An Exploration of Writing Education for a Critical Sense of Humor a Dissertat

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University of Nevada, Reno

Pedagogy of the Amused: An Exploration of Writing Education for a Critical Sense of Humor

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

Luke E. Kingery

Dr. Catherine J. Chaput/Dissertation Advisor

May 2019

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

We recommend that the dissertation prepared under our supervision by

Entitled

be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

, Advisor

, Committee Member

, Comm ittee Member

, Committee Member

, Graduate School Representative

David W. Zeh, Ph.D., Dean, Graduate School

Abstract

While scholars have been largely optimistic about the role of humor as a critical public pedagogy that generates emancipatory spaces from which students can recognize social injustice and re-envision a more equitable society, I argue that the distance humor generates can be used to emancipate people from empathic responses that would otherwise motivate action. I offer three cases that serve as examples of how critical humor is a neutral rhetoric that can serve nefarious ends as easily as critical: stand-up comedy that makes fun of activists, trolls who use disparaging humor to bolster and protect their privileged identities, and conspiracy theorist news outlets that use satirical elements to generate credibility. Finally, I offer an argument for bringing the study of the sense of humor into the composition classroom as a way of braiding together the prominent pedagogical approaches to composition of expressivism, social constructivism, critical theory, and posthumanism.

Dedication

This is for Dara who always reminds me Birdie who always listens Carlos who knows about my website Currie who always takes my calls Carley who always tells the truth And Cori who flies free

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Emancipation from Empathy: The Problem with Humor as a Critical Public

Pedagogy…1

Chapter 2: Making Fun of Making a Difference: George Carlin’s Humor and

Spectatorship Advocacy…29

Chapter 3: Transcending the Troll: Rhetorical Identification, Positive Distinctiveness, and

Transcendence…60

Chapter 4: Incredibly Credible Liars: Satirical News and Ethos

in the Infowar…95

Chapter 5: Exploring the Sense of Humor: The Critical Classroom as a Space for Critical

Public Pedagogical Inquiry…128

Works Cited…160

Chapter 1

Emancipation from Empathy: The Problem with Humor as a Critical Public Pedagogy

Laughing at the pain and suffering in the world is not the best medicine. At best, it is an anesthetic—it may lessen the pain caused by the symptoms, but it does not address the root cause of them. Climate change is destroying the planet, obscene wealth inequality has ushered in a new gilded age, money in politics has fully corrupted the systems of government, the United States government has engaged in the internment of children separated from their families for seeking asylum—late-night comedy hosts skewer these issues and the people behind them, but things continue on unabated. We not only laugh at our problems, but we laugh at those who have the audacity to try to solve these problems as being dreamers out of touch with reality. This laughter does make us feel better. It offers a momentary reprieve from the stress, frustration, and grief these issues cause, and that is good. It is needed and necessary. However, as a form of public pedagogy this humor also teaches us to believe in and accept a certain representation of reality—a reality that seems inevitable and unavoidable. Laughing at our problems minimizes our perception of their severity, but it also persuades us to accept our problems as too large to deal with. Humor does have the potential to shake us free from this reality, but it is important to know the difference between humor that incarcerates and humor that emancipates—this answer lies in the study of public pedagogy.

The mission of critical pedagogy is to help students become aware of the ways in which schooling has taught them to serve their oppressors. Paulo Freire is the father of the modern turn towards a critical pedagogy, and scholars such as Andrea Darder, Peter

McLaren, Henry A. Giroux, Stanley Aronowitz, and Ira Shor took up this mantle in the 2

1980s and 1990s to open students’ eyes to the forces that compel them and shape them in the image of injustices that came before. For composition scholars, the goal is to teach writing, but the question is always what students should write about: literature, scholarship, themselves. Ira Shor argued in When Students have Power that the content of the composition classroom should be the university and education itself—he wanted to give the power back to students in order to shirk the fetters of the traditional teacher- student power dynamic that had been inhibiting new kinds of learning. Peter Elbow advocated for ways to revolutionize the classroom by circumventing the traditional power dynamic between teachers and students by centralizing student experience. He and others such as Ken Macrorie and Donald Murray, believed that by writing about their own experiences, students would become more skillful writers enabling them to participate more fully in professional and academic discourses. David Bartholomae felt that this approach neglected the social element of identity and argued that students should practice and reinvent the conventions of academic study—In this way students would be encouraged to take risks and fail as opposed to writing safely about their own experiences. It is in this process of risk-taking that Bartholomae asserted would lead to learning and growth. All of these scholars sought to live up to the responsibilities of preparing students for professional and academic writing.

As part of the so-called social turn of the 1980s and 1990s many scholars argued that the content of the composition classroom should be the culture they come from.

Scholars such as Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Diana George, and John Trimbur to name a few argued that as part of a move away from process approaches to writing instruction, teachers should help students to recognize the hegemonic forces of culture so 3 that the composition classroom might be more equitable and encourage students to be more aware of their own socially constructed identities. Out of this turn toward culture studies in combination with critical approaches that studied how the education system works to reproduce power comes the theory of public pedagogy. In this sense, public pedagogy is the study of cultural forces as pedagogical—not to be confused with the kind of public pedagogy advocated for by Ashley J. Holmes which asks students to engage in public forms of writing. For Giroux, public pedagogy is the notion that students learn most of what they know outside of the classroom, and these cultural forces should be studied as pedagogical, so that scholars can better understand how and what culture teaches. This is where I pick up the thread of the conversation and propose that humor is a fertile site for exploring public pedagogy and for bringing this study into the composition classroom. The first-year writing class has goals that align with the study of humor—evaluating sources of information, writing in various modes, and developing a critical sense of societal norms. However, without bring this study into the classroom, citizens would be left at its mercy.

Culture is not designed intentionally. In Pierre Bourdieu’s words, culture is better understood as a habitus that is made up of “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations… without in any way being the product of obedience to rules… or the product of an orchestrating conductor” (72). Thus, Giroux suggests that the study of public pedagogy is the study of how this habitus habituates us. Students practice consuming culture and develop a guiding model of citizenship that persuades them of certain versions of reality. The 4 question for scholars who study humor as a public pedagogy is how humor produces habits of mind that condition people to act and/or accept the current iteration of the habitus. Largely, they have been optimistic that this sort of humorous/educational entertainment is encouraging people to work for change and participate in deliberative democracy. All tend to agree that humor, because it tends to highlight some social norm and then expose an incongruity, has the potential to create distance and space from which audiences can question and reconceive their perceptions of reality.

Understanding culture as pedagogy has enabled scholars to articulate how culture promotes certain versions of society—often these versions of society support the reigning system of neoliberal capitalism in which the free market determines all morality

(Giroux). On the other hand, scholars such as bell hooks, Lawrence Grossberg, and

Giroux, have theorized that artists and performers can create art and culture that is critical of and challenges the dominant public pedagogy. While there are various modes through which this occurs, scholars have begun to focus on how humor, satire, and pranks can serve the function of creating emancipatory spaces—where audiences can step outside of their a priori belief systems to look back and reflect from a new vantage point (Rossing

2016; Harold 2004; Haugerud 2012: McCosker 2014; Achter 2008; Sandlin and Milam

2008; McClennen and Maisel 2014). From this space, citizens can foster a critical consciousness and awareness of harmful hegemonies such as racism and white privilege

(Rossing 2015), neoliberalism, advertising and consumerism (Harold 2004; Sandlin and

Milam 2008), and wealth inequality (Haugerud 2012). Rather than looking to traditional news, scholars have suggested that satirical news outlets are more credible and use strategies that may be rescuing the state of democracy (McClennen and Maisel 2014; 5

Baym 2009; Achter 2008). These studies have optimistically suggested that in general humor, because of its ability to denaturalize common cultural beliefs and lay bare production and dissemination of hegemony, serves as a powerful and unique form of critical public pedagogy.

The main problem with assuming this emancipatory and critical power exists within humor is that these studies fail to account for the emotional distance and potential apathy that often results due to the way in which humor encourages amusement as opposed to other emotional reactions. In other words, being amused and entertained by problems does not encourage audiences to become practically engaged. Within the fields of humor studies and psychology, scholars explain that the evolutionary value, purpose, and cause of humor often problematizes humor’s emancipatory potential. Specifically, humor desensitizes people to social violations (Warren and McGraw 2010), increases feelings of superiority of one group identity over another (Zillman 2000; Ferguson and

Ford 2008), and may promote ideas meant to be critiqued making it difficult to distinguish sincere from ironic messages (Morreall 2010; Lewis 2006). This vein of research is relatively untapped in critical pedagogy scholarship and studying the psychological and cognitive functions of humor complicates our understanding of humor’s ability to function as a critical public pedagogy beyond its argumentative value.

Even though humor denaturalizes problems and hypocrisies in society in helpful ways, it also may be lessening the passion and empathy that drives society to work to address societal issues in constructive ways.

This dissertation provides insight into humor’s value as a critical public pedagogy by explaining how studies in the fields of humor studies and psychology help complicate 6 our understanding of how humor simultaneously enlightens and desensitizes humanity in the face of dire circumstances. Furthermore, I argue that bringing humor into the first- year writing classroom is a way to raise students’ awareness of how humor affects them and also enable them to be more savvy consumers and producers of humorous texts. In the following sections, I will trace the history of critical pedagogy’s origin. Building on this history, I will show how public pedagogy and critical public pedagogy grow out of the tradition of critical pedagogy. Next, I show that humor’s amusing qualities complicate its potency as a critical public pedagogy because the same distance that enables audiences to reevaluate societal arrangements might also serve to provide an emotional distance from issues which minimize empathy and the potential for action. Finally, I explore how psychological humor studies complement our understanding of how humor creates a space for resistance and reinforces existing power structures. There is critical value in humor as critical public pedagogy, but only if we can better understand how it provokes as well as pacifies audiences. Developing that understanding will take more than simply consuming humor, people will be better equipped to work for change if they understand how and why they sense humor, and they can learn this in the rhetoric and writing classroom.

Educating for a Critical Democracy

To ground this discussion, it is necessary to trace the evolving mission of critical pedagogy that leads to the study of public pedagogy. John Dewey, in the early twentieth century, recognized that education is the means through which future citizens are initiated into the nature of democratic institutions. Dewey writes that what a species “must have in common in order to form a community or society are claims, beliefs, aspirations, 7 knowledge—a common understanding—like-mindedness as sociologists say” (5). Of course, with “like-mindedness” and “participation in common understanding that secures similar emotional and intellectual dispositions” comes the replication of harmful cultural and social norms like racism and sexism (5). Anticipating this problem, Dewey cautions that “instead of reproducing current habits,” an ideal education should see that “better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an improvement on [our] own” (93). While Dewey’s vision of education promotes the idea that the educated within a democracy should improve the democracy itself, scholars like Paulo Freire recognized that educators must focus directly on how educational practices risk reproducing classism, racism, and sexism when teachers act as gatekeepers who pass on culture and knowledge without encouraging its critical evaluation.

In order to avoid the propensity toward corporate and cultural gatekeeping and foster more inclusive educational practices, Freire developed a dialogic mode of literacy education working with impoverished Brazilian workers to help them use their education to challenge power. In other words, Freire was interested in tapping into the knowledge and lived-experience that students brought to the classroom to encourage students to become aware of the forces, political, commercial, and educational, that oppress them so that they might resist the uncritical reproduction of existing power structures. Freire asserted that while Dewey’s conception of “schooling” was intended to produce a democratically active citizenry, it is also potentially a form of “social control” that reproduces inequalities in class, race, and gender—hegemonic forces masquerading as a priori truths (McLaren 169). By promoting educational praxes that avoid a banking mode in which teachers transfer knowledge—passed down from existing power structures—to 8 students, this model assumes that the knowledge students already have is of no value.

This assumption guarantees that education will reproduce existing social problems uncritically, because in the banking mode all knowledge emanates from those in power.

However, Freire saw that student knowledge is the key to ensuring that the next generation of educated citizens will improve the current society by contributing to the creation of knowledge and meaning. Freire’s work laid the groundwork for modern conceptions of critical pedagogy as a problem-posing pedagogical strategy that incorporates students’ knowledge and experience into the subject matter of the classroom.

Freire’s work has influenced various educational fields as evidenced in the scholarship of

Peter McLaren, Henry A. Giroux, and Ira Shor all of whom have influenced the field of rhetoric, composition, and writing instruction.

Freire’s disciples conceive of critical pedagogy as a process through which practice and theory complement each other to educate democratically active citizens in ways that encourage them to identify and resist the forces of hegemony and ideology that reproduce oppression and suppress movements for progressive change. McLaren explains that such critical pedagogy does not “constitute a homogenous set of ideas” (163).

Instead, “It is more accurate to say that critical theorists are united in their objectives: to empower the powerless and transform existing social inequalities and injustices”

(McLaren 164). In order to achieve these common objectives, Shor asserts that “The notion of praxis—reflective action—works off the difference between theorizing practice and theorizing theory. Consider the phrase ‘theorizing practice’ and how it can be reversed to ‘practicing theory.’ This is what praxis meant to Freire: a close relationship between words and action, between the symbolic and the concrete” (emphasis in original 9

15). Educators must pay attention to how the actions we take in the classroom reflect the words we use to describe what we hope to accomplish. The unifying goal of this reciprocation between practice and theory is student/citizen-empowerment and critical consciousness-building. This is why it is so important to present students with the problems they face in their own lives and allow for them to advocate for themselves, as opposed to “banking” modes of education that stipulate appropriate and valuable knowledge/action. In addition to being a top-down approach to education, the banking mode situates teachers as gatekeepers who ensure that the students leaving their classrooms are capable of being a part of a pliable workforce, who as George Carlin so eloquently pointed out “are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it” (George Carlin - American

Dream HD). Critical pedagogues reject this structure and work to ensure that the citizenry can do more than “passively” accept their increasingly inequitable situation.

Working against such privileging, the hope of the critical pedagogue is to engage in dialogue within the classroom that makes evident larger public pedagogies, and cultural forms and hegemonic ideology are two integral concepts for public pedagogy.

McLaren explains how hegemonic ideologies, defined as “the production and representation of ideas, values, and beliefs and the manner in which they are expressed and lived out by both individuals and groups,” work to educate citizens (emphasis in original 180). Hegemonic ideologies are conveyed, spread, and maintained inside and outside of schools through cultural forms, which are various rhetorical texts that convey 10 culture—these cultural forms are the curricula of public pedagogy and they are often taken for granted by citizens and consumers as the natural extensions of social and communal life—they go unquestioned (McLaren 180). These institutions and artifacts include but are not limited to religious institutions and texts, media news outlets, and political theater, such as public debates, but likely the most ubiquitous and unquestioned is popular entertainment (movies, music, comedy, and other narrative based texts).

Traditionally, the goal of critical pedagogy is to use the classroom as a site in which problem-posing can make evident the pedagogical and symbolic nature of these institutions so that students can both see the hegemonic ideologies that structure their worldviews and use that awareness to work toward a more inclusive and equitable society.

Cultural forms rely heavily on language to construct the symbols that reinforce hegemonic ideologies, and this explains why critical pedagogy has been influential in the field of composition since the 1980s. In other words, scholars of composition came to believe that being more aware of the language used to construct cultural forms, students would become more aware of their own worldviews—and awareness leads to the agency needed to willfully change those worldviews. Composition scholars recognized that the classroom is inevitably ideological and that embracing our own biases leads to the possibility for honest dialogues in the classroom between subjectivities (Berlin 1988).

Theorizing these dialogical spaces as contact zones, Bizzell argued that the writing classroom is a space in which students practice critical citizenship using language to advocate for change (Bizzell 1996). Employing a version of contact zone, problem- posing pedagogy, Shor put the university itself and the composition classroom at the 11 center of his writing pedagogy, asking students to grapple with the purpose and value of the composition course itself. This strategy helped students make connections between the work they did in his class and how they might use those skills to succeed and improve society outside the classroom. Shor writes that “no pedagogy is autonomous of society because every pedagogy—not just my critical one—is dependent on the larger social conditions enveloping every learning process” (181). Because no pedagogy can exist outside of reality, no pedagogy can be objective, thus, teachers must navigate various subjectivities just as all citizens must do outside the classroom. While studying the university is important for fostering a critical learning environment and bettering the educational system, there has been an important turn toward studying the pedagogical experiences that students encounter outside the classroom.

Building on the work of scholars who have brought various rhetorical, popular culture artifacts into the writing classroom for analysis, I argue, in line with Giroux’s call to view popular culture as pedagogical (as a public pedagogy), that scholars must continue to delve deeper for ourselves into the pedagogical nature of culture and how this public pedagogy is responsible for defining and representing certain versions of reality.

In other words, critical scholarship needs to go further in exploring how popular culture is not only a symbolic system of argument and persuasion, but we need to study how symbolic systems serve as models of citizenship even when they do not seem to be inherently educational or persuasive. The difference between having students analyze cultural forms as rhetorical texts and understanding how those texts are pedagogical is slight but significant. Viewing culture as a form of pedagogy reveals that it is more powerful than direct forms of education and schooling in which the student has an 12 awareness of the fact that they are being educated. Cultural forms masquerade as common sense grounded in a priori reality, and questioning these forms seems to many people tantamount to questioning observable reality. Therefore, students can come to understand that cultural artifacts are not simply arguing a point but are habituating and naturalizing ways of being that are amenable to existing power structures.

Not only has this shift towards viewing cultural forms as public pedagogy revealed how texts normalize certain ways of being, but this shift has also revealed that cultural forms have the power to resist normalization as well. Scholars identify such texts as critical public pedagogies, which are texts that encourage awareness and resistance to hegemonic ideologies and possibly create emancipatory spaces for questioning the status quo. Specifically, scholars have recently looked to sites of humorous critique and satirical activism or “culture jamming,” which is a form of satirical, parodic, or pranking activism, as spaces in which counter-hegemonic, emancipatory forces may be at work.

Critical Public Pedagogy as Culture Jamming

Whereas critical studies of cultural forms as pedagogy demonstrate that popular culture texts can both reinforce and critique existing power structures, satire, humor, and pranking (pranktivism), sometimes referred to as culture jamming, have begun to receive attention as texts that work to denaturalize oppressive societal norms. Education scholars

Jenifer A. Sandlin and Jennifer L. Milam argue that “culture jamming operates as a potentially powerful pedagogy through the ways in which it seeks to foster participatory cultural production, engages with the learner and the ‘teacher’ corporeally, and aims to foster the creation of a community politic” (330), while communication studies rhetorician Jonathon P. Rossing asserts that the critical public pedagogies should 13

“animate social transformation” (4). Critical public pedagogy crafts interactions between text and audience that encourage new ways of seeing the world and may motivate action for change. From this perspective, studying how popular culture performs as a critical public pedagogy constitutes 1) locating the various texts that inform and model citizenship as a rejection and critique of existing power structures and 2) viewing those texts alongside the actions and reactions of citizens who internalize those models. In addition, scholars must work to understand how these texts function rhetorically to create spaces from which audiences can re-envision their place and role in maintaining existing power structures.

Central to the distinction between critical public pedagogy and non-critical public pedagogy is how critical texts create transitional or emancipatory spaces in which audiences can gain the necessary distance to see and confront their own role in constructing an inequitable society. While the term emancipation has a scholastic history, within the study of critical public pedagogy, it refers to a rhetorical space in which audiences are freed from their normative views of social hierarchy and the arrangement of existing power to perceive power structures as arbitrary and socially constructed. From this rhetorical space, they can find a more critical viewpoint that transcends their own subjectivity. In other words, while public pedagogy presents economic, social, and political arrangements as the consequence of some natural force that exists and acts independently of humanity, critical public pedagogy seeks to free audiences from their own subjectivity so that they become aware of the constructed, corrupted, and malleable state of power. Furthermore, critical public pedagogy is at its best when texts present symbols that encourage audiences to reconstruct meanings for themselves. 14

When an audience encounters a text that invites them to bring their own faculties of common sense to bear in achieving emancipation from their a priori beliefs, the discovery is their own and more persuasive than if they were simply told what to believe.

In concrete terms, humorous protests and critiques often employ rhetorical tactics that shock, confuse, or defy standard communicative conventions so that audiences are forced to engage the message on a deeper level than simple comprehension. For instance,

Adbusters is a magazine that produces ads, which they call “subvertisements” because they are intended to subvert real ads through satirical parody. As an example of how critical public pedagogy can jolt audiences into introspection, Sandlin and Milam analyze

Adbusters magazine to show how they use common forms in surprising ways to cause proverbial double-takes—this double-take is indicative of what happens when audiences encounter texts that require deeper reflection to comprehend. Sandlin and Milam analyze an ad that at first glance looks like a generic perfume advertisement. The black and white image depicts a thin, topless woman with her hunched over, rib-defined back facing the camera, and the print reads: “obsession.” At first glance, this looks like a common ad, but upon closer examination, we can see that the woman is leaning over a barely visible toilet. This subvertisment looks like a generic perfume ad, but it requires a double take for the audience to realize that it offers a critique the advertising industry which often promotes unhealthy versions of beauty. Once the critique is evident, the word

“obsession” takes on a grave new meaning—specifically that this woman’s obsession with her body and image has led her to purge. This is a salient example of how critical public pedagogy encourages a sort of double-vision in which the audience’s vision 15 oscillates between an accepted social norm, in this case beauty standards, and a challenge of that social norm.

One problem with these critiques, in which the critique is artfully ambiguous, is that audiences could miss the intended critique, fail to enter an emancipatory space, and simply accept the message as non-ironic. Satire is particularly susceptible to this sort of confusion as it relies on mimesis and parody. This potential confusion may undercut these texts’ value as a social critique. For example, rhetorician Christine Harold cites another Adbusters subvertisment for what they called Blackspot tennis shoes. The ad featured an image of a shoe that had no logo and text that stated, “Phil Knight had a dream. He’d sell shoes. He’d sell dreams. He’d get rich. He’d use sweatshops if he had to. Then along came the new shoe. Plain. Simple. Cheap. Fair. Designed for only one thing. Kicking Phil’s ass. The Unswoosher” (189). This subvertisment was intended to be a critique of Nike’s labor exploitation, but rather than encourage critical thinking and awareness of neoliberal corruption, the ad became what it sought to critique when “over

200 independent shoe stores and 4000 individuals placed orders for the shoes, and

Blackspot was featured in The New York Times Magazine’s special ‘Year in Ideas’ issue as one of the ‘best ideas of 2003’” (190). This illustrates how parody protests risk becoming the thing they parody. If the goal was to critique a capitalist system that places profit above all other ethical considerations, then it is problematic that people wanted to participate in the protest by buying the shoes. It is a catch 22, because the critique of capitalism becomes just one more option vying for a profit share of the free market.

Harold cites this as a potential setback for parody approaches to critique. Jody C.

Baumgartner, a communication studies scholar, notes this same problem with audiences 16 sometimes missing The Colbert Report’s critique of right-wing punditry and understanding his messages as straight-forward and literal. While parody and irony do risk being taken literally due to their inherent ambiguity, Harold asserts that this ambiguity can also be an asset that strengthens the power of the critique when audiences do get the joke. Pranking rhetoric also risks being misinterpreted due to its inherent ambiguity, however, it utilizes the disequilibrium function in order to generate the emancipatory space generated by humor, and it encourages audiences to come to their own conclusion about what the humor means. It embodies the critical practice of leveraging the knowledge of the audience as opposed to teaching through a banking model telling people what they should know.

The ambiguity of humorous pranking rhetoric throws audiences into confusion and disequilibrium intentionally, which creates an opportunity for audiences to think through their confusion and ultimately discover the point behind the humor as though it was their own realization. Due to this characteristic, Harold asserts that culture jammers who employ pranking rhetoric are ultimately engaging in an effective critical public pedagogical practice. Protests that employ pranking rhetoric are adept at disrupting norms that are taken for granted by employing familiar forms, while also distorting and reconfiguring them in thoughtful ways. Harold explains that:

Prank, in this sense, is an augmentation of dominant modes of

communication that interrupts their conventional patterns… a prank is a

wrinkle, or a fold. Like a fold, a prank can render a qualitative change by

turning and doubling a material or text. This qualitative change is 17

produced not through the addition of novelty, but through reconfiguration

of the object itself (196).

In this sense, pranking serves as a critical public pedagogy because it seeks to make the familiar unfamiliar. It forces audiences to think about social norms through the process of breaking those norms in ways that reorganize the norms in unexpected and unconventional ways. Parody also attempts to do this, but because it mimics that which it seeks to critique, it is more likely that audiences can miss the critique and instead mistake the parody for the real. Pranking repurposes social norms to promote critical consciousness within citizens.

The study of humor as a form of critical public pedagogy represents an important moment in the evolution of critical pedagogy, because the pranktivists and culture jammers are citizens who use what they know to rebel against existing power structures.

However, it is important that scholars who study critical public pedagogy recognize the difference between cultural pranksters/jammers/trolls and parodists who often uncritically reenact the very element of society they intend to critique and those who successfully critique their intended targets. Not only do these messages risk being misinterpreted, it is also possible that critical public pedagogy, particularly that which is humorous, not only emancipates audiences from their subject positions in relation to social norms, but also emancipates audiences from their practical concerns for challenging these social norms because of the emotional distance that humor generates.

The Limits of Humorous Texts as Effective Critical Public Pedagogy

Viewing humorous texts as both a form of critical public pedagogy as well as a form of entertainment, raises questions about the efficacy of their critiques and the 18 possibility that the critique may be undercut by their entertainment value. It may be that these texts must first entertain, and any critique they offer becomes an incidental, second tier effect. This does not necessarily negate their value as critique, but it does raise questions about the degree to which humorous, amusing texts can inspire action. Many scholars have begun to explore various sites where humorous texts may be better at creating emancipatory spaces. Scholars have studied the influence of humorous, satirical news (Jones and Geoffrey; Baumgartner; Achter; Day; McClennen and Maisel), while others have looked to stand-up comedy in terms of its critical questioning (Rossing) and philosophical value (Morreall). Additionally, as mentioned above, scholars have looked directly at how humor has been employed in activist endeavors (Haugerud, Harold,

Sandlin and Milam) as well as its influence in the political arena (Mascha). While I agree that these forms of humorous cultural critique offer some critical value, they are neutral tools, and just as easily as they can critique power, they can be used to dull the anger and unrest of the masses—protecting power in effect.

The very emancipation from social constructed norms and conventions that humor encourages—the ability to gain enough distance from an issue to be amused by it—can lead to a cathartic apathy in which the emotions that drive action are lessened and replaced by amusement. In contrast to the common notion that stress is to be avoided at all costs, humor theorist Paul Lewis argues that “in some situations reducing stress is harmful, that relaxing about a given subject or problem is, even in the context of a stress- ridden culture, is not always wise” (14). He goes on to explain that “If the problems are real (rather than imagined), humor can support denial and evasion, drawing observers…away from urgent issues by enticing them to enjoy a little laugh about a 19 subject and dismiss it from consciousness” (15). In other words, a momentary release from the anger, stress, and passion associated with the drive for social justice enables the citizens to more readily endure social problems rather than encourage them to work for change. Humor scholar John Morreall explains that like philosophy, comedy— specifically stand-up comedy—questions and reflects upon “everyday experiences” from a “detached” standpoint that allows the audience to see the familiar as unfamiliar (127).

However, this practice does not necessarily lead to critical awareness of these social familiarities. Rather, it is more likely that “Laughter’s function is to put the ridiculed person outside the group, allowing those laughing to maintain their own noble conception of what it is to be human” (Morreall 132). While Morreall is specifically focused on humor that disparages a certain person, this concept also applies to problems that society faces. Joking about death, cancer, climate change, or prejudice diminishes those problems and allows humans to escape them momentarily. Rather than engaging audiences in radical critique, humor offers a detached view of the world that may help audiences think about serious issues but may also discourage them from feeling strongly about the issues they should feel strongly about.

