Ammunition,not a ride: Humor,human geography,and the fragile absurdities of power

Introduction

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, hot-on-the-heels of the Beijing Winter Olympics, is no laughing matter. Tens of thousands have been reported killed, and several million have fled their homes. The material and psychological damage of the war are already catastrophic, and few encouraging signs of abatement are on offer at the time of writing (as of the waning days of March 2022). Anxious analysts from the seasoned professional to the suddenly-enthusiastic amateur wonder in whispers if the Ukrainian President is this century's Archduke Ferdinand. In an epoch defined in large part by the imposed insularities of the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the global mass media has for several years been especially fixated on figureheads like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, Jacinda Ardern, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, and Anthony Fauci. But since late February 2022, the figure dominating the global small screen (albeit 2.0) is that embattled Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, the comedian head of state. Zelensky's rise to power was oddly presaged by his humorous television portrayal of an ordinary school teacher unexpectedly catapulted into the Ukrainian Presidency in the three-season sitcom Servant of the People (2015–2019),¹ a role commonly described as akin to Jimmy Stewart's Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and propelled by a rather bumbling and naive dedication, generously lubricated by jokes and physical comedy. In the month or so since the Russian invasion, much has been made of what Gopnik (2022) calls Zelensky's ‘comedic courage’. Just before his election in April 2019, Zelensky told Bernard-Henri Lévy (2019; cf. Gopnik, 2022) that he ‘wants badly to meet [Russian President Vladimir Putin] face to face’. Asked why, Zelensky replied, ‘You realize that I can make even Putin laugh?’, adding, ‘Laughter is a weapon that is fatal to men of marble’ (Gopnik, 2022; Lévy, 2019). Perhaps the most oft-cited remark by Zelensky since the invasion is one that has yet to be officially confirmed² despite its frequent attribution as the tragicomic heartbeat of a rapidly gathering oppositional zeitgeist.

Reportedly offered evacuation by US officials in late February, Zelensky is said to have replied, ‘The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride’. Among many far-more-important lessons, and in ways both similar to and distinct from those of the countless prominent and obscure figures cited in this forum and the immense literature on humor besides, Zelensky's career and approach to (geo)politics before and after the invasion throw an unsettling and unforgiving light on the power and the seriousness of humor as a tool of politics.

In this author's response, I close this forum on the spatiality and political utility of humor by responding to a superb set of critical commentaries – for which I am extremely grateful – in three parts, with the sobering contemporary reality of the comedian-president facing down a brutal invasion serving as a critical, conjunctural point of entry. First, humor can be, as the commentators highlight in different ways, extremely serious business. Second, context matters. And, third, there's a great deal more work to be done. In each of these areas, I respond to some of the many significant issues and questions raised by the commentators that remain for the study of humor, both within geography and as a matter of interdisciplinary inquiry.

Humor and seriousness

As several of the commentators argue, it's time humor was treated with the seriousness it clearly deserves. Academic interest in humor is a big tent, and geographical work in this tradition has often been tucked away in disparate, hard-to-reach, and dimly-lit corners. There are relatively few laboring in the light who knows the way to these corners, but the world is changing in ways that make the potency and ubiquity of humor as a tool and medium of politics increasingly difficult to deny. Dodds’s (2022) account of initially discarding a dissertation chapter for fear that it wouldn't be ‘taken seriously’ by examiners is heartbreakingly instructive, the more so because Dodds's work remains foundational to our understanding of the spatiality and geopolitical significance of humor as well as to the growing recognition of its relevance as a topic of research in human geography. My hope is that the further development of a robust research agenda in this area will mean that the next curious party keen to grapple with the ambiguous power of humor finds a body of research and a community of researchers within easy reach, to beat back doubts on the value of their insights and the significance of such work to scholarship, politics, and everyday life.

Eschewing the binary between the humorous and the serious, Fluri (2022) reminds us that ‘Humor and adversity co-mingle through the contextual situation of adversity and humor and a response that cannot be easily controlled, coopted, or curtailed by dominant forms of power, authority, or control’, and that ‘engaging with humor need not be treated as serious, meaning it does not always need to exist in the realm of the thoughtful, important, earnest, or causing critical consequences’. Both are important lessons. On the one hand, as Fluri and several other commentators affirm, humor can be extremely serious, both in that its use can be, and frequently is, inherently dangerous, and in that its effects can be extremely profound. Neria (2022) demonstrates far better than I that both have been the case in Mexico City, in many different ways and over a longer period of time than is often appreciated. The powerful are frequent targets of humor and can't always be expected to take it in stride. As Chenoweth argues in an interview with Hidden Brain (2022) on the use of non-violent means for achieving revolutionary social change, ‘If there's one thing that we know that autocrats don't like, it's people laughing at them’. The converse may also be true: laughing at autocrats – at authorities of all kinds, perhaps – seems to be a cherished source of joy and satisfaction across space and time. This is, indeed, one of humor's important ‘unifying’ functions, though Neria (2022) warns (via Benton) that ‘humor alone will not mobilize anyone’. As the commentators note and as persons like Zelensky and Egypt's Bassem Youssef abundantly demonstrate, humor is a potent and consequential political force in the contemporary world and quite worthy of serious attention from human geography.

Geography matters

On the other hand, Fluri argues that humor's analysis need not be quite so serious, or at least not in quite the way I argue in ‘Deadly Serious’. As Kirby (2022) rightly notes, wading through the diverse experiences and interpretations of moments like that of Lidia's performance – the third example I explore in that article – brings us up against the limits of existing theories of humor, an endless source of debate from the canonical to the apocryphal. ‘Benign violation theory’ (BVT, see McGraw and Warner, 2014; Warren and McGraw, 2016), as Kirby argues, is indeed useful for asking and answering questions in and about these highly ambiguous and contested situations, most especially why some find them funny and some don't and why some consider this or that to be expressions of humor – funny or not as the case may be – while others do not. As Lidia's case and the various reactions to my interpretation of it continue to demonstrate, however, even the relational flexibility of BVT can carry us little further analytically than we are willing to carry ourselves. After all, mine (the graduate student ethnographer in the room at the time and the junior academic geographer reflecting on the situation some years later) is the version of the story that is printed in the pages of this journal, with all the complications I bring to its recording and reconstruction. BVT encourages the analyst to focus on diversity in the reception of a humorous gesture, but to be of much critical utility this analysis must also be turned upon the analyst, who inevitably forms a privileged part of the peculiar ‘universality’ (Neria, 2022) of any humorous situation. Ethnography offers special advantages in this regard, as continuous contact and exchange with differently-positioned persons can – as it so frequently and fortunately has done in my own work – afford the analyst many opportunities to confront the limitations of their own positionality. This, too, is a danger of stepping into the analysis of humor; the singularity of one's own relationship with the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2010) makes it so very easy to get it all wrong, and the shifting plurality of others we are hopeless to represent makes it practically impossible to get it all right. If humor is to take on the kind of significance that I and others argue it should as a concern of human geography, the socio-political cartography of the situation and the position of the analyst within it must be approached, somewhat ironically, with serious care.

As Fluri (2022) contends, then, efforts to ‘agree upon a set of expected theoretical tools for analysis’, and certainly the establishment of an overarching theory of humor's spatiality, are likely to be quite violent and destructive endeavors in important ways, most especially by ‘limit[ing] our understanding of humor's spontaneity, incongruities, and happenstance-ness’. Instead, Fluri argues, ‘to effectively examine humor we must be open to a diversity of approaches that may themselves be spatially, socially, and politically contingent’. Much as Mitchell (1995) famously argues of culture, efforts to understand and contend with the power dynamics rooted in and exercised through humor must avoid attribution of a specific ontology to humor – an ‘impatience’ in my own discussion that Kirby (2022) is quite right to point out. Dodds (2022, original emphasis) likewise provides helpful notes on holding humor's potentialities in tension, both taking seriously ‘how and why such things might make some sense in the first place’ and ‘the cultivation of the less-than-sensible’ or ‘the creative potential of the “nonsensical”’.

