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Abstract
Parody and related forms of political humor are essential resources for sustaining democratic public culture. They do so by exposing the limits of public speech, transforming discursive demands into virtual images, setting those images before a carnivalesque audience, and celebrating social leveling while decentering all discourses within the “immense novel” of the public address system. Parody culminates in modern laughter, which is the shock of delighted dislocation when mediation is revealed. That laughter provides a rhetorical education for engaged spectatorship.
Acknowledgements
The author is particularly grateful for the comments of Julio Sicago at UIC.
Notes
1. Warren St. John, “Seriously, the Joke Is Dead,” New York Times, May 22, 2005.
2. Attention within communication studies has been paid to political humor at least since Jeffrey Auer's 1947 Quarterly Journal of Speech essay on Tom Corwin, and very recent scholarship has included fine studies of notable examples of political parody, satire, and the like. J. Jeffrey Auer, “Tom Corwin: ‘Men Will Remember Me as a Joker!’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 33 (1947): 9–14; Martin J. Medhurst and Michael A. DeSousa, “Political Cartoons as Rhetorical Form: A Taxonomy of Graphic Discourse,” Communication Monographs 48 (1981): 197–236; Barry Alan Morris, “The Communal Constraints on Parody: The Symbolic Death of Joe Bob Briggs,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 460–73; A. Cheree Carlson, “Limitations on the Comic Frame: Some Witty American Women of the Nineteenth Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 310–22; Adrienne E. Christiansen and Jeremy J. Hanson, “Comedy as Cure for Tragedy: ACT UP and the Rhetoric of AIDS,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 157–70; Janis L. Edwards and Carol K. Winkler, “Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Image in Editorial Cartoons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 289–310; Kara Shultz and Darla Germeroth, “Should We Laugh or Should We Cry? John Callahan's Humor as a Tool to Change Societal Attitudes Toward Disability,” Howard Journal of Communications 9 (1998): 229–44; John C. Meyer, “Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication,” Communication Theory 10 (2000): 310–31; Helene A. Shugart, “Parody as Subversive Performance: Denaturalizing Gender and Reconstituting Desire in Ellen,” Text and Performance Quarterly 21 (2001): 95–113; Chris Smith and Ben Voth, “The Role of Humor in Political Argument: How ‘Strategery’ and ‘Lockboxes’ Changed a Political Campaign,” Argumentation and Advocacy 39 (2002): 110–29; Lisa Gring-Pemble and Martha Solomon Watson, “The Rhetorical Limits of Satire: An Analysis of James Finn Garner's Politically Correct Bedtime Stories,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 132–53; Joanne R. Gilbert, Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004); Stephen Gencarella Olbrys, “Seinfeld's Democratic Vistas,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22 (2005): 390–408, and “Disciplining the Carnivalesque: Chris Farley's Exotic Dance,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 240–59; “Critical Forum: On Doonesbury,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24 (2007): 77–92. I believe that these studies, like the wider literature on humor, comedy, and parody, provide ample evidence that there is little value in making strong, comprehensive discriminations between humor, comedy, parody, satire, wit, jokes, and the like, particularly when done to rule some genre out of court. There are differences to be marked for various purposes—see note 31 below—but no parsing of terms should distract from the primary focus of this essay, which is on parody. I have featured parody because I believe that it is an important form of political humor and the most vital and influential form of the past several years, and because it offers important resources for understanding culture.
3. Mark Backman, Sophistication: Rhetoric and the Rise of Self-Consciousness (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1991).
4. See the discussion in Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 119. I find Rose's review of the history of erudition about parody to be the most useful. Other recent work includes Simon Dentith, Parody (New York: Routledge, 2000) and Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
5. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Shovell, Henry Brereton, and Fred Rothwell (Project Gutenberg, 2003), chapter I, section v, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4352/. Bergson lays out the problem with reference to the relationship between gesture and speech in oratory. There is an element of romance in his thinking, however: “The truth is that a really living life should never repeat itself” (19). Whatever the insight or affirmation here, Bergson has to deny (a) the reality of life as it is lived, not least the nature of ethical obligation; (b) our artificial nature as users of language and other tools and the role of culture that both gives meaning to life and exists only through iteration; and (c) the truth that some of the best things in life can occur only in the second time. Even so, the essay remains one of the great works on comedy.
6. Christopher Stone, Parody (London: 1914), quoted in Rose, Parody, 26.
7. Fred W. Householder, Jr., “Παρωιδια,” Journal of Classical Philology 39 (1944): 1–9, quoted in Rose, Parody, 7.
8. Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, trans. H. E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), 395. See also Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
9. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 53.