Consequently, the ambiguity and artfulness of critical humor can contribute to various uncritical interpretations. For example, humor that is critical of racism is often cited as an example of humor’s critical potential. However, even Dave Chappelle, who

Rossing champions as a comedian who uses emancipatory racial humor to powerful effect, left his iconic show and a $50 million contract because he recognized the thin line between critique and capitulation. A 2005 article in Time magazine describes how the last 20 sketch Chappelle worked on for Comedy Central made him feel as if the sketch did more to further racism than to critique it:

The black pixie—played by Chappelle—wears blackface and tries to

convince blacks to act in stereotypical ways. Chappelle thought the sketch

was funny, the kind of thing his friends would laugh at. But at the taping,

one spectator, a white man, laughed particularly loud and long. His

laughter struck Chappelle as wrong, and he wondered if the new season of

his show had gone from sending up stereotypes to merely reinforcing

them. "When he laughed, it made me uncomfortable," says Chappelle. "As

a matter of fact, that was the last thing I shot before I told myself I gotta

take a f______time out after this. Because my head almost exploded."

(Farley n.p.)

Chappelle intended his comedic representation of how black people often feel as though they are performing or negating stereotypes with their every action to offer comfort to those who experience these feelings and awareness to those who don’t, however, in practice he suspected that white audiences unaware of the minority experience of stereotypes were laughing at him—not with him. Rather than identifying with the pain of this experience, Chappelle felt that audiences were more likely to identify with the stereotypes themselves and miss the point of the critique. Furthermore, even if audiences did experience the best-case scenario in which the humor creates an emancipatory space from which an audience can see the absurdity of racial stereotypes—the experience of amusement and emancipation can generate relief and catharsis. This raises questions 21 about the degree to which humor can serve as a meaningful critique that encourages people to change the society they live in.

A Funny Idea for a Writing Course

There is an inextricable link between humor, language, and psychology—namely that amusement can generate psychological distance from one’s worries and concerns, but also from one’s empathy and compassion. In order for students, citizens, and rhetoricians to fully grasp critical humor, critical pedagogues must understand the psychological processes that comprise an individual’s sense of humor. The critical value of humor or lack thereof is directly related to the effects of finding something funny, which stems from psychological as well as rhetorical factors. Psychological research suggests that there is a link between an individual’s socially constructed identity and an individual’s sense of humor (Ferguson and Ford). In addition, the sense of humor is directly related to and may reveal with study how that identity is constructed. Being amused is dependent upon one’s disposition and interrogating why something strikes an individual as funny can reveal that disposition.

It is important that humorous instances of critical public pedagogy be brought into the writing classroom. Studying how these texts function as critical public pedagogies can help students understand how humor shapes their perceptions and connects them to the world outside and to each other. A study of the sense of humor brings together important elements of various composition pedagogies including tenets of process, social constructionist, cultural studies, critical, and post-humanist pedagogical approaches.

Being aware of how humor distances and/or connects humans and technologies engenders students with the power to influence society as both critical consumers and 22 producers of humor that makes a point. To return to Dewey’s original purpose for educating a democratic citizenry, teaching for democracy requires that we teach students to do more than passively consume public and critical public pedagogy—they must understand how it works if they are to take advantage of the awareness humor offers so that they might participate in making society more inclusive and equitable.

There are two disciplinary threads of inquiry that I propose be a part of a writing classroom that focuses on humor: Psychology and Rhetoric. There may be other disciplines that have a stake in understanding humor, but these two fields are particularly relevant. Rhetoric is not easy to define though many have made the attempt; however,

Charles Bazerman’s definition of rhetoric as “the study of how people use language and other symbols to realize human goals and carry out human activities” explains why rhetoric is fundamental to the study of humor (6). If as Bazerman suggests, “Rhetoric is ultimately a practical study offering people greater control over their symbolic activity,” then it follows that students who understand how symbols coalesce and generate amusement will have “greater control” over how those symbols influence them (6). This emphasis on rhetoric provides students with a critical vocabulary to talk about the structure and symbolic nature of humor. Many scholars are also looking at humor rhetorically, and rhetoric alone fails to fully explain the emotional effects that humor has on individuals, which is why the writing classroom should also explore psychological aspects of humor.

In light of the work of those who have studied critical public pedagogy through the lens of culture jamming, pranking rhetoric, and mainstream comedy, the psychological nature of humor is particularly problematic because it allows for audiences 23 to recognize the critical messages being conveyed and simultaneously laugh at those critiques as a form of entertainment. This laughter discourages emotional engagement, and it minimizes the issues that are joked about. It is true that humor is critical of social norms, and it is also true that humor often provides insights in ways that might be off- putting in other more serious messages. Humor decreases our empathy towards the butts of the jokes we tell, and it allows us to see social contradictions, not as problems that can be improved or even solved, but as absurd paradoxes that can never be reconciled— irrational puzzles that are amusing and confounding but ultimately inevitable. This positioning of social critique precludes democratic improvement of social ills rendering action unnecessary if not impossible.

Two recent and insightful theories that could be brought into the classroom to better understand the impact of humor as a critical public pedagogy are benign violations theory (McGraw and Warren) and the social identity theory of disparagement humor

(Ferguson and Ford). Currently, scholars of critical public pedagogy have not explored these theories, yet they both have important implications regarding how humorous messages are processed and what effects they have on audiences’ emotional attachment to social issues and disparaged targets of jokes. The theory of benign violations suggests that humor and amusement result from recognizing a social violation as both wrong and not wrong (benign) at the same time (McGraw and Warren). In effect, this theory locates humor within the texts’ construction showing that presenting social violations humorously belittles social problems and makes them seem less threatening or logically justified. This ability to construct texts in ways that seem to make social violations benign is a persuasive, rhetorical technique that convinces audiences that the social 24 problem is humorous, and this undermines the potential for strong emotion toward the social problem that was revealed by the violation. The same denaturalization that allows audiences to see critically that which oppresses also offers a certain emotional distance from those problems. The issue for critical educators is how to both reveal hegemonic oppression and maintain an empathic fire that drives the desire for social justice.

Students and scholars would also benefit by exploring how social identity theory could be used to study humor in ways that encourage empathy. Humor psychologists

Mark A. Ferguson and Thomas E. Ford suggest that a form of superiority theory is at work when we laugh at jokes that disparage a given target because jokes that disparage others generate positive distinctiveness about our own social identity. Whether the humor is directed at a specific identity or social problem, disparagement humor diminishes that which is joked about into manageable non-threatening forms. While this may be necessary in certain instances, it is also potentially encouraging apathy and a lack of empathy. Ferguson and Ford explain that “When a group is recognized as superior to a relevant out-group along some valued dimension, it has achieved positive distinctiveness” (296). Through humor that disparages other groups, identity groups enhance their perception of their own social identities by reinforcing the perception of their own superiority over the other (296). Bringing social identity theory to bear on rhetorical studies of emancipatory humor shows how some critical humor not only helps audiences see social problems more clearly, but also emancipates humans from the feelings associated with being human. Humor’s ability to help audiences achieve distance from their own emotion is the central mechanism through which hegemonic forces allow cerebral critiques that generate catharsis that ultimately protect the power structures that 25 benefit from an apathetic citizenry. These kinds of jokes may make us feel better in the face of dire circumstances when feeling worse would be more likely to make people work to be better.

Conclusion

While humor theorists have studied the psychology of humor and rhetoricians have studied whether this humor can be considered critical in its effects, there is a need to examine these two veins of research together under the same microscope. If humor is funny because it gives us emotional distance from the people and societal issues it targets, then it likely undercuts the ability to inspire a critical passion that will result in positive social change. In other words, cold, calculating humor without love and compassion for humanity, the environment, and society, is unlikely to encourage people to work to improve society. If we bring this new found understanding into the writing classroom, we encourage students to know their own sense of humor—this knowledge will help them to use the emotional distance generated by humor to form critique without losing their ability to empathize with the target of the humor.

Humor encourages both critical thinking and a problematic empathy-lacking- apathy that benefits various harmful ideologies because rather than making sacrifices for change, people are convinced that we can laugh and entertain our problems away. John

Morreall quotes Henri Bergson as having claimed that “humor is a ‘momentary anesthesia of the heart’” and he adds “Horace Walpole’s observation that ‘this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel’” (31). One does not have to look far to find examples of how humor and amusement counteracts strong emotion. It is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain anger, sadness, or fear if something funny 26 happens to make us laugh, but anger, sadness, and fear are powerful motivators for change. Unlike other rhetorical forms that seek to persuade audiences to action, humor most often seeks to go no farther beyond persuading the audience to laugh. When a stand- up comedian points out some flaw in societal logic, they do not seek a correction of this flaw, but seek to amuse others through the recognition of the flaw. The goal is not to create strong feeling, but to play with social boundaries and say outrageous things—it is mock-aggression.

The need for social justice is rooted in compassion, love, and empathy for our fellow oppressed people, but laughing at the oppressors may not be the best expression of that love and compassion in terms of working for change. Cornel West writes in

Democracy Matters that:

Divine compassion undergirds the divine love of justice just as human

compassion undergirds the prophetic love of justice. The premier

prophetic language [consists] of cries and tears because human hurt and

misery give rise to visions of justice and deeds of compassion. For the

prophetic tradition, the cries and tears of an oppressed people signify an

alternative to oppression” (214).

While humor does offer a critique in that it helps us to see the chains and bonds that oppress our society, it does more to help us stave off the cries and tears that “give rise to visions of justice and compassion.” As critical pedagogues who deal with the construction of language, we must find a way to help students recognize the critical emancipatory value within humor, but also to hold onto the anger and empathy that will 27 drive them toward acting to change the society they have been momentarily emancipated from.

In the next three chapters, I will provide three cases that complicate our understanding of humor as a critical public pedagogy. Humor is a neutral tool—and the cases I offer all reveal the ways in which humor can be used to critique power or to protect it. These cases contribute to recent discussions of humorous texts as emancipatory critical pedagogy by introducing psychological and rhetorical studies of humor which suggest that humor not only emancipates audiences from social conventions, but also from empathy and compassion which are the core of the human drive for social justice.

This intervention is grounded on the premise that empathy and a love for fellow human beings drives the desire to work for social justice and that humor can insulate us from this love. Based on this foundation, I will show through psychological and rhetorical theories of humor that amusement complicates a humorous text’s value as critical public pedagogy, because it reduces empathy and compassion. When satirical activists make fun of pernicious advertisers who manipulate the public into frenzied consumption, when stand-up comedians make light of societal issues such as police brutality, neoliberal capitalism, and other social ills, when trolls use sadistic humor to attack from right to left and left to right, and when even the news that should not be trusted uses satirical strategies to establish a credible ethos, then society is laughing at its problems rather than dealing with them. These theories of humor and satire first help to explain why the rhetorical value of humor as critical public pedagogy has been overestimated by critical pedagogues. 28

The problem that this dissertation addresses is two-fold: How can critical pedagogues distinguish when humor is a critique of societal problems that generates a useful distance and fosters a reorientation to social norms and critical awareness as opposed to humor that generates apathy, catharsis, and at worst protects harmful hegemonic ideologies? And secondly, how can educators use this understanding to help students become more critical consumers and producers of humorous texts? First, scholars should complement studying the rhetoric of humor with a study of the psychology of humor. Second, as I argue in the final chapter of this dissertation, the writing classroom can be an opportunity for students to explore the psychological and rhetorical aspects of their sense of humor. With this understanding, they will be able to take control of their symbolic experience of humor. They will be more savvy consumers and producers.

Chapter 2

Making Fun of Making a Difference: George Carlin’s Humor and Spectatorship

Advocacy

George Orwell wrote that “A thing is funny when — in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening — it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution” (Funny, but not Vulgar). So, what happens when the content of humor is literally the most frightening, threatening, and offensive elements in society—when these elements are made inoffensive, unthreatening, and unfrightening? Are these threats reduced to “tiny revolutions” do they “upset the established order” in some tangible and permanent way? Many scholars in both rhetorical studies and psychology have grappled with the issue of how humor can promote or deter social change. From the field of psychology, Caleb Warren and Peter McGraw’s theory of benign violations suggests that humor arises when people perceive a social or moral violation as both a violation and as benign or “okay” at the same time. In other words, humor is the practice of making fun of social norms and problems—as Orwell has said, humor is the “debunking” of humanity

(Funny, but not Vulgar). The question for scholars who believe that there is critical power in humor—a power that might assist in raising awareness of social problems like racism, sexism, and general corruption—is to what degree making fun out of moral or social critique might undercut the necessary anger, passion, and even fear that drives people to work for change rather than cope with or accept social problems.

George Carlin is lauded as being a social comedian adept at pointing out the ills of society. He is a modern-day cynic, exile, and parrhesiastes who spoke out against corruption and hypocrisy, but he did not advocate that people should resist the status quo. 30

Rather, he encouraged his audience to use the critical distance his comedy afforded them to check out—to become exiles like him who could watch the “freak show” America has become without feeling as though they have any “stake in the outcome” (BECOME A

SPECTATOR). Because Carlin positions himself as an exile from the human experience who cracks jokes at the expense of humanity’s demise, he serves as a prime example of how humor can serve as critical, albeit cynical, public pedagogy that is a form of diogenic resistance. However, this resistance does not resist that corrupt status quo in any material way—what Carlin and his audiences resist is their own humanity. They resist the empathic and emotional responses as the witness what they perceive to be the destruction of our society, but they laugh instead of cry. Carlin’s humor does raise awareness regarding social issues; however, by making light of these issues, his humor not only fails to encourage action, but it actually discourages it—to act would be pointless, futile, and most of all painful.

To make fun of something is to take something dull, serious, or concerning and turn it into play through ridicule. This form of playful ridicule serves to divorce a social problem from its possible consequences in order to find it amusing. Making fun of social problems can be a way of coping with said problems—especially when confronting them in a non-playful way seems impossible, but coping is very different from actively engaging and working to solve problems. In fact, coping is more often a way of accepting problems as inevitable and unsolvable. While many scholars have begun to suspect that humor contributes to a form of critical public pedagogy that asks audiences to think about taken-for-granted social problems in novel ways, it is important to take into consideration how the playful, benign nature of humor may help audiences to also cope with and accept 31 social problems as unavoidable once they leave the safety of the stand-up comedy show in which consequences have been momentarily set aside.

Within the field of psychology, scholars have attempted to understand the psychological processes that result in humor and amusement and their effects upon the psyche and social identity (McGraw and Warren 2010; Ferguson and Ford 2004). Warren and McGraw theorize that all potentially humorous texts will exhibit three conditions: the text features a social violation, the social violation can be perceived as non-threatening

(benign), and these two conditions are satisfied simultaneously (407). On the other hand, within the field of critical public pedagogy, scholars such as Jonathan P Rossing, Jennifer

A. Sandlin and Jennifer L. Milam, and Sophia A. McClennen and Remy M. Maisel have used rhetorical analysis to reveal that humorous texts often include some critical evaluation of a societal flaw—and that this critical evaluation raises awareness and encourages democratic participation serving as a sort of critical public pedagogy. These two approaches to the study of humor seem largely unaware of each other. However, they have the potential to complement each other, because the social violation in political jokes often presents a social critique. In other words, rhetorical scholars have correctly identified that what is funny within stand-up comedy, for example, is that the jokes reveal some social problem that audiences have overlooked. The potential problem that psychological studies helps reveal, in terms of evaluating the critical value of humorous texts rhetorically, is that making a social violation/critique non-threatening enough to be considered humorous must undercut the potential for that critique to inspire action for change. To be amused by something, audiences must feel disconnected enough from the immediacy of an issue to be amused—they must perceive the issue is “benign.” 32

Carlin’s humor is a prime example of the kind of humor that is critical of societal flaws, but that also makes these flaws amusing by making them seem non-threatening. A key to this shift is Carlin’s rhetorical invitation to audiences to join him in detaching emotionally from societal problems, so that they might find and enjoy the humor in their incongruous logics. In fact, detaching from emotional attachment to activism of any kind is often the message of Carlin’s humor, and he often states this overtly in his books and in numerous interviews. Of course, making fun of activism is not necessary for humor to have this effect, because as Warren and McGraw theorize, amusement is the result of perceiving social violations as non-threatening.

Scholars who are optimistic about the potential critique prevalent in stand-up comedy and other kinds of humor would do well to remember that the rhetorical purpose of these oratorical performances is laughter and amusement. Anything beyond that purpose is superfluous in terms of the rhetorical intention. So, the strategy is to create enough emotional distance to create amusement—not to make people angry enough to act as some have suggested. This is not to say that they can have no secondary effects, only that those effects are not the measure of success for the comic. The fact that people laugh and display amusement in response to Carlin’s explication of societal downfall, political corruption, and even the extinction of humanity is in and of itself proof that they have emotionally detached from the outcome of a given social struggle.

While Carlin’s critiques could potentially serve as a critical public pedagogy, the humorousness of the critique diminishes the seriousness of the problems exposed by the critiques—He makes fun of things that should not be fun so long as one has a stake in the outcome—things like rape, oppression, racism, political corruption, suicide. In his later 33 years, Carlin described himself as a “spectator,” who was “emotionally detached” enough to observe the “freak show” without feeling that he had any “stake in the outcome”

(BECOME A SPECTATOR). To better understand the work of Carlin, I reviewed and analyzed his body of work: his 16 HBO comedy specials from 1977-2008, his 5 books both comedic and his 2009 posthumous memoir Last Words, and many of his interviews on YouTube using the search term “George Carlin Interview.” Examining this body of work reveals that Carlin’s job as a comedian is not to end the freak show, but to help others view it from a safe distance and be amused. Carlin’s work is an example of how humor allows audiences to deidentify with their own connections to humanity—to stand outside of humanity and look back with disdainful amusement at all its follies.

In what follows, I will provide a background on how stand-up comedy has been conceived of by rhetoricians as critical public pedagogy and explain how the theory of benign violations complicates stand-up comedy’s critical qualities by quelling emotional attachment to humanity. Carlin’s work is especially useful in this discussion because he has been so influential for many of the comedians working today. Not only was Carlin a comedian, but he was also a philosopher of humor. Additionally, his comedy is often simultaneously critical and apathetic, and his humor contains social violations that use logical argument to make the violations seem appropriate. My analysis complicates the optimistic vision of critical humor as a critical public pedagogy. It may be that the most powerful thing critical educators can do for students is to encourage them to interrogate their own sense of humor—we need to develop an understanding of what we are laughing at, and whether or not laughter is really the best medicine in all cases.

Standup and be Heard: Envisioning Standup Comedy as Eye-Opening Critique

Critical thinking is characterized by the recognition that socially constructed norms reinforce existing power structures and the ability to imagine more equitable and/or rational alternatives. Standup comedy often does exactly this, but the goal is to amuse through critical reflection—not necessarily engender action or even imagine specific alternatives. Nevertheless, scholars have begun to study how stand-up comedy serves as a critical public pedagogy that challenges existing power structures and social norms. In general, humorous texts have been studied for their critical potential—specific attention has been paid to satirical news like The Onion (Achter 2008), The Daily Show

(Baym 2009; Buerkle 2011; Day 2011), and The Colbert Report (McClennen 2011;

McClennen and Maisel 2014; Rossing 2012). Scholars have also studied publications like

Adbusters (Sandlin and Milam, 2008; Harold, 2004) and The Billionaires for Bush

(Haugerud, 2012) to show how culture jamming or satirical activism employs a humorous approach to activism—one that they claim has a powerful impact on spectators and audiences.

Within the field of rhetorical studies, scholars have just begun to scratch the surface of the study of stand-up comedy. In the foreword to a recent collection of articles called Standing Up Speaking Out: Stand Up Comedy and the Rhetoric of Social Change,

Judith Yaross Lee quotes Andrea Greenbaum writing in 1999 that “stand-up comedy is a form of rhetorical argument whereby comics construct ethos (credibility) by creating comic personae (character or voice) while negotiating kairos (timing) to ensure the maximum impact of their punchlines” (xxiii). Furthermore, Lee goes on to quote another scholar, Stephanie Koziski, contending that “stand-up comedians function as social critics 35 who ‘jar their [audience’s] sensibilities by making [them] experience the shock of recognition’ and by revealing ‘the hidden underpinnings of their culture’” (xxiii). The practice of exposing the “hidden underpinnings of [our] culture” is a promising aspect of humor, but this “shock of recognition” does not go far beyond creating a tickling of the mind temporarily. While recognition is the identification of something familiar, breaking the word down connotes at some level a re-cognition or re-thinking. In other words, comics are in the business of encouraging audiences to think again about commonplaces they may have taken for granted. This is certainly a positive aspect of stand-up comedy.

From a rhetorical standpoint, scholars have explored how comedians have encouraged audiences to re-think and become aware of various social problems. Of particular interest have been issues of identity and race (Lowrey and Reingar 2017; Meir and Nelson 2017; Rossing 2012, 2014, 2016). When considering how scholars such as

Henry A. Giroux have theorized that people receive the lion’s share of their educational experiences through the consumption of popular culture, it stands to reason that stand-up comedy is part of the way that people internalize their roles in society (61). Therefore, if stand-up is critical public pedagogy, it could help people internalize new ways of acting.

In fact, Rossing argues that stand-up comedy is a form of critical public pedagogy that enables audiences to be aware of and question problematic social norms. Rossing argues that what he calls “emancipatory racial humor” in particular “offers a disarming pedagogical strategy for exploring social issues surrounding race and for confronting the cultural conditions spawning racial injustice” (Emancipatory Humor 2). Optimistically,

Rossing concludes that “Emancipatory racial humor understood as a critical public pedagogy carries the “potential to disrupt racist hegemony and free us from its grip” 36

(Emancipatory Humor 14). In Rossing’s “A Sense of Humor for Civic Life,” he defends humor from a slew of skeptics who either believe it engenders apathy or cynicism. He also admonishes those who offer a “weak defense” of humor when they concede that it is

“neutral” and that “if humor has any relationship to the serious world of action, it operates like a mirror that merely reflects our pre-existing world” (A Sense of Humor for

Civic Life 8-9). Rossing claims a strong defense of humor conceives of it as “a blend of game, play, and purposeful action” (9) and that it “unwaveringly upholds its potential to promote habits of thinking and acting as well as attitudes and sensibilities necessary for just citizenship” (A Sense of Humor for Civic Life 4). However, stand-up seems to have more to do with asking audiences to re-think ideas they are already familiar with as opposed to generating new ideas.

Of course, not everyone agrees that “stand-up is a powerful tool for shaking the status quo, destabilizing assumptions of all things, including norms of propriety, political arguments, personal or social identity, and race” (Meier and Schmitt xxvi). Ron Von

Burg and Kai Heidermann studied conservative comedian Brad Stine to show how the

“identity-making” aspect of his humor which “harm[s] the political process by entrenching sentiments of conflict and division among actors in civil society at the expense of striving for the forms of collaboration and deliberation needed to make democratic systems of governance work” (154). Thus, the act of ridiculing others is as likely to calcify existing divisions in society as other forms of comedy might be to encourage audiences to rethink the validity of those differences. This contradicts

Rossing’s strong defense of humor and suggests that comedy can be a neutral tool used for purposes both critical and stabilizing. Further complicating the rhetorical study of 37 humor, Don Waisanen, through a systematic discourse analysis of Joan Rivers’s comedy, concludes that Rivers’s “audiences are asked to understand that these spaces’ in which comedic oratory is delivered “are only a temporary, goalless reprieve from a planet gone crazy” (147). This is not so far from Carlin’s direct statement that he, and by extension his audience, is only a “spectator” here to be amused by “the freak show” that is society.

In other words, it may be that the standup comedy show serves as a sort of playground or theatre in which real-world consequences can be suspended temporarily. It is here that my analysis of Carlin’s ridicule of activism from a standpoint of benign violations enters into the conversation. The theory of benign violations helps explain how using rhetoric to create amusement makes problems seem distant and non-threatening.

While George Carlin is certainly not the only example of stand-up comedy that produces humor by committing social violations and making them seem benign, he is a prime example of how biting social commentary can be perceived as humorous.

Furthermore, Carlin often ridicules those who feel motivated to work for change through his ridicule of feminism, environmentalism, and activism in general. Interestingly,

Carlin’s anti-authoritarianism is often something that activists identify with, however, they often miss that Carlin rejects what he perceives as a sort of authoritarianism prevalent within many activist movements. Interestingly, Carlin precipitates the arguments for free-speech made by right-wing trolls such as Milo Yiannopoulis and Ben

Shapiro claiming that language policing is the true tyrant of our times. In sum, Carlin’s humor and his commentary about his humor illustrate how the success of his humor/rhetoric rests on the condition that his audience join him as “spectators” rather than participants in democratic action. Nevertheless, before I explain how Carlin’s humor 38 exemplifies benign violations theory and may discourage political engagement, I provide a brief explanation of how the study of the philosophy and psychology of humor led to the theory of benign violations. Additionally, I will overview how the theory of benign violations differentiates humorous from non-humorous incongruities.

A Very Brief History of Humor Theory

The notion that comedy can serve as a social corrective is not new. In fact, this idea is as old as philosophy itself. Plato was skeptical of laughter and felt that it was the manifestation of finding joy in malice (Philebus 48-50). Rene Descartes also believed that although “laughter might seem to be one of the chief signs of joy, joy can’t cause laughter except when it is moderate and mixed with an element of wonder or hatred.”

(The Passions of the Soul, Article 125). The hatred Descartes is referring to is the hatred of evil, thus, what is found worthy of laughter are those characteristics in others that need correction. Descartes believed laughter could correct or remedy flaws in the soul through a sort of ridicule. Thomas Hobbes also, in The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, explained that laughter results from a “sudden glory” through the recognition of one’s superiority over another being. Unlike these theorists, who studied humor in terms of what are often referred to as superiority theories of humor because they believed laughter was the result of perceiving another as inferior combining joy and malice, Aristotle added an interesting element that would eventually lead to what are known as incongruity theories of humor.

Like philosophers and theorists who believe humor serves as a social corrective,

Aristotle thought that humor could expose social flaws such as “ugliness,” but he adds the distinction that this exposure does not necessarily require hatred, and it is certainly 39 not painful. He writes in Poetics that the comic mask “consist[s] of some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain” (V). This distortion without discomfort precipitates other incongruity theories that suggest humor is a result of inconsistency or irrationality of some sort, and it is reminiscent of benign violations in that these incongruities are perceived as non-threatening, non-painful, non-destructive. In other words, incongruity theory suggests that humor occurs when one perceives a disruption in an expected pattern—something occurs that does not match perceptions of how things should be. John Morreall asserts that “the core meaning of ‘incongruity’ in standard incongruity theories is that some thing or event we perceive or think about violates our normal mental patterns and normal expectations” (11). According to these theories, this sort of incongruity can be the result of observing something surprising, unexpected, atypical, absurd, or in illogical juxtaposition, but these theories fail to recognize that incongruity alone cannot account for humor. There must also be some perception of congruity or appropriateness—a sort of double-vision in which audiences see a joke as both true and not-true at the same time, or true in two different contexts simultaneously.

Recognizing that incongruity theories of humor account for some instances of humor but fail to differentiate humorous from non-humorous texts, McGraw and Warren developed the theory of benign violations, which holds that the condition of incongruity must be accompanied by a condition of congruity or resolution to be perceived as humorous. In sum, the theory of benign violations is that humor can only occur when an audience perceives a social violation, the violation is appraised as benign, and these conditions are present simultaneously (Warren and McGraw 407). Warren and McGraw 40 argue that “A violation is a narrower conceptualization of incongruity than atypicality,” which includes elements of surprise, absurdity, and illogic, “because not all atypical experiences are violations. Running a 4-minute mile and winning the lottery, for example, are atypical, but they are not necessarily violations” (409). In order to be considered a social violation, a statement or event must “depart from a person’s perceptions of how things should be, whereas atypical experiences depart from a person’s perception of how things typically are” (McGraw and Warren 409). Social violations work by transgressing perceived “cultural patterns” that calcify into “beliefs about who to be (i.e. identity), how to behave (i.e. social norms), how to communicate (i.e. grammar, language rules, communication norms), and how to think (i.e. logic)” (Warren and

McGraw 410). Therefore, violations explain what many scholars perceive to be the critical aspect of humor. These violations challenge social patterns that many people take for granted as the way things should be in accordance with what they perceive to be a seemingly natural order of things.

One problem with incongruity theory is that, while it can anticipate events that contradict the way things should be, it does not help us to predict when or why something will be humorous, because often a violation of how things should be could be interpreted as threatening. Thus, Warren and McGraw explain that in order to be perceived as humorous, social violations, which include “not only threats to physical well-being, but also identity threats and things that seem wrong or bad according to a social, linguistic, communication or logic norm,” must be rendered benign or non-threatening in order to be perceived as humorous, because “positive emotions, including amusement, occur in the absence of serious danger” (410-11). In my analysis below, I will contend that the 41 process of making social violations or threats seem benign is a rhetorical process that relies on signs and symbols and that, given humor’s evolutionary origin and purpose, this process calls into question the value of critical humor in terms of encouraging audiences to act on the knowledge that critical humor might generate.

Warren and McGraw explain that there are various reasons which might cause a violation to be perceived as benign, but regardless of the reason the common effect is that a social threat is appraised as non-threatening, which allows audiences to experience amusement. To be perceived as benign a phenomenon must seem, “normal or “good,”

“acceptable,” “correct,” or “makes sense” “according to a social, cultural, communication, linguistic, or logic norm” (McGraw and Warren 409). A violation could be perceived non-threatening, “harmless,” or “inconsequential,” because the audience may perceive it from a distance from which they are not personally or immediately threatened. Additionally, a social violation, such as making a controversial statement about some societal problem will be perceived as benign as long as it is provided a context in which “an alternative norm suggests that the behavior is acceptable, sensible, or correct” (McGraw and Warren 411). The most simplistic example of this doubling of incongruous/congruous norms would be puns that have two possible meanings, such as the pun, “Whenever I get undressed in the bathroom, my shower gets turned on.” This joke works because the term “turned on” has two possible meanings—one literal and one sexual/metaphorical. There is a sense of verity in the joke, because the shower does indeed get “turned on” even though it does not become sexually attracted to the person using it. In more complex humorous oratory, this doubling explains why people often think the funniest statements are those that are perceived to reveal some unstated or taboo 42 truth. It may not be appropriate to state something, but if it rings true, the inappropriateness may be overlooked by the audience. Again, this element of humor often constitutes what many scholars identify as the critical component of humor— especially when the statement attacks power structures. However, these potential critiques, if they achieve the goal of amusing the audience, do not generally offend or anger audiences. As the theory of benign violations and others suggest, in order to be amused, one must feel safe from threat—even though power structures and dominant ideologies are potentially threatening.

Warren and McGraw explain that violations become benign “when a person feels that there is nothing to worry about. In other words, everything seems acceptable. The reason why people might simultaneously appraise a violation as benign depends on how the violation threatens them” (Warren and McGraw 411). Not only does this call into question the value of critical humor in terms of activism, but from a humor theory standpoint, it explains why some people find some jokes funny while others do not. The idea that people are amused when “there is nothing to worry about” complicates

Rossing’s idea that critical humor will lead audiences to recognize, think critically about, and possibly even work to correct social problems. Morreall explains that humor developed in humans as a way of quickly signaling to others through laughter that a threat had been appraised as non-threatening—that there had been a “false alarm” of some kind (45). In addition, Morreall argues that amusement is not like other emotions in that “it does not involve the practical engagement of beliefs, desires, and adaptive action”

(30). While I disagree with Morreall’s contention that beliefs are not involved, I think there is verity in the notion that amusement requires no further action than potentially 43 laughter. When “everything seems okay,” there is no need to engage in a fight or flight response, which is not all bad. Overall, amusement is a positive experience for society. It is pleasurable, increases social bonding, and may raise awareness of problematic social norms. However, we must not overestimate the power of humor in creating a more inclusive and democratic society—sometimes anger, fight, or even flight is necessary for democratic action—in these cases amusement is not enough.

In the following section, I will use the comedy of George Carlin, who is considered by many to be a central figure in critical stand-up comedy, to explore the rhetorical process through which social violations, such as not caring for humanity and society, seem benign by making them seem logically appropriate. While no topic is sacred or safe from the critical focus of Carlin, he often returns to the idea that working for a better society is a futile exercise, and that activists are arrogant and self-serving. His overall solution to the urge to work for change seems to be that the best thing you can do is “enjoy the freak show.” This is a rhetorical strategy that embodies the benign violations hypothesis and shows how critical comedy can work against the idea of being critical itself. In other words, I argue that while humor may have the potential to be critical of hegemonic structures by exposing these social problems for our amusement, humorous critique positions audiences as outside observers or “spectators” who are powerless to effect any large-scale change.

Watching the Freak Show Explode

When asked, in a radio interview, how he could recognize all the faults in the world, but still stay engaged without becoming disheartened by the sorry state of things,

Carlin explained that he did not feel engaged at all. Carlin said, “I don’t really have an 44 emotional stake in the outcome anymore in terms of my caring. I don’t really give a fuck when you get right down to it. I don’t care what happens to my species, because I think this species has squandered great gifts” (BECOME A SPECTATOR). This is not to say that he didn’t love the people around him or that he didn’t care about any other humans in his personal circle, but in Carlin’s public life and speech he rejected sentiment and love as viable paths to change, or to saving society, because he rejected the idea that saving society is possible—the gifts of humanity have already been “squandered.” Carlin rejected the sort of sentimentality, the root of empathy and solidarity, that encourages getting involved in trying to make the world a better place in any way. In the aforementioned interview and in various other interviews, Carlin claims that the human species is doomed to inevitable failure and says that being born is like being “given a ticket to the freak show,” and “When you’re born in America, you’re given a front row seat. And, man, I’m sitting there, and I have my notebook out and I’m enjoying the show, and I wish I could live a thousand years to watch this all develop” (BECOME A

SPECTATOR). This move is important for the rhetorical potential of critical humor, because in order to achieve the emotional detachment that allows for his critical point of view to be amusing, he first has to adopt a stance of non-involvement—placing himself outside the species as not impacted by the outcome of societal, democratic struggle. How could you laugh at rape, violence, racism, political corruption on a massive scale, and even extinction itself if you felt emotionally engaged in any of these issues? He reiterates this point in the introduction to Brain Droppings as well as in his stand-up comedy, and the point is clear: stop trying to fix the world and be amused while you watch it die. 45

It could be that this was all a performance, and that Carlin was merely being ironic, but I argue that to take his meaning as irony is to miss his ultimate point, which is that this existence is pointless and temporary. It is an existential acceptance of mortality, which situates his humor as a kind of gallows humor in which an unemotional bravado guards him from the fear of failure, death, and even total extinction. The process through which he achieves this rhetorical purpose is by using logic and reason, a kind of common sense, to render the social violation of not caring about humanity as benign because it is sensible, appropriate, and it makes sense in the provided context. Carlin explains of his rhetorical strategy that he doesn’t “fuck around responding to one side or the other of a current debate but,” instead, “go[es] all the way back to the fundamental core of an issue”

(Last Words 249). This is how he attempts to get around the social mores that govern discourse, and by appealing to the core or common sense, he renders these violations as socially benign through their apparent logical appropriateness.

Carlin’s best work commits the social violation of recognizing some irrational, social taboo and then using logic to construct alternate norms in which violations seem reasonable—create benign violations. On the one hand, this process may make people more aware of these societal issues, but in order to be amused by these problems, they must feel emotionally detached from the consequences the issues pose to society, and some of Carlin’s comedy advocates for this sort of cynical detachment openly.

Nevertheless, a prime example of Carlin’s strategy at creating humor using benign violations is his landmark “Filthy Words,” which became famous for instigating a 1978 supreme court case, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) v. Pacifica Foundation, in which the court ruled that the piece was inappropriately aired on the radio. The bit is 46 essentially a critique of the broadcast industry’s censorship practices of not airing certain words. Carlin’s commentary comprises a listing and analysis of words that the FCC had deemed the seven most “dirty” words—"Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker,

Motherfucker, and Tits”—words that can never be uttered on television regardless of context (Filthy Words). In a later interview, Carlin explains that the original idea for this sketch came from his recognition that words like “bitch,” “ass,” and “cock” have “saving meanings” that allow for their use on television, but others, such as “cunt,” “fuck,” and

“tits” have no second meaning that allows them to be said (Carlin on The “Seven Dirty

Words”). In other words, Carlin’s strategy in writing this oratory was to recognize some incongruity or absurdity in a social norm—in this case the social norm of appropriate and inappropriate language use. Carlin uses his analytical skill to denaturalize and make evident this logical inconsistency—the audience sees that these words have nothing inherently obscene about them and the violation of speaking these words in public evaporates. Carlin’s alternate norm “makes sense.” In other words, the audience is asked to think of how these certain arbitrary sounds could be considered more offensive than the content for which they are symbolic.

The recognition of the social violation alone, does not make the speech humorous or amusing, but the fact that the audience can see that Carlin is both wrong and not wrong simultaneously tickles the mind. Conceiving of old rules within the context of new norms creates the “shock of recognition,” which is something the human mind enjoys. If one is offended by the language, it is because they feel that the violation of stating these words publicly has not been overcome by any logic. This audience member does not perceive the violation as benign and is, therefore, not amused and the joke/persuasion has failed. 47

However, those who are amused are likely to be convinced of Carlin’s alternate norm—It also stands to reason that in this case they are more likely to feel from now on that using

“filthy” language is not such a grave social offense. Of course, it may be the case that comedy such as Carlin’s can only reach a receptive audience—it may not be able to convince someone who is resistant to profanity that profanity is okay. Likewise, it may also calcify preconceived ideas furthering social divisions as Von Burg and Heidermann suggested of conservative comedian Brad Stine. In other words, Carlin’s audience may simply relish in the anti-authoritarian practice of questioning traditional norms that seem arbitrary, useless, and even potentially oppressive. Once this has been questioned, the threat of these standards is lessened, and the power of the FCC is also reified. Therefore, the audience is free to see that the standards don’t make sense in the alternate norm, but also encouraged to accept that the alternate norm is only temporary—the dominant norm will remain intact.

Regardless of the audience’s reason for being receptive to Carlin’s social violations, his comedy contains increasingly morbid social violations, and the fact that they are amused is evidence that they must perceive the violations as benign. It is one thing to be okay with the use of profanity on television and quite another to be okay with the destruction of the human race. The question of how these violations become non- threatening is especially pertinent when considering the often violent and cynical nature of Carlin’s comedy. For example, in one bit he cathartically lists off all the people he thinks ought to be killed such as people who use credit cards for small purchases, people who read self-help books, and people who let their kids record the outgoing message on their answering machines (A List of People Who Ought to be Killed). At one point he 48 fantasizes about scaring a little girl who recorded an outgoing answering machine message by threatening to kill and skin her parents before he rapes her (the last bit about rape is implied as he is cut off by the beep) (A List of People Who Ought to be Killed). In effect, his display of anger is another way of allowing himself and his audience the freedom to cathartically purge any emotional attachment they have to their fellow human beings. It could be that the audience perceives this display of rhetorical violence and aggression as benign because they are imaginary people being killed, but it also could be that on some level, the audience feels that humans and humanity, themselves temporarily excluded, are deserving of such violence. This is only possible if one feels that they themselves are not included in the term human or humanity. I am not suggesting that

Carlin and his audiences do not believe they are humans—only that they perceive themselves as apart from humanity, at least temporarily, and Carlin says as much in his last interview. He states poignantly, “The freaks are all humans. They’re like me. We’re all the same. I’m not better. I’m not different. I’m just apart now. I’m separate… Oh, they say if you scratch a cynic you’ll find a disappointed idealist, and I would admit that somewhere underneath all this there’s a little flicker of a flame of idealism that would like to see it all change, but it can’t happen that way,” through “incremental change—It just seems like the pile of shit is too deep” (George Carlin on God, the planet, and “the freak show”-EMMYTVLEGENDS). While Carlin admits that he has some kind of idealism that drives his disappointment and cynicism, he employs gallows humor typical of those condemned to die in which it is better to laugh at the absurdity of life than to weep over the tragedy of losing it all. He uses humor not to resist power and corruption, 49 but to resist the feeling of despair that threaten to consume if he ever kindled his idealistic flicker of flame.

This angry humor serves as a shield against emotion, and Carlin invites his audience to join him—from this outside position they can look back on the social problems and feel unconcerned with the “outcome” as spectators. When used this way, humor becomes a shield that protects people from feeling anything too strongly. In fact, psychologists Andrea C. Samson and James J. Gross have found that there is distinct difference in how people react to negative, mean-spirited humor and positive good- natured humor (375). They found that just as positive humor may have some positive emotional effects, negative humor may increase negative emotions—in this case the negative emotion being cynical anger that leads to a sort of apathy (375). It is likely that this kind of humor promotes a sort of cynical apathy—or at the very least amplifies this cynicism in audience members who likely became fans because they identified with

Carlin’s views. This complex relationship between emotions and humor has implications for how effectively humor can engender a critical awareness of problems that leads to some action beyond cynical apathy—it is possible that humor actually discourages people from acting beyond their amusement.

Carlin explicitly makes the point that he does not care about humanity or the problems it faces in the introduction to Brain Droppings making this sort of detachment seem appropriate. He writes of other comedians who comment on social issues that they seem to be “looking for solutions and rooting for particular results” and adds a disclaimer: “I don’t feel so confined, I frankly don’t give a fuck how it all turns out in this country” (xi). He goes on to explain how this is an advantage for him as a comedian 50 writing that “The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if you are emotionally detached from it. I have always viewed it from a safe distance, knowing I don’t belong; it doesn’t include me, and it never has… I have no interest in any of it…my motto: Fuck Hope! (Brain Droppings xii). According to the theory of benign violations, if someone were to find this disclaimer amusing, it is likely because they perceive the notion that detaching from humanity is a social violation, but that it makes sense because it is an appeal to a cynical perception of reality, which suggests that trying to change things is a lost cause— “the pile of shit is too deep.” Carlin’s assertion to “fuck hope” is socially inappropriate because it rejects the sentimentality, empathy, and solidarity that would lead people to engage in democratic action. To the audience he is addressing, though, this seems more authentic than someone who offers a vision of a better world, which his audience would perceive as inauthentic, politically mainstream rhetoric—his audience identifies with the notion that anyone claiming things will get better has an agenda they are hiding. For Carlin, people who tell you there is hope are the truly cynical, because he would contend that they know there is no hope but offer it to people to advance their own interests (Brain Droppings xii).

Carlin’s crass humor cuts through all the sentimentality that typically frames political discussions of social issues, and this is amusing because it seems wrong to be so blunt and direct—to say what many of us are thinking but would never say in public. This appeal to commonsense is a powerful rhetorical technique, and Carlin preempts anyone who considers him a cynic by claiming purchase on reality without unneeded optimism.

He claims to be “a personal optimist, but a skeptic about all else” (Brain Droppings xii). I believe this is Carlin’s attempt to advocate for a hedonistic or at the very least personal 51 focus on development and growth as opposed to fretting over large-scale issues. This call is similar to his letter to activists entitled “Nothing Changes.” Carlin writes,

“All your chanting, marching, voting, picketing, boycotting and letter-

writing will not change a thing; you will never right the wrongs of this

world. The only thing your activity will accomplish is to make some of you

feel better. Such activity makes powerless people feel useful and provides

them the illusion that they’re making a difference. But it doesn’t work.

Nothing changes. The powerful keep their power. That’s why they’re

called the powerful.” (When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? 84)

Within a supposedly democratic country, it is a social violation to state that activism is pointless. It speaks to the core identity of many American citizens, especially those who would be critical of authority and work for change, and yet there is an undeniable truth to the fact that protesting does indeed mark the powerless and the powerful. Those with power have no need to protest, and it is easy to feel as though protesting the actions of the powerful is as inconvenient to the powerful as the swatting away of so many gnats. While this logical turn may not be amusing to some, to others there is a cynical recognition of reality that makes the violation seem non-threatening and sensible.

It seems possible that this sort of humor will make people feel less angry about their powerlessness, which might not be a positive outcome from a critical public pedagogy standpoint. In fact, Carlin, ends his letter by suggesting that love is powerless in the face of the powerful, but that it is a useful thing for individuals, because “it just feels good. Love yourself, find another person to love and feel good” (When Will Jesus

Bring the Pork Chops? 84). The message seems clear: give up on large scale change and 52 focus on doing what feels good. In some ways, I do not think this is a bad message—if change truly is impossible, as Carlin suggests, then working for change seems to be little more than an effective way of wasting one’s time. Additionally, maybe change is only possible at the local and personal level, which could then lead to larger changes. Carlin is convincing in this and this seems to be a critical appraisal of activism. He is attacking a social norm amongst those who consider themselves activists—and he is exposing that norm as illogical. This is not so different from the rhetorical strategies that attack social norms like racism, sexism, and political corruption, but in this case the hegemonic norm happens to be activism itself. Problematically, the strategy seems to work the same. The awareness that audiences walk away with is that working for change is pointless. In terms of scholars who believe stand-up comedy can be a form of critical public pedagogy, it is important to recognize that this antiauthoritarian thread of comedy can seem to be critical of power even when it is not. Unfortunately, this does not encourage the kind of democratic action that improves society. In fact, it is democratic action that is being critiqued

Possibly the coup de grace of Carlin’s social violation humor is his attack on environmentalism and environmentalists, in which he claims that he loves to be entertained by bad news and is delighted to watch the downfall of human society. In this bit, Carlin attacks those who claim they wish to save the planet. Essentially, his argument, which precipitates the current conservative argument against the man-made causes of climate change—is that humanity is arrogant to believe that they could possibly destroy the planet with a few “aluminum cans” and “plastic bags” (The Top 10 George

Carlin Routines - 5. The Planet Is Fine (Jammin' In New York)). Of course, Carlin’s 53 argument has an important twist, and herein lies the benign violation. His claim is that

“There’s nothing wrong with the planet—the planet is fine—the people are fucked!” (The

Top 10 George Carlin Routines - 5. The Planet Is Fine (Jammin' In New York)). He creates an alternate norm from the perspective of the planet as opposed to humans. In other words, he claims, environmentalists, who he defines as “bourgeois, liberal, white people who think the only thing wrong with this planet is there aren’t enough bicycle paths,” don’t care about the planet, but care about preserving their ability to survive on the planet (The Top 10 George Carlin Routines - 5. The Planet Is Fine (Jammin' In New

York)). This is an obvious social violation, because one would expect that all humans could at the very least agree that preserving our habitat is a common goal that is good for all, but Carlin suggests that he does not want humanity to survive, because it defies the natural order of things. He admits “I’m a little perverted,” because “I enjoy chaos and disorder, and not just because they help me professionally, no, it’s also my hobby. You see, I’m an entropy fan” (The Top 10 George Carlin Routines - 5. The Planet Is Fine

(Jammin' In New York)). Again, we have an instance where Carlin refuses to take any of the sides that already exist and reframes the issue entirely—from the standpoint of a non- engaged human—the established alternate norm—the planet does not need humanity to survive, so let it go.

The structure of Carlin’s “The Planet is Fine” is an example of how Carlin coaxes his audience into detaching from human compassion temporarily in order to be amused by the prospect of their own extinction. He starts this oratory by asking about how the water is, and from there he explains that he finds it humorous that everywhere he goes he asks about the water and has never gotten a positive response. From this basepoint, Carlin 54 jokes that he enjoys “chaos and disorder,” and he makes commentary about the fact that humans in general are entertained by catastrophe and violence—even claiming that the closer the catastrophe is to home the more entertaining it is (The Top 10 George Carlin

Routines - 5. The Planet Is Fine (Jammin' In New York)). At this point in the bit, it could be argued that Carlin is critiquing the insensitivity of society to tragedy by using it for entertainment value, but it is not clear that he is being ironic. In fact, it seems obvious that he means exactly what he says. In this observation, Carlin is neither critiquing nor praising humanities infatuation with violent catastrophe, but he is observing it to generate the shock of recognition—he is holding up a mirror to the audience and asking themselves to see them from his perspective.

The largest laughter responses that Carlin gets during this oratory have to do with his enjoyment of violence. The largest might be when his says he enjoys entropy, “and not just because it helps me professionally” (The Top 10 George Carlin Routines - 5. The

Planet Is Fine (Jammin' In New York)). Benign violations are at work here in that one should not profit off disaster and be happy about it, but Carlin clearly is—and undergirding this violation is the simultaneous truth that the audience’s own bloodlust and lack of empathy has enabled his ability to profit in precisely that way. Nevertheless, the laughter shifts about halfway through the bit into applause. Carlin convinces the audience that only people who are in denial refuse to admit that they enjoy the downfall of humankind stating of his own admission that “at least I admit it. Most people won’t admit to those thoughts. Most people see something like that on television” and say “‘Oh isn’t that awful. Isn’t that too bad’ (Carlin makes a fart noise sticking his tongue out and blowing) Lying asshole. Lying asshole—you love it and you know it.” (The Top 10 55

George Carlin Routines - 5. The Planet Is Fine (Jammin' In New York)). Again, this admission and accusation of the audience and the population at large is met with one of the largest rounds applause and laughter of the piece. To disagree at this point is to be an

“asshole” in denial. In addition, Carlin creates a communion with his audience in which it is okay to enjoy the spectacle, it is natural—right or wrong are questions that no longer matter once one is free from the fetters of human empathy and emotion—truth, honesty, and authenticity are all that matter to the spectator.

Carlin then turns the piece away from being funny through his own twisted amusement at violence, chaos, and destruction toward a hatred of environmentalists and those who would try to make a difference. From this point forward, the audience is not laughing as much but is applauding agreement with the crescendo coming after Carlin exclaims that the “planet is fine” and it is humanity that is “fucked” (The Top 10 George

Carlin Routines - 5. The Planet Is Fine (Jammin' In New York)). By starting off fairly light, discussing water and his own tendency to enjoy “bad news,” Carlin takes the audience with him. By laughing they accept this thing about their own desires to be entertained by others’ pain and suffering as both a social violation and true—and not really all that bad because, if we are being honest with ourselves it is a part of who we are

(The Top 10 George Carlin Routines - 5. The Planet Is Fine (Jammin' In New York)).

Interestingly, this dark side of our humanity is the key to Carlin’s ability to convince the audience to join him as spectators rather than participants, in the extinction of humanity.

After all, environmentalism is about saving humans, not the planet—from the planet’s point of view we are all just so many “fleas” (The Top 10 George Carlin Routines - 5.

The Planet Is Fine (Jammin' In New York)). Why bother with sentimentality when you 56 can simply enjoy the freak show. He ends the bit by explaining how the AIDS virus is likely the planet’s way of getting rid of the parasite of humanity (The Top 10 George

Carlin Routines - 5. The Planet Is Fine (Jammin' In New York)). Our purpose? To give the planet plastic—that being accomplished, we can be exterminated (The Top 10 George

Carlin Routines - 5. The Planet Is Fine (Jammin' In New York)). The idea that the purpose of humanity was to create plastic—one of the very things that environmentalists believe is harmful to the planet—is a rhetorical flourish that receives a great round of laughter from the audience, because in Carlin’s alternate norm it makes sense.

In all of these instances, Carlin uses benign violations to make ideas, that should seem terrible and irresponsible—even reprehensible—seem logical and reasonable. In doing so, his audience is able to find these ideas amusing because they are invited to divorce themselves from any emotional attachment they might have otherwise felt toward the preservation of humanity. While this humor is critical it is critical of those who would like to make a difference. Typically, we think of critical humor as being directed at an authority, but Carlin is adept at turning those who are rebelling against authority into the authority themselves. This is a playbook that has enabled many conservative trolls such as Milo Yiannopoulis, Alex Jones, and Ben Shapiro to attack progressives who are concerned about the environment, social equity, and injustice through language-use and otherwise as authoritarian regimes intent upon destroying freedom—even as these groups fight against power from marginalized spaces.

Conclusion

Carlin describes his work as “testing the willingness” of audiences, and he was not always successful in rendering his social violations as benign. He explains in his 57 memoir that early versions of his bit about saving the planet, he included a line about the planet killing humanity as “justifiable homicide” but the line did not get laughs, so he writes “I’m a realist. After a while, I dropped the line. And maybe they were right: maybe it was too complex an idea or the phrasing was too harsh. But it shows how the audience shapes the material. They are part of the process. I write, they edit” (Last Words 249).

Thus, my claim is not that the comedian can shape the ideas of the audience; rather, it may be that what audiences find acceptable reveals something about where our society stands on any given issue. Many scholars seem to think that comedy has the power to shift ideas either to activism or cynicism—but I’m not convinced that either is the case.

Even still, humor is a valuable place from which to take stock of where society places the boundaries of what should or should not be acceptable. Carlin did believe that something magical was occurring when he got laughs explaining that:

when you’re in front of an audience and you make them laugh at a new

idea, you’re guiding their whole being for the moment. No one is ever

more herself or himself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are

down. It’s very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open,

completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh

begins. That’s when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at

that moment, it has a chance to grow. So, for that moment, that tiny

moment, I own them…at the same time, I’ve had to surrender myself to

that moment and it’s a communion. A genuine, momentary communion.

Which they would not have experienced without me. And I wouldn’t have

experienced without them” (Last Words 250). 58

If we take the power of the comedian to slip ideas into the minds of their audience seriously, then the comic represents a powerful public pedagogue, and rhetoricians interested in encouraging critical citizens to engage in democracy need to be aware of how this tool can be used for all causes—even for the cause of cynicism and apathy. Of course, this is not entirely a power that rests with the comedian as the audience has to be receptive to the message, and Carlin found his audience—people frustrated with the decaying state of society and the corrupt and seemingly insurmountable powers overseeing its destruction. He was able to create a community of spectators by offering them an easy way out. Instead of worrying, stressing, and fighting the onslaught of humanity’s destruction, Carlin offered his audience a way to check out and be amused instead. He offered them a way to resist their emotional reactions and avoid the pain and suffering at least for a moment or two.

Throughout Carlin’s career, he used benign violations to amuse people by shocking them, making them think in new ways, and helping them become aware of the social structures under which they live out their lives. However, his goal was never to encourage any sort of action; rather, he sought only to amuse and be amused—and maybe have communion of minds in which new ideas might be exchanged—to make fun.

Carlin’s work taps into the rebellious spirit that our society tends to value, but like most class clowns, the goal is not to educate, but to resist education—to resist taking anything seriously enough to become involved. In spite of this intentional disregard for involvement, comedians are educators and they do contribute to how people view the world. They open people’s eyes to new ways of looking at old, naturalized concepts, but that does not mean that they always do so in healthy ways. 59

As this analysis has shown, humor is more likely to resonate with people who already agree with the underlying premise being conveyed and is thus unlikely to serve as a means to convince anyone not already convinced. This kind of mental transformation and the creation of new knowledge and worldviews might be evident in the changing content of stand-up comedy, but it doesn’t seem as though comedy is causing those changes. Additionally, the act of being amused requires emotional distance—a sort of distance that minimizes threats—so that audiences can feel comfortable enough to laugh.

This seems like an inherent flaw in humor when it comes to functioning as a critical public pedagogy that spurs democratic activism. In the following chapter, I delve deeper into the way in which humor actually creates a sort of shield from emotions that drive the desire for a better world—specifically, the practice of trolling, which amounts to a kind of bullying/pranktivism as a way of diminishing opposing views and disengaging from our compassion for humanity. Making fun of the people and problems we fear is a way of keeping ourselves apart from the democratic processes through which we might effect change.

Chapter 3

Transcending the Troll: Rhetorical Identification, Positive Distinctiveness, and

Transcendence

In 2017, the pranktivist group The Yes Men posed as DNC officials at Politicon and declared that the DNC was altering course. Rather than remain beholden to their donors, Andy Bichlbaum, posing as DNC representative Frank Spencer, explained the democratic party would now ban corporate donations and adopt a policy agenda informed entirely by what polling data has shown to be the most popular policy ideas in the United

States: Medicare for all, tuition-free college, and stronger unions. On yeslab.org, the stated purpose of the stunt was “to call the DNC's bluff” in response to their “better deal.”

The website explains that “the bipartisan audience asked questions for 50 minutes. Never once did anyone express doubt that these were the actual new positions of the Democratic

Party—because why shouldn't they be" (yeslab.org)? Bichlbaum explained in an appearance on Redacted Tonight, that their stunt was the realization of what they wished the democratic party would stand for. While this stunt did not garner as much media attention as other Yes Men events have in the past, the stunt was described by some in the media as an instance of trolling the DNC. It is not uncommon for these kinds of stunts to be referred to as trolling, and while there are similarities between these events, which I refer to as instances of pranktivism, and instances of trolling, there are also key differences that distinguish these pranks as good for society unlike trolling, which exacerbates marginalization and protects privilege.

Like the Yes Men, troll Milo Yiannopoulis also thrives by gaining the media’s attention—this is how he promotes his brand and makes his living. However, unlike the 61

Yes Men and other pranktivists, Yiannopoulis grabs the media spotlight by making statements meant to ridicule people of marginal status who he situates as powerful entities who would limit the freedoms of others to protect their own “feelings” —he is adept at crossing social lines and defending it as an exercise of free speech. For instance,

Yiannopoulis is best known for his attacks on various social justice warriors (Black Lives

Matter, Feminists, body positivists). For example, in his attacks on feminism, he claims that “feminism is cancer,” that women who call themselves feminists are “hideously ugly,” and that third-wave feminism has become an exercise in misandry. The statement that feminism is “cancer” and others like it are designed to grab the media spotlight, and once he has their attention he dodges any critique of that statement by labeling it as a joke and critiquing any who were offended by a mere joke as “snowflakes” incapable of handling free speech. Once he is questioned by the media, Yiannopoulis tends to temper his statement by explaining that his point in making his controversial joke was only that feminists are not seeking equality but privilege at the expense of men, the statement is far less shocking and provocative than calling feminism cancer and feminists ugly, but it also does not shy away from his challenge to feminism. This strategy is effective, maybe even more so than pranktivists who essentially follow the same rhetorical pattern, because the media has a bias toward spectacle. Philosopher and education scholar Douglas Kellner explains that “Corporate media increasingly promote entertainment over news and information, like the tabloids, framed by codes of media spectacle” (xvi). The troll’s tendency to be outrageous and say highly controversial things creates a larger spectacle than pranktivists who stage often light-hearted yet poignant spectacles, so if the goal is to 62 grab the attention of the public, the more controversial and shocking the spectacle the better in terms of gaining media coverage.

Rhetoricians who have studied pranktivists have largely had an optimistic view of how this movement uses humor to make political statements and to provoke new ways of thinking through public issues. Studies of pranktivism, also referred to as “culture jamming” (Harold 2004; Haugerud 2013; Sandlin and Milam 2008), show how pranktivists innovate and improvise upon the existing culture (as jazz musicians “jam” to a common tune), and seek to disrupt and dislodge citizens’ unquestioned perceptions of culture (as in jamming up the cultural system). Scholars in general have largely been encouraged that these movements mark a shift toward a citizenry more engaged in deliberative democracy. Even though trolling has not been received quite so positively, those who have studied trolling have also found ways to use trolling to further discourse.

Like pranktivism, trolling’s ability to disrupt discourse has been viewed as something that can shake up traditional discourse encouraging and provoking new lines of thought

(McCosker; Mendel and Riesch). Rhetorician David Riche sees the study of trolling as a means through which rhetoricians can study our own “rhetorical vulnerability” and how it might be “exploited” (n.p.). However, unlike the study of pranktivism, which has been largely optimistic, scholars recognize that trolling’s level of disruption has the potential to do more harm than good because of the way in which it could promote violence

(Herring et al.; Riche; Vera-Gray). Even so, there is a scholarly consensus that the strategies pranktivists and trolls employ are effective because they shake up traditional means of protest finding original ways to combat complacency. 63

The questions that stand out for rhetorical scholars who have optimistically viewed pranktivism as an effective means for educating and mobilizing an unaware public is how a trolling strategy that offends, disrupts, and provokes has been so effective at bringing together audiences with ridicule and hate— and why pranktivism has been less effective in both motivating the public and in holding the public gaze by manipulating the media. To address these questions, this chapter compares the pranktivism movement which uses pranks and stunts to confront and disparage power to self-described troll Milo Yiannopoulis who claims that he trolls as a champion for free speech against those who would label and censor his words as hate-speech. Like culture jammers and pranktivists, trolls use pranks, stunts, ridicule, parody, and irony to attack their targets. Trolling also works to disrupt the status quo rattling audiences out of complacency and encouraging them to re-think their commonly held preconceptions of a given issue (Harold 2004; Sandlin and Milam 2008; Haugerud 2013). Similarly, trolls, like other pranktivists, skewer targets for the sake of amusement, and in doing so both trolls and pranktivists achieve identification. However, while culture jammers attack power and seek to educate people who suffer unknowingly under its rule, trolls attack the marginalized to mark them as others and protect their own privileged status. This tendency to attack traditionally oppressed groups marks trolling as a defender of privilege and as deconstructive to notions of equity and democracy.

Both pranktivism and trolling use disparaging humor to generate positive distinctiveness, a feeling that one’s own identity group is superior to others. However, because pranktivists attack the powerful in playful and optimistic ways, they invite audiences to experience identification and also to transcend their own social status to see 64 more clearly across divisions. On the other hand, trolls attack the marginalized with derision and disdain, which also invites the audience to experience identification, but rather than transcend their social status to see across divisions, they become further entrenched in their social status. I ground this analysis in Kenneth Burke’s identification and consubstantiation complimented by Mark E. Ferguson and Thomas A. Ford’s studies of disparaging humor using social identity theory and prejudiced norm theory. In other words, the explanation for how pranktivism transcends and trolling divides can be found at the convex of rhetoric and social psychology.

To ridicule an adversary is to diminish them as well as their point of view, which is a useful rhetorical strategy in the face of power, but when directed at marginalized groups it encourages the kind of identification with other members of a privileged group which furthers divisions that perpetuate harmful prejudices. As Burke claims in Rhetoric of Motives, war is the ultimate perversion of consubstantiation because one side so completely identifies with their own countrymen that they become a single substance— and they so completely lack identification with the other side as to render them inconsubstantial and so less than human—enabling the justification of violence and slaughter (22). I believe that trolling may be just this sort of “perversion of cooperation”—the troll disparages others to such a degree that they dehumanize their targets. In the following sections, I establish the common rhetorical strategies shared by pranktivists and trolls and explain how rhetoric and social psychology complement each other in the study of disparaging humor. I then ground my analysis of pranktivism and trolling within the frame of these two theoretical approaches to identity and humor.

Culture Jamming and Trolling: Identity and Identification 65

Both trolling and pranktivism are complex rhetorical acts. Both acts seek to publicly confront a target in ways that disparage the target and provide audiences with a derisive kind of amusement. However, there are key differences. Christine Harold asserts that the term prank derives from two meanings—1) to have a “showy manner” and “to add a stylistic flourish to one’s dress” and 2) “a wrinkle or a fold” through which “a qualitative change is produced not through the addition of novelty but through reconfiguration of the object itself” (71-2) Thus, a pranktivist’s (a term I use interchangeably with culture jammer) prank is an event or text which parodies that which it critiques in order to expose some flaw which results in disparaging humor—they make fun of and mock the element of society they would seek to alter. Their goal is to get the attention of the media, and they do this by convincing the media that the event or text is real. The spectacle the pranktivist creates—the reason the media is interested—makes it seem as though the entity being critiqued is admitting to some flaw or corruption that they would normally deny. The prankivist makes transparent what is known but generally unsaid. They pose as the emperor and admit that they have no clothes on.

On the other hand, trolling is the practice of making statements and behaving, historically in online social forums, in ways that are intended to engender anger and frustration within others for the amusement of their audiences. Rhetorician David Riche writes that “For trolls, the rhetorical aim is to lure vulnerable media-users into exposing their naivete or sensitivity, thereby disrupting the flow of communication, subverting trust among networked interlocuters, and sometimes going so far as to induce outrage or actual harm” (n.p.)There are other elements of trolling, but the core of it is the idea that the audience and the troll have no adherence to social decorum, which frees them to fight 66 by a different set of rules than the victims of their statements. They say anything as long as the target takes the statements seriously, and this is not to say that they don’t have a point—it only means that they don’t have to play fair in arguing for the point. While pranktivists mimic and mock their targets, trolls insult, ridicule, and denigrate them using disparaging humor. Riche, in his study of trolling rhetoric points out two effects that this kind of rhetoric has “(1) disrupting the flow of information and communication, and (2) garnering as much attention as possible for as long as possible” (n.p.) These same effects could be attributed to pranktivism, so as rhetoricians, we need a way to distinguish the two rhetorics, because they are very different in what they do for society. The key to understanding this difference is looking at these phenomena through the lenses of social identity theory and rhetorical identification and transcendence.

While both trolls and pranktivists use disparaging humor that invokes and critiques certain identities and both appeal to rhetorical identification and transcendence, there are key differences in the identities of who they target and who their audiences are, and this difference marks trolling as a pernicious and divisive force in society.

Pranktivists invite audiences to transcend their social status and join new conflict against powerful and corrupt forces, while trolls invite their audiences to transcend their identities as beings who adhere to social standards of decorum to join a new conflict against the forces of social justice warriors who they believe would limit their freedom of speech. In both cases, new identifications and divisions are created, but the effects on society are quite different—one is parrhesiastic, while the other is just another instance of protecting privilege. 67

Harold coins the term culture jamming and she explains that it not only seeks to

“monkey-wrench” the system, but that it employs “an artful proliferation of messages, a rhetorical process of intervention and invention, that challenges the ability of corporate discourses to make meaning in predictable ways” (66). I argue that, like pranktivists, trolls jam the system of information by violating social norms in ways that attract the attention of media outlets and jar people out of complacency. This is because the news is attracted to spectacle—both pranktivists and trolls are expert spectacle dealers. The way in which the Yes Men and Milo Yiannopoulis have employed the rhetorical process I outline here in order to show how these strategies are similar.

In this section, I will compare the work of pranktivists (a.k.a. culture jammers) to the work of trolls. Both trolls and culture jammers use a similar rhetorical/humor strategy to grab the attention of the public and critique people and institutions they disagree with.

However, there are distinct differences that mark trolling as a dark and divisive force in society while culture jamming represents art acting as a positive force for social change.

This analysis is vitally important if rhetoricians are to fully understand the value of activism that employs disparaging humor.

An experience of the stunts of the Yes Men and the statements and controversies generated by Yiannopoulis is fragmented—these things take place across a variety of platforms, and the reactions to these events do also. After the fact, not all of the texts are always still available, so the moments are fleeting. For example, after the twitter battle that Yiannopoulis had with SNL actor Leslie Jones, he was banned from Twitter and his tweets ceased to exist, so I had to rely on articles that I could find through Google. In the case of the Yes Men, they often make news agencies look stupid by tricking them into 68 believing they represent companies and organizations that they do not actually represent, and news agencies don’t always share the recordings of these episodes freely. Therefore,

I was forced to mine YouTube for videos that had been posted by fans and viewers who happened to capture these interviews and press conferences. The Yes Men also make a point of maintaining their own website that catalogues these various events. Therefore, the methodology for gathering my data was necessarily fragmenting and emerging. I reconstructed the experience of the audience by tracing the various steps available to me using the platform YouTube. Then, I used Google to find articles in the news that reacted to these events. Finally, I turned to the artists themselves. For the Yes Men, I studied their website, watched the videos they personally posted to YouTube, and watched their movies. For Yiannopoulis, I read his book, Dangerous, and I followed his short-lived blog on YouTube and watched the videos he posted of his speeches on YouTube.

Through this methodology, I was able to reconstruct the experience that audience members have of these individuals as they create controversy and stage events.

The following analysis reveals that both culture jammers and trolls follow a three- step rhetorical strategy to disrupt and engage in public discourses. First, they create controversy by using disparagement humor. Pranktivists tend to stage an event or produce a text in which they imitate and exaggerate their targets, while trolls make outrageous and controversial public statements of ridicule about their targets. These controversies are intended to attract as much attention as possible from the media and the public at large. Second, pranktivists and trolls, now in the media spotlight, explain away reactions to the generated controversy by claiming that their use of humor is non-serious and should not be held to the social standards of more serious events or statements. They 69 reject people who do take these jokes seriously as having no sense of humor. In addition, they claim that taking offense to the humor obscures the larger and more important point they were trying to make. Finally, they use the attention they gained by creating controversy to make their case about some social issue through less controversial language.

Generally, this is the way in which trolls and pranktivists use disparaging humor to engage in public discourse, and it has proven to be an effective and attractive strategy in an environment where the attention of audiences is the commodity. As Richard

Lanham has argued in The Economics of Attention, we are no longer a society who values what one can produce, rather, the economy’s focus is on generating content that can capture the gaze of the media and the public at large (21). This is something that both trolls and pranktivists have proven to be very good at, although, it may be that trolls ultimately have the advantage in the attention economy. This is because, as Kellner posited the media has become “tabloidized,” they are driven by controversial spectacle, and invective that violates social decorum and is more likely to grab the attention of more viewers than playful parodies. The following two examples, the Yes Men and Milo

Yiannopoulis, demonstrate how pranktivists and trolls put their rhetorical strategy into action.

The Prankivist group, The Yes Men, use this three-step strategy to spread their message, and the following example illustrates how this rhetorical strategy has been effective for pranktivists. The Yes Men typically pose as representatives from governments or corporations in order to announce some change to policy that would be beneficial to society. In doing so, they grab the attention of the media at large due to the 70 radical nature of these announcements. Once they have the attention of the media, they are able to spread their ultimate message, which is that the targets of their parody should in fact enact the policy that they announced would be going into effect. For example, in their 2014 film, The Yes Men are Revolting, Andy Bichlbaum, disguised as a representative from the U.S department of Homeland Security announced that the U.S would end their reliance on fossil fuels entirely by the year 2030. Furthermore, the renewable energy that would supply the U.S. with power would largely be owned and operated by Native American tribes as restitution for the hardship placed upon these peoples at the hands of the U.S. government throughout history—they referred to this as a second thanksgiving. The audience made up of government officials and defense contractors then participated in a circle dance and was led in song by one of the Native

Americans present at the conference. In staging this controversial stunt, the Yes Men were able to catch the attention of many news outlets. Once they did, they toured various press outlets and explained that the purpose of the stunt was to raise awareness of climate change and promote policy change.

Trolls also work to grab the attention of the media through controversial spectacle. Milo Yiannopoulis is adept at creating controversy. Yiannopoulis identifies this as one of his goals as a troll. Yiannopoulis writes in Dangerous that “One of the purposes of trolling is to generate as much noise and public outcry as possible, which has the added effect of drawing attention to the very facts society is so eager to suppress”

(n.p.). Take, for example, the way in which Yiannopoulis has made a career out of attacking feminists. One of his more famous statements is that feminism is cancer. He has also claimed that feminist women are uglier and more masculine, and he writes that “It 71 turns out that adopting aggressive, masculine postures and developing combative psychological reflexes can boost testosterone levels by significant percentages” (Does

Feminism Make Women Ugly?). Additionally, in a 2016 article entitled Feminism Kills

Women, he charges the feminist movement with indirectly killing women by advocating for their right to serve in the military (Milo: Feminism Kills Women). Calling feminism a cancer and claiming that it is killing women are statements that are designed to generate controversy. Yiannopoulis has positioned himself as the leading anti-feminist troll—

Articles like this one have catapulted Yiannopoulis into television appearances in which he is asked to explain and/or defend his attacks on feminism and a college lecture circuit where he is protested by his adversaries and applauded by his fans.

The second step of Yiannopoulis’s rhetorical strategy is to qualify his controversial statements as humorous and therefore non-serious. He explained in an interview with Alex Jones that while the media gives left-wing comedians such as Jon

Stewart and Stephen Colbert passes to say whatever they like as humorists, his jokes are often taken seriously. In the case of his attacks on feminism, Milo has described his controversial statements having “jokes” that are meant to “expose, ridicule and have fun” at the expense of those he perceives to be in power (Milo Yiannopoulis Talks Free

Speech, Feminism, Fake News, & Australian Tour: Studio 10). Despite the fact that feminists are fighting against the marginalization and oppression of women that has been going on for centuries, the point I wish to emphasize is how Yiannopoulis uses the defense that his literal statement that feminism is cancer is a joke that reveals a more important and less offensive point. Using this defense, Yiannopoulis is free to say whatever he needs to say to shock the public and the media into paying attention to him 72 so that 1) further his pursuit of fame and recognition and 2) make a case for some issue he is championing—in this case that feminism is not about equality but is a new anti- male movement.

Finally, Yiannopoulis uses the attention he gets for making his sensational and provocative comment in order to defend his right to say shocking things and to make the shocking statement seem reasonable—he claims that what is shocking is not what he has said, but the way in which he said it. To illustrate the difference between the initial shocking statement meant to “troll” his targets and gain media attention and the less shocking argument he makes once he has the media’s attention, I compare a speech

Yiannopoulis gave at the University of Massachusetts with his appearance on the

Australian TV show Studio 10 in which he was asked to comment on the speech.

Yiannopoulis’s career largely consists of his lecture circuit in which he tours U.S. colleges delivering controversial speeches and his appearances on news media. One appearance at the University of Massachusetts became infamous on YouTube because as part of a panel of presenters at University of Massachusetts, Yiannopoulis, in sunglasses and adorned with large gold chains around his neck stood at the podium, declared

“feminism is cancer” and proceeded to return to his seat (Milo Gives the Shortest (But

Best) Lecture In American College History). His entire speech lasted approximately five seconds, yet it is indicative of his ability to engender anger and rage within his opponents. Yiannopoulis is often asked to defend comments like this when he is interviewed on mainstream television, which was the case when he appeared on the

Australian television show Studio 10, Yiannopoulis. These interviews are typically posted and circulated on YouTube furthering Yiannopoulis’s fame and ensuring more future 73 appearances. On Studio 10 Yiannopoulis explains his position on feminism in a way that is less shocking than his University of Massachusetts speech:

It’s very difficult to describe yourself as not a feminist if you’re in public

life, and that’s an enforcement of a particular political orthodoxy that

is not shared by the majority of the public. I mean very few women

describe themselves as feminists—fewer than one in five in America, just

seven percent in England. I’m sure the numbers for Australia, being a very

sensitive, uh, very sensible country, are about the same. And, you

know, these ideas that are being enforced in popular culture and on TV

are not views reflected in the public, and the gap between the media

and the people at home is growing all the time. That’s my insight, and

that’s what I seek to expose, and ridicule, and have fun with. Uhm,

it’s perfectly fine if you’re a feminist. My problem isn’t that… my

problem is with those feminists who require us all in public to say we are

too when we might not be. We might think that feminism has run its

course and had its day. I’m not particularly interested in anybody

else’s specific positions. What I’m interested in is an open

marketplace of ideas.

(Milo Yiannopoulos Talks Free Speech, Feminism, Fake News &

Australian Tour | Studio 10)

Asking for an open marketplace of ideas and claiming that he has no problem with people who consider themselves feminists is very different from calling feminism a cancer and claiming that it will kill women. The tone in this interview is significantly different as 74 well. Yiannopoulis comes across as polite and claims to simply be misunderstood. This shifting between personas is indicative of the trolling strategy to first get the attention of the media and the public and then make a more reasoned and nuanced point once they find themselves in the spotlight. In fact, in the Studio 10 interview, the woman questioning Yiannopoulis looks like the more aggressive of the two. Yiannopoulis is able to display his skill in debate by twisting his previous shocking and offensive statement into a rational, logical argument.

This is not to say he is right, but he is convincing. Additionally, it furthers the trolling cycle. Yiannopoulis’s stated strategy as a troll is that he “baits the target into a trap, from which there is no escape without public embarrassment” (n.p.). Yiannopoulis goes into these interviews with the intent of getting under the skin of the reporters who interview him so that he can circulate them on YouTube as examples of him “destroying” feminists. So, Yiannopoulis is able to attack a target, in this case feminists, then when the target responds to the attack, he can accuse them of lacking a sense of humor and missing the point of the joke due to a kind of blindness caused by their emotional reaction to the offensive statement. It is a vicious cycle, and this is why responding to a troll is often referred to as feeding the troll—it is what the troll needs and wants.

Both pranktivists and trolls need attention in order to successfully spread their messages, and both use the same strategy of disparaging targets with humor and then using the attention they get to make larger, less humorous political points. The key difference between trolls and pranktivists is who they choose to target. There are other differences also in their tactics, but who they choose to attack is what marks pranktivism as a movement that works to improve society by making it more equitable and fairer and 75 trolling as a movement that seeks to preserve privilege and promote prejudice toward marginalized peoples. Social identity theory explains the appeal of disparaging humor and how it promotes prejudice while Burke’s rhetorical identification helps explain how pranktivism invites audiences to transcend the limits of their identity to find identification with other identity groups and trolling entrenches audiences firmly within their identity groups.

Identification, Transcendence, and Division: Class Clowns v. Bullies

While culture jammers and trolls use the same rhetorical strategies to engage in discourse, who they attack and the points they make are significantly different. There are at least three distinct differences in tactics between culture jamming and trolling that distinguish pranktivism as a positive force and trolling as a negative force of destruction:

1) While culture jammers use a playful and optimistic tone, trolls use a more angry

and insulting tone.

2) While culture jamming is characterized by attacks on powerful institutions, trolls

focus their attacks on marginalized groups with less power.

3) While pranktivists break with social decorum to provoke audiences to rethink

social arrangements and hierarchies, trolls break with social decorum to reinforce

social arrangements as they are—to protect their privilege.

Viewing these significant differences through the rhetorical lens of dramatistic identification and the social psychological lens of social identity theory reveals how pranktivism works to unite people to work for the betterment of society while trolling works to divide people along partisan and social lines. I argue that pranktivism uses disparaging humor in such a way that audiences experience positive distinctiveness at the 76 expense of powerful institutions they perceive as corrupt. In doing so, they are achieving rhetorical identification that allows people to transcend the limitations of their identity to see their shared interest with others who are oppressed by the same institutions. On the other hand, trolling employs disparaging humor in such a way that audiences experience positive distinctiveness at the expense of other citizens who they perceive to be inferior and/or threatening to their privileged way of life. In doing so, trolls resolve conflict not by finding common interests and identification with those they disagree with, rather, they achieve rhetorical identification within their privileged identity group. They perceive their interests as privileged individuals as being in direct opposition to those who would seek to take that privilege away by working toward equity and equality.

The key difference between trolls and culture jammers is the social status of who they attack, and both social identity theory and rhetorical identification inform how this difference is significant in terms of the social value of these movements. Ferguson and

Ford use prejudiced norm theory to explain how disparaging humor reifies prejudice. The prejudiced norm theory of disparaging humor has four components: 1) jokes “activate a conversational rule of levity” and are interpreted as “nonserious;” 2) This switch allows for audiences to believe that “they need not be critical of discrimination against the targeted group,” 3) which allows for the audience member to adopt “greater personal tolerance of discrimination;” 4) the joker-group becomes more “prejudiced” against the target group (Ford and Ferguson 81-2). Given that disparaging humor attacks an out- group in a humorous manner, it follows that audiences who are amused by this humor and recognize any disparaging attack of this sort as humor will then be susceptible to adopting the prejudices the joke promotes as their own. This is particularly salient given 77 that both trolls and pranktivists seek to gain the attention of the media and the public by employing a kind of shocking humor that transgresses some social line—from

Yiannopoulis claiming that feminists practice feminism because they are ugly and are unable to attract men (Dangerous) to pretending to be the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announcing that they would stop lobbying against climate change legislation (yeslab.org).

In both cases, the trolls/pranktivists capture the public gaze by breaking social norms in a way that is amusing for some audiences and shocking/offensive to others. Once they are in the spotlight, they can minimize the offense/shock by pointing out that as jokes, their comments are not as serious as the real issue/target they are critiquing. This defense is effective precisely because people are conditioned to interpret jokes as non-serious, non- threatening, and ultimately benign. Ferguson and Ford explain that perceiving these disparaging jokes as benign actually enables the reification of prejudices. But, not all prejudices are equal in their ability to oppress and marginalize—prejudice toward the powerful can be a symptom of thinking critically about how the powerful grow and maintain their power at the expense of the powerless.

Prejudiced norm theory explains why the distinction between culture jammers who ridicule powerful identity groups and institutions and trolls who attack traditionally marginalized identity groups is so significant. When pranktivists disparage the wealthy, stock brokers, oil companies/executives, or politicians who are indeed often corrupt, they engender a kind of prejudice that is more akin to critical awareness of the way in which these powerful entities are exploiting those less fortunate and less powerful. In fact, I would argue these are prejudices that would more accurately be described as views informed by critical thinking. In other words, when the Yes Men parody powerful 78 institutions like the Chamber of Commerce for their policy of working against climate change, the prejudice that is reified is that powerful institutions do not work for the best interest of society, but for their own interests above all—this is an informed kind of prejudice, and it is a more just and righteous form of prejudice than those directed at people because of their sex or race. However, when trolls ridicule feminists, Black Lives

Matter activists, the LGBTQ community, and anyone working for social justice, their disparaging humor actually reifies existing prejudices that are antithetical to notions of equity and equality.

In addition to promoting and normalizing prejudice, Ferguson and Ford use social identity theory to explain that disparaging humor generates positive distinctiveness (a feeling of superiority over another group or individual) for those who use it. Positive distinctiveness in and of itself is not inherently positive or negative, but it can be either depending upon who is attacked by the humor. Social psychologists define social identity “as the significance and qualitative meaning that individuals accord their group membership within their self-concept” (Roberts et. al 272). This “significance and qualitative meaning” is influenced by a myriad of social factors including positive distinctiveness. Ferguson and Ford define positive distinctiveness as “When a group is recognized as superior to a relevant out-group along some valued dimension” and they explain that, “Because social groups value such distinctiveness, they will use various means for attaining it. One such means is disparagement humor” (Disparagement Humor

296). Social psychologists Laura Morgan Roberts, Isis H. Settles, and William A. Jellison contend that positive distinctiveness strategies such as “avoiding categorization in a socially devalued group and elevating the status of a socially devalued group are ways of 79 controlling others’ impressions” and these strategies are useful when employed by traditionally devalued identity groups. Thus, when a “devalued” or oppressed group experiences positive distinctiveness at the expense of a privileged or powerful group, it is a move toward equity and equality. On the other hand, when positive distinctiveness is experienced by privileged groups, it serves to further reify the oppression of underprivileged groups.

