Humor Theories/Stand-Up Comedy/Theories About Funny

Chattoo, The Laughter Effect V. Comedy Highlights and Strategies (part 2)

Posted on by nwilson

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.

Skipping ahead again, I want to discuss her Highlights and Strategic Recommendations in two parts. Some of these I agree with, some I question, mostly because I think we could do more, if we try.  Here’s a quick overview of her points (paraphrasing):

  1. “Let the comedy be comedy.”
  2. Don’t shoot for behavior change
  3. Timing is key
  4. Amplify the message
  5. Satire mobilizes, but doesn’t convert
  6. Use consistent portrayals to normalize people and ideas
  7. Have a consistent, trusted messenger
  8. Representation matters
  9. Be self-deprecating, not mean
  10. Work with news sources

I’ll hit the second five here; I agree with a couple of these!

  1. Use consistent portrayals to normalize people and ideas

“Want to build empathy and connection to people? Consistent entertainment portrayals of characters can normalize people and ideas over time.”

Chattoo’s sources show that para social relationships create emotional effects in entertainment storytelling that accrue over time.

Seeing unfamiliar characters or divisive issues portrayed regularly builds a level of identification, even in a comedy format. Normalizing the existence of people and ideas happens best through consistent portrayals, not necessarily one episode of a fuller series.

However, I again question the limits of this theory. Can a comic play a role, then return to the stage and tell a consistent story to further normalize and identify? Can we watch their role, then encounter an older stand-up bit where they tell a consistent story and further normalize and identify?

Hasan Minhaj

What about consistent depictions by different comics? If all Muslim comics – Aasif Mandvi, Ahmed Ahmed, Dave Chappelle, Maz Jobrani, Dean Obeidallah, Hasan Minhaj, Maysoon Zayid,  – all seem like normal, down-to-earth people – if a little odd, as all comics are, but not in any ways that support any harmful stereotypes – doesn’t that serve to normalize and identify? Isn’t this consistent over time?

  1. Have a consistent, trusted messenger

“A consistent trusted messenger may be the most powerful mouthpiece.”

Chattoo’s research documents that having a “consistent messenger or host” who is “trustworthy and liked” helps an audience form “a close parasocial relationship,” which creates effects over time.

Amanda Seales

Liking is easy to come by for comics, because of the perceived rewards laughter provides.  However, consistent and trustworthy? A bit more rare, at present, though things seem to be changing. As we get more examples like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Bill Maher, Zainab Johnson, Amanda Seales, Aditi Mittal, etc., we may come to expect their messages, and indeed, seek them out.

This may be preaching to the choir, but as I said before, we’re just proving what’s possible.  Persuasion is always possible under certain conditions, that doesn’t mean it always happens under those conditions, why should humorous persuasion be any different?

  1. Representation matters

“Comedy is culturally specific. Issues of representation matter in comedy’s effectiveness for social issues.”

Chattoo says it succinctly,

Humor is culturally dependent on the ability of the audience to understand and identify. When using comedy or humor for public engagement around locally-specific issues, it won’t work to create the humor without local voices and perspectives. Be very sure about your audience—local, national, international? It matters in the talent who creates the comedy and the messages it promotes.

This just makes sense.

  1. Be self-deprecating, not mean

“Self-deprecating humor is more powerful than mean-spirited humor in the context of social issues.”

If the goal is to attract attention and help raise awareness about a new issue, self-deprecating humor [horatian satire] is more powerful than mean-spirited or sharp-tongued humor [juvenalian satire]. Be careful about the target of the humor—it should never be the oppressed or powerless, even in pursuit of the laugh. Doing so risks back ring.

There are some mixed messages in this statement.  On the one hand, self-deprecating is better; on the other, you can’t target the oppressed or powerless. But what if you, the comic are oppressed and powerless? How do you call attention to your oppression in a self-deprecating way, without triggering mockery and ridicule?

I’ve talked about the victims of a joke, versus the butt of the joke, how the former is harmed and we laugh with her, at the latter, which is at fault. Surely, casting oneself as a victim and making the system the butt is not mean-spirited, though neither is it quite self-deprecating. Moving into self-deprecation would seem to make you, the victim, at least a bit “at fault,” and that’s dangerous territory. A distinction between victims and butts seems like a better way to go.

  1. Work with news sources

“Comedy and news sources can be powerful allies, working together to fuel social change.”

As research documents, comedy does not have to compete with news—instead, it complements news coverage about social issues. In fact, comedy can open the cognitive doors for people to make sense of complex social issues, thus helping them to understand more serious news and information about them in the future. With careful partnerships between comedy game-changers and sources of serious news and information, this powerful connector role can be optimally synergistic in pursuit of social change.

I support these endeavors wholeheartedly, and it again returns to what comedy can easily do, which it should do.

Conclusions

Chattoo says a few important, new things in the conclusion I’d like to take a moment to address.

Humor is not a tactical tool

She says,

Most importantly, comedy shouldn’t be imagined as a simple tactical tool, as that thinking reduces it—falsely—to a lab-created mechanism able to create predictable effects.

I couldn’t agree more. The idea of just couching a social message in humor is ridiculous. First off, because as she notes humor isn’t that simply done or predictable, but secondly, and more importantly, because you have to find the funny.

It’s not a matter of “making it funny,” or “adding humor” to the serious message.  Yes, this can be done, but it’s not optimal and unlikely to be successful.  Instead we have to find in the situation something that is quirky, amusing, humorous when put in the right light – and not all issues immediately lend themselves to that. It takes finesse, timing, and a lot of work. This is why not everyone can do stand-up: it’s hard!

Directions for the future

She further notes,

[D]espite many notable case studies of comedy appeals or stunts attempted in social change, most do not include evaluations of social impact beyond reach.

Moving forward, expanding these lines of work—and creating intentional conversations between researchers, social-change strategists and thinkers, and comic talents—would inform and shape our public engagement solutions to issues that matter the most. Considering the challenges we face as global citizens, it may be well worth the risk.

Well, in trying to have an intentional conversation regarding her work, I’m furthering the latter.  In order to do the former, I’ve made some suggestions for finding a greater persuasive impact of comedy:

  1. Can we find instances where comics state outright that they have a message, and are they still generally regarded as funny (not polarizing or niche)?
    • I have argued that many currently state their political intentions, but I know that many partisan comics, like Bill Maher, are considered polarizing. What about younger, hipper comics addressing social, non-partisan issues?
  2. Can we find evidence of comics who are also actors, who tell stories that cast them as similar to the characters they’ve played?
    • Is there evidence of empathy and connection being created?
  3. Can we find evidence to break down the central and peripheral processing dichotomy?
    • Can we show that people can do them in one or the other sequence?
      • If this study has been done, I’ve never heard it cited.
    • Can we find evidence of them happening simultaneously?
      • Can we identify moments where someone recognizes that they agree with the message, and yet honestly laughs simultaneously (or close enough; and it’s not clapter)?
      • Can we identify moments when an audience member both laughs at something in the joke, and yet disagrees with the message (and it’s not a fake laugh or a guffaw)?

I probably made some other statements, but these would be a good place to start.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

Humor Theories/Stand-Up Comedy/Theories About Funny

Chattoo, The Laughter Effect V. Comedy Highlights and Strategies (part 1)

Posted on by nwilson

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.

Skipping ahead again, I want to discuss her Highlights and Strategic Recommendations in two parts. Some of these I agree with, some I question, mostly because I think we could do more, if we try.  Here’s a quick overview of her points (paraphrasing):

  1. “Let the comedy be comedy.”
  2. Don’t shoot for behavior change
  3. Timing is key
  4. Amplify the message
  5. Satire mobilizes, but doesn’t convert
  6. Use consistent portrayals to normalize people and ideas
  7. Have a consistent, trusted messenger
  8. Representation matters
  9. Be self-deprecating, not mean
  10. Work with news sources

I’ll hit the first five here, the next five will follow.

  1. “Let the comedy be comedy.”

“Don’t make it do a heavier lift.”

I’m reminded of a Gin Blossoms lyric: “”and if you don’t expect too much from me, you might not be let down….” It’s a sad note to end on, and it comes entirely from Chattoo’s assumptions. She assumes that Petty and Cacioppo are correct, and that we must either process information consciously through the central route, or respond only to peripheral, heuristic cues. This leads her to say:

The precise way in which comedy works as persuasion means its power is diluted if audiences are aware they are being “messaged to” or persuaded…. Leave the comedy alone, and let it be optimally hilarious, without diluting it with overly massaged, safe constraints. This is hard to achieve in practice, but comedy may be useless otherwise.

But what if that’s not true? What if we can process consciously and peripherally at the same time? Maybe we can’t right now. Maybe we’re not trained to. Maybe we don’t expect to. Maybe we don’t want to yet.  But if Young is correct, audiences are beginning to seek out “smart civically-focused comedy and entertainment,” like The Daily Show, and that,

[They] may do so for more than one reason—to be entertained and to make sense of serious information…. And when audiences seek and use entertainment with active “truth-seeking motivations,” they process the civic information in such a way that sparks “reflective thoughts…issue interest, and information seeking.”

If this is true, and if comics are responding with more social commentary and more addressing of social issues, then perhaps we are being trained. Cordoning off comedy from serious discourse is a step backward. Doing comedy that is both hilarious and has a message is, admittedly, harder to do, and I have yet to see one sustained special where it’s done, or even a chunk of one, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen, and perhaps it will soon.

Some would argue that, at best, this happens when the comic is “preaching to the choir,” that we can laugh because we didn’t have to scrutinize the message much to know that we agree with it. However, I don’t need to argue that everyone will do it all the time, I only need to prove that it’s theoretically possible.

In the meantime, we should definitely use “comedy’s ability to amplify a message.” Yes, we should also,

Send users and audience members to a website for more information, direct them to a separate serious place, and consider pairing the comedy appeals with other more serious information…. In other words, pair the comedy with the serious information and even a call to action.

However, the statements that “At almost all costs, the serious information should be separate from the comedy” or that we shouldn’t “embed the serious information within the comedy itself” are bunk. Why can’t we try both?  Just because Chattoo hasn’t noticed it yet, doesn’t mean it can’t be done, isn’t already being done, won’t be done better in the future.

  1. Don’t shoot for behavior change

“Behavior change might not be the right objective for comedy in the context of social change.”

True, behavior change is a lot to expect from any message, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Still, we might be better served not focusing on it, and there might be other, sneakier things we could do. Chattoo reiterates her five forms of influence:

  • Attracting attention & facilitating memory
  • Feeling: comedy’s route to persuasion
  • Entering complex social issues
  • Breaking down social barriers
  • Sharing with others

These are all worthwhile pursuits.

In this way, comedy can serve a reinforcing, amplifying role alongside serious news and information about social issues. And attention leads to sharing, fueling a multiplier effect of the original message.

However, while she’s got the Sleeper effect and Multiplier effects down, what she forgets is the more subtle aspects of the Priming effect. Properly composed, the comedy can introduce a particular frame – a terministic screen – that will stay with viewers.  Beyond just setting the agenda and telling audiences what to think about and look more into, comics can set up the issue in particular ways that shape how the audience looks at and interprets the issue.

  1. Timing is key

“Comedy alone is not a magic formula. Leverage comedy’s attention-getting power with strategic timing.”

Comedy’s attention-getting power is most effective when paired with key advocacy moments or milestones—a call to action that makes sense and is optimally timed…. Simply producing and distributing a comedy piece— without the infrastructure for change (specific call to action) or the appropriate urgent moment— likely won’t lead to influence that can make a difference.

