017/0​1/23/​how-j​okes-​won-t​he-el​ectio​n. Orwell, George. “Funny, But Not Vulgar.” In The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus New York: Harcourt Bruce, 1968. http://orwell.ru/library/articles/funny/english/e_funny Palmer, Jerry. The Logic of the Absurd. Bury St. Edmunds, UK: British Film Institute, 1987. Reilly, Katie. “We Were Wrong”: Stephen Colbert Apologizes to Eric Trump After Donald Trump Jr. Emails.” Time. July 12, 2017. http:​//tim​e.com​/4854​416/s​tephe​ n-col​bert-​eric-​trump​-dona​ld-tr​ump-j​r-rus​sia-e​mails​/. Riley, Kerry K. Everyday Subversion. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008. Scharff, Cristina. “The Psychic Life of Neoliberalism: Mapping the Contours of Entrepreneurial Subjectivity.” Theory, Culture & Society 33 (2016): 107–122. Schwartz, Ben. “Satirized for your Consumption.” The Baffler. 2015. http:​//the​baffl​ er.co​m/sal​vos/s​atiri​zed-c​onsum​ption​. Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of Cynical Reason. University of Minnesota Press, 1988. St. Onge, Jeffrey. “Neoliberalism as Common Sense in Barack Obama’s Health Care Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2017): 1–17. Szakolczai, Arpad. Comedy and the Public Sphere. New York, NY: Routledge, 2012. “The Political Leanings of Late Night’s Big Three.” YouGov. September 2016. https​ ://to​day.y​ougov​.com/​news/​2016/​09/30​/late​-nigh​t-tal​k-sho​ws-po​litic​s-aud​ience​/. Waisanen, Don J. “Crafting Hyperreal Spaces for Comic Insights: The Onion News Network’s Ironic Iconicity.” Communication Quarterly 59 (2011): 508–528. Waisanen, Don J. “An Alternative Sense of Humor: The Problems with Crossing Comedy and Politics in Public Discourse.” In Clarke Rountree (ed.), Venomous Speech and other Problems in American Political Discourse, Vol. 2. New York, NY: Praegar, 2013a. 299–315. Waisanen, Don J. “The Irony of Revolutions.” Huffington Post. October 28, 2013b. www.h​uffin​gtonp​ost.c​om/do​n-wai​sanen​/the-​irony​-of-r​evolu​tions​_b_38​17571​ .html​. Waisanen, Don J. “Comedian-in-Chief: Presidential Jokes as Enthymematic Crisis Rhetoric.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 45 (2015): 335–360. Waisanen, Don J. “The Comic Counterfactual: Laughter, Affect, and Civic Alternatives.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104 (2018): 71–93. Williams, Bruce A. and Michael X. Delli Carpini. After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Zinoman, Jason. “Laughs Can Be Cheap at a Comedy Theater.” The New York Times. February 19, 2013. www.n​ytime​s.com​/2013​/02/2​0/the​ater/​uprig​ht-ci​tizen​s-bri​ gade-​grows​-by-n​ot-pa​ying-​perfo​rmers​.html​, 21.

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 proposition 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 comedy 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 seemingly 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

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politicians by making them seem familiar (Schaffer, 2016). Indeed, responding 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’ carries 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 current 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.

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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 elevated 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 ensuring 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 (Brassett 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 critical foil in political democracy, an egalitarian force capable of troubling the

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comfortable to the benefit of the afflicted, or, on the other hand, another failing 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 resistance 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 devastatingly, 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 productive 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 comedy 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)

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In order to understand the relationship between British comedy and rightwing 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 irreverence toward the establishment, the concern was more with imperial fascinations, 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 understand this narrative of alternative comedy, and the various conflicts and divisions 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 backgrounds 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

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voice as he said this, as if he was reluctantly admitting to being a humanitarian 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, modernity 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 mainstream 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 failure to splits “within the movement,” including the alliance between alternative 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, writing 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

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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 satire 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 forgotten 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 movement 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 relevance in the current post-Brexit world? While such tensions are commonly excluded from the dominant narrative of mainstream comedy as progressive,

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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, popular culture. It was partly format based, part subversion of the media through shows like This Morning with Richard but Not Judy, and their earlier combination 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 increasingly 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 deprecation 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 examining 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

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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 question 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 tensions 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 fundamental 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

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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 reinforcing prejudices, it actively challenges them.

But even here, while I somewhat share Coogan’s point of view, it nevertheless 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/arguments? 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

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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 London, 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 factory: “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 irreverence, 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 comparison 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 underlying racist views, for example, inter alia highlighting the ancestry of Barak Obama. Equally, it is unclear if the joke always translates to an international

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audience as when, for instance, he likened a post-Brexit trade deal to a question 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” (Murray, 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 solidarity 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 Bohmermann, a satirist who had also targeted Erdogan. Johnson thus animates national attachments and liberal values through a, no doubt, imperfect appropriation 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 Twitter 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

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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 reassuring 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 terrorism 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

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activists—is clearly commensurate with the historical development of British 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 conflictual—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).

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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 Godfrey Elfwick always claimed to have written the Guardian article, this was never confirmed 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 several 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. . . .”

WORKS CITED Anonymous. (2016). “Alt-right” online poison nearly turned me into a racist,” The Guardian, downloaded from: https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​isfre​e/201​ 6/nov​/28/a​lt-ri​ght-o​nline​-pois​on-ra​cist-​bigot​-sam-​harri​s-mil​o-yia​nnopo​ulos-​islam​ ophob​ia (Last accessed July 27, 2018). Brassett, J. (2016). “British Comedy, Global Resistance: Russell Brand, Charlie Brooker, and Stewart Lee,” European Journal of International Relations 22(1): 168–191. Brassett, J. and Sutton, A. (2017). “British Satire, Everyday Politics: Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci, and Charlie Brooker,” British Journal of Politics and International Studies, forthcoming. Butler, J. (2006). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Coe, Jonathan. (2013). “Sinking Giggling Into the Sea,” London Review of Books 35(14): 30–31. Coleman. (2016). “Liberal Pop Culture has Officially Outlived its 0Usefulness in Politics,” LA Weekly, http:​//www​.lawe​ekly.​com/a​rts/l​ibera​l-pop​-cult​ure-h​as-of​ficia​ lly-o​utliv​ed-it​s-use​fulne​ss-in​-poli​tics-​76531​25 (Accessed March 03, 2017). Coogan, S. (2017). https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/tv​-and-​radio​/2011​/feb/​05/to​p-gea​ r-off​ensiv​e-ste​ve-co​ogan (Accessed March 30, 2017). Davies, Will. (2016). “Thoughts on the Sociology of Brexit” Goldsmiths,” Political Economy Research Centre, http:​//www​.perc​.org.​uk/pr​oject​_post​s/tho​ughts​-on-t​ he-so​ciolo​gy-of​-brex​it/. Denby, D. (2010). Snark New York: Simon and Schuster.

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Fielding, S. (2014). A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of it. Bloomsbury Publishing. Flinders, M. (2013). “Dear Russell Brand,” OUP Blog: http:​//blo​g.oup​.com/​2013/​10/ de​ar-ru​ssell​-bran​d-pol​itics​-come​dy-je​remy-​paxma​n/. Hardy, J. (2017). “Live at Soho Theatre,” The Comedian’s Comedian Podcast, by Stuart Goldsmith. Higgie, Rebecca. (2017). “Public Engagement, Propaganda or Both? Attitudes Towards Politicians on Political Satire and Comedy Programs,” International Journal of Communication Vol. 11, 930–948. Iannucci, A. (2016). “From Trump to Boris, I wouldn’t write The Thick of It now— politics already feels fictional enough,” The New Statesman, accessed from: http:​ //www​.news​tates​man.c​om/po​litic​s/uk/​2016/​06/tr​ump-b​oris-​i-wou​ldn-t​-writ​e-thi​ ck-it​-now-​polit​ics-a​lread​y-fee​ls-fi​ction​al (June 11, 2016). Johnson, Boris. (2012). “Speech to Conservative Party Conference,” accessed at https​ ://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=EIV​ZbxjH​92s (Last accessed July, 27, 2018). Lee, Stewart. (2010). How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian, London, Bloomsbury: Faber and Faber. Lee, S. (2014). “What To Do If Millions Of Romanian Vampires Pitch Camp At Marble Arch,” The Guardian. Available at: http:​//www​.theg​uardi​an.co​m/com​ menti​sfree​/2014​/jan/​05/ro​mania​-immi​grati​on-uk​-stew​art-l​ee?CM​P=fb_​gu. Murray, D. (2018). “Boris Johnson’s Award Winning Entry in the “President Erdogan Offensive Poetry” competition,” The Spectator, https​://bl​ogs.s​pecta​tor.c​o.uk/​2016/​ 12/bo​ris-j​ohnso​ns-aw​ard-w​innin​g-ent​ry-sp​ectat​ors-p​resid​ent-e​rdoga​n-off​ensiv​ e-poe​try-c​ompet​ition​/ (Last accessed July 27, 2018). Orwell, G. (1970). “Funny, Not vulgar,” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Sayle. (2014). “Alexei Sayle, Recorded Live,” Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast. Sayle, A. (2016). Thatcher Stole My Trousers. London: Bloomsbury. Self, W. (2015). “The Charlie Hebdo Attack and the Awkward Truths About Our Fetish for “Free Speech,” Vice, January 9th, https​://ww​w.vic​e.com​/en_u​k/art​icle/​ will-​self-​charl​ie-he​bdo-a​ttack​-the-​west-​satir​e-fra​nce-t​error​-105.​ Schaffer, Gavin. (2016). “Fighting Thatcher with Comedy: What to do When there is no Alternative,” Journal of British Studies 55(2): 374–397. Wagg, Stephen. (2002). “Comedy, Politics and Permissiveness: The “Satire Boom” and it’s Inheritance,” Contemporary Politics 8(4): 319–334. Webber, Julie. (2013). The Cultural Set Up of Comedy: Affective Politics in the United States Post 9/11. Bristol, Intellect: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, Jason. (2017). “Hiding in plain sight: how the al-right is weaponizing irony to spread fascism,” The Guardian, Tuesday, 23rd May, https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​ om/te​chnol​ogy/2​017/m​ay/23​/alt-​right​-onli​ne-hu​mor-a​s-a-w​eapon​-faci​sm. Wood, Matthew, Corbett, Jack, and Flinders Mat. (2016). “Just like us: Everyday celebrity politicians and the pursuit of popularity in an age of anti-politics,” British 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

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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 preposterous 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 performances became a scholarly cottage industry Unto itself itself? The Colbert that was so terrifying to the politicians, pundits, blowhards, and cranks that dominate 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 precisely 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 postfact 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 appropriation of Colbert-esque political aesthetics by the alt-right and White House

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(specifically “Truthiness” and the metafictional performance of political character) begs the question of whether the postmodern aesthetics of American 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, postdigital 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 Richardson in the polls, holding a respectable 13 percent in a hypothetical matchup 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

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you, to quote Russert—has remained our default, though entirely paradoxical, 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, medical records—as allowable “evidence” of an author’s intentions) and PostStructuralism (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). Distinct 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 phenomenon: 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”

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(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 interpretive standard necessarily brings it, and six other (ontologically distinct) audience/speaker positions, into existence via the narrative model of communication. 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 methodologically, 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 (journalist) 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

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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 ignoring 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 creates 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

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author, one divorced from their grubby daily dealings in our “shit-laden world” (Booth 2005, 77). But “better” or “worse” are too simplistic as categories 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 Aristotle’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 acquiesces 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 candidates: 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, manipulations, and strategems of presidential campaign politics standing alongside

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our stubborn refusal to let go of authenticity as a measure of political character, 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 comedy—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 infamously 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 misconduct. 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.”

