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Jesting international politics: The productive power and limitations of humorous practices in an age of entertainment politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2022

Helle Malmvig Open the ORCID record for Helle Malmvig [Opens in a new window]
Helle Malmvig*
Affiliation:
Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark
*
*Corresponding author. Email: hma@diis.dk
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Abstract

Humour has recently emerged as an important research topic in International Politics. Scholars have investigated how states and state leaders practice humour as part of their diplomatic exchanges, in misinformation campaigns, and nation-branding. Important knowledge has been gained as to how humorous practices partake in constituting identities, managing recognition, and international anxieties or contesting global orders. Yet, little attention has been devoted to interrogating the risk that humorous practices may give rise to in international politics, to the underside of humour's productive power. This article aims to begin unpacking these risks both theoretically and empirically. To do so, it engages with the critical thinking on humour by Kierkegaard and Foster Wallace in particular, suggesting three challenging implications: (1) humorous entrapments; (2) facile forms of detached engagement; and (3) ambiguous blurring of fiction and reality. It then shows how these unfold empirically in: Iran's meme war with the US, a Yes Men's parody during COP15, and the Pyongyang Nuclear Summit, developing a three-pronged analytical strategy for studying humorous practices and their different relations to formations of power/knowledge.

Keywords

HumourEntertainment PoliticsPoststructuralismPowerPublic DiplomacyMemes
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , July 2023 , pp. 513 - 534
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association

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References

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6 Wedderburn, Humour, Subjectivity and World Politics, p. 5.

7 On the term analytical strategy, see Niels Aakerstrøm Andersen, Discursive Analytical Strategies: Understanding Foucault, Kosseleck and Luhmann (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2003) and Helle Malmvig, State Sovereignty and Intervention (London, UK: Routledge, 2011), pp. 23–50.

8 Simon Critchley, On Humour: Thinking in Action (London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), p. 41.

9 John Morreall, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humour (New York, NY: Blackwell, 2011), p. 17.

10 Critchley, On Humour, p. 4.

11 Adler-Nissen and Tsinovoi, ‘International misrecognition’, p. 23.

12 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 232.

13 Sigmund Freud, The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious (London, UK: Penguin, 2003 [orig. pub. 1905]).

14 In particular, Adler-Nissen and Tsinovoi, ‘International misrecognition’ and Brasett, Browning, O'Dwyer, ‘EU've got to be kidding’.

15 Wedderburn, Humour, Subjectivity and World Politics, p. 32.

16 Mark B. Salter, ‘No joking', in Vida Bajc and Williem de Lint (eds), Security and Everyday Life (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011).

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22 Louiza Odysseos, ‘Laughing matters: Peace, democracy and the challenge of the Comic narrative’, Millennium, 30:3 (2001), pp. 709–32.

23 Ibid.; see also Steele, ‘“A catharsis for anxieties”’.

24 See also Wedderburn, Humour, Subjectivity and World Politics, p. 4.

25 Louise Amoore and Alexandra Hall, ‘The clown at the gates of the camp: Sovereignty, resistance and figure of the fool’, Security Dialogue, 44:2 (2013), pp. 93–110.

26 Lars Tønder, ‘Comic power: Another road not taken?’, Theory & Event, 17:4 (2014).

27 Riika Kuusisto ‘Comparing IR plots: Dismal tragedies, exuberant romances, hopeful comedies and cynical satires', International Politics, 55 (2018), pp. 160–76.

28 Amal Ibrahim and Nahed Eltantawy, ‘Egypt's Jon Stewart: Humorous political satire and serious culture jamming’, International Journal of Communication, 11 (2017), pp. 2806–24.

29 Brent J. Steele, ‘Irony, emotions and critical distance’, Millennium, 39:1 (2010), pp. 89–107.

30 Brassett, Browning, and O'Dwyer, ‘EU've got to be kidding’.

31 Adler-Nissen and Tsinovoi, ‘International misrecognition’.

32 Brassett, Browning, and O'Dwyer, ‘EU've got to be kidding’, p. 12.

33 In the conclusion to their article Brassett, Browning, and O'Dwyer indeed emphasise that ‘humour has constitutive effects but some may be more positive than others’. See ‘EU've got to be kidding’, p. 23.

34 Steele, ‘Irony, emotions and critical distance’, p. 105.

35 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 328.

36 Kate Kenny, ‘The performative surprise: Parody, documentary and critique’, Culture and Organization, 15:2 (2009), pp. 221–35.

37 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, p. 257 (p. 272 in particular).

38 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (London, UK: Penguin Classics, 1992), p. 525.

39 Allard den Dulk, ‘Beyond endless “aesthetic” irony: A comparison of the irony critique of Søren Kierkegaard and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest’, Studies in the Novel, 44:3 (2012), pp. 325–45.

40 Rhys Crilley and Precious Chatterje-Doody, ‘From Russia with lols: Humour, RT, and the legitimation of Russian foreign policy’, Global Society (2020), pp. 1–20.

41 Tom Embury-Dennis, ‘Russian ambassador claims UK has stocks of Novichok nerve agent, in extraordinary press conference’, The Independent (22 March 2018).

42 den Dulk, ‘Beyond endless “aesthetic” irony’.

43 Reuters, ‘“Who rules the world?” Nordic PMs poke fun at Trump's Saudi photo op’ (30 May 2017), available at: {https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nordics-trump-idUSKBN18Q2FU} accessed 3 June 2021.

44 Zachary Cohen, ‘Did Nordic leaders troll Trump with “orb” photo?’, CNN (3 May 2017), available at: {https://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/31/politics/trump-nordic-leaders-orb-photo/index.html} accessed 3 June 2021.

45 David Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and US fiction’, in David Foster Wallace (ed.), A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (London, UK: Abacus, 2002), p. 67; den Dulk, ‘Beyond endless “aesthetic” irony’.

46 See, for example: {https://impactnottingham.com/2022/02/ukrainian-invasion-nows-not-the-time-for-memes/}.

47 Stephen Wagg, ‘Comedy, politics and permisiveness: The “satire boom” and its inheritance’, Contemporary Politics, 8:4 (2002), pp. 319–34 (2002); Huw Marsh, ‘“Sinking giggling into the sea”?: Jonathan Coe and the politics of comedy’, in The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction: Who's Laughing Now? (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), pp. 21–51; {https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/03/01/ukraines-meme-war-with-russia-is-no-laughing-matter}.

48 Marsh, ‘“Sinking giggling into the sea”?’.

49 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London, UK: Routledge, 1990); for similar approaches drawing on Judith Butler, see also Wedderburn, Humour, Subjectivity and World Politics; Källstig, ‘Laughing in the face of danger’; James Brassett, The Ironic State: British Comedy and the Everyday Politics of Globalization (Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2021).

50 Wedderburn, Humour, Subjectivity and World Politics, p. 4.

51 See also Louiza Odysseos, Carl Death, and Helle Malmvig, ‘Interrogating Michel Foucault's counter-conduct: Theorizing the subjects and practices of resistance in global politics’, Global Society, 30:2 (2016), pp. 151–6.

52 Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self’, in Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick Hutton (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (London, UK: Tavistock, 1988).

53 Wedderburn, Humour, Subjectivity and World Politics, p. 5.

54 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1980).

55 An analytical strategy is to be understood as ‘a second-order strategy for the observation of how “the social” emerges in observations, enunciations and articulations. The elaboration of an analytical strategy involves shaping a specific gaze that allows the environment to appear as consisting of the observations of other people or systems.’ Aakerstrøm Andersen, Discursive Analytical Strategies, p. vi; Malmvig, State Sovereignty and Intervention, pp. 23–6.

56 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison (London, UK: Penguin, 1991).

57 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge (London, Penguin, 1998).

58 See, for example, Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self’; Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).

59 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. xxiv.

60 In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard thus writes: ‘It is the secret of a discourse that is no longer simply ambiguous, as political discourses can be, but that conveys the impossibility of a determined position of power the impossibility of a determined discursive position … illusion is no longer possible because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of parody, of hypersimulation.’ Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 17–19.

61 Thus this is not imply that humour genuinely belongs to some rather than others, but to point to those instances where there is a certain oddity or out of placeness to it linked to a strong element of strategic calculation. See also Brassett, Browning, and O'Dwyer, ‘EU've got to be kidding’, p. 11.

62 Critchley, On Humour, p. 12; Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen, Power at Play: The Relationships between Play, Work and Governance (London, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

63 Skradol, ‘Laughing with Comrade Stalin’.

64 Butler, Gender Trouble.

65 Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Hariman, Robert, ‘Political parody and public culture’, Communication Studies, 94:3 (2008), pp. 247–72Google Scholar; Kenny, ‘The performative surprise’.

66 Hariman, ‘Political parody’, p. 254.

67 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 269.

68 Ibid., p. 175.

69 Kenny, ‘The performative surprise’.

70 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 176.

71 Ibid., p. xxiv.

72 Elizabeth Lopatto, ‘Sarah Cooper reflects on her whirlwind 2020 of Trump impressions’, The Verge, available at: {https://www.theverge.com/22160107/sarah-cooper-2020-trump-lip-sync-netflix-tiktok} accessed 3 June 2021.

73 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.

74 Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 119.

75 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 1.

76 Slavoj Zizek, ‘The Desert and the Real’ (2002), available at: {https://www.lacan.com/zizek-welcome.htm} accessed 3 June 2021.

77 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 160.

78 These three examples have been chosen in order to cover a wide range of humorous practices in international politics, including examples that involve both government leaders and activists, a variety of political themes (conflict escalation in the Middle East, climate change and nuclear negotiations) and different types of humour; irony, parody, and the ‘unheimlich’.

79 Bakhtin famously analysed the Medieval carnival as a counter-cultural or transgressive event capable of shifting ‘authorities, truths … and world order’, thereby inversing – if only for a while – the strict hierarchies of the Middle Ages. Fools became kings, women became men, and laughter succumbed fear. For the brief time of the festival, life was without stricture. Bakhtin, Mikhael, ‘Creativity, Francois Rabelais and the folk culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’, Artist Literature, 543 (1990), pp. 89, 127Google Scholar.

80 Greg (@norfsidegrerg), ‘Me on my way to school during WWIII’, Twitter post (4 January 2020), available at: {https://twitter.com/norfsidegreg/status/1213539176597131264} accessed 3 June 2021.

81 Noel (@NoelSznn), ‘Me minding my business with my headphones on during World War 3’, Twitter post (3 January 2020) available at: {https://twitter.com/NoelSznn/status/1212943280817741824} accessed 3 June 2021.

82 Kat Tenbarge, ‘Iranian commander and Trump fought each other with “Game of Thrones” memes before airstrike on General Soleimani’, Business Insider (4 January 2020), available at: {https://www.businessinsider.com/soleimani-fought-trump-with-game-of-thrones-memes-before-airstrike-2020-1?r=US&IR=T} accessed 3 June 2021.

83 Owen, Louise, ‘Identity correction: The Yes Men and acts of discursive leverage’, Journal of Performance Research, 16:2 (2011), pp. 28–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 Canada being one of the only two governments in the world at the time, who had abandoned the Kyoto protocol's emission and climate debt targets. Reilly, Ian, ‘From critique to mobilization: The Yes Men and the utopian politics of satirical fake news’, International Journal of Communication, 7 (2013), p. 1253Google Scholar.

85 Owen, ‘Identity correction’, p. 28.

86 Reilly, ‘From critique to mobilization’, p. 1248.

87 ‘The action-movie style trailer Trump says he played to Kim Jong-Un’, The Guardian (12 June 2018), available at: {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYsaC2CADs0} accessed 3 June 2021.

88 At the press conference, Trump tells, or brags to, the journalists about the movie trailer and it is subsequently put on YouTube for all to watch.

89 See, for example, Susan Page, ‘Analysis: When Trump met Kim, the handshake was more historic than the words’, USA Today, accessed 3 June 2021; ‘Trump Kim summit: Handshake moment explained in pictures’, BBC News (12 June 2018) available at: {https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44447807} accessed 3 June 2021; ‘Kim Jong Un, Trump shake hands, make history’, ABC News (6 December 2018) accessed 3 June 2021; David Nakamura, Philip Rucker, Anna Fifield, and Anne Gearan, ‘Trump-Kim summit: Trump says after historic meeting, “We have developed a very special bond”’, The Washington Post (12 June 2018) available at: {https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-kim-summit-trump-says-we-have-developed-a-very-special-bond-at-end-of-historic-meeting/2018/06/12/ff43465a-6dba-11e8-bf86-a2351b5ece99_story.html} accessed 3 June 2021.

90 See, for example, Julian Borger, ‘A historic handshake … but what did the Trump-Kim summit really achieve’, The Guardian, available at: {https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/16/trump-kim-summit-analysis-north-korea} accessed 3 June 2021.

91 ‘Trump-Kim summit: Deciphering what happened in Singapore’, BBC News (13 June 2018), available at: {https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44451587} accessed 3 June 2021.

92 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 5.

93 ‘Kim's trip to Singapore, from departure to return’, North Korea Now (15 June 2018). Yet one senses that Baudrillard's laugh perhaps is one out of despair. It is, as Foster Wallace might have suggested, a last deterrence in the face of the dissolution of distinctions, where (simulated) irony is merely countered with (simulated) irony. See: {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVljAdGS3Hc} accessed 3 June 2021.

94 Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram’, p. 49.

95 Wagg, ‘Comedy, politics and permissiveness’.

96 Wedderburn, Humour, Subjectivity and World Politics, p. 176.

97 Foster Wallace draws on Kafka's understanding of the komisch as a mode of writing that is always also tragedy that embraces the strangeness of experience. Kaiser, Wilson, ‘Humour after postmodernism: David Foster Wallace and proximal irony’, Studies in American Humor, New Series, 3:28 (2013), pp. 31–44 (pp. 33–6)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 Kaiser, ‘Humor after postmodernism’, p. 31.