The limits of satire,or the reification of cultural politics

Our satirical century

Indicative of the growing consensus regarding the cultural political potential of humour, satire has been increasingly embraced as a popular and legitimate means by which to cover, analyse and intervene in politics in the early 21st century. On the one hand we have the popular success and cultural resonance of political comedy, ranging from the snide documentary showmanship of Michael Moore to the laughter-laden news-coverage of The Daily Show under first Jon Stewart and then Trevor Noah (as well as that show’s multiple imitators and inheritors [Baym and Jones, 2013]), from the deadpan absurdities of The Onion to Armando Iannucci’s political comedy of errors The Thick of It and its US adaptation Veep, to the 2020 revival of the UK puppet-based political parody, Spitting Image, and the seemingly never-ending deluge of politically-tinted stand-up comedy. Moreover, such professional output through legacy media channels is more than matched by an up swell of online content: in terms of both anonymous unchecked political memes and gifs that offer a new way to conduct political discourse, and the emergence of new forms of political entertainment, most prominently comedy political podcasts, such as Abe Lincoln’s Top Hat, Partly Political Broadcast, and Chapo Trap House. Yet, despite the often-predicted end of political satire, the popular appetite for comic comment on politics seems to be showing little sign of slowing even as its expression shifts to better fit the advantages and affordances offered by new media forms.

On the other hand, the 21st century has also been witness to an ever-narrowing gap between comedians and politicians proper. This can be seen in the increasing willingness of prominent politicians to engage with and even indulge in comic performances (Peterson, 2008). For instance, in the USA, there has been Barack Obama’s multiple appearances on late night comedy shows, Donald Trump’s embrace of mockery and ridicule as political tactics (Mercieca, 2020) and most recently Joe Biden’s cultivation of an avuncular, folksy persona. This tendency also finds expression in the slightly unnerving rise of the figure of the comedian-politician (Milburn, 2018). Most prominent in this regard is Volodymyr Zelensky, who played the starring role in the Ukrainian sitcom Sluga Naroda [Servant of the People] (in which a high-school teacher is unexpectedly elected to the position of President of Ukraine) before himself being actually elected to the same position as the leader of a political party sharing the name of the show (and then assuming the mantle of a war-time leader). Moreover, while Zelensky may be the definitive example, he is far from alone in this regard. Other comedian-politicians of note include Jón Gnarr of Iceland, Al Franken in the USA, Beppe Grillo of Italy, and the former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose previous role as a waggish pundit directly informed his political career as a libertine buffoon. No longer would a lack of seriousness appear to be a meaningful barrier to electoral success. Indeed, there appears to be a certain advantage to be obtained from the injection of joviality and jollity into matters of state.

What we can see in such instances, then, is that across multiple constituencies and cultures, humour has become an increasingly acceptable way to conduct, discuss and do politics. Around the world, comedy has been widely embraced, and even celebrated, as an important, popular and legitimate means by which to analyse and intervene in political issues. Moreover, such professional texts are only the tip of the satirical iceberg, absolutely superseded in terms of sheer content by the online explosion of satire in meme culture, online videos and the festering snark-fest that lurks in the haunted remains of Twitter: online spaces where it is now almost expected that critique will be leavened, as often as not, with generous helpings of humour. This is true not only in US and Anglophone contexts, where the latest versions of the culture wars rage on in new comic shapes and forms, but also in places like China. where subtle comedy informs attempts by everyday social media users to express political discontent. For example, as was widely reported in 2018, in that year, Chinese censors begun to remove all references to Winnie the Pooh from the Chinese corners of the internet, after the character was adopted as a mocking stand-in for President Xi Jinping (Freudenstein, 2020). The larger point, here, is that satire now seems to be everywhere, all the time, as an expected aspect of politics. It seems, indeed, that we have entered a new golden age of satire.