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“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 Colbert’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 remedy 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 inevitable 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 justifies 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 necessarily, as William Davies neatly summarizes, “produces a chronic sense of self-blame, unease, anxiety, and self-recrimination” which ultimately leads to

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“a society without any sanctuaries from economic competition” (Davies 2017). The seemingly inescapable, connections between ethos, neoliberalism, and privacy 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 himself 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 Magazine 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 Facebook . . . 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

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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 declaration. Also consider the social science research that quantitatively demonstrates 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 communication” is demanded, “but only in quantified terms, and thus, anything that cannot 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 surveillance industry’s quest to sell our “true” neo-liberal identities (as patients,

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students, citizens, sexual partners, and employees) to the highest bidder—in order to mutually construct (and play along with) an author/performer/comedian/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 Facebook’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 Twitter, 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—embodies the aesthetics of comedy that the IA necessarily fiats (like Colbert, but without the costume) by making his deep irony both inscrutable and impervious to appeals to personal information in interpretation. Nowhere is MacDonald’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 terrifyingly 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 trolling, 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

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(internet-proof) unstable irony and the new (equally impossible to interpret for certain) comedic frame MacDonald started offering during his press interactions. 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 [Gayomali 2013].) Neither stable nor unstable irony, what MacDonald presents is the necessity of the IA to configure all possible interpretations. In our neoliberal, 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 protecting 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 storytelling 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 context of our precarious digital moment, perhaps even ethos and the fall of despicable 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 xenophobia, islamophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or online harassment of Saturday

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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 teenage 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 circumstances and a comedian in others” (Nash 2017). Again, the IA offers no judgment of particular rhetorical acts, by comedians 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 intention 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 former 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 publicized 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 polarization (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

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“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 pulling 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 ideological, 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 multiple generations of underemployed humanities majors (Pariser 2011; Manjoo 2005; Calcutt 2017). But what has been under-analyzed are the inherent aesthetic connections between our electorate’s newfound comfort with “alternative 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 aesthetics 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:

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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 audience 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 journalistic 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, structurally, The Daily Show’s satiric critique of the news became the aesthetics of news—and politics—itself (McKain 2005). After Campaign 2016, what now

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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 operationalize 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 polarized 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 Dungeons 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 certainly 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.

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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. Following 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 marketed 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, McLeroy is clearly checkmated by Colbert. And the key difference is the aesthetic shift of attention—from the postmodern critique of epistemology to considerations 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 Colbert’s comedic innovation clear and show how it can be easily implemented, beyond the narrow confines of improv comedy, as a post-postmodern aesthetic 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 constructs), and the thematic (the allegorical level; the “ideational function of the

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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 taking a person’s beliefs to their next, and then next, and then next, logical conclusion 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 further: 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 simultaneously accept both the “true” and “untrue,” the narrative model starts by

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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 inviting 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 better, ‘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?’” (Rabinowitz 1977: 214).) While developed explicitly for the reading of fiction, the narrative model easily enacts a roadmap for The Colbert Report’s postpostmodern aesthetic frame for political debate, whether you are a participant or spectator. As Colbert makes clear in his debate with Leroy, in a balkanized post-digital world where there is often no agreed upon “reality” (where citizens, literally, live in different factual realms) why bother, after all, endlessly 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 rebuilding 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 public 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

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advantage of the narrative model (and Colbert’s comedic approach) is moving 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 position 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 gastronomical 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 neoliberal “no taxes pledge”—which strong-armed scores of Republican candidates for decades—Norquist was, in essence, the purest embodiment of the ideological rigidity that has come to define digital America’s post-Truth politics. (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

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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 kidnapped 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 grandmothers 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 Colbert 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 communication 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 postpostmodern 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

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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. WORKS CITED Balkin Jack. 2018. “Free Speech in the Algorithmic Society: Big Data, Private Governance, and New School Speech Regulation.” UC Davis Law Review, forthcoming. Barthes, Roland. 1978. “The Death of the Author.” in Image-Music Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 142–149. New York, Hill and Wang Baym, Geoffrey. “Representation and the Politics of Play: Stephen Colbert’s Better Know a District.” Political Communication 24: 359–376. Berlant, Lauren and Sienne Ngai. 2017. “Comedy Has Issues.” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 3 (Winter 2017): 233–249. Biedenharn, Isabella. 2014. “15 Things We Learned from Norm MacDonald’s Wacky and Meandering Reddit AMA.” Flavorwire, May 13, 2014. http:​//fla​vorwi​re.co​ m/457​142/1​5-thi​ngs-w​e-lea​rned-​from-​norm-​macdo​nalds​-wack​y-and​-mean​derin​ g-red​dit-a​ma. Booth, Wayne. 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1974. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. “Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowtiz. Malden: Blackwell. Breaking the News. 2017. “Post-Emmys Cameo, Spicer Says He Regrets Battles Over Trump’s Inauguration Size.” NBC KARE 11, September 18, 2017. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 2015. Calcutt, Andrews. 2016. “The Truth About Post-Truth Politics.” Newsweek, November 21, 2016. Colbert, Stephen. 2005. The Colbert Report. Comedy Central, October 17, 2005. ———. 2006. “Interview by Charlie Rose.” Charlie Rose, PBS, December 8, 2006. ———. 2007. “Interview by Tim Russert.” Meet the Press, NBC, October 20, 2007. ———. 2011. The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, June 27, 2011. Davies, William. Interview by Jon Bailes. Counterpunch, October 18, 2017. https​ ://ww​w.cou​nterp​unch.​org/2​017/1​0/18/​menta​l-hea​lth-a​nd-ne​olibe​ralis​m-an-​inter​ view-​with-​willi​am-da​vies.​ Day, Amber. 2011. Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Denyer, Simon. 2016. “China’s Plan to Organize Its Society Relies on Big Data to Rate Everyone.” Washington Post, October 22, 2016. Gayomali, Chris. 2013. “How Facebook Knew a Man Was Gay Before He Came Out.” The Week, March 13, 2013.

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Grim, Ryan. 2017. “MSNBC Reverses Decision to Fire Sam Seder.” The Intercept.com, December 7, 2017. https​://th​einte​rcept​.com/​2017/​12/07​/sam-​seder​-msnb​c-rev​erses​ -deci​sion-​to-fi​re-co​ntrib​utor-​sam-s​eder.​ Doyle, Devin. 2017. “The FBI Labeled Insane Clown Posse Fans a Gang.” Washington Post, August 31, 2017. Foucault, Michel. 1977. “What is an Author?” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 124–127. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Garber, Megan. 2017. “How Donald Trump Beat Stephen Colbert at His Own Game.” The Atlantic, September 23, 2017. Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Grieve, Mark. 2007. “Warning to Democrats: Stay Clear of Colbert.” Slate, March 15, 2007. Haberman, Maggie, Glenn Thrush, and Peter Baker. 2017. “Inside Trump’s Hour by Hour Battle for Self Preservation.” The New York Times, December 9, 2017. Herzog, Werner. 2011. “Interview by Stephen Colbert.” The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, June 6, 2011. Hutchens, Eleanor. 1960. “The Identification of Irony.” ELH 27 (4): 352–363. Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Mueller. 2006. The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Klein, Rick. 2007. “No Joke: Colbert's Campaign May Run Afoul of Law.” ABCNews.com, October 24, 2007. LaMarre, Heather L., Kristen D. Landreville, and Michael A. Beam. 2009. “The Irony of Satire Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report.” The International Journal of Press/Politics 14 (2): 212–231. Lanier, Jaron. 2011. You Are Not a Gadget. New York, Vantage Press. Lapowski, Issie. 2017. “What Did Cambridge Analytica Really Do for Trump’s Campaign?” Wired, October 26, 2017. https​://ww​w.wir​ed.co​m/sto​ry/wh​at-di​d-cam​ bridg​e-ana​lytic​a really-do-for-trumps-campaign. Lizza, Ryan. 2017. “Anthony Scaramucci Called Me to Unload About White House Leakers, Reince Preibus, and Steve Bannon.” The New Yorker, July 27, 2017. Manjoo, Farhad. 2008. True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. Hoboken: Wiley Press. MacDonald, Norm. 2016a. Based on a True Story: A Memoir. New York: Spiegel and Grau. ———. 2016b. “Interview by Conan O’Brien.” Conan, TBS, X, October 6, 2016. McKain, Aaron. 2012. “Fear and Loathing in the Digital Era: How to Realign Our Judgments for the Post-Postmodern, Post-Digital Age.” PhD diss., Ohio State University. ———. 2005. “Not Necessarily Not the News: Gatekeeping, Remediation, and The Daily Show.” Journal of American Culture 28 (4): 415–430. McLeroy, Don. 2012. “Interview by Stephen Colbert.” The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, April 23, 2012. Moore, Phoebe and Andrew Robinson. 2016. “The Quantified Self: What Counts in the Neoliberal Workplace?” New Media and Society 18 (11): 2774–2792.

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Nash, Carline. 2017. “Press Conference: Milo Apologizes.” Breitbart, February 21, 2017. http:​//www​.brei​tbart​.com/​milo/​2017/​02/21​/milo​-apol​ogize​s/. Norquist, Grover. 2003. “Interview by Terry Gross.” Fresh Air, NPR, October 2, 2003. ———. 2011a. Interview by Steve Croft. “The Pledge: Grover Norquist’s Hold on the GOP.” 60 Minutes, CBS, November 20, 2011. ———. 2011b. “Interview by Stephen Colbert.” The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, June 27, 2011. Pariser, Eli. 2012. The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is Changing How We Read and How We Think. New York, Penguin Books. Paroske, Marcus. 2016. “Pious Policymaking: The Participatory Satires of Stephen Colbert.” Studies in American Humor 2 (2): 208–235. Perelmen, Chaim and Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1969. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. James, Phelan. 2005. Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rabinowitz, Peter J. 1977. “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences.” Critical Inquiry 4, no. 1(Autumn): 121–144. Poniewozik, James. 2015. “Jon Stewart: The Fake Newsman Who Made a Real Difference.” Time, August 4, 2015. Primetime Emmy Awards. 2017. “69th Annual Primetime Emmys,” CBS, September 17, 2017. Ranciere, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. New York: Continuum Press. 2009a. “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Beth Hinderliter, 31–50. Durham: Duke University Press. Rife, Katie. 2015. “Dave Chapelle Is Very Serious About No Cell Phones At His Shows.” AV Club, December 2, 2015. https​://ne​ws.av​club.​com/d​ave-c​happe​lle-i​ s-ver​y-ser​ious-​about​no-ce​ll-ph​ones-​at-17​98286​927. Schmidt, Eric. 2013. Interview by Stephen Colbert. The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, April 23, 2013. Schwabel, Dan. 2009. Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success. New York: Kaplan Publishing. ———. 2011. “Why the ‘Joey Quits’ Video is a Seriously Bad Career Move.” Time, October 25, 2011. Seinfeld, Jerry. 2017. “Interview with Stephen Colbert.” The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, CBS, September 20, 2017. Shearer, Elisa and Jeffrey Gottfried. 2017. “News Use across Social Media Platforms 2017.” Pew Research Center, September 7, 2017. Trump, Donald. 2015. “Interview by Stephen Colbert.” The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, CBS, September 22, 2015. Weingarten, Christopher R. R. 2009. “Before the Report: Stephen Colbert’s Rise From Sketch Shows to America’s Hero.” Rolling Stone, September 2, 2009.

