Only joking? Online humour in the 2005 UK general election

Abstract

Humour has long been a part of election campaigns but rarely has election humour been subject to scholarly analysis. The increasing popularity of new forms of Internet-based humour has, however, raised questions about the significance of humour in campaigning and whether online humour can be used as means of stimulating political engagement. This article assesses online humour in the context of the 2005 UK election, exploring both the motivations of the different actors who distributed web-based political humour and the nature of the texts themselves. We find that whilst the official party campaigns use humour very cautiously, there has been an upsurge in humour based campaigns from net activists as well as more traditional broadcasters. Yet, overall, the way that humour is used is paradoxical, since it often attempts to encourage participation but portrays politics as a cynical game, leaving the rationale for political participation unclear.

Keywords:

• Internet
• humour
• political participation
• election campaigns
• game-playing

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the support of the Economic and Social Research Council Award no RES 000-22-1284, for funding part of this research. We would also like to thank Ralph Schroeder and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Notes

1. We found only three papers that dealt directly with this theme – all of them based on US experiences (Warnick 1998, 2002; Foot & Schneider 2002).

2. For a recent review of the literature on political participation and ICTs see Rabia (2005). For more empirical evidence on ICTs and participation in the UK see Gibson et al. (2005) and Curtice & Norris (2004).

3. For example, in 1992, Labour leader Neil Kinnock's shriek at the Sheffield campaign rally. The 1997 campaign saw a televised but unplanned confrontation between scandal ridden Conservative incumbent Neil Hamilton, his wife and his opponent Martin Bell (an independent candidate and former high profile BBC journalist). At the 2001 election, John Prescott (Deputy Labour Party leader), was caught on camera punching a protester who had thrown an egg at him.

4. Only two games could not be classified as belonging to one of these categories: Spinon's WMD hunting and the 5 May election, in which people were invited to vote for Jamie Oliver (celebrity TV chef), Kylie Minogue (pop star) or Wayne Rooney (footballer) as the representatives of the people.

5. The irony that a mainstream Conservative party was using (a type of) graffiti to attract voters requires further research which was outside the scope of this study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Limor Shifman

Limor Shifman is a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. She investigates various aspects of Internet-based humour, as well as the evolution of communication technologies. Her PhD dissertation, in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, focuses on the interaction between humour, media and social processes.

Stephen Coleman

Stephen Coleman is Professor of Political Communication at the Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds. He has written widely on the relationship between ICT and democratic participation, and on the intersections between popular culture and political democracy. He is currently completing a book (with Karen Ross) on the public in media discourse.

Stephen Ward

Stephen Ward is research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He has written widely on the role of ICTs in politics and, in particular, on political parties, elections and online technologies.