Emotional Shockwaves, Populist Mode of Humour and Post-Truth Politics

Abstract

Different approaches have tried to unravel the ways humour works in politics. We consider the relevance that humour practices and products acquire after the affective turn in political and social theory and examine more specifically the populist mode of humour from the perspective of moral tribalism. We focus on a threatening and self-indulgent humour that fuels collective emotional shockwaves and becomes an aggressively disrespectful weapon for discrediting and ridiculing the opponents while inciting large audiences in highly polarized scenarios. The populist humour combines with the strategy of taking advantage of the proliferation of pseudo-truths in current postfactual politics and (post) truth markets. Arguably, populist humour enforces the moods and consumers’ attitudes that are only sensitive to alternative facts and make justified information ridiculous. It is directly addressed to those who are willing to reaffirm their unexamined beliefs and to complacently swallow the agreeable manipulation that is offered to them. We claim that political humour should reinforce the conflict around the emotions and the facts, instead of supplanting the latter, and be at the service of public positioning and critical discrepancies of the emotional citizens without surrendering to the hegemony of post-truth politics.

The research resulting in this chapter was part of Civic Constellation III: Democracy, Constitutionalism, and Anti-Liberalism project (Spain’s National Research Fund, PGC2018-093573-B-100) and COST Action 16211 Reappraising Intellectual Debates on Civic Rights and Democracy in Europe (RECAST).