No more jokes: Comic complexity,Adult Swim and a political aesthetic model of humour

The problem with jokes (and fruit flies)

If humour were ever as straightforward a cultural and textual phenomenon as is implied in the joke-model (a proposition that is itself highly contestable), then that is certainly no longer the case in our current moment: in which transformative expansions in the media and cultural apparatuses by which humour is produced, distributed and consumed have fundamentally changed the political possibilities and purchase of the comic. These new forms of humour exceed the joke-form, which technically refers to a precise linguistic formation where an expectation is established through a set-up and then resolved through a punchline. Although the term is often used in a less precise manner in both popular and scholarly discussion, its wider usage nonetheless carries the traces of that original meaning: not least a perception of comedy as composed of discrete identifiable units characterised by a degree of cultural autonomy from their context. This broad meaning is captured in the phrases ‘that’s the joke’ – which seeks to identify a singular point of origin for humour in a given example – and ‘it’s just a joke’ – which often serves as a (defensive) appeal to the autonomy of the comic from political and social realms. However, in contrast to the relatively simple structure implied by the joke model, contemporary humour is instead now increasingly characterised by a high degree of formal diversity and complexity.

This is in no small part due to the profound influence exerted on comedy by mass media technologies and industries over the last century: the dominance of which have transformed humour from a relatively static cultural form with ample room for amateurs and folk practices, to one overdetermined by the dynamic professional output of a global legion of paid humourists working in the service of a multi-trillion dollar global comedy industry. In stark contrast to the anonymous and socially distributed origin of jokes (Kuipers, 2006: 22–23), most mediated humour is the product of trained specialists who undergo sustained periods of semi-formal comic apprenticeship in the context of stratified and structured media organisations. This shift away from the joke format can be observed across a range of cultural forms, including the de-emphasis of jokes in narrative forms like sitcom and comic film in favour of narrative and character-based comedy (King, 2002: 2–12; Mills, 2010: 24–25); and the turn-away from joke-telling in contemporary stand-up (Brodie, 2014: 13, 25). Although the decline of the joke is very difficult to trace empirically – there are no historical records of joke prevalence or range, nor any straightforward proxy for such data – there can be little doubt that the rise of these media industries has exerted substantial influence on the formal manifestation of popular humour, and that this has been to the relative detriment of the joke as a dominant comic form (Jennings, 2019: 65–69; Martin and Kuiper, 1999). The increasing complexity of the comic conjuncture has been met on multiple fronts by the development of astute and incisive models of humour arising out of the cultural and critical study of humour (for example, Billig, 2005; Palmer, 1987). And yet, despite these alternatives, the repeated invocation of jokes as both a form and a concept is a frequent feature of even the most politically minded and theoretically astute analyses of humour (Lewis, 2006; Limon, 2000; Weaver, 2011; Zupančič, 2008). Even for those alert to the limitations of the format, the language of jokes and joking seems to remain stubbornly embedded in our analyses.

Why, though, are we still talking about jokes? Why do jokes still function as a persistent aspect of humour analysis and easy shorthand for humour more generally? And what are the consequences of doing so? Although, undeniably a historically important variant of humour, it is no longer clear why jokes should be understood as its most archetypal form. As Jim Holt has charted, jokes are not a ‘cultural constant [but rather] a form of humor [sic] that comes and goes with the rise and fall of civilisations’ (2008: 6). Consequently, in contrast to an earlier moment, where we might point to the success of a publication like Joe Miller’s Jests (1739) as evidence of a thriving culture of joke-telling (Billig, 2005: 67), the joke is far from a dominant comic form in contemporary culture. Hence, although they may persist in certain sectors of society – Giselinde Kuipers and Sam Friedman have tracked the residual popularity of jokes among low-income men and in the repertoire of older comedians (Friedman, 2014; Friedman and Kuipers, 2013; Kuipers, 2006) – jokes are no longer the dominant form of humour. Instead, they are better regarded as one among many competing forms, and at worst minimus inter pares: the least among equals. Consequently, while there is no doubt that jokes have a long and storied pedigree, given the shifting fortunes of comic form, it is less clear why that format continues to exert any substantial influence over how we might conceive of humour in the 21st century.