While culture jammers use of disparaging humor creates positive distinctiveness at the expense of the privileged and powerful, trolls do so at the expense of marginalized groups, which is a more destructive and divisive use of disparagement humor. For example, the Yes Men have consistently chosen targets like Shell Oil, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Dow Chemical, while Yiannopoulis chooses targets such as feminists,

Black Lives Matter, and the trans-community. When the Yes-Men appear on BBC World as representatives from Dow Chemical and announce that they will pay for clean-up efforts in Bhopal where they were responsible for a disastrous chemical spill that poisoned 600,000 people, those who find this stunt humorous experience positive distinctiveness—they are invited to feel as though they as citizens are superior to corporate entities who destroy the environment and poison people without suffering the consequence or even feeling as though they should suffer any consequences (Bhopal

Disaster – BBC – The Yes Men). On the other hand, when Yiannopoulis appears at the

University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and ridicules a transgendered college student who fought and won the right to use the bathroom she was most comfortable in for her appearance—her inability to “pass” as a woman to a crowd of her peers, he is also inviting his audience to experience positive distinctiveness, but it is at the expense of a 80 person and identity group who is already marginalized (Milo Yiannopoulis Bullies

Transgender Student on Stage in the Name of Free Speech). This iteration of positive distinctiveness does not invite his audience to reevaluate their identity and find common interests with the person Yiannopoulis ridicules, it invites them to entrench within their interests and identity as heteronormative and privileged. Therefore, one way to tell a troll from a pranktivist is to examine who they target.

One thing that complicates the application of these social identity theories is that our perception of our own identity is not static but is dynamic and multifaceted. How people categorize themselves is ever-changing depending on their context, and disparaging humor plays a role shaping that context. An understanding of disparaging humor explains how trolling rhetorically constructs identifications and divisions around events and individuals. Nevertheless, in order to organize our understanding of the various identifications, Ferguson and Ford identified two categories of identities upon a continuum: the social and the personal. On one end, social identifications are defined by affiliation with others who share common social affiliations or traits (race, gender, fraternities, occupation, political affiliation), and they are in tension with personal identities that are defined by more idiosyncratic attributes (family, income, intelligence).

Their research shows that the level of amusement at humorous stimuli correlate to the degree in which a person identifies with the identity attacked by the joke. If one’s social identity is disparaged through a humorous attack, that individual may shield themselves from feeling attacked by the joke by identifying with an alternative personal identity which is not being disparaged by the joke and vice versa. For example, in a study of disparaging humor and social identity theory, Ferguson and Ford studied African 81

American’s response to humor that disparaged African Americans for their race. They were surprised to find that more African Americans than they expected found the jokes funny, and they found a correlation between income and perceived amusement

(Disparagement Humor 290). In other words, because the jokes ridiculed African

Americans for being poor, African Americans with higher personal incomes distanced themselves from their social, racial identity and found humor, as well as positive distinctiveness, from the vantage point of their personal identity as wealthy. This multiplicity of identities is what allows trolls to entrench in their common privileged identity even while they may share social identities with those being attacked. When trolls disparage marginalized groups, they feel as though their social identity as white male is protected from marginalized social identity groups--women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community—even though they likely share many common interests that transcend those identity categories. In this way, trolling calcifies certain identity factors and encourages a sort of division that distances trolls from out-group identities. It is here that rhetoric can help explain how pranktivism and trolling differ in their ability to transcend the limitations of one’s identity to find identification across identity groups.

Both pranking and trolling are social movements, and part of their purpose is to entertain and amuse, but they also, and more importantly, seek to persuade people to adopt a certain viewpoint. Burke’s theory of identification helps explain how the disparaging humor employed by pranktivism and trolling work as persuasive forces— how they promote certain worldviews within audiences. For Burke, persuasion is the perpetual process through which individuals find common identifications to transcend social conflicts so that they may act consubstantially as a single entity—as a movement. 82

Each individual has many possible identifications—students, citizens, scholars, parents, children, patriots, activists—which are largely labels that represent groups who have common features and interests. Rhetorician Diane Davis explains that “According to

Burke, there is no essential identity; what goes for your individual ‘substance’ is not an essence but the incalculable totality of your complex and contradictory identifications, through which you variously (and vicariously) become able to say identity can shift slightly from moment to moment as they encounter new experiences” (127). As with social identity theory and the continuum between social and personal identity, rhetoric also explains that identity is a moving target. This is what makes persuasion possible:

The rhetor persuades through appeals to an identity by framing conflicts in ways that highlight common interests. The way in which common interests are framed makes the difference between disparate groups of people pulling together and disparate groups pulling away from each other. It is the difference between uniting to work for equity and inclusiveness and dividing to protect privileged social status.

With every coming together—every instance of identification—there is also a moving apart—an instance of division. By being A, one is choosing to be separate from

B. Burke writes in A Rhetoric of Motives that “Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity” (22). When social conflict occurs, the various sides of the conflict align according to their interests and resolving the conflict is a matter of finding common interests—these interests are often a matter of identity. For example, when the Yes Men imitated the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and announced that they would no longer be 83 lobbying against climate change legislation, they identified themselves and their interests as unified with all common people who would benefit from such legislation as opposed to wealthy businesses and corporations who would be regulated and potentially lose profits with such legislation. Thus, this new line of identification creates a new line of division— by being concerned about the environment over profit, one cannot be concerned for profit over the environment.

This process of identification and division does not always result in a settled conflict—Rather, for every moment of identification and transcendence, there is also the discovery of a new division and a new conflict. According to Burke in Attitudes Toward

History, “When approached from a certain point of view, A and B are ‘opposites.’ We mean by ‘transcendence’ the adoption of another point of view from which they cease to be opposites” (336). Of course, transcendence is about more than opposites becoming one—transcendence is a matter of identity transformation, which Burke likens to hazing and coming-of-age rituals. He writes, “at different periods in the life of an individual, he

[or she] is symbolically endowed with a new identity, as he [or she] enters some new corporate grouping within the tribe” (337). Therefore, the process of identification, when successful, is the adoption of a new point of view, a new frame that changes their perception of reality and how they view themselves in relation to that reality. This shifting from one social identity to another is integral to the process through which trolls and pranktivists are able to amuse and persuade their audiences to see themselves as pitted against powerful forces. Pranktivists identify with their audiences as victims of powerful corporations like Shell Oil and Dow Chemical who have a common interest in resisting these powerful folks. On the other hand, trolls identify with their audiences as 84 victims of social movements they perceive to be in power, such as feminists and Black

Lives Matter activists—political elites who would silence their free speech and negate their privilege in the name of social justice. In both cases audiences are invited to transcend any other social category to identify with each other as divided against some other group. As James P. Zappen points out, “when we identify with another person, idea, or group, we overcome our divisions; on the other hand, we thereby also divide ourselves from someone or something else” (289). In this way, both pranktivists and trolls achieve some kind of identification through the use of disparaging humor, but they have very different consequences for society—one challenges power while the other protects privilege.

The Yes Men did not actually settle the conflict with corporate entities working against climate change legislation. Rhetorician James P. Zappen explains that “these dialectical processes are in fact three principles, not two, reflected in the development from merger to division to a new merger that offers both the possibility of transcendence and the possibility of a new division—processes that are, therefore, always incomplete”

(286). Thus, once individuals identify their interests as being aligned, they can act as though they are of a single substance—as consubstantial—but this will also create new divisions. Therefore, the resolution of conflicts through identification does not always mean that opposing sides come to total agreement or alignment. Rather, the conflict can remain, or a new conflict can be created at the moment that those involved in conflict move past the confrontation. In the case of the Yes Men and their confrontation with the

U.S. Chamber of Commerce, their actions resulted in a new conflict. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce sued them and ultimately lost. However, what makes this distinction 85 regarding this dialectical process the key to understanding how trolls and culture jammers both achieve identification and transcendence—each is of a different kind—is that it explains how trolls transcend conflict by strengthening existing divisions and pranktivists do so by creating identification and sometimes creating new divisions.

Burke’s identification, transcendence, and division provides a vocabulary with which rhetoricians can describe how the social status of the targets that pranktivists and trolls target changes the nature of the rhetorical act. I will provide an example from the culture jamming group “The Billionaires and an infamous example from Yiannopoulis’s attack on Leslie Jones to illustrate how rhetorical identification, transcendence, and division are influenced by the social status of the targets attacked. Yet again, culture jamming’s tendency to attack the powerful lends itself to the possibility of transcendence while trolling’s tendency to attack the marginalized lends itself to more division.

The culture jamming group The Billionaires for Wealthcare (formerly the The

Billionaires for Bush) are characterized by their guerilla theater style protests in which they dress as cartoonesque caricatures of the ultra-wealthy chanting slogans, such as

“wealthcare, not healthcare” and “your pain, our gain.” On the surface, The Billionaires’ stunts capture the attention of passersby and occasionally the news media because they break with conventional social norms. Typically, those in power do not take to the streets to protest policy that would help the poor or middle class—they hire lobbyists and package their policy initiatives in palatable rhetoric about bootstraps, job-creators, and protecting freedoms. Anthropologist and communication studies scholar Angelique

Haugerud reports that cofounder of The Billionaires, Andrew Boyd, believes that catching the attention of audiences and even entertaining and amusing them allows for a 86 more “human” connection. Rather than spewing a litany of facts at their audience,

Haugerud explains that “hope and human connection are nourished through political street theater that is simultaneously playful, surprising, and provocative. Irony here is partly a tool for dealing with power structures one can’t control, and with historical and ideological disorder one can neither accept nor fully fathom” (36). For example, as part of a protest against what they perceive as an unfair system of taxation that favors the rich,

The Billionaires gathered outside post offices in various cities on April 15th, 2005 dressed in tuxedos, wearing monocles, smoking cartoonishly large cigars, and carrying signs that read “Thank YOU for paying OUR taxes!” (B4B National Day of Action Tax Day, April

15). In doing so, they use irony and parody to ridicule and disparage the ultra-wealthy who avoid paying their share of taxes and invite the audience, who it is safe to assume are not ultra-wealthy, to recognize their common interests as taxpayers treated unfairly— audiences are invited to identify with the protesters and each other as victims of a group of wealthy elites who have gamed the tax system to their advantage. By disparaging actual billionaires by dressing as caricatures of them, The Billionaires invite audience members to be amused and experience positive distinctiveness at the expense of the powerful, and this allows them to transcend the limitations of their social status for a moment. The common people can laugh at and minimize those who generate their disadvantage. Rather than calcify existing identities, all people who are not billionaires are invited to become consubstantial with the movement. At this point, they may find ways to act together for change, which is significantly different from the effect that trolling has on its audience. 87

As an example of how trolling reduces the ability of one to transcend their social identity, I turn to perhaps Yiannopoulis’s most successful troll—his public twitter battle with Leslie jones, which ultimately led to his banishment from the platform.

Yiannopoulis published a provocative review of the The Ghostbusters on Breitbart.com, in which he described Jones as “a two-dimensional racist stereotype by even the most forgiving measure” (n.p.) He goes on to chide that “it’s her flat-as-a-pancake black stylings that ought to have irritated the SJWs. I don’t get offended by such things, but they should” (n.p.). In addition, later on Twitter he referred to Jones as “barely literate,” and wrote that he had been “rejected by yet another black dude” (Triggered n.p.). On

Studio 10, Yiannopoulis defended these remarks as “punching up” given Jones’s status as a celebrity. However, the disparaging humor that Yiannopoulis uses in this article and his

Twitter posts attacks Jones’s identity as a woman and as a person of color, which are traditionally marginalized identity categories. His attack does more than amuse his audience. It appeals to their very sense of identity as white males—particularly white males who perceive their identity as under threat from those who would reduce them to a state of equality. Rather than provide a means to transcend a social identity, Yiannopoulis provides an avenue for his audience to further entrench themselves within the identity status—the feeling of positive distinctiveness justifies their status as privileged and

Jones’s status as underprivileged at the same time. This is just one example but knowing that disparaging humor has different effects depending upon the social status of the targets who are attacked allows rhetoricians to better distinguish trolling from culture jamming. 88

One key difference between how trolls and pranktivists make appeals for identifications is that the troll is much more direct in making controversial statements than the more ambiguous parody and mimicry indicative of pranktivists. There is an element of trickery in both cases, but trolls tend to trick the media and their targets into becoming outraged, while pranktivists pretend to be what they are ridiculing, which can lead to confusion. Haugerud explains that The Billionaires tax-day stunt left many passersby confused—unsure how to take the protest. However, ultimately, she sees this as a potentially effective means for encouraging critical reflection. Haugerud writes,

“Billionaire street performances play on uncertainties and unsettle ideas about political categories,” but “spectators—whether they get the joke or not—become active co- producers as well as consumers of meanings” (n.p.). While those who do not get the jokes are essentially duped by the performance—those who do get the jokes delight in the irony and parody and are delighted further by the fact that some people do not get the joke. For example, Haugerud explains that some people duped by the Billionaires joined them in chanting “Four More Wars” in support of President Bush’s reelection—they become part of the performance and the humor is enhanced by their ignorance. This is yet another way that pranktivists achieve identification and positive distinctiveness. Those who get the joke are invited to laugh at those who do not. In addition, they experience a form of positive distinctiveness by being among a group of others who get the humor and by extension get the point the joke is making.

On the other hand, Trolls take a more direct approach, which leaves less room for confusion or misfire, but there is a similar element of trickery. In this case, the trickery arises from “triggering” or angering targets, and audiences who are in on the joke are 89 invited to be amused at the emotional reactions the troll causes. Like those who get the jokes of pranktivists, troll audiences experience identification as individuals who get and enjoy these attacks, and they experience positive distinctiveness as superior to those who have been ridiculed—for their perceived flaws, but also for their inability to either get or take the joke. For instance, Yiannopoulis’s appearance at the University of Massachusetts in which he claimed that “feminism is cancer” became known as “the triggering,” because of a student protester who interrupted screaming obscenities, chanting “keep your hate speech off of this campus,” and pumping her fists in rhythm. This woman, Cora

Segal, became known amongst Yiannopoulis’s fans as “Trigglypuff” and was memed and ridiculed by many of them because of her appearance. Yiannopoulis also joined his audience in bullying this woman for her weight, but he did so under the guise of sympathy for her:

Now, many people wonder why I don’t make fun of Trigglypuff. Well I

do, a little bit, as you can see. But mostly I feel sorry for her. She’s

been completely lost to the ideology of fat acceptance. Did you know

she actually gave a speech on sizeism? A speech! On sizeism! It’s like

someone going around preaching the virtues of having HIV! Well, I

mean you do lose a ton of weight and get loads of attention, but

regardless… I don’t think there’s any way back for Trigglypuff. Even If

by some miracle, she were to abandon her entire worldview, it would take

years, even decades, to reverse the damage. The damage that was done to

her by the body positivity movement. It’s consigned her to a life of

misery and embarrassment. (Nolan n.p.). 90

Like pranktivists, Yiannopoulis is being ironic—Yiannopoulis does not actually feel any sympathy for Segal, rather, he uses the guise of sympathy to ridicule her and amuse his audience. His audience identifies with him and with each other as people who both get the irony and also find amusement in the abuse of someone else. While Yiannopoulis blames the body positivity movement for “consign[ing]” Segal “to a life of misery and embarrassment,” the ridicule he and his followers put her through is what actually causes any misery and embarrassment. Nevertheless, the larger point here is that Yiannopoulis and his followers actually dehumanize their targets so that they can feel superior, and this positive distinctiveness reinforces their privilege and discourages them from finding any sort of common identity with Segal—it encourages a kind of aggression that is unhealthy for society in general.

Prejudiced norm theory and social identity theory complements our understanding of Kenneth Burke’s identification. Specifically, these theories explain how identification can be perverted into a “disease of cooperation,” in which identification with a particular identity supersedes all other possible identifications. Burke writes that “We refer to that ultimate disease of cooperation: war. (You will understand war much better if you think of it, not simply as strife come to a head, but rather as a disease, or perversion of communion. Modern war characteristically requires a myriad of constructive acts for each destructive one; before each culminating blast, there must be a vast network of interlocking operations, directed communally)” (22). While pranktivism encourages people to transcend the limitations of their identity categories, trolling marks a form of these interlocking operations that contribute to social polarization and lead to a figurative war if not a literal one over the future and identity of American society. In war, a group 91 of individuals so completely identify under the banner of national identity, they can justify the murder and destruction of other human beings. Rhetoricians Shane

Borrowman & Marcia Kmetz point out that “The tendency toward identification with one another and division from one another is neither new nor unnatural nor separable from forms of violent aggression (physical or rhetorical, focused at enemies internal or external)” (281). I would argue that disparagement humor is in and of itself a form of aggression that features symbolic violence.

Disparaging humor may serve as an alternate outlet for violence, but its brand of symbolic violence can also be harmful to a democratic society because it is imperative to maintain an open space for dialogue. This free speech is integral to protecting the balance between identification and division; however, certain forms of humor such as trolling threaten the possibility for open dialogue across identity groups. Trolling discourages dialogue in favor of ridicule. Make no mistake this ridicule is still rhetorical and symbolic, but it uses identification to protect its privileged place in discursive realm by reducing all others to fools and snowflakes. Of course, when disparaging humor is directed toward power, using many of the same strategies and techniques as trolling, it can also work to even the discursive playing field and diminish privilege and power. Both pranktivists and trolls use disparaging humor to shock and disrupt normalized discourse, however, the defining targets of these attacks distinguishes pranktivists working to expose power and corruption from troll seeking to protect it. Making this distinction is integral to the rhetorical study of public pedagogy and democratic discourse. Citizens need to have a certain kind of literacy that enables them to be wiser consumers of disparaging humor if we are to work toward a more equitable and inclusive society. 92

Conclusion

The strategies of both pranktivists and trolls have a certain appeal. There is something carnivalesque and deliciously rebellious about breaking social norms and disrupting the status quo that entertains and amuses us. While pranktivists playfully turn social hierarchies upside down encouraging audiences to break free for a moment and reevaluate their station in society, trolls ridicule the marginalized from a place of privilege reinforcing social hierarchies and protecting their privileged status. Bringing together the work of rhetoricians and social psychologists helps to explain this difference.

A social identity theory of humor explains why disparaging humor is amusing and how it affects our self-perception and our prejudices, while rhetorical theories of identification explain how the effects of disparaging humor, particularly positive distinctiveness, can work as persuasive tools that shape and reshape societal statuses and structures. This understanding gives society a vocabulary to distinguish humorous rhetoric that seeks to transcend old social hierarchies and those that seek to calcify and protect them. Knowing this difference is vitally important if humor is going to do more than simply amuse and provide a cathartic release of pressure within a tense and divided society.

Without the ability to see how trolling is harming our democracy, people will continue to be at its mercy. While culture jamming is playful and ironic, staging artistic interventions in society, trolling is likely more effective at attracting and holding the eye of the public due to its ability to shock, drawing more attention than the media. I would venture to bet that more people have heard of Milo Yiannopoulis than have heard of the

Yes Men or The Billionaires, and this is because Yiannopoulis is just as appealing (in terms of attracting attention) to those who hate him as those who love him. All publicity 93 is good publicity in this arena, and trolls are just generally better at generating publicity.

This makes it even more vitally important that rhetoricians know how to spot the difference, because trolls are pushing us toward war, if not physically then certainly rhetorically. Rhetoricians can then help others to be more mindful about how trolling might affect them and their attitudes towards others.

What I have provided here is not a prescriptive set of statistics that describe exactly what trolling is (or pranktivism for that matter), but it is a means with which to tell these very similar rhetorical strategies apart. The differences are significant in the effects they have on the people who witness such things. As a democratic society in which free speech and deliberative debates are the foundations of our union, it is imperative that we understand how societies come together and how they drift apart. We live in tumultuous times and it seems that we mock power more than ever, but the polarized state of politics means that we also mock each other more than ever. It has come to a point in which people stare across the political divide and quite literally do not see the other side as being of the same substance. Increasingly, citizens are defined by their partisan identities. I would love to say that humor will save us, but it is just as likely to damn us further. Nevertheless, as the troll entrenches, there is hope that the pranktivists will shake them loose of their entrenchment and help them to transcend their individual interests and work for the betterment of our community.

One of the most important elements of this potential transcendence is the source of information itself—the news media. There too, polarization has taken hold, and the objectivity once striven for has been replaced by a media that values neutrality above facts and reality. In this environment, satirical news seems more credible than 94 mainstream news because it takes a side and evaluates the messages that come from the powerful. These developments have opened the door for satirical geniuses like Jon

Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but it has also created a space for the likes of conspiracy theorist and satirist Alex Jones. As with pranktivism and trolling, these disparate personalities use many of the same tactics to establish their credibility, but their use of them achieves very different effects in society. In the following chapter, I will explore how Jones uses elements of humor to achieve credibility amongst his viewers, and how he uses this credibility to spread misinformation and engage in a war on information.

Chapter 4

Incredibly Credible Liars: Satirical News and Ethos in the Infowar

Alex Jones is a political commentator and a conspiracy theorist most well-known for his tendency to promote the conspiracies that 9/11 and the Sandy Hook shootings were hoaxes perpetrated by the deep state. He also suggested that chemicals in the water are turning frogs gay, that Michelle Obama is trans, that Antifa is gearing up for civil war, that Hillary Clinton and President Obama actively engaged in running and covering up the sexual trafficking of children, and the list goes on. He has yet to meet a conspiracy he didn’t champion. When asked whether he considers himself an entertainer or a social and political commentator, Jones explain “I believe in my overall libertarian ideas, but then I’ll play Devil’s advocate, I’ll make jokes, and the media, the corporate media kind of snips it out and says ‘oh, when you’re being silly, you’re serious—saying the left are the only group who are allowed to be comical” (Milo Meets Alex Jones). In other words,

Jones sees himself as both a social commentator and an entertainer, but he also feels as though he is not understood by the mainstream media who refuse to recognize the difference between his satirical and genuine commentary—he believes that his outlandish statements, for example that water is turning frogs gay, are taken out of context. Whether or not this is true, even after being banned from social platforms like YouTube and

Facebook, Jones’s website boasts 10 million visits on average each month, and he continues to have influence with his audience who largely support President Trump. Even as someone who knows that he peddles in falsehood, I can attest to the fact that Jones does present himself as credible, and I believe that he does this by invoking the principles 96 of Aristotelian ethos in the very similar ways to those satirists on the left of the political spectrum.

With the proliferation of news outlets online and on television and the pervasiveness of postmodern reflexivity, through which publics have become more aware of the constructedness of political spectacle, a “radical skepticism” has taken hold of our democracy (Banning 86). This radical skepticism results in a profound distrust of information outlets, and people are unable to distinguish fact from fiction. Renowned political scientist Murray Edelman explains that “Ambiguity and subjectivity are neither deviations nor pathologies in news dissemination; they constitute the political world. To posit a universe of objective events is a form of mysticism that legitimizes the status quo because the interpretation that is defined as objective is likely to reflect the dominant values of the time” (95-6). Thus, when traditional news outlets attempt to maintain an aura of objectivity, people recognize that they are no more than arbiters of the status quo performing their role in a simulated democracy. In the age of Trump, “alternative facts” represent a divergence from the status quo, and for the masses of people who feel cheated by the “rigged” system this divergence is a welcome development.

When traditional news is considered an artifice masquerading as objectivity, rhetoric and communication scholars have come to believe that entertaining, satirical news may be the subjective antidote to the instability of reality. Edelman recognized as early as 1988, years before the rise of modern, satirical news, that art and humor can deconstruct the political spectacle because it has a kind of “pessimism [that can] help to counter political language” because it “offers a liberating contrast to the rosy promises with which political and commercial pitchmen assault the public” (127). Politics is 97 plagued with a sort of inauthenticity in which politicians model themselves as citizens who only want to make the world a better place even while they use the offices they hold to make themselves wealthy by pleasing the donor class. More recently, Geoffrey Baym claims that in the post-network age defined by various avenues of information dissemination, The Daily Show sets a precedent through which viewers can deconstruct and reconstruct the political information they see on the news, which encourages a more active form of citizenship (174). Building on this work, Amber Day claims that young liberals in particular “distrust… [the] black-and-white morality” offered by the news media and mainstream politics, which has generated a “gravitation toward a more savvy, detached view of the world, which easily incorporates a knowingly ironic sense of humor and in which the effect of someone like Jon Stewart seems welcome and at home” (5).

Finally, Sophia A. McClennen and Remy M. Maisel have gone so far as to claim that satire is “Saving Our Nation” by rescuing democratic deliberative debate from the dustbin of history with reinvigorating strategies of amplifying citizen voices in various public forums online and otherwise (6). In other words, because satirical news takes a moral and ethical position, invites online participation, sharing, and activism, requires in- depth knowledge of political events for literacy of irony, entertains as well as informs, and has reflexive strategies for critiquing even the media itself, it can offer a democratic society the means through which to stay informed and involved in deliberative debate

(McClennen and Maisel). In fact, rhetorician Joanne Morreale argues that The Daily

Show is a form of “epideictic rhetoric” that lays the necessary foundation for the occurrence of “deliberative rhetoric”—one designed to display and explain relevant issues, and the other designed to encourage and catalyze action respectively. Overall, 98 scholars who study politics, activism, and information dissemination agree that generally, media that employs humor to entertain, parodies mainstream news media, and unabashedly takes a political stance is good for encouraging engaged citizenship and providing information—at least as good at doing so as traditional news outlets are.

In spite of this overall optimism about the impact of satirical news as “a corrective to misinformation and lies” (McClennen and Maisel 190), little research has focused on how the authenticity invoked through satirical strategies serve more nefarious purposes such as spreading propaganda, lies, and misinformation. While there have been skeptics who are not so optimistic about satirical news shows’ ability to “save our nation,” such as those in political science who conducted empirical studies that showed that satirical news may increase cynicism and apathy (Baumgartner and Morris 2011), oversimplify complex problems (Williams and Carpini 2011), and confuse viewers (Baumgartner and

Morris 2008; Lamarre, Landreville, and Beam 2009), this chapter will explore how satirical strategies can be used to fake an ethos which makes “alternative facts” and alternative news personalities seem credible. While this issue has been studied by political scientists, it is a rhetorical issue because this credibility resides in the structures of language and it is an issue of persuasion. Specifically, Alex Jones’s rhetorical strategies on Infowars serve as a key example of the ways in which the social construction of language and persona can be used to convince people to believe empirical falsehoods simply because they trust and believe the person.

Jones creates an ethos by using humor, ridicule, exaggeration, sarcasm, and social critique to situate himself as the last vestige of “resistance” to the “globalist” establishment who want to destroy humanity in the pursuit of implementing a global 99 technocracy. Like Juvenal who claimed that society was so corrupt he found that “not to write satire is what comes hard,” Jones believes that engaging in social and political critique is a moral and ethical compulsion (37). In this chapter, I explore what factors have enabled satirical news to gain credibility, make a case for considering Jones’s work as satirical, and show how he uses this satirical ethos to establish his credibility as a speaker of truth to power or parrhesiastes. Jones hosts a three-hour internet radio show each day that is also filmed, so he generates a lot of material. These three-hour shows feature a lot of ranting and repetition, and the producers choose key clips and moments to post to infowars.com and formerly YouTube.com. Infowars.com also features news editorials and a store that sells nutritional supplements. To get a sense of how Jones’s viewers experience his ethos, I used Infowars.com as a user would. Therefore, I logged onto his website daily and followed the trail of daily headlines. This not only lead me to current events, but over time, I started to get a sense of Jones’s common themes, repeatedly accusing Michelle Obama of being a man, claiming the left is gearing up for civil war, debunking Sandy Hook. Based on my review of this body of work, I assert that

Jones uses satirical rhetoric, decrying the downfall of humanity, to establish himself as a credible source of information when all other sources are incredible.

