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. As previously described, Chattoo creates list of comedy formats that work for social change:
- Satire/Satirical News
- Scripted entertainment storytelling
- Marketing and advertising
- Stand-up and sketch comedy
I’ll focus on the parts of these that directly address stand-up, but there’s a lot of overlap: Stand-ups sometimes employ satire. Stand-ups sometimes tell stories. There are also some differences–few stand-ups do more elaborate sketches. I’ll try to work through it in a way that makes sense. First up (sixth?), I’ll address the definitions of satire.
How it works: Pointing out – and re-framing – life’s absurdities
I’ve previously defined satire as “a directed effort to correct, censure or ridicule, to bring about contempt or derision and therefore to enforce the status quo” (Cuddon; Gring-Pemble and Watson; Morner and Rausch). Similarly, Chattoo states that satire “uses humor to point out the absurdness or inherent power dynamics of a situation.” While pointing out absurdity is, to a certain extent, to ridicule, pointing out power dynamics is not necessarily so.
Chattoo further argues, with Bore and his colleagues, that satire offers “a mechanism for political or social commentary on a state of affairs.” It’s worth noting, as Chattoo does, that satire is entertaining and humorous, but it is so of a purpose. As Bore and his colleagues describe it:
Satire uses humor as a weapon, attacking ideas, behaviors, institutions, or individuals by encouraging us to laugh at them. It may be gentle or hostile, clear-cut or ambiguous, aimed at “us” or “them”—or it may oscillate between different approaches, remaining flexible and surprising.
I like this description of satire, as it allows the satirical critique to take multiple forms, remaining fluid and interesting. However, it is still framed as laughing at, and the form satire takes cannot be so mercurial that we miss the point.
Getting it and litige
Chattoo also notes the necessity of “getting it,” which I have discussed via Jean Francois Lyotard’s notion of litige: which, as Maurice Charland describes it, is,
[A] dispute where both parties articulate their claims in a language they mutually share with a court or judge whose legitimacy they both recognize, [in which] the decorum of the court is known and respected by both parties, and the judgment imposes closure (221-22).
Similarly, Chattoo notes, with Young (2008),
On the audience’s part, satire requires some basic recognition and understanding of the original scenario at the heart of the joke, and is, therefore, culturally specific and relatively sophisticated…. To understand satirical jokes and to find them funny, individuals engage in active, involved processing known as “frame-shifting”—making the connection with the original information that is the target of the joke. With this kind of humor, the audience’s focus on “getting the joke” may reduce careful scrutiny of the message.
So here again we see the idea that the audience must share a frame of reference with the joke teller.
Once again, I take issue with the idea of “reducing scrutiny,” as it comes from Chattoo’s binary model of processing, courtesy of Petty and Cacioppo. The idea of “getting the joke” as a separate goal from “getting the message” seems to just shift our scrutiny from one goal to the other–we are still thinking. And who’s to say what we think about and what conclusions we will draw, once we are forced to engage in central processing–to do the work?
Types
Holbert and friends note that there are two forms of satire:
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Juvenalian, a more hostile, “other-directed” form of humor that relies on aggression and judgement… [it] is inherently negative.
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Horatian, which relies on and emphasizes elements of laughter, play and self-directed, self-deprecating humor… [in comparison to the Juvenalian form, it] involves more positive attributes
This distinction is useful, and parallels a distinction I’d forgotten: between deep or cutting satire and shallow or pseudo-satire [I’ll have to go back and add it to my section, when I get a moment.]
Chattoo considers “a satirical roast” to be the former, in that it has “an acidic juvenalian tone that exposes evil through scorn and ridicule.” Meanwhile “a TV program like Parks & Recreation” is the latter, a “horatian-satire-style lighter content that exposes foolishness.” I would say this is not a big enough distinction, perhaps owing to the nature of what we know of roasts, via their appearance on MTV–the jokes are frequently not very cutting; they could be worse or more harsh.
Similar to what I’ve discussed about Late Night Television and what Russell Peterson calls “Leno-izing” the news, Holbert’s (and friends) later study found that,
In today’s political media environment, horatian satire is dominant relative to juvenalian satire. The vast majority of satirical works offered on programs like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Saturday Night Live, and the monologues crafted for various late-night talk show hosts (e.g., Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien) fall more in line with the horatian style.
It would seem that, as with deep versus shallow satire, we should be conceptualizing not polar opposites, but a spectrum, where maybe TDS and TCR are more toward juvenalian, but the whole is to the horatian side of the spectrum.
These distinctions might be important going forward.
Tips
In order not to bury the lead, I’d like to jump to the conclusion of the section and quickly list Young and colleague’s recommendations for using satire. I’ll bring these back in and comment on them as they become most relevant.
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Reconceptualize meaningful outcome measures: Possible impacts of satire for social issues should include the positive impact of sharing, play, laughter, creating shared popular culture experiences—instead of overt knowledge gain or behavior change.
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Be Transparent & Authentic: For the audience, believing the messenger is crucial for satire to work.
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Let the Comedians Be Comedians: Creating something only mildly amusing defeats humor’s potential for impact; attempting humor means truly allowing the comedians to be funny about social issues.
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Identify a Call to Action When You Have the Credibility to Do So: With credibility and authenticity from the source, satire should include a call to action for the audience.
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Recognize the Boundaries of Political Satire and Parody: Some topics aren’t seen as fair game for satire, recognized when the person or issue doesn’t seem worthy of satire or is unfairly targeted. Be careful about the tone of the satire—who and what does it poke fun at?
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
References:
Bore, I.-L. K., & Reid, G., (2014). Laughing in the face of climate change? Satire as a device for engaging audiences in public debate. Science Communication, 36(4), 454-478.
Charland, Maurice. “Property and Propriety: Rhetoric, Justice, and Lyotard’s Différend.” Judgment Calls: Rhetoric, Politics, and Indeterminancy. Ed. John M. Sloop and James P. McDaniel. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998. 220-36.
Cuddon, J.A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 4th ed. Rev. C.E. Preston. Williston, VT: Blackwell, 1998.
Gring-Pemble, Lisa and Martha Solomon Watson. “The Rhetorical Limits of Satire: An Analysis of James Finn Garner’s Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89.2 (2003): 132-53.
Holbert, R. L., Hmielowski, J., Jain, P., Lather, J., & Morey, A. (2011). Adding nuance to the study of political humor effects: Experimental research on Juvenalian satire versus Horatian satire. American Behavioral Scientist, 55, 187–211.
Lyotard, Jean François. “Lessons in Paganism.” The Lyotard Reader. Ed. Andrew Benjamin. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989/1993. 122-154.
Morner, Kathleen and Ralph Rausch. “Satire.” Dictionary of Literary Terms. Lincolnwood, IL: National Textbook Company, 1991. 194.
Peterson, Russell. Strange Bedfellows: The Politics of Late-Night Television. Doctorial Dissertation. The University of Iowa, 2005.
Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology Vol. 19, (pp. 123-205). New York, NY: Academic Press.
Young, D. G., (2008). The privileged role of the late-night joke: Exploring humor’s role in disrupting argument scrutiny. Media Psychology, 11, 119-142.
Young, D. G., Holbert, R. L., & Jamieson, K. H., (2014). Successful practices for the strategic use of political parody and satire: Lessons from the P6 Symposium and the 2012 election campaign. American Behavioral Scientist, 58(9), 1111-1130.
