The Cultural Set Up of Comedy – Affective Politics in the United States Post 9/11 (IB - Cultural Studies Toward Transformat) - Softcover

Webber, Julie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783200316 ISBN 13: 9781783200313

Publisher: Intellect, 2013

Synopsis

How do various forms of comedy - including stand-up, satire, and film and television - transform contemporary invocations of nationalism and citizenship in youth cultures? And how are attitudes about gender, race, and sexuality transformed through comedic performances on social media? The Cultural Set Up of Comedy seeks to answer these questions by examining comedic performances by Chris Rock and Louis C.K., news parodies like the The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the role of satire in the Arab Spring, and the groundbreaking performances by women in Bridesmaids. Breaking with the usual cultural studies debates over how to conceptualize youth, the book instead focuses on the comedic cultural and political scripts that frame them.

About this title

About the Author

Julie Webber is associate professor in the Department of Politics at Illinois State University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Cultural Set Up of Comedy

Affective Politics in the United States Post 9/11

By Julie Webber

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-031-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Chapter 1: The Cultural Set Up of Comedy, 
Chapter 2: Re-signifying the F-word: Comedy as Political Resistance or Entrenchment?, 
Chapter 3: Breaking the 'Crass Ceiling': Women as Comedians, 
Chapter 4: The Tone of Political Comedy in The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, 
Chapter 5: Globalizing Political Humor, 
Conclusion: After Comedy, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Cultural Set Up of Comedy

Look, I can appreciate this. I was young too, I felt just like you. Hated authority, hated all my bosses, thought they were full of shit. Look, it's like they say: if you're not a rebel by the age of 20, you got no heart, but if you haven't turned establishment by 30, you've got no brains. Because there are no storybook romances, no fairy-tale endings. So before you run out and change the world, ask yourself, 'What do you really want?' (Buddy Ackerman in Swimming with Sharks [George Huang, 1994])

This is a famous quote from a parody of Hollywood studio culture, Swimming with Sharks, starring Kevin Spacey in one of his signature performances as an 'asshole.' The film examines a cut-throat industry through the lens of a producer of Michael-Bay-like films named Buddy Ackerman. As he says while critiquing the sound editing in one of his projects, 'I told you, it's gotta be loud, loud, loud! The audience should feel their balls tremble, their ears should bleed!' His assistant (read: slave) is the Everyman, Generation Xer named 'Guy.' Guy believes that he can 'work really, really hard' and succeed honestly in Hollywood. Buddy schools him otherwise. The lead quote demonstrates a kind of political and cultural truism about American culture and its relationship to youth: that is, that young people are simply 'playing around' until it's time to get serious. The 'hard' reality of life eventually bears down on a person and they give up the soft dreams of 'fairy-tale endings' and 'storybook romances.' Just such an event was said to take place on 9/11 that was meant to force the entire country into a decisive and serious tone and ask the question: 'What do you really want?' Instead, contrary to all the predictions of the anti-irony crowd who longed for seriousness in American cultural life prior to 9/11, the media did not 'return' to a sober, reflective mode of information transmission, politicians did not earnestly make policy designed to improve the lives of their constituents (by and large), and Americans did not demand intelligent, thought-provoking news and cultural programming. Instead, most Americans got exactly what they wanted: the Michael Bay version of America on a daily loop on Fox News and other competing networks. Students turned to Tom Clancy novels for answers about the terrorist attacks rather than actual history or foreign policy texts. Being 'dumb' was fashionable and humble, just like our president, George W. Bush, who never lived in Texas as a child, but developed an accent when he became governor of the state, and exaggerated it when he became president of the country. As Molly Ivins once said of him, 'Born on third and thinks he scored a triple,' George W. Bush was paradigmatic of the kind of leadership people throughout the country would come to emulate through their consumption of media and information. A member of the patrimonial elite to his core, W. epitomized the new American dream: the person who pretends to have worked hard from nothing to 'earn' their guaranteed inheritance. People chose their president because he seemed like someone they'd like to have a beer with rather than because he had shown he could lead a country in a time of war. Once established in media and politics, this genre of information-sharing institutionalized both the 'expert' discourse of the pundit and the authoritative aura of the wealthy who patronized them. The only way to 'talk back' to such an establishment was indirectly through strategies of irony, parody and exaggerated imitations of what passed for 'common sense.' The media, enthralled by having access to this elite core of wealthy leaders, stayed on the path of unquestioning obedience. In doing this they equated wealth with justice as a hegemonic norm. Throughout this book, we will examine how comedy of the political variety attempts to maneuver its way through the hegemony of earnest political cronyism. Furthermore we will refer to this cultural hegemony that often passes as 'common sense' in the Gramscian tradition as:

[...] a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our sense and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values – constitutive and constituting – which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives. It is, that is to say, in the strongest sense a 'culture', but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes. (R. Williams 1977: 110)

In the absence of thoughtful political analysis and responsible journalism, political comedy emerged as the only strategy to challenge the hegemonic norm of earnestness and ignorance. The smartest thing about American cultural life was its comedy. Oddly, it was comedy that was covering serious news, rather than News covering news at all (McKain 2005). One reason for this, according to media scholars, is that news and entertainment had been blurred to such an extent that no one knew what objectivity meant anymore. So let's take a short jaunt through the recent history leading up to this pragmatic conjuncture where fact meets fiction.

Scholars of political entertainment mark the debut of the blurring of the lines between hard and soft news at the 1992 US presidential election, when candidates began to avail themselves of talk shows such as Oprah(and nowadays The View) in order to bypass the media filters and speak directly to publics (Holbert 2005: 441). Cartoon shows like the The Simpsons (1989–), which frequently feature parodies of political figures and celebrities, have been around for over two decades (debut half-hour sketches began in 1989). Blurring would be accelerated around 1995 by the duplication of information-sharing achieved by the Internet, and the technologies and applications that followed to enhance its communicative capacities, such as Facebook, mobile web services, satellite radio, YouTube, aand so on. A related trend in news media was the invention of the 24-hour news cycle. This cycle encouraged the transformation of the news anchor, a person charged with objectively presenting 'facts' to the American public at 6 p.m., with little or no affect, into an editorializing affect manager, whose goal was less to communicate information than to create controversy (Baym 2010). Around 2000, television struck back at declining ratings with 'reality-based programming,' the lure of which is to create reality on a sensational register using the same techniques as fictional television: editing and scriptwriting with actors. Its novelty was to present reality as outrageous, making otherwise banal lifestyle environments entertaining through post-production editing or by dropping ordinary people into extraordinary environments. Television genres replicated themselves throughout the world, creating the globalization of media (reality television, news parody, romantic comedy, 24-hour networks, etc.) which were copying each other at every turn. And finally, in 2004, the pronounced success of a long-time satiric news show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, coincided with its coverage of the 2004 presidential election: 'the year that entertainment media became a permanent fixture of the American political landscape' (Holbert 2005: 436). Immediately following it in 2005, the debut of The Colbert Report introduced Americans to a parody of the long-running right-wing news coverage that had dominated newspapers and cable television in the form of the Fox News channel, a subsidiary of News Corp., and self-described 'fair and balanced' show, The O'Reilly Factor, featuring Bill O'Reilly. News Corp., owned by Rupert Murdoch, had for some time been blurring entertainment and news in Great Britain, Australia and Canada through tabloids.