Like Jon Stewart and other left-wing satirists, Jones both entertains his audience and creates an aura of authenticity that contrasts with the artificiality of traditional media personalities and politicians. Overall, the effect of Jones’s brand of Juvenalian satire, which is characterized by aggressive, insulting attacks on targets who he perceives as displaying a lack of moral fiber, is to twist reality into a narrative that supports his moral agenda and enables him to peddle his dietary supplements, making him a wealthy and 100 influential man. Alex Jones’s brand of pseudo-satirical news coverage capitalizes on society’s distrust of news outlets to profit by spreading truly “fake” news, and this ability to make lies seem credible by couching them in satirical humor and attack calls into question satire’s unequivocal usefulness to deliberative democracy.

The Rise of Satirical News

The democratization of video production through sites like YouTube, the invention of cable recording platforms like TiVo enabling the capture of all new and political broadcasts, the rise of the for-profit news, and their propensity to serve as public relations firms for corporate and government entities converged to fuel the rise of satirical news. Jon Stewart’s approach to satirical news has grown out of the convergence of various factors, and these same factors have paved the way for the distrust of mainstream news that empowers conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones.

The role of technology in the rise of Jon Stewart’s coverage of politics and news media and politics has been integral to the way in which the writers at The Daily Show collect information and use it to expose contradictory statements by politicians and a lack of critique in media coverage of political messaging. While the news has traditionally claimed the responsibility for holding politicians accountable for what they say, The

Daily Show has used the ability to play clips of politicians contradicting themselves in real time to powerful effect. One early example of this power came in April of 2003 when Stewart staged a debate between Governor George W. Bush and President George

W. Bush regarding the war with Iraq (Smith 107). Daily Show writer Steve Bodow refers to this Bush vs. Bush debate as “a Rosetta Stone piece,” and explains that “it was the beginning of using our institutional memory as a major asset to the show” (Smith 108). In 101 the early days of The Daily Show, finding clips to use as evidence was a painstaking process through which writers would either record a certain clip onto VHS or rely on companies like Multivision for recordings of relevant clips. Another member of The

Daily Show staff, Justin Melkman remembers that they assembled the Bush debate using

“two mountains of VHS tapes” and that “it took about two weeks to assemble” (Smith

106). The lack of recording technology significantly limited the scope of material to which the team had access. Thus, with the invention of TiVo and other devices that enabled digital recording of live television, The Daily Show dramatically increased their

“institutional memory” enabling them to catch every lie, every contradiction, every push of propaganda. With “sixteen TiVos running at all times” the staff turned this strategy loose on “other politicians, to media outlets, to pundits” and changed the way they approached coverage of politics and news (Smith 108-9). Now this strategy is used by a variety of different comedic and non-comedic outlets alike. Without this technology, it is difficult to imagine a world in which politicians are now confronted regularly with soundbites of their own voices contradicting what they say. In addition, the ability to capture live television so easily and at such volume has created a database available to all journalists, comedians, and anyone who would seek to engage in multimodal text production.

Not only did technology enhance The Daily Show’s ability to track government and media messaging, but it also enabled them to spread their own messages beyond the confines of Comedy Central. By the end of Jon Stewart’s tenure at The Daily Show, many viewers watched the show in the form of clips on YouTube rather than nightly broadcast at 11:30pm. This online presence continues to be a significant means for late-night hosts 102 who mimic Stewart’s approach to news coverage (Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy

Kimmel, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Jordan Klepper, and Trevor Noah). While a live late-night show might have an audience of a few million viewers, the resulting clips on

YouTube often attract many millions more viewers. In part, this is because the format is gaining popularity, but it is also because once a clip is posted, users may view it on their own time schedule. In addition to extending the reach of professional news and television, YouTube and other social media provide platforms that anyone can use to spread their messages—thus, the control over information and knowledge dissemination has been decentralized. Figures like Jones, then, find themselves on equal footing with legitimate news organizations in terms of their ability to reach audiences. They appear on the same platforms, and this provides legitimacy to these pundits and performers.

In addition to the advance of technology, the changing values of the news has contributed to the rise of Stewart’s style of satirical news coverage. Baym has compellingly demonstrated how network and later cable news abandoned altruistic notions of informing the public in favor of a profit motivated drive for ratings. Baym asserts that, while the news was traditionally insulated from the advertising and profit gathering elements of the TV business, “during the Reagan presidency and culminating with the Telecommunications act of 1996, the government dropped most of the regulations that mandated news and public affairs programming” (13). The result of this deregulation is that, “conceptualized less as a democratic service than a synergistic resource in an integrated conglomerate structure, television news largely became another style of ‘reality TV,’ a narrative-based form of infotainment, blending the aesthetic- expressive with the political-normative in the effort to tell engaging stories about the 103 real” (Baym 14). Marlia Banning also recognizes that “there are a variety of media practices that are emerging that change the landscape of public information. These practices include the ongoing melding of the genres of news reporting, entertainment, and advertisement in the media. These emergent and melded genres function to blur—if not erase—the distinction between fact and fiction” (83). This shift explains the current emphasis on the horse-race of elections over policy, the coverage of personal scandals over corporate corruption, the simulation of binary, partisan arguing in lieu of deliberative, nuanced debate, and the elevation of every event of public import to the status of “breaking news.” Ratings driven news coverage shirks the responsibility of informing the public with factual information in favor of hyped spectacle and crisis, which motivated Stewart’s 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity and his now infamous CNN

Crossfire appearance in which he scolded Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson for “hurting

America.” In both of these cases Stewart critiques the media for displaying a bias toward theater and spectacle rather than offering reasoned debate and informative news coverage. It may be untenable to expect the news to be objective in the postmodern age, but by failing to embrace their subjectivity and inform in spite of it the news has come to be perceived as a vapid exercise of misrepresenting reality on behalf of the powerful.

Not only does the news have a bias toward crisis and spectacle, but it also has a very cozy relationship with power—courting corporate sponsors who pay its bills and government officials who appear on airwaves and supply it with legitimacy—which has caused much concern regarding their ability to hold the powerful accountable for their actions and statements. Banning asserts that this skepticism is a result of the invasion of government PR campaigns into the news masquerading as investigative reporting (84). 104

Nevertheless, Banning optimistically writes that “the practice of incorporating public relation releases into print journalism - often verbatim - and video news releases directly into televised news programs is not widely known among viewing publics. Perhaps if these practices were given more publicity, they could be discussed and openly challenged” (84). Not only is the average citizen unaware of this relationship between news and public relations, but they are also unaware of the cycle that generates this relationship. Essentially, news agencies need to secure office-holders for appearances on their shows—this lends them credibility and legitimacy—so the media is incentivized to allow politicians to control the narrative and promote their version of the truth. The turn to alternative news outlets for news suggests that people are becoming more aware of this reality. With the media’s public role relegated to an outlet for political public relations campaigns, one of the appeals of The Daily Show, and Infowars for that matter, is that they are more critical of these politicians—satirical outlets speak truth to power in ways that mainstream news wouldn’t dare, because they do not have legitimacy to protect.

These downfalls of the mainstream media have allowed for Stewart’s approach to rise by exposing the artifice of media to the viewing public and alternative news is on the rise. Not only are there a variety of satirical news shows who employ Stewart’s approach

(Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, The Daily Show with Trevor

Noah), but the approach has spread into late-night comedy (Late Night with Seth Meyers,

The Jimmy Kimmel Show, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert), which is a zone that has traditionally been apolitical. Furthermore, YouTube boasts a variety of up and coming news personalities who offer commentary on newsworthy events from both left and right 105 perspectives. Additionally, I would argue that the Daily Show’s approach has seeped into traditional news outlets in the form of more use of politicians’ statements to show contradictions and moments of humor that appear in the form of punning headlines. One question that lingers in the field of rhetoric and those concerned with democratic engagement is the degree to which the satirical inhibits and confuses viewers promoting cynicism and apathy—or does it encourage, motivate, inform, and facilitate action among its viewers.

How Alex Jones is Satirical

Infowars is very different from The Daily Show and other satirical news, however its inclusion of satirical elements marks it as a hybrid of regular news and satire. If The

Daily Show is primarily a comedy show that makes commentary about the news and also inadvertently informs its audience, Infowars masquerades as a news network that primarily makes commentary about the news, but is unafraid to make jokes and use humor to ridicule enemies. While these differences are significant, the common thread of the satirical strategy helps both programs to develop a credible ethos. In this section, I will provide a definition of satire and overview how these satirical elements appear within the work of Alex Jones on Infowars.

Defining what is satirical is difficult—traditionally, scholars have settled on claiming that it has a variety of features that commonly show up in what we recognize as satirical. Putting aside the literary, poetic genre of satire, the satirical typically exhibits some of the following features. It includes a moral critique, it is entertaining, ironic, witty, viscously insulting, sarcastic, and exaggerated. Communication studies scholars R.

Lance Holbert et al explain that “Outlining a normative approach to political satire is no 106 easy task. Satire derives from the Latin term satura, which roughly translates as ‘a mixed bag.’ Any one act of political satire is an amalgam of varied message types (e.g., irony, sarcasm, parody) that undergo a seemingly infinite number of permutations” (306). With this problem of definition in mind, it is difficult to pin satire down to any specific set of features, but what is consistent is that satire is a “literary form [that] often seeks to both educate and entertain as it tries to persuade” through the attack some target or butt, and

“it is in the nature of satire to exploit preexisting genres” (Holbert et al. 191). Dieter

Declercq agrees that “the essential combination of critique and entertainment” are integral to any definition of the satirical, and as long as the two purposes interact, he contends that all other variables are unnecessary to be considered at least in part satirical

(323). While this definition is broad and invited the consideration of many texts as satirical which might not have been otherwise, it does get at the essence of what the satirical does—everything else is variable. Thus, any genre could be considered satirical if it is designed to critique and entertain, and this is what I would argue of Alex Jones’s

Infowars. Jones employs ridicule to attack what he sees as society’s flaws. He uses name- calling, sarcasm, irony, and his own breed of wit. However, the core of his show is that it offers a critique in a way that is meant to be entertaining. Jones himself identifies himself as an entertainer, and this is not to say that he is playing a character like Stephen

Colbert, but to point out that Jones’s angry tirades are designed to entertain his audience.

Building on this definition of satire, it is important to distinguish between

Stewart’s playful horatian style that is more humorous and Jones’s juvenalian style which is characterized by righteous rage, aggression, and diatribe. Holbert et al. clarify that, while there are various types of satire, the two most commonly studied are horatian and 107 juvenalian (Holbert et al. 192). Holbert et al. explain that horatian satire is typically

“lighter than juvenalian satire, with the ultimate goal being the production of a wry smile in audience members” (192). On the other hand, juvenalian is “more acidic in tone,” and it “does not seek to heal as much as to wound” (Holbert et al. 192). Therefore, while

Stewart and The Daily Show often exhibit a more horatian sensibility by wittily pointing out the follies of politicians and media, Jones’s tirades about chemicals in the water that are turning frogs gay is more juvenalian (Hobert et al. 192).

Dustin Griffin’s theorization of the common attributes displayed in classical satire reveals that Jones’s work exhibits many of the same qualities that traditional satire does.

A foundational work in the study of satire is Dustin Griffin’s Satire: A Critical

Reintroduction in which he lays out a loose theory for how satire can move beyond mere comedic insult and do something positive for society. Specifically, Griffin explains that satire engages in the rhetorical strategies of inquiry, provocation, play, and display (39).

Griffin maintains that “By conducting open-ended speculative inquiry, by provoking and challenging comfortable and received ideas, by unsettling our convictions and occasionally shattering our illusions, by asking questions and raising doubts but not providing answers, satire ultimately has political consequences” (160). Jones’s brand of rage news embodies all of these rhetorical elements. Jones provokes by offering radical interpretations of reality often presenting evidence without drawing hard conclusions.

Take his notorious questioning of the Sandy Hook massacre—when pressed by Megyn

Kelly, Jones claimed that he didn’t know whether it happened or not but that he was simply sharing information and raising legitimate questions. Essentially, Jones uses critical reasoning that distorts rather than reveals, and it is persuasive because he provides 108 evidence that appears to raise legitimate questions. As a conspiracy theorist, Jones positions himself as a truth-teller who pulls back the curtain of the establishment revealing its rotten core. He has gained the following he has, over 1 billion during his time on YouTube, and he is credible because, like Stewart, his position as a satirical truthteller helps him to establish an ethos of good common sense (phronesis), virtue

(arête), and a drive to improve society (eunoia).

Alex Jones’s Fraudulent Phronesis

Phronesis is an integral part of ethos because it is a form of common sense that engenders trust in a rhetor. Both Jones and Stewart are able to convince audiences that their interpretations of news and politics are grounded in this sort of common sense, which enhances their credibility. Jonathan E. Barbur and Trischa Goodnow explain that

The Daily Show displays phronesis through its ability to provide context for political events, relying on clips as self-evident evidence, exposing the artificiality of media conventions, and landing interviews with key political players (8). Jones and Infowars also use these strategies to display a form of good sense, but Jones twists these strategies to make his fabrications seem credible. Jones uses clips and he provides context, but he edits clips to support his conspiracy theories and the context he provides is misleading.

Both The Daily Show and Infowars employ the use of clips and stories featured in mainstream news coverage, which contributes to their ethos. Both shows use clips to establish the idea that they are being transparent and making their claims appear self- evident. As political communication scholars Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli

Carpini point out, “The Daily Show uses a set of well-established signals, understood by the regular viewer, to indicate the status of the different components of any segments. 109

This tacit commitment to getting the facts right is an important part of the show’s appeal and central to the significant role it plays in American political discourse” (182). One of the most famous examples of The Daily Show’s use of clips to expose a politician’s hypocrisy is when they staged a debate between Governor George W. Bush and President

George W. Bush using clips from his past speeches regarding the war in Iraq (Smith

106). In this segment, Stewart asks then President Bush why the U.S. interferes in the affairs of other countries—he then shows a clip of President Bush speaking at the U.N. during the lead-up to the Iraq war explaining that “We must stand up for our security and the permanent rights and the hopes of mankind—The United States of America will make that stand” (Bush v Bush). Stewart then juxtaposes that clip with a clip of Governor Bush from the year 2000 describing his approach to foreign policy by saying “Yeah, I’m not so sure it’s the role of the United States to go around the world and say this is the way it’s gotta be” The clips are chosen, and they have been edited to focus only on the relevant parts of the speeches, but given the statements there is very little room for misinterpretation. It is a clear case of Bush contradicting himself on the role of the U.S. in foreign policy. The Daily Show was not misleading viewers. In moderating the debate between Governor Bush and President Bush, Stewart represents Bush’s statements for what they really were.

Unlike The Daily Show, Infowars, chooses and edits clips that give credibility to misinformation campaigns. In doing so, Jones is able to simulate journalistic phronesis.

For example, A common trope on Infowars is that liberals and the deep state have designs to kill President Trump. They point to the video of Kathy Griffin holding a severed trump head and clips of celebrities like Johnny Depp, Robert DeNiro and Madonna threatening 110 violence to the President. In each case, the clips are provided without context because the context would reveal that these are not real threats of violence. In one example, Jones plays a clip of CIA analyst and CNN Commentator Phil Mudd responding to Trump’s insult to the intelligence community. Mudd says “They’re gonna kill this guy.” Jones presents this clip as though Mudd unintentionally leaked the true plan of the elites to get rid of Trump ignoring the fact that Jake Tapper clarifies with Mudd that his use of the term “kill” is “metaphorical” and Mudd affirms this by saying “obviously.” Jones says of

Mudd as “a guy who never killed anybody—He doesn’t do the torturing—He just sits around and gets off on the power that he directed those programs—He’s on CNN and trying to show off, blurting out what they’ve got planned!” (“Phil Mudd on Trump: The

Government’s Gonna Kill This Guy”). Even though Jones uses this clip dishonestly, his ability to make the clip fit his narrative makes it as effective as The Daily Show’s use of clips because he is confirming what viewers already suspect. A key difference is that The

Daily Show allows a narrative to emerge from the clips they reveal to the audience, while

Jones imposes his narrative on clips that seem to support his vision of reality. The use of this clip allows Jones to appeal to the common sense of his viewers while displaying his own common sense to them. In taking Mudd’s statement literally, Jones ignores all kinds of non-verbal cues such as Mudd’s tone, which is light, and he is smiling in the clip—it is evident that he is not seriously predicting Trump’s assassination. However, Mudd does say that they are going to kill Trump, and that is all he needs to convince his viewers that anything Mudd says to the contrary is an attempt to hide the truth. Jones’s use of clips makes it appear he is exercising a sort of virtue and good character by not only making wild claims but grounding those claims in irrefutable video evidence making the claims 111 seem self-evident. This is a common tactic that Jones uses to convince his audience that he is transparent with them even as he deceives them.

Not only does Jones edit clips to fit his narrative, he provides context that misrepresents facts and events making them fit his narrative and seem more nefarious than they are. This rhetorical strategy serves as the foundation for making his conspiracy theories seem believable—after all, Jones is using real world events (often referenced without any other evidence than highly edited clips) to support fabricated motives. Take the pizzagate conspiracy as an example. Pizzagate was a conspiracy theory that circulated during the 2016 presidential election season that alleged that Hillary Clinton and other high-profile democrats were involved in a child sex-trafficking ring. The hub of this operation was rumored to be a pizza place in Washington D.C. and this conspiracy theory resulted in one deranged individual storming into the pizza place firing a weapon. The man found that there were no children being abused, and, thankfully, no one was harmed.

Even so, Jones insisted there was truth to the theory even if this particular restaurant was not involved. On a podcast entitled The Joe Rogan Experience, Jones explains he is not the “progenitor of pizzagate,” but that the scandal was based on a list of code words that the FBI created in 2007 (Alex Jones & Joe Rogan Breakdown PizzaGate Pedophile Cult).

Jones claims that according to this list, pizza refers to a child victim, hotdog refers to a young boy, and walnut sauce refers to “brown-skinned” kids (Alex Jones & Joe Rogan

Breakdown PizzaGate Pedophile Cult). Once Jones has referenced this actual document from the FBI, he uses this list to analyze the emails leaked from John Podesta’s email by

Wikileaks and finds that there are numerous mentions for pizza, hotdogs and various other code words (Alex Jones & Joe Rogan Breakdown PizzaGate Pedophile Cult). 112

The problem with this context is that, while the list compiled by the FBI regarding pedophilia symbols does exist, the actual FBI list released by Wikileaks does not reference any of the terms laid out by Jones, rather, it contains other symbols that covertly represent pedophilia (FBI pedophile symbols). The best lies consist mostly of the truth. Betting that not everyone will take the time to read the original document, Jones comes across as honest and emphatic, but he is creating a context that doesn’t exist.

Furthermore, Jones points to the cover-up of Jerry Sandusky’s sex crimes to illustrate that this sort of cover-up is possible. Then, to bring the conspiracy into closer proximity to powerful democrats, Jones uses Dennis Hastert, a convicted sex offender—who was a

Democrat and connected to various prominent politicians—and argues that he is merely the surface of an underground, Satanist child sex ring that Hillary Clinton, Barack

Obama, and others have actively worked to cover up and even participate in (Alex Jones

& Joe Rogan Breakdown PizzaGate Pedophile Cult). None of this is supported by empirical facts, but Jones’s interpretation of the true pieces of information is believable.

Hastert and Sandusky are real pedophiles who covered up their actions, Hastert is known to have been friends with Podesta who worked for Clinton’s campaign, and because of the referenced FBI report being “real,” “then all this other stuff becomes odd” (Alex

Jones & Joe Rogan Breakdown PizzaGate Pedophile Cult). Jones weaves these details together so that they seem to coalesce into a narrative that suggests that the people in the most powerful positions in the world just might be part of a Satan-worshiping cult who preys on and sexually abuses children. By weaving together these details, Jones displays that he has the good sense to see through the lies of the powerful and the good character to speak out against them. Again, he uses this strategy to simulate his credibility. 113

The fact that pizzagate has been entirely debunked by reputable news sources such as snopes.com and The New York Times, but that debunking actually works in

Jones’s favor in the view of his audience. Their fact-checking simply confirms that they are in league with the establishment. Jones is creating a context that appears to uncover some unseen truth—it seems like common sense when all the disparate, disconnected puzzle pieces are laid out within Jones’s fabricated context—it seems obvious that there must be more to the story and that the powerful would like nothing more than to silence

Jones. Banning Jones from outlets like Facebook and YouTube simply play into that narrative as well. Jones appeals to common sense—his phronesis—to convince his audience that he is speaking truths that anyone can verify as self-evident truth if only they use their own common sense. Jones makes it appear no other explanation for these conspiracies would make sense, which means that anyone who denies these beliefs must have nefarious reasons for doing so or must simply lack common sense.

The Arête of Doing God’s Work

While The Daily Show is credited for exhibiting arête through their wittiness and even-tempered critiques (Barbur and Goodnow), Jones displays arête through religious zeal and righteous anger. While these traits are not funny, they do provide Jones with the moral high ground he needs to attack others as a satirist—entertaining his audience with rage-infused tirades against secular forces. Barbur and Goodnow explain that “Aristotle defines [arête] as the golden mean between the excess of buffoonery and deficiency of boorishness” which would seem to disqualify Jones from possessing this type of good character (13). True though that may be, Aristotle also explains in his Nicomachean

Ethics that “it is no easy matter to define whom and with what persons, and at what kind 114 of things, and how long one ought to be angry, and up to what point a person is right or wrong” (70). So, Jones’s tirades do fall into the “golden mean,” but more likely rise to the level of buffoonery. However, Jones appeals to good to convince his viewers that his anger is righteous and directed at the right people. Within that limited context, Jones displays good character that is consistent with arête. They view a person who defends the christian God against the onslaught of Satan and the spread of Satanism and pedophilia as qualities that indicate strong moral character.

Jones displays his religious zeal by explaining that his mission in the information war is conducted on behalf of god. He refers to any who are on the opposite political side as Satanists even going so far as to claim that President Barack Obama is often covered in flies and he and Hillary Clinton reportedly smell like sulfur because they are literally demonic (Hillary Clinton: Demonic Warmonger). Jones’s rhetorical move here is to associate himself with inherent good and his enemies with inherent evil. He said in one rant that his enemies attack him and his followers “because the spirit of Infowars—it’s not just my spirit, it’s your spirit. It’s our spirits together with God…tying us together—

Our spirit is one of victory, it’s one of commitment, it’s one of honor, it’s one of delivery, it’s one of straight shooting,” so “you remember that and don’t ever feel bad about yourself, when you know you love God. Don’t ever let the enemy make you depressed, keep you down and tell you you’re crap. They’re the crap. We don’t revel in how they’re failed and fallen” (Get Behind Me, Satan). By invoking this religious foundation for his news program and inviting his audience to join him in a mission from god, he establishes his own ethos and that of his show as virtuous and moral. 115

The “info war” then becomes a fight against the forces of evil that can be won by telling the “truth.” For example, Jones, growling and snarling his words, chants a mantra meant to cast Satan aside: “And I just think we should all pray to God to help us be strong and in Christ’s name say, get behind me Satan. Get behind me Satan. Get behind me Satan. Get behind me Satan. Get behind me Satan. In the name of Jesus Christ get behind me Satan. Get behind me Brian Stelter. Get behind me Michael Wolfe. Get behind me Hillary Clinton” (Get Behind Me, Satan). In this appeal to god to help him defeat the forces of evil, Jones situates himself as the picture of virtue—his battle is not political but spiritual. He does not merely disagree with his political opponents, but is engaged in a holy war, and the risks he takes in exposing evil are done for the good of humanity.

What is not represented in this quote is the pure vitriol in Jones tone—as he growls the words flanked by a backdrop of Brian Stelter smiling, he eventually becomes so overwhelmed with anger and emotion that he melodramatically demands Stelter be taken off screen and appears to become physically ill. It is important to point out that this is a show—Jones is entertaining his audience by spewing this vitriolic critique of the

“Satanists” who have taken over society. This does not mean he does not believe what he says, but he is performing anger on behalf of himself and on behalf of his audience. What makes this angry, satirical tirade so dangerous is that Jones’s viewers believe what he says, and they are convinced that he is an honorable person who is standing up for what is right. Thus, Jones is only a buffoon to those who see through his casuistry, but he is appropriately and righteously angered for those who do not see.

In another moment of religious zeal and what his audience must perceive as righteous anger, Jones attacks Michael Wolfe and Brian Stelter as “the true faces of evil,” 116 and in doing so presents himself as the model of virtue and integrity simulating arête. In this example, Jones begins by expressing his disgust with the way in which Stelter and

Wolfe flaunt their wickedness. Jones calls Wolfe a “Wolfe in journalist’s clothing,” and says Stelter is “scarier looking than It the clown.” While this segment starts as an attempt at humorous ridicule, it quickly turns into another vitriolic rage as Jones screams

“They’re not just lying anti-American SCUMBAGS THAT WANNA RIDE US ALL

INTO THE GROUND… THEY THINK THEY’RE BETTER THAN EVERYBODY!

THAT’S WHAT IT’S ABOUT—IT’S THE SPIRIT OF EVIL, AND WE MUST

BREAK THEM!” (Brian Stelter And Michael Wolfe Are The True Faces of Evil). As mentioned above, in this segment Jones is growling, gnashing his teeth, and screaming at the camera in a bitter and bilious manner. The tirade culminates with Jones growling that these people are “drunk on our children’s blood” and him raising his hand in the air saying “I swear before my heavenly father that I-I-I-I-I will resist them with e-e-e-e- every way I can. These people are the literal spawn of the pit of hell” (Brian Stelter And

Michael Wolfe Are The True Faces of Evil). Given the way that the pizzagate conspiracy resulted in an actual shooting, this rant is frightening. It is worth pointing out that within a year after this segment aired, CNN was the victim of an attempted bombing. Even though that attack is apparently unconnected to Jones, it just confirms that this kind of rhetoric can have real consequences. Phrases like “drunk on our children’s blood” invoke images of Hitler ranting against the Jews. Nevertheless, this anger and fear create an ethos in which he stands up for the good of humanity despite the danger it brings upon him and the toll it takes on him spiritually and mentally. Jones is visibly shaken and becomes physically ill throughout the piece—it is difficult to tell whether he believes 117 what he says or if it is all a performance, but people who take him seriously could commit acts of violence toward the people who he claims are “literally the spawn of the pit of hell.” These sorts of outbursts are also ways to gain the attention of other media outlets. They are stunts at least insofar as they are meant to create controversy and attract attention. While it is unclear how many of Jones’s viewers actually believe him, his website receives 10 million hits on average each month, which is comparable to sites like economist.com, newsweek.com, and rt.com. In part, Jones is able to generate this following because he uses the same rhetorical strategies that Stewart uses to simulate an ethos of credibility, and a key aspect to this simulation is presenting himself as someone who risks their own livelihood to stand up to powerful forces working to limit American freedom.

