“Conciliatory laughter is heard as the echo of an escape from power; the wrong kind overcomes fear by capitulating to the forces which are to be feared. It is the echo of power as something inescapable. Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practised on happiness.”
Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944

If ironic laughter is the cultural means to acknowledge and release the hysteria that is at the heart of our experience as supplicants in an overbearing power structure, then this laughter is also a means of numbing us to our own state, making reality more palatable for its sustenance and continuation. Or is it?

Implicit in watching a television show is the passivity of the viewer and the powerful ‘voice’ of the TV show. While shows like The Daily Show may make the viewer feel as if they are smarter than the media by poking fun at the biased way in which news outlets like Fox News reports a story, the viewer is still just receiving another channel of information or entertainment. The role of the viewer is a submissive one that plays into a consumer based economy and culture of control. In the same way that Roman emperors provided ‘bread and circus’ for the peasants to keep them distracted from the power structure that was around them, we are kept amused by television and a mediated dialogue about the world around us. Growing up, my family had a video camera and I would spend free time with friends making ‘movies.’ Certain silly scenarios that we came up with like my family enacting the myth of Sisyphus, I look back on fondly. Instead of being fed this powerful myth, we chose to create a parody of it—in a sense destabilizing its power. It is a ridiculous scene with my mother tied to a tree and my pre-pubescent brother in a bed sheet pretending to push a rock up a hill—it still makes my whole family laugh. On the other hand, some of the videos we were making were just parodies of what was already on television, like the dance show, Club MTV. In this one to some extent, we were enforcing the pleasure industry’s social currency—as we emulated these vapid, observed dancers.

How many people choose to spend their free time watching programs like The Daily Show, or Saturday Night Live, instead of paying attention to the actual facts of what is happening in the world around them? I know I do. Maybe it provides a release for blowing off steam, but doesn’t it keep us tuned out as a society? Laughter and humor are important to keep us sane when things are unbearable and provide an opening for absurd, irrational behavior. There are redeeming qualities from realizing the absurdity of the way we are fed information that hurts as well as benefits us. I feel comfortable criticizing politicians, empowered to question what I hear instead of feeding into a fear-based dialogue. This absurdist type of humor, gets me thinking outside of the box in terms of what is possible, politically, socially and culturally. If I had not felt an overall sense of absurdity over a situation in my past, I never would have been able to call a high-up government official to discuss the political situation involving a friend. Fortunately, I did, felt comfortable to do so and perhaps there is something about this type of humor that made me feel ‘smarter’ or no different than the people in power, which enabled me to take this type of action. In my naivete there were aspects about my gumption that also hurt the political situation, the abducted did not want to publicly be associated with the United States. That affiliation hurt his chances of support from his fellow citizens. Perhaps, this absurdism is not something that can be used to re-insert control and as such encourages more of a sense of disengagement.

Following this line of thinking, this type of humor might also push us to become more and more detached from reality and participation in shaping our society, culture and government. Popular Leftist satires like The Daily Show poke fun at both standard contemporary news reporting and at the headlines of today. As a viewer, I feel ‘in’ on the joke, like I am smarter than Dick Cheney, who shoots his friend in the face after getting out of his SUV to hunt. I can feel glib about the stupidity of my country’s vice president and his capabilities and newsworthiness. All the while, I am not doing anything active to change the external reality; I am made to feel comfortable in my inaction through this medium. There is a certain sense of self-satisfaction from feeling informed and in-the-know. We also must take into consideration that this exists within the power structure, it would not exist if it did not serve a valuable purpose. Perhaps part of that purpose is to keep us feeling satisfied enough not to take action, in this way it can almost serve as a political excuse.

As much as I dislike criticizing this genre, I think it also tends to deepen the divide between the polarized country into the Left and Right camps. While the Right view this type of humor as blasphemy it gives them an excuse to see the ‘other side’ as wastoids and numbskulls. The Left wastes time on jokes instead of working on solutions. The Daily Show is very funny, Jon Stewart talks to me. He knows that I am smarter than all of the regular fools watching CNN and Fox News. Oh excuse me, I’m having delusions of grandeur brought on by the smug, self-satisfying effects of satire.

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