Question: Can a comic talk about politics without it being political? What about race? Class? Sex? Gender? Sexuality? What differentiates jokes on a political (or politicized) topic from political jokes? What’s your definition of politics? That’s the question I would ask of Phil Wang.
About race
In an interview with Josh Walton of The Argus.com (9/15/2017), Wang says,
The show is broadly about race, Britishness and what it means to most people to be British. It also focuses on my British pride and how that interacts with my Asian pride as I am British Malaysian. I hope to appeal to an internationalist audience. My stand-up won’t just be about race though. I just think people are interested in talking about this subject and they can feel relief when they hear anecdotes and jokes that break down barriers. My new material has taken a lot of research. Some people get nervous about race when its dealt with cack-handedly.
So, he mentions relief theory, that he’s trying to relieve tension from the issue that race evokes in people. He also wants to break down barriers, but it’s not political… as he claims in the answer to the next question:
Not politics
Do you aim to make your stand-up comedy quite political and where does this interest come from?
I have no explicit interest in making my shows political. I always seem to talk about race but not necessarily politics or specific political issues. I think it just seems political as a result of race and immigration being a hot topic in politics currently. There has been a huge political shift that has made this so. In my show I won’t be mentioning the word Brexit once. People tend to let emotions attached to the subject take over.
So this would seem to be a direct negation of what he just said. I guess the distinction is that Brexit is the policy result of people’s racism, which played out in the views of prominent political candidates and a popular vote. Apparently, for Wang politics requires some element of a formal, partisan political process. However, the idea that race has only recently become “politicized” is quite frankly ludicrous.
A different definition
Instead, what many people call political is how I’ve defined it in my dissertation:
What I am calling political includes not only the notion of partisan politics and public policy, but any humor dealing with social issues that are potentially divisive…: race, class, gender, sexuality issues, or any humor dealing with difference from social norms – in other words, cultural politics. This definition encompasses a lot of humorous material, yet it does not manage to exhaust that realm. My conception of “the political” recognizes the need and desire for activism, including activism within the politics of culture, the everyday and material conditions of peoples’ lives.
I borrow this term from Ono & Sloop, 536 n1. The stake of any social game is power, which is always entangled with the knowledge people have of and about their lived world (Foucault) Further, I am interested in questions of agency; that is, with identifying, if not creating and enhancing, places and times where people have the ability to alter their world, to address power differentials, especially when these changes are thought to be to the good (however that is defined).
Political humor thus defined has the greatest potential to operate as an assertion or critique of power, if it operates at all.
How can one relieve tension and break down barriers without affecting the power dynamic? How can one discuss race/class/gender/sexuality/etc. without affecting the power dynamic one way or another (normalizing a condition or critiquing it)? There are no innocuous jokes about race, but that’s not to say they can’t be good. One just needs to be aware that your belief in the politics of something is akin to your belief in science:
It’s political whether or not you believe it is.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
Sources
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Ed. Colin Gordon, Trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
Ono, Kent A. and John M. Sloop. “Critical Rhetorics of Controversy.” Western Journal of Communication 63.4 (1999): 526-538.
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.
