A Spoonful of Humour Makes the Right-Wing Go Down, in a Most Delightful Way! By James Reed

I don’t know if Mary Poppins would agree, if she is not yet cancelled, but humour is a great ideological weapon of the Right. The Left try to use humour, but they typically fall on their faces, as it is hard to be humorous when your day job is so absurd anyway.

An academic paper “Humor, Ridicule, and the Far Right: Mainstreaming Exclusion Through Online Animation,” by Jordan McSwiney et al., in the journal Television and New Media, looks at how One Nation has used humour to great effect. That is true, but I am afraid the Americans are much more savage in their attacks upon the Left; the rude rhetoric of Javier Milei is a good example. I will not give links to others, even stronger, as since we are a family publication, some of the sites may be a bit “gamey,” others too earthy, and we need to protect the children readers. But trust me, publications in Australia which satirise the Left typically send them into moral panic, which is a joy to see. The blog here uses satire, often at a Swiftian level (Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), author of Gulliver’s Travels (1726)).

Question: How many Marxist does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Answer: None, the light bulb already contains the seeds of its own revolution!

https://www.amazon.com/Absolutely-Essential-Book-Jokes-About/dp/1911589229

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L4qauTiCY4

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15274764231213816

Abstract

“This paper critically examines the use of online humor and ridicule to promote and normalize far-right exclusionary discourses. Through a critical qualitative study of the Please Explain miniseries, a series of thirty-four short web cartoons produced by Australian far-right populist party, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, we explore the strategic use of humor in the communicative arsenal of the contemporary far-right. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and thematic analysis, we examine how humor is used to soften articulations of exclusionary and supremacist ideas, including racism, misogyny, and queerphobia. Our findings suggest that the frivolity and irony of the online animated genre works to stretch the boundaries of the sayable, potentially making the content more palatable to non-far-right audiences. We argue that the strategic use of exclusionary humor forms part of a wider project of far-right discursive mainstreaming that simultaneously (re)legitimizes everyday expressions of exclusion.”