In May (2017), Caty Borum Chattoo, co-director of the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University and a comedy fan, released “The Laughter Effect: The [Serious] Role of Comedy in Social Change“, in which she summarizes the research and gives advice on how to use humor to further social issues. She notes that comedy is promising, but that there are some hard, paradoxical problems as well.
The promise and paradox of comedy
The promise
Chattoo begins with the promise, citing Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’s success at getting action on New York City’s bail bond system. Basically, Oliver’s monologue culminating in a statement that “Increasingly, bail has become a way to lock up the poor, regardless of guilt,” had an immediate impact:
New York City officials changed the city’s bail protocol, immediately impacting 3,000 poor and low-level offenders in the short term, and thousands more in the long run.
That sounds great! Direct effects, comedy FTW!
The paradox
However, she also brings up the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “The Zombie Apocalypse” social media public health marketing campaign, which, while it built buzz and encouraged message sharing, also showed that people who had been exposed to the messages “were significantly less likely to take protective actions in the face of an impending disaster” (Fraustino & Ma). So yeah, increased exposure that backfires? Not good. Chattoo explains:
The two stories illustrate the promise and paradox of comedy in service of serious social challenges. On the one hand, it’s not revelatory to claim, based on compelling anecdotes alone, that comedy can cut through the clutter of today’s unrelenting supply of digital news and information. Comedy may even be able to help set the media agenda in a way that impacts policy, as illustrated in the bail story. On the other hand, to ascribe monolithic, one-size-fits-all characteristics onto comedy risks possible backfiring.
Preview
Chattoo creates a list of comedy formats that she argues work for social change:
- Satire
- Scripted entertainment storytelling
- Marketing and advertising
- Stand-up and sketch comedy
These formats, she asserts, exert five common forms of influence (to which she adds another factor: active audiences):
- Attracting attention,
- Persuading through emotion,
- Offering a way into complex social issues,
- Breaking down social barriers, and
- Encouraging sharing (multiplier effect).
In addition, Chattoo explains,
Perhaps most useful for social change efforts, contemporary comedy is uniquely able to set media agendas by creating shared cultural watercooler moments in an increasingly cluttered information age. Comedy doesn’t only preach to the choir—audiences actively seek out comedy as a vital form of entertainment and even as a source of information to understand the world. Comedy’s ability to reach unexpected audiences is crucial.
This report represents fairly recent, “breaking,” stuff (though most of what she’s citing is not), and so I want to delve deeper into her work over the next several days, starting with how she sets the scene, then to the five effects (plus active audiences), next moving on to satire, parts of storytelling and stand-up comedy, then her final advice. On the way, I’ll probably break out her “Big Theories” and the authors she’s working from.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
References
Fraustino, J. D., & Ma, L. (2015). CDC’s Use of Social Media and Humor in a Risk Campaign—“Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse.” Journal of Applied Communication, 222-241.