Anyone who knows anything about comedy knows that timing is key. Anyone who knows anything about persuasion knows that this is true there as well.  We must take into account Kairos, the appropriate moment. Also true, there must be an infrastructure to support specific change.

However, students of the Rhetorical Situation will note that Lloyd Bitzer’s idea of an exigence, “an imperfection marked by urgency,” is somewhat flawed. Vatz points out that perhaps the speaker determines when the moment is right in some instances, and others have gone further off the deep end, suggesting the whole thing is a result of the audience, or the message itself.

The upshot of this line of theory is this: Perhaps sometimes we can be just as effective at creating a moment as we can be responding to one. The key is to try, and we won’t if we listen to Chattoo and think that this effort constitutes “a heavier lift.”

  1. Amplify the message

“Comedy is a powerful media tool. The audience is not just the public, but media.”

This seems, on face, to be just a restatement of her Multiplier effect – we aim to magnify the impact of the message through sharing, which captures further attention, and sets the agenda for larger media attention.  This allows it the largest potential to reach “an activated, motivated audience—a group we want to learn, feel or do something…. [B]oth target audiences and decision-makers who are able to directly impact the issue.”

This echoes another part of Bitzer’s Rhetorical Situation: that for persuasion to happen, we must have an audience that is motivated to and capable of acting. The issue I take here is, who says anyone we reach is not, at least potentially, an “activated, motivated audience”? Especially if they’ve sought out social and political comedy, they certainly may be. The idea is just to reach as many people as possible, and let the message do the work.

  1. Satire mobilizes, but doesn’t convert

“Use satire to mobilize a base of supporters, but don’t count on it to change minds around deeply polarizing issues.”

To add to this, it’s not just that satire frequently uses irony and parody, which can be gotten or missed and thus leave different audiences with differing understandings of the message, though that’s true enough.

If I mock a flat-earther on Facebook or in a bit, some might “get it,” and laugh at flat-earthers. Some might not think that it’s strong enough criticism and laugh at me, or others might think it’s just a ridiculous critique, and both might laugh because they think I don’t know how the world works. Some might “get” something else (cats push things off tables), and laugh in agreement with what I’m saying, but remain flat-earthers.

However, Chattoo’s point is that when the critique is too sharp, deep, cutting, it will polarize your audience. “Research supports the idea that people with deeply-held partisan or ideological beliefs will retain them in the face of satire.”

On the other hand,

Mobilizing a base of supporters is also a valuable way to use satire, particularly when the timing is strategic to coincide with a meaningful call to action.

I might add that, if the bit is well constructed, the opposing audience will still find reasons to laugh – in fact, to be recognized as satire and not just ridicule it must be funny, at least to some – but they won’t be persuaded by the underlying message, as Chattoo says, “it won’t work to turn naysayers into the choir.”

However, the idea that someone can laugh at something peripheral in a joke and yet recognize that they fundamentally disagree with the message would adequately display that we can process both paths, simultaneously. Nevertheless, satire probably won’t even re-frame the issue for that audience member in a meaningful way – unless you land it within an audience’s latitude of acceptance.

Briefly, Sherif, Sherif and Nebergall’s Social Judgment Theory suggests that around a person’s position on an issue are a cluster of other positions they find viable, acceptable – though not as good as their own. The idea is to hit the edge of this latitude of acceptance, and by doing so, make these positions seem better, causing the audience to reevaluate their position and perhaps shift slightly your way. This is persuasion 101, and would suggest that we could change minds using satire, at least slightly, if we’re sensitive enough to the audience.

Certainly, however, Chattoo is right that,

Satire’s role is to serve as a gateway to more complicated information…. For issues that are new or nascent—or for which ideological or partisan camps have not already divided the culture—satire can be a good tool.

This is again a restatement of a couple of her forms of influence. I just wish we could try to do more.  The rest of her recommendations are up next!

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Lloyd Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 1(1) (January 1968):

Sherif, M. and Sherif, C. W. (1967). Attitudes as the individual’s own categories: The social-judgment approach to attitude and attitude change. In C. W. Sherif and M. Sherif (eds.), Attitude, ego-involvement and change (pp. 105-139). New York: Wiley.

Sherif, C. W., Sherif, M. and Nebergall, R. E. (1965). Attitude and attitude change: The social judgment-involvement approach. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders.

Richard E Vatz, “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 6(3) (Summer 1973)

Young, D. G. (2013). Laughter, learning, or enlightenment? Viewing and avoidance motivations behind The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 57(2), 153-169.

Humor Theories/Stand-Up Comedy/Theories About Funny

Chattoo, The Laughter Effect III. D. 3. Comedy Formats: Stand-Up Impacts

Posted on by nwilson

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
  1. Social commentary on social issues and power dynamics
  2. Breaking down cultural barriers
  3. Reducing stigma for marginalized people and ideas, and
  4. 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.

  1. 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.

Amanda Seales

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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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

Zainab Johnson

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.

Humor Theories/Stand-Up Comedy

Stand-Up: Brief History (A.K.A. Chattoo T.L.E. III. D. 2.)

Posted on by nwilson

When Caty Borum Chattoo, co-director of the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University turns to stand-up, she begins by defining it and giving some history of the form.  I’ve written a similar document using some of the same sources (it was part of chapter one of my dissertation), so I’ll take some partial credit for this expanded version.

History of Stand-up

Origins

Still, in terms of its history, stand-up comedy is distinctly American, stemming partly, as Chattoo and Montagne note, from vaudeville:

The roots of stand-up comedy are found in American vaudeville of the early 1900s, when a comic named Frank Fay first took to the vaudeville stage without props or a costume and told jokes, influencing other comics who would follow from stand-up into radio and TV, including Milton Berle and George Burns.

