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”m currently addressing her views on stand-up. In this installment (the eleventh), we’ll discuss the impacts of stand-up comedy.
Stand-up’s characteristics
Chattoo finds four characteristics that affect its impact (though she begins with another precursor):
- Safe place
- Social commentary on social issues and power dynamics
- Breaking down cultural barriers
- Reducing stigma for marginalized people and ideas, and
- Its use by racial minority groups to normalize and express their experiences.
Safe place/space
Chattoo states, with Quirk,
Indeed, stand-up comedy is able to occupy a “marginal safe place” in which normally “subversive ideas” are granted license to be openly heard and discussed.
I’ve talked about humorous space here, both in its basic play and carnivalesque forms (though there are others I’ve yet to get to), with some of its offshoots: that comics’ only intention is to entertain or create humor, thus they are non bona fide, unreliable and discordant narrators, they don’t mean what they say; that jokes are porous, open texts that require supplementation, and so we can find meaning and humor as we like it; that humor is only processed peripherally or in a comic mode, thus audiences don’t treat it seriously in any event, and thus are unlikely to act – and our laughter supposedly signals that we won’t. These notions form our understanding of the space, but these notions might be wrong. Thus I’ve disputed that these places are “safe.” Nevertheless, the license is still granted.
Because of her understanding of the space and history of stand-up, Chattoo argues,
Consequently, stand-up comedy and its evolution into other comedy forms (scripted, sketch) is naturally positioned, in other words, to spotlight pressing social issues and offer audiences a way to commiserate, laugh and re-frame.
I couldn’t agree more, but we still haven’t seen direct impact; though it seems like it’s forthcoming. So we turn to her first impact, the social commentary.
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Social commentary on social issues and power dynamics
From her discussion of the history of stand-up, Chattoo argues,
From inception to the present day, stand-up comedy finds its humor in observational commentary and social critique.
Directly addressing and poking fun at power positions and inequity—inherent in many deeply entrenched social challenges—are the mainstays of stand-up comedy.
However, I’ve argued that these observations need not be (and frequently aren’t) socially or politically meaningful, and when they are, they aren’t always socially beneficial – stand-up doesn’t always punch up, sometimes it punches down.
Nevertheless, the times might be a’changin’. Chattoo offers numerous examples from Africa and the Asia as evidence that other countries are taking up stand-up to challenge their social structures.
Here in the U.S., I’ve found a few examples of comics openly talking about their activism; from black female comics Zainab Johnson and Amanda Seales, to Indian female comics like Aditi Mittal, these comics are offering up social commentary.
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Breaking down cultural barriers
For marginalized or minority groups, breaking down the cultural barriers of stereotype and difference is a valuable element of social impact on the road to understanding. Following the 9/11 events in the United States, with heightened incidents of misunderstanding and condemnation of Muslims and Muslim-Americans, Muslim comics in the U.S. took on the issues directly.
Both Amarasingam and Michael note the number of studies showing that “Muslim stand-up comedy skewered stereotypes, attempting to influence perceptions about Muslims and Muslim-Americans.” Chattoo cites Amarasingam, who argues that,
Muslim stand-up comedians helped to break down “cultural barriers, promoting inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue, as well as tackling the misperceptions about Muslim and Arab Americans in the United States,” taking on a role of public intellectual to correct misinformation.
Once again, I’ll cite the examples above, but I’ll save my comments for the end.
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Reducing stigma for marginalized people and ideas
Reducing stigma around sensitive topics is yet another potential impact of stand-up comedy in social change.
To display this, Chattoo cites Jones and his colleague’s study, they examined how audience members’ felt (short-term) about the stigma surrounding mental health topics after viewing a stand-up show with mental health information versus without. Those who saw the informative one reported less stigma, but that’s just one study, and long-term effects were not measured.
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Its use by racial minority groups to normalize and express their experiences.
Beyond its appeal to audiences, stand-up comedy’s social change potential is illustrated also in a different way—by the impact on the comedians’ representative groups. Members of underrepresented or marginalized societal groups—particularly vulnerable racial groups—use stand-up to help to normalize and express their experiences to audiences outside their racial groups—a process leading to tolerance and acceptance.
Cohen and Richards talk about Dave Chappelle’s, blind white supremacist, who appeared in the first sketch of the first episode of his eponymously named show. Chattoo notes that for these authors, Chappelle “was able to comically unleash the worst, most sensitive stereotypes of African Americans in a way that re-framed the issue for audiences:”
Beneath the humor lies a rich layer of social commentary about race relations in the United States. While comedians will make everyone uncomfortable at some point, good comics are playing an important function in society by holding up a mirror and forcing us to confront realities that we would often prefer to ignore. For minority groups, humor also serves as a tool to neutralize the power of stereotypes that obstruct their path to equal participation in society. Stand-up comedy can give social critique and instigate transformation in a way that leaves many audience members wanting more.
Problems
There’s a lot of overlap here, obviously. As with my examples above, when minority groups normalize their experiences, they break down cultural barriers and reduce stigma – in fact, breaking down cultural barriers itself reduces stigma. In expressing their experiences, minority groups cannot help but provide social commentary on social issues and power dynamics. It’s kind of all of a piece. Perhaps the first (social commentary) can be done without the others, but it seems like if you’ve done any of the last three, you’ve implicitly done all four.
The previous quote expresses this well by reiterating several of the previous points, while still making the latest as well: by neutralizing the power of stereotypes, they normalize their groups, perform social critique.
Cautionary notes
Uptake
Chattoo backs away from saying stand-up will solve all our problems. First off, because it can “push the boundaries of decency and taste,” but also be taken different ways by different people, it may backfire: “what’s funny to one may be offensive to another.”
Also because of its ability to be taken up in different ways Chattoo note with Cohen and Richards that when it comes to power dynamics, social issues, and so forth, “stand-up comedy may inadvertently reinforce power dynamics instead of effectively skewering them—including perpetuating racial stereotypes.”
Comic intent
She also notes as she did with satirical news that we have to let comedians be comedians
But to be overly sensitive and safe is to muzzle the power of stand-up comedy in the first place—its role is to be funny first, so attempts to water down jokes or material in order to deliver perspectives that are safe to a broad audience will likely not be effective.
Indeed, it’s only because of the understanding that comics are trying to be funny first that the space of humor can be maintained.
Culturally bound
Chattoo notes that stand-up is culturally specific. Political and social commentary in particular requires so much localized knowledge and information that it may just not translate across regional or social barriers, let alone broader national or racial/ethnic groups.
Hope
Nevertheless, Chattoo ends with a message of hope:
[S]tand-up and sketch comedy in the contemporary era is more widely available through digital platforms, sought by audiences, and attention-getting—an important potential vehicle for messages.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
References:
Amarasingam, A. (2010). Laughter the best medicine: Muslim comedians and social criticism in post-9/11 America. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 30(4), 463-477.
Cohen, R. & Richards, R. When the truth hurts, tell a joke: Why America needs its comedians.
Jones, N., Twardzicki, M., Ryan, J., Jackson, T., Fertout, M., Henderson, C., & Greenberg, N. (2014). Modifying attitudes to mental health using comedy as a delivery medium. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 49(10), 1667-76.
Michael, J. (2013). American Muslims stand up and speak out: Trajectories of humor in Muslim American stand-up comedy. Contemporary Islam, 7(2), 129-153.