The Revolutionary Eunoia of Gun Rights and Brain Force

Stewart and The Daily Show display eunoia by exposing the hypocrisy of the media and displaying anger at injustice in the world (Barbur and Goodnow), and his extra-show work outside the show such as advocating for the first-responders bill that congress eventually passed to provide aid for those firefighters and construction workers who were sickened because of their rescue and recovery efforts at the 9/11 ground zero site. These are admirable endeavors that do show a sense of goodwill toward society at large. Infowars also constructs an ethos of goodwill toward their audience and society—

Two key examples of Jones’s display of goodwill towards society are his advocacy of gun rights and his dietary supplement sales. In both cases, it is more likely that Jones is advocating and promoting his own career, but he presents his involvement in these issues as fighting for the common good. He advocates for gun rights because society needs to be 118 able to protect themselves from a tyrannical government. He sells health supplements, not to turn a profit, but to simultaneously spread the word about how various dietary supplements he has discovered will improve the health and well-being of his viewers, such as “Brain Force Plus” (Retail: $39.95; Now $29.95), which his website promises will “Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind” or “Cell Force” (Retail:

$149.95; Now: $99.95), which is “focused on overhauling your body’s cellular engines and protecting from reactive oxygen species.” Jones regularly extols the benefits he experiences as he takes all these supplements himself, and in selling these products he claims that all the money he makes goes right back into Infowars, so that he can continue to fight the good fight of truth-telling. Establishing that he is working for society lends credibility to Jones’s ridicule and attacks on his enemies. Within this context, it appears that he attacks them in order to improve society.

Jones advocates gun rights so that his audience and others can protect themselves from a tyrannical, Satanist government, thus, he presents this campaign as an honorable and sacrificial endeavor. For example, in one of his more famous appearances, Jones confronts Piers Morgan over his stance on gun control and goes on a tirade exclaiming at one point:

More guns means less crime! Britain took the guns fifteen, sixteen years

ago tripling your overall violent crime—true we have a higher gun

violence level, but overall muggings, stabbings, deaths, you—those

men raped that woman in India to death with an iron rod—four feet

long—you can’t ban the iron rods, the guns, the iron rods, Piers, didn’t do

it. The tyrants did it. Hitler took the guns! Stalin took the guns! Mao 119

took the guns! Fidel Castro took the guns! Hugo Chavez took the guns!

And I’m here to tell you—1776 will commence again if you try to take our

firearms!” (Alex Jones VS Piers Morgan on Gun Control – CNN

1/7/2013).

During this exchange Jones is sitting forward screaming at Morgan and pointing his finger directly in his face. The video of this debate on CNN has been posted multiple times and received millions of views. CNN’s posting of the debate received 994,731 views alone (5.1K likes and 524 dislikes), and the comments are largely pro-Jones—The top comments are as follows:

• That 1776 comment gave me a giant freedom hard-on - 571 likes - (Corek

BleedingHollow)

• Piers Morgan should identify as a mop. Everyone he debates with wipes the floor

with him – 500 likes – (renovatenyc)

• CNN getting views because of Alex Jones 5 years later – 517 likes (Texas

Nationalists)

• How can Alex rant like that. It’s so impressive - 184 likes – (Babyboy kiss kiss)

• 1776 WILL COMMENCE AGAIN!! – 1.7K likes - (Tito Gaming)

It is worth noting that the video was posted 6 years ago, but these comments were all less than a year old with the exception of the comment from Tito Gaming, which was two years old. These comments reveal the kind of glee that Jones’s viewers experience in witnessing him stand up to “liberal elites” like Piers Morgan. Jones situates himself as the representative of the American people—especially those who own guns. He refers to “our firearms,” and in other places refers to “we” as in “we will not allow you to take our 120 guns.” Additionally, Jones couches the issue in the interest of freedom and attaches his cause to the revolution that birthed the country. It is no accident that he threatens

Morgan, a Brit, with 1776—a fact which his audience is likely to be aware of and amused by. By invoking the American revolution, using the pronoun we, and likening Morgan and other control advocates to Stalin, Mao, and Hugo Chavez, Jones makes it clear that his motive is about protecting American and an American way of life. His appeal is patriotic. Again, this isn’t funny in the way we have come to expect of satire, but there is a certain rebellious wit to the fact that Jones is attacking Morgan to his face without observing the typical rules of news etiquette. For “Babyboy Kiss Kiss,” Jones’s ability to go on these tirades is “so impressive.” All of these factors help build a powerful and credible ethos for Jones.

Another way in which Jones establishes his desire to improve the community is the way in which he sells his dietary supplements. Rather than attracting mainstream sponsors, which would call his ethos as anti-mainstream into question, Jones peddles his own brands of pseudo-pharmaceuticals as a form of defense against the forces of globalization. For example, infowars.com claims that:

we are being hit by toxic weapons in the food and water supply that are

making us fat, sick, and stupid. It's time to fight back with Brain Force

PLUS from Infowars and Infowars Life, the next generation of advanced

neural activation and nootropics. This all-new enhanced formulation …

has been enhanced for maximum potency and even contains a brand-

new ingredient called Black Pepper Fruit Extract for an added kick.

(bold included in original, infowars.com) 121

From this description, it is unclear what exactly this supplement does other than the fact that it is more potent than it was, and it has “an added kick.” Again, the metaphor of war and violence is invoked—taking this supplement is part of a “fight” against the “toxic weapons” that are being used against the American people. Therefore, Jones attempts to convince his audience that he isn’t selling these products to enrich himself, but as a service for his viewers. Furthermore, he claims that “it costs millions” to maintain his network and “the money that’s made is put pretty much back into [Infowars]” (Alex

Jones of Infowars,’ Conspiracy Theories, And Trump Campaign (Full) | Megyn Kelly |

NBC News). He preaches to his audience that buying his products is like buying “war bonds” that enable him to keep up the work of spreading the truth despite the globalist, satanic conspiracy to defeat him and his followers.

In addition to supporting the website, Jones attempts to convince his viewers that buying his products will actually make “libtards” angry. This is an element of the satirical and in some ways akin to trolling as the audience is invited to troll—to defy, provoke, and anger—the other side by participating in support of the network by buying products.

It is an ingenious strategy, because Jones is able to situate giving him money as the same thing as fighting against the liberal elite, Satanists who would take their guns, health, and freedom away. In other words, viewers who buy his products are buying his ethos for themselves in a sense. In one ad, correspondent Paul Joseph Watson promotes the product as a way to “trigger the verified libtards” and “Support this network,” at the same time. He goads his critics: “You’re gonna get triggered over this? Good, we’ll sell even more bottles of it. You’re literally making Infowars and me money with your autistic hissy fits. Carry on with your autistic screeching, because it’s a lot funnier from my 122 perspective” (Get Behind Me, Satan). This strategy is a powerful sales technique, it is satirical in that it provokes (or triggers) liberals (or anyone who questions them), because this triggering is a form of trolling or ridicule in which the goal is to get under the skin of political enemies. Furthermore, it builds a form of eunoia into the ethos of Infowars.

After all, they claim that these products make them more productive and they will help people to fight the good fight in the information war, so customers are building their own ethos in the process—one which they associate with that of Jones.

Simulating Parrhesia

Many Infowars videos on YouTube begin with the tag-line “If you are receiving this transmission, you are the resistance,” which is representative for the way in which

Jones presents himself as “public enemy number one” simply because he tells the “truth” in the face of the establishment. Having established a credible ethos, Jones and his cronies are able to practice satirical parrhesia against an establishment of their own fabrication. It has been fascinating to watch Jones deal with the fact that his anti- establishment candidate, Donald Trump, has now won the election and essentially become the figurehead of the very same establishment they claim is out to get them. It is unclear how many times Jones can inaccurately predict coups and assassinations before he starts to lose his credibility—the deplatforming from YouTube and Facebook that occurred in the summer of 2018 seems to have slowed down his viewership, but he is still getting 10 million hits per month. However, this also feeds into the narrative that he is speaking truth to power. Jones’s ethos allows him to convince his audience that he is a parrhesiastes, or one who speaks truth to power, on the “front-line of the infowar.” This position as the “resistance,” as an entity being oppressed by a powerful left-wing 123 establishment who represents a danger to himself, is what qualifies Jones to engage in satirical ridicule. When he is attacking Michelle Obama for allegedly being transgender, or the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre for being a part of a hoax, or attacking Hillary

Clinton for covering up a pedophile ring, Jones represents himself as one without political power attacking those who have political power, which contributes to his ethos as a parrhesiastes who cares deeply for the betterment of society.

One reason Jones’s performance of speaking truth to power appears to be compelling is because the traditional news no longer seems to hold power accountable, which is a critique of the media that The Daily Show helped to bring to light. Too often, the news simply serves as a megaphone for the government. In The Daily Show (The

Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests,

Jon Stewart explains that “the show always did best when it existed in the space between what was presented as public policy and the strategizing that went into creating it. That was the defining thread of the show, that sense that we were being sold something” (104).

While Stewart and his writers always found a way to stand aside and laugh at the absurdity of the news media’s inability to be critical of power, Jones taps into this same liminal space to espouse conspiracy theories that seem believable precisely because the media fails to question the establishment, by which I mean politicians and corporations that write and enact public policy. In other words, the space exposed by satirical news is also exploited by conspiracy theorists and has credibility because viewers and audiences have been conditioned to believe that the press is either hiding something for the powerful or too ineffectual to read between the lines—they are not wrong. However, while The Daily Show playfully points out the conventions and hypocrisies of news 124 media and politics as a means of creating humor, Infowars seeks to peddle any conspiracy that might enable them to generate controversy, promote an aggressive stance toward power, and sell dietary supplements. Even though Jones peddles fantasy and falsehood, the rhetoric is dangerously effective because of the credibility he has built with his audience that he is the only person brave enough and willing to tell the truth. In both

Stewart’s and Jones’s cases, they appear to be parrhesiastes, or agents willing to speak truth even at risk to themselves, but Jones’s has a more aggressive and violent style.

Stewart is known for calling for reason, while Jones is known as an agitator for violence.

This risk-taking is a key element that distinguishes mere truth-telling from parrhesia or speaking truth to power. Michel Foucault explains of parrhesia that “when a philosopher addresses himself to a sovereign, to a tyrant, and tells him that his tyranny is disturbing and unpleasant because tyranny is incompatible with justice, then the philosopher speaks the truth, believes he is speaking the truth, and, more than that, also takes a risk (since the tyrant may become angry, may punish him, may exile him, may kill him)” (16). During the build-up to the war in Iraq, the media failed to expose what are now commonly accepted as strategies by the Bush administration to get into a war that was unnecessary, costly, and entered into under the false pretenses that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and at this time, The Daily Show gained and used credibility as an oppositional force by questioning the narratives promoted by both government and mainstream media. Stewart explains that questioning the Bush administration at the time was an uphill battle because after 9/11 a “scared” public

“wanted to believe that” 9/11 “had sobered our politics and our media,” yet “what it did was it lent a weight and a consequence to criticism and dissent. Dissent was now seen as 125 not just snarky, but unpatriotic. We had never gotten death threats before” (Smith 116).

As a viewer of The Daily Show, I remember this feeling of danger at speaking out as being palpable, and this moment serves as a prime example of true parrhesia. It is this element of risk that makes parrhesia possible. Furthermore, it is this element of risk that makes the parrhesiastes admirable. By taking a risk to expose a truth that is helpful and necessary to reveal, a rhetor displays virtue for the good of all—this is an honorable person of integrity. This qualifies as a display of both arête and eunoia, which helps to establish a rhetor’s ethos. The fact that Jones espouses conspiracy theories which he claims are being concealed by those in the deep state (a powerful cabal controlling the government outside the purview of the public eye) marks him as a parrhesiastes in the perception of his audience.

Jones often claims that he is in real danger because he speaks the truth when those in power would rather the public not have access to it. Jones manufactures tyranny and refers to a globalist conspiracy to take over the world, and his audience believes the danger to be real, and they believe that Jones is risking his own life to bring the truth to light. To find an example of this rhetorical strategy one need look no further than the name of Jones’s network, Infowars, which serves as a metaphor for the danger Jones faces as a “warrior” fighting for control of the reigning news narrative. From behind this veneer of parrhesia, Jones can qualify any critique of his rants as simply trying to silence him from speaking the truth. When Jones poses the question of Michelle Obama’s gender, he claims that he only followed this lead after Joan Rivers made the claim and mysteriously died a few months later (“Is This Final Proof Michelle Obama Is A Man?

Number 1). A common thread in his broadcasts is that “the globalists” would love to shut 126 him down by assassinating him or assassinating President Trump. Creating the appearance that he is speaking out in spite of the danger he brings upon his family and upon himself is a way of creating his ethos as a parrhesiastes. As Barbur and Goodnow argued of Stewart’s ethos, Jones’s strategy displays his arête and eunoia. His claims and display establish that he is honorable because he will not allow his integrity to be compromised even in the name of his own safety, and it also suggests that he endanger himself to do his part in saving America from the “globalists” who he has claimed are demon possessed and want to destroy it. His theories sound insane (and they are), but by employing these techniques he gains and maintains credibility within the eyes of his viewers.

McClennen and Maisel confidently assert that “the satirist pulls back the curtain to expose the truth behind the mask, but if the public does not act, then nothing will change” (14). The problem with this assertion is the implicit assumption that the satirist must reveal the “truth,” or that we live in a society in which truth is possible to ascertain.

Jones also claims to be revealing the truth, but if his viewers act on his fabricated truth, we would find ourselves in the midst of a civil war. It may be that satirical news could be a positive force for good, but truth is no longer something that we can appeal to as a common thread that unites society. In an information war, the one who controls the narrative fabricates the truth. In an age of alternative facts, people increasingly turn to alternative news. We now have more satirical news than ever before. Not only has there been a proliferation of shows that mimic The Daily Show, but there is alternative news on all sides from Infowars and Brietbart to The Young Turks, The David Packman Show, and

The Majority Report with Sam Seder. They all use ridicule of their political enemies and 127 satirical strategies to attract and amuse their viewers, but this does not ever seem to lead to any sort of deliberative debate in which all sides see themselves as stakeholders in the outcome of societal issues. Rather, they help to increase polarization. As I have shown here, even the wildest conspiracy theories become believable when citizens only get their information from conspiracy theorists. The ability to create an ethos of credibility is not solely the birthright of truth and virtue as Aristotle may have believed, so we must be wary how far we trust satire and ridicule to save our democracy. We are in the midst of a satirical takeover of the channels of information, and as much as I personally enjoy the wit, I hope we are not laughing our way toward a civil war in which the weapons are more than information.

128

Chapter 5

Practicing Good Humor Habits: The Composition Classroom and the Study of the Sense

of Humor

The central question of this dissertation is exploring how humor promotes a critical awareness of social issues while simultaneously discouraging empathetic and emotional responses to those same social issues. Furthermore, the cases provided show that humor is a neutral rhetorical tool, and this means that the same rhetorics of humor that encourage critical awareness and discourage empathy used by progressives and liberals in good faith can be used by conservatives, conspiracy theorists, anarchists, and anyone else who seeks to tear down the fabric of this democratic society. Dealing with this complex rhetorical phenomenon requires intervention. Research has shown that people between the ages of 18 and 25, who are in the process of forming their identities, prefer to get their news from humorous and satirical outlets, so the first-year composition classroom is a fertile site for this intervention, and composition has a history of pedagogical approaches that can be united in making this intervention (Boukes et al.

726). Expressivist, social constructivist, and critical approaches to teaching writing all lend strategies and methods for helping students to take advantage of the spaces that critical humor provides. This approach will enable students to explore their own senses of humor through narrative in ways that encourage and promote empathy even in the face of disparaging humor.

The divide between the social and the individual is an old question in the discussion of pedagogical approaches to the writing classroom. On the one hand, scholars such as Donald Murray, Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow, Christopher Burnham, and James 129

Britton, held that teachers should enable students to write about what they know—they contend that writing narratives about self, literacy, and experience imbue students with the ability to find their voice. It is from this foundation that students would become prepared to engage in academic and democratic discourse. On the other side of this debate, scholars such as James Berlin, Patricia Bizzell, and David Bartholomae assert that the best way to teach students to write is to help them understand the socially constructed nature of their own identities and academic and professional discourse. They reject the notion that conducting academic research and interjecting into ongoing academic discussions is somehow less authentic writing than the writing students compose regarding their own personal experiences. Macrorie wrote that students, uninitiated into the forms and conventions of academic writing, produce what he called “Engfish,” which is a kind of writing that is a poor imitation of academic prose based on limited experience with this kind of writing. However, Bartholomae countered that, even when students grapple with complex ideas in ways that produce less than desirable prose, the value of these exercises is in reaching and challenging themselves to grapple with these ideas. In doing so, Bartholomae believes that students will ultimately become more fluent academic writers prepared to enter academic discourse. While the social constructivists seemed to have won this debate and laid the ground work for a critical approach, various components of the process movement made a substantial mark on composition pedagogy as we still use freewriting, conferencing, personal narratives—all strategies that they championed in the 1970s and 1980s.

Growing out of the social turn in composition scholarship, various critical approaches to teaching writing have been introduced into the discussion. While these 130 approaches vary in their methods and methodologies, the unifying goal is to enable students to be aware of the power structures that govern their lives in the academy, in public, and in private. This scholarship emerges out of the work of Paulo Freire who influenced later scholars like Henry A. Giroux, Stanley Aronowitz, Ira Shor, and Peter

McLaren. Within composition, the approach to critical pedagogy has varied—there have been debates about studying culture or studying the academy itself, and it has sparked debate about how teachers reenact power structures simply by introducing their own ideologies into the classroom. Critics claim that there is no way to escape the power that teachers have over students and hiding it from view does not negate the way it influences and shapes students.

Most recently, composition scholars have begun to explore beyond what Casey

Boyle refers to as current-critical pedagogy, which views humans as individuals exercising agency independently of nonhumans, and this complicates the nature of the critical approach to writing instruction. Building on Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory,

Andrew Mara and Byron Hawk have argued that the composition classroom should trace the networks of the social in search of “Boundary objects as rhetorical exigencies,” which

“can work to connect these disparate discourses” (7). By studying boundary objects, students will see the ways in which nonhuman objects facilitate the construction of discourse networks. To become aware of these networks, to develop a palate for the nuance in human/nonhuman structures, Boyle argues that we reconceive the discreet practice of reflection as a serial mode in which students engage in repetition that results in affective habituation. In this posthumanist mode, Boyle suggests that “A practice proceeds as an infectious germ that activates (metastasizes) new relationships 131

(metamorphoses) within an ongoing habit (metastability) of relations (metaphysics). This habit/habitat is an ecology whose inventiveness is accelerated when its tendencies are exercised” (551). This mode of learning, Boyle suggests, is a way to develop a form of metacognition that does not reenact a dialectic perception of humanist dominance over the nonhuman.

I have offered here an oversimplified history of composition over the last 40 years, and the field has moved beyond these pedagogical debates. However, these questions about agency and indoctrination are still relevant today. I argue that asking students in the composition classroom to investigate their own sense of humor is a way of braiding these theoretical approaches to writing instruction together. In the systematic study of their own sense of humor, students engage in modes of process that highlight the nature of their socially constructed perceptions mediated by the material objects and technologies that shape who they are. This approach to understanding identity does not contradict recent turns toward a posthumanist paradigm. Rather, exploring the sense of humor invites students to engage in a serial process of refining their humor palate so that they can engage in metacognitive inquiry.

The question is one of education or indoctrination. In recent years, the thread of critical pedagogy has come back into vogue as scholars have begun to explore the nature of culture as a pedagogical force under the heading of public pedagogy. By public pedagogy, I refer to Giroux’s notion of viewing cultural forms as pedagogical forces.

This should be distinguished from the way Ashley Holmes uses the term public pedagogy in Public Pedagogy in Composition, which reifies the current-critical rhetorical approach by asking students to use their agency and writing skills to get involved in public, local 132 democratic practices. Rather, I argue that we understand public pedagogy through a posthumanist mindset using the classroom as a space to practice tracing the networks that comprise public pedagogy in the tradition of Henry A. Giroux—the conception that all culture is pedagogical and that most learning happens outside the classroom. In this way, students can develop a palate for identifying and describing the various boundary objects that connect us together. In my view, the sense of humor is a fruitful sight through which we can see not only our interconnectivity to other humans, but also to the objects that enable us to be together. By bringing tenets of all the pedagogies together, we can help students to write better, understand themselves better, and do so while being both critical, empathetic, and aware of the educational forces that organize our lives.

Currently, researchers contend that humor serves innately as a form of critical public pedagogy that denaturalizes social norms and encourages critical reflection. From stand-up comedy to satirical news to culture jamming, the consensus is that humor has the potential to engender critical thinking in the public at large, and I agree that it does have the potential. Jonathan P. Rossing, who studies the impact of stand-up comedy on racism on public pedagogy, explains that what he calls “emancipatory racial humor attends to questions of identity, privilege, and power in ways that may contribute to loosening the restraints of racial oppression and freeing culture from the control of hegemonic racism” (2). Essentially, Rossing believes that humor “exposes dominant meaning-making practices,” and provides a “forum where counternarratives might gain a hearing,” and “features cunning, inventive retaliation by interrogating the assumptive, naturalized racial constructions” (7). Jennifer A. Sandlin and Jennifer L. Milam have also identified humor’s ability to encourage a reevaluation of social norms in their study of 133 culture jamming. Sandlin and Milam write that culture jamming creates “spaces of transition” because “All of the pedagogical tactics used in culture jamming attempt to lead the learner to a moment of detournement, where she is no longer who she used to be, but rather is caught off guard by the possibility of becoming someone or something different” (339). In addition, Sophia L McClennen and Remy M. Maisel, who have studied the satire of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, assert that “Satire has exposed lies, deception, logical fallacies, and abuses of power. But it has done more than that; it has given us the hope in the face of what can seem like insurmountable odds… that we do indeed have the ability to change the narratives that govern this nation, that we can speak truth to power, and that—most of all—we can have fun while we do it” (200). All these scholars identify humor as capable of generating a critical distance that enables audiences to rethink their worldviews and societal norms, and I agree that humor can do this, but I do not believe it does so inherently. Rather, even humor that is intentionally critical is ambiguous in its critical capacity.

As I asserted in chapter one, this emancipatory space also creates the distance from connectivity that discourages people from feeling empathy for the targets of the humor. To ensure that people are equipped to absorb the critical messages of humor without losing their empathic and emotional reactions, we must move beyond studying humor texts as though anyone who encounters them will benefit from their critical potential. We can do this by exploring how humor works, how audiences perceive humor, and how this sense informs the way in which people consume humor. In addition, we should study the networks that supply and distribute humor searching for boundary objects that reveal the interconnectedness to humans and nonhumans alike. In other 134 words, the best way to ensure that students are ready to experience the emancipatory space in Rossing’s words, or detournement in Sandlin and Milam’s is to bring the critical public pedagogies into the composition classroom where we can ask students to interrogate and explore their own reactions to them. Rather than telling students how to interpret humorous texts from the top down, we can help them to develop a palate for them—from the inside out through serial practice.

As teachers of rhetoric and communication who help students develop a critical mindset that enables them to become aware of the way in which they are situated within a network of social actors, we should help students establish methods for exploring themselves—the stories that make them who they are, which determine what they think is funny. This may seem to contradict the posthuman movement in composition, but I believe it is in fact an opportunity for students to explore all facets of themselves including the technologies that extend their reach and connect them to each other. In doing so, we bring together the most effective elements of posthuman, critical, social constructivist, and expressivist pedagogies. Students learn how to be critical in the emancipatory spaces humor generates, and they learn to see the objects that contribute to the generation of these spaces. They also write their own narratives and encounter the narratives of others so that they avoid losing their empathetic reactions to others. Students will encounter these educational experiences whether they have the palate for them or not—by exploring their own and others’ senses of humor, students are not indoctrinated with any ideology, but they are imbued with the agency to recognize the ideologies they encounter as such and respond accordingly, both critically and empathically. 135

In this chapter, I make the case that studying the sense of humor in the composition classroom using psychological and rhetorical theories of humor in collaboration with expressivist writing strategies into the composition classroom will encourage students to become more savvy consumers of humor. This knowledge will allow them to take advantage of the critical spaces humor affords while maintaining the empathic responses that drive and motivate action. We can teach students to conduct and write academic research while also employing expressivist approaches in which they can locate their own voice, their own place within the network, and write about their own experiences. First, I review in more detail the three cases covered in this dissertation and how they inform this pedagogical approach. Second, using a police brutality meme as a humor text, I offer an analysis of how bringing psychological and rhetorical studies of humor into the composition classroom employs expressivist, social constructivist, and critical pedagogies to encourage critical awareness of oneself and encourage empathic and emotional responses to humorous texts.

You Are What You Laugh At

In chapter two, I provided the humor of George Carlin as an example of how the same kind of critical humor that scholars like Rossing, Sandlin and Milam, and

McClennen and Maisel have argued creates emancipatory spaces from which to reevaluate societal problems can also distance people from the empathic responses that might have encouraged them to feel responsible for working for change. The key to this chapter is not to damn critical humor into the dustbin of history as harmful for society, but to equip students with an understanding of how it works and how it discourages them from empathy and action. Specifically, teaching benign violations theory in the 136 composition classroom provides an opportunity for students to practice applying theory to real world situations, and it also disarms the ability of humor to manipulate students who are unaware of its rhetorical power. In other words, I do not suggest that we should tell students how to feel about Carlin’s work and others like him, but that we should have them practice exercising their understandings of its theoretical underpinnings with their eyes wide open.

Benign violations theory explains why rhetorical stimuli are perceived as humorous. A joke is funny because it violates a social standard and simultaneously justifies the violation as non-threatening to the social order (Warren and McGraw 407).

However, as Ferguson and Ford have pointed out, prejudiced norm theory suggests that using humor to disparage someone based on their identity formation normalizes and increases prejudice (82). Thus, it is important that people practice paying attention to what amuses them. Perceiving social violations as benign shapes the way that people interact with the social networks they are a part of. Ultimately, if humorous texts are to serve as critical public pedagogies that resist uncritical public pedagogies, people must practice understanding how humor works. They must develop habits of mind that enable them to see the ways in which humor asks them to agree with certain versions of reality.

Humor can minimize societal issues and problems. For example, in discussing violent humor, humor theorist Paul Lewis explains that “violent ridicule” can have the effect of “relaxing moral inhibition. To the extent that empathy is based on fellow feeling, attacks accompanied by humor can make it easier to achieve distance from victims by providing a gleeful alternative mood” (61). It is this distance, from any issue—animal rights, climate change, racial prejudice, police brutality, rape, murder, 137 death, infant mortality—that allows for people to be amused, and exploring benign violations provides insight into how this minimization or distance occurs. The function of humor, then, is not necessarily to encourage action and raise awareness, but it is to help people cope with problems they are unable to change or address in a more direct manner. As I argued in chapter 1, this minimization is a result of the loss of empathy that occurs as people are invited to laugh at disparaging humor, and if people are unaware of humor’s ability in this light, it is just as likely that consumers of humor will fail to perceive any possible critique and instead be susceptible to it.

The question then becomes how educators can not only encourage critical analysis of humor but also find a way to use that analysis to work against the kind of empathic atrophy that results from being amused by social violations. For example,

George Carlin’s humor targets activism by encouraging his audience to give up hope out of frustration and social impotence. While Carlin does critique the power structures in place as corrupt, the crux of his comedy suggests that fighting against said corruption is as laughable and ridiculous as the corruption itself. Rather than serving to work against this corruption, Carlin’s humor encourages his audience to give up hope and to disengage entirely. This does provide audiences with critical distance, but it does not invite audiences to use this critical distance to act. Instead, Carlin suggests that society and even humanity is already beyond the point of saving, so people should simply watch the world burn and enjoy the show. The effect of his comedy is that it imbues his audience with the agency to disconnect from their role in the social network and be amused.

Providing students with an understanding of benign violations theory empowers them to identify how Carlin’s humor works they can be consumers of his critique of society and 138 also reject the aspect of distance he provides which allows people to emancipate themselves from their empathy.

An effective pedagogy in this age of humor, in which people get much of their news filtered through the lens of late-night comedy shows, will teach people to understand why they are laughing at the problems we face and how that might discourage them form having emotional reactions that compel them to deal with social problems.