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 intellectuals,” 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 Netflix 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

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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 comics 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, experiences, 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 comedy 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 speaking 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 reaching new audiences, I will also critically engage with the ways the podcast, and its hosts, Jessica Williams and Phoebe Robinson, at times problematically (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 initiative 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 inequality 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).

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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 formative 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 common 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. Watkins 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

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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 standup 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 theatrical pretense. At this point, satire became part of the American stand-up comic tradition, marked by the kind of postmodern comic soapboxing I discuss 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 successful, 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 retaining 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

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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 culture” (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 ideals 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 embodiment 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 signifiers that come under fire in the routines of contemporary black women comics in ways that can work paradoxically to upend hegemonic ideology that circulates 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

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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 audiences, 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 nontheatricality were acts of what Signithia Fordham terms “gender passing,”

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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 making 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 traditional tropes of black humor, but also exceed the boundaries of the genre, aesthetically 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 performing 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 demonstrate 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.

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For the purposes of this chapter, when I use the term “alternative comedy,” 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 showcase 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 (UnCabaret). As Emily Hertz puts it, alternative comedy “denote[s] comedians that challenge the boundaries of the field through innovation, pastiche and reflexive 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 visibility 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 neoliberalism 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 traditional 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 manifests 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

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aspects of the podcast 2DQ, how black girl awkwardness as an identity is supplanted 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 understandable 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 playing 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

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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 compliment (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 caricatured 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 awkwardness” 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 celebrating 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

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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 economic 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 symbolically punishing herself for not conforming to conventional norms of workingclass 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 version 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 alternative 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

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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 standup 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.” [Mimicking 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 hoping 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 mimicking 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 continuously 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

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what is expected of a “sassy black woman,” like Franklin’s anti-sass character 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 citational and marked by personal experience and emotion, and this is particularly true when contemporary black women comics like Franklin and Zamata cite and then reject the “sassy black woman” character. In this dynamic process, 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 expressive 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 performances. 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 redrimmed 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 everything 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

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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 version of black womanhood is insufficiently legible as such, and must be forcibly 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 doubleconsciousness. 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-consciousness 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

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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 neoliberal 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 antiracist politics seeking to dismantle the structures of racial domination. Debuting on the radio station WNYC April 4, 2016, and now in its third season, 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 various 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, especially people of color and LGBTQ people. For example, in a Glamour magazine 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)

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2DQ, both the podcast and the comics themselves, demonstrate the eminently political nature of these “new stories” in terms of how black women’s voices (both literally and figuratively) have been (under)represented in popular 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 alternative comedy scene. Not only are Williams and Robinson engaging in cutting-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 sensibilities” (Meserko 2015, 28), helps them to build broad (and virtual) communities 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 marginalized folks to get their voices out in the internet airwaves in new and exciting 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, “giving 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 Stylistically, 2DQ has been described as “irreverent, goofy, incisive, and unapologetically black and female” (Davis 2016). Robinson and Williams’s humor

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is more complicated than simply offering a black and female perspective, though. Yes, Williams and Robinson bring a black woman comedic perspective, 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 differences 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 bodies 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 experience 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

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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 reconciliation 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 disidentification 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 subjects 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 flipping 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

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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, Harriet! [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 symbolically 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 marginalizing those black women comics who are deemed traditional, less “innovative,” and whose comedy is less palatable to mainstream audiences.

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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 frustration 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 stealing 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)

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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 statement lays bare an important paradox of the proliferation of black women’s alt-comedy in that it (un)wittingly embraces a neoliberal (feminist) orientation 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 neoliberal subjectivity in ways that remind us of double-consciousness—the twoworld 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 womanhood, and are supposed to give audiences more “freedom” and “choice,”

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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 “affluent” 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.

WORKS CITED Anderson, Tre’Vell. 2017. “How Black Women are Shaking up the Comedy World.” The Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2017. http:​//www​.lati​mes.c​om/en​terta​inmen​t/mov​ ies/l​a-ca-​black​-wome​n-com​edy-2​01707​20-ht​mlsto​ry.ht​ml. Blau, Judith R. and Eric S. Brown. 2001. “Du Bois and Diasporic Identity: The Veil and the Unveiling Project.” Sociological Theory 19, no. 2 (2001): 219–233. Bradley, Regina N. 2015. “Awkwardly Hysterical: Theorizing Black Girl Awkwardness and Humor in Social Media.” Comedy Studies 6, no. 2 (2015): 148–153. Brown, Wendy. 2005. “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory & Event 7, no. 1 (2003) 37–59. Davis, Allison P. 2016. “Yes, Queens.” The Ringer (blog), August 10, 2016, https​://th​ ering​er.co​m/2-d​ope-q​ueens​-podc​astin​g-pho​ebe-r​obins​on-91​bfe78​5ed4d​.

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Deresiewicz, William. 2017. “Welcome to Our Neoliberal World.” Open Source, podcast audio, March 17, 2017. https​://ww​w.aca​st.co​m/ope​nsour​cewit​hchri​stoph​ erlyd​on/we​lcome​-to-o​ur-ne​olibe​ral-w​orld.​ Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. 2008 [1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Eckert, Penelope. 2008. “Vowel Shifts in Northern California and the Detroit Suburbs.” http:​//www​.stan​ford.​edu/~​ecker​t/vow​els.h​tml. Fauset, Jessie Redmon. 1925. “The Gift of Laughter.” In The New Negro: An Interpretation, edited by Alain Locke, 161–67. New York: A. and C. Boni. Fordham, Signithia.1993. “‘Those Loud Black Girls’: (Black) Women, Silence, and Gender ‘Passing’ in the Academy.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 24, no. 1 (March): 3–32. Franklin, Marina. 2016. Live performance, Vermont Comedy Club. Burlington, VT, March 05, 2016. Gillota, David. 2013. “Black Nerds: New Directions in African American Humor.” Studies in American Humor 28 (2013): 17–30. Givens, Adele. “Adele Givens—Def Comedy Jam.” Online video clip, published August 3, 2014. https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=TGi​-ihN4​EDA. Accessed August 20, 2017. Haggins, Bambi. 2007. Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Hertz, Emily. 2010. “Alternative Comedy: Women in Stand-Up.” PhD diss., Central European University. Izade, Elahe. 2017. “The New Rock Stars: Inside Today’s Golden Age of Comedy.” The Washington Post, July 13, 2017. https​://ww​w.was​hingt​onpos​t.com​/grap​hics/​ 2017/​lifes​tyle/​insid​e-com​edys-​new-g​olden​-age/​?utm_​term=​.df98​b82d7​818. Jung, E. Alex. 2015. “The Sharp, Sensitive , and Surreal New Wave of Black Male Comedians.” Vulture, April 1, 2015. http:​//www​.vult​ure.c​om/20​15/04​/blac​k-com​ edian​s-the​-new-​wave.​html.​ King, Candace. 2016. “‘2 Dope Queens’ Are Bringing More Diversity to Podcasts.” NBC News, April 5, 2016. http:​//www​.nbcn​ews.c​om/ne​ws/nb​cblk/​2-dop​e-que​ens-a​ re-br​ingin​g-mor​e-div​ersit​y-pod​casts​-n551​306. Khoo, Isabelle. 2017. “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. Mahaney, Emily. 2016. “The 2 Dope Queens Podcast Hosts on the One Joke They Never Want to Hear a Dude Make Again.” Glamour, August 10, 2016, http:​//www​ .glam​our.c​om/st​ory/t​he-tw​o-dop​e-que​ens-p​odcas​t-hos​ts-on​-the-​one-j​oke-t​hey-n​ ever-​want-​to-he​ar-a-​dude-​make-​again​. Meserko, Vince. “Standing Upright: Podcasting, Performance, and Alternative Comedy.” Studies in American Humor 1, no. 1 (2015): 20–40. Nair, Yasmin. 2017. “Welcome to Our Neoliberal World.” Open Source, podcast audio, March 17, 2017. https​://ww​w.aca​st.co​m/ope​nsour​cewit​hchri​stoph​erlyd​on/ we​lcome​-to-o​ur-ne​olibe​ral-w​orld.​

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Nelson, Laura. 2016. “Why Your Company Should Be Investing in Podcast Advertising.” crowdSPRING (blog), October 17, 2016. https​://bl​og.cr​owdsp​ring.​com/2​ 016/1​0/why​-your​-comp​any-s​hould​-be-i​nvest​ing-i​n-pod​cast-​adver​tisin​g. 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. Robinson, Debra J. director. 1984. I Be Done Been Was Is. New York: Women Make Movies. Robinson, Phoebe. 2016. “Two Dope Queens on Feminism.” Note to Self, podcast, WNYC, April 13, 2016. http:​//www​.wnyc​.org/​story​/femi​nist-​podca​sts-p​hoebe​-robi​ nson/​. Rottenberg, Catherine. 2014. “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism.” Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 418–437. Scialabba, George. 2017. “Welcome to Our Neoliberal World.” Open Source, podcast audio, March 17, 2017. https​://ww​w.aca​st.co​m/ope​nsour​cewit​hchri​stoph​erlyd​on/ we​lcome​-to-o​ur-ne​olibe​ral-w​orld.​ UnCabaret. n.d. “About UnCabaret.” http://uncabaret.com/alternativecomedy. UCB Comedy. 2013. “Be Blacker: a SKETCH from UCB Comedy.” Online video clip, published February 14, 2013. https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=Pef​Zk3q0​ U_U. Accessed August 20, 2017. Varnado, Victor, director. 2010. The Awkward Comedy Show. Supreme Robot Pictures, liner notes. Vidale, Thea. 2012. Personal interview with author, April 29, 2012. Watkins, Mel. 1994. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying-- The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor that Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor. New York: Simon & Schuster. Williams, Jessica and Phoebe Robinson. Williams, Jessica and Phoebe Robinson. 2016. “Thank You, Harriet Tubman.” 2 Dope Queens, podcast, WNYC, April 25, 2016. http:​//www​.wnyc​.org/​story​/2-do​pe-qu​eens-​podca​st-ep​isode​-5-th​ank-y​ou-ha​ rriet​-tubm​an/. ———. 2017. “Mom Jokes with Kevin Bacon.” 2 Dope Queens podcast, WNYC, June 5, 2017. http:​//www​.wnyc​.org/​story​/2-do​pe-qu​eens-​podca​st-ep​isode​-35-m​ om-jo​kes-k​evin-​bacon​/. ———. 2017. “Who Is Jeff Tweedy?” 2 Dope Queens, podcast, WNYC. June 13, 2017. http:​//www​.wnyc​.org/​story​/2-do​pe-qu​eens-​podca​st-ep​isode​-36-w​ho-je​ff-tw​ eedy/​. Womack, Y. L. 2010. Post Black: How a New Generation is Redefining African American Identity. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Zamata, Sasheer. 2016. Live performance, Vermont Comedy Club, Burlington VT, June 3, 2016.

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 discourses surrounding political correctness are not new or fresh or symptomatic 245

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of social media, although at times it certainly feels like social media has exacerbated 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 saying: “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 qualitative 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 comedy, 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 sensitive because the funny is always tripping over the not funny, sometimes appearing identical to it. The contexts that incite these issues of how to manage 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,

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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 morally 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 comparisons, 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 contemporaries 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 standup 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

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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 incongruities 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 apolitical 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 “communist militarism” and summarily discounted alongside any outcries in the academy from students and faculty voicing discontent about microaggressions 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 international 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 KesslerHarris’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 histories 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.

