Abstract
Politics is a laughing stock. At least, this is the sentiment of The Cultural Set Up Of Comedy. Julie Webber follows scholars from many fields who have analysed with varying degrees of aversion or acclaim the role of comedy in our ‘affect-driven, image-spliced … world of infotainment’ (p. 5). This world, for Webber, is expressly post-9/11 in that the politics of fear advertise threat, news is scandal, government is paternalistic, moral absenteeism is a fait accompli and corporate-sponsored political elites serve to abrogate the public good. Furthermore, it is a world organised by philia and phobia, and thus governed by a Gramscian ‘sense of reality’ that Webber approaches through collective moods which set the tone for rational judgments. Comedy, in her view, expresses ready-made cultural norms – set-ups – that orchestrate affective politics. Mass media, then, is the filter; comedy is the foil.
In many ways, Webber’s book updates Neil Postman’s 1985 jeremiad Amusing Ourselves To Death. Postman’s vision is all here: damaging media epistemologies, Huxleyan ‘baby-talk’ posing as public conversations and images of political ‘culture-death’. Indeed, if Postman proposed the demise of common sense, Webber denies that we have outgrown televisual mediations of intellect. To explore moments ‘where affect and ideology meet’ (p. 183), Webber first laments what academics currently get wrong. Political scientists, Webber argues, approach comedy as a hindrance to serious inquiries into civic life, public sphere theorists understate the formation of populaces through screens and communication scholars hastily extol the value of comic politics as a vehicle for fostering engaged spectatorship. Amber Day (2011), author of Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate, is Webber’s primary target of criticism, typifying those who trumpet communities of satire and the carnivalesque antics that bring marginalised voices into the mainstream. However, while striking a grand bargain between cultural contexts of comedy and a demise of civil society, Webber cultivates a somewhat random array of case studies (of individuals such as stand-up comedians to Middle Eastern television satires) to make sweeping generalisations about the ‘global’ import of the comic form. A crucial shortfall emerges from the inconsistencies between her theoretical gambit and the stories told to illustrate it.
Interestingly, these inconsistencies foment Webber’s compelling sense that shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (TDS) and spinoff characters like Stephen Colbert respond to generational malaise – that is, the discontent of an entire ‘youth’ cohort. To prove this, she echoes mainline critiques of neoliberal democracy, which depict an uninformed and infantilised citizenry. Apathetic Generation X-ers and ‘politically correct’ Millennials are upheld as cases in point. But extending youth studies scholarship, Webber flips the script and dubs ‘youth’ a generative trope, not a definitive category, for defenceless audiences burdened with making decisions about personal welfare without the requisite materials for doing so (p. 34). Ironically, Stewart and Colbert train spectators to feel like they are political even if they abhor participatory citizenship.
Of course, this is the point: screened politics mobilise affective investments that drive political allegiances and belie practical reason. Herein lies the root of some hitches in Webber’s account. First, the book relies upon a thin description of affect as a ‘mediating layer’ between political cultures and audience perceptions. Webber provides token references to theories of affect and their intellectual forebears, nodding to Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Brian Massumi to imagine pre-rational, tonal expressions of feeling. Then, in short shrift, stand-up comedians Chris Rock and Louis C.K. are examined as profane perpetrators of hegemonic masculinity. For Webber, patriarchal privilege is their cultural set-up. This seems both hackneyed and heavy-handed. Instead of tackling questions of why some forms of affect allow (some) comics to get away with terms of abuse (i.e. ‘faggot’), she declares a Nietzschean ‘bad conscience’ as the reason our famed funny men sidestep responsibility for socialising shame. Then, she situates ultra-Conservative culture wars polemicist, Ann Coulter, as a ‘satirist’ who gay bashes without the same sort of impunity. Webber does this without doing due diligence either to the gendered (never mind generic) charade or to the gender politics in (dis)identifying as a comic.
The same goes for Webber’s critique of comedy as a male aptitude. Webber rightly rebuts the idea that female comedians are either killjoy feminists or that actresses need masculine storylines for feminine appeal. However, Tina Fey exploits gender stereotypes to sell books and travesty chauvinistic ascriptions, and films like Bridesmaids (2011) reify heteronormative ideals of work, family, sex and friendships. To celebrate female comedy is, therefore, to reaffirm (White) heterosexuality through ‘complicit masculinities’ (p. 104). Granted. But how is ‘hegemonic femininity/masculinity’ affective rather than representational?
It is worthwhile at this point to acknowledge the ‘affective turn’ on which Webber’s book, well, turns. Research on affect has become a cottage industry, namely, in terms of how it challenges or supplements theories of subjectivity and representation. At base, turns to affect return to the body as a site of critical inquiry. Deleuze (via Bergson and Spinoza) is widely credited as the catalyst for scholars of media and culture who approach the encounters and sensations – as opposed to the proscribed empirical categories – that work to determine individual and group identities. The motivation to do so comes from what many portray as a problem of Modernity: the organisation of control societies and the impact they have on human capacities to act. As such, affect emerged in the late 1980s as a vehicle for engaging the relationship between identity and social/political agency, with the body as a locus of action and litmus test for how people affect and are affected by society.
Today, debates rage about the role of affect in public culture, but there is much agreement on its autonomic and even autonomous characteristics. First, affect is neither emotion nor feeling per se, but rather a set of non-cognitive bodily activities that influence perception and perspective. Second, affect is both hidden by and evident in technologies that mediate experience. Third and finally, it encompasses energies, intensities, feelings, vitalities, vims and verves – in other words, it has no subjective content, like an emotion and its rhetorically qualified substance. Instead, affect is almost like power in Foucault’s sense, or what Freud calls a contagion or what Raymond Williams sees as a ‘structure of feeling’, in that it is diffuse, distributed and ‘always-already’ there in human relations. For those interested in cultural politics and media communication, such as Lawrence Grossberg, Meaghan Morris and others, considerations of affect raise the stakes in matters of political effectivity. The agency in investments, and thus the power of identification, becomes a site of contestation over affinities, attachments and articulations of value. For post-Marxists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, ‘affective labour’ becomes a way to understand contemporary political economies. Many, many more scholars could be cited here, including Lauren Berlant, Patricia T. Clough, Adam Frank, Melissa Gregg, Elizabeth Grosz, Eve Sedgwick, Gregory J. Seigworth and others, all of whom take up affect as a means of articulating the relational and connective components of cultural change. Ultimately, matters of affect are matters of what Massumi (who took up Deleuze’s mantle) dubs the ‘alchemy of reason’, or the enchanting goad to know what makes individuals, images and ideas stick.
This gets at the abovementioned inconsistencies seeing as Chapter 4, ‘The tone of political comedy in The Daily Show and The Colbert Report’, best encapsulates Webber’s argument about comedy as a ‘sign of the times’ (p. 83). Notwithstanding that there is no obvious through line from earlier chapters to this one – such as the shows’ treatments of gay marriage or their critiques of post-racial sentimentality – there is scant analysis of how affectations, or performative displays meant to feign feeling and/or pretend affectedness, portray the impure motives behind politicised affect. Instead, Webber rehashes postmodern irony to argue that ‘getting’ illogicalities means having superior understanding. This is a strange case to make given her affective turn, especially when it falls back on a rationalistic paradigm, setting up satire shows as popular forms of ideology critique. The incongruity is most glaring in the penultimate chapter, wherein Webber observes emancipatory humour in state-sponsored, globalised programmes like Alhurra, Parazit and Al Bernameg. Ultimately, Webber is concerned with hegemonic constructs more than comedy, and thus with the domineering ‘force of affect’ (p. 171). The problem is that she lacks content analysis, makes sweeping generalities, demands reader familiarity with her artefacts and assumes that readers will share her general attitude about, say, the revolutionary status of the Arab spring or the enmity of Bush era governmentality. More is needed to articulate comedy in relation to the politicisation, and not just the pathos, of affect. After all, the comic forms in which Webber is interested can and should be approached for the behaviours they manipulate, the bodies of knowledge they circulate and the hot-button issues they take up, not simply what Spinoza might call the bodily ‘modifications’ they seem to inspire.
Still, there is much to recommend this book. Webber’s allusions to state-sponsored satire as politics (even war) by other means importantly align comedy with propagandistic news sources and attempt at providing ideological cues to people through perverse blends of information and entertainment. Perhaps more fruitful is Webber’s connection of comedy to crisis. While some might question the absence of certain controversial moments in which political affect is at work (i.e. Colbert’s testimony at a 2010 congressional hearing), Webber offers a sense in which affective investments are most palpable at turning points in political discourse.
It is nevertheless unclear how comedy does more to animate affective politics than to offer up political affect as itself an affectation, or in part a calculated exhibition rather than an almost accidental emotive display. For Webber, affect is an emotive construct – a kind of patho-logic – not a predisposition. Therefore, inasmuch as her comedians attempt to alter perspectives and opinions through analogies, appeals to hypocrisy, dissuasion and so on, one is left wondering about the line between argumentation and affect. Maybe that is the point. Maybe there is an affective logic whereby the politics of comedy reside outside content orientations and in the structure of ‘feelies’ (in Postman’s terms) that conditions public expressions. The Cultural Set Up of Comedy is a primer for feeling out this terrain, but only when read as an account that meditates on a cultural problematic in a way that might actually divert careful attention away from some of the larger issues underlying this hegemonic exposition.