However, others, like Stebbins, point to the monologues of Mark Twain who started giving humorous lectures back in 1856. But certainly others before Twain had used humor in their speeches.  Some go further back to the medieval court jester or wise fool, or even back to the Greek monologues given before plays to warm up the audience, some of which were humorous (Stebbins). Nevertheless, these early forms may not be recognized by most people as what we would call stand-up today.

Truth to power

As far as stand-up’s history of addressing power, yes, early speakers did occasionally try to speak truth to power. Speaking of both monologuists and wise fools, Stebbins notes,

All these entertainers spoke to and for the common people.  They presented familiar ideas, situations, and stories in language the people could understand and from points of view with which they could identify.  In taking the people’s view, entertainers sometimes challenged established society and sometimes got in trouble for doing so (6-7).

Further, Mintz argues,

Stand-up comedy is arguably the oldest, most universal, basic, and deeply significant form of humorous expression (excluding perhaps truly spontaneous, informal social joking and teasing). It is the purest public comic communication, performing essentially the same social and cultural roles in practically every known society, past and present.

I used both these quotes in the dissertation, and I’m still unconvinced of their universality, as the role of stand-up seems to have changed over time, and to still be changing today – as Chattoo herself has already argued.

Stand-up in America

In it’s American incarnations, stand-up hasn’t always tried to speak truth to power. Though Twain gave good satire, the variations on vaudeville, burlesque, chautauqua, variety shows and night-club and resort entertainment usually came with the conception that good stand-up meant short jokes (not developed stories), wisecracks and one-liners – and therefore no “messages” (political or social) or personality (Nachman).

While some of these forms of humor, such as wisecracks and insult comedy (think Don Rickles), might appear to be attacks that would seem to return us to a critique of power, the general view Gerald Nachman expresses is that there was nothing overtly political about such attacks; they were often pat comments about being tall or short, fat or thin, well-dressed or underdressed, only as “political” as they were personal, which is to say, not very.  When these jokes cut, usually they did not cut very deep.

However, this characterization came before feminism insisted that “the personal is political.” Insofar as insult comedy is a critique of tall/short, fat/thin, it is a critique of body image; when it discusses clothing style it is a critique of class differences, etc. In these forms, it can be defined as “political” in the era of identity politics.  Insult comedy also requires a particular set of expectations and finesse in order to avoid offense, another word for judgment that signals the imposition of the political and the limit of humor. However, insult comedy and similar forms were more the exception than the rule. Further, they’re not exactly the type of humor we would like to promote: they represent ridicule, punching down, enforcing social norms, not challenging them.

Yes, there’s strong documentation of a tradition of humor in the U.S. from Jewish-Americans and African-Americans, but just as much from mainstream White figures like the rube or hayseed (Nesteroff; Rourke).  While race, class, and rural/urban power dynamics are well-represented in early stand-up, as with the body image stuff represented above, we should not think that all of these representations were progressive. Vaudeville was known for its racism; though not as bad perhaps as the minstrel shows that preceded it, it still frequently had acts with blackface and other worse stereotypical racial depiction.  The tendency to ridicule, punch down and enforce the status quo didn’t just magically go away.

It’s useful to know that the first use of the word “stand-up” to describe the form was in 1966 (O.E.D.), but stand-up comedy didn’t move out of the Catskills and began to take off in the 1970s, and it really didn’t explode until the 1980s with the birth of the circuit club (think The Improv).  Yes, some of the comics in the 1970s were, as Chattoo and Zoglin note, “social commentators, including George Carlin and Lenny Bruce, known for taking on taboo topics directly and challenging the status quo perspective on social issues.”

However, Bruce predates the 1970s, and if we look back at who was on-stage in his day, they’re not all political or social. For every Mort Sahl or Dick Gregory, many more were sheer entertainers, think Milton Berle, Bob Hope, etc. The point is, many were still just trying to entertain, not make a statement.

Nevertheless, Nachman charts a change in the 1950s and 1960s toward more personal disclosure, more of a storytelling style, and yes, more radical politics. Today, as Chattoo argues, there is a growing trend toward political action via stand-up. People expect more social and political commentary, comics are providing it, and it might be enacting serious change, which classical models said was impossible. I guess the classical models shall have to change.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Mintz, Lawrence E. “Stand-Up Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation.”  American Quarterly 37.1 (1985): 71-80.

Montagne, R. (2015, December 21). ‘The Comedians’ stand-up history and some laughs [Radio Interview].

Nachman, Gerald.  Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950’s and 1960’s.  New York: Pantheon, 2003.

Nesteroff, K. (2015). The comedians: Drunks, thieves, scoundrels and the history of American comedy. New York, NY: Grove Press.

Rourke, Constance. (1931). American Humor: A Study of the National Character. New York, NY: New York Review.

Stebbins, Robert A.  The Laugh-Makers: Stand-Up Comedy as Art, Business and Life-Style.  Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990.

Strinati, Dominic.  An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, 2nd Edition.  New York: Routledge (2004).

Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny?  A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.

Zoglin, R. (2008). Comedy at the edge: How stand-up in the 1970s changed America. New York, NY: Bloomsbury USA.

Humor Theories/Stand-Up Comedy

Stand-Up: Definitions (A.K.A. Chattoo T.L.E. III. D. 1.)

Posted on by nwilson

When Caty Borum Chattoo, co-director of the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University turns to stand-up, she begins by defining it and giving some history of the form.  I’ve written a similar document using some of the same sources (it was part of chapter one of my dissertation), so I’ll take some partial credit for this expanded version.

Definition of stand-up

Folk art

Stand-up comedy is a vulgar art. It can be vulgar in the usual way we use that word. But vulgar really means ‘of the people.’ It’s the people’s art.  – Comedian George Carlin

Another word for vulgar that we could use here is folk art or folk culture.  As opposed to high art/culture, which is elevated to its status by the elite, or mass art/culture, which is produced by industry elites for the people, folk art/culture is produced by the people for themselves (Strinati).

These lines are fuzzy and permeable. Elite critics can still say Carlin was one of the best stand-ups, thereby elevating him to high art.  Comedy clubs might do more than nudge comics into “stock” character and humor types, thereby manufacturing mass art.

As just a brief example, my local club gives open mic’ers three minutes, and says they want to see straight setup-punchline jokes. This greatly limits what humor is to a small, preset category. The time limit alone would hamstring any attempt to tell stories, work the crowd, build rapport, etc.

Nevertheless, stand-up can rightfully be said to be a vulgar, folk art.

Form

Chattoo gives a definition of the form of stand-up that is partial, but decent.  Stand-up is when:

A comic stands on stage and entertains a live audience with jokes and social commentary, with minimal or no props.

She somewhat misses duos like the Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, and the Smothers Brothers – though it could be argued these were more sketch comedy and less stand-up.  The same cannot be said of the Sklar Brothers or the Lucas Brothers.  Further, some comics sit down from time to time.

The live audience is non-negotiable, but stand-up’s material is broader than strict jokes and commentary; it includes musical acts including parodies, slapstick, impressions, ventriloquism, stories – there are lots of forms.  This is why Lawrence E. Mintz expands his definition to include the comic “behaving comically and/or saying funny things” (71).

Finally, while the standard props are the microphone and a stool, and frequently a drink or cigarette is used, there are also those musical instruments, puppets – and what do we do with Carrot Top and Gallagher? Stand-up has no clear and easy limitations.

From my own dissertation, I would add with Robert A. Stebbins that stand-up is primarily verbal (though augmented by theatrical embellishments), often memorized (although the performer is free to ad lib) and expressed in a conversational manner.  Thus, the stand-up routine tends to be a one-sided conversation with the possibility of more extensive audience interaction than their resultant laughter (which is assumed), although this interaction is not always welcomed by the comic.

Finally, the routine is usually written (and therefore owned) by the performer, a condition very different from the norm in other forms of entertainment (e.g. television and film). This has important repercussions in terms of copyright law when it comes to joke stealing.

Reach of stand-up

I agree with Chattoo that stand-up is the basis for much of the humor we see everywhere else – most of our performers in T.V. and film were stand-ups – and we have access to it like never before:

Digital-era stand-up comedy audiences are no longer limited to live experiences alone, expanding stand-up’s reach and potential social influence.

So we have access to it, but moreover we desire it: stand-up offers rewards in the form of pleasure, an effect that is well documented.

However, I find that, in separating out forms of humor, Chattoo does stand-up a disservice in terms of representing its reach. If most late night hosts and satirical news hosts are former stand-ups, if most of our T.V. and film performers were stand-ups, then where does stand-up end and something else begin?

For instance, she notes that entertainment storytelling differs from stand-up in its ability to develop para social relationships over an extended period of time. Through these para social relationships, we identify with characters and react emotionally to their situations. However, what if the actor also does stand-up (since we can view their stand-up and shows outside their original timeline, the timing of each doesn’t matter); if the stand-up and character are aligned, doesn’t the stand-up garner the same results? Is this only true when they tell stories or act in sketches in a similar character, or do the jokes accomplish it too?

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Mintz, Lawrence E. “Stand-Up Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation.”  American Quarterly 37.1 (1985): 71-80.

Stebbins, Robert A.  The Laugh-Makers: Stand-Up Comedy as Art, Business and Life-Style.  Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990.

Strinati, Dominic.  An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, 2nd Edition.  New York: Routledge (2004).

Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny?  A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.

Humor Theories/Stand-Up Comedy/Theories About Funny

Chattoo, The Laughter Effect III. A. 3. Comedy Formats: Satirical News Cautions

Posted on by nwilson

Still talking about Caty Borum Chattoo, co-director of the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University and a comedy fan’s, May (2017) release “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 satire. In this installment (the eighth), we’ll discuss the cautionary notes about satirical news: that we’ve set the bar too high, that satirical messages are ambiguous, and that we should pick our battles.

The bar is too high

Young and his colleagues have cautioned that setting the bar for satire’s impact on audiences at learning and persuasion might be too high. I would point out that most bona fide messages don’t meet this criteria, especially when audiences don’t see them, don’t seek them out, and don’t engage with them.

Instead Chattoo summarizes Young and company, saying that “the important effects of cultural connection, raising awareness and adding an element of play into serious social issues might be the more realistic objectives.”

This leads to her first piece of advice, borrowed from Young and his colleagues:

  1. 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.

Pretty straightforward here; we need to reframe what we expect humor to do, and my whole project sets out to recognize that this is not much different than what any message can do.

Ambiguity

Expectations

“Additionally,” Chattoo notes, “when dealing with issues that have well-established ideological or partisan perspectives, satire may not be effective.” She notes with Lamarre and company that

When information delivered via satire is ambiguous—often the very characteristic that makes satire amusing—individuals respond in ways that correspond with their original attitudes about the issue. This was demonstrated [by Lamarre and colleagues] in the case of Stephen Colbert’s ironic and deadpan style of satire on The Colbert Report: “Because satire is often ambiguous, biased information processing models provide an excellent framework for understanding how audiences see what they want to see in Colbert’s political satire.” In the face of ambiguous messages (i.e., political satire), individuals process or understand the information through a motivation for “political affiliation or self-enhancement.” In other words, people see what they want to see, and believe what they already believe, when they are confused (or, more precisely, when there are no external cues available to help them to interpret a message). Hoping satire can change someone’s mind about a hot-button civic, political or social issue—rather than hoping to engage the individual or place a new issue on a mental agenda—is likely futile.