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Just like those opposing political correctness in comedy, opponents of multiculturalism 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 vociferous 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 neoliberalism 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 competition and independence over egalitarianism and community breeds contempt

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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 inequalities. In the late 1990s and into the early aughts, neoliberalism did to initiatives directed at multiculturalism what it does so well. Efforts aimed at multiculturalism 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 minorities. 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 companies 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 public 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 conversations about homophobia during the decade. In this way, even crude, derogatory 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

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books on the topic of political correctness, Howard Schwarz’s arguments are prolific and I do not always (or often) agree with his analyses, particularly 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 political 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 selfreflection? 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 humorous targeting of the nation’s most vulnerable populations offers useful opportunities 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.

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Like Schwartz and Cohen, Key and Peele argue that unfettered joking expands the conversation and, curiously, so do those advocating for political 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 someone’s indifference to rape as singular or an anomaly versus that such insouciance 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 question or if they consulted additional media sources. This is a perfect recipe for producing what comedian Karith Foster (2016) calls the “outrage phenomenon” 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 accusations 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

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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. Chappelle 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 conversationstopper 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 arguments 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 challenge 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 comedians 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

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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 political 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 flexibility. 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

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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 material 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 hilarity 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 proceed—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 reception makes this an onerous argument. How can you ensure that each audience 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

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strategies to do so, including self-deprecatory humor, claiming to be an “equal opportunity offender,” and donning characters of “Others” for comedic 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 demonstrate 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 comedian’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 comedy 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 necessitates 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 publicly 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 comedy is unfunny comedy, but on the latter point, Rock is right; watchful fans may disrupt and destabilize our longstanding shared comic sensibility, one

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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 making 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, criticism 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 politically 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 performance 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

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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 perform 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 conscientious 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.

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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 progressive 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 confrontations of the problems plaguing American society, is a striking juxtaposition of the rational comic persona and that which refuses to conform to rational understanding . . . . 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 narrower 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, misinterpreted, 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 comics. 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 professional 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 correct 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,

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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 status 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, humorless, 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 racists, 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 wellmeaning 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 person 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

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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 generation 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 substance 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 correctness 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 blackface 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 feedback 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.

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What if ever-larger numbers of people have become more aware of the pernicious 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 “political 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, heterosexism, 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 Transgressive 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

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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 Comedians. 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 Correctness 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.​

WORKS CITED Berlant, Lauren and Sianne Ngai. “Comedy Has Issues.” Critical Inquiry 43 (Winter 2017): 233–249. Can We Take a Joke? Directed by Ted Balaker. U.S.: Korchula Productions, 2016. Cohen, Sascha. “How the Marginalized Invented Politically Incorrect Comedy.” Zocalo Public Square, September 19, 2016. Accessed September 20. http:​//www​ .zoca​lopub​licsq​uare.​org/2​016/0​9/19/​margi​naliz​ed-in​vente​d-off​ensiv​e-com​edy/i​ deas/​nexus​/. Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Season 5, Episode 3, first broadcast November 20, 2014 by Crackle. Produced by Tammy Johnston. Crouch, Ian. “Is Social Media Ruining Comedy?” The New Yorker, December 30, 2014. Accessed April 17, 2015. http:​//www​.newy​orker​.com/​cultu​re/cu​ltura​l-com​ ment/​socia​l-med​ia-ru​ining​-come​dy. Daley, David. “Salon’s Patton Oswalt Peace Summit.” Salon, March 11, 2015. Accessed June 10, 2015. http:​//www​.salo​n.com​/2015​/03/1​1/sal​ons_p​atton​_oswa​ lt_pe​ace_s​ummit​/. Dave Chappelle: The Age of Spin. Collection 1, Episode 1. Streaming. Directed by Stan Lathan. U.S.: Netflix, 2017. Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003. Finley, Jessyka. “Black Women’s Satire as (Black) Postmodern Performance.” Studies in American Humor 2, no. 2 (2016): 236–265. Foster, Karith. “Keep the Offensive Comedy Coming.” Zocalo Public Square, September 19, 2016. Accessed September 20, 2016. http:​//www​.zoca​lopub​licsq​ uare.​org/2​016/0​9/19/​keep-​offen​sive-​comed​y-com​ing/i​deas/​nexus​/.

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Ginelle, Leela. “College Students Don’t Want to Hire Racist or Homophobic Comedians. 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. Gorenstein, Colin. “Jerry Seinfeld Doubles Down: “There’s a Creepy PC Thing out there that Really Bothers me.” Salon, June 10, 2015. Accessed June 11, 2015. http:​//www​.salo​n.com​/2015​/06/1​0/jer​ry_se​infel​d_dou​bles_​down_​%E2%8​ 0%9Ct​here%​E2%80​%99s_​a_cre​epy_p​c_thi​ng_ou​t_the​re_th​at_re​ally_​bothe​rs_me​ %E2%8​0%9D/​. Jim Norton: Mouthful of Shame. Streaming. Written and directed by Jim Norton. U.S.: Netflix. 2017. Kessler-Harris, Alice. “Cultural Locations: Positioning American Studies in the Great Debate.” (1992) In Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline, edited by Lucy Maddox, 335–352. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. Key, Keegan-Michael and Jordan Peele. “The Ideas Issue: Comedy: Make Fun of Everything.” Time Magazine 183, no. 11 (March 24, 2014): 30–32. Kotsko, Adam. “Neoliberalism’s Demons.” Theory and Event 20, no. 2 (April 2017): 493–509. Krefting, Rebecca. All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. Krefting, Rebecca 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. Lukianoff, Greg and Jonathan Haidt. “The Coddling of the American Mind.” The Atlantic, September 2015. Newfield, Christopher. “What Was Political Correctness? Race, the Right, and Managerial Democracy in the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 2 (Winter, 1993): 308–336. Norton, Jim. “Trevor Noah Isn’t the Problem: You Are.” Time, April 1, 2015. Accessed April 8, 2015. http:​//tim​e.com​/3766​915/t​revor​-noah​-twee​ts-ou​trage​/. Patton Oswalt: Talking for Clapping. Streaming. Written by Patton Oswalt. U.S.: Black Flint Productions, 2016. Pérez, Raúl. “Learning to Make Racism Funny in the ‘Color-Blind’ Era: Stand-up Comedy Students, Performance Strategies, and the (Re)Production of Racist Jokes in Public.” Discourse & Society 24, no. 4 (2013): 478–503. Peterson, Latoya. “‘Twitter is Terrifying.’ 5 Comedians on the New Realities of Comedy.” Fusion, April 2, 2015. Accessed April 24, 2015. http:​//fus​ion.n​et/st​ory/1​ 13606​/twit​ter-i​s-ter​rifyi​ng-5-​comed​ians-​on-th​e-new​-real​ities​-of-c​omedy​/. Rich, Frank. “In Conversation Chris Rock: What’s Killing comedy. What’s Saving America.” Vulture, November 30, 2014. Accessed December 4, 2014. http:​//www​ .vult​ure.c​om/20​14/11​/chri​s-roc​k-fra​nk-ri​ch-in​-conv​ersat​ion.h​tml. Peterson, Russell. Strange Bedfellows: How Late Night Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke. New Brunswick, NJ & London: Rutgers UP, 2008.

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Ryan, Maureen. “Trevor Noah, Twitter and the Uses of Social Media Outrage.” The Huffington Post, July 30, 2015. Accessed August 3, 2015. http:​//www​.huff​i ngto​ npost​.com/​2015/​07/30​/trev​or-no​ah-tw​itter​_n_79​00912​.html​. Schwartz, Howard. Political Correctness and the Destruction of Social Order: Chronicling the Rise of the Pristine Self. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Silman, Anna. “10 Famous Comedians on How Political Correctness 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/​.

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 characterization 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 presidencies “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 yuppievampire 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

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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 referent, 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 implosive 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 elections. 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 selfaware 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

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

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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 parent’s gene pool (unless one claims Satan as dad.) Considerations of context and audience are foregrounded in ways that having 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 middleclass family in their suburban home or a pastoral woodsy landscape—positions 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 playing ukuleles. Sexual psychopaths, hunting, guns, cannibalism, mind control, well-meaning conversations about Obama. The police. Well-meaning conversations 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

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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 overproximity 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 apparent 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; comedy 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 reduplication 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 reappears 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 Solanas. 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

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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 suppressed 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 elation among pussy grabbing Trump supporters) in the battleground state of Michigan. I approach the series through its lead protagonist, Ally MayfairRichards, her role as biological mother of Oz and as wife to Ivy MayfairRichards. 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

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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 motherbaby 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 analysis 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 considerable 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

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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) Perfection 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 maintain my good looks and my sexually attractive and well-groomed body?” (McRobbie, 2015, 9). The neoliberal drive to perfection characterizes the over invested narcissistic mother who “leans in”; entrepreneurship is its idealized form. The single poor (raced) single mother with a low wage job and several dependent children 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 affluent (white) mother as “stage manager of the family enterprise,” attentive to its success. (McRobbie, 2013, 131) Ally is responsible for the financesdoing 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).

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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” (McRobbie, 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.)

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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 perfection 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-fibromyalgia, 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 obsessional 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 disbelief in Trump’s electoral victory causes her to uncontrollably sob, “Merrick

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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 emphasis). 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 reaction 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 behavior 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

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by Virginia Woolf on the cusp of German fascism and it links “state autocracy” 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 protective 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 mideighties 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 hermetic 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/

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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 gratuitous 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 motherhood 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

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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 biggest 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 looking—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 spectator 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

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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 psychoanalytic 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 Valerie 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 lesbian 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 support (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

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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 assassination 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 reality 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 misogynist 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 neoliberal post-feminism in its resolute whiteness (Gay is dumbfounded that the girls in Girls have no blipster friends) and in the class cronyism and entitlement 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 civicminded, responsible thrill seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex” (Solanas, 35).

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The manifesto’s style is “icily logical, elegantly comic, a strange juxtaposition, as if Oscar Wilde had decided to become a terrorist” (Hammon, viii). Solanas’ literary qualities earned her the accolades of many writers and theorists—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 Bobbitt, 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 imaginings 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 coincidences—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 sartorial metonym of Solanas, the green cape that we saw her acolytes wearing

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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 neoliberal 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 thirdparty 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, freewheeling, 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 radically 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, emotional 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

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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 childish 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 reproductive 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 disaffiliation 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.

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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 Babadook 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 suburban (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 appropriation 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 allegorically. (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 sexuality 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 collections 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

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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 KoolAid” (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 Rubenstein 2008. 15. There is a homonymic slippage between ‘non’ and ‘nom’ in the French lacanian 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 narcissistic 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

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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 problems 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 winning 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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Wood, R. 1979. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in A. Britton, R. Lippe, T. Williams and R. Wood, ed. American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 7–28. Yaeger, Lynn. 2018. “Dark Matter: Inside Fashion’s Current Horror Obsession,” http:​//www​.depa​rture​s.com​/fash​ion/s​pring​-2018​-horr​or-tr​end (accessed March 12, 2018). Yahr, E. 2017. “The Bachelorette: Finale was an actual nightmare, but it was pretty good T.V,” Washington Post, August 8. https​://ww​w.was​hingt​omnpo​st.co​m/new​s/ art​s (accessed August 10, 2017). Yuan, J. and H. Harris. 2018. “The First Great Movie of the Trump Era: How Get Out got made,” New York Magazine, February 19–March 4. Zinoman, J. 2018. “Are They Really Horror Movies? Afraid So,” The New York Times, January 21, AR 12. Zupancic, A. 2008. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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, questions 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 politically correct speech and policy but its Achilles heel is that it cannot claim—as 293

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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 execution” (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 television and Twitter. On all sides, comedians worried and criticized each other and the corporate establishment each one pointing a finger at the other accusing 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 controversies 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 neoliberalism 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.