Although the Trump presidency amidst the rise of global populisms generated some concern regarding the limitations of comedy as a form of political action (Brooks, 2020; Phiddian, 2020), the predominant response to the ongoing satire boom has been celebration, with the politics of humour hailed as simultaneously subversive, accessible and entertaining (Farnsworth and Lichter, 2019; Henson and Jankowski, 2020; Kilby, 2018; Rehak and Trnka, 2018). No longer restricted to the educated or the especially engaged, satire renders critique an enjoyable and pleasurable activity and thereby expands the public appetite for detailed engagement with political questions and investigations. Key advocates of such an approach to humour and satire include media and communication scholars such as Jeffrey P. Jones (2010), Amber Day (2012, 2018), Jonathan Rossing (2016, 2019) and James Caron (2021), as well as those like Simon Critchley (2002), who frame humour’s political potential in broader philosophical terms. This is a perspective that finds it’s perhaps most perfect expression in the oft-cited Mark Twain quotation that ‘Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand’ (Holm, 2018).

However, this approach to humour is not just restricted to the academy alone. I would also posit that it sits behind wider popular attitudes towards the role of humour in political engagement: assumptions about what Alenka Zupančič refers to as ‘the humanist-romantic presentation of comedy as intellectual resistance’ (2008: 4). Indeed, so popular is this new mode of comic critique that, in many contexts, it threatens to supplant the suspiciously sombre forms of ideology critique and affiliated modes by which power was previously interrogated. As a consequence, there often seems to be increasingly little time or taste for solemn denunciations and deconstructions of whatever political ills against which one wishes to take aim. Instead, almost everywhere, a little laughter would seem to go a long way.

A dream of cultural politics

To think about humour in such ways is to imagine it as the contemporary realisation of a longstanding desire that I here refer to the ‘dream of cultural politics’. This dream aspires to a form of cultural conception, production or performance that is able to bring about changes in the lived reality of everyday life. In different manifestations, this dream has been an important aspect of the production and study of culture since at least the turn of the 20th century: from the artistic experimentation of the various Modernist avant-gardes (Watson, 2002: 52–72) to the libidinous aspirations of 1960s rock and the politics of noise (Miller, 2015), from the de-familiarisation of the Russian formalists to the critical aesthetic theory of the Frankfurt school (Jay, 1996), to Raymond Williams’ cultural materialism, critical feminism, queer theory and other iterations of critical cultural studies. What unites these disparate intellectual, artistic and scholarly projects is a belief that cultural works, in themselves, in their formal properties rather than just their represented content, can reach beyond themselves to enact a change in the world.

The mechanism by which this ‘reaching beyond’ becomes possible has been understood in multiple ways. For some, this process is primarily cognitive, for others, affective. At times, the natural medium for this influence is the interiority of the individual. For others it is, by necessity, the structures and systems of shared society. At the dawn of the 20th century, Francisco Marinetti – ‘the first artist of the manifesto’ (Danchev, 2011 [1909]: 2) – articulated the power of art as ‘a violent assault upon the forces of the unknown with the intention of making them prostrate themselves at the feet of mankind’ (2011 [1909]: 4), while, a few years later, Wassily Kandinsky hailed the transformative power of art in explicitly spiritual terms (1966 [1912]: 26). For Viktor Shklovsky of the Russian Formalists, art could shake the world through a process of ostranenie or familiarisation, whereby the play of form and the difficulty of expression could thwart the ‘habitualisation’ of perception (Shklovsky, 1965: 17–18). Martin Heidegger looked towards art’s capacity to ‘found’ a new world that engendered a state of existential disorientation akin to the uncanniness of an awareness of one’s death (Vattimo, 1992: 50–1). For such thinkers, when properly executed in terms of technique, composition and motivation, formal art had the power to transform minds, and thereby transform the world.