10. Rose, Parody, 52.
11. Full comparison of parody and the art of rhetoric should include the following comic reversal: What if, instead of the development of classical rhetoric, with wit a subtopic within that art, the Greek sophists had developed an art of comedy, with rhetoric (strategic maneuver) merely a subtopic within that art? Plato still would have had plenty to dislike. Many concepts might have been much the same, but the parodic inversion could lead to imagining other forms and a different history.
12. Robert Siegel, ed., Dispatches from the Tenth Circle: The Best of the Onion (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), 5.
13. Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976).
14. This technical, philosophical, and attitudinal alignment of the art of rhetoric with parodic imitation is felt most directly within the genre of the epideictic. For an outline of the genre, see Yun Lee Too, “Epideictic Genre,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas O. Sloane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 251–57. Jeffrey Walker argues that epideictic discourse “shapes and cultivates the basic codes of value and belief by which a society or culture live.” Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9. This claim grants considerable political significance to display, albeit with too neat a division of labor with pragmatic genres that also negotiate values rather than merely apply them. Scott Consigny suggests an additional function by demonstrating that parody was Gorgias's master trope and the comedic character of the alazon his preferred role in his epideictic performances. Gorgias: Sophist and Artist (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 167–77, 192–97. In sum, parody lies within epideictic discourse, which not only does (some of) the serious work of forming deep sources of civic action, but also can provide an equally important critical function through the public formalization of language beside itself.
15. Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 310.
16. Note that Loraux and R. E. Allen disagree on whether Plato has Pericles or Thucydides as his primary target. It seems safe to say that both are nailed, with the question of primacy best determined by the reader's interest. R. E. Allen, trans., The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 323–27.
17. Loraux, Invention of Athens, 312.
18. Loraux, Invention of Athens, 314.
19. Loraux, Invention of Athens, 327. The dialogue strongly supports this last claim: e.g., Menexenus, 324a–336d and 338c–339a.
20. This is the standard gloss on Cicero, Orator 44.151, e.g., in Orator, trans. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
21. Loraux, Invention of Athens, 311–12, 321–23.
22. Loraux, Invention of Athens, 323.
23. If this is not a perfect template for the conservative history of the Vietnam War, I do not know what is. See, for example, Richard Nixon's statement that the US had demonstrated a level of restraint unmatched in the history of nations. Hearts and Minds, VHS, directed by Peter Davis (1974; Beverly Hills, CA: Rainbow Pictures).
24. Drawing on Robert Connor, I argue that this is an element of classical prudence, in Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice, ed. Robert Hariman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 8–12. W. Robert Connor, Thucydides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 65.
25. That advice, which was inscribed on the temple to Apollo at Delphi, is featured in the serious corrective to Athenian folly that Plato supplies at the end of the speech. Plato, Menexenus, trans. R. E. Allen, The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1, 247e.
26. The literature of humor is filled with attempts to provide formalistic definitions of parody and the many related forms of comic variation. Situating those accounts within the tradition of rhetoric reveals that the techniques are in fact much more broadly distributed. Gary Saul Morrison argues that parody can never be adequately explained by the technical devices used because the unit of analysis has to be the utterance. “Parody, History, Metaparody,” in Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, ed. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 63–86.
27. Bakhtin argues that premodern parody created a broad field of discourses but was “homeless” (Dialogic Imagination, 59); that is, it lacked the genre that could incorporate parodic doubling and heteroglossia into a system of discourse. This is a key insight into the modernity of the novel and its importance in the literary public sphere. It also can mislead, as the discursive field continued and grew within the modern print media to become the larger, more inchoate system. See M. M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres” in Speech Genres and Other Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 60–102. That is, novels themselves are imitations of the field in which they exist, the public address system, and to see that system one has to step outside the literary enclosure of parodic functioning that is implied by Bakhtin's historical narrative.
28. Siegel, Dispatches, 39. This “headline” also is an excellent example of the primary technique for creating both ambiguity and the parodic effect: hybridization, or the “mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance” (Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 358).
29. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 56.
30. The questions of whether parody (and related forms such as satire) are more critical or appreciative, progressive or conservative, and the like, have been much discussed. See Rose, Parody, 45–53. There also is a history of fussing about the distinction between parody and satire; generally, satire need not imitate the structure of its object while parody must do so, and satire presumes a more stable commitment as opposed to the greater ambivalence of parody. See Rose, Parody, 80–86. Recent studies of satire include Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994).
31. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 51. “Image” in this English translation refers to the Russian word obraz, which can mean image while also being the word for icon. Bakhtin also is punning against obrazetz or sample. Thanks to Gary Saul Morson for instruction on this point. See also his parodic work by Alica Chudo, And Quiet Flows the Vodka, or When Pushkin Comes to Shove: The Curmudgeon's Guide to Russian Literature and Culture with the Devil's Dictionary of Received Ideas: Alphabetical Reflections on the Loathesomeness of Russia, American Academia, and Humanity in General, ed. Andrew Sobesednikov (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000).
32. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 23.
33. Note that there is an unexplored relationship between the idea of the “image of a language” and the role of visual images in public culture.
34. Note that this point also implies the importance of taking style seriously in the study of public discourse. Parody is always a representation not of a specific text but rather its style and, likewise, not of a specific person but rather the social type or protocol. If parody is representative of public consciousness generally, then that consciousness must include a trafficking in styles.
35. This is the current title for the section titled “What Do You Think?” in previous years.
36. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 159–60.
37. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 21.
38. This effect can be created by other means outside of comedy, such as the addition of women in the nineteenth century to produce the “promiscuous audience.” The initial transgression carried some of the features of parodic duplication and was counterattacked with explicit derision. Susan Zaeske, “The ‘Promiscuous Audience’ Controversy and the Emergence of the Early Women's Rights Movement,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 191–207.
39. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 23–24.
40. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 159.
41. Kenneth Burke, “Four Master Tropes,” A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 503–17.
42. Siegel, Dispatches, 167.
43. This feature is valorized more by some theorists than others; Kenneth Burke perhaps makes the most of it, as the “comic corrective” consists precisely in the reduction of social distance that comes through deflating hierarchies and thereby restoring those caught up in forms of assent to their senses, their compatriots, and their need for others. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 34–74, 166–75; A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 208–12, 221–33. Other more explicitly prudential theories of political humor feature its function as an equalizer, social lubricant, and so forth (much like the alcohol also present in the standard model): humor reduces partisan hostility and also the inevitable gap between rulers and ruled by bringing people to see past their differences to a common fallibility and shared experiences. (Note also that humor converts those differences into images of difference, which then can be set aside more easily.) See Charles E. Schutz, Political Humor: From Aristophanes to Sam Ervin (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1977). Schutz sees political humor through the rosy lenses of dramatism and humanism. One source may be Kenneth Burke's signature statement on the comic: “Like tragedy, comedy warns against the dangers of pride, but its emphasis shifts from crime to stupidity. … The progress of humane enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy” (Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 41). Perhaps the best popular example of prudential humor is the series of collections by Paul F. Boller, Jr. on wit and other comic episodes in congressional and presidential history: e.g., Congressional Anecdotes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). These approaches can be either too large or too narrow for constituting a public world: the first applies to all symbolic action, the second to the political class. This last interest is, of course, a topic in the history of rhetoric. See, e.g., Cicero, De Oratore, 2.217–34; Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtier; and so on. See also Anthony Corbeill, Controlling Laughter: Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Chris Holcomb, Mirth Making: The Rhetorical Discourse on Jesting in Early Modern England (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001); Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, ed., A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). A more contemporary public art is the editorial cartoon; see, e.g., Edward J. Lordan, Politics, Ink: How America's Cartoonists Skewer Politicians, from King George III to George Dubya (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). More generally, see Maurice Charney, ed., Comedy: A Geographic and Historical Guide, 2 vol. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005); Wes D. Gehring, Parody as Film Genre: “Never Give a Saga an Even Break” (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999); Dan Harries, Film Parody (London: BFI Publishing OR British Film Institute, 2000); Jonathan Gray, Watching with The Simpsons: Televison, Parody, and Intertextuality (New York: Routledge, 2006); Stephen E. Kercher, Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Joseph Boskin, Rebellious Laughter: People's Humor in American Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997); Paul Lewis, Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). At the edge of the spectrum are mock candidates and street theater: e.g., L. M. Bogad, Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements (New York: Routledge, 2005).
44. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 54, 201.
45. Siegel, Dispatches, 60.
46. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 7.
47. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 76.