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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 comedy 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 philosophical 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 selfrighteous 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.

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Anti-comedy and trolling have similar motives: to take apart the selfrighteous 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 participates in media framing that mistakes a psychological attitude (liberals think they are “better than” everyone) with material reality. Liberals may be assholes, 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 provoked 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 identified 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”

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(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 institutions 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, outrage, and so on. Viveca Greene’s chapter on Leslie Jones’s battle with Yiannopoulos (among other trolls) demonstrates the lack of protection afforded on the internet and Twitter. As well, Rebecca Krefting’s chapter and its focus on

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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 judging 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, writing, “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 neoliberalism—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 collateral 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 reasonable decision-making, and where decisions are made by corporate leaders. The overall question is whether this comedy has a future in American cultural

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life, especially given that it was cancelled amid criticism from the liberal comedy establishment at the network. Were these liberal celebrities protecting 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 cultist, 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 corporate 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 Dadaists, André’s “lack of morality and sensitivity” creates comedy by “opposing 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 endless proliferation of talking points ruthlessly adhered to by Republicans and conservatives when confronted with contradiction) acts as a “strategy of neoliberal 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

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and religious crusades of the class of gullible dopes and hillbillies” (Kingsmith 2016, 293). This critique is central to my understanding of Hyde’s comedy, 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 designated 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 collaborators, Don Jolly, writing in The Daily Caller, claimed the network cancelled it because “he voted for Trump.” But his justification for this goes even further, 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 establishment, 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

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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 creator 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 coverage) 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 Sascha Baron Cohen or even Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, whose antics interviewing 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

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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 exclusively 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 Brianna 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 controversy 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

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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.

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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 grouping 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 continent. 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 movements, 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 morality 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 challenge 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 partisanship 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

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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 generally 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 criticism of how left-leaning neoliberalism’s politics might actually function we are left believing, according to the dominant media stance, that network comedy 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 cyberbullying that portends to ridicule and cruelty), but we might try to read these

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“confrontations” on social media and elsewhere, especially as performed by self-identified communities of trollers, or Hyde’s performances, as a certain 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 episodes 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, premigrant” 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 situation 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 transgressive 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

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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 attacking 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 society are propelling this vitriol forward into a kind of comedic space where

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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 “deplorables” 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 engagement 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 deliberate 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

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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 dissertation 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 something 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 discussion. 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 improvement) 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 neoliberalism, 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 comedian 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?

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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 equalization 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 conjuncture.” In the election, Hyde is there as an effect of the conjucture. See The Philosophical 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 demographic, 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 provoke 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, vindictive 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 ‘metapolitical’ strategy seeking to transform the broader culture.” This is the central point

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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 racism” (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 activism 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 activism 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 aspersions 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?

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Phillips, Whitney. 2016. “The Alt-right Was Conjured Out of Pearl Clutching and Media Attention,” Motherboard (October 16). ———. 2015. This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Boston, MA: The M.I.T. Press. ———. 2011. “Meet the Trolls,” Index on Censorship 40(2): 68–76. Robertson, Adi. 2015. “A Violent, Delusional Gamergate Psychopath is Actually a Comedian’s Terrible Hoax,” The Verge (February 15), found at: http:​//www​ .thev​erge.​com/2​015/2​/24/8​09953​1/gam​ergat​e-jac​e-con​nors-​threa​ts-co​media​n-hoa​ x (accessed March 26, 2017). Robin, Corey. 2018. The Reactionary Mind, 2nd Ed. Oxford University Press. Schaffer, Gavin. 2016. “Fighting Thatcher with Comedy: What to Do When There Is No Alternative,” Journal of British Studies 55(2): 473–397. Sconce, Jeffrey. 2013. “Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job!: Metacomedy,” in Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittel (eds.) How To Watch Television. New York: New York University Press, 74–82. Sims, David. 2016. “The Battle over Adult Swim’s Alt-Right TV Show,” Atlantic (November 17), found at: https​://ww​w.the​atlan​tic.c​om/en​terta​inmen​t/arc​hive/​ 2016/​11/th​e-rag​ing-b​attle​-over​-adul​t-swi​ms-al​t-rig​ht-tv​-show​/5080​16/ (accessed March 17, 2017). Springer, Simon. 2016. “Fuck Neoliberalism,” ACME 15(2): 285–292. Strachan, Maxwell. 2016. “Adult Swim Star Severs Ties over Late-Night Network’s ‘Misogyny,’” Huffington Post (November 14), found at: http:​//m.h​uffpo​st.co​m/ us/​entry​/us_5​829f4​9be4b​060ad​b56f6​f39/a​mp?ir​=Poli​tics&​utm_h​p_ref​=poli​tics (accessed November 15, 2016). Verhaeghe, Paul. 2014. “Neoliberalism Has Brought out the Worst in Us,” Guardian (September 29), found at: https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​isfre​e/201​ 4/sep​/29/n​eolib​erali​sm-ec​onomi​c-sys​tem-e​thics​-pers​onali​ty-ps​ychop​athic​sthic​ (accessed March 1, 2017). Waisanen, Don J. 2013. “An Alternative Sense of Humor: The Problems with Crossing Comedy and Politics in Public Discourse,” in Clarke Rountree (ed.) Venomous Speech, 2 Vols. New York: Praeger, 299–316. Webber, Julie. 2017. Beyond Columbine: School Violence and the Virtual. New York: Peter Lang. Weigel, David. 2016. “The Story Behind the Sudden Cancellation of Adult Swim’s Trump-Loving Comedy Show,” Washington Post (December 23), found at: https​ ://ww​w.was​hingt​onpos​t.com​/life​style​/the-​story​-behi​nd-th​e-sud​den-c​ancel​latio​ n-of-​adult​-swim​s-tru​mp-lo​ving-​comed​y-sho​w/201​6/12/​23/ed​9e2e3​a-c3c​8-11e​ 6-842​2-eac​61c0e​f74d_​story​.html​?utm_​term=​.242d​6f9eb​11d#c​ommen​ts (accessed March 26, 2017).

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;

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, 269 315

316

Anderson, Kai, 273 André, Eric, 229, 299 angry black women. See black women Anotine, Katja, 42 anti-black beauty structure, 42, 43 anti-comedy, 293–96 antijokes, 39, 43; Black feminist, 55–59; Twitter trolls with, 47 Antoinette, Marie, 171 Apatow, Judd, 300 Apel, Dora, 49 apolitical generation, 109 The Apprentice, 298 Arab Spring, 6, 90 Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle, 70 Aronofsky, Darren, 269 Aronowitz, S., 67 Arthur, Alice, 226 Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, 108, 111 Ataturk Cultural Centre, 121 The Atlantic, 164, 251 Attardo, S., 71 audiences: black, 226; college-educated, 15; conservative, 203; counterculture, 7; ideal, 25, 197–98, 202; liberals, 203; with motivation, 170; and performer, social contract between, 253; technologies and, 27 Aufklärung, 147, 149, 150 auntie humor, 121–23 authoritarianism, 5, 23–24; neoliberal, 107; in Turkey, 105–24 Average Joe, 134, 138–42, 142–49, 151–55 The Awkward Comedy Show, 229, 231 awkwardness, black women, 230–31

Index

The Babadook, 268, 269, 277 Baby Boomers, 87 Bacon, Kevin, 239 Badinter, Elisabeth, 278 Bailey, Moya, 45 Baldwin, Alec, 178 Banks, Arron, 78 Bannon, Steve, 45, 297 Barnes, Chloe, 12 Barr, Roseanne, 28, 296, 298, 308 Barthes, Roland, 196, 269 Based on a True Story: A Memoir, 204 Basic Instinct, 279 Bataille, George, 114, 137 Batur, Pinar, 110 Baudelaire, C., 74 Bauman, Zygmunt, 66, 67–68, 94 BBC news, 76, 189 “Be Blacker,” 233–35 Beck, Glenn, 14 Bee, Samantha, 19, 133, 162, 165 Bell, Steve, 77, 80 Berger, A. A., 70 Berlant, Lauren, 5, 9, 10, 11, 14, 168, 201, 246, 255 Beyoncé, 232 big box marketing, 15 Big Data, 21, 23, 199, 202, 203, 304 Billig, Michael, 38, 39, 49–51, 55, 56 Binder, Matt, 98 birthers, 1 BitchMedia, 257 black comedy, 26, 221–42 Black feminist unlaughter, 55–59 black folk humor, 223 black girl awkwardness, 230–31 BlackkKlansman, 269 Black Lives Matter, 14 black male comics, 26, 221, 224–25 Black men, 56 Black Twitter, 22 black womanhood, 26, 225, 226, 231– 34, 241–42

Index

black women, 15, 37, 38–39; in alternative scene, 226–29, 235–39; awkwardness, 230–31; comedy, 26, 221–42; crossover comedy, 39–42; discourse of, 226; gendered oppression, 56; as masculine, 46–47; network of comics, 227; postmodern satire, 233–35; racial oppression, 56; sassy, 225, 229–35; slavery, 39–42; subjectivity, 226; urban versus alternative comedy, 227 Blades, Joan, 89 Blau, Judith R., 225 Booth, Wayne, 196–99, 203, 211 Bourdieu, Pierre, 133, 138, 140 Bowlby, Rachel, 285 Boyd, Wes, 89 Boyer, Dominic, 114, 115 Bradley, Laura, 89 Bradley, Regina N., 230 Brakhage, Stan, 286 branding, 202 Brasset, James, 6, 24, 294 Breaking Bad, 238 breastfeeding, 278 Breeding Slave, 39, 41 Breitbart News, 45 Brennan, Teresa, 276 Brexit discourse, 65–82; in comedy, 66–82; contradictions of, 72; as floating signifier, 71; as populist, 68; situational irony of, 76, 78 Brexit irony, 65–67, 70–72, 304 Brexit populism, 67, 68–69, 71 Bridesmaids, 15 Brigstocke, J., 70 British comedy, 24, 177–90; and politics of resistance, 177–90;

317

and right-wing comedy, 177–90; and stand-up comedy, 181 Brooker, Alex, 66, 76, 79 Brown, Arnold, 180 Brown, Dave, 77 Brown, Doc, 185 Brown, Eric S., 225 Brown, Wendy, 136, 201, 238 Bruce, Lenny, 224, 247, 248 Burke, Kenneth, 167 Burr, Bill, 246, 256, 257 Burress, Hannibal, 221, 229 Bush, George W., 15 Buteau, Michelle, 227, 236 Butler, Judith, 178, 275 Byer, Nicole, 227, 228, 233–35 Cambridge, Godfrey, 224 Cambridge Analytica, 201 Cameron, David, 77, 151–52 Can We Take a Joke?, 247, 252, 258, 259 capitalism, neoliberal, 11, 38, 89 caricature, 22, 66; of Brexit politicians, 66–67; definition of, 73; in EU referendum campaign, 75–81; examples of, 72–73; of Farage, Nigel, 76–79; genre of, 72; of Johnson, Boris, 79–81; as political satire, 72–75; as short-circuit sign, 74–75; use of, 67 Carlin, George, 247 Carlson, Matt, 168 Carolla, Adam, 248 Carpio, Glenda, 14, 22, 41 Carroll, Rebecca, 40 cartoons, 73; about Ergenekon, 110; Ottoman, 108; Turkish, 108, 109–10, 112–13 Castagner, Marc-Olivier, 24, 25