In a scholarly context, a significant part of this answer is the historical importance of jokes to the study of humour. Giselinde Kuipers has defined jokes as the ‘fruit flies of humour scholarship’ (2008: 361), a description that not only highlights the extent to which jokes have been historically central to the study of humour but also draws attention to the particular characteristics of jokes that have made this possible. Like fruit flies, jokes are plentiful, easy to gather and transport and provide relatively simple examples on which to conduct fundamental analysis. The dominance of jokes thus speaks to the historical influence exerted on the study of humour by folklorists and linguists, each of which for their own reasons – which might be simplified as collectability and simplicity, respectively – favoured jokes over other forms of humour as subjects of analysis (Attardo, 2001, 2017; Davies, 1998, 2011) However, while Kuipers’ original remark was offered only in passing, I think the metaphor is capable of bearing quite a bit more explanatory weight: not least that, as with fruit flies, a substantial portion of the population are irritated by jokes and no one much cares if you kill them. Furthermore, if I’m permitted to push this a bit further still, the comparison between the two can also draw our attention to other important distinctions between the treatment of fruit flies and jokes in their respective areas of study.

In the genetic biology literature, there is a substantial discussion regarding the viability of fruit flies – drosophila melanogaster – as what are called model organisms (Hughes et al., 2012; Mirzoyan et al., 2019; Tolwisnki, 2017). Drosophila share about 60% of their DNA with humans and other complex organisms and their simple chromosomal structure provides a fantastic basis for exploring genetic mechanisms. However, there is also awareness of the limitations of their model status: Most obviously, gross differences in anatomy from humans, but also the lack of an adaptive immune system. The recognition of these fundamental differences plays an important and explicit role by which biologists understand the limitations of fruit fly research: not least the extent to which findings based on fruit flies can and cannot be generalised to other species. In contrast, humour scholars have not been so careful with jokes. Instead, the study of humour has been defined by a tendency to either take up jokes as a fundamental model of humour (e.g. (Attardo, 2001; Critchley, 2002; Eagleton, 2019; Oring, 2003)) or to over-study them in their specificity as a stand-in for humour more broadly (e.g. Davies, 1998). The first of these practices is equivalent to a form of biology that takes fruit flies as the fundamental unit of life. The second is the equivalent of a form of dedicated fruit fly studies as a substitute for biology. Neither is an adequate or desirable substitute for properly reflexive analysis. Both of these joke-derived approaches to humour are premised on what should be unsustainable assumptions about the applicability of jokes and their relevance to the broader category of humour. The problem with this unintentional conceptual manoeuvre is that it creates a situation where the specific characteristics of the joke form are mistaken for characteristics of humour more broadly. These approaches generalise the status of the joke – as an isolatable and relatively self-contained unit – as a characteristic of humour in general. A formal aspect of jokes in particular thus becomes a central assumption of a broader theory of humour, which is consequently imagined to be an autonomous cultural form, one that can be meaningfully isolated and studied in seclusion from its wider context.

Yet, to misquote CLR James (who was himself borrowing from Rudyard Kipling), what do they know of humour they who only humour know (2005)? There is a stark limit to our understanding of comedy if we study it as a phenomenon apart from the world, which is exactly what that idea of the joke encourages us to do. It suggests that humour can be picked up and placed down anywhere with not just its meaning, but also its affective, social and political implications unchanged. However, as those who look at humour across national lines and historical periods know, humour – as a general concept or a particular example – does not work in the same way, nor express the same meanings, in different places. An instance of humour that does stark political work in one moment or context may not do so in another: Indeed, it may not even be perceptible as humour. Not only is no instance of humour inherently political in a given way, but the stable formal arrangement does not even guarantee that it will be legible as comedy in another setting. Humour thus takes on both its aesthetic and political consequences by virtue of its location within wider systems.