Teaching students to interrogate their sense of humor—to understand how jokes are texts that feature perceived social violations and how those social violations are rhetorically rendered as benign—empowers them to take full advantage of the critical potential that many scholars have begun to recognize exists in some humorous texts. Analyzing texts from a rhetorical standpoint is in and of itself insufficient but bringing psychological theories into the classroom enables students to be aware of how critical distance can decrease empathetic and emotional attachment—this awareness is enough to counter that effect.

All culture, including humor, is pedagogical, and the composition classroom is in a position to help students see how these public pedagogies are political. This is an opportunity for students to understand the material and theoretical practices that shape their perceptions of reality. By disconnecting from society, they refuse to see the interconnectedness of the networks they participate in—they become spectators. Henry

A. Giroux writes that “Refusing to decouple politics from pedagogy means, in part, that teaching in the classroom or in any other public sphere should not only simply honor the experiences students bring to such sites, including the classroom, but should also connect their experiences to specific problems that emanate from the material contexts of their 139 everyday life” (On Critical Pedagogy n.p.). A student’s sense of humor is a fertile site through which we can help them connect their own experience to these “specific problems.” I am not suggesting the students reflect on their sense of humor, rather, in line with Boyle’s notion of the “serial” I am suggesting that students recognize that when they

“register an affect or register being affected, [they] perceive and through perception increase capacities to affect and be affected” (547). Given this context, a study of the sense of humor can help them to see that their identities, others’ identities, public pedagogies, critical public pedagogies, and nonhuman objects and technologies “are continuous with but also distinct from one another without being separate” (Boyle 547).

Specifically, introducing benign violations theory as a tool for analyzing humor enables students to identify how their experience of humor increases their perception of apartness and this dulls their reactions to the “specific problems that emanate from the material contexts of their everyday life” (On Critical Pedagogy n.p.). Being aware of how and through what means they are being educated by their culture, “does not impose moral ideals but works within a given situation to develop good practices” (emphasis in original

Boyle 548).

Using Humor to Explore Identity and Identification

In chapter 3, I argued that trolling and pranktivism use many of the same strategies to stage humorous and disparaging interventions into public discourse to shock, amuse, and persuade audiences of the validity of their critiques. The difference between these two movements is that while pranktivists tend to attack targets in positions of power, trolls attack marginalized groups who seek equality. Trolls perceive these campaigns for equality as an attack upon their privilege, which they characterize as a 140 kind of reverse oppression. Applying Ferguson and Ford’s social identity theory and prejudiced norm theory to the disparagement humor used by trolls and pranktivists reveals the way in which this humor increases prejudice and creates feelings of identity superiority within the joking group, otherwise referred to as positive distinctiveness;

While prejudice and positive distinctiveness felt toward the systems of power can engender the motivation and awareness to act, prejudice and positive distinctiveness felt by the privileged at the expense of the marginalized reifies and protects privileged status.

In rhetorical terms, this difference means that pranktivists transcend social identity divisions and create new identifications that enable people to resist power, while trolling inhibits the transcendence of social identity categories and increases old divisions. At its core this is a question of empathizing across identities. Knowing the difference between how these similar forms of humor have very different effects on how people empathize with each other empowers students embrace and/or reject the interconnectivity and habits of mind that give pranktivists/trolls power over them.

Ferguson and Ford’s social identity theory of humor posits that a person’s identity is directly connected to what a person finds amusing, and a key element to encouraging critical thinking is self-awareness. However, people are not generally good narrators of their own experience, in part, because they are too absorbed and ensconced within their habituated actions. Studying disparagement humor in the composition classroom provides students with evidence that helps them understand their identities upon a continuum of the personal and the social. Developing this understanding is more difficult than it may appear on the surface, because our identities are fractured. It can be difficult to gain enough objective distance to understand the situated and constructed nature of identity. 141

Teaching students to use social identity theory and rhetorical identification to explore their sense of humor will enable them to use the distance that humor provides to know who they are and how they have been constructed. This is vital when considering that disparaging humor, which is highly prevalent in all facets of society, taken without critical analysis and awareness increases prejudice and feelings of superiority. Another way of thinking of these increased prejudices is that disparaging others with humor is a way of distancing ourselves from the possibility of empathizing with others.

At the core of disparaging humor is identity—disparaging humor seeks to attack another’s identity and in doing so it raises up those who use it. Trolls, such as Milo

Yiannopoulis, see themselves as champions of free speech—they believe it is their right to say whatever they like, and fighting for this right is a way of maintaining their privileged status. Rhetorician Laura J. Collins, who studied rights rhetoric by examining

2nd amendment advocates, explains that “this practice” of viewing rights as ends in and of themselves “helps to figure, to bring into signification, the ‘demanding subject’ in opposition to that ‘other’ and, therefore, performs important identity work for the subject” (738). This certainly seems to explain the appeal of the troll whose identity is dependent on the other who it sees as imposing upon it certain elements of social conformation. In other words, trolls maintain their privileged identity status through perpetual defense of their rights, not to practice those rights freely, but because their identity is stabilized when they situate themselves as the defenders of the right to speak.

Collins writes that “Politics as the exercise of freedom (where rights may serve as means) is rare because it insists on non-domination and conceivably on a mutable and fluid identity as “subject.” Such a politics rests less on identity and more on action and 142 interaction” (752). By exercising free speech to accomplish goals outside of defending free speech, the troll’s identity, as under attack from powerful institutions who are out to silence them, would cease to be meaningful, and the ties that bind them together would dissolve.

The composition classroom is a space that can challenge the practices of these identity formations. Students can explore the ways in which their identities exist within a network of actors, and they can study the networks and boundary objects that allow someone like Milo Yiannopoulis and the Yes Men to grab media attention. Furthermore, they can understand how these movements rely upon the institutions they rail against for their identities. Ultimately, students can better understand how pranktivists and trolls appeal to them so that they can see they ways in which they are being asked to engage in practices that limit who they can be and how they can act.

Discerning Fact and Fiction in Satirical Ethos

In Chapter 4, I argued that Alex Jones, who I define as a juvenalian satirist, uses many of the same strategies as left-wing satirist Jon Stewart to establish his credibility as a trustworthy voice who is challenging the powerful with his social commentary.

Specifically, like Stewart, Jones establishes himself as a man of common, practical sense

(phronesis) who displays goodwill towards society and other people (eunoia) and fights for that good even if it means putting himself in danger (arête). In addition, his ethos is grounded in his ability to situate himself as someone who speaks truth to power even though it is dangerous for him—as a parrhesiastes. Here, I contend that his use of humor, which is aggressive and derisive, has the effect of creating distance from political enemies and from empathy towards those enemies. Furthermore, the ethos he creates for 143 himself explains his fiercely loyal audience, willing to follow him even as he is banned from various social media outlets—the very same outlets that enabled his rise to prominence. In fact, he uses his banishment or deplatforming as a way to confirm his position as parrhesiastes, because it supports the narrative that he is speaking truths that the powerful don’t want his audience to hear. The most powerful way to counter someone like Jones is by teaching students how this kind of ethos is constructed, and this is something that can complement the mission and goals of a critical composition classroom.

Studying the culture as pedagogical is about discerning why some interpretations of reality gain widespread acceptance, while others do not, and being able to see how credibility is manufactured is vitally important in this age when the factuality of information is under siege. Within this context, humor is used in politics and in the media to establish ethos and credibility, so this is another element of humor study that needs to be brought into the composition classroom—it is a rhetorical and writing concern. There is a reciprocal relationship between a sense of humor contributing to the ethos of the rhetor and the way in which the ethos of the comedian lends to the credibility of the humorous messages they convey. Critical pedagogues must better understand how the ethos of public figures who employ satire or humor can cut both ways. Humor has a reputation of revealing truth, but it can just as easily be used to reveal a falsehood that appears to be true. In a similar way, the establishment of ethos can be used by those who seek to reveal truth, or it can be used by those who seek to promote falsehoods.

There are various means through which public figures like Alex Jones establish their credibility and students should practice discerning how ethos is created, so that they 144 can question and be wary of those who try to persuade them. With the current president popularizing the notion that news agencies have agendas, and that some news is fake while other news is legitimate, it is vital to the health of the democracy that students be able to tell the difference between fact and fiction without being taken in by the cult of personality. This is not so simple as discounting news entertainment in favor of the more unbiased or neutral reporting of certain networks, because entertaining news such as The

Daily Show and other late-night comedy shows can be even more credible precisely because they are not neutral. Geoffrey Baym writes in From Cronkite to Colbert that

“The Daily Show’s blending of news and satire confronts a system of political communication that has honed the art of manipulation and misinformation, while it’s use of parody unmasks the artifice in contemporary news practices that all too often echo the scripts of power” (120). It is the propensity to confront and unmask power that helps build the credibility of satirical news, yet, this same non-neutral tendency to confront power is employed by those who would obscure truth for political gain and profit, such as

Alex Jones. These kinds of conspiracy theorists benefit from the same kind of skepticism that attracts audiences to satirical news. How these entities establish their credibility is something students need to be aware of, and this study falls under the purview of rhetoric.

Teaching students Aristotle’s notions of ethos will help them understand how various forms of satirical news commentaries construct a form of credibility that allows them to be convincing and persuasive. In chapter four, I explained how both Alex Jones and Jon Stewart situate themselves as credible by displaying phronesis, arête, and eunoia to build ethos. Knowing how this rhetorical credibility works, offers students another 145 avenue through which they can explore how culture is pedagogical. Equipped with this knowledge, they will be less likely to accept this kind of credibility at face value and will be able to distinguish good-faith actors like Stewart from grifters like Jones.

A Humor Intervention in the Writing Classroom

Because humor is directly connected to identity, values, and worldview, what people laugh at reveals a great deal about who they are and how they came to be. If we are to be critical of the society in which we live, then it is vitally important that we fully understand what society is made of and how we are situated within it. As pedagogues who seek to help students establish habits and practices that enable them to affect and be affected in ways that move toward a more equitable and fair society, we first must help them hold a mirror up to themselves so that they can see who they are. They need an awareness of what structures have structured them, and how this construction places them in cooperation and competition with others. In sum, the writing classroom can be a site where students explore their own sense of humor so that they can become smarter consumers and producers of humor.

Too often, students feel as though their flawed perception of reality is an accurate representation of that reality—that what they know is all there is to know. One goal of a composition pedagogy is to help students see that their realities are shaped by a myriad of texts, institutions, actors both human and nonhuman—This is a way of making visible the habitus that houses all social structures and behaviors. Students will produce meaning more effectively when they understand how meaning is produced. These formations do not happen in school, but students come into our classroom fully formed and reforming continuously. Henry A. Giroux in Public “Pedagogy and Rodent Politics” explains that 146 studying public pedagogy is about learning “how to read cultural forms as they articulate with a whole assemblage of other texts, ideologies, and practices. How audiences interpret … texts may not be as significant as how some ideas, meanings, and messages under certain political conditions become more highly rated as representations of reality than others” (261). Students encounter these pedagogical representations of reality at work, church, movie theaters, sports arenas, and various other public spaces. People should be more aware of how all these spaces serve as sites for learning ways of being. A particularly fruitful avenue for better understanding ourselves is to study our senses of humor, because this sense through which we determine what humors us, strikes at the very core of how we are socially constructed and what we perceive to be real and true.

Bringing the study of humor into the composition classroom merges critical, rhetorical, and process pedagogies in a way that enables students to use their own experience and social construction not only to learn to be effective writers but also to use that writing to change society for the better. As stated above, a key point of debate for composition teachers has been the purpose of writing instruction—personal exploration and voice-finding or social preparation and convention learning. Eli Goldblatt effectively argues that many of the tenets of the process movement still shape how we teach writing.

He writes in “Don't Call It Expressivism: Legacies of a ‘Tacit Tradition’” that the current

"writing about writing" pedagogy movement, and the contemporary conversation about teaching to transfer, have oriented the discussion about writing instruction too narrowly around school success and professional preparation” (441). While it is certainly important to understand how our pedagogy prepares students for the next steps in their careers, we face a paradox: “writers write alone but within a charged social space shaped by 147 contemporary culture, ethnic and erotic identities, home language, economics, power dynamics, genre and gender expectations” (442). Asking students to study their own sense of humor can merge their experience of the social within the boundaries of what they already know about themselves but have yet to explore. In addition, invoking the tenets of the process movement invites students to stay in touch with their empathetic concerns about society and about others.

While I will not provide a complete methodology or fully fleshed out pedagogy for introducing humor into the classroom, I do want to explain how studying the sense of humor in the writing classroom brings together the major theories that have guided composition theory over the last 40 years. Again, the study of humor, particularly that which disparages, is important in the composition classroom because the majority of first-year writing students fall within the 18-25 age range, and these are the populations most attracted and influenced by humorous texts. In what follows, I will use a single text, a meme that features a pun about police brutality, in order to show how each humor theory might be applied in the classroom. In addition to this critical analysis approach, I will explain how expressive and social constructionist approaches to writing instruction complement this strategy by encouraging students to have empathic reactions to the text or to notice and question why they don’t have empathic responses. By engaging in this inquiry, students learn how to approach the humorous public pedagogies at large that influence and shape their perceptions of reality. In addition, students will learn how to be producers and writers of humor that makes a point so that they can use humor to impact society. 148

In order to stage an intervention into students’ humor consumption in the composition classroom, it is important that students become familiar with theories of humor both psychological and rhetorical. This not only gives them an understanding of how humor works but reading this kind of academic work, from Aristotle to Warren and

McGraw to Ferguson and Ford to Kenneth Burke, starts to expose them to the conventions of academic discourse from multiple disciplines. This is in line with social constructivist approaches to composition instruction. This gives students the opportunity to “appropriate (or be appropriated by a specialized discourse…as though they were easily and comfortably one with their audience, as though they were members of the academy” (Bartholomae 5). These texts range from theoretical, philosophical, and empirical. However, before students “appropriate or be appropriated by” these genres, it is important students explore their own sense of humor. As Elbow points out, writing pedagogies that ask students to write about their own experiences, the goal is not to disregard academic work but to help students “genuinely ‘take on’ and invest themselves in hard academic thinking about academic topics and also bring their own experience to bear fruitfully and intellectually—and not to write empty uninvested prose” (20).

Students should care about and have a vested interest in the writing they do—they will work harder and produce better writing this way. Therefore, it is vital that students explore their own experiences and they do so in response to academic questions catalyzed by their own exploration and curiosity. Furthermore, engaging in narrative writing and reading the narratives of others is a way to promote empathic responses to humor.

Specifically, bringing a collective of narratives together encourages people to step outside their own worldviews and experiences and learn to empathize with others who have had 149 different experiences (Clair et al. 470), and empathy leads one to enjoy humor at another’s expense less (Bui et al. 124).

In order to illustrate how the theories of humor can be applied to a composition pedagogy that invites students to share their experiences, explore their interconnectivity, and practice tracing the networks that construct society, I turn to the study of humorous memes. Rhetorical scholars recognized that memes represent a shift in the way that we think of texts in context. Eric S. Jenkins posits that the study of memes necessitates that we think of memes as virtual and that we study them as “modes” which “are collective, emergent phenomena that express the circulating energies of contemporary existence rather than re-presenting the interests of particular rhetors” (443). This makes memes a particularly fertile site for the study of humor because this study “begins not with a preconstituted text or audience but with the interfacing between text and audience,” which is exactly how humor works in general (Jenkins 443). It is an active rhetoric that generates laughter or doesn’t and this success or failure is a symptom of this interfacing.

The meme’s status as mode marks it as a “boundary object” that brings together various nodes in the social network. Through a post-humanist lens, memes are not unlike topoi and tropes in that they all serve as boundary objects which connect people and things together around a common rhetorical structure. Memes, topoi, and tropes are all emergent phenomena that shape discourse through their structural strengths and limitations. Rhetorician Frank J. D’Angelo traces the history of both the topoi and tropes—he explains that both “are basic categories or headings that represent “logical relationships” between and among ideas” (204). Interestingly, the topoi, or topics, have 150 often been described by rhetoricians and philosophers as places—as “a storehouse of arguments, a place where arguments can be stored, a garden, a treasure house of ideas, and so forth” (D’Angelo 201). Tropes on the other hand have largely been associated with figurative stylistic rhetoric (D’Angelo 203). Like memes, tropes and topoi emerge through language use and they are structures that have a kind of agency given their limits and strengths. Because of their emergent design, these rhetorical elements are embedded within the social network and they shape discourse, humorous and non-humorous alike. In fact, humor relies upon topoi, tropes, and memes, because these common structures are recognizable to audiences—they cue the audience into understanding that these social violations are meant to be benign. Tropes, topoi, and memes become embedded within the network because they are effective at conveying certain messages. These common rhetorical structures connect various points within the actor network. In what follows, I will practice applying the theories of humor I have outlined here to demonstrate how the writing classroom would benefit from an exploration of humor.

The following meme is an image of riot police in full gear standing in a defensive line with text that reads “Why do riot police like to go to work early? To beat the crowd,” and this is the kind of virtual text that lends itself to an interrogation of the humor sense.

When students encounter this meme, they will have a reaction—offense, laughter, indifference. In a composition classroom where students study their sense of humor, 151 they will use personal writing to explore their reactions. By exploring their own reactions to the text, students get the opportunity to be “the authority and can tell the truth of his or her own experience—a truth that is unavailable to the teacher” and to each other (Elbow

19). Once students have explored this truth for themselves, they can share it with each other, and hearing each other’s stories about the effects this meme has on them will enable them to empathize with each other more readily and may lessen the minimization that occurs when they perceive it as humorous. Clair et al. establish that extended narrative empathy, which “views culture as unfolding and interrelated narratives that can be interpreted in such a way as to connect the stories of humanity,” is an approach to education in which people address complex social issues by sharing their various vantage points with each other (474).

Here is an opportunity to breathe new life into narrative writing in the composition classroom. Exploring their reaction to this meme through narratives that they will share with the rest of the class enables them to trace the various aspects of their habituation which brought them to this moment and determined their reaction to this meme. Bringing this strategy into the composition classroom represents a merging of expressivist, social constructivist, and even posthumanist theories of composition instruction. By developing an understanding of how humor works psychologically, students can practice taking advantage of any emancipatory space that the humor may have generated. In addition, students work backwards from their sense of humor to identify and explore the forces and experiences that have shaped them.

Once students have explored their reactions to a humorous text, such as the police brutality meme above, they can begin to apply theories of humor that enable them 152 to explore their own reaction in an academically rigorous way—it is here that students are able to take a critical approach to the text. It is at this point that students can practice researching by reviewing academic literature and writing about theoretical approaches and synthesizing them—tracing the history of an academic conversation. Students can then apply this critical awareness to the humorous text so they can better understand how it works. For example, in the police brutality meme, there are two violations that may generate amusement as according to the theory of benign violations: 1) the pun in this meme violates the precision of language because the word beat has two meanings, and both meanings answer the question posed at the top of the image. The riot police like to go to work early to beat the crowd–get there before everyone else—or to beat the crowd—subject people to violence. This double meaning is simultaneously wrong and right—this is a violation of the language code, and it is how all puns work. 2) what makes this simple pun controversial is the fact that the simple language violation allows for a more significant social violation. If we examine the second meaning—that riot police get to work early because they enjoy committing violent acts against crowds of people—it is a social violation because it suggests that riot police do not work to protect the public or resolve and calm riotous crowds, but they beat people because they enjoy doing so.

Making light of the fact that police do sometimes commit unnecessary and unjust violence minimizes that violence and makes it seem insignificant. However, if some students have shared personal narratives that express experiences in which they feared or suffered this kind of brutality, students may be less likely to minimize this issue.

Likewise, if some students write of family members who are police officers who do not engage in or would not enjoy “beating” crowds, that too could change the discussion in 153 ways that both leverage students experience and encourage the kind of serial practice that provide students with the palate to recognize nuance and complexity in the ways that memes generate reactions. Thinking about their own and others’ reactions to the meme and how it violates social norms can help students better understand the version of reality that this meme promotes.

Students could also use the meme to identify and explore their social and personal identities. Social identity theory suggests that people are amused by humor that disparages some other identity group, and this amusement generates feelings of positive distinctiveness (Ford and Ferguson). Applying this theory to the police brutality meme enables students to question who or what is being disparaged, and depending on their reaction to the meme, whether they experienced any level of positive distinctiveness or not. In addition, they will explore what aspect of their identity is amused or offended by the meme. For example, it may be that students who found the meme amusing are identifying with the police or with protesters/crowds. Their amusement, then, emerges in part because they feel superior to those crowds and identify themselves as citizens who accept the authority of police to achieve order at all costs even if it means subjecting people to violence. Exploring these questions in the context of the classroom where everyone has worked to share their stories will complicate their ability to brush the meme off as just another joke. Instead they are invited to grapple with the complexity, nuance, and critical nature of a text that is clandestinely teaching them about their reality.

Students are engaging in a practice that will lead to better practices and habits of humor consumption. 154

Once students recognize their own positionality in relation to the humorous artifact, they can engage in an exploration of how the artifact seeks to persuade them through rhetorical identification. Does the meme invite them to transcend the limitations of their social identity, reconfigure their connections to the social network, and reassess their perception of reality or does it seek to entrench them in a position of privilege? This is a question that each student would have to answer for themselves. While I would argue that the police brutality meme is largely supportive of police and that it seeks to identify audiences with riot police and dehumanize those who are subjected to violence—there is some ambiguity. It could be argued that the meme is ironic, and that it is in fact a critique of police brutality. Regardless of which way students see the ad, it is important that they engage in the process of articulating how the add seeks to identify them. In asking this question in the composition classroom, students train themselves to ask these questions when they encounter these texts in their daily lives.

In addition to understanding how humor seeks to create rhetorical identification, students can also explore how rhetorical ethos is used to establish credibility, and this is inextricably linked to its appeal to identity. Students can use the concept of ethos— phronesis, arête, and eunoia—to establish how jokes and humor appear to reveal truth— how they become credible. In the case of the police brutality meme, there are various ways in which the humor creates a certain ethos. The police brutality meme establishes phronesis, or common sense, by invoking the working-class mentality mentioned above.

It uses colloquial language with the phrase “beat the crowd” to indicate getting there before the crowd. The meme is simple, and it does not overtly claim that it is working for eunoia or the good of humanity, but the image itself, police standing in full gear facing 155 the camera ready to hold their ground and defend the property and people on the other side, suggests a kind of honor—this could point to a kind of arête also. Consider how different the meme would be if the image were of a protester being beaten on the bridge in Selma, Alabama. A meme featuring this image would be more likely to be read as a critique of police brutality—the ethos and credibility would shift to the side of the protester. Exploring how humorous artifacts establish credibility enables students to be more aware of how these artifacts convince them of certain truths.

Finally, after exploring their own consumption and sense of humor students will be asked to become writers and producers of humor. Students could be asked to develop pranktivist stunts, to compose essays that employ humor to make a political point or employ various mediums and modalities to compose digital texts that are humorous. In this example, students would be asked to compose a meme that uses the given generic conventions to make some political point. In constructing these texts students will anticipate the possible reactions from their audiences—they will learn to compare what they intend as they write humor with how others might react to their text. This sort of audience awareness is foundational to the composition classroom.

In addition to practicing anticipating an audience, writing in humorous modes will enable students to think about how rhetorical structures have a certain kind of agency.

The generic conventions of memes and other humorous texts are limiting, but they also offer certain advantages. When students compose in these modes, they will be invited to reflect upon how these constraints shaped and altered the nature of their message. From this vantage point, students will begin to understand how they use tools but also how the tools use them. They create the tools, but the tools also create them. In addition to 156 understanding the agency of their texts and the memes, topoi, and tropes that populate them, students will also have an opportunity to publish their own work. Lanham has argued that what matters in the information age is the ability to get the attention of audiences—getting attention has replaced the production of goods. Therefore, students who learn to use humorous rhetoric will be better equipped to recognize and create texts that get a lot of attention and getting a lot of attention is akin to building a multitude of network connections Thus, students will start to see that change is not accomplished by great, historic individuals, but it emerges as the accumulation of actors around an idea.

This kind of composition class accomplishes the goals of first-year writing courses, but it also encourages students to be savvy consumers and producers of humor.

A composition class that focuses on the study of the sense of humor will ask students to write in a variety of modes from personal narratives to academic research papers.

Students will keep journals that keep a record of the humorous texts they encounter and the reactions these texts engender, which will enable them to practice conducting autoethnographic research while they also engage in the practice of articulating themselves in writing. In addition, engaging in these studies enable students to encounter and discern a variety of sources, both popular and academic, for their credibility. In addition to all of these traditional writing goals of the composition classroom, students will have the opportunity to develop and practice habits of mind that lead them to recognize the connections that situate them within the larger context of society. There are many ways to achieve this goal in the writing classroom, but the nature of the sense of humor is that it is uniquely attuned to social phenomena—humor is a text that acts upon 157 us in ways that most texts do not, and we can use that to explore who we are and how we came to be.

Conclusion

The scholars who have such high hopes for humor all point to its ability to generate distance—emancipatory space (Rossing), spaces of transition (Sandlin and

Milam), create the possibility for reorientation to reality (Baym)—and this common thread does identify an element of humor that is quite powerful. It has the potential to help people see new possibilities for perceiving reality. However, the fact that humor can create these spaces does not guarantee that audiences will be equipped to take advantage of these spaces. Nevertheless, if we teach students the tools they need to understand how humor not only creates space for reconceiving reality, but the ways in which it can promote different realities, they will be more conscious about how and when they choose to accept what humor offers. In addition, the exercise of sharing their stories and narratives with each other will help them to better understand the complexity of humor, which is often brushed aside as just humor or just jokes, but it often makes serious claims and points that shape how we see the world and the people we share it with.

A key element of this pedagogical approach is finding ways to get students to be open to self-exploration while also engaging in critique of the world around them bringing together the tenets of expressivist, social constructivist, critical, and posthumanist pedagogies. Asking students to engage in these analyses is worth this challenge, because humor is such a rich site of inquiry. This approach to composition also leaves open the possibility of working with texts from various modalities, and it is 158 something that students will be able to relate to. We are a society that loves to laugh and ridicule, and in many ways, it is a healthy outlet for dealing with painful realities our culture faces. It is certainly better than engaging in brutality and violence. Even so, making sense of our sense of humor answers Giroux’s call to explore why certain representations of reality govern while others do not. Students will be shaped by these public pedagogies regardless of whether they are prepared or not, and I feel it is our responsibility as teachers of rhetoric and writing to prepare them.

While I have outlined a rudimentary beginning to bringing the study of humor into the composition classroom, there is much more to be done. It is important that as we delve into the study of humor as a critical public pedagogy, we do not get blinded by our optimistic visions biased by partisanship. Critical pedagogues who bring humor into the classroom need to recognize that the power of humor is neutral—it can be employed by all sides of the political spectrum to promote truth as well as casuistry. This knowledge will empower students to consume these public pedagogies to educate themselves instead of being educated by them unknowingly.

While humor is a powerful form of public pedagogy that has a high capacity for encouraging critical thought, its role as a coping mechanism makes it a problematic tool.

This is not to say that coping in these tumultuous times is all bad—it is vital and healthy for the most part, but we need to ensure that we don’t become too complacent or too cynical. Some stress and some anxiety over the state of the world is good, and this stress comes from love and concern for other people, for our democracy, for our society, and for our planet. Laughing these cares away, even if this laughter brings a critical awareness, is not enough unless we also choose to feel for each other. Mel Brooks once 159 said that “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall in an open sewer and die.” At the risk of sounding like a spoilsport, I think we need to actively resist the ability and propensity to distance ourselves from others and from problems when we laugh at them—first, we should make sure we do what we can to help.

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