Dear Readers: I am sorry for sprinkling humor and sarcasm throughout my Substack posts. My apologies!
Had I known that social scientists Jordan McSwiney and Kurt Sengul found the use of humor and ridicule to be an insidious attack on our democracy, I would certainly avoid even a trace of sarcasm or humor in my articles!
According to the authors, the evil far-right forces invented a novel, innovative, and subversive discursive technique called humor.
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It is broadly accepted that contemporary far-right actors, be they parties, movements, or activists, are savvy media performers (Wodak 2021) who employ a range of innovative communication strategies to exploit the highly mediatized and hybridized political landscape. A particular focus in recent times has been the effective use of humor and irony as part of the far-right’s social media strategy (Greene 2019).
Humor is used insidiously:
Humor and laughter have powerful social functions. Through sharing a joke, humor can positively impact social cohesion, by generating feelings of enjoyment through shared laughter. [very dangerous for democracy – I.C.] It engenders group cohesion and solidarity in a manner that is fun and playful. As a form of affective rhetoric, humor can persuade or align, facilitating social cooperation by uniting interlocutors.
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We are beginning to see how dangerous humor is because laughter can keep social groups together, which is totally unacceptable. The authors go on, being utterly serious and bordering on the pompous:
But humor can also be used to divide and marginalize, constructing and maintaining social distance and inequalities. In the form of ridicule, humor serves to “target, discipline, marginalize, and alienate groups and individuals who are othered”. Humor can therefore be both pro- and anti-social: one can “laugh with others and at others”. In doing so, humor may simultaneously foster greater social affiliation with the in-group and greater social distance against out-groups, and so plays an active role in boundary maintenance. Through negative portrayals of the Other, casting them as buffoonish, dangerous, inferior, and the like, exclusionary humor reproduces and normalizes social hierarchies. Such joking works to support exclusionary notions and structures regardless of the intention of the joke teller. In a settler-colonial society such as Australia, where historic and ongoing inequalities stem from systematic racial and gender hierarchies, exclusionary humor along such lines naturalizes these unequal social relations.
Humor, it turns out, makes materials more accessible to neutral audiences:
Here, humor helps the far right to soften their ideological content, deactivating social boundaries and making their materials more palpable to non-far-right audiences
The McSwiney et al. article turns its attention to a series of cartoons named Please Explain by an Australian politician, Pauline Hanson.