However, it was in the work of those theorists and philosophers who would come to be known as Western or cultural Marxists that the most fully developed account of the political function of contemporary culture has been articulated. Marxist intellectuals such as Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Henri Lefebvre, Lucien Goldmann, and especially Theodor Adorno contributed substantially to our theoretical language and frameworks for making sense of the social and political power of art and literature by virtue of their conditional autonomy (Anderson, 1979: 75–8; Brown, 2019). In this framework, art’s potential to prise out a space of critical distance from its capitalist context could allow it to express uncomfortable truths about the exploitative ways of the world. Taking their lead from that earlier generation of political aesthetic theorists – sometimes as a form of inspiration, at other times in direct opposition (Holm and Duncan, 2018) – later scholars of culture and politics, including Raymond Williams, Michel de Certeau, Linda Hutcheon, Guy Debord, Pierre Bourdieu and Stuart Hall, would then expand the scope of this theoretical project to increasingly encompass popular and everyday forms of culture, as well as high art, in a variety of ways. Sometimes culture was envisioned as the expression of the popular will or the raw material for oppositional tactics, at other times it became the terrain on power struggles. Regardless of the precise mechanism, though, culture was thought to be deeply interwoven into the political conflicts and opportunities of the time. In our current moment, in the wake of a disenchantment with some of the more radical claims made for the political power of the popular (Gilbert, 2008: 41–73), affect has emerged as the predominant site for conceiving of the potential of culture to impact upon the world as expressed in the work of a new generation of aesthetic theorists such as Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai and Ben Highmore. The concern to develop a sufficient account of how cultural products might have a bearing upon the world, and under what conditions, remains ongoing.

The reason for indulging in this admittedly only partial history is to begin to reconnect the critical claims made on behalf of satire with the longer history of the dream of cultural politics. The idea of cultural works as political interventions is not new, even if often presented as such in discussions of satire: as if the judicious application of comedy to change the world reflected a hitherto unimagined form of political practice. Instead, contemporary claims for the power of satire harken back to that longer tradition: be they framed in terms redolent of the violent edge of Marinetti’s aesthetic destruction or Kandinsky’s careful composition. The historical ideas of cultural politics inform accounts of the power of humour to reveal the lurking nonsense in the habitual or expected aspects of our social lives (Rossing, 2019), to provide the basis for new affiliations and communities (Doona, 2018), or to reshape our emotional orientations towards the affective terrain of contemporary life (Berlant and Ngai, 2017). All of this marks a continuation, rather than a break, with the history of cultural political thought.

Too often, though, this continuity is overlooked, because of the prevalence of a different idea that offers to organise and explain the politics of humour. This is the idea of satire, a key term for understanding humour as an accepted and expected aspect of politics in the early 21st century. For those concerned with exploring the relationship between culture and politics, one of the most obvious and apparent paths available today leads through satire. The concept not only offers a way of making sense of how an aesthetic and cultural category like humour could do political work, but also seemingly holds out the promise of something even more significant as an actually existing example of a properly critical form of contemporary culture in action.

Be it John Oliver’s laughter-laden calls to political action on Last Week Tonight, Michelle Wolf’s controversial speaking of comic truth to power at the 2018 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, or Jon Stewart’s role as America’s comic conscience during the Bush administration, satirists have become ever more central to contemporary politics: both in the USA, and around the world. When considered alongside a well-documented and widely distributed sense of general political disenfranchisement, fears regarding waning social solidarity, and the ongoing global consequences of economic inequality, this utopian promise of satire appears as a rare glimmer of hope: a widely-consumed, popular expression of political critique that promises to, in the words of Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey Jones and Ethan Thompson, ‘encapsulate public sentiment…energize civic culture [and] engag[e] citizen-audiences’ (2009: 4). In doing this sort of work, satire promises to realise a particularly compelling vision of cultural politics, whereby meaningful and measurable change is enacted through the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural texts. More than simply the delivery of culturally-sweetened political messages (which has historically been decried as propaganda), satire appears as an aesthetic practice wherein the formal (comic) arrangement of the work is central to the employment and expression of its political purpose. At the very least, this is a very seductive story about the power of popular humour properly wielded to challenge politics as usual. It is certainly a story that has captured the attention, and indeed the affections, of many scholars of both historical and contemporary humour, while also aligning with what appears to be a genuine popular opinion. But my question today, then, is does this satirical paradigm actually adequately account for the politics of humour at our particular historical moment?

After all, if satire is not only the inheritor but possibly even the realisation of the dream of cultural politics, we might wonder why – in these satirical times – our political world seems to be tending, in general, in a different and less desirable direction. This can be seen not least with the surge of global nationalisms and forms of prejudice long since thought abandoned. It can also be seen in the increasingly aggressive monitoring of the correct bounds and forms of comic speech in both mediated and interpersonal communication, and in the use of legal and police powers to prosecute humourists from Kenya (Gathara, 2021) to Hong Kong (Baptista, 2020) to Russia (Dixon and Ilyushina, 2021). If satire is being not only consumed but also produced and shared by millions if not hundreds of millions of people around the world, then how might we explain what appears to be the decline or defeat of critical thought and emancipatory politics? If satire has the power to do so much, then why does it seem to have done so little?

