The Revolution Will Be Hilarious: Comedy for Social Change and Civic Power by Caty Borum

The Revolution Will Be Hilarious: Comedy for Social Change and Civic Power

Caty Borum

280 pages, NYU Press, 2023

The participatory culture of the streaming, social-media age has changed nearly every norm of how effective human rights activism works. At the same time, the entertainment industry finds itself in the midst of radical transformation, opening space for social justice leaders to be effective creative partners where they were once seen as adversaries—particularly organizations and groups that represent historically marginalized people. How this works, and why it matters for building an equitable and just world, is the throughline of The Revolution Will Be Hilarious: Comedy for Social Change and Civic Power. The book reveals how and why comedy fuels social change in the participatory media age, how post-millennial social justice organizations collaborate with comedians and the evolving entertainment industry, and why creativity and cultural power matter for social justice. It illuminates transforming entertainment industry and activism practices, and it explains why deviant creativity expressed through comedy builds civic power—and can help change the world.

This excerpt from Chapter 3 (“Hollywood Won’t Change Unless It’s Forced to Change”: How Activism and Entertainment Collide and Collaborate) explains “narrative change” work—how and why contemporary social justice activists are turning to the entertainment industry as the targets of social change efforts.—Caty Borum

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For post-millennial activists, the participatory media age has empowered new creative ways of doing cultural representation business and new Hollywood relationships to get the job done. A formalized job title has emerged for this work: narrative or cultural strategist, often used interchangeably. As a concept, narrative strategy is a cultural and communication practice by which social justice practitioners collaborate with entertainment industry executives, writers, and producers to shape positive portrayals of marginalized communities and social issues in scripted and non-scripted entertaining narratives, critique negative portrayals, and produce and disseminate their own entertainment storytelling content. The core belief holds that entertainment storytelling is meaningful to social change in its ability to shift public opinion and perceptions—and foster cultural conversation and public participation—all of which is necessary, ultimately, for supportive policy that expands equity and justice. Entertainment narratives are seen as stories that can reinforce or disrupt troubling social norms or portrayals—and thus, narrative strategists work to create enlightening and diverse portrayals, and to dismantle damaging ones.

How are they carving their own path as creative strategists, storytellers, and activists? The most effective social justice activism organizations collaborate directly within the entertainment industry—including comedy—instead of primarily acting as mechanisms of pressure from the outside (even though public critique is never off the table). They have figured out, through understanding the informal norms and protocols of the entertainment business, how to position themselves directly within Hollywood’s social capital networks. Social justice organizations that practice narrative strategy carry out one or more—sometimes all—of a series of activities: working to change the pipeline of decision-making culture creators, influencing existing storylines in big entertainment programming, developing and pitching new entertainment for mainstream entertainment industry distribution, creating self-produced content for distribution on digital platforms, mobilizing and pressuring Hollywood to change damaging portrayals of people and social problems, and participating as visible thought-leaders in entertainment industry spaces. They are seen by entertainment decision-makers as full creative partners and collaborators.

Color of Change, for instance, centers “Culture Change and Media Justice” as a guiding premise that shapes its work as a Hollywood collaborator and critic, but also by showcasing and inspiring “Black joy” through entertainment, landing the group on the Fast Company list of “50 Most Innovative Companies.”¹ As part of its efforts, the group produces its own entertainment programming through its filmed podcast, #TellBlackStories, also distributed on YouTube and Instagram,² pitches original storytelling content for mainstream media distribution, and partners with Hollywood producers to create and direct social-change campaigns around entertainment, such as Ava DuVernay’s award-winning Netflix series, When They See Us. Comedy is a part of it. In the 2020 year of uprising, when media giant ViacomCBS looked around ways to entertain and engage the public around Juneteenth, executives turned to a creative partnership with Color of Change. On June 19, 2020, comedian Mamoudou N’Diaye took over the company’s social media channels with comedy material developed through the Color of Change original comedy production, By Us For Us, produced in collaboration with my organization, the Center for Media & Social Impact.

In yet another nod to large-scale creative and strategy collaboration between narrative strategy activists and the entertainment industry, the MTV Entertainment Group announced its wide-ranging Culture Code initiative—training and new programming designed to bring diverse storytellers and executives into the ViacomCBS family of networks—at the end of 2020.³ Activist groups, working in lockstep with entertainment executives, are the co-creators and designers: The Museum of Tolerance, Color of Change, Anti-Defamation League, The Jed Foundation, MPAC, RAINN, RespectAbility, Storyline Partners, and GLAAD. “We’re not doing this alone, and that’s important,” says Erika Soto Lamb, the social impact executive who works across ViacomCBS entertainment networks including Comedy Central, Paramount, MTV and others. “This effort is designed to result in a changed environment for content and a shift in who creates it and what stories we’re telling.”⁴ Outcomes are not theoretical or abstract, says Soto Lamb, when entertainment industry power dynamics and stories change. As one illustrious example, when Hispanic shoppers were the target of a 2019 mass shooting in an El Paso Walmart, she shares, Comedy Central executives rushed to cancel an episode of the comedy sketch show Alternatino, a Latinx take on the Millennial experience in the United States, because it dealt with gun violence.⁵ The sketch, she recalls, was focused on an immigrant in an American citizenship class:

The teacher says, “Okay, now let’s talk about gun violence in America.” The immigrant character played by [the show’s star] Arturo Castro says “Wait, so it’s related to cartels, right?” He keeps asking these questions from his frame of reference, and what guns are like in South America. And the teacher has to keep saying, “No. In the U.S., it’s just regular people going into churches, malls, movie theaters and killing people.” It just does not compute to this immigrant character.⁶

Because Mexican-American former activist Soto Lamb worked inside the network in a decision-making role, she recognized the power of entertainment and comedy to address gun violence from an immigrant Latino perspective, which was sorely needed in that moment, she thought. With Soto Lamb’s guidance within Comedy Central, the episode aired, and comedian Arturo Castro wrote an article for The Washington Post⁷ and spoke out on CNN and MSNBC. As Soto Lamb recalls, this moment is indicative of how change manifests in a tangible way: “It became something that the company was really proud of—a recognition that what happened there was a toxic combination of both hate in America and easy access to guns that resulted in that tragedy. That sketch could have been fully scrubbed without someone who understood the experience from different perspectives.”⁸ Two diverse individuals—the comedian and the entertainment executive—worked together to make it happen.

In 2021, Creative Artists Agency (CAA), arguably the most powerful entertainment talent industry in the business, launched The Full Story initiative in partnership with its foundation, designed to “generate authentic narratives in television and film for a more equitable future” and spotlight marginalized creative storytellers and social issues.⁹ Its creative partners? Activist groups like the ACLU, GLAAD, Color of Change, Everytown Gun Safety, CAPE (Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment), IllumiNative and Amnesty International.¹⁰ Here’s the key element: CAA will work with its activist colleagues not only to find and develop diverse storytellers, but to source the stories from within their communities. It’s unprecedented. And there are also the lists—the original Black List, expanded to inspire the Muslim List, the Indigenous List, the Latinx TV List—that spotlight overlooked entertainment stories diverse creators, fueled by social justice organizations now considered full members of the Hollywood ecosystem and its unwritten norms of social capital.¹¹

Together, this is the cultural social justice long game: changing the entertainment industry pipeline to lift up and ensure the success of historically marginalized storytellers, shifting on-screen portrayals of people who have been dehumanized or erased, and creating and distributing entertainment content produced from inside activist groups and the communities they represent. It’s not always fast change, but it’s also not invisible or marginal. As comedy producer and executive Josh Church (Apatow Productions) puts it, “Activism is essential to help Hollywood continue to move forward because without the activists pushing, it’s so easy for gatekeepers to go back to historically what they thought worked before.”¹² Veteran producer Deniese Davis adds:

Activism is challenging the system and the most glaring issues that, quite honestly, have been able to be swept under the rug or covered up or not really talked about in mainstream media… In the era of social media, people are saying, “We’re not going to just sit around for this. We will band together and we will find ways to fight for what we feel like is right.” The fight is about challenging the system to change and be more modern to reflect the world that we currently live in.¹³

Activism for representation and justice, in small and big ways, is firmly embedded within the entertainment industry revolution and ultimately, the images, stories, people, dreams, and worlds that will amuse us and make us think—sometimes differently than we did before.

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Shrewd contemporary cultural activists are legitimate collaborators within the entertainment business, a distinction from earlier antagonistic Hollywood activism that relied heavily on boycotts and letter-writing campaigns. As a GLAAD strategist put it, “we no longer have to scream at the front door; instead, we are being invited in through the back door.”¹⁴ The savviest narrative change strategists and activists are seen by Hollywood producers, writers, and executives as essential partners in the business of creating authentic entertainment that appeals to a full range of audiences. To be sure, the industry as a whole is not necessarily motivated by a burst of moral consciousness (even if, on an individual level, this is often true), but rather, smart business in the face of social media and other public dissent that can make or break a show. There’s also the omnipresent real danger of vocal, visible pressure moments evaporating into performative activism at best; as Kristen Marston notes, “It’s interesting that Black Lives Matter only became cool for some people during the summer [of 2020], which is disturbing.”¹⁵

For their part, collaborative relationships aside, social justice groups also know full well that playing nice is not their only possible path. Mobilizing organized public dissent is a threat they can employ at any moment—and the entertainment industry gets it. Collective, vocal, visible outrage is still effective. Women, people of color, disabled, and queer folks are vocal about their erasure or mistreatment in entertainment; silencing them while conducting business as usual is not a task that Hollywood can manage effectively in the wild open chaos of the social media landscape. As Sue Obeidi memorably puts it, “Today, if a TV show has a Muslim character praying, and she’s praying all wrong, you’re going to be called out on Muslim Twitter.”¹⁶

How does this backdrop matter when it comes to entertainment that spotlights the hilarious lived experiences of comedians with something to say about injustice? Between their increasing creative skill as entertainment storytellers and strategic know-how as advocates, the culture-focused social justice activists have positioned themselves as Hollywood insiders, partners, and peers. And from collaboration comes co-creation, a merger of entertainment artistic process and social change strategy. Comedy, given its universal affection in the marketplace and the entertainment business—and the increasing value of humor for social justice groups who see its ability to cut through polarized divisions and capture widespread attention—is the fresh opportunity.