This develops a point I’ve made in my published work (which BTW predates Lamarre and company *ahem*): Gring-Pemble and Watson wrote about satire’s ambiguity way back in 2003 – particularly when it relies on irony – we don’t need an “information processing model” to see that audiences see what they want to see – just look at the fact that Colbert was invited to speak at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner in 2007 for your evidence of people (Republicans) wrongly thinking they knew what he was about – they saw what they wanted and believed what they already believed, and then were shocked by what transpired.

However, the further point is well-taken: that if the message is at all ambiguous, it will likely not persuade, or even teach.  It is more likely to further entrench.  However, I would point out that this would seem to require further, “central processing.”

Ironic Satire

Even those who interpreted it as satire directed at the President could have read him as being ironical – in the horatian sense that he didn’t mean a word of it.  This ambiguity of message provides for a flexibility of uptake that severely affects the satirist’s ability to have an impact.

Trivialization

This can lead to satire being taken other ways as well: “For example,” she notes with Moyer Guse and his colleagues that “satire—as well as other forms of comedy—can risk inadvertently trivializing the severity of a complex issue.” This again harkens back to the idea of peripheral processing – that they didn’t take the speaker’s satire seriously – but with the added idea that they might conclude that the critique itself is trivial.  Gring-Pemble and Watson point out this can easily happen with faint criticism or pseudo-satire; the audience concludes that there is no deeper critique to be made.

This is the problem with the third recommendation, “let comics be comics”: If they’re going for the “funny,” they risk not making the point effectively, or of people missing it, or misconstruing their message based on their expectations.

Pick your battles

Again channeling Young and his colleagues, Chattoo points out that “not all issues or people may be seen by the audience as fair game for satire:”

[Young et al.] To be effective, there needs to be an agreement between the satirist and satire that the satirized is worthy of and appropriate for attack…the audience has the ultimate agency in determining what can and cannot be treated in a humorous or satirical manner.

[Chattoo] And what is ripe for satire is usually—at least as illustrated in case studies—the individuals and institutions with power.

This leads to her final recommendation, borrowed from Young and colleagues:

  1. 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?

This is the old adage that “Comedy punches up.” Colin Quinn mocks this notion in his 2016 stand-up special, The New York Story,

And when I say Polish, obviously, it’s a bit reductive to the rest of Eastern Europe… and I don’t want to marginalize the rest of Eastern Europe, because that’s punching down, and comedy never punches down, it only punches up. I read that from fifty people that never did comedy, they all said… what? What?

I laughed, and I also understood his mockery and agreed that his point is well taken, though it runs counter to common wisdom. Yes, audiences will put boundaries on what can be satirized, but here’s the kicker: different audiences will place different boundaries.  Because satire frequently involves ridicule to maintain the status quo, it most certainly punches down, and frequently. Some audiences will be perfectly fine with that.

However, if the work the humorist is trying to do is progressive, then they will choose to punch up and make systemic problems and their causes the butt of their jokes, not down at victims by making them the butts of the jokes.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

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.

LaMarre, H. L., Landreville, K. D., & Beam, M. A., (2009). The irony of satire: Political ideology and the motivation to see what you want to see in The Colbert Report. International Journal of Press/Politics, 14(2), 212-231.

Moyer-Guse, E., Mahood, C., & Brookes, S., (2011). Entertainment education in the context of humor: Effects on safer sex intentions and risk perceptions. Health Communication, 26, 765-744.

Wilson, Nathan. “Irony and Silence/Ironies of Silence: On the Politics of Not Laughing.”  Electronic Journal of Communication, 18 (2-4), 2008: 1-14.

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.

Humor Theories/Stand-Up Comedy/Theories About Funny

Chattoo, The Laughter Effect III. A. 2. Comedy Formats: Satirical News Impacts

Posted on by nwilson

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 satire. In this installment (the seventh), we’ll discuss the impacts of satirical news.

Influence – Persuasion

There is some question as to whether or not type of satire (juvenalian, horatian) matters when trying to influence audiences. As Chattoo notes,

In [Becker and Haller’s] study involving the use of self-deprecating humor vs. “other-directed” humor in TV satire about a social issue (blindness), viewers responded more positively to the positive—horatian—humor and developed more positive attitudes about the social issue than when the issue was depicted with the more aggressive, judgmental juvenalian humor. However, in [Holbert and friends’ later study] also involving political TV satire, viewers perceived the horatian satire as a lower-strength message than a traditional news op-ed, but found no differences with the harsher, juvenialian humor compared to an op-ed.

So the results are somewhat mixed, but the outputs are different: positive attitudes about the issue versus strength of message.  The former might have a larger sleeper and priming effect, whereas the latter may have more of an impact.

Learning in one of two-modes

Chattoo finally returns to a point that she conflated earlier.  Using the example of a hypothetical Jon Oliver rant from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, she says

Audiences may be thoughtfully considering his messages and arguments in a similar fashion to scrutinizing a more traditional news opinion piece.

So this process seems to be what she has described as central processing, in terms of Petty and Cacioppo’s model. She goes on to say:

Ultimately, how much people actively learn from satire—at least in the context of satirical faux news programs—depends in part on how people perceive the format in the first place. Do they see it as news or entertainment, or a mix of both? [Feldman] has demonstrated that people who think of The Daily Show as both entertainment and real information are able to learn more than people who perceive it as only entertainment.

This again emphasizes that audiences seek it out, and they do so not just for entertainment value, but, as Chattoo (summarizing Young) notes, because they hope “to make sense of the world and public affairs, and also because they see it as unbiased, ‘truthful and real.’” In short, they seek it out in order to learn.

Further, she argues with Young and colleagues that “the role of the messenger is key. For satire to work, the audience has to believe the source has some credibility in the issue he/she is discussing, and that he or she is authentic.” This brings us back to the idea of a bona fide speaker who means what he says, which is different than how audiences supposedly approach a stand-up comic.  This leads her to her second and fourth recommendations, borrowed from Young and his colleagues:

  1. Be Transparent & Authentic: For the audience, believing the messenger is crucial for satire to work.

  1. 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.