Defining satire against ‘mere humour’

If we are to account for satire’s apparent failure as a form of cultural politics, then it is first necessary to account for what exactly is meant by the term. This definition has been postponed until this point of the discussion. Although there has historically been a degree of variation and even ambiguity regarding the definition of satire (Condren, 2012), the term has been consistently understood to name a form of cultural expression that both entertains and criticises (Declerq, 2018: 218). For example, in his classic work The Art of Satire, David Worcester argues that ‘the content of satire is criticism’ (1960: 16), Leonard Feinberg asserts in Introduction to Satire that ‘whatever else [satirists] do, they criticise’ (1967: 6), and in Arthur Pollard’s Satire, the author declares that ‘Satire always has a victim, it always criticizes’ (1970: 73). Such authors and opinions are representative of a long-standing consensus regarding the social, cultural and political function of satire that was codified during an intense period of scholarly activity in the 1960s (see also Elliott, 1960; Highet, 1962; Sutherland, 1962). Drawing upon an established canon of satirical writers – from Juvenal to Jonathan Swift – authors of this period traced satire as a particularly literary historical form characterised by a restricted set of techniques and specific generic features. Although more narrowly conceived than the contemporary usage due to a particular focus on ‘formal verse satire’, even in this restricted form, satire was nonetheless understood as fundamentally constituted by the intermixture of jest and judgement.

More recent scholarship has built upon this earlier definition to take into account the emergence of a broader range of cultural forms that do not adhere to the strict formal arrangements of those literary precedents but are nonetheless understood as satire (Condren, 2012; Declerq, 2018; Griffin, 1994; Knight, 2004; Phiddian, 2013). This contemporary reformulation expands upon the traditional definition in order to account for how satire manifests beyond the narrow field of literature and across a range of media forms, including editorial cartoons, television programming and social media posts. As a result of the expansion of potential forms, contemporary scholars of satire argue that it no longer functions as a clearly defined genre, but instead is better understood as a mode or tone that can modify other forms of expression, rather than constituting a set body of cultural works in itself (Knight, 2004; Phiddian, 2013). Moreover, when satire makes its transition from a limited range of literary forms to the breadth of popular media, its meaning also tends to lose some of that rigidity and clarity as regards its moral-political critical function. Contrary to traditional models, a satirist in this sense need not operate ‘in a world of clear standards and boundaries’ (Griffin, 1994: 35), but rather can lampoon and provoke without suggesting preferable alternatives. At the same time, although historically satire was not thought to be necessarily humorous, in practice, contemporary usage of the term tends to privilege humour as a constituent element of satire (Noonan and Leggett, 2018). Satire is therefore no longer seen as simply a tool of comic moral instruction expressed in prose, but becomes applied to any instance of humour that potentially speaks to political or social matters.

For some authors, this loss of precise meaning represents a public failure to properly understand the central critical function of satire that ought to be actively refuted in order to protect the true and correct meaning of the term (Declerq, 2018). For others, this decline in precision, while lamentable insofar as it dilutes the ‘moral seriousness’ of satire, is inevitable and needs to be accepted as simply another aspect of the gradual decline of Western civilisation under the assault of ‘mainstream, mass entertainment’ (Condren, 2012). However, there is an alternate way to understand this shifting and broadening meaning, not as an expression of ‘faults in a system, or errors of feedback, or deficiencies of education’ (Williams, 1988: 24), but rather as a result of shifting material conditions in which satire operates. This way of approaching satire follows Raymond Williams’ method in Keywords where ‘language change generally, and meaning change specifically, forms part of and provides insight into the nature of social and cultural transformation’ (Moran, 2021). Understood in this manner, shifts in the popular understanding of satire are not simply the result of a public failure to adequate grasp a technical term, nor even a record of the transforming nature of a dynamic but coherent phenomenon. Instead, debates over the meaning of satire reflect active and ongoing conflicts ‘that cannot be resolved by reducing the complexity of actual usage’ (Williams, 1988: 91).