Consequently, if we are to be concerned with the politics of humour, we need to be deeply sceptical of the assumptions and limitations of the joke model. Jokes are not the most basic unit of humour; they are particular, historically located, culturally bounded, formally specific manifestations of humour that flourished during a pre-mass media era. However, their time in the wild, as it were, is rapidly drawing to a close. In this sense, jokes are actually less like fruit flies and more like smallpox, kept alive in the lab for study purposes, while outside most people are quite glad they’ve gone away. When we take the joke as a basic formula for humour, we are actively distorting our understanding of humour by forcing it into a temporal and formal pattern of set-up and resolution that cannot account for a great deal of contemporary comic culture. Indeed, the joke model cannot account for either the aesthetic complexity or shifting nature of what is understood as humour.

Towards a political aesthetics of humour

The joke model of humour thus fails on two important counts. First, it forces multiple and complex forms of humour into a reductive schema: one that is premised on the primacy of a historically specific comic form. Second, it assumes the autonomy of humour as a cultural form that – while it certainly can be made to serve political purposes – is by default distinct and detached from any wider social context. These conceptual errors become particularly limiting in a moment when comedy is not just increasingly formally complex, but also increasingly implicated in a range of immediately political debates, controversies and conflicts (Goltz, 2017: 53–84; Kuipers, 2011). It is to address these two failings that I now turn to the critical aesthetics of Jacques Rancière and cultural materialism of Raymond Williams as the basis for an alternative ‘political aesthetic’ model of humour that is better equipped to address the complicated politics of humour in an era of comic complexity.

‘Greetings, I am Space Ghost!’ introducing Adult Swim

Adult Swim stands as a particularly stark and influential example of the radical shift towards comic complexity in the 21st century. Although largely overlooked in scholarly discussion, its importance has been noted in more vernacular contexts: for example, on a YouTube video viewed over 1.5 million times, online historian Kristian Williams (aka Kaptain Kristian) asserts that Adult Swim ‘hone[d] in on the sensibilities of an entire generation’ (2016): Founded in 2001, Adult Swim began as a late-night programming block of the Cartoon Network cable channel: adult-orientated programming located in the midst of a youth-focussed media platform. Launched on the inauspicious date of 2 September 2001 – a little over a week before the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre – Adult Swim quickly became known as a home for outlandish and experimental animated programming, the majority of which was developed by the in-house Williams Street Production studio. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, far from the established centres of American comedy production and animation, and almost entirely deprived of start-up resources beyond access to the raw material of the Hanna-Barbera animation archives, the sustained survival of the Williams Street productions, let alone their success, was far from assured. However, the combination of isolation and deprivation enabled a particular form of freedom: Exempt from all but the most minimal expectations, and sequestered far from the eyes of most audiences, executives and censors, Adult Swim was permitted a rare degree of experimental licence in its approach to televised comedy.

The prototype for this endeavour was Space Ghost: Coast to Coast (SG: CC) which first aired in 1994 as Cartoon Network’s first original production. Re-using character assets from the 1960s superhero cartoon Space Ghost, the show loosely followed a talk show format. The titular animated hero played the role of host in conversation with real celebrity guests who appeared via a monitor. Space Ghost’s lines of questioning were rarely linear, and the interview sections of SG: CC are characterised by long pauses, non-sequiturs and misunderstandings. The oddness of this experience is exaggerated by the intentionally graceless editing whereby the original interview footage is repurposed to remove all the promotional trappings that usually characterise such appearances and instead emphasises the frequently awkward and surreal nature of the conversations. The absurdity of these anti-interviews is then further emphasised by the onscreen action as Space Ghost bickers with his director, Moltar, and bandleader, Zorak, and regularly engages in bizarre adventures: raising sea monkeys, turning invisible or organising a murder mystery. With its template of stolen assets, explicitly shoddy animation, unsympathetically odd characters and disregard for conventional comic expectations, SG: CC provided the template of radical stupidity on which later Adult Swim productions would build.

In 2001, alongside the seventh season of SG:CC, four new Williams Street series were broadcast as the first wave of Adult Swim programming ¹ : The Brak Show nonsensically parodied the tropes of 1950s sitcoms; Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law recast beloved Hanna-Barbara characters as participants in offbeat and often salacious courtroom dramas; Sealab 2021 was an anarchic reimagining of a historical educational cartoon and Aqua Teen Hunger Force (ATHF) featured the near uncategorizable adventures of three fast food items. ² Although all the shows shared a common comic tone, the first three shows were reminiscent of SG:CC in their reliance upon the reuse of assets from previous Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Sealab 2021 in particular consisted solely of re-edited and dubbed footage from the original 1970s cartoon about a team of underwater scientists and adventurers. All three shows would prove successful in the context of Adult Swim and demonstrated that SG: CC was more than just an exception (or perhaps an ‘aberration’) with respect to televisual conventions. Through the iteration and extension of SG:CC fundamental comic assumptions – the parodic repurposing of prior material, and the embrace of nihilistic absurdity – Adult Swim helped cultivate a wider appetite for new forms of humour larger than any single show.

The most immediately obvious aspect of Adult Swim’s humour, the comedy of repurposing, is premised on the presentation of formal elements in a manner contrary to the original meaning. This is most apparent in Harvey Birdman, the central comic conceit of which is the appearance of familiar cartoon characters in ways that contravene or ironically undercut their established personae. Birdman himself is transformed from a superhero to bumbling attorney (and occasionally litigator), while other characters are re-contextualised as his clients: Shaggy and Scooby Doo are arrested on marijuana possession charges, Fred Flintstone is tried as a mob boss and Yogi Bear’s companion Boo-Boo is accused of terrorism. In the course of these fictional trials, footage from the original animated series serves as trial evidence, in the process reframing the original material in ways that alternately tacitly acknowledge fan theories or radically overturn conventional wisdom. For example, the crux of the Flintstone case hinges on an overused gimmick from the original 1960s series where Fred would frequently change personality when struck on the head. Such humour reaches out beyond the bounds of the immediate text, enlisting and then upending viewers’ nostalgia. It is premised upon retroactive interventions into the audience’s shared cultural knowledge that, while never directly acknowledged, are fundamental to the overarching tone of irreverence and play.

Such cultural memory need not be particularly precise, however, as the other Adult Swim shows demonstrate. Although the formal aesthetic of The Brak Show and Sealab are similarly determined by the re-use of historical assets, they demonstrate even less fidelity to the source material. Thus, while The Brak Show is largely assembled from existing animation assets (as with SG: CC, these are mostly drawn from superhero cartoons), the narrative assumes no familiarity with the prior characters who are recast as a cliché sitcom family. Sealab, meanwhile, aggressively re-imagines the original characters as a team of sociopaths whose depravity and idiocy subverts the wholesome blandness of the source material. In the first episode, a bored Captain Murphy founds a pirate radio station and harasses the research facility with rock music and prank calls; in later episodes, the crew would become addicted to pills, battle invisible monsters and be captured by alternative reality clones. The humour here is therefore more than the skewering of familiar characters and settings. It is instead better understood as premised on a divergence in tone between the outlandish plots and the texture of the animation itself. With its simplicity of line, flat colours and utopian sci-fi setting, Sealab’s aesthetic form is evocative of an earlier, earnest worldview that clashes with the cynical, anarchic content of the show. Such humour suggests a broader comedy of repurposing: one that extends beyond Birdman’s insider references. Less a matter of explicit reference or parody, this is a comedy of pastiche, premised on the recollection of the general feel of a past era, but without any particular texture or detail (Jameson, 2005: 16–19). More than random references to past pop culture, like those that characterise a show like Family Guy (Holm, 2017: 161–166), Adult Swim’s comedy of repurposing arises from sustained and unresolved inconsistency between the implied innocence of the visual style and the nihilistic play of the narratives.

Moreover, the comical ineptitude of Adult Swim’s aesthetic presentation is not simply a case of formal incongruity but is also deeply premised on the shortcomings of the animation itself. In stark defiance of conventions of ‘good’ animation, these early Adult Swim shows are jerky, stilted and often simply ugly. Animations for basic actions are incomplete: characters on occasion float in the absence of a walk cycle. Not only do the visuals fail to tally with the narrative, but they also fail to constitute a convincing visual display in and of themselves. Such intentional malfunctions serve as a visual analogue for the aforementioned narrative nihilism: an explicit and intentional refusal of the expected visual markers of quality or professionalism. This aesthetic of ugliness is most apparent in the final show of the original line-up: ATHF. Unlike other programmes in the schedule, ATHF did not rely upon existing assets and instead featured its own original but equally limited and crude animation. ATHF is also distinct among the original block in the extent of its whole-hearted embrace of randomness and meaninglessness. The show was infamously initially pitched as Scooby Doo-esque mystery show, but the creators abandoned that concept by the fourth episode (Wolinsky, 2009). The consequent lack of any organising principle meant that plots differed wildly between episodes and meander aimlessly within them. Typical episodes would combine domestic conflicts over cleaning and petty theft with supernatural, science-fiction and extra-terrestrial elements with the only stable element being the three main characters – who are seemingly refugees from a fast-food promotion implied in the show’s title – and their antisocial contempt for one another. In practice, then, ATHF’s comedy is constituted by a compounding series of formal and contextual incongruities that are never resolved: a trend towards nihilism and dark nonsense accompanied by aggressively flawed visuals that would be taken even further in later Adult Swim’s shows like 12 oz. Mouse (2005-present) and Xavier: Renegade Angel (2007–2009).

All kids out of the pool: Adult Swim as cultural formation

As a consequence of such experimental comic elements, Adult Swim’s humour has frequently been discussed in terms of potential for radical disruption along the lines of the Bakhtinian Carnivalesque and even occasioned comparisons with avant-garde cultural movements such as surrealism (Daubs, 2010; Farmer, 2008; Gurney and Payne, 2016). To understand this humour, and its politics, through that lens is to evoke a model of cultural politics that takes us beyond the joke-form and into a language of de-familiarisation and subversion in a manner conversant with Rancière’s aesthetic theory, whereby Adult Swim is thought to possess the ability to challenge established norms and value by virtue of its aberrant aesthetic: to shock suburban squares out of their mindless conformity through the power of nonsense and offence. To focus on the formal mechanisms of such humour is to consider how it intervenes in wider logics of perception and sense, how such comedy tends towards an utter rejection of meaning, rather than the idea of playful tension and resolution that informs the joke model. For instance, such humour could be argued to align with Rancière’s call for a post-didactic political art: one that rejects the desire to intervene and remake the spectator (2009: 11–12). Rancière argues that a properly emancipatory art does not transmit ‘the artist’s knowledge or inspiration to the spectator’ but is instead equally ‘alien’ to both parties: ‘it is the third thing . . . whose meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect’ (2009: 15). In line with Rancière’s wider political project of radical equality, shared artistic ambiguity creates the conditions for the construction of an ‘emancipated community’ where no agent seeks to dominate or determine the mind of any other.

Although ostensibly far more trivial and less serious than Rancière’s imagined art form, it is indeed possible to characterise the comedy of Adult Swim in very similar terms. Adult Swim programming takes some of the most mundane and familiar elements of mediated life – children’s cartoons – as the building blocks for radically nonsensical comedy. In doing so, it renders them strange and potentially upsetting. In this comic operation, there is precious little clear meaning; no seriousness present which could form the basis of a lesson to be taught or learnt. This is true not only in terms of morality, but also of logic. Thus, in the comedy of these shows, meaning is not just not ‘owned’ (to return to Rancière) but its stable possibility is refuted as unnecessary within that media context. Adult Swim thus offers political aesthetic equality through a celebration of radical stupidity that denies the relevance of clear meaning and thereby relinquishes the author’s claim to final authority (an equality that also informs Adult Swim’s wider use of contextual and para-textual markers, which celebrate and centre the audience as an active partner in meaning-making (Ross, 2008: 103–105)). In its commitment to incoherence, Adult Swim models an aesthetic of disconnection and dissensus: one that threatens the disruption of the existing aesthetic community and opens up the possibility of new ways of thinking and engaging with the world. And yet, this conclusion, however attractive, does not go far enough.