However, if late night hosts are all stand-up comics, who usually say they can’t or won’t have an impact – Jon Stewart has claimed this; that his jokes are only “atmospheric” – and if their critiques are operating at the horatian level – the so called “Leno-izing of the news” – and if the audience is entertained and laughing (not centrally processing), then how can we theorize any type of persuasion, learning, etc.?

Breakdown of the two-mode model

So here’s where the two-mode processing models break down – by definition, either they process it as humor/entertainment, and laugh, or they process it as serious information, and scrutinize, and don’t laugh.  A better idea is they laugh first, remember and scrutinize later.  Still better is the idea that they laugh and scrutinize simultaneously, but that isn’t allowed in these models – once again, enjoyment, humor and laughter are typically treated as unconscious, embodied responses that will have nothing to do with conscious thought.

Agenda Setting: attracting attention & facilitating memory

Chattoo notes that there are other forms of influence beyond strict persuasion and learning; there’s also the agenda-setting function, which she’s previously described as attracting attention & facilitating memory, along with the so-called sleeper effect and the priming effect.

Chattoo summarizes Hollander, who notes that when particular civic or social issues are addressed through satire, audiences may not fully “recall” them, or gain specific knowledge (learning), but they may still recognize these issues – that’s the sleeper effect.  She does not go into here, but it’s important to remember, that satire addresses particular characteristics of the issue, which then serve as a frame for understanding when these audiences encounter the issue again – they are “primed,” to interpret it a particular way.

Gateway effect

Further, satire grants entry into complex social issues, the so-called “gateway” effect discussed previously, which allows audiences to “pay greater attention to more serious news about [these social issues] over time.”

Chattoo notes additional benefits here not previously discussed (they’ve since been added):

In fact, [Feldman and colleagues have shown] this impact … as particularly great for those with less formal education and less understanding of or exposure to the issue in the first place.

Yes, she’s addressed the idea of it as an early exposure, but the idea of its impact on those with “less formal education” is entirely new.

Comics must be comics

However, this effect only works if people encounter the information, and that probably won’t happen unless it’s funny; that’s when people share it and others seek it out.  This brings us to Chattoo’s third recommendation, borrowed from Young and his colleagues:

  1. 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.

Of course, this hamstrings a comic who is trying to be a bona fide speaker, as the common wisdom has it that you can either always go for the joke, or you can make your point, and Chattoo has already made this point – that serious messages hurt comedy.

So there is a tightrope to walk between being “transparent and authentic,” so as to build credibility for a “call to action,” and being “funny.”  And this only gets more complicated as we add in other factors, like ambiguity, expectations, and targets.  More to come!

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Becker, A. B., & Haller, B. A. (2014). When political comedy turns personal: Humor types, audience evaluations, and attitudes. The Howard Journal of Communication, 25, 34-55.

Feldman, L. (2013b). Learning about politics from The Daily Show: The role of viewer orientation and processing motivations. Mass Communication and Society, 16(4), 586 – 607.

Feldman, L., Leiserowitz, A., & Maibach, E., (2011). The Science of satire: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as sources of public attention to science and the environment. In A. Amarasingam (Ed.), The Stewart/Colbert effect: Essays on the real impact of fake news, (pp. 25-46). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.

Holbert, R. L., Tchernev, J. M., Walther, W. O., Esralew, S. E., Benski, K., (2013). Young voter perceptions of political satire as persuasion: A focus on perceived influence, persuasive intent, and message strength. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 57(2), 170-186.

Hollander, B. A., (2005). Late-night learning: Do entertainment programs increase political campaign knowledge for young viewers? Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 49(4), pp. 405-415.

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. (2013). Laughter, learning, or enlightenment? Viewing and avoidance motivations behind The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 57(2), 153-169.

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.

Humor Theories/Stand-Up Comedy/Theories About Funny

Chattoo, The Laughter Effect III. A. 1. Comedy Formats: Satirical News Definitions and Types

Posted on by nwilson

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:

  • Juvenalian, a more hostile, “other-directed” form of humor that relies on aggression and judgement… [it] is inherently negative.

  • 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.

  1. 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.

  2. Be Transparent & Authentic: For the audience, believing the messenger is crucial for satire to work.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

Humor Theories/Stand-Up Comedy/Theories About Funny

Chattoo, The Laughter Effect II. C. How Comedy Works: Social Barriers and Sharing

Posted on by nwilson

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 tells of five forms of influence:

  1. attracting attention & facilitating memory
  2. feeling: comedy’s route to persuasion
  3. entering complex social issues
  4. breaking down social barriers
  5. sharing with others

In this fifth installment, I run through her last two points.

Breaking down social barriers

Comedy can introduce people, social issues and new norms in non-threatening, “non-othering” ways that encourage identification and connection, rather than alienation.

“Our gay friend”

Here, Chattoo turns to Schiappa and his colleagues for the para social contract hypothesis.  Basically, it’s the idea that when we watch TV or movies, we form relationships with the characters, the Friends become our friends, Will (of Will & Grace) becomes our gay friend; it’s the whole premise behind the movie, Nurse Betty.

The idea is that if these portrayals of minority groups are positive, we then have a positive relationship with the minority group, especially if we have few actual friends from or encounters with that minority group.

Smedema and her co-authors have shown this effect to work for people with physical disabilities too, though it’s complicated.  As Chattoo explains:

As is the case in other complex social issues, particular portrayals of individuals with challenges may serve to dramatize and widen the gap between them and the audience, inadvertently evoking pity rather than encouraging connections.

Basically, while we have a greater familiarity, that may not lead to an ideal, healthy relationship. It all depends on the depiction.

Sharing with others

People share comedy to create shared cultural moments and display personal identity, amplifying serious messages.