Such debates are particularly acute in the case of satire, which, unlike the majority of terms of cultural analysis, is a concept whose meaning can carry real material impacts when it speaks to perceptions of originality, intentionality and responsibility in legally meaningful ways (Condren et al., 2008; Godioli and Little 2022; Holm, 2020). Historical shifts in the formal definition of satire thus do more than track a changing sense of how humour can do politics. Rather, they express ongoing disagreements about how satire works in ways that potentially carry real material consequences. Satire thus appears as a specific form of humour that does more than simply provoke laughter, but instead reaches beyond itself to articulate a point regarding its wider social or political context. While the lack of clear formal cues has led some to argue that satire remains difficult to define as a cultural form (Bogel, 2001: 4), this is meant only in the sense of the difficulty in identifying any clearly delimited set of aesthetic techniques. Indeed, in the absence of those particular formal cues, the idea that satire is essentially defined by its comingling of (often comic) pleasure and politics has become even more central to the use and meaning of that term. In general usage, ‘satire’ thus no longer names a specific set of formal qualities, nor even a particular critical purpose. Rather it refers to a manifestation of humour that is thought to be explicitly orientated towards ends and concerns beyond amusement. In other words, humour that ought to be taken seriously.

However, if satire names a form of humour that ought to be taken seriously, then this presumes the existence of another sort of humour from which satire is to be distinguished. This is a form of humour which does not reach beyond itself, which is not political, and which therefore needn’t be taken seriously. I suggest that we refer to this as ‘mere humour’. This is a residual category that is called into being when satire is defined as a meaningful and serious mode of humour. It is composed of those instances of humour that are ostensibly purposeless and thereby fail to meet the satirical criteria of critique or commitment and is potentially a particularly large set because it is the comic remainder left behind once instances of the satirical have been identified and extracted. This distinction between satire and mere humour informs the work of David Worcester’s statement that ‘the laughter of comedy is relatively purposeless. The laughter of satire is directed toward a preconceived end’ (1960: 38), while comedy comes to name the broader purposeless forms of humour. This distinction is also important to Dieter Declerq’s argument that satire needs to be distinguished from what he refers to as non-satiric ‘frivolous mockery’: a term he uses to describe the comedy of panel shows that, although they might take the business of politics as a subject for jokes, do not seek to make any particular critical point about those politics (a similar point could be made about late-night comedy in the USA which fills a similar niche in the local comedy ecosystem). For Declerq, while this humour may be joking about politics, it is not political joking, because it prioritises the amusement of its audience over their critical enlightenment.

Most readers will have their own personal example of what such ‘mere humour’ might look like. Typical examples could include American or UK sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory, Mrs Brown’s Boys, the eternal punching bags of Jay Leno or Adam Sandler, or the even more eternal punching bag of punning, all of which frequently serve to illustrate a mode of the comic that lacks ethical and political weight. These are forms of humour that are regarded as light-hearted, diverting entertainment that do not reach beyond themselves to pass comment on the social and political world. Such examples of ostensibly mere humour are not only among the most widely-consumed instances of popular humour. They also frequently rely heavily upon styles of humour associated with less educated and less privileged groups (Kuipers, 2015). The distinction drawn by contemporary celebrations of satire – between meaningful and mere humour – thus traces an older division between ‘legitimate’ and ‘lowbrow’ comedy that has long historical roots in Anglo comic traditions (Friedman, 2014). This correspondence highlights the barely suppressed class elements of the satirical distinction whereby satire becomes a term by which to re-inscribe ‘symbolic boundaries’ between those who possess sanctified comic taste and those who do not (Friedman and Kuipers, 2013).

Mere humour, then, is humour that is seen to be less valuable because it is without particular purpose, beyond the immediate task of prompting its audience to laughter, or at the least amusement. It is humour that is (or at least is deemed to be) concerned with amusement and laughter, rather than criticism and intervention. In the context of our satirical century, satire emerges as a heroic and engaged mode of humour, defined against the backdrop of a morass of detached, apolitical ‘laffs’. Satire stages this comic incongruity while simultaneously defining itself against the backdrop of ‘mere humour’. The definition of satire against ‘mere humour’ thus acts as a ‘convenient working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not’ (Jameson, 1986: 20).

The reification of cultural politics

The entanglement of satire with structures of distinction and cultural privilege should give pause to any who seek to designate it as an exceptionally political form of popular culture. However, the limitations of the satirical model of cultural politics are not simply a consequence of its alignment with particular class interests. Rather, they manifest at a more fundamental formal level and do so in ways that threaten to foreclose a full reckoning with the complexity and diversity of ways that not just humour, but all culture, can do politics. This closure of cultural political possibility is the result of an act of reification that draws a clear and apparently objective distinction between political and non-political forms of comical culture. The concept of reification – as developed most influentially in Georg Lukács and then expounded upon in the work of Fredric Jameson – refers to a process whereby social relations, activities and categories become understood as objective things in themselves, rather than as the products of human behaviour (Lukács, 1971: 83–5). Reification is predicated on the extension of the abstract logic of the commodity-form – which mistakes relations between objects for relations between people – to society and subjectivity more broadly. In doing so, reification rationalises and reduces the ways we understand and interact with the world to a matter of distinct, durable, and discrete social and psychological units, rather than understanding our social environment as a contingent, dynamic, and deeply interconnected assemblage (Lukács, 1971: 101–3). At the most basic level, to argue that satire reifies cultural politics is to suggest that it reduces the complicated, dynamic and above all human terrain of cultural politics to a set of stable categories, fossilised relationships, and rote moves.

Central to this reifying process is the foundation of the separate, stable categories of satire and ‘mere humour’. This act of partitioning is premised on more than just a series of differences in formal expression or textual purpose, but rather operates via a politically meaningful distinction between two separate domains of culture: one where politics takes place and another where it does not. In doing so, satirical thinking reproduces the wider structural pattern of a reified society – where it is presumed that culture and cultural forms are distinct from matters of politics or society – within the sphere of comedy. When satire makes a claim for its status as politically meaningful culture, it does so only on the basis that it is an exception from the general tendency. Satire’s claim for political status is premised on the assertion that other forms of comedy are not political. Thus, the celebration of satire as a privileged site of political commitment comes at the expense of the vast remainder of mere humour (and beyond that mere culture) that is thereby consigned to the apolitical realm of un-invested entertainment. In doing so, the rationalisation of satire transforms critical comic practice from a familiar aspect of everyday life into both a vocation and a genre.

In terms of a vocation, the concept of satire enacts a division of labour that separates out comic critique as a particular skill possessed by a specific few as the basis for industry and profit, rather than as something shared in common by virtue of being human. In this way, ‘satire’ entangles humour’s critical qualities with the semi-industrial logics of production and mediation and thereby separates them from everyday practice. Satire, that is to say politically-meaningful humour, thereby becomes no longer something that regular people do themselves, but rather something that they experience and consume through mediated channels and professional performance. Satire transforms cultural politics into something that is observed and consumed, rather than enacted and engaged with in potentially transformative ways.

However, the reification of satire is more than just a restriction of access but can also be grasped on the formal level as a question of genre. To address satire in these terms is to understand it in terms of what Jameson refers to the ‘ideology of form’ whereby a given aesthetic form, style or genre is understood as existing in determinant relation to its underlying social and economic conditions (1986: 98). Such a perspective illuminates how the changes in the definition of satire are more than just the latest series in a shifting game of form but can also be placed into conversation with the underlying material conditions of the era. This approach raises that question, then, of why the particular understanding of satire as a mode of especially political popular culture might emerge at in the historical-economic conditions of the early 21st century. One way of answering this is in terms of satire’s style or sensibility, what Jameson refers to as a ‘semantic’ understanding of genre. For example, Tragedy is characterised as a narrative form concerned with ‘the triumph of an inhuman destiny’ (Jameson, 1986: 116), whereas the Romance genre is constituted by the fundamental operation of a binary opposition between good and evil forms (Jameson, 1986: 111). In contrast, having abandoned ‘moral seriousness’, in its contemporary mode satire has relatively little concern with such ethical questions. Instead, as previously established, satire adheres to a more anarchic, transgressive worldview: a particular vision of cultural politics where laughter is presented as a threat to political structures. As a generic sensibility, satire is thus defined by the assertion that humour, and cultural consumption in general, can be apprehended as a way of doing politics. This worldview has the potential to be particularly appealing in an environment where other means of political praxis seem increasingly closed off or impotent (Dean, 2009; Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014).

Burning the bridge between culture and politics

An account of satire as a particular style or sensibility does not exhaust its political work, however, especially in terms of reification. Instead, the satirical genre also needs to be grasped as a structural category that manifests a particular arrangement of textual relationships and movements (Jameson, 1986: 107–8). Beyond the discursive construction of satire as a particular form of comic politics, there is the question of how satirical texts are actually formed, which takes us back to satire’s foundational division between culture and politics. The relationship between these two spheres in relation to satire has been most fully theorised in the American Communication and Media Studies tradition by influential writers such as Day (2012, 2018), Jones (2010; Jones et al., 2012), Rossing (2016, 2019) and Geoffrey Baym (2013, 2014). In this account, the political promise of satire is realised through the subversion of the otherwise inviolate barrier between the separate worlds of popular entertainment and serious politics. Satire is thus seen to perform its fundamental politics by transgressing the line that would normally keep the political separate from the popular and the cultural and thereby wreaking a form of progressive havoc that unsettles dogma and upends hierarchy. For those who usually experience the division between popular culture and politics as a clear, common-sense and normative distinction, this satirical subversion of the politics-culture boundary appears as a radical act where satire acts as a utopian form able to overcome the partition between political action and cultural consumption.

In doing so satire appears to be doing the same work that underpins the longer tradition of cultural politics considered earlier: dismantling the assumed partition between culture and politics as separate realms. And if we were to leave off the argument here, it would thus appear that satire ultimately opposes rather than enacts reification because it acknowledges the continuity between cultural and political aspects of life. However, this conclusion is unfortunately premature insofar as it does not consider the aforementioned way in which satire characterises the broader relation between itself and other forms of popular culture. White satire may gesture towards the possibility of doing politics with culture, it does so while simultaneously presenting such interventions as exceptional. Indeed, it is the apparently exceptional nature of the culture-politics encounter that renders satire comic: the fundamental comic incongruity here is the unexpected encounter between serious politics and otherwise trifling culture. According to this logic, then, while individual satirical texts can transcend the ostensible gap between the spheres of politics and mere entertainment, they do so only on the assumption that the two are otherwise properly separate. Satire challenges structural divisions between entertainment and politics only as a provocation – one that produces and is resolved in the shock of laughter – rather than a revelation of their deeper continuity. What this means is that satire only appears as a radical challenge to the status quo on the basis that politics and culture ought to be otherwise regarded as incommensurably separate categories. Satire stages its apparent revolution on the presumption that no other cultural form (especially any comic form) is of political significance.

Furthermore, the claim that satire is humour doing politics is premised on the assumption that humour (or indeed any cultural text) may not be political in any other way. Satire’s conscious and critical engagement is presented as if it were the only viable manifestation of a political popular humour in a manner that excludes the broader range of politically-meaningful interventions that humour – even and especially ‘mere humour’ – can enact. For example, absurd humour can intervene in politically-meaningful disputes over what is seen to make sense and what is not (Dodds, 2022), while awkward humour can be used to encourage or forestall affective connections through the orchestration of empathy (Sawallisch, 2021). When employed in representational contexts, humour can shape and steer the articulation of identities in complex and potentially counter-intuitive ways (Davies and Ilot, 2018) or be employed to make controversial or upsetting topics both legible and palatable (Lionis, 2021). In contrast to the liberational model assumed by satire, humour can even contribute to the building of consensus and the mobilisation of discipline (Nieuwenhuis, 2022) or to nihilistic opposition of all community (Zijp, 2022). It is these forms of diverse, subtle and potentially powerful forms of cultural politics that are eclipsed when the politics of humour are over-determined by the category of satire, which renders other forms of comic politics invisible and reduces the political function of the humour to variations on critique, transgression and subversion. For these diverse and contingent strategies of comic politics, satire substitutes a singular political aesthetic strategy that presents the encounter of culture and politics as a comic provocation rather than a necessary intervention.