48. Simon Critchley's observation about the relationship between joke structure and social structure is particularly useful here: “in order for the incongruity of the joke to be seen as such, there has to be a congruence between joke structure and social structure—no social congruity, no comic incongruity.” On Humour (New York: Routledge, 2002), 4. A restatement of the enthymematic element in any joke, Critchley's insight also looks back to Bergson's emphasis on the social function of laughter, specifically, to mark the rigidity that inhibits optimal social interaction. That formulation can mislead, however, as both the individual and the social structure can be sources of rigidity. Nor are they symmetrical: where the individual might nonconform, the society can tyrannize. Thus, Critchley's claim might be adjusted to better reflect Begson's claim that comedy operates at “the border-line between art and life” (Laughter, 55). Parody not only reflects a social structure; it also marks and adjusts the relationship between a discursive convention and social reality. Society may be out of whack with its discursive order (say, its ideals), or the discursive form (at any scale—myth, speech, or phrase) may no longer reflect social experience. The result is the same: the parodic composition creates an image of what needs to be examined, an image now isolated from the modal assumptions that allow it to escape notice otherwise. Comic distortion provides the key to seeing where incorrect alignment occurs between another discursive structure and the world it would describe. By folding the medium on itself, parody exposes distorted relationships between discourse and society.
49. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 59–60.
50. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 60.
51. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 361. Bakhtin adds, “a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another, the carving-out of a living image of another language.” This singleness of purpose would apply only to the literary work, if there, and not to the discursive field of which it is a model and which would have multiple intentions.
52. Thanks to Ron Greene for promoting the system metaphor in the study of public address: “Rhetorical Pedagogy as a Postal System: Circulating Subjects through Michael Warner's ‘Publics and Counterpublics,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 434–43.
53. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 68.
54. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 47.
55. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 39.
56. Robert Hariman, “Civic Education, Classical Imitation, and Democratic Polity,” in Isocrates and Civic Education, ed. Takis Poulakos and David Depew (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 225.
57. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 270.
58. Burke, Grammar of Motives, 21–23; Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278–93.
59. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963). I am necessarily simplifying, not least because Freud allowed that jokes differ from dreams by being thoroughly social. Those using psychoanalysis today would emphasize its value in charting the distribution of tensions within economies of symbolic exchange.
60. Other theories of humor from those mentioned so far include discharging social tension, discharging formal tension, creating pleasure via incongruity or play, sublimating cynicism or absurdity, reasserting radical freedom, and creating community.
61. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).
62. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 48–71. Thus, emotional responses such as laughter reflect patterns of experience developed over time in collective interaction and articulated through the intermediate realm of culture rather than in either vernacular or official discourses alone.
63. “Army Holds Annual ‘Bring Your Daughter to War’ Day,” Onion, March 24, 2008, http://www.theonion.com/content/video/army_holds_annual_bring_your/.
64. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 108.
65. Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006) argues for the importance of aesthetic assumptions in political theory.
66. On playfulness as a constituent of human action, see Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966) and Lanham, Motives of Eloquence. For a recent example of the debate between advocates of comedy and seriousness, see the forum essays on The Daily Show in Critical Studies in Media Communication 24 (2007): 262–83, which includes my essay, “In Defense of Jon Stewart,” 273–77.
67. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
68. Obviously, the virtual representation of other discourses will differ as it happens through rational-critical discourse or parody. A note on critical method may apply here. Taking parody seriously can involve a series of operations: identifying and analyzing a parodic composition; including in the analysis of a serious discourse attention to parodic doubles of that discourse; reading either serious or parodic discourses in respect to the now “novelized” genre and the decentered intertext of the public address system; employing parodic exaggerations to discover and test ideas. Let me make one additional suggestion as well. Once a speech culture develops and in particular once genres become “novelized,” the distinction between the “original” genre and parodic supplements begins to blur. As with Bakhtin's account of the structure of the utterance, every speech act is a response to a prior act. Thus, not only is the parody a response to the serious discourse that precedes it, but over time the serious discourse becomes a response to its parodic other. Thus, the direct discourse is no longer entirely prior to its comic double; in fact, to be a serious discourse, it has to be selected or reconstructed as such out the parodic field. Serious discourse (official statements, “real news,” and the like) can't be so prima facie once implicated in the dialectic of seriousness and parody. To be serious, the discourse has to distinguish itself from doubled, exaggerated, or profaned versions of itself, and serious discourse can be shown to employ many techniques to that end. Michael Calvin McGee made a similar argument in response to the inherent fragmentation of discourses in postmodern media environments: “Text, Context, and Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 274–89. McGee left the work of constructing the focal text to the critic, rather than considering how it is part of the process of discourse production.
69. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 56.
70. Gehring notes how parody provides the tools for learning an artistic genre's conventions. Parody as Film Genre, 3.
71. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 84.