As Neria (2022) explains, ‘humor constructs its own universality, always linked to the reality to which the phenomenon belongs’. In other words, context (e.g., geography) matters. So too does Crossa argue that ‘[h]umor must be appreciated beyond an analysis of intentionality and valued as practices imbricated in the spatialities of quotidian social relations’; I couldn't agree more. It is for precisely this reason that the study of humor as a matter of geography, politics, and everyday life must also be an intersectional undertaking, as several commentators also suggest in various ways. Lidia's humorous gesture is my favorite of the three examples I explore in ‘Deadly Serious’, in part because I myself have attached such strong feelings to that moment. These feelings were from the first and continue to be extremely muddled, and have pushed me to interrogate the moment further in the days, weeks, and years that have now since passed, often collaboratively. People who were there experienced and understood this moment quite differently, as have many with whom I’ve since shared the story and my own analysis of it (including, through this forum, the commentators). That questions and disagreements should persist and provoke as they do recommends this terrain as especially generative, if especially dangerous (for all sorts of analytical and political reasons). As Neria (2022) highlights (via Orwell and Davison), ‘every joke is a tiny revolution’. Likewise, Fluri (2022) rightly suggests that Lidia's behavior can be read as ‘an act that highlights the spatial in-between of the activity assigned to that place … and the reconfiguration of place that she transgressively inhabited by way of her response’. In the moments and spaces of profound uncertainty and ambiguity generated by humor, the seams of the social are revealed and renegotiated. I argue that this is precisely what makes them so worthy of our curiosity and our attention. Whether such conjunctures or ‘situations’ (to borrow from Debord 1994[1967]) can be turned toward emancipatory politics, as Crossa (2022) asks, or to some other among limitless possibilities, is a question of potential. The intimately related – indeed, I argue co-constitutive – questions of how we understand and pursue these moments are, rather, questions of perspective.

Ammunition, not a ride

The blistering retort, ‘I need ammunition, not a ride’ now widely attributed to Zelensky lends a certain perspective to the pursuit of humor as a topic and a practice of human geography. Bending the statement's seeming intentions, I am here interested in humor's use as a means to distinct ends, and to the great deal of work the commentators insist is yet to be done in understanding and refining this utility. For all the reasons mentioned and unmentioned in this forum, humor is best approached as a tool or technique of explosive, unpredictable, and not-especially-pacific potential (cf. ‘ammunition’), rather than a reliable or even stable path to any particular destination (i.e. ‘a ride’). Fortunately, an emergent literature in geography, including this forum, provides some guidance on generative and responsible use, analytical and otherwise.

Working with humor should encourage the richest forms of collaboration, as its multivalence, inconstancy, and hazardous potential require the consensual construction and careful maintenance of specific kinds of intimacy and shared understanding. This is dangerous work, and in its pursuit humor must not be used – as it so often is – as an end in itself, as its own justification, nor as an infinitely-flexible cloak of deniability for harmful attitudes and behaviors, regardless of intentions. As Neria (2022) states plainly, ‘The phrase “I’m just joking” is no longer valid’. Working collaboratively with partners, participants, communities, etc., should help us to better navigate and mitigate the inevitable pitfalls attending to humor's many dangers. Listening to others can also help us not only to see our own and others’ limitations and errors more clearly, but also to better judge when to be still or to act; from the practice of ‘unlaughter’ (see Dodds and Kirby, 2013) or the adamant refusal of the abuse-justifying logic of ‘locker room talk’ to case selection and other considerations of research design and practice taken on with reflexive normativity (i.e. which, when, where, why, how, whose/by whom, and even whether humor is worthy of investigation and amplification).

Relatedly, humor can act as a kind of ‘accent’ (see Caldeira, 2000, 2017), so much the more so given the intrinsic contextual and social linkages noted above. Much as it can in the practice of everyday life, analyzing and theorizing through humor can help us to see things differently. In ‘Deadly Serious’, I argue that this lens refracts the empirical and theoretical landscapes of urban geopolitics in several important ways, opening up new questions and angles of approach. Crossa (2022) highlights two of these: ‘First, the value of geopolitical research to develop an agenda that incorporates the political at the city scale. Second, the need for urban geopolitics to think about urban transformations as lived experiences at the scale of everyday life’. This potential to shift, distort, and unsettle perspectives and paradigms in ways that cannot be easily anticipated nor replicated by other means is something I hope this forum encourages geographers and others to continue to enthusiastically embrace.