The failure of satire is thus twofold: even as it own internal formal logical presents the possibility of cultural politics as a comic scandal, it simultaneously denies the possibility of other forms of meaningfully political humour. The popular politics of satire – and the comic ‘scandal’ of the non-serious treatment of political issues in satire – are thus orientated against a broader politics of humour in a manner that works to contain and mitigate the wider promises of cultural politics. This explanation furnishes a theoretical mechanism for the widely observed and lamented observation that, in practice, satire does not appear to do much of anything (Baumgartner and Morris, 2006; Higgie, 2017; Phiddian, 2017), because satire encounters the grand promise of cultural politics as a joke, rather than a dream. The dominance of satirical thinking does more, then, than just create a reified distinction between political and mere humour. It enacts a premature shutdown of any broader reckoning with the possibilities of affective, ideological, aesthetic forms of politics of humour.

The popular politics of satire thus obscure a deeper political truth: that in many meaningful ways the cultural and the political are always connected and it is in this deeper connection that the ‘true’ and potentially less desirable, uglier, more reactionary politics of satire lie. Or, to put this another way, satire is the reification of cultural politics. It is the transformation of cultural politics into a pre-ordained, pre-given thing, rather than as a process of a struggle and ongoing development. At a moment of comic expansion, when humour is increasingly integrated in multiple forms of politics, the idea of satire prematurely shuts down the possibility of the grander, utopian visions that have historically emerged from the confrontation between aesthetics and politics. Even as it aspires to meaningful critique, satire’s ultimate outcome is to burn the bridge of cultural politics behind itself.

Conclusion

The failure to properly characterise the cultural politics of satire is a consequence of an insufficiently dialectic approach that emphasises the critical at the expense of the ideological aspects of the form. This critical vision constitutes ‘the promise of the real and indeed fully visceral pleasure of utopian transformation’ that underpins the appeal of satire (Jameson, 1986: 62). But satire is not simply the appearance of critique. It is also the fantasy of critique that would be possible if we had not divorced culture from economics, from the lived experience of life. Without a more abstract shift in cultural political consciousness, satire is therefore only capable of functioning at an aesthetic level, where political and social critique becomes the impetus for humour, to be thereby resolved through amusement. Although satire contains the utopian promise that the production and consumption of popular culture can change the world, it then carries out the ideological work of explaining that this has already been successfully achieved by the comic resolution of the text. This is a paradigmatic example of ‘a projected solution, on the aesthetic or imaginary level, to a genuinely contradictory situation in the concrete world of real life’ (Jameson, 1986: 225). Satire thus stages a conflict between the political and the non-political aspects of culture which it then resolves within its own comic form. In this way, the satirical form thus appears as both the expression of, and utopian compensation for, a context in which the political value of culture is denied at both an intellectual and material level.

Advocates of satire imagine it as a critical cultural form capable of effecting social and political change when properly wielded. From this perspective, the lack of concrete change is a problem of execution, rather than conception. However, the failure of satire to instigate political change is not the result of a failure of application but rather an expression of the underlying logic of the form. Satire’s claim to be a form of political critique is predicated on the denial of a deeper connection between politics and popular culture: between politics and everyday life. Satire acknowledges, or perhaps more accurately assumes, that those spheres are now experienced as separate, even as it feigns to combine them. Thus while satirical humour is often understood to be breaching a boundary between the serious business of politics and the vulgar world of the popular, in practice to understand satire as critique is to understand it as the exception rather than the rule. Satire reifies and reduces (cultural) politics to the skewering of opponents or the bringing down of the abstract and ethereal into the lower realm of the everyday. In doing so, it calls on us to abandon the ideological terrain on which the larger and more important work of cultural politics is done. It is for this reason that the ascendance of satire as both a concept and a form should not be considered a moment of triumph of the dream of political culture but rather a troubling and ongoing challenge for those who are concerned with the broader idea, the broader dream, perhaps, of not just a politics of humour but the politics of culture.