Too much thinking on the politics of humour (and culture more generally) stops at this point: with the celebration of a cultural form’s ability to problematize and unsettle an existing cultural status quo. Rancière’s aesthetic theory itself is an example of this tendency, because his theory prioritises disruption, at the expense of the full consideration of the potential for eventual consensus arising from any situation (Zizek, 2002: 238). Such an approach fails to acknowledge the extent to which a disruptive aesthetic can over time form the basis of a new consensus. For example, although certainly a stark challenge to the formal conventions of comedy at its moment of foundation, the (relatively minor) success of Adult Swim eventually led to its recognition as an influential cultural touchstone in its own right. Consequently, any diagnosis is incomplete if it does not also account for Adult Swim’s subsequent establishment as a comic institution. To do so requires a shift from the level of form to that of ‘distinguishable cultural formation’ (Williams, 1977: 174) as a way of accounting for the relation between Adult Swim as a cultural project and its wider social implication. To take up Williams’ terms, at its initial manifestation Adult Swim could be understood as an ‘emergent’ manifestation of a new form of irreverent comic consciousness: a popular and unserious manifestation of a previously marginalised cultural attitude that finds expression in a distinct set of texts. However, as Williams argues, what is conceived as a daring challenge to the status quo is not guaranteed to continue to fulfil that cultural function over time. Discussing the influence of the playwright August Strindberg, he notes how his early embrace by socialist revolutionaries is difficult to reconcile with his later ‘Cultural Darwinism’ and celebration of Futurist violence (2007: 49–50). For Williams, this is an example of how the politics of a cultural formation can shift in relation to its social context: and how what was once a challenge to an established order can become the justification for a new language of oppression.

Adult Swim, it needs to be remembered, premiered in early September 2001. It was conceived and initially produced in a different world, as a product of the consensus politics of the 1990s United States (Fukuyama, 2006; Mouffe, 2006). In such an environment, its comic nihilism would have been most legible as a discombobulating strike against the perceived coherence and calm of that decade: a popular aesthetic experimentation against a backdrop of relative political stability. The timing of Adult Swim was such that it constituted a comic protest against a cultural order, but one that arrived at the very moment that order was rocked to its core by the larger geopolitical events spinning out from the terrorist attacks of September 2011. Consequently, instead of playfully destabilising the comic consensus, this new form of humour instead ended up contributing to a new sense of cultural cacophony, as the world of its primary audience changed into something more chaotic and frightening. Therefore, while it may seem inappropriate to compare the cultural politics of Adult Swim to those of Strindberg, this comparison is productive insofar as it can illuminate the shifting politics of that cultural formation. Not only is the anarchic formal irreverence of Adult Swim evocative of a softer, more popular form of the anti-bourgeois sentiment traced in Williams’ analysis of Strindberg (2007: 49–57), but the transformation of its political valence traces a similar path from iconoclastic to misanthropic.

At its inception, Adult Swim shifted the manner in which humour was conceived and produced and created the conditions for a messier, openly aggressive and nihilistic mode of humour. It was an intentionally unpalatable strike against what was presented as a staid comic order. However, while initially indicative of the disruptive possibilities of what could be achieved in a small relatively open corner of the corporate mediascape, the same techniques have the potential to become oppressive and destructive the more they become characteristics of the dominant culture. It is one thing for Adult Swim, operating as a relatively minor organisation, to champion irreverent nihilism in the context of a 1990s comic environment dominated by the output of major media corporations. It is another entirely when such an ‘anti-mainstream’ attitude begins to exert significant influence in the wider cultural context of online humour.