Through all this, media, with consumers as willing accomplices, have blurred the boundaries between earnest communication of rationally presented facts and discourses of entertainment. A related theme is the confounding of the public interest by the intrusion of and into privacy. The model of communication that foments the democratic citizen, who sorts out the knowledge for him/herself and finally 'decides,' is replaced by the affect-driven, image-spliced simulacra of the world of infotainment. As societies verge toward the latter trend, we find narcissistic obsession with self and Other (celebrity worship as the route to self-awareness), consumption as a citizen activity, whether in the form of emulation of important celebrity figures or as a mark of class consciousness or political preference. The dominant narrative to emerge from this explains that, because of media conglomeration (Jenkins 2006), consumers lose the ability to discern important facts from the entertaining way they are presented, as corporations who run news companies have more of an interest in selling related products and airtime than they do in informing publics. Moreover, because ratings pay, it is important for television and other media formats to appeal to the individualistic and consumer tastes of viewers and listeners by giving them what they think they want. This presumes that the individual consumer knows what they want, and can discern with increasing sophistication the political narratives that enrich their lives and those that disparage them. Throughout the decade, politicians and the media have taken this credo to an extreme: 'You decide' has become the most important trope in contemporary media and social politics, alongside the often muted assumption that once you decide you are also responsible for that decision. That's also why Time magazine made 'You' the Person of the Year in 2006. 'We' have no role to play; the semiotics of the social have been completely overtaken by social media. Rather than viewing our political activities as a relationship between citizens and government, we now view it as between consumers and media – the government being one player among many, often an adversary. Hence, in 2012, Eric Kain predicts that Time's Person of the Year will be the 'slactivist' – someone 'doing something in support of an issue or cause that requires minimal effort' – a merger between 'you' and a 'protester' (Time's 2011 Person of the Year). The slactivist is a trope on slacker/activist and it is more important for its generational implications than for its political consequences. Slactivist takes the participatory social politics of the baby boomers and marries it to the popular culture sensitivity of Generation X (who are known for nothing but popular culture) in order to produce 'youth' in the form of the digital media participant. The politics of the slactivist are important for understanding the role of political humor in fostering democratic pushback in any political debate. As we shall see in Chapter 5, the protests of the Arab Spring, which began in 2010 and continue to the present, were precipitated by social media organizers using Facebook and Twitter, avoiding government censors by using servers from outside the countries where they took place in the Arab world. Many of these protests used political humor, especially exploiting the irony of the political context between 'older' authoritarian discourses and 'youthful' movements for democracy. Many in the West, especially the United States, looked on these protest movements with apparent pleasure, often citing the main cause of them to have been the advent of social media itself forging a digital 'youthscape,' or the achievement of recognition between diverse online demographics who do not 'know' one another in an embodied, cultural way. While these are movements against governments, they are more accurately thought of as movements against governmentality: the notion that the government will think for you about how your life will be structured in order to best serve its own instrumental purposes and preserve its paradigmatic power (Bayat 2007). Some see this as the essence of the democratic experiment. Bassem Youssef, host of Al Bernameg, a copy of The Daily Show which airs on satellite television in Egypt, had this to say when he visited Jon Stewart on air in June 2012, several days before the outcome of the presidential elections in the country were to be announced:

We haven't actually been speaking to each other for all these years. For sixty years. Because of the military regime there was some sort of a buffer, someone was actually dealing with everybody else and now for the first time we actually have to communicate and people tell me, 'When does it stop? We used to be one hand in the square.' And I tell them, 'Look at the American media. Look at MSNBC, Fox News CNN ... they're cutting each other's throats. If you watch them, Americans, through the media you'd think that the apocalypse will come in like two days. That's normal. Everybody is opinionated.' They're just not used to a different kind of opinion to be in your face like this. (The Daily Show 2012)

Still others see political satire, especially that performed by The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, as no more than a necessary corrective to the failures of contemporary journalism (J. Jones 2009; Baym 2012).

In the United States, in recent years, citizens have come to feel threatened by government action to address even the smallest of bureaucratic tasks. The safety net of government is increasingly under attack as anti-democratic. Because media conglomeration has been the result of market deregulation (1996 Telecommunications Act, for example) and the increasing role that so-called privatization plays in determining both content and presentation of news media, those on the political right see no reason to criticize these blurred boundaries (indeed they often celebrate it, as in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 558 US 50 [2010] granting corporations the right to free speech). Indeed, the narrative fiction on the Right continues to be the old refrain about 'liberal media bias,' where the simple existence of government oversight or federal law implies progressive encroachment on formerly free speech and interpretation. In more extreme versions, it is labeled 'socialism.' On the Left, this conglomeration is seen as the gradual erosion of consumer rights to critical information that might persuade consumers of media to vote differently and make different consumer decisions. It is argued that important information is left out of news coverage or, if it hurts corporate interests, is reframed as benign and possibly repackaged as entertainment. Responding to the charge that the media is biased toward corporate interests, especially as they merge with political interests through lobbying groups, many who view themselves as part of a 'progressive' movement – though not always identified with the US Democratic Party – have come to view humor as a critical weapon in the ideological arsenal against hegemonic interests. Thus, popular audiences, scholars and citizens have grown accustomed to discussing political comedy as the sole progressive strategy for responding to both conservative hyperbole in the media and pro-corporate governing in congresses and parliaments.

In political science, the discipline from which I matriculate, political comedy is still viewed with suspicion. As a relatively conservative social science charged with educating young people about civic responsibility and studying the way citizens rationalize their political views, political science has been skeptical about humor's role in political thought because, for the majority of the past century, the discipline has been preoccupied with finding political truisms through empiricism and rationalism. A subset of the discipline, normative political theory has its roots in political philosophy and moral criticism, and uses texts from the canon to interpret contemporary political ideologies and social and political movements through the discourses of power and pleasure found in such thinkers as Plato and Hobbes, and even contemporary social theorists such as Foucault and Baudrillard. Political science rarely acknowledges that it has anything to say about political comedy. All the traditional theories of humor come from the canon of political and social philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Freud (by way of Nietzsche), and so on. And yet, few political science scholars examine political comedy, and when they do, they ask an outdated disciplinary question: does it promote civic engagement? Or, does it make citizens cynical toward government? (Morris & Baumgartner 2008). Usually the proof of engagement is measured by some simple activity, like voting or participating in extracurricular political organizing activities. Political science has yet to embrace more affect-driven paradigms, and, outside of political theory, which remains, to some extent, exiled from the larger discipline, political science remains embedded in the rationalist, positivist paradigm. When political theory has engaged affect, it has not looked at comedy as an object of political analysis except to mention in passing the role of comedy in highlighting media manipulation of affect (Connolly 2011: 796). Most general treatments of political comedy have been by scholars interested in looking at how it impacts trends in their own fields. In the fields of communication, scholars look at how comedy transforms news media (Baym 2005, 2009; J. Jones 2009); in rhetoric and cultural studies, scholars have looked at the cultural influence of comedy in post-9/11 dark humor, as an ethical object and a generator of counterpublic narratives (Gournelos & Greene 2011; Lewis 2008; Day 2011, respectively); and in philosophy, humor has been analyzed as a reformer of social manners and as moral criticism (Willet 2008; Daldez 2011). While communications scholars have a close affinity to political theory because of their interest in the way changing media and political comedy have transformed information gathering and sharing in democratic republics, they offer little in the way of explaining how certain narrative forms of political comedy organize or disorganize audience political affiliation, and often fail to connect it to historical trends in thinking about the economy, culture wars, modern political parties and social movements. One study of the rhetoric of The Daily Show (TDS), for example, mainly focuses on the argumentative strategies deployed by the show, and debates the effectiveness of satire for provoking political alliances with progressive politics (Goodnow 2011). Another multidisciplinary approach, again focused on TDS and The Colbert Report (TCR) includes essays on the 'real impacts of fake news' with important chapters detailing, for example, how TCR and TDS have attempted to bring scientific thinking and research back into style (Amarasingam 2011). Most approaches have been limited to focusing on these iconic shows and assessing their role in making satire and parody a contending political strategy for producing social change through information sharing and knowledge production in convergence culture; that is, how they extend the rationalist paradigm. Rarely marked by historical or narrative analysis of tropes and common themes drawn in both the shows and the larger cultural drama of political comedy, they avoid the times when, as Amarasingam notes, comedy fails (Amarasingam 2011: 19). When it sticks in someone's craw, political comedy is controversial. As I teach my students, whatever is contested is political. Though many of the scholarly treatments of political comedy that precede this one have made valiant attempts to explain certain examples of satirical failure, rarely have they done so by looking at the mobilization of affect through cultural strategies that achieve a certain tone. Throughout most of this book, we will follow so-called cultural warriors and their adversaries to examine how they compete for affective impact with audiences using generational tone. Following Sconce (2002), I will argue that the success or failure of political comedy largely depends on meeting its audience with the appropriate tone in order to shift or reinforce political ideologies that favor genuine political courses of action. Comedic failure, then, would seem on its surface to indicate a comedian's lack of engagement with audiences on an affective register. However, when we look more closely, we see it is difficult to generalize from failure as well. When looking at failure, the most commonly discussed one has been the cartoon on the cover of The New Yorker's 21 July 2008 edition, featuring Michelle and Barack Obama in 'The Politics of Fear', also known as 'the fist bump.'

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Intellect
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783200316
• ISBN 13: 9781783200313
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192