A Comedian and An Activist Walk Into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice
Caty Borum Chattoo & Lauren Feldman
296 pages, University of California Press, 2020
A Comedian and An Activist Walk Into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice (University of California Press), the launch volume of the new Communication for Social Justice Activism series, is the first book to examine comedy in the digital media era and its connection to contemporary social justice public engagement and movements. Our book argues that media and technological disruption—combined with newly invigorated calls for justice—have created the ideal conditions for boundary-pushing socially critical comedy to not only thrive in the entertainment marketplace but also play a strategic role in social change efforts. The legendary TV producer and activist Norman Lear (All In the Family, The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time) wrote the foreword, and it features interviews with comedians such as W. Kamau Bell (CNN’s United Shades of America), Hasan Minhaj (Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj on Netflix), Franchesca Ramsey (MTV’s Decoded), alongside social justice leaders from organizations such as Rise, Define American, and Caring Across Generations.
Comedians who say something serious about the world while they make us laugh are capable of mobilizing the masses, focusing a critical lens on injustices, and injecting hope and optimism into seemingly hopeless problems. Through rich case studies, audience research, and interviews with comedians and social justice leaders and strategists, A Comedian and an Activist Walk Into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice explains how comedy – both in the entertainment marketplace and as cultural strategy – can engage audiences with issues such as global poverty, climate change, immigration, and sexual assault, and how activists work with comedy to reach and empower publics in the networked, participatory digital media age. — Caty Borum Chattoo & Lauren Feldman
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The 21st century finds us within a dramatic transformation in information, entertainment, and technology – and, simultaneously, an era of social justice activism augmented by digital advocacy. Thanks to a confluence of factors, comedy may be in the midst of its newest golden era of experimentation and influence, both in the U.S. and around the world. In the still-evolving digital era, the opportunity to consume and share comedy has never been as available. And yet, despite its vast cultural imprint, comedy is a little-understood vehicle for serious public engagement in urgent social problems. Moreover, in the midst of a merger of entertainment and news in the contemporary information ecology, a revolutionary transformation in entertainment media business practices and technology, alongside a decline in perceptions of trust in government and traditional media institutions,1 comedy may be a unique force for change in pressing social justice challenges, such as global poverty, immigrant rights, gender equality, and climate change, to name only a few. Simultaneously, the post-9/11 sociocultural moment is characterized by renewed demands for social justice and equity, exemplified by social movements such as the Movement for Black Lives and #MeToo. Both the activism and cultural expression empowered by digital media converge to position comedy as a source of influence on today’s social justice issues.
With the growth of entertainment in the streaming era, mediated comedy is finding new outlets beyond traditional gatekeepers, and the present-day entertainment marketplace is embracing and reflecting new voices and cultural identities. As a result, the digital media landscape has witnessed a surge of comedy. The contemporary mediated comedy menu includes an array of genres – some legacy, established forms, and some that emerged in the digital era – including satirical news, long-form sketch programs, scripted TV sitcoms, streaming comedy stand-up specials, short-form online videos destined for viral spread, documentary storytelling, and podcasts. The present-day U.S. comedy ecology includes a heavy dose of social-issue consciousness: through overt social justice commentary and topics in commercially successful comedy entertainment on legacy TV like NBC, HBO, Showtime, and Comedy Central; through new voices and audacious reflections on social justice issues on risk-taking streaming networks like Netflix and Amazon; through a rise in YouTube-enabled comedy; and through comedy producers like Funny or Die.
We position digital-era mediated comedy as a powerful influencer in contemporary social justice issues based on several specific ideas:
The entertainment marketplace for contemporary mediated comedy is embracing humor that includes social justice challenges. From a media industry perspective, mediated comedy’s current moment is characterized by upheaval in economics, production, distribution, and consumption. The digital entertainment ecosystem is dominated by the upstarts, including Netflix and other streaming outlets, that have the power to shape and demonstrate a massive audience marketplace for diverse comedic voices that overtly take on social justice issues. Amanda Lotz articulated the authoritative cultural power asserted by the new streaming, niche-dominated TV environment, coining the term “phenomenal television” to describe “a particular category of programming that retains the cultural importance attributed to television’s earlier operation as a cultural forum despite the changes of the post-network era” that limit its reach to a narrowcast audience.2 Phenomenal television – new watercooler-moment entertainment – is characterized by its ability to cut through media clutter and reach incongruous, or unexpected, audiences, due to its resonance with particular themes and discourses circulating in the culture and its attention to issues of social importance.3 This is a useful characterization for our own articulation of comedy and social justice. Phenomenal TV projects may naturally tend to incorporate social justice topics because of their attention to matters of contemporary cultural, civic importance.
TV comedy sketch programs that skewer social issues such as race, gender politics, and class include the long-running Saturday Night Live, which reasserts its cultural legacy with each decade. Among other notable examples, legacy TV network ABC memorably portrayed the historic wedding of a gay couple, Mitch and Cam, on its hit sitcom, Modern Family. Streaming networks like Amazon Studios have welcomed new voices and social-issue perspectives through scripted episodic programming like Transparent. Netflix has become a home for on-demand stand-up comedy specials; for example, its culturally-acclaimed, Peabody-Award-winning 2017 hit, Homecoming King, featured comedian Hasan Minhaj talking about his experiences as an Indian American immigrant experiencing racism in the United States.4 TV is not the sole domain of comedy that embraces social justice topics, however. Podcasts and online sites, like Funny or Die, are also influential sources.