The most significant contemporary site at which the comic tendency exemplified by Adult Swim continues is in relation to the rise of meme culture and associated online comic forms. While it is not possible to establish any direct causal connection between Adult Swim and meme humour in the space available, the formal features of Adult Swim’s comic aesthetic certainly, at the very least, foreshadow some of the most prominent aspects of new forms of online comedy. Indeed, the new forms of humour enabled by social media platforms such as YouTube, 4chan and Reddit are characterised by comic tendencies, such as intertextual play, parody and calculated offence (Chiaro, 2017: 125; Kunze, 2015: 101–106; Marsh 2019: 226), which closely resemble the radical stupidity of Adult Swim. It is not so much the content of Adult Swim that is repeated here, but rather its comic form: Common elements include the embrace of a hyper-amateurish aesthetic of ugliness and failure, the rejection of (the possibility of) coherence and the often aggressive repurposing of existing popular cultural texts as raw material for new comic interventions (Aroesti, 2019; Bruenig, 2017). However, while the formal operations remain relatively stable what has changed is the social position of that humour in relation to its wider context. While Adult Swim operated within a marginal corner section of the broadcast schedule, meme culture (and associated forms of humour inspired by the formal aesthetics of Adult Swim’s humour) has become fundamental aspect of online communication more broadly (Shifman, 2014). Thus, no longer ‘marginal’ by any stretch of the imagination, what was once the product of a minor player, operating in a tightly controlled corporate mediascape, now increasingly operates as an aesthetic lingua franca of online humour.

As such, the prevalence of such humour can be read in terms of the movement of the cultural formation, represented in the first instance by Adult Swim, from emergence to cultural dominance. In the newly ascendant centres of comic-cultural production and distribution, places like 4chan, 8chan and reddit, an intentionally amateurish and discordant humour style has become the basic for an increasingly influential comic style (Phillips, 2015). However, as it shifts away from its marginal origins, the sense of anarchic disruption attendant to such humour becomes less clearly liberating and more potentially oppressive (Greene, 2019). The embrace of failure and rejection of sense could once appear as subversive comic gestures when measured against a backdrop of perceived social stability enabled by a tightly-regulated media environment. However, once such comic forms become relatively common and thereby dominant in an online context, it becomes less clear as to what exactly they might be pushing against. Nihilistic forms of humour that can appear radical when positioned from an underdog perspective, become openly hostile and aggressive under circumstances of ubiquity, where they create the conditions to ridicule any desire for shared cultural and social beliefs (Nagle, 2017). The comic transgression of imposed standards that characterises Adult Swim thus threatens to become misanthropic once it assumes the role of the dominant under the new conditions of meme culture. Hence, although as comedy these formal operations retain their potential to amuse, as cultural–political statements it is difficult to maintain that they still do primarily emancipatory work. Instead, now integrated into dominant cultural conventions, such comic aesthetic interventions threaten to mitigate, or even reverse, any critical cultural politics that might be assigned to its earlier iterations.

Conclusion

To the extent that humour is a meaningful and powerful force in the world, it needs to be understood in cultural and critical terms. Given the complex and shifting nature of humour’s relation to its wider social context, there is a demonstrable need for a sufficiently sophisticated theory of humour that is able to account for its contingent and consequential politics. We can do better than jokes, which, with their self-contained, highly structured form, have long overdetermined the broader study of humour. In doing so, the joke model has inhibited our ability to account for, not only, the varied aesthetic forms of humour, but also their political relation to the wider world through an emphasis on formal iterability and internal resolution. Consequently, the purpose of this article has not been to trace the entire comic-political fortunes of Adult Swim, nor to condemn the reactionary potential of the comedy of radical stupidity in an online age: in terms of both those positions, what is presented here is merely the beginning of what will need to be a larger and more nuanced argument. Rather, in sketching that argument I have sought to demonstrate how a political aesthetic model of humour can better account for the complexity of contemporary humour than the inherited joke model and, in doing so, better account for the social and political role of humour in the current conjuncture. The formal operation of humour certainly can enact politics, but those politics are not stable and can shift over time. This is not the same as saying that these politics are tenuous or mean different things to different people; rather it means that the politics of humour are dynamic and contingent, and therefore need to be understood as such. Forms of humour that do critical and even emancipatory political aesthetic work in one social context can become the basis for oppression under changed social and technological conditions. While certainly not the final word, a political aesthetic model of humour can provide the basis to begin conceiving new ways of analysing humour in an era when comic complexity is an increasingly central aspect of political deliberation and discussion.