More than ever before, comedy is shareable, and sharing things we like is how many people express themselves. As Chattoo notes,

Sharing a funny media product is a way to express both individual values and identities, and to commemorate shared cultural moments. In the process, sharing with peers anchors and amplifies the original messages.

The first part of this is like the John Cusack line from High Fidelity,

I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like… Books, records, films – these things matter. Call me shallow but it’s the fuckin’ truth….

Postmodern theorists will argue that identity is a construct, and that the only encounter people have with our identity is via the things we say and do, which often centers around the things we like, so in a sense, they matter very much.  There may not even be anything deeper; as Katie Holmes opines in Batman Begins:

However, there’s also the idea that in commemorating “shared cultural moments,” we don’t just reflect the reality around us, but in Kenneth Burke’s terms, we’ve selected portions of the reality, and reflected only the parts of that which we like; therefore we are deflecting reality.  That’s what gets anchored and amplified – not all of it.

Further, Campo and friends found that humorous messages are more likely to get shared, and reshared, multiplying the number of people reached.  Further this lead “to additive conversation-based effects and not just message-based effects”; people didn’t just absorb it, but interacted with it and talked about it. This is what Fraustino & Ma found about the CDC’s “Zombie Apocalypse” campaign, although we should remember that the campaign not only did not create changes in people’s behavior, but may have made them less likely to respond.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Campo, S., Askelson, N. M., Spies, E., Boxer, C., Scharp, K. M., Losch, M. E., (2013). “Wow, that was funny”: The value of exposure and humor in fostering campaign message sharing. Social Marketing Quarterly, 19(2), 84-96.

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.

Schiappa, E., Gregg, P., & Hewes, D. (2005). The para social contact hypothesis. Communication Monographs, 72(1), 92–115.

Smedema, S. M., Ebener, D., & Grist-Gordon, V., (2012). The impact of humorous media on attitudes toward persons with disabilities. Disability & Rehabilitation, 34(17), 1431-1437.

Argumentation Theory/Big Theories

Petty & Cacioppo’s Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)

Posted on by nwilson

Caty Borum Chattoo turns to Petty & Cacioppo’s Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) here (especially as it has been applied by Zhang), which theorizes two routes of information processing: central and peripheral.

[W]hen individuals experience serious information and news—and are able to process the information and are highly motivated to do so—they use a central cognitive route of processing by focusing on the merits of the message itself. But in a humor context, attitude shifts may occur in response to peripheral or heuristic cues—such as emotional reactions, liking the message source and believing the source is credible and believable. Persuasion then moves through a different route than the one employed when encountering a strong message delivered in a serious way. As individuals enjoy the comedy message and the messenger, they are less likely to scrutinize and counter-argue against the information, which improves the conditions for persuasion.

The problems with dual models

Such dual-mode or processing models, in my educated opinion, are bunk – at least in the way they are applied to humor.  They are one of the reasons I have to blog in the first place [– I’ll deal with a lot more of them on here soon; they crop up everywhere!].  While it may be true that we can pay close attention or not, why does humor necessarily make us “less likely” to?

Chattoo just argued that audiences actively seek out the information, and that they do so “with active “truth-seeking motivations” – they process the civic information in such a way that sparks ‘reflective thoughts…issue interest, and information seeking.’” Further, she cites Garber, who believes that all the outrage and celebrations of comics these days is ample evidence that we’re not taking their words for granted.  So where did that all go? Aren’t these all instances of audiences taking comedy as “serious information and news,” that they are “highly motivated” to seek out and absorb?

And who’s to say that they are unable to do so?  Obviously we don’t shut off our brains when the comic starts talking.

Further, there’s a lot of evidence that people are lazy and process many messages peripherally – even “strong messages delivered in a serious way” – particularly when they are from your in-group, clan, tribe [there are lots of terms]. Robert Cialdini posits this when he talks about perceived expertise and liking effects – we process our perception of them rather than the message. So the question is: Why single out any form of discourse as “exclusively peripheral”?  It has always struck me as dumb.

Serious messages hurt comedy

Chattoo returns to the idea that overt persuasion can hinder the comedy:

And in fact, by letting the audience in on the idea that the comedy message is designed to be “a message”—overt persuasion—the comedy becomes (perhaps ironically) less effective, triggering the cognitive route to persuasion, including scrutinizing the information or counter-arguing against the messages. For comedy to be a successful vehicle for persuasion in service of a serious social issue, it can’t be seen as trying too hard to explicitly persuade even if it comparts serious information.

There’s the false dichotomy that dual-mode or processing models run up against: either we are scrutinizing the joke, or we are laughing.  This brings back the common interpretations of laughter: that it’s an unconscious, embodied response, not a result of thought. Further, such thinking suggests that we can’t react twice, reassess.

This would have it that after it invokes initial scrutiny, a joke can only produce “clapter” – or “humor support,” like when your significant other says, “that’s funny,” which is not the same as laughing.  Further, after laughing we apparently can’t go back and think it through; or perhaps we’re just less likely to.

The return of the sleeper

These understandings are obviously bunk. The best evidence for this is that there might be that “sleeper effect of comedy—remembering and being influenced by the content of a funny message longer than a serious one.” Can we guarantee that every time we think of the message, we think of it in the same way?  Can it’s influence not change over time?

An easy way to disprove this is the joke that you re-evaluate and laugh again at – the joke that gets funnier the more you think about it. If it can work that way, why can’t we find sense or wisdom in a joke after the laugh?  I have.

Further, even if the above were historically true, idea that audiences are changing and becoming more active would call it into question: the fact that we tend to act in certain ways (that people have traditionally acted in certain ways) in no way means that can’t change (nor that it isn’t already changing).

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?

References:

Cialdini, R. Influence: Science and Practice.

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.

Zhang, Y., (1996). Responses to humorous advertising: The moderating effect of need for cognition. Journal of Advertising, 25(1), 15-32.