As a far-reaching projector of cultural values and narratives, contemporary mediated comedy can serve as a site of cultural resistance. Comedy’s prominent role and popularity in the dominant system of popular culture – the shared location where “we absorb the majority of our beliefs, ideologies, and cultural narratives”5 – provides its central position of influence. Comedy is watched, shared, and discussed by millions, more than ever before, in the digital age. Such reach matters, given that popular culture and the industrial production of entertainment is “the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured.”6 Dominant shared norms are fluid, and popular culture both reflects and shapes societal values and beliefs.7
For its part, contemporary mediated comedy – positioned prominently in the current entertainment marketplace through both reconfigured post-network TV8 and the digital-native environment of YouTube and Funny or Die – is an engine for new ways of seeing, or an arena of resistance. The contemporary TV landscape, a dominant – but not the sole – domain for mediated comedy viewing, thus operates as a cultural institution and a cultural industry, “as a social conduit that participates in communicating values and ideas within a culture by telling stories and conveying information that reflects, challenges, and responds to shared debates and concerns.”9 To the extent that much contemporary comedy overtly includes social justice topics, it may thus provide a steady stream of cultural resistance.
Social justice topics – and diverse new comedy voices – are embraced by audiences in a cultural moment characterized by social justice struggle. Contemporary comedians are using their voices and platforms to assert their cultural identities and call out oppressive power dynamics. In turn, as a partial consequence of the shifting comedy and entertainment marketplace in the digital era, the voices of traditionally marginalized people and groups – racial and ethnic minorities, women, and sexual minorities – are not just increasingly seen in comedy, but also are rewarded by critical acclaim, media coverage, and audience buzz. For instance, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, as the United States turned the page on a new chapter of Islamophobia, Muslim-American comedians took to their microphones. In 2013, comedians Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah distributed their Netflix documentary, The Muslims Are Coming, which featured their stand-up tour throughout the American Midwest and South, where they aimed to hilariously entertain audiences and “to combat what they call Islamophobia and to explain, reveal and connect with prejudice one passerby at a time.”10 In 2015, comedians Zahra Noorbakhsh and Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed launched the #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast to humorously address harmful Islamaphobic stereotypes.11
Within the context of a cultural moment marked by struggle and calls for social equity, comedians themselves serve as social justice influencers in a range of ways. They are overtly calling for remedies to social problems, re-framing news issues, asserting cultural identity, sharing experiences of discrimination and othering, and unmasking taboo topics. At a similar cultural and social justice moment, in 1960, Time magazine featured comedian Mort Sahl, made famous by his humorous social critique, in an in-depth article titled, “Comedians: The Third Campaign,” focused on the powerful social influence of a new class of comedians as public intellectuals: “At 33, Mort Sahl is young, irreverent, and trenchant. With one eye on world news and the other on Variety, he is a volatile mixture of show business and politics, of exhibitionistic self-dedication and a seemingly sincere passion to change the world.”12 Notably, coinciding with a moment in which fewer than two in 10 Americans say they trust government, and not even half (45%) describe business leaders as honest and trustworthy,13 a 2015 article in The Atlantic magazine (“How Comedians Became Public Intellectuals”) asserted a similar premise:
Comedians are acting not just as joke-tellers, but as truth-tellers—as guides through our cultural debates… comedians are doing their work not just in sweaty clubs or network variety shows or cable sitcoms, but also on the Internet. Wherever the jokes start—Comedy Central, The Tonight Show, Marc Maron’s garage—they will end up, eventually and probably immediately, living online. They will, at their best, go “really, insanely viral.” …. Comedy, like so much else in the culture, now exists largely of, by, and for the Internet. Which is to say that there are two broad things happening right now—comedy with moral messaging, and comedy with mass attention—and their combined effect is this: Comedians have taken on the role of public intellectuals.14
Satirical news, perhaps the most immediately recognizable in this context, is well-documented as a source of political and civic information15 – and an undisputed audience hit, with millions of views and shares. At its height, use of The Daily Show as a source of news and information – not just entertainment – rivaled that of traditional news programs, and its coverage was found to ideologically balance topics and perform a de facto watchdog function, particularly for civic issues, politicians, and the media.16 Viewers’ widespread embrace of satirical news has manifested in a handful of new shows – Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver – thus multiplying the reach of this kind of agenda-setting information and social critique packaged in comedy.
Mediated comedy in the digital era is shared virally, a public engagement mechanism and practice also central to contemporary networked social justice efforts. Within the context of a technologically-engaged digital society, contemporary comedy’s availability online is situated for the kind of peer sharing that also is a requirement for public engagement in social justice topics. The cultural imprint of comedy programming is amplified by the viral-sharing nature of digital-era entertainment, which allows content to reach well beyond the audiences who tune in to watch the full shows. Indeed, along with their full appointment-viewing episodes, comedy programs produce short-form video clips designed for easy online sharing. Along parallel lines, a YouTube-socialized digital audience is all too happy to share the objects of its cultural affection. How comedy’s public engagement potential comes together and can manifest explicitly – based on its audience, agenda-setting, and discursive effects – is the core of the ensuing chapters. Of course, the peer-sharing, participatory properties of the digital era do not encompass the full spectrum of social-change possibilities, but they are central, parallel traits of both contemporary entertainment and social justice activism. The practices enabled by the networked culture are embedded in both digital-era entertainment and public engagement with social challenges.