Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Dissent in Jest: Humour in the Liberal Moment

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Humour as Politics

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Comedy ((PSCOM))

Abstract

This chapter traces how popular and critical models of humour align with liberal discourses of freedom and reasonableness through an analysis of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” held in Washington D.C. in October 2010. Tracing this understanding of humour through a range of recent humour theory, this chapter argues that the model of humour as a form of dissent is both ascendant and reductive, and over-determines the political work of humour without sufficient attention to the actual aesthetic manifestation of humour and the politics thereof.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 119.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Abrams, M.H. 1993. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bakhtin, Mikail. 1984. Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barad, Judith. 2007. Stewart and Socrates: Speaking Truth to Power. In The Daily Show and Philosophy, ed. Jason Holt, 69–80. Malden: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Batchelor, Tim, Cedar Lewisohn, and Martin Myrone. 2010. Politics. In Rude Britannia: British Comic Art, ed. Martin Myrone, 64–87. London: Tate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Shelia Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baumgartner, Jody, and Jonathan S. Morris. 2006. The Daily Show Effect: Candidate Evaluations, Efficacy, and American Youth. American Politics Research 34 (3): 341–367.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baym, Geoffrey. 2005. The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism. Political Communication 22 (3): 259–276.

    Google Scholar 

  • Berlant, Lauren, and Sianne Ngai. 2017. Comedy Has Issues. Critical Inquiry 43: 233–249.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Billig, Michael. 2005. Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boltanski, Luc. 2002. The Left After May 1968 and the Longing for Total Revolution. Thesis 11 69 (1): 1–20.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boskin, Joseph. 1997. Rebellious Laughter: People’s Humour in American Culture. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boyer, Dominic, and Alexei Yurchak. 2010. American Stiob: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal About Contemporary Political Culture in the West. Cultural Anthropology 25 (2): 179–221.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Braund, Susanna Morton. 2001. Libertas or Licentia? Freedom and Criticism in Roman Satire. In Free Speech in Classical Antiquity, ed. Ineke Sluiter and Ralph M. Rosen, 409–428. Leiden: Brill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, Wendy. 2005. Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy. In Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, Wendy. 2006. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bruns, John. 2009. Loopholes: Reading Comically. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Burke, Kenneth. 1984. Attitudes Towards History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Critchley, Simon. 2002. On Humour. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Day, Amber. 2011. Satire and Dissent. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dearlove, Des. 2010. The Unauthorised Guide to Doing Business the Richard Branson Way. Chichester: Capstone.

    Google Scholar 

  • Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Postscript on the Societies of Control. October 59: 3–7.

    Google Scholar 

  • Deveau, Danielle Jeanine. 2011. The Cultural Critique of Gender Parody in Canadian Sketch Comedy. Topia 25: 133–152.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dickson-Carr, Darryl. 2001. African American Satire. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eco, Umberto. 1984. The Frames of Comic ‘Freedom’. In Carnival! ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. New York: Mouton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Order of Things. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Freedman, Leonard. 2009. The Offensive Art. Wesport: Praeger.

    Google Scholar 

  • Freeman, Samuel. 2003. Introduction: John Rawls: An Overview. In The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman, 1–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gelven, Michael. 2000. Truth and the Comedic Art. Albany: State University of New York Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Giddens, Anthony. 1998. The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cambridge: Polity.

    Google Scholar 

  • Giddens, Anthony. 2000. The Third Way and Its Critics. Cambridge: Polity.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gilbert, Jeremy. 2008a. After ’68: Narratives of the New Capitalism. New Formations 65: 34–53.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gilbert, Jeremy. 2008b. Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics. Oxford: Berg.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Gilbert, Joanne R. 2004. Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender and Cultural Critique. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gray, Jonathan, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson. 2009. The State of Satire, the Satire of State. In Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, ed. Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson, 3–36. New York: New York University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Groys, Boris. 1992. The Total Art of Stalinism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hale, Grace Elizabeth. 2011. A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hall, Stuart. 1986. Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (2): 5–27.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hart, Roderick P., and Johanna E. Hartelius. 2007. The Political Sins of Jon Stewart. Critical Studies in Media Communication 24 (3): 263–272.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hefflin, Kristen. 2006. Laughter Helps Interpret the News. Television Quarterly 36 (3/4): 26–31.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hennessy-Fiske, Molly, and Amro Hassan. 2011. Cultural Exchange: Bassem Youssef is a Kind of Egyptian Jon Stewart. Los Angeles Times, June 5. Accessed 10 Jan 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hitchens, Christopher. 2009. Cheap Laughs. The Atlantic, October: 101–110.

    Google Scholar 

  • Horkheimer, Max. 2004. Eclipse of Reason. London: Continuum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hynes, Maria, and Scott Sharpe. 2010. Yea-Saying Laughter. Parallax 16 (3): 44–54.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Irwin, William. 2000. Jerry and Socrates: The Examined Life? In Seinfeld and Philosophy, ed. William Irwin, 3–11. Chicago: Open Court.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jordan, Matthew. 2008. Thinking with Foucault About Truth-Telling and The Daily Show. The Electronic Journal of Communication 18 (2–4). n.p.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kaplan, Louis. 2002. ‘It Will Get a Terrific Laugh’: On the Problematic Pleasures and Politics of Holocaust Humor. In Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, ed. Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc, 343–356. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Karam, Zeina. 2012. Syrians Face Crackdown with Creativity, Humor. Associated Press, February 1. Accessed 2 Feb 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kercher, Stephen E. 2006. Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Klein, Sheri. 2007. Art and Laughter. London: I.B. Tauris.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leland, John. 2004. Hip: The History. New York: Harper Collins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Locke, John. 2003. Two Treatises on Government. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lockyer, Sharon, and Michael Pickering. 2009. Introduction: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Humour and Comedy. In Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour, ed. Sharon Lockyer, and Michael Pickering, 25–44. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacMullan, Terrance. 2007. Jon Stewart and the New Public Intellectual. In The Daily Show and Philosophy, ed. Jason Holt, 57–68. Malden: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Magistrale, Tony. 2005. Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film. New York: Peter Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marc, David. 2009. Foreward. In Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, ed. Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson, ix–xiv. New York: New York University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1987. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Pathfinder Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • McKain, Aaron. 2005. Not Necessarily not the News: Gatekeeping, Remediation, and The Daily Show. The Journal of American Culture 28 (4): 415–430.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Michels, Steven, and Michael Ventimiglia. 2007. Can The Daily Show Save Democracy? Jon Stewart as the Gadfly of Gotham. In The Daily Show and Philosophy, ed. Jason Holt, 81–92. Malden: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, Toby. 1993. The Well-Tempered Subject: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mindess, Harvey. 1971. Laughter and Liberation. Los Angeles: Nash.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morreall, John. 1983. Taking Laughter Seriously. Albany: State University of New York Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Niedzviecki, Hal. 2006. Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity. San Francisco: City Lights.

    Google Scholar 

  • Noah, Timothy. 2010. Stay Home! The Case Against the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Slate.com, October 19. Accessed 28 Oct 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Olson, Kirby. 2001. Comedy After Postmodernism. Lubbock: Texas Tech University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Peterson, Russell L. 2008. Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Phiddian, Robert. 2014. Satire and the Limits of Literary Theory. Critical Quarterly 55 (3): 44–58.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Postman, Neil. 1996. Amusing Ourselves to Death. London: Methuen.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ralkowski, Mark. 2009. Is Stephen Colbert America’s Socrates? In Stephen Colbert and Philosophy, ed. Aaron Allen Schiller, 145–162. Chicago: Open Court.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rally to Restore Sanity. 2010. The Daily Show. http://www.rallytorestoresanity.com. Accessed 22 Oct 2010.

  • Rawls, John. 1996. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reilly, Ian. 2013. From Critique to Mobilization: The Yes Men and the Utopian Politics of Satirical Fake News. International Journal of Communication 7: 1243–1264.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reilly, Ian, and Megan Boler. 2014. The Rally to Restore Sanity, Prepoliticization, and the Future of Politics. Communication, Culture and Critique 7 (4): 435–452.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Samuels, Bob. 2010. Why Jon Stewart Is Bad for America (and Why You Will Dislike This Article). The Huffington Post, October 25. Accessed 26 Oct 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Slackman, Michael. 2011. When a Punch Line Is no Longer a Lifeline for Egyptians. New York Times, April 5. Accessed 10 Jan 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, David. 2011. Libyan Rebels Find Humour Is the Sharpest Weapon Against Gaddafi. The Guardian, July 21. Accessed 14 Jan 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stott, Andrew. 2007. Comedy. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sussman, Anna Louie. 2011. Laugh, O Revolution: Humor in the Egyptian Uprising. The Atlantic.com, February 23. Accesed 10 Jan 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • Touraine, Alain. 2001. Beyond Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Polity.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vanderheiden, Steve. 2007. America (The Book): Textbook Parody and Democratic Theory. In The Daily Show and Philosophy, ed. Jason Holt, 205–216. Malden: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Warner, Jamie. 2010. The Daily Show and the Politics of Truth. In Homer Simpson Marches on Washington, ed. Timothy M. Dale and Joseph J. Foy, 37–58. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wickberg, Daniel. 1998. The Senses of Humour: Self and Laughter in Modern America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, Raymond. 1961. The Long Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. London: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Young III, William W. 2007. A Lot of Hot Air, or the Corruption of Youth? In South Park and Philosophy, ed. Robert Arp, 5–12. Malden: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence. New York: Picador.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zoglin, Richard. 2008. Comedy at the Edge. New York: Bloomsbury.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zupančič, Alenka. 2008. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zurawick, David. 2010. Stewart-Colbert Rally: A Nation of Jokers Lost in Irony. Z on TV. The Baltimore Sun, October 23. Accessed 24 Oct 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zwart, Hub. 1996. Ethical Consensus and the Truth of Laughter. Dudley: Peeters Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of English and Media Studies, Massey University, Palmerston North, Manawatu-Wanganui, New Zealand

    Nicholas Holm

Authors
  1. Nicholas Holm
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nicholas Holm .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Holm, N. (2017). Dissent in Jest: Humour in the Liberal Moment. In: Humour as Politics. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50950-1_2

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation