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. This is the second installment, where I talk about the situation as she describes it.
Why comedy – and why now?
Chattoo cites a gaggle of research on the rise of online media, and how The Daily Show has lead us into “a surge of comedy programs—both on TV and online” with profound cultural influence. She cites Garber’s article on comedians as public intellectuals and asks, can comedy “cut through the zeitgeist,” “act as a connector” for people, and are comics “—the observers and savants of the cultural landscape—seen as the true authentic truth-tellers?” This leads her to the conclusion:
If any element of this is true, the process by which comedy is understood and shared within the context of social issues—and the impact on audiences—is worth understanding more precisely.
Comedy’s [potentially powerful] role in social change
Defining social change
Following Singhal and Rogers, Chattoo defines social change as,
The process in which an alteration occurs in the structure and function of a social system. Social change can happen at the level of the individual, community, and organization or a society.
This gives her, she notes, a definition with maximum reach, where we can potentially see effects.
Defining comedy/humor
A major problem for me in Chattoo’s work, is that she uses comedy and humor interchangeably – when most theorists get more mileage by separating the two. In any case, she uses Palmer’s definition of humor as,
[E]verything that is actually or potentially funny, and the process by which this ‘funniness’ occurs (3).
This, again, gives her maximum scope. However, for the purposes of social change, she limits her scope to the following four types of comedy (which is actually five):
- Satire
- Scripted entertainment storytelling
- Marketing and advertising
- Stand-up and sketch comedy
I would argue that sketch comedy has more in common with “scripted entertainment storytelling” than stand-up, but we’ll roll with it for now.
She notes that although comedy has been “defined for thousands of years, and studying comedy is not new…. conclusively attempting to understand its connection to potential social change is relatively nascent.” I would concur; most traditional scholars dismiss humor for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the lack of proven effects, as the study of the CDC’s “The Zombie Apocalypse” social media public health marketing campaign displays.
Defining comedy’s role
Chattoo begins with three qualities comedy possesses, as commonly understood by theorists, which can “serve as a helpful guide for a contemporary understanding of entertainment comedy in service of serious social issues”:
- attracting attention to raise tough topics (Downe and Freud)
- situational awareness requiring a kind of shared cultural literacy on behalf of the audience (Allen)
- providing a voice for the powerless, catharsis (Downe)
Specific to my purpose on this blog, on the first point, Chattoo points out the model represented by Comic Relief, in which a comedy show is used to attract attention and benefit a campaign. However, in this case, the comedy is just a lure, the jokes don’t necessarily have anything to do with the politics of the social issue.
On the latter points, Chattoo notes, with Goldman,
In 1970s America, amidst the tumultuous terrain of the Vietnam War, women’s equality movement and civil rights, stand-up comics and other comedy provided sarcastic, perhaps cathartic, social commentary on the juxtaposed absurdness of reality and the ideal.
For a lot of the social commentary coming from George Carlin and the like, it was best understood in the cultural moment, when people had both the awareness of the topics and a need for catharsis. But more than these traditional understandings, Chattoo wonders:
Comedy evokes hope and joy, emotions not typically imagined in more somber storytelling about complex social issues. But is emotional response enough to propel attitude change, beyond sharing and setting a media agenda? Will change-makers and storytellers be willing to take the risk, and if so, what should they know in order to make the attempt? And, importantly, what kind of “change”— along a spectrum of learning, feeling, sharing, and acting—is a feasible objective in terms of comedy’s role?
This serves to introduce her project, as from here she launches into her five common forms of influence (plus another factor – active audiences).
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
References:
Allen, L. (2014). Don’t forget, Thursday is test[icle]! The use of humour in sexuality education. Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning, 14(4), 387-399.
Downe, P. J. (1999). Laughing when it hurts: Humor and violence in the lives of Costa Rican prostitutes. Women’s Studies International Forum, 22(1), 63–78.
Goldman, N. (2013). Comedy and democracy: The role of comedy in social justice. Retrieved from http://animatingdemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Humor%20Trend%20Paper.pdf
Singhal, A., and Rogers, E. (1999). Entertainment-education: a communication strategy for social change. New York, NY: Routledge.