318

Index

Cenac, Wyatt, 221 Chang, Tom, 273 Chappelle, Dave, 14, 15, 16, 43, 200, 221, 224, 252 Châtelet, Gilles, 7–8, 20 cheekiness, comedy, 170–72 Chisolm, Shirley, 15, 259 Cho, Margaret, 228 Chomsky, Noam, 182 Chun, Wendy, 304, 306, 308 citizen-satire activism, 97–99 citizenship, 88, 92–93 Clarkson, Jeremy, 186 Clay, Andrew Dice, 250 Clegg, Nick, 79 clictivism, 89–90 Clinton, Bill, 23, 136 Clinton, Hillary, 167 Cohen, Sascha, 247, 250, 252, 257, 301 Colbert, Stephen, 24, 97–98, 99, 101, 133, 150, 162, 164, 165, 168, 172, 193–215, 259, 268, 298, 299, 301 The Colbert Report, 24, 97, 133, 194, 201, 207, 210, 213, 214, 299 Coleman, Gabriella, 52 Colletta, L., 72 colonialism, 39, 42, 43, 248 Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, 256 comedy, 9–10; African American, 14, 43; black, 221–42; black women, 39–42, 222–42; Brexit discourse in, 66–82; British, 24; cheekiness, 170–72; containment, 25; controversies in, 21–22; educational, 15; enslavement and, 40; as expectation, 10–21; gender, 40; as genre, 10–21; historical, 15; horror, 267–86;

innovative, 25; job, 41; labor of, 166–70; late night, 13; material effects of, 296–310; as mediation, 10–21; in neoliberalism, 21–28, 160; political, 2, 4, 8, 160–62, 168, 195, 200, 204, 208, 209, 214, 268; race, 39–43; recognition, 25, 299–300; right-wing, 24, 177–90; stand-up, 221–22, 224, 226–29; style of, 55, 228, 234, 236, 257; trickster, 26; urban, 223–24 Comedy Central, 25, 156, 161, 194, 195, 197, 209, 211, 301 comedy-horror, 27, 268 Comedy Store, 180 It Comes at Night, 268 Comic Relief, 185 The Comic Strip, 180, 181 Comic View, 227 commodification: comedy, 179; of diversity, 6 common sense, 138, 139, 141, 151 communicative capitalism, 116 communist militarism, 248 community, 58, 96; black, 15, 29; breeds, 250; of dissent, 98; gated, 67; labor, 166; of laughter, 222, 238; LGBT, 87, 307; marginalized, 59; political, 199; reality-based, 5–6; of sense, 201; shared, 99; YouTube, 172 containment comedy, 25

Index

Conway, Joe, 11, 12 Coogan, Steve, 186 Cooper, Brittney, 41, 43 Cooper, Melinda, 15, 22 Cosby, Bill, 200, 224, 253 Coulter, Ann, 14 Couture, Jean-Pierre, 150 Crawford, Joan, 280, 281 crime, 39 Critchley, Simon, 9 Critique of Cynical Reason, 147 Cross, David, 228 Crouch, Ian, 254, 256 The Crystal Palace, 148, 149 cults, 271–76 cultural schizophrenia, 108 culture wars, 24, 133–34; analysis, 138; infotainment and, 134–42; moral hazards and, 135; neoliberal policies and, 135; order-recreation to Average Joe, 138–42; as playfulness, 137; rules of game in, 137 cybernetics, 12, 20, 308 cynical labor, 25, 166–70 cynicism, 12, 99, 114, 134, 142, 148, 155, 166–71 Dagtas, Secil, 7, 23–24 The Daily Caller, 300, 303 The Daily Show, 24, 88, 97, 114, 133, 162, 178, 208, 211, 253, 299 Daley, David, 258–59 Dalton, Russell, 92 Davidson, Telly, 135, 136, 144, 152 Davies, Will, 179 Davies, William, 201 Davis, Allison P., 238 Davis, Angela, 43 Davis, Bette, 280, 281 Day, Amber, 170, 214 Day Today, 184 Dean, Jodi, 8

319

Dear White People, 269 Def Comedy Jam, 227 de la Tour, Andy, 180 Delonas, Sean, 49 democracy, 11, 38 Desmonds, 182 Dick, Andy, 228 Didion, Joan, 208 digi modernism, 11 digital activism, 97–99 Direniş Hatırası, 113, 117 divisive humor, 55, 56 Doane, Mary Ann, 275 Dodd, Chris, 195 Dolar, Mladen, 271 domination, techniques of, 3 Dorsey, Jack, 47 double-consciousness, Du Boisian condition of, 222, 225 doxxing, 44 Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, 96 D'Souza, Dinesh, 43 Du Boisian: condition of double-consciousness, 222, 225–26; Veil, 222, 225 Duckworth, Tammy, 279 Duggan, Lisa, 27, 249, 250 Duncan, Pansy Kathleen, 11 Duncombe, Stephen, 88, 96, 99 Dungeons and Dragons, 209 Dunham, Lena, 19, 282 earnestness, 11–12 Ebony, 39, 56 Eckert, Penny, 231 economic norms, 9 economic philosophy, 2 economy, 2 educational comedy, 15 Ekperigin, Naomi, 227, 236 Ekşi Sözlük, 115 Elfwick, Godfrey, 188

320

Index

Elias, Norbert, 69 Elton, Ben, 181 emotional labor, 167–68 end of politics, 12 engaged citizenship, 92–93 Entertaining the Citizen, 97 entertainment, 97 epistemology, 207 equality politics, 27 Equality Street, 185, 188 Erdoğan, Tayyip, 106, 113 Ergenekon, 110 essentialist feminism, 278 ethical spectacles, 96–99 ethos, 70, 79, 81; digital, 203; evaluation, 203; IA as post-digital, 200–206; implied author (IA) as, 198–200 EU referendum campaign, caricature in, 75–81 Eurocentrism, 6 Eurotaoismus, 148 Exit 57, 197 The Exorcist, 270 Experiencing Fiction, 210 extremist fringe, 113 Facebook, 57, 90, 201, 246 fake news, 20, 29, 133, 141, 204, 207, 212, 268, 296, 304 Fallon, Jimmy, 13, 163 false consciousness, 147–49 Farage, Nigel, 23, 76–79, 179 Fatal Attraction, 279 Fauset, Jessie, 223 Fawlty Towers, 184 Feagin, Joe R., 57 Featherstone, M., 67 feedback, 27, 247, 252, 255, 258, 259, 261, 308 feminism, 16–17; essentialist, 278; neoliberal, 27; neoliberal manifestations of, 17; as self-serving, 19

feminist self, 17 Feud, 280 Fielding, Steve, 8 Fink, B., 276 Finley, Jessyka, 6, 15, 26, 40, 55, 259 Flanagan, Caitlin, 164 Flatliners, Ghost or Jacob’s Ladder, 268 flesh-and-blood (FB) author, 196, 197 The Florida Project, 275 It Follows, 269 Forbes, Adam, 299 Fordham, Signithia, 226 Foster, Karith, 252 Foucault, Michel, 3, 10, 16, 196 Fox News, 49, 100, 208, 294, 295, 296, 308, 308 Foxx, Redd, 224 Franklin, Marina, 227, 228, 229–31 freedom, 4, 6, 18, 20, 38, 54 free-dumb, 20 French, Dawn, 180 Full Frontal, 133, 162 Funches, Ron, 221 funnel helmets protest, 112–14, 117, 118; by environmentalists and inhabitants of Bursa, 119; by nurses’ union, 118; by students of Mersin University, 119 gallows humor, 206 Galvin-Lewis, Jane, 226 GamerGate, 17, 37, 44–47, 302, 310n6 Gangnam style, 187 Gargantua and Pantagruel, 73 Garofalo, Janeane, 228 Gay, Roxane, 41, 282 Gelman, Brett, 300 Gena Davis Inclusion Quotient (GDIQ), 269 gender, 15, 19; comedy, 40; horror comedy, 269–71, 279–81; in media, 14;

Index

in political comedy, 14; and race, 55; role of, 25 gendered capitalism, 42, 43 gender passing, 226–27 General Electric, 159 Genet, Jean, 283 genre, 9, 10; body, 269; of caricature, 72; comedy as, 10–21; earnestness, 11–12; hate attribution, 11; helps, 9; humorlessness, 284, 309; stiob, 114 Gervais, Ricky, 24, 184, 185, 186 Get Out, 269, 270, 272–73, 282 Gezi Park, Turkey, 105 Gezi protests, in Turkey, 7, 105–24 Ghostbusters, 17, 22, 37, 44–45, 55 The Ghost Busters, 53 A Ghost Story, 268 Giles, Martin, 165 Gillota, David, 224, 225 Gilmore, Leigh, 205 Ginelle, Leela, 257 Giora, R., 71 Girard, René, 144 Girl Code, 235 Girls, 282 Giroux, Henry, 94–95 Giuliani, Rudy, 195 Givens, Adele, 224 Glamour magazine, 235 globalization: negative, 67; neoliberal, 66, 67–69, 71; as utopia, 67 global management state, 6 global neoliberalism, othering in, 66 Global War on Terror (GWOT), 6, 12 Glover, Donald, 221 Gone with the Wind, 234 Gonzalez, Vicente, 305 Good Morning Britain, 77–78

Gottfried, Gilbert, 247, 252, 257 Gourarie, Chava, 296 Gove, Michael, 23 Grae, Jean, 236 Gray, Herman, 42 Gray, Jonathan, 142, 150–51 Green, Tom, 301 Greene, Viveca, 5, 17, 21, 22 Gregory, Dick, 224, 247 Griffin, Kathy, 19, 228 Grondin, David, 24, 25, 141 grotesque, 69, 72, 74, 79, 139 The Guardian, 77, 80, 89, 189, 221 Gurel, Perin, 121, 123 GWOT. See Global War on Terror (GWOT) Haggins, Bambi, 42, 43, 224 Haidt, Jonathan, 251 Hall, Stuart, 55, 133, 138 Hansome, Rhonda, 226 Harold, Christine, 170 Harrison, Chris, 267 Harron, Mary, 282 Hart, Kevin, 224 Hartman, Andrew, 297 Harvard Institute of Politics, 91 Hashtags, 58 Hasselbeck, Elisabeth, 14 hate attribution genre, 11 Haugerud, Angelique, 99 Have I Got News for You, 178, 179 Hawkins, Calise, 227, 236 Hays Code, 247 Herring, Richard, 184 Hertz, Emily, 228 higher education entertainment, 257 Hilliard, Chloe, 227 Hills, Adam, 66, 76, 77, 78 Hispanics, 57 historical comedy, 15 Homo Ludens, 137 homonationalism, 274 homo oeconomicus, 201 Hope, Beverly, 275, 276, 278

321

322

horror comedy, 267–86; cults, 271–76; gender, 269–71, 279–81; phobia, 276–78; post-horror, 269–71; Solanas, Valerie, 281–85; and women, 279–81 House of Cards, 12 Howe, Neil, 92 Huchtens, Eleanor, 203 Huffington Post, 261 Huizinga, Johan, 133, 137, 138 human security, 2 humor, 8; activism, 107; alt-right, 11, 46, 49, 188; auntie, 121–23; black folk, 223; divisive, 55, 56; gallows, 206; Gezi Park, 107–8, 114–15, 121; meta-discourse of, 47, 52–55; and power, 106; racist, 38–43, 55. See also racist humor; as resistance, 112–20; rhetorical context of, 51, 69–70; sense of, 23; style of, 55, 228, 234, 236, 257; as symbolic violence, 120–23; theory, 38; in Turkey protests, political use, 106–24; Turkish, 108 humorlessness, 284, 309 Hutcheon, Linda, 10 Huyssen, Andres, 169 Hyde, Sam, 296–309 Iannucci, Armando, 184 I Be Done Been Was Is, 226 Ideal Audience, 25, 197–98, 202 identity politics, 14, 18, 44, 109, 182, 185, 186 ideologies:

Index

anti-racist, 51; culturalist, 6–7, 95; free market, 7; political, 209; in pop cultural media, 59; privileging, 249; racial, 48, 49, 51, 55, 56, 58; white supremacist, 56 imperialism, 39 implied author (IA), 196–98; as ethos, 198–200; as post-digital ethos, 200–206 individualism, 20, 69 inequality, radical, 18–19 infotainers, 133, 134, 138–44 infotainment, 21, 133–34; birth of, 135; culture wars and, 134–42; modus operandi of, 151 InfoWars, 209 In Living Color, 42, 234 İnönu, İsmet, 108 Insane Clown Posse online, 201 Instagram, 221, 246 institutional profits, late night comedy and, 161–63 insult comedy, 7 integral reality, 12 intentionalism, 196 Internet, 90, 245 irony, 65, 203; as algorithmic resistance, 203–6; Brexit irony, 65–67, 70–72, 304; definitions, 65, 70; everyday, 184; over political correctness, 188; postmodern, 71–72; romantic, 71–72; situational, 71, 72, 76 irritability, 149 I Shot Andy Warhol, 282 Islamism, 6 Is Satire Saving Our Nation, 97 ITV news, 76 Izadi, Elahe, 221

Index

Jace, Connor, 302 Jackson, Jesse, 136 Jackson, Sarah, 58 James, LeBron, 40 Jane Eyre, 269 Jay, Sam, 236 Jeffries, Jim, 257 Jennings, Ben, 80 “Joey Quits,” viral video, 202 Johnson, Boris, 23, 75, 79–81, 178–79, 187 Johnson, Zainab, 227 jokes: during Gezi protests, 121; racist, 48–49; rhetorical context of, 69–70; as tiny revolution, 163; on Vietnamese women, 258 Jolly, Don, 300, 303 Jones, Alex, 136, 209 Jones, Jeffrey, 142, 150–51 Jones, Jim, 272 Jones, Leslie, 8, 15, 17, 21–22, 37, 44, 259; attacks to, 44–45; criticism, 37–42; Internet trolls to, 44–55; online racist harassment campaign against, 37, 45–47, 49, 52, 58; pain, 41–42; racist Twitter trolls against, 45–47, 49, 52, 58 Jost, Colin, 22, 38 Jung, E. Alex, 228 Justice and Development Party, 106 Kardaş, Tuncay, 110 Kent, Jennifer, 268 Kessler-Harris, Alice, 248, 249 Key, Keegan-Michael, 251, 252, 260 Keynesian economics, 2 Khalil, Yousef, 6 Kimmel, Jimmy, 163, 164 kinetic utopia, 148 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 14

323

Kingsmith, A. T., 299, 301 Kinison, Sam, 250 Kirby, Alan, 11 Klein, S. R., 72, 73 Kondabolu, Hari, 255 Koresh, David, 272 Kotsko, Adam, 21, 26, 54, 67, 171, 249 Krefting, Rebecca, 27, 297 Kucinich, Dennis, 195 Kuipers, Giselinde, 38 Kyi, Aung San Suu, 182 Kyl, Jon, 97 kynicism, 147, 150, 169 Lacan, J., 276 La Leche League (LLL), 278 lamest generation. See millennials Lampanelli, Lisa, 246, 257 “Lanky Kong” joker, 50 LaSha, 56 The Last Leg, 66, 76, 77, 78 Last Week Tonight (LWT), 24–25, 66, 76, 80, 133, 142–47, 163–64; formatted performance of, 143–47; main topic/story, 146–47; Panopticon, 145; quick recap, 143–45 late night comedy, 13, 25; cheekiness, 170–72; cynical labor and, 166–70; institutional profits and, 161–63; political economy of, 159–72; as small revolutions, 163–66 Late Night with Seth Meyers, 246 Late Show, 193–94, 200, 204 laughter, 38, 50–51 Lawrence, Martin, 224 Lawson, Thomas, 13, 25 lazy, 18–19 Leave.EU campaign, 23, 78, 81 leavers, 22 Lee, Spike, 234, 269 Lee, Stewart, 178, 184 left neoliberalism, 11 Leigh, Jennifer Jason, 269

324

Leman, 110 Lemieux, Jamilah, 39, 40, 43 Lenny Henry Show, 182 lesbianism, 275 Letterman, David, 204 Lewis, Paul, 39 liberalism, 4, 10 liberation, 120 liberty, 4 Limbaugh, Rush, 136 Lindsay, Rachel, 267 Loaded, 184, 185 localized neoliberal hybrids, 17 logos, 70, 81 Louis, C. K., 259 ludic surveillance, 134 Luenell, 224 Lukianoff, Greg, 251 lulz, 22, 37–59 Luther, Martin, 171 LWT. See Last Week Tonight (LWT) Mabley, Jackie, 224, 226 Mac, Bernie, 224 MacDonald, Norm, 204–5 Maher, Bill, 136, 166 Mailer, Norman, 208, 283 Maisel, Remy, 97, 98 Mamet, David, 282 Mandela, Nelson, 182 Manjoo, Farhad, 207 Manning, Bernard, 181 marketing, 13, 89–90 Marko Pasha, 108 Mary White House Experience, 184 The Mary Whitehouse Experience, 185 mass incarceration, 14 mass media, 304 maternity, neoliberal, 278–79 mature neoliberalism, 5–6 Mayfair-Richards, Ally, 272–75, 281, 284 Mayfair-Richards, Ivy, 272–75 Mayfair-Richards, Ozzie, 285 McCarthy, Melissa, 44, 208

Index

McClennen, Sophia, 23–24 McDonald, Heather, 258 McDonald, Michael, 257 McInnes, Gavin, 300 McKain, Aaron, 13, 25 McKinnon, Kate, 44 McLeroy, Don, 209–10 McMillan Cottom, Tressie, 42 McNutt, Myles, 172 Mc Robbins, Angela, 273 Meet the Press, 195, 197, 199 Meserko, Vince, 236 meta-discourse of humor, 47, 52–55 #MeToo, 201 Meyer, John C., 51 Meyers, Seth, 164 Michaels, Lorne, 208 migratory movements, 151 millennials, 23, 88; activism, 87–88, 90; attacks on, 87–88, 95–96; bashing, 92–94; citizenship, 88, 92–93; generation, 93–94; and neoliberal ideology, 88–96; politics, 88, 96–101; and satiractivism, 87, 96–101; slactivist attack on, 95–96 Miller, Dennis, 246 Million Dollar Extreme: World Peace, 293, 300 Milner, Ryan M., 52 mimetic, 210–13 mimicry, 114 Mirowski, Phillip, 5, 8, 13, 16, 20 misogynoir, 42, 45, 55, 56 mobilizations, 148 modernity, 148–49 A Modest Proposal, 74 Monique, 224 Moore, Phoebe, 203 moral discourses, 147–48 morality, 147–48 Morgan, Tracy, 224, 253 Morris, Chris, 184

Index

mother!, 269, 271 Mouthful of Shame, 259 MoveOn.org, 89 multiculturalism, 59, 248, 250 Murphy, Eddie, 224 Murphy, Ryan, 280, 283 Muslim woman, 19 Myer, Seth, 13–14 Nancherla, Aparna, 254, 255 National Health Service (NHS), 23 nativism, 20 Nazi symbolism in Thailand, 151 NBC, 159 Nebitt, Kathleen, 90 neoliberal: authoritarianism in Turkey, 105–24; blanket, 16; body, 69, 74, 79; capitalism, 89; feminism, 27; globalization, 66, 67–69, 71; governance, 9; identities, 204; ideology, 16, 88–96; marketing, 13; maternity, 278–79; and millennials, 88–96; mothers, 273–74; policy-making, 13, 15, 17, 18, 250; reforms, 2; truthers, 1 neoliberalism, 1, 4–5, 11, 13, 19, 66, 67–69, 167; American, 10, 26; authoritarianism and, 5, 23–24; and Brexit populism, 71; British do-over of, 23; comedy in, 21–28, 160; communicative, 8; definition, 160; economic structures of, 69; failures, 21, 26; as faith in God, 21, 26; government and, 2–3, 5;

325

left, 11; mature, 5–6; multiculturalism and, 59; as overarching ideology, 2; political, 3–4, 16; political correctness and, 249–53; privacy and, 201–3; progressive horizon of, 11; role of, 25; self, 3–4, 16–17; social control of, 6; as social order, 54; state and, 19–20; structural conditions, 18–19; synonyms, 4; Turkish, 105–24; violence in, 68 Neoliberal Thought Collective, 2 Netflix, 221 Newfield, Christopher, 248, 249 The New Yorker magazine, 57, 254 Ngai, Sianne, 9, 10, 11, 14, 72, 168, 201, 246, 252, 255, 282, 306 NHS. See National Health Service (NHS) The Nightly Show, 133 Noah, Trevor, 163, 253 Norquist, Grover, 213 Norton, Jim, 247, 258, 259, 261 nosferatu, 286 Note to Self, 236 Nur, 120 Nussbaum, Emily, 160 Nyong, Lupita, 38 Nyong’o, Lupita, 41 Obama, Barack, 15, 23, 49, 160, 225 Obama, Michelle, 232 O’Brien, Conan, 12, 169, 205 Occupy movements, 6, 87–88 Occupy Wall Street (OWS), 87–88, 100 11 O’Clock Show, 184 The Office, 6, 184, 294 Oliver, John, 24, 25, 66, 76, 80, 133, 141, 142–47, 163–64, 169

326

online: abuse, 44–47; activism, 89, 117; activities, 52; personal account hacking, 44; racist harassment campaign, 37, 45–47, 49, 52, 58; trait-based harassment, 57 On the Real Side, 223 Oprah, 8–9 optimism, 11 O’Reilly, Bill, 87, 88, 136 Orji, Yvonne, 223, 227 Orwell, George, 163 Orwellian social credit scores, 201 Oswalt, Patton, 228, 256, 258, 260–61 othering, 66; of Brexit, 68; in global neoliberalism, 66 OWS. See Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Özgur, Yiğit, 112 Page, Benjamin, 165 Page, LaWanda, 226 paideia, 137 Palace, 148–49 Palin, Sarah, 160 paratextual media, 21 Pariser, Eli, 207 Paroske, Marcus, 196 parrhesia, 152–55 pathos, 70, 81 patriarchy, 13, 17, 19, 57 pax Americana, 4 Peele, Jordan, 251, 252, 260 Peifer, Jason T., 168 Penguen magazine, 110, 112 penguins in Gezi resistance, 115, 118 Penn State, 101 Pérez, Raúl, 41, 48, 49, 255 perfection dispositif, 273, 275, 284 personal online account hacking, 44 Peters, Evan, 272 Peters, Russell, 246, 255 Peterson, Jordan, 4, 303

Index

Peterson, Latoya, 253 Pew Center study, 57 Pew Research Center, 90, 164 Phelan, James, 196, 210 Phillips, Whitney, 52, 56, 211, 308 phobia, 276–78 Pinker, Steven, 303 policy-making, 13, 15 political: activism, 29, 88, 116, 169; comedy, 2, 4, 8, 9, 160–62, 168, 195, 200, 204, 208, 209, 214, 268; correctness, 24, 27, 44, 46, 54, 72, 183, 185–90, 245–62; deliberation, 209–13; economic norms, 9, 25; economy of media, 159–72; efficacy, 23; engagement, 96; liberalism, 4; literacy, 211; mobilization, 71, 90, 96, 116; neoliberalism, 3–4; resistance, 24, 177–90; satire, caricature as, 72–75; theater, 8 political comedy, 4, 8, 9; example, 12; gender in, 14; race in, 14 Political Correctness and the Destruction of the Social Order: The Rise of the Pristine Self, 251 politics: aesthetics, 207–15; entertainment in, 97; identity, 14, 18, 44, 109, 182, 185, 186; post-digital, 207–9; in post-Trump theater of truthiness, 206–15; of resistance, 24, 177–90; satire role in, 177

Index

populism, 68 portmanteau: of activism, 87; of slacker, 87 positive state. See welfare state post-digital politics, 207–9 post-horror comedy, 269–71 postmodern irony, 71–72 post-network politics, 24 post-normative period, 22 post-structuralism, 196 post-Truth, 207–15 power: and humor, 106; soft, 6; symbolic, 140; truth to, 159–60 privacy, 201–3 Pryor, Richard, 14, 224, 247, 248 Puar, Jasbir, 274 quantitative self, 203 Rabelais, François, 73 Rabinowitz, Peter, 212 race, 14, 18–19, 21–22; analysis of, 14; comedy, 39–43; and gender, 55; in graphic form, 49; in media, 14, 49; in political comedy, 14; role of, 25; sociological nature of, 38 racial hierarchy, 42, 43 racism: language, 57; and violence, 68 racist humor, 38–43, 55; meta-discourse of, 47, 52–55; modes of, 48–55; nature of, 48; racist jokes posting mode, 48–49; racist tweets, finding humor in, 50–51;

327

social consequences of, 44–48; trolling, 52–55, 52–59; white supremacists on, 48 racist tweets, 45–46 radical inequality, 18–19 Rae, Issa, 227 Rahman, Aamer, 253, 261 Rancière, Jacques, 208 Rankowski, Jan, 302 Raw (Grave), 268 Read, Susanna, 77 Reagan, Ronald, 136 reality-based community, 5–6 recognition, 26 recognition comedy, 25 Reddit, 45, 246 Reed, Adolph, 14 resisting penguin stencil, 115–16 Reversal of Fortune, 268 Revisionaries, 210 rhetorical discourse analysis, 69–70 Rich, B. Ruby, 283 Richards, Michael, 200, 254 Richardson, Bill, 195 right-wing comedy: productive account of, 188–90; rise of, 177–88 Right-Wing Comedy, 24 risk-taker, 16 Rivière, Joan, 275 Robinson, Debra, 226 Robinson, Phoebe, 40, 222, 227, 235–39 Rock, Chris, 39–42, 224, 246, 256, 258 romantic irony, 71–72 Ronell, Avital, 268, 283 Rose, Jacqueline, 278, 279 Rose, Steven, 268 Roseanne, 294 Rosemary’s Baby, 270 Rosenkranz, Karl, 73 Rousseff, Dilma, 7 Rove, Karl, 5 Rubenstein, Diane, 12, 17, 27 Rudolph, Maya, 38 Rupert Murdoch product, 9

328

Russell, Nipsey, 224 Russert, Tim, 195, 196–99 Ryan, Maureen, 261–62 Sahl, Mort, 224 Salon, 258 Salter, Mark, 136 Sandy Hook, 1 Sanni, Rae, 227, 236 sassy black woman, 225, 229–35 satiractivism: activism as, 88; attack on, 89–90; as digital citizenship, 91; and millennials, 87, 96–101; rise of, 96–101 satire: and free speech, 177; political, 177–79; radical potentials of, 184; in U.S. politics, 177 Satire and Dissent, 214 Saturday Night Live (SNL), 37, 159, 177, 221, 231 Sayle, Alexei, 24, 180, 181–83, 185 Scaramucci, Anthony, 209 Scharff, Cristina, 19 Schilling, Dave, 221 Schmitt, Eric, 202 Schopf, Oliver, 79 Schumer, Amy, 19 Schwabel, Dan, 202 Schwartz, Howard, 251, 252 Scialabba, George, 237 Sconce, Jeffrey, 294 Scum Manifesto, 282, 283 Seales, Amanda, 223, 224, 227 Second City improv, 209 Sedaris, Amy, 197 Seder, Sam, 206 Seinfeld, Jerry, 200–201, 246, 256, 257 self: feminist, 17; identity, 4; neoliberalism, 3–4, 16–17;

Index

plasticity of, 16–17; techniques of, 3 Self, Will, 177 self-help, 4 self-managing subjects, 19 self-reliance, 69 sense of humor, 23 sexism, 14 Sexton, Jared, 268 sexual assault, 17 sexuality, 285 sexual violence, 55 Seymour, Richard, 53 Sharpton, Al, 136 Shattered, Regarding Henry, The Doctor, 267 The Shining, 270, 272 significative comic, 74 silly citizenship, 134 Silverman, Sarah, 300 Simas, David, 57 Simien, Justin, 269 Simmons, Laurie, 282 Simmons, Russell, 227 situational irony, 71, 72, 76 Six Feet Under, 284 Slack Bay (Ma Loute), 268 slacker, portmanteau of, 87 slactivism, 23 slactivists, 23, 87, 95–96 slave rape, 39, 43 slavery, 14; black women, 39–42, 55; and sexual violence, 55 Sloan, Dulce, 227 Sloterdijk, Peter, 134, 147, 148, 165, 169, 171 Smith, Moira, 50 Smith, Zadie, 270 SNL. See Saturday Night Live (SNL) Snowden, Edward, 153, 154 SNS. See social networking sites (SNS) social inequities, 95 social insurance, 2

Index

social justice warriors, 17, 44 social media, 58, 90, 253–54; abuse of women and, 245; in activism, 98–99, 116; activism prevalence on, 88, 90; for critical engagement, 115; culture of, 56; Gezi protesters and, 116; Occupy movement and, 116; offers protesters, 90; for political advertising, 201; race on, 14, 49 social networking, 90–91 social networking sites (SNS), 91 social protection, 18 soft power, 6 Solanas, Valerie, 17, 27, 281–85 sophomoric viral pranks, 202 Sousa, De, 50 South Park, 13 Spacey, Kevin, 12 Spencer, Richard, 303 Spheres, 148 Spicer, Sean, 208 Spitting Image, 177 stand-up comedy, 221–22, 224, 226–29, 248, 253–61 Starbucks diversity, 6 Stein, Jill, 269, 284 Stewart, Jon, 8, 24, 97, 133, 141, 208, 253, 259, 301 stiob, 114–15 Stipe, Michael, 178 Stone, Rosetta, 205 stoned slackers. See millennials Strait Jacket, 281 Strangers with Candy, 197 Strauss, William, 92 street politics, 117 Stuart, Gisela, 23, 75 The Sun, 151 Swift, Jonathan, 74 symbolic power, 140 symbolic systems, 138 symbolic violence, 140

329

symbolism, 179 synthetic, 210–13 Taggart, P., 68, 71 Talking for Clapping, 260 Tapper, Jake, 12 techniques: of domination, 3; of self, 3 technologies, 27 The Tempest, 248 Terrorist Assemblages, 274 Thea, 226 theater of political deliberation, 212–13 thematic, 210–13 third space, 6 This Is Not a President: Sense, Nonsense and the American Political Imaginary, 267 This Morning with Richard but Not Judy, 184 Thompson, Ethan, 142, 150–51 Thompson, Hunter S., 208, 209 Thorne, Bella, 269 thought leadership, 302 Time Magazine, 202 Time Out, 180 Top Gear, 186 Tosh, Daniel, 200, 247, 253, 257 tragedy, 9–10 transatlantic movement, 7–8 trickster comedy, 26 Trog, 281 trolling, 52, 295–96; modern case, 56; racist, 52–59 Trudeau, Justin, 237 Trump, Donald, 44, 56, 58, 159, 160, 177–78, 193–94, 204, 304 truthers, neoliberal, 1 Truthiness, 207–9, 213 Tudor, D., 69 Tumblr, 246

330

Turkey: authoritarianism in, 105–24; Gezi protests, 105–24; humor: political use in protests, 106–24; as resistance, 112–20; as symbolic violence, 120–23 neoliberalism, 105–24; political satire history in, 108–11 Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, 249 Twilight Zone, 214 Twitter, 21, 22, 38, 57–59, 221; fans, 246; harassment of Jones, 45–47, 49, 52, 58; jokes, 48–49 UK Independence Party (UKIP), 76 UKIP. See UK Independence Party (UKIP) UnCabaret, 228 underclass, 18–19 Union Hall, in Brooklyn, NY, 227 universal communication, 203 unlaughter, 38, 53; Black feminist, 55–59; definition, 39; racist humor and, 38–43; and sociological nature of racial, 38–43; Twitter trolls with, 47 Upright Citizen’s Brigade (UCB), 227 urban comedy, 223–24 Urkel, Steve, 234 Uykusuz, 110 Valentine, Sarah, 272 Vance, Danitra, 15, 259 Vanderlippe, John, 110 Vanity Fair, 56 van Zoonen, Liesbet, 97 Varnado, Victor, 229 Vaughn, Baron, 229

Index

Veep, 12 Vidale, Thea, 226–27 violence: in neoliberalism, 68; police, 112–16; and racism, 68; symbolic, 140; symbolic, humor as, 120–23; threats, 44 Violence Against Women Act, 17 volition, 4–5 Volker, Paul, 2 Vote Leave Campaign, 23, 77, 78, 81 Waisenen, Don, 13, 25 Walker, Kara, 14 Warfield, Marsha, 226 Warhol, Andy, 272 Watkins, Mel, 223 Weaver, Simon, 7, 22, 304 Webber, Julie, 27 “Weekend Update,” 38–39, 204 Weinstein, Harvey, 204 welfare queen, 18–19 welfare state, 2 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, 280 white: masculinity, 37, 57; racial frame, 57; supremacy, 13, 16, 22, 40, 56, 59 White, Micah, 89 Whitney, Daniel Lawrence, 246 Widdicombe, Josh, 66, 76 Wiig, Kristen, 44 Williams, Allison, 282 Williams, Brian, 282 Williams, Jessica, 222, 227, 235–39 Williams, Linda, 280 Wilmore, Larry, 133, 161 Wilson, Flip, 224 Wilson, Julie, 11 Wilton, Harrison, 275 Winstead, Lizz, 13 The Witch, 268–69 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 Science 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 subjectivities, 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 Sociology 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 relationship 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 Anthropology). Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Connaught Fund, and the Regional Studies Association. Her work was also recognized with a Sakip Sabanci International 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 Studies. 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 College 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 studies. 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 Communication at the Université de Montréal, where he teaches international communication, media studies, political communication, surveillance, digital technologies, and popular culture. He is a regular researcher at the International 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, algorithmic 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 Department, 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 history 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 Intellectuals (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 internationally. 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 postpostmodernism 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 appearances 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 Cornell 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 training, 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 political campaigns. He is the founder of Communication Upward, an adjunct lecturer 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 representation 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 Racist Humour: US, UK and Global Race Joking (Ashgate) significantly contributed 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 Violence. 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 neoliberal 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.