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The world, abjected: contemporary comedy across media

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The world, abjected: contemporary comedy across media

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Content THE WORLD, ABJECTED:
CONTEMPORARY COMEDY ACROSS MEDIA

by
George Carstocea

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMATIC ARTS – CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES)

December 2018

Copyright 2018 George Carstocea

Dedication

In loving memory of my father,
who died before he could defend.

Acknowledgments
This dissertation is both labor and love, and I owe a debt of gratitude to the many hearts
and brains that made it possible. First, of course, comes my dissertation committee. My advisor
Ellen Seiter taught me innumerable lessons inside and outside the classroom, and never lost faith
in my project; she shepherded my writing to completion, even as she had a full plate to contend
with on her own. I am grateful to her for taking me on, for protecting my work and championing
it, and for being there when I needed her. Thank you, Ellen. Virginia Kuhn, who has been on this
journey with me from the beginning, gave me the research and theory leads to help frame my
argument, and she was a life-saver so many times, I’ve lost count. Thank you, Vee. J.D. Connor,
who came onboard very late, provided such useful feedback that I can see myself returning to
this project almost immediately, with an eye towards turning it into a book. I am grateful to him
for his keen eye, encyclopedic knowledge, as well as for helping me find a path forward for my
work in the upcoming years. Thank you, J.D.
My friends and classmates were there for me throughout the process, and I could not
imagine a better group of people to turn to when I needed a space of trust and friendship, as well
as a sounding board for my ideas and opinions. Maria Zalewska and Sabrina Howard were my
roommates for the first few years of this project, and their brilliance and sense of humor
sustained me as I gained my footing in Los Angeles and at USC. I hope everyone else will
forgive me for simply listing their name – I am blessed to have met so many amazing people on
my educational journey, that this acknowledgments section could go on forever. So, thank you,
in no particular order: Don Fisco, Chad Gray, Alexis Ong, Trace Cabot, Isaac Rooks, Mike
LaRocco, Sonia Misra, Jake Bohrod, Sebnem Baran, Andy Myers, Cliff Galiher, Jinhee Park,
Amy Murphy, Jeremy Heilmann, Manouchka Labouba, Branden Buehler, Roxanne Samer,
Amber Rae Bowyer, Leah Aldridge, Luci Marzola, Kate Fortmueller, Anirban Kapil Baishya and

Darshana Sreedhar Mini, Lara Bradshaw, Karl and Jen Menjívar-Baumann, Adam and Heidi
Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz, Bree Russell, Allison Ross, Emma Ben-Ayoun, Sophia Wagner Serrano,
Leslie Berntsen, Amalia Stark, Melinda Stang, Dori Thomas, Josh Foley, Laura Schumacher,
Rebecca Stimson, Bobby Sevenich, Isaac Davidson, Anne Kelly, Lance St. Laurent, and
Geneveive Newman. And, from a bit farther: thank you, Nick Forster, Catherine Martin, Ralph
Morrison, Scott Olesen, Tanya Levari, Tony Coleman, Jax Richardson, Alan Arias, Eva Flamm,
and everyone else who helped me define myself and my goals over the years. To those of you I
forgot: sorry, I will try to make it up for you, I’m just very tired.
My home and my life for the past four years has been Kyra - even at times when we
weren’t so lucky as to live under the same roof, or even in the same zipcode. We got our dream
apartment just as I started to write this dissertation - a place of joy that I’ve often littered with my
pathos, exhaustion, and half-eaten slices of Nutella-bread in the process. Kyra has put up with
me, challenged me, encouraged me, and taken me seriously as well as humorously for four years
of togetherness, and one year (and counting!) of marriage. Her wit, intelligence, generosity,
playfulness, and sense of aesthetic form inspire me every day. I owe her for becoming my Los
Angeles family, throughout and after two long years of long-distance, iMessage-powered
cohabitation. And I’m thankful to Kyra’s own immediate family: Peter, Susan, Maud, and
Cooper, thank you for welcoming me and making me feel at home, and for supporting me
through this process, when I needed it the most.
Most importantly, I am forever indebted to those who sacrificed a lot and never doubted
me for a second, all to make sure I thrive: my mother and my brother. When I was eighteen, I left
my home in Romania to study towards my B.A. at Williams College, in Massachusetts. I’ve been
in school, on an F-1 international student visa, ever since - that’s eleven years, if anyone’s

counting. My mom’s sacrifices, hard work, and continuous moral as well as financial support
have allowed me to reach goals and live through experiences that she never wanted for herself,
or for me. She is a middle school teacher and former principal in my hometown of Cluj-Napoca,
Romania. She is the most dedicated and hard-working educator I’ve ever known, and a true
moral compass. I know that she let me leave eleven years ago with a heavy heart, but she has
never wavered in her love and support for me, and trusted me to make my own decisions. Her
wisdom and example inspire me every day.
My brother, Stefan Carstocea, was sixteen years old when I left - two years younger than
me, which means we bore the brunt of each other’s puberty, made even more difficult by the loss
of our father to cancer when I was thirteen and he was ten. Every time I see Stefan or talk to him,
I beam with pride: the teenager I knew has since grown into a brilliant, resourceful, and
successful young man, while retaining his natural kindness and generosity. He has been my
mom’s first line of support since I left home, and I owe him the world for that and everything
else.
I dedicate this work to the memory of our father, Dumitru Carstocea, who died after a
protracted battle with lung cancer, as he was writing his own Ph.D. dissertation. He was
somewhat more somber than I am - or maybe I just perceived him as such as a kid. But I know
how much he loved to laugh, how much he relished the poetry of a well-conceived turn of
phrase, and how much people appreciated his intelligence and wit. I was too young to understand
him when he passed away, but he ensured I had a good start in trying to understand the world.
I know I’ve forgotten to mention many here. I apologize, and I hope you’ll let me make
up for it in the form of long conversations over good food and good drinks, whenever we see
each other.

Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter I. Theories of Humor Within the Context of Liberal Irony ....................................... 8
Rortian Irony ........................................................................................................................................... 8
Contingency ........................................................................................................................................... 10
Solidarity ................................................................................................................................................ 12
Common Sense, Humor, and Abjection .............................................................................................. 15
Superiority, Incongruity, Relief ........................................................................................................... 19
Cognition as a Game of Abstractions .................................................................................................. 24
Aporia, Paranoid Reading, and Reparative Reading ........................................................................ 31
Discursive Communities and Comedic Cruelty .................................................................................. 38
The Angel of Comedy ............................................................................................................................ 46
Chapter II. The Pubic Zirconia Age of Comedy ...................................................................... 50
Laughing Faster, Laughing Farther .................................................................................................... 50
Case Study - The Internet Thinks (Itself): xkcd ................................................................................. 63
#TheDress ............................................................................................................................................... 72
Chapter III. Satire and Worldbuilding ..................................................................................... 76
Origins of Satirical World-building ..................................................................................................... 78
From Antiquity to Modernity .............................................................................................................. 84
American Satirical Worlds in the 20th and 21st Century ................................................................. 88
Through Pastel, Darkly: The Algorithmic Fall from Grace ............................................................. 95
Act I: Passive Aggression and Social Conditioning ........................................................................... 95
Act II: The Best Laid Plans ............................................................................................................... 100
Act III: Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose ....................................................................... 101
Coda: Freedom, Honest Laughter, Shared Humanity ....................................................................... 103
Sentient Ads and Member Berries: South Park’s Theory of Trump ............................................. 106
Where My Country Gone: Virtue Signaling and Backlash ............................................................... 114
Ads Masquerading as Humans .......................................................................................................... 118
Chapter IV. Comedy and the Technological Sublime ........................................................... 121
Comedy as Hubris, Comedy and Transcendence: Can the Singularity Laugh? ........................... 121
Sublime Visions: Asimov’s Singularities ........................................................................................... 123
Can the Singularity Laugh? ............................................................................................................... 129
Can the Borg Laugh, Though? ........................................................................................................... 129
Case Study - When a Quest Turns into a Venture ........................................................................... 137
Comedy in Animated Television ...................................................................................................... 137
Nomen Est Omen .............................................................................................................................. 143
Cartoon Bodies and Death ................................................................................................................ 147
Get Their Clothes / Get Their Clones ............................................................................................... 151
How Can You Play With A Disembodied Head? ............................................................................. 152
Art Takes A While: The Long Tail of Toxic Masculinity ................................................................ 160
The World of Venture ....................................................................................................................... 167
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 171

The Legacy Genre and New Media: Sitcoms as Prosocial Comedic Containers ........................... 171
Parks and Recreation: A Flawed Town ............................................................................................ 179
A Perfect Hell: The Good Place ......................................................................................................... 181
Community: Spaces to be Used .......................................................................................................... 188
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 193
Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 196
Introduction

Televised comedy has never been more diverse, inventive, or aesthetically complex.
Streaming services are financing the production of deeply personal and intelligent comedic work
that could have never made it to air in earlier media environments. Twitter has become the home
of a culture of liberal comedy and reasoned critique at the same time as it has been overrun by
trolling and abuse. Conspiracist thinking abounds online, as does hatred; yet the same medium
provides access to educational resources that would have been unthinkable, even two decades
ago. Web comics have reached maturity as an artform, engaging in complex medium-specific
experiments and allowing new communities to coalesce around shared aesthetics.
In this dissertation, I set these examples against recent media shifts that have exacerbated the
conditions that would sow the paranoid retrenchment of in-groups and the reification of their
discursive boundaries. The fragmented contemporary mediascape targets individual sensibilities
at a more granular level than ever before, making it difficult to take stock of the patterns of
common dissensus that might allow for the expansion of aesthetic and political coalitions; social
media bubbles have exacerbated the narrowing of aesthetic and political sensibilities that was
already underway in the cable TV world. The joke-patterns of various in-groups, previously
private, are now visible to anyone who might seek offense. Online context collapse, combined
with the accelerated and reactive temporality of social media and the 24-hour news cycle and an
online “hot-take” culture of rapid ideologically-driven cultural criticism make ironic detachment
seem impossible. Online anonymity has led to the perpetuation of trolling behaviors, hate speech,
and harassment - some simply anarchic, a lot of it deeply hateful. Media convergence has further
collapsed the boundaries between culture and politics, public life and the realm of private irony.
The moderate liberal first black president of the United States, portrayed as a radical foreign
2
Muslim socialist by wild online conspiracy theorists throughout his eight years in office, has
been supplanted by a reactionary reality TV star who foments ethnic hatred and seems unable to
accept the basic norms of free speech, civil behavior, and the public sphere.
In order to distinguish between these contradictory tendencies in the media landscape today,
and to examine assumptions about laughter, jokes, bigotry and cruelty, in an
Internet/digital/algorithmic technological environment that will be essential to my analysis, this
dissertation reviews the most significant works on the aesthetics of comedy and comedic
response. This is not an exhaustive list, and I am more interested in broad notions of the
interplay of comedy with ideology, power and social critique than in a review of the literature on
television comedy per se. This dissertation chronicles the state of contemporary American
humor across media, in a moment of increasing polarization. There are many reasons to worry,
but the community of liberal comedians and cultural ironists that has emerged online also
provides a reason for continued hope that reason and a poeticized culture might yet prevail.
In the first chapter, I survey historical theories of comedy and place them within the context
of liberal political theory, staking the theoretical grounds for the rest of my writing. I place these
historical theories of comedy within the context of approaches to political liberalism in relation
to theories of mediation and sociality. From Richard Rorty, I adopt the pragmatist armature of
liberal irony as a way to think about the relationship between individual expression and self-
definition on the one hand, and the demands of sociality on the other, between private freedom
and political responsibility. Rorty’s framework doesn’t contain an account of comedy in its own
structure, but his account of overlapping structures of meaning that bridge the personal and the
political offers a way to envision comedic work as that which unsettles the boundaries of various
discursive communities and their respective “final vocabularies,” to use his formulation.
3
I survey historical theories of comedy, by way of John Morreall and Simon Critchley’s
contemporary accounts of the topic, and discuss the kinship between transgressive forms of
meaning-making with reference to Noël Carroll’s work on the interrelated nature of the comic
and horror, and framing the ways in which comedy often implies some degree of cruelty, at the
very least in its challenge to the final vocabularies that often undergird cultural identities. It is in
this nexus – between private final vocabularies and the public vocabularies of sociality and
identity – that comedy operates, and where the comic unsettles the sense of identification
between one’s individuality and the scripts and roles one performs in the public sphere.
Critchley’s gloss on the sense of humor as a form of “dissensus communis,” as opposed to the
sensus communis that undergirds more traditional accounts of the public sphere, allows for a
continuous negotiation of the boundaries of social identity. For Critchley, humor is the prosocial
valence of the comic, because it challenges its own final vocabulary before and as it engages
with the arbitrariness of final vocabularies it encounters in the world.
At the end of the chapter, I return to the idea of liberal irony, and explore the ways in which
Rorty’s conception of the liberal ironist maps neatly onto Critchley’s idea of humor: the liberal
ironist is someone who has arrived at the point of a mature sense of humor by theoretical means
rather than through the piecemeal deconstructive processes of the comic. I show how a liberal
ironist might approach the notion of critique through a reading of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s
arguments against critical paranoia in her last essay collection, Thinking Feeling. Sedgwick
writes in favor of what she calls “reparative reading,” recognizing the ways in which critical
theory perpetuates paranoid feedback cycles and therefore limits its range of insight. I take
Kosofsky Sedgwick’s writing as a template for the rest of the dissertation, which argues in
piecemeal, sometimes blasphemous ways for the importance of the text over theory, of
4
interpretative flux over argumentative finality in writing about comedy. At the end of the first
chapter, I redescribe a painting by Paul Klee that served as an inspiration to Walter Benjamin’s
writing, and read it as an instantiation of comedy, rather than (as Benjamin did) historical
consciousness. It is oppositional, it is simultaneously glib and serious, and it hopefully offers a
road map to the kind of writing that I believe can bring the reparative impulse in writing about
and with comedy: cutting across layers of abstraction, mixing the birds’ eye theoretical view
with specific interpretations of comedic objects and the kinds of aesthetic, theoretical, and
political conversations in which they engage.
The second chapter surveys the manifold avatars of the comic across contemporary
computational media. The electronic convergence of traditional forms and formats as well as the
epistemological disruptions that have emerged as the enclosed spatial arrangement of the room -
in traditional stand-up comedy - continue to clash with the undifferentiated global polity
envisioned by utopian glosses on the new online public sphere. As web-connected, camera-
enabled smartphones saturated the market, the previously quasi-private spaces of stand-up
performance have become open to wider scrutiny. Moving from general considerations of the
complex meaning-making practices of comedy across new media, I turn to a case study of xkcd,
Randall Munroe’s long-running web comic whose self-reflexive humorous meditations on online
cultures and the relationship between humans and technologies engages with and expands the
vocabulary of graphic art to take into account the affordances and cultural practices of the
contemporary connected world.
The third chapter begins with a historical overview of the relationship between satire and
worldbuilding, in which I argue that contemporary satire draws on a wide range of historical
practices and discourses that identify the locus of satire in the relationship between the world as
5
it exists and the world envisioned in the satirical object. I then proceed to in-depth ekphrastic
readings of two contemporary satirical objects – an episode of Black Mirror titled Nosedive and
a segment of a recent season of South Park – that exemplify satirical worldbuilding in
contemporary media in disparate genres (Netflix series vs. cable series, live-action vs. animation,
feature-length production cycle vs. animation produced on a weekly schedule, etc). These shows
are also connected by their subject matter: the satirical impulse behind both of these objects is
the human relationship to computational contemporary media. Nosedive envisions a near-future
dystopia where a reductive social credit system determines every aspect of lived experience, a
very slight variation from the world as it exists. Meanwhile, South Park posits a political
symptomatology of the present in which the fatal flaw of a citizenship educated through cable
television, internet flame wars, and the machinations of consumer capitalism boils down to the
inability to tell the difference between humans and advertisements.
The fourth chapter begins with a discussion of the ways in which comedy engages with
technological as well as religious and political visions of sublimity. I make explicit the ways in
which the comedic mode is inherently at tension with the aesthetics of the sublime, and survey
the ways in which the sublime – as a vision of transcendence through formal balance – relies on
a fundamental abjection of the concept of humanistic apprehension of the world. Here, too, I rely
on two different, yet mutually reinforcing case studies. The first object of interpretation, the
concept of the Singularity, seems like an easy target for the comedic mode, and I show through
Star Trek’s use of its Borg species the ways in which the franchise’s vision of the Singularity
moves, through narrative negotiation, from an object of abject horror to a collection of laughable
automatisms.
Laughable automatisms also lie at the core of the aesthetics of my second case study in this
6
chapter: The Venture Bros., a long-running [adult swim] series that negotiates the complex
legacy of mass popular culture through a systematic critique of its practices at every level of
representation – from character design to worldbuilding, from narrative structure to industrial
critique. The Venture Bros. operates in the same space of anarchic intertextuality as South Park,
but takes place on an expansive time scale, in a consistent world in which the derelict remains of
the past – physical as well as emotional, historical as well as fictional – limit the protagonists’
ability to grow in the present. Stasis, in The Venture Bros, is the result of the hypertrophy of the
past, of the structures of power that stories as well as objects have set in motion before the
beginning of the series; its response is to find ways for the characters to attempt growth, in fits
and starts, against the ever-present probability of failure, against the odds of the game. In
contrast with the conversational, provisional nature of individual episodes on South Park, The
Venture Bros. creates an interconnected patchwork, and tries to find ways to valorize the past
that drive away from the impulses of collector geekdom, to engage in play rather than enterprise.
Finally, the conclusion brings all these considerations together into a discussion of the
contemporary network sitcom. Historically, the sitcom has been the premier way for American
media industries to embed the anarchic impulses of the comic into a prosocial container, a proxy
for the envisionings of sociality that underlie American political culture. The sitcom’s focus on
mass-relatable yet flawed characters, embedded in a familiar structured environment (family,
workplace, school) allows the genre to balance the tension between earnest melodrama and
deconstructive comedy. I argue here that contemporary sitcoms, especially single-camera ones
packed to the brim with stylized performance, background jokes, intertextual references, and
formal experimentation, continue the role of their forebears even as audience fragmentation has
removed them from the culturally dominant status they enjoyed in the network era of television.
7
They mediate between the anarchic high-speed global cultures of the contemporary moment and
try to envision a possibility of sociality that emerges, partially, through the recognition and
negotiation of the disruptive role of humor.
In effect, I hope that the alternating structure of large scale theoretical considerations coupled
with in-depth readings of particular case studies can help illuminate the range and utmost
importance of humor in defining contemporary American culture. In the back and forth between
comedic deconstruction and its reinscription in moments of earnest, melodramatic identification,
in their wavering between representation and imagination, and in their consistent renegotiation of
the relationship between individuality and community, they suggest an embedded theoretical
inclination that maps quite neatly onto the Rortian framework of liberal irony. They exhibit a
commitment to reason as well as self-deprecation that might allow us to expand the community
of the laughing: as long as we continue to challenge received dogma, our communities can still
expand. In other words, they help us own our dissensus and turn it into visions of community.

8

Chapter I. Theories of Humor Within the Context of Liberal Irony

Rortian Irony

As he acknowledges from the very first words of the introduction, Richard Rorty’s project in
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is daunting. He seeks to find a way past the foundational
question that has plagued Western philosophy since the time of Plato: “[t]he attempt to fuse the
public and the private.”
1
The status of this vexing problem in philosophical thinking is
comparable to the search for a theory of everything in modern physics, which might one day find
the common ground between general relativity, which explains large-scale phenomena, and the
quantum field theory that explains the behavior of subatomic particles. Rorty’s work begins by
assuming a high degree of familiarity with the edifice of post-metaphysical historicist
philosophy, one that has already given up the search for a transcendental truth or conception of
human nature, and instead preoccupies itself with the achievement of freedom as its primary
goal. He splits the projects of such historicist thinkers into two main groups, defined by the
vector of their approach to the issue. On the one hand, philosophers concerned above all with
“self-creation” and “private autonomy” tend to see the bounds of social life as repressive; he
counts among them Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault, as well as a variety of literary authors
who have engaged in radical self-creation in their artistic work - Baudelaire, Proust, and
Nabokov. On the other hand, philosophers like Marx, Mill, Dewey, and Habermas focus
primarily on large-scale institutional and social changes that might ensure the reduction of

1
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.
xiii
9
human cruelty.
2

Rorty’s thoroughly pragmatist solution is, simply put, to accept the fact that the theoretical
synthesis of these two viewpoints is impossible, and think about them instrumentally, as forever-
divergent mental toolkits, “as little in need of synthesis as are paintbrushes and crowbars.”
3
His
central figure is the liberal ironist: liberal in the sense that he or she is fully committed to the
goal of reducing human cruelty, and an ironist because of the knowledge that such a commitment
cannot be defended in terms that do not result in self-referential paradox.
4
Incidentally, this
formulation also mirrors a fundamental paradigm shift in 20
th
century scientific positivism:
Gödel’s proof that the attempt to discover an axiomatic basis for all of mathematics that doesn’t
result in self-referential paradox (most famously attempted by Russell and Whitehead) is doomed
to failure. Although he never phrases it as such, Rorty essentially asks philosophy to do what
mathematics did after Gödel: accept that it cannot fully justify its foundations, and instead trust
that its instrumental utility and conceptual expansion are intrinsically interconnected and
mutually reinforcing. In this vision, human solidarity becomes a goal or a task to strive towards,
rather than the mythical result of discovering some transcendental moral truth that might
encourage all of humanity to discover its inner kinship. Its vehicle is not reflection, but
imagination, not theory, but literature, or the practice of constructing and consuming variegated,
expressive, and redescriptive renderings of the world. The liberal ironist seeks to expand his or
her sensitivity to the suffering of others by creating and consuming an ever-widening range of

2
Rorty xiii-xiv
3
Rorty xiv
4
Rorty xv
10
non-theoretical texts that make apparent the “particular details of the pain and humiliation of
other, unfamiliar sorts of people.”
5

At the core of Rorty’s conception of irony lies the idea that the ways in which we make sense
of the world are entirely contingent, and therefore the concept of truth is itself contingent on its
use within shifting, continually negotiated linguistic frameworks, for the purpose of achieving
particular goals, in particular contexts. As such, every language is a continual process of
metaphoric redescription.
6
He proceeds to argue that the concept of the self is therefore itself
contingent, by drawing on Freud’s account of the emergence of selfhood as an adaptive interplay
of competing, overlapping mental frameworks.
7
In the Freudian account of the self, he finds the
way beyond the residual Platonism of both Kant and Nietzsche, whom he sees as a mirror of one
another: Kant’s conception of transcendent reason as the basis of morality is, for Rorty, simply
the Platonic flip-side of Nietzsche’s account of the self-creating übermensch.
8
The whole of
signification becomes, then, an attempt to find metaphorical accounts that resonate as useful with
a large enough number of people.
9

Contingency

Rorty proceeds to synthesize the major debates of 20
th
century philosophy, arriving at an
account of the ideal liberal society as a poeticized culture, rather than a rationalized one, which

5
Rorty xvi
6
Rorty 3-22 et passim
7
Rorty 32-33
8
Rorty 33-35
9
Rorty 37
11
fosters open and free encounters between its citizens.
10
In such a culture, autonomist
philosophers of selfhood and radical freedom such as Nietzsche, Derrida, or Foucault would
become touchstones of private self-definition and growth, and the public matters of politics
would be a matter of free and open negotiation in the spirit of Habermas’s account of liberal
institutions and the public sphere.
11
In other words, Rorty wishes to uphold Habermasian public
institutional bulwarks against oppression because of their practical utility, while acknowledging
that their claims to universality derive from an outdated and inherently flawed model of
rationalism.
12
In Rorty’s view, such institutions do not need to impose the values of the
Enlightenment in order to prove their worth; they can instead be justified on historical grounds
and by the (contingent) commitment to the goal of minimizing cruelty.
13

With this understanding in mind, he proceeds to the image of the private liberal ironist, the
ideal citizen of such a liberal society. He begins from the idea of a “final vocabulary” - the
private language in which every individual defines and justifies his or her beliefs and actions, the
deepest sense of self. Ironists, for Rorty, are individuals who continually doubt their own set of
internal criteria for action, understand that such doubts cannot be dispelled without reference to
criteria outside their present vocabulary, and do not believe that their own vocabulary can be
justified through a claim to metaphysical universality.
14
Ironists are nominalist, historicist, and

10
Rorty 51-53
11
Rorty 65
12
Rorty 66-67
13
Rorty 68
14
Rorty 73
12
distrust claims to common sense.
15
As such, ironists are engaged in a permanent dialectical
process of redefinition, and bristle against settled taxonomies and categorical divisions between
different vocabularies for describing the world.
16
Their approach to the world is defined by
contextualization and imagination, rather than the attempt to find an ultimate, settled truth with
which they can align themselves for all eternity; rather than establishing a canon, they want to
expand the boundaries of any canonical structure.
17

Solidarity

Knowing that ironist philosophers have been historically accused of political irresponsibility,
Rorty responds preemptively to the Habermasian critique of Frankfurt counter-enlightenment, by
drawing a rigid distinction between the private and the public; irony works best for private self-
creation, but the ironist should commit to a Habermasian liberal public life.
18
From the ironist’s
perspective, the only relevant philosophical distinction in public life is that between forceful
coercion and dialogic persuasion, acknowledging that the latter will always be subject to the
distortions of ideology and power.
19
Against the claim that liberal societies cannot survive
without a complete private commitment to the universalism of reason, he professes that such a
commitment never existed; societies are rather held together by contingencies: “common

15
Rorty 74
16
Rorty 75
17
Rorty 79-81
18
Rorty 82-83
19
Rorty 84
13
vocabularies and common hopes.”
20
The ironist’s commitment to liberalism arises not because
of high theory and its postulations of moral universality, but by way of a commitment to
literature, to the proliferation of cultural knowledge that sensitizes individuals to the differences
between humans, communities, and practices.
21
Taking the susceptibility to pain and humiliation
as the only thing common to all humans, liberal ironists commit to the kinds of cultural
production that will sensitize them to the presence of cruelty, whatever form such cruelty might
take.
22

The last part of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity consists of an in-depth discussion of
works by two ostensibly diametrically opposed novelists: Nabokov the aesthete and Orwell the
politically engaged polemicist. In keeping with his framework, Rorty’s descriptions of their
works aim to prove that, to the liberal ironist, even such seemingly disparate works can
contribute to the shared purpose of better understanding cruelty and humiliation. Both
Nabokov’s deeply private and intensely aestheticized writing and Orwell’s political allegory and
argumentative directness can supplement the mental toolkits necessary to expand our sense of
the possibilities of humanity, and therefore the conception of what social solidarity might mean.
Ultimately, Rorty’s idea of solidarity is therefore rooted in an expansion of individual empathy
that does not take as its prerequisite some theoretical identification with humanity as a whole, but
rather an identification with a constructed liberal community determined to become larger and
more diverse for the very sake of such diversity.

20
Rorty 86
21
Rorty 93
22
Rorty 93-4
14

The most glaring flaw in Rorty’s framework is apparent in the idea of free and earnest
exchange within the public sphere, an idealized framework of conversation that brackets, for the
sake of his own argument, the ways in which structures of power curtail free speech. His is a
discursive form of speech-libertarian utopianism, akin to the liberal utopianism of Habermas’s
trust in the public sphere. This flaw, to be sure, is a result of reflective commitment rather than
ignorance, as he proves repeatedly in his discussion of Marx, Foucault, Derrida, and Adorno. His
framework is ultimately thoroughly pragmatist, descriptive of the realities of human behavior,
rather than engaging in any form of prescriptive idealism. He believes in the ideal of free and
open conversation as something to strive for, while acknowledging that such an ideal is unlikely
to be achieved in practice.
An example will probably help clarify this attitude: the liberal ironist might simultaneously
agree that climate change denialism seems more than likely to be wrong because of scientists’
consensus on the matter, while challenging the idea that the denialists could be brought into the
fold of reason through the argumentative methods of reason alone. In Rorty’s view, only those
who share an abiding belief in the methods of science, who in other words take scientific inquiry
to be the basis of their own personal final vocabulary, will be convinced by scientific arguments
that the global climate is indeed warming. Furthermore, even within that fold, conviction hinges
on a process of trust and conversation rather than a direct understanding of the matter at hand:
one chooses to believe in the process and edifice of science the same way one might choose to
believe in religious revelation or political institutions. In practice, this means that most of the
people who believe in climate change believe the consensus of scientists; they have not gathered
their own data and tested every single scientific assumption that supports the climate-change
15
thesis. The human allegiance to reason relies, therefore, on proxies for understanding, rather than
a direct, privileged relationship to reality. In other words, any form of agreement relies not on the
fact that a particular methodology has discovered the final, fundamental truth about the world,
but rather on the decision to believe in a vocabulary as the valid, correct way to see the world; it
is not about a truth that is out there, but a conversation that leads individuals to trust a particular
framework.
As such, the historical attempt to rid epistemology of metaphysics has simply given birth to a
more refined, indirect system of faith-affiliation, rather than superseding the issue of faith
altogether. Rorty’s argument enjoins us to come to terms with this irony, yet nonetheless hold on
to the commitment to liberalism: not because it describes the world better than any alternative
framework, but because it is the one framework among many that would allow us to come to
terms with the fact that many different frameworks can be useful for individuals in a wide variety
of circumstances; it is the commitment that enables the proliferation of a multiplicity of
worldviews.

Common Sense, Humor, and Abjection

Rorty offers no account of comedy, but the liberal ironist’s position is intrinsically connected
to Simon Critchley’s argument that humor highlights the inner workings of a community,
returning us to a specific ethos, “a shared set of customs and characteristics.”
23
Critchley betrays
himself as a liberal ironist when he argues, after Frank Cioffi, that humor forces us to “have the

23
Simon Critchley. On Humour. Thinking in Action. London ; New York: Routledge, 2002.
Page 73
16
courage of our parochialism;” this choice, to him, is much preferable to repressing or denying the
kinds of laughter that make us uncomfortable. He is therefore inclined to read moments of
uncomfortable laughter symptomatically: a joke that makes us laugh but contradicts our deeply
held ideological commitments is likely to be a sign of particular patterns of societal
subordination and denigration.
24
Critchley’s argument that a sense of humor is a form of
common sense, and therefore works to highlight the consensus of a particular status quo
25
, might
seemingly lead to the conclusion that humor and liberal irony are intrinsically at odds with one
another. Yet he engages in a thoroughly Rortian move when he describes his own sense of
humor in an attempt to move away from the idea that all humor might, at its core, be reactionary
and conservative. In his view, the fact that the jokes are a form of everyday anamnesis
26
that
returns one to the internal common sense of a particular culture does not necessarily have to reify
the boundaries of that culture; indeed, that recognition of the boundaries can be the first step
towards challenging them, by highlighting the possibility of what he calls a “dissensus
communis” - the possibility of dissolving the boundaries, rites, and parochialisms of a closed
culture through a form of shared comedic dissent.
27

In Rortian terms, this would suggest that humor can challenge both the illiberal dogmatism of
a non-ironic final vocabulary and the illiberal solipsism of those ironists who would place their
own final vocabulary above the goals of reducing cruelty in the world. Drawing on Freud,

24
Critchley 74-76
25
Critchley 79-85
26
Critchley 86
27
Critchley 5, 16-18, 90-91
17
Critchley is once more inherently Rortian, in his distinction between jokes, which may well be
repressive and cruelly aimed at belittling the other, and humor, which is the attitude that allows
an individual to laugh at his or her own ridiculousness - an idea akin to Rorty’s account of the
ironist as the individual who can be critical towards his or her own final vocabulary. Aligning
himself with Freud, Critchley argues for humor’s hierarchical primacy over the act of joking: one
might joke to belittle others, in thoroughly illiberal or cruel fashion, but laughter at oneself is
better, more socially and individually useful than laughter at others.
28

Critchley’s account of Freud’s theory of humor attempts to synthesize Freud’s 1905 essay on
Jokes and Their Relation to The Subconscious with his 1927 paper titled On Humor. He does so
by integrating them with Freud’s structural model of the psyche, with its familiar categories of
the id, ego, and superego, which Freud had developed between the two essays on jokes and
humor. Whereas jokes are simply vectors of pleasure, which they provide in Freud’s framework
through the release of sexual or aggressive repressed energy, humor is a rather more dignified
concept, “the contribution made to the comic by the super-ego.”
29
Critchley explains the concept
of humor by way of a detour through Freud’s theory of melancholia, which is in Freud the result
of the splitting of the ego into separate agencies, one of which judges the other from a standpoint
of critical superiority. The judging agency, the vector of conscience and rule-based behavior, is
what Freud ends up calling the super-ego. This splitting, Critchley points out, does not only
cause the ego to become an object of the super-ego’s criticism; it also makes the ego seem
abjectly loathsome when considered through the critical lens of the super-ego. This is the cause,

28
Critchley 94-95
29
Critchley 94
18
in Freudian psychoanalytics, of what he calls melancholia and psychology was to call
depression.
30

Therefore, according to Freud, melancholics engage in persistent self-criticism - a condition
that Critchley, drawing on Aristotle as well as Wittgenstein, identifies with the critical impulse of
philosophy as a whole.
31
He goes on to integrate melancholia with mania, which for Freud are
mirror images of the same inner turmoil: “in melancholy the ego succumbs to the complex,
whereas in mania it pushes it aside.”
32
The only way for the narcissistic ego to escape this back
and forth motion between its extreme states is humor, which “has the same formal structure as
depression, but it is an anti-depressant that works by the ego finding itself ridiculous.”
33
Here,
Critchley argues for Freud’s account of humor as a way to come to terms with the limitedness of
the human condition in contrast with the idealistic moral extremism of the unyielding superego.
He sees in Freud’s writing on humor a version of the super-ego that allows the subject to move
beyond the depressive ego-abjection that lies at the core of the psychoanalyst’s theory of
depression.
34
He calls this version of the super-ego “super-ego II,” and writes of it in a language
highly reminiscent of Rorty’s account of irony as an escape from the metaphysical drive towards
a perfect final vocabulary:
I think that ‘super-ego II’ is what takes the place of the ego ideal, and all the fantasies of
primary narcissism: perversion, ecstasy, superman affirmation, fusion with God or your

30
Critchley 97-98
31
Critchley 98-99
32
Critchley 100
33
Critchley 101
34
Critchley 102-103
19
essential self, and a legion of other chimeras
35

This mature super-ego, disabused of fantasies of infinite power or knowledge, is what
Critchley considers the highest form of humor, one that might give birth to a rueful, discrete
smile instead of explosive, anarchic laughter.
36
He calls it the “risus purus” or pure laughter, a
way to come to terms with the fact that we can envision human wretchedness (and indeed
ourselves as wretched). This, according to Critchley, is also the source of human greatness:
awareness and acceptance of our individual inclinations and limitations.
37
Whereas the
conceptual model of Freud’s theory of the self has been superseded by more complex models of
emergent consciousness, Critchley’s allegiance to his own sense of humor could well be cast in
the terms of more recent work in cognitive science, a point to which I will return after a short
excursus through the historical understanding of laughter as an expression of superiority, a result
of noticing incongruity, or a matter of emotional relief.
Superiority, Incongruity, Relief

Critchley’s normative framework privileges a type of mature detachment, akin to the Rortian
concept of liberal irony. Critchley arrives at this position psychoanalytically, and Rorty through a
pragmatist critique of latent sublime idealism in a large swath of Western philosophy. To put it
bluntly, both their frameworks smack of academic rarefied detachment. That doesn’t make them
wrong, but it does put them at odds with the ways in which comedy operates in the actual public
sphere; it also opens them up to charges of privileged elitism. After all, it is indeed a privilege to

35
Critchley 105
36
Critchley 108-109
37
Critchley 111
20
have the time, space, and resources to challenge one’s own final vocabulary, and therefore not
mind that others are challenging it as well. Faced with the immediacy of social struggles, with
the brutal reality of real-world repression, most of the world might not take it too kindly to be the
butt of a joke.
Both of them, of course, recognize this: Rorty in his insistence that irony is best reserved for
the private sphere, and Critchley in his privileging of mature self-directed humor over laughter at
others. Critchley does indeed build his case for humor starting from its disruptive, aggressive
potential as theorized by John Morreall in Taking Laughter Seriously. Morreall synthesizes
historical theories of humor into a taxonomy consisting of three main categories: superiority
theories, incongruity theories, and relief theories. The first category, whose pedigree goes back
all the way to Plato, holds that laughter arises from the expression of feelings of superiority over
other people.
38
Aristotle agreed with Plato, as did Hobbes, who expressed concerns that the
inherent aggression in superior laughter might be a sign of a troubled character.
39
This
explanation of laughter and ridicule, as Morreall points out, is certainly an accurate
characterization of certain laughter situations.
He does, however, register an interesting complaint from Voltaire: that, since laughter “arises
from a gaiety of disposition,” it is “absolutely incompatible with contempt and indignation.”
40

Coming from the author of aggressive satires such as Candide and Mahomet, this might seem
quite a specious claim; Morreall certainly holds him responsible for the inconsistency, noting

38
John Morreall. Taking Laughter Seriously. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1983: page 4
39
Morreall 6
40
Morreall 8
21
that a favorite pastime of the rich in Voltaire’s day involved visits to the insane asylum “to taunt
the inmates,” and listing other pervasive forms of cruel laughter across societies
41
. I would
propose to hold Voltaire’s observation in mind as a rhetorical device deployed against the charge
of cruelty; I will return to its merits shortly.
Morreall then moves on to incongruity theories, which he identifies as an attempt to explain
laughter not through emotion, but through cognition. Incongruity theories see laughter as “an
intellectual reaction to something that is unexpected, illogical, or inappropriate in some other
way.”
42
Morreall acknowledges that this theory can overlap with the superiority theory, but it
doesn’t necessarily presuppose that the laugher thinks he or she is superior to the object of the
laughter. The idea that laughter might arise as the result of a surprising development incongruous
with expectations was already present in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, but was not fully
developed until Kant and Schopenhauer.
43

A similar understanding also undergirds Henri Bergson’s historically influential theoretical
contribution to the field of comedy. Bergson claims that we laugh when we perceive a certain
mechanical rigidity in a living object: the body becomes an object in slapstick or gestural
comedy, including the comedy of manners; the same pattern holds when we laugh at the rigidity
of a particular language pattern or belief system.
44
Once more, Morreall disqualifies the general

41
Morreall 9-11
42
Morreall 15
43
Morreall 16-17
44
Henri Bergson. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. New York, NY: The Macmillan Company,
1914. Page 29, 69
22
theory of incongruity as a candidate because it is not comprehensive enough.
45
Finally, he turns
to relief theories, which stipulate that laughter emerges as a reaction to the transgression of a
societal taboo; Freud’s theory, which I discussed in the context of Critchley, is the main version
of this approach.
46

Drawing on these three categories, Morreall proceeds to synthesize them into a
comprehensive theory that functions at a slightly higher level of abstraction. Laughter, he says, is
the result of a sudden, pleasant shift in one’s psychological state, whether that shift be cognitive
or emotional. The suddenness of the shift is paramount, because it ensures “we cannot smoothly
adjust to what we are experiencing.”
47
This theory is general enough, Morreall argues, to
account for a wide variety of laughter: an infant might laugh in response to physical stimuli such
as tickling, if he feels comfortable and is in a familiar situation
48
; a child might laugh in
response to new experiences that do not fit neatly into her pre-existing mental schemata
49
; as an
adolescent moves into adulthood, he might learn to appreciate sophisticated wit
50
. Suddenness
also explains, for Morreall, why “most pieces of humor will have their full effect on us only
once.”
51
Even in the case of embarrassment, laughter allows us to reintegrate the experience of

45
Morreall 18-19
46
Morreall 20-37
47
Morreall 38-39
48
Morreall 41
49
Morreall 43
50
Morreall 45
51
Morreall 50
23
an awkward moment into a socially acceptable script of behavior.
52
In embarrassing situations as
well as in the paradoxical case of hysterical laughter, it is a coping mechanism.
53

With this in mind, let us return to Voltaire’s defense of laughter. He says that laughter cannot
be explained through cruelty or superiority, that it is incompatible with contempt or indignation,
because it “arises from a disposition of gaiety.” I would propose that this is not a statement of
fact on his part, but rather a matter of rhetorical framing. As an enlightenment liberal, Voltaire
attacked throughout his career the impact of religion, which he called superstition, and self-
interested, corrupt leaders on the freedoms of French citizenry. By his own definition, since his
satires were not intended from a disposition of gaiety, he simply did not think of them as
primarily works of humor - but rather works of reason, at odds with the religious dogmatism and
political corruption of the leadership he was attacking. Voltaire happens to be a relatively somber
satirist who doesn’t much mix the comedic and the political, even as he ridicules; his work
proceeds not from a commitment to the carnivalesque, but from a sense of moral outrage. In this
sense, he is enacting a type of distinction between personal humor and political expression akin
to the ideal of separation between the private and the public that is at the core of both Rorty’s
and Critchley’s willful separation of the two realms.
This kind of distinction between the private realm of irony and comedy and the realm of
public life, however, can only function within the context of a cohesive culture whose
individuals all ascribe to the same definition of boundaries. It is the kind of distinction that only
makes sense in a uniform community that shares an ethos, which is often a proxy for ethnic,

52
Morreall 56
53
Morreall 56-57
24
religious, or other cultural affiliations. Morreall, drawing on Wittgenstein’s notion of shared
language games as shared worldviews, explains that people from different cultures are often
unable to understand each other’s humor. Their worldviews differ, and as a result their
definitions of incongruity are incompatible.
54
Other rifts determine individuals’ sense of humor:
“one’s educational level, social class, profession, sex, etc., can all make a difference,” writes
Morreall.
55
I would argue that this is the hinging point that makes humor difficult to discuss
outside of the context of a cohesive culture with well-defined discursive standards. This is also
the reason why accusations of cruelty might arise, whether or not the individual who makes a
joke intends to humiliate the object of the joke. A comedian might tell a joke thinking of it as
primarily an example of incongruity, yet in the process offend someone else’s final vocabulary;
indeed, most jokes rely precisely on the idea of skewering the inconsistencies of particular,
immovable final vocabularies.
Cognition as a Game of Abstractions

In their landmark cognitive science treatise Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson advance the argument that “human thought processes are largely metaphorical.”
56

Furthermore, the human mind does not resort to conceptual metaphors in isolation. Every
metaphor brings with it the contextual valences of its presence in a larger linguistic system of
signification; as such, individual metaphors refer to a cohesive internal system, but in

54
Morreall 61
55
Morreall 62
56
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Page 6 et passim
25
conversation, they can mean different things to individual interlocutors.
57

Lakoff and Johnson expand this observation to interpersonal communication, arguing that the
essential values of a particular culture are coherent with the metaphorical value of its concepts.
58

Their understanding of cognition maps neatly onto Umberto Eco’s contemporary efforts in the
theory of semiotics. Eco argued that traditional semiotics, as codified in the work of C.S. Peirce,
overstated the differences between its categories of index, icon, and symbol. Whereas Peirce
argued that the index and the icon have a natural, unfettered, direct relationship to the reality they
represent, Eco shows that signification always relies on a process of social negotiation. Even
indices and icons, for Eco, are subject to assumptions derived from the realm of discourse. As
such, he proposes that we never really see the world naturally: we are always engaged in a
process of (re)interpretation, in response to socially contingent mental constructs.
5960
The same
kind of dialectical interplay of abstract mental structures undergirds cognitive scientist Douglas
Hofstadter’s writings on selfhood, representation, and artistic expression. For Hofstadter, the self
(or consciousness, or the soul, as he often calls them in order to account for different
metaphorical approaches to the subject) is a “strange loop,” an emergent phenomenon that allows
the human brain to use some of its mental schemata to reflect on others. By objectifying some
concepts and allowing other concepts to reflect upon them in a dialectical interplay, the human
brain therefore constructs the illusion of selfhood, the fallacy of identity. The concept of the

57
Lakoff and Johnson 10-12
58
Lakoff and Johnson 23
59
Umberto Eco. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976
60
Umberto Eco. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. World Literature Today.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984
26
stable, single agent we learn to call a “self” is therefore an illusory feedback pattern that cuts
across different abstract mental schemata. As such, it is both subject and object of constant
redefinition. For someone like Hofstadter, who has spent his entire career inquiring into the
abstract structures of different ways of seeing the world, to think of oneself in terms of a static
identity is to refuse to grow.
61

The position advanced by Lakoff, Johnson, and Hofstadter is therefore akin to the
postmodern and poststructuralist insistence that discourse determines experience; they simply
arrive at this understanding from opposing directions. However, Hofstadter’s image of the
human mind’s relationship to discourse and knowledge, unlike the rhizomatic metaphor
advanced by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, preserves a sense of hierarchical
organization. Deleuze and Guattari famously argued against the understanding of signification
and epistemology as a hierarchical tree, and claimed that “any point of a rhizome can be
connected to any other, and indeed it must be.”
62
Their metaphor, evidently inspiring to many
scholars and artists, sacrifices reasonable systematic thought at the altar of fertile inspiration.
Hofstadter would encourage us to preserve an understanding of different levels of abstraction at
play in our mental faculties, and he does so repeatedly throughout his work through the
metaphorical image of the fractal. In a fractal, similar patterns of organization are replicated at
different levels of abstraction. The fractal therefore retains both the ability to map knowledge
outwards and the ability to organize information hierarchically, and therefore seems to my mind

61
Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. 20
th
Anniversary Edition: Basic Books,
1999 (original publication 1976) and I Am A Strange Loop, Basic Books, 2007
62
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; Brian Massumi (transl.). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis, MN and London, UK: The University of Minnesota Press, 1987

27
a better metaphorical map to the interplay of various understandings of reality.
Incidentally, the rhizomatic metaphor as employed in academic poststructuralism, while
doubtlessly attractive to the associative sensibilities of scholars, relies on a fundamental
misunderstanding of the biological workings of actual rhizomes, which grow in the fractal
patterns found across all living organisms. Rhizomes, it must be said, are not devoid of
hierarchical organization, and certainly don’t connect their every point to every other point in an
undifferentiated egalitarian mish-mash; indeed, no natural phenomenon is completely
structureless. The poststructuralist-rhizomatic view is therefore inspired by a form of theoretical
utopianism when it claims to consider all mental metaphors on the staging ground of a flat,
undifferentiated ground of signification. The fractal view, on the other hand, is consistent with
both Eco’s theory of semiotics and Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of cognition. It asks us to
simultaneously consider any individual mental construct within its own hierarchy, the possibility
of its divergent valence in competing hierarchical systems of signification, as well as the fact that
different hierarchical systems of signification can hold competing metaphors that fulfill
isomorphic functions, even across disparate levels of abstraction.
The insights of modern cognitive science, however, do not completely invalidate Freud’s
historical model of cognition. Rather, they can help nuance both Freud’s understanding of humor
and Critchley’s version of Freud’s humor, and allow us to draw relatively similar conclusions.
Critchley already suggests as much when he differentiates between the version of the concept of
the super-ego in Freud’s writings on melancholy and his later essay on humor. Whereas Freud
uses the same term in both writings, Critchley is correct to point out that the valence of the
super-ego changes significantly; it is, to use Lakoff and Johnson’s terms, the same metaphor
employed in a slightly different system of signification. Whereas the earlier version of the super-
28
ego inflicts so much pressure on the ego that it condemns it to stasis and depression, the later
version of the super-ego, says Critchley, liberates the ego by “allowing it to find itself
ridiculous.”
63
For Critchley, this is a mark of the transition towards “a cognitive relation to
oneself and the world.”
64

This statement by Critchley, however, is the mark of another inconsistency in the shadow
game of conceptual permutation: it implies that the earlier version of the super-ego was not
cognitive. This is, of course, an absurd implication, given that the super-ego traffics in all its
versions in rules and regulations, that it carries the impact of acculturation in the Freudian
schema. Critchley likely means to use “cognitive” in this context in contrast to the missing
dialectical pair of “emotional,” a distinction that simplifies a continuum between cold abstraction
and embodied reactivity into a polar dialectical pairing. Rhetorically, this allows Critchley to
posit a stable normative end-point for the mature sense of humor. While this conclusion is
rhetorically satisfying, it also betrays a latent form of Enlightenment idealism. To use a narrative
metaphor, it’s a forced happy ending for the protagonist.
In contrast with Critchley, and in keeping with more recent cognitive frameworks, I would
argue that his normative account of humor is mostly correct, yet it should be expanded to
account for the possibility of ongoing perturbations of the ideal, balanced, humorous self. Taking
the id, ego, and super-ego as constantly fluctuating metaphors for the continuum between
physical embodiment and balanced conceptual abstraction, I would therefore re-cast the tension
between external impositions on the self and internal drives and desires as a never-ending

63
Critchley 103
64
Critchley 102
29
process of renegotiation, redescription, and conceptual expansion. As Critchley argues, the
super-ego demands normative perfection, demanding that the ego drop the self-involved
animalistic drives of the id and conform to a greater purpose. In doing so, the super-ego abjects
the ego; in other words, it makes the self, or consciousness, aware of the ways in which it falls
short of its final vocabulary. The super-ego operates from a conceptual position that relishes the
fact that it can imagine perfection, and turns the demands of such a perfection on the ego. In
Kantian terms, the super-ego marshals the power of the sublime against the abject demands of
the id.
Yet, as Rorty points out, the demands of this final vocabulary, the image of unfettered
perception inherent in any form of absolute conceptual purity, is at its extreme based on a flawed
conception of perfect epistemological access to the world. In Rorty’s terms, then, the moment of
mature humor is the moment when the super-ego has the knowledge as well as the luxury of
seeing itself as a liberal ironist. At this point, the self can come to terms with the fact that its
utmost ideals - for the liberal mind, the goals of reducing cruelty in the world - are a welcome
disease, but a disease nonetheless. This doesn’t mean that the super-ego has abandoned its claims
on the ego; it simply means that they have come to a truce in their neverending struggle. Because
the liberal ironist never stops questioning his or her final vocabulary, the demands of the super-
ego are themselves subject to continuous renegotiation. A sense of good humor is, in this
context, a sense of contented balance, a kind of meditative, blissful enlightenment. The smile of
humor is also the smile of ultimate irony, not only of coming to a state where the self can laugh
at its own ridiculousness, but also of knowing that this hard-won bliss can fall apart in the face of
subsequent threats. Melancholy and mania are still a possibility, when the self feels threatened. A
sense of humor is the privilege of being returned not to just one’s locale, but to one’s physically
30
abject limitations, on one’s own terms.
Critchley casts this ironist version of the super-ego in parental terms, describing the
depressive’s version of the super-ego as “the prohibitive parent, scolding the child,” and the
humorist’s version as “the comforting parent,” or “the child that has become the parent: wiser
and wittier, if slightly wizened.”
65
Interestingly enough, these are exactly the two parenting
paradigms that George Lakoff identifies as the basis of political inclinations in contemporary
American public life. In his 2003 book Moral Politics, he argues that the moral foundations of
American conservatives are based primarily on the “strict father” model, whereas the moral
foundations of American liberals are based on the “nurturant parent” model.
66

The “strict father” model, drawn primarily from Christian evangelical morality, emphasizes
hierarchical obedience to the authority of established rules, morality as purity, competition,
discipline, and the atomistic integrity of the self-reliant individual subject, bound by traditional,
homogeneous principles of moral authority; it also includes, as Lakoff’s name suggests, the
implication that the authority should be based on patriarchal values.
67
The “nurturant parent”
model, conversely, thinks of morality as a form of empathy, emphasizing social as well as self-
nurturance, social ties, fairness, and happiness.
68
I keep in mind these categories throughout the
chapters of this dissertation, but I would point out, to begin with, that Critchley’s concept of
humor is at odds with the “strict father” model, which leaves no room for self-deprecation. I

65
Critchley 103
66
Lakoff, George. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 2002 (Second Edition). 33-34 et passim
67
Lakoff 65-70 et passim
68
Lakoff 114 et passim
31
would also add that the general outline of these two parenting models is too general to account
for the possible variety of political identifications at work in the public sphere. However, these
stereotypical models are certainly used as shorthand proxies for political discussion in
contemporary American media. As frozen stereotypes of particular final vocabularies, they are
also the target of a significant swath of mainstream American political comedy. As such,
versions of them will continue to surface throughout my discussion of contemporary American
comedy.
Aporia, Paranoid Reading, and Reparative Reading

Rorty’s framework of liberal irony rests on an uncomfortable dialectical tension, if not
outright inconsistency. In trying to bracket private irony from his public commitment to liberal
institutions, norms of discourse, and political practice, he seemingly divorces politics from
culture. In doing so, he not only opens up his framework to the traditional Marxist,
psychoanalytical, and (post-)structuralist critiques that have undergirded nearly two centuries of
academic cultural criticism, but also enacts a public taxonomy of knowledge akin to the one he
seeks to abolish in private practice. The liberal ironist, he says, refuses the metaphysician’s
attempt to categorize “all the original minds who had a talent for redescription,” to privately
differentiate between philosophers and poets and scientists, yet holds fast the hopes of liberal
institutions.
69
To put it bluntly as well as glibly, the liberal ironist is a Habermasian in the streets
and whatever he or she damn well pleases in the sheets. And if Rorty contradicts himself, he is
undoubtedly ready to offer Whitman’s famous retort, which Rorty’s pragmatist forebear
Emerson loved so dearly:

69
Rorty 76
32

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
70

Even much more politically committed forms of leftist criticism reach a similar form of
theoretical aporia when followed to their ultimate implications. Christian Thorne proves as much
in his brilliant history of anti-foundationalist philosophy titled The Dialectic of Counter-
Enlightenment.
71
The seriousness of Thorne’s theoretical writing, his sweeping knowledge of
leftist critical theory, and his painstakingly lucid prose still prove no match for the contradictions
that have plagued skeptical philosophy through the centuries. The final chapter of his book,
which was excerpted as an article in the Fall 2005 issue of boundary 2
72
, dubs this theoretical
malaise “the antinomy of antinomies.” His argument, which deserves much more detailed
attention than I could provide in these pages, draws on classical Pyrrhonism, Frankfurt counter-
enlightenment, Birmingham cultural studies, and Lyotardian postmodernism to show that the
dialectical operations of skeptical thought have not only stalled, but have also provided
theoretical cover for the kinds of marketplace subjugations that they propose to critique. The
attempt to resist metaphysics and instrumentality through deconstruction, the attempt to resist
hierarchies by appealing to rhizomes and networks, has been thoroughly coopted by the
networked marketplace logic of late capitalism.
Thorne glimpses a bitterly ironic picture: critical theory has been reduced to an antinomy of

70
Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself. Public domain. First published in Leaves of Grass, 1855.
71
Christian Thorne. The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010
72
Christian Thorne. “The Antinomy of Antinomies,” in boundary2, 2005:32(3), pages 81-96
33
antinomies while the depredations of global capital continue unchecked, and the information
society produces heretofore unthinkable forms of surveillance and social control. The forms of
knowledge production that warned of such a shape of things to come are toothless; their excesses
take the form of reactionary, retributive paranoia, further alienating the dispossessed whom they
purport to help. Even if the dispossessed wanted to read such critiques, they would hit first upon
the paywalls of corporate publishers, then the jargon-walls of academese. The super-ego of
critical theory might do well to learn to laugh at itself and its own frozen orthodoxies, if it
intends to ever break free of the cycle of irony.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick shows what kind of writing might break through this cycle of aporia
in the fourth chapter of Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. The verbose title
announces her break from academic orthodoxy: Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or,
You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.
73
Throughout the chapter,
she reflects on the ubiquity of paranoia in critical theory, drawing on her decades’ worth of
foundational work as a queer theorist. Her claim is that it is not only the edifice of high theory,
but also the proliferation of more piecemeal forms of the hermeneutics of suspicion - a concept
she borrows from Paul Ricoeur - that has led to the crisis of contemporary academic critique.
Without denying the salutary insights gained from what she calls the “paranoid critical stance,”
she makes a passionate call to supplement the paranoid impulse with a reparative critical stance,
one that does not further replicate and propagate the negative affect that has fueled the critical
enterprise from Marx onwards. Reparative reading, rather than engaging in the drudging
stylistics and pleasure denial of paranoia, would instead attempt to valorize and rejoice in its

73
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003.
34
objects, without losing sight of the negative symptomatologies that underlie the history of critical
theory. From Melanie Klein, she draws one name for this reparative process: love.
74

Yet both her theoretical discussion and the stylistics of her essay suggest another name, an
unsurprising one: humor. Her discussion of Freud lingers on the psychoanalyst’s comparison of
persecutory delusion with the moods and operations of critical theory, the same Freudian
operation that Critchley references in his discussion of endlessly self-tormenting, melancholic
ego-abjection.
75
She notes that paranoia is anticipatory, reflexive, and mimetic; in other words,
the paranoid affect exacerbates and replicates the moods and symptoms that it diagnoses.
76

Drawing on Silvan Tomkins, she shows that the critical obsession with diagnosing humiliation, a
strong and therefore easily applicable theory, “gains in strength […] by virtue of the continuing
failures of its strategies to afford protection through successful avoidance of the experience of
negative affect.”
77
As a mode of “selective scanning and amplification,” paranoid reading,
rigorously exclusive of alternative readings, risk tautology.
78
Just like Critchley, she identifies a
risky yet worthwhile path out of depression in the critical move away from pain-avoidance and
into the realm of pleasure-seeking exegesis.
79
Even more importantly, she shows that the critical
faith in the naming and exposure of systemic injustice has often been ineffective in fixing the

74
Sedgwick 128
75
Sedgwick 125, Critchley 98-99
76
Sedgwick 131-133
77
Sedgwick 134
78
Sedgwick 135
79
Sedgwick 137
35
symptoms they identify; indeed, this obsession with visibility fails to account for the fact that, in
certain cases, “visibility itself constitutes much of the violence”.
80

Finally, she points out that the critique of “secular, universalist liberal humanism” has
become a matter of ideological dogma in American academic culture, its operations parroted by
graduate students who grew up under the xenophobic, neoconservative, religiously dogmatic
culture bracketed on one end by the Reagan administration and on the other by George W. Bush;
in other words, by graduate students who never even got a chance to be liberal.
81
Even if we
bracket her other arguments, this point alone should suffice to prove that anti-liberal academic
left-progressivism has betrayed its political emancipatory goals for the sake of replicating its
orthodoxies. Triumphalist ideological dogmaticism, Sedgwick warns, can also leave its students
ill-equipped to respond to reactionary blowback: “the trouble with a shallow gene pool, of
course, is its diminished ability to respond to environmental (e.g., political) change.”
82
Reading
between the lines: rigid progressivism will find it hard to make allies if the tide of progress turns.
The monopoly of paranoia, suspicious of pleasure, which it considers “merely aesthetic” as well
as piecemeal change (“merely reformist”), leads to aporia.
83

Sedgwick could sound this alarm without fear of retribution because of her privileged
position as one of the leading lights of academic queer theory. Yet her prose style provides a
rhetorical template for contextual, deeply sympathetic writing that nevertheless challenges the

80
Sedgwick 138-141
81
Sedgwick 139-140
82
Sedgwick 144
83
Sedgwick 144
36
damaging orthodoxies of a well-intentioned final vocabulary frozen in uninspiring pique. Her
introduction is a masterpiece of emotional self-disclosure, taking stock of the dehumanizing
historical violence that justified the paranoid polemics of queer theory. She acknowledges that
the conspiracist tendencies that she attacks are justified by the myriad indignities of American
racism and homophobia.
84
Even so, she explains, the decision to engage in a project of exposure
is not self-evident, but rather “strategic and local.”
85
She again returns to the community she is
addressing, mourning the tragic loss of so many queer lives in an uncaring homophobic society,
towards the end of the essay.
86
She discloses that she is living with advanced breast cancer, and
therefore feels an urgent need for sincerity: “there isn’t time to bullshit.”
87
In short, she is never
glib about the importance of the critical work whose flaws she is exposing.
It is in context of this deeply resonant sincerity that she unleashes her caustic wit, revealing the
shortcomings of critical paranoia. The Jamesonian imperative to “always historicize,” she points
out, is nonsensically atemporal, reminiscent of bumper stickers that read “Question Authority.”
“Excellent advice,” she quips, “perhaps wasted on anyone who does whatever they’re ordered to
do by a strip of paper glued to an automobile!”
88
She doesn’t let it go, pointing out that a
hermeneutics of suspicion will inherently bristle at imperatives. She peppers such small nuggets
of self-ridicule throughout the essay, moving back and forth between earnest argument, caustic

84
Sedgwick 123
85
Sedgwick 124
86
Sedgwick 148-149
87
Sedgwick 149
88
Sedgwick 125
37
tonal shifts, and ironic ambiguity, before unleashing perhaps the funniest, most lucid
condemnations of academic stodginess ever written:
A disturbingly large amount of theory seems explicitly to undertake the proliferation of only
one affect, or maybe two, of whatever kind—whether ecstasy, sublimity, self-shattering,
jouissance, suspicion, abjection, knowingness, horror, grim satisfaction, or righteous
indignation. It’s like the old joke: ‘‘Comes the revolution, Comrade, everyone gets to eat
roast beef every day.’’ ‘‘But Comrade, I don’t like roast beef.’’ ‘‘Comes the revolution,
Comrade, you’ll like roast beef.’’ Comes the revolution, Comrade, you’ll be tickled pink by
those deconstructive jokes; you’ll faint from ennui every minute you’re not smashing the
state apparatus; you’ll definitely want hot sex twenty to thirty times a day. You’ll be
mournful and militant. You’ll never want to tell Deleuze and Guattari, “Not tonight, dears, I
have a headache.”
89

It would be a great injustice to unpack this paragraph analytically, but I hope that its
rhetorical strategies are self-evident. I will just say that it does the one thing that earnest
academic prose will always fail to do by definition: it enacts its own argument. Of course, that’s
precisely Sedgwick’s point.
One last observation, before we finally get to contemporary comedy. Towards the end of the
essay, Sedgwick touches briefly on camp, to make an important point, namely “that related
practices of reparative knowing may lie, barely recognized and little explored, at the heart of
many histories of gay, lesbian, and queer intertextuality.” She holds Judith Butler accountable for
viewing camp through a paranoid lens, and therefore misrecognizing its potential by focusing on
its valences as a practice of “parody, denaturalization, demystification, and mocking exposure of
the elements and assumptions of a dominant culture.”
90
The fear that camp might be a self-
hating, internalized version of dominant homophobic culture leads Butler to retreat into a
paranoid aesthetic of “minimalist elegance and conceptual economy.” Sedgwick doesn’t even

89
Sedgwick 146
90
Sedgwick 149
38
dignify Butler’s aesthetic choice with the self-evident paranoid critique: elegance, minimalism,
and conceptual economy are arguably the aesthetic choices of sixties modernism, which
perpetuates… and so on and so forth. Instead, she shows how easily a reparative impulse,
“additive and accretive,” highlights the best in camp, listing its most joyful and redemptive
practices in brief. And in a final coup de grace, she points out that many prominent camp
practitioners have been “almost legendarily ‘paranoid’ personalities,” proving that reparative
practices of love do not curtail the possibility of fruitful paranoid critique.

Discursive Communities and Comedic Cruelty

With Sedgwick’s example in mind, let us return to humor and liberal irony once more, with
an eye to comedic cruelty and the possibility of reparative reading. The liberal ironist relies, as
we have seen, on a strict delineation between the public and private realm. Yet, the moment he
moves to his discussion of Nabokov and Orwell, Rorty seems to break the bounds of this
distinction: novels are, after all, a matter of public expression. Yet, as far as Rorty is concerned,
they are not a matter of the public sphere, construed in terms of politics, but rather of poeticized
culture - as is any philosophical book that does not ascribe to a form of Habermasian liberalism,
and any other form of cultural expression. To be sure, Rorty doesn’t argue that all individuals, in
actuality, make their political choices in purely reasonable, liberal terms. He simply points out
that the only conceivable way to ensure radical freedom of thought and expression in a
heterogeneous society is for individual citizens to assume a standpoint of liberal irony. In other
words, the only way for a society to move towards his version of multicultural utopia is for its
citizens to commit to the rhetorical framing and epistemological implications of the liberal
ironist position. This is precisely the kind of rhetorical framing of comedy, whether explicitly
39
political or not, that mainstream American comedians have historically assumed in their public
personas; comedy, comedians would argue, responds first and foremost to the criterion of
laughter, rather than ideological criteria. It also paradoxically helps explain why the majority of
mainstream professional comedians are avowed liberals or libertarians, a point that I will explore
in detail in subsequent chapters.
Comedy therefore poses a particularly thorny issue for the liberal public sphere. The cruel
comedy of superiority has been used, in various historical contexts, as a weapon for repressive
political mobilization and manipulation. To account for this valence of humor, we must add one
more theoretical framework to our toolkit: Noel Carroll’s discussion of the inner kinship between
horror and comedy, which he developed in two essays published in 1999 and 2003. The earlier
essay, titled simply “Horror and Humor,” begins from the seemingly incongruous recent
proliferation of horror-comedy films like Gremlins, Ghostbusters, The Addams Family, and Mars
Attacks. Carroll acknowledges that, at first glance, such films present an aesthetic conundrum,
because they encourage a combination of opposing psychological states.
91
Yet not only do
combinations of horror and humor exist, they share the same theoretical lineage: Freud’s theory
of jokework as the manifestation of the repressed unconscious, Carroll points out, is very similar
to his account of the uncanny.
92
Throughout the rest of the essay, Carroll explains this kinship
between horror and comedy in familiar terms. On the one hand, horror arouses disgust and fear
through the figure of the monster, which provokes a sense of existential dread because of its
transgressive impurity. The monsters of horror, Carrol argues, do not simply provoke fear, but

91
Carroll, Noël. “Horror and Humor,” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Spring,
1999), pages 145-160. Page 145
92
Carroll 1999, 146
40
also revulsion, because they violate “cultural categories, norms, and conceptual schemes.”
93

This account of horror is, of course, very similar to the incongruity theory of humor. He
cannily illustrates this similarity by appealing to the image of the clown, a “categorically
interstitial and categorically transgressive” being that can function either as a monster or as an
object of laughter, depending on the context of its portrayal.
94
This porous boundary between
comedy and horror hinges on fear. In Carroll’s words: “Horror equals categorical transgression
or jamming plus fear; incongruity humor equals, in part, categorical transgression or jamming
minus fear.”
95

Carroll’s first essay on horror and humor ends with a problematic supposition: that the
transgressions of comic figures do not come across as horrific to an audience because “comedy is
a realm in which fear, in principle, is banished.”
96
Although he ends his argument on a settled
note, that interspersed apposition signals Carroll’s doubts on the matter. Four years later, he
would once more take up the question of horror and humor in a book chapter titled “Ethnicity,
Race, and Monstrosity: The Rhetorics of Horror and Humor,” and more thoroughly address that
residue of comic fear, which he discusses in an aesthetic frame rather than a psychoanalytic one.
To summarize his argument: representations of human beauty have historically posited a
correlation between physical beauty and moral superiority. Conversely, practices of caricature

93
Carroll 1999, 151-152
94
Carroll 1999, 155-156
95
Carroll 1999, 157
96
Carroll 1999, 157
41
and representations of ugliness have been associated with moral degradation.
97
Horror and
humor, genres that traffic in deviations from the ideal of beauty, have consequently been
exploited to reinforce images of political purity, often rendering the ethnic or racial other as
transgressive and monstrous. These portrayals of ethnic and racial outsiders as monsters have
been used to deprive their targets or “the moral consideration appropriate to […] human
beings.”
98
Carroll spends the rest of the essay exploring three examples of dehumanizing racism
that have been used for such political purposes: British portrayals of the Irish as “Devil-fish,”
and American portrayals of Asians and Blacks as apes.
99

Carroll uses the term “humor” much too loosely throughout these two essays, and I would
propose that we retain his insights as pertaining not to humor in Critchley’s sense, but rather the
practices of joke-work, in Freud’s terms. Critchley draws on Bergson’s idea of laughter as a
momentary “anesthesia of the heart”
100
to meditate on the cold, distancing effect that comic
portrayal can sometimes have, but even that formulation falls short when trying to portray the
cruelty of jokes directed at a subjugated outsider. Cruel, dehumanizing joke-work aimed at the
less powerful is a betrayal of the very idea of a sense of humor, because it aims to reinforce the
normative purity of the in-group by denying the humanity of the other, by defining the other as
abject. Luckily, this pattern of joke-work is easy to notice, precisely because it depends on
reinforcing the illusory inviolable purity of the powerful in-group. The cruel laughter of power

97
Carroll, Noël. Engaging the Moving Image. New Haven, CT and London, UK: Yale University Press, 2003.
Pages 88-89
98
Carroll 2003: 93
99
Carroll 2003: 94-103
100
Critchley 87-88
42
would never dream of allowing its own final vocabulary to be challenged.
One of the pervasive approaches for dealing with cruel humor, however, seems to me
misguided: the attempt to prove that a joke is “not funny.” In proper ironic fashion, this is the
exact kind of argument that someone wounded by a joke is most likely to make. To be clear, I
don’t mean that cruel public jokes do not exist or have a real political impact; there are, indeed,
many bigoted jokes that I would argue one should not make. I simply mean that I find it critically
useless to declare any particular joke unfunny. If someone attempted to make a joke, that means
that, when they made the joke, they thought it funny or thought that others might find it funny. I
would simply propose, following Critchley, that the only useful critical stance for dealing with
cruel humor is one that takes responsibility for the parochialism embedded in the joke. As such,
it seems to me like the proper rhetorical stance to address cruel and belittling jokes is to ask the
joker to elaborate on why he or she finds that particular joke funny. In other words, we ought to
force bigotry to make its terms explicit.
With this in mind, I would like to turn back to the idea that the ability for self-deprecation is
the defining criterion of a sense of humor. As I mentioned earlier, self-deprecation is a mark of
privileged detachment, and of a balance that can easily fall apart, plunging the self back into
melancholy and mania. This is because the processes of self-deprecation are short-circuited when
the self is under threat from external sources of power. The “super-ego II,” as Critchley calls the
nurturing version of the super-ego, relies on an individual’s freedom for self-definition. The
stability of the self-deprecating, ironic position hinges on the possibility of radical individual
freedom. When that possibility is under threat, as it is in the case of most forms of social
repression, so is the inner balance of private irony.
Yet the fact that laughter is communitarian, based on a shared sense of discursive formations
43
and boundaries, means that the members of oppressed communities, however designated, might
at will engage in ironic games of self-deprecation and self-abjection; just as in the individual
case, when a community has the freedom to negotiate its taboos, rather than being challenged
from the outside, it is more likely to do so. Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of carnivalesque practices
in medieval Europe provides an example of such ritual self-debasing behaviors, which served to
temporarily flaunt the day to day social taboos.
101
The carnivalesque, flouting the norms of
feudal high society, is a celebration of embodiment and physical transgression. This is the
operative difference between the cruel, objectifying abjection of the other, and the
transgressively celebratory, self-objectifying abjection of the self or of the in-group. It’s also
why the greatest display of trust towards an outsider is to include him or her within the humorous
community of an in-group.
In this context, we might see the liberal ironist’s division between private irony and public
liberalism in a slightly different light. Privacy is not just a matter of absolute individual freedom,
but rather hinges on various forms of constructed communal boundaries. The overlapping forms
of identitarian community affiliation form a variety of private in-groups, in which self-
deprecation and self-mockery may well be allowed, if not encouraged. To be sure, many groups
insist on forms of identitarian or ideological purity, which liberal ironists tend to disrupt; this is
the basis of what Critchley calls the dissensus communis, or common dissent that allows for the
renegotiation and expansion of the in-group. When a member of a group disrupts its identitarian
practices from within, its boundaries might become open to renegotiation. When, on the other
hand, the in-group comes under fire from the outside, it tends to dig deeper into its identity,

101
Mikhail Bakhtin. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984

44
under threat. In other words, it loses its sense of humor. It also becomes less susceptible to the
claims of reason that undergird ironic detachment and the possibility of dissolving its boundaries.
It becomes, as Sedgwick would put it, paranoid.
Recent media shifts have exacerbated the conditions that would sow the paranoid
retrenchment of in-groups and the reification of their discursive boundaries. The fragmented
contemporary mediascape targets individual sensibilities at a more granular level than ever
before, making it difficult to take stock of the patterns of common dissensus that might allow for
the expansion of aesthetic and political coalitions; social media bubbles have exacerbated the
narrowing of aesthetic and political sensibilities that was already underway in the cable TV
world. The joke-patterns of various in-groups, previously private, are now visible to anyone who
might seek offense. Online context collapse, combined with the accelerated and reactive
temporality of social media and the 24-hour news cycle and an online “hot-take” culture of rapid
ideologically-driven cultural criticism make ironic detachment seem impossible. Online
anonymity has led to the perpetuation of trolling behaviors, hate speech, and harassment - some
simply anarchic, a lot of it deeply hateful. Media convergence has further collapsed the
boundaries between culture and politics, public life and the realm of private irony. The moderate
liberal first black president of the United States, portrayed as a radical foreign Muslim socialist
by wild online conspiracy theorists throughout his eight years in office, has been supplanted by a
reactionary reality TV star who foments ethnic hatred and seems unable to accept the basic
norms of free speech, civil behavior, and the public sphere.
Yet televised comedy has never been more diverse, inventive, or aesthetically complex.
Streaming services are financing the production of deeply personal and intelligent comedic work
that could have never made it to air in earlier media environments. Twitter has become the home
45
of a culture of liberal comedy and reasoned critique at the same time as it has been overrun by
trolling and abuse. Conspiracist thinking abounds online, as does hatred; yet the same medium
provides access to educational resources that would have been unthinkable, even two decades
ago. Web comics have reached maturity as an artform, engaging in complex medium-specific
experiments and allowing new communities to coalesce around shared aesthetics. This
dissertation chronicles the state of contemporary American humor across media, in a moment of
increasing polarization. There are many reasons to worry, but the community of liberal
comedians and cultural ironists that has emerged online also provides a reason for continued
hope that reason and a poeticized culture might yet prevail. As long as we commit to reason and
the self-deprecation that might allow us to expand the community of the laughing, as long as we
continue to challenge received dogma, our communities can still expand.

The Angel of Comedy

Figure 1. Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920.
Oil transfer and watercolor on paper.
Held in the collection of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
In the spirit of reparative reading practices, I would like to begin with a blasphemous
redescription of one of the most resonant and beautifully paranoid passages in the history of
leftist cultural criticism, and reappropriate it as a guiding metaphor for my project. I hope that,
47
by sacrificing one of my personal sacred paragraphs in the spirit of liberal ironic redescription, I
might inspire others to do the same.
In his ninth thesis on the philosophy of history, Walter Benjamin famously refers to a
painting by Paul Klee titled Angelus Novus, which he bought in 1921 and held dear throughout
the rest of his life.
102
He interprets the angel in the painting as an evocative representation of the
angel of history, or, to put it more mundanely, of historical consciousness itself. This angel, says
Benjamin, “looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is
staring at.” Eyes and mouth wide open, wings outstretched, he is forced to move deeper into the
future by a single ongoing and unavoidable catastrophe. The storm of human progress carries
him inexorably through historical eras, leaving a pile of rubble in its wake; he is bound to forever
bear witness to the casualties of historical progress, without the ability to pause, “to awaken the
dead and to piece together what has been smashed.” Humans, who have the ability to act and
influence history, see only partial chains of events from their limited perspective. Conversely, the
angel of history can perceive the storm of progress holistically, but is unable to stop, to slow
down, to help us batten the hatches against the ongoing calamity.
Rorty would undoubtedly point out that the angel of history is another version of the sublime,
epistemologically limitless vision of transcendence that underpins the mythology of a large
variety of cultural traditions. Benjamin himself signals as much when he prefaces this thesis with
an excerpt from a poem by Gershom Scholem, a Jewish mystic and close friend of Benjamin’s
who went on to inherit the painting after the philosopher’s death. The Benjaminian interpretation
of this painting has become somewhat of a commonplace in progressive iconography, inspiring a

102
Alex Danchev. On Good and Evil and The Grey Zone. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
Pages 44, 51
48
variety of artists and academics throughout the past century and becoming a shorthand for what
Rorty might call the final vocabulary of social critics inspired by the Frankfurt school. As such, it
has given birth to a thoroughly ironic situation: aside from Benjamin’s own emotional
investment in the painting and the evocative nature of his ekphrasis, there is no proof to support
his interpretation of the painting. Indeed, as Alex Danchev points out in his thoroughly
researched discussion of Angelus Novus, Perdita Rösch, perhaps influenced by Otto
Werckmeister, has made a strong case for interpreting it as a self-portrait of Klee as an angel.
The image could then be interpreted metaphorically (the artist tries to break through the
limitations of war-time through his art, taking flight in his imagination) or prosaically (World
War I was the first major conflict in which air warfare played a large role).
103
Danchev also
notes that Benjamin entrusted his beloved painting to Theodor Adorno for safe keeping, and
Adorno interpreted it as an image of Kaiser Wilhelm, noting its origin in Klee’s earlier
caricatures of the emperor.
104
Bewilderingly enough, some scholars have convincingly
interpreted the painting as a portrait of Adolph Hitler, who came to prominence as a political
agitator in Klee’s Munich around the time of the painting’s creation.
105

In light of the painting’s complex exegetic legacy, I would propose an alternative
interpretation of the Angelus Novus as the Angel of Comedy, or the trickster-god of liberal
irony. A striking feature of his physiognomy, to which Benjamin alludes only obliquely, supports
this reinterpretation: Benjamin says that the angel’s mouth “stands open,” but he doesn’t mention

103
Danchev 49
104
Danchev 53-54
105
Danchev 54
49
that his teeth are prominently visible - both the top and bottom row, with a significant gap
between them, a visual detail incompatible with Benjamin’s overall gloss. His mouth is open,
yes, but it seems to be in mid-sentence, rather than screaming for a break from the violent storm
of historical progress or gaping in horror. His teeth are not the snarling, bared incisors of an
animal in fight-or-flight mode either; his lips betray no tension, his forehead looks relaxed, and
his eyes are focused slightly towards the lower-right side of the painting, as if he were a stand-up
comedian scanning the audience, attempting to connect with them. The right corner of his mouth
is considerably higher than the left corner, forming a crooked, expectant smirk. This is not the
mouth of a doomed angel expressing shock or overwhelmed despair, but the half-smile of a
trickster angel in the middle of telling a joke that he knows will take the audience by surprise.
His body language seems to support this interpretation as well: the angel is not defending himself
from debris, covering his body against the onslaught of disaster, but rather raising his arms or
wings to gesture as he exaggerates elements of his comedic set-up. The wings themselves are
not, as Benjamin would have it, opened wide and carried backwards by the storm: they are bent
at the elbows, in a relaxed yet engaged position. His relaxed leaning body, unkempt hair, and
gap-toothed grin, in short, betray him as the Angel of Comedy.

Chapter II. The Pubic Zirconia Age of Comedy

Laughing Faster, Laughing Farther

The oblique worldview of comedy, challenging received information as well as its
semiotic structures, is present throughout human activities, and pervades all existing forms of
media. This observation applies not only to forms, formats, or genres that are associated with
comedy: jokes ranging from 140-character Twitter nuggets to fully developed stand-up comedy
sets, Hollywood romantic comedies, comedian podcasts, or late-night television shows. The
comedic view rather hybridizes and affects earnest cultural formats, offering up momentary bits
of relief and sly cultural commentary even in a bleak universe of major existential concerns.
For example, Fargo (1996), the Coen Brothers’ self-proclaimed “homespun murder
story,” might be best emblematized by the distressing image of policewoman Marge Gunderson
(Frances McDormand) holding the hyperviolent antagonist Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) at
gunpoint, while the latter feeds Showalter’s (Steve Buscemi) last wordly remains into a
woodchipper, and a shower of flesh and blood mars the serene purity of a snowed-over
midwestern lanscape. Yet every earnest plot point that carries us to Grimsrud’s final
comeuppance gains its texture, beat by beat, through humorous efflorescences. Jerry Lundegaard
(William H. Macy)’s fatal character flaw gets the action rolling when he attempts to extort
money from his father-in-law by having his own wife kidnapped. Yet, his monstrous behavior
emerges from stupidity rather than malice, and the filmmakers repeatedly enable us to laugh at
his naivete, his illusory grasp at power and control that emerges out of panic and disguises itself
under the cloak of a Minnesota-nice demeanor; the Coens are therefore not quite humanizing the
monster, but rather reminding us that the monster has been a function of us humans all along, and
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that thrillers and horrors are as much ways to circumscribe it in discourse as is comedy - the
different fun-house mirrors through which we might approximate our understanding of ethical
dilemmas interpersonally.
Perhaps even more importantly, laughter is often a response even to works that aim to
arouse an entirely earnest effect from their audience, the likes of unhybridized melodrama and
tragedy: unruly audiences have, for example, laughed at so many midnight screenings of Tommy
Wiseau’s awkwardly earnest The Room that the author himself has attempted to reclaim the film
as a comedy, in a transparent attempt to side with the only audience that has actually appreciated
his work, no matter how different their interpretation might be from Wiseau’s initially desired
effect. If we see The Room as a comedy - and it would be hard to experience any kind of
aesthetic pleasure if we were to consider it earnestly - it becomes apparent that, while some
artists excel at extracting laughter from an audience, the joy of laughter is a prerogative of the
beholder. To put it in semiotic terms, the locus of comedy doesn’t lie exclusively in the encoding
process, and laughter is a matter of decoding at least as much as encoding.
The comedic mode therefore asserts itself across the continuum of communication, a
trickster-god or shoulder-devil that delights in laughter without regard to norms of propriety. In
this second chapter, I plan to explore the extent of this mode of discourse, mapping it across the
myriad forms and formats of contemporary media and considering the continuities and ruptures
that it has experienced in the transition from the one-to-many rhetorical model of old forms of
mass-mediated communication to the participatory world of online communication. I will pay
close attention to the electronic convergence of traditional forms and formats as well as the
epistemological disruptions that have emerged as the enclosed spatial arrangement of the room -
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in traditional stand-up comedy - continues to clash with the undifferentiated global polity
envisioned by utopian glosses on the new online public sphere.
The ubiquity of the comedic mode in contemporary culture begs for a name, and, in
keeping with the comedic ethos, I can hardly aim for the staid, earnest image of gold or
diamonds. Instead, following that ethos, I have decided to dub it The Pubic Zirconia Age of
Comedy: a tricksterly combination of bodily bawdiness, programmatic impropriety, and
marketplace logic in an overwhelming world of gleaming, fake symbols of value. This chapter
explores the seemingly boundary-less spread of the comedic mode of discourse, mapping it
across the myriad forms and formats of contemporary media and considering the continuities and
ruptures that it has experienced in the transition from the one-to-many rhetorical model of old
forms of mass-mediