Political Humor in American Culture: From Affability to Aggression

Abstract

This chapter uses Invited Behavior (my original concept) to analyze the power of leaders’ humor and to show how changes in American leaders’ humor reflect and reinforce recent changes in American political culture, especially the change from legitimacy to illegitimacy and the rise of a fantasy-based, extreme right-wing movement that has captured one of the two major American political parties. During the era of legitimacy, leaders used gentle humor to gain acceptance within that system, inviting the media and the public to follow the cultural norm of deference to the establishment. Now that legitimacy has been substantially eroded, insurgent far-right leaders such as Donald Trump use crude, aggressive humor to debase establishment rivals, inviting their supporters to treat these antagonists as life-and-death enemies. Such humor also reinforces the ultra-nationalist, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, misogynist fantasy world promoted by right-wing talk radio, Fox News, and other media. More traditional leaders such as Joseph Biden continue to employ the gentler humor that was nearly universal when the system was legitimate, inviting their supporters to see themselves as part of a united nation and to defer to established leaders and institutions offering a nearly fact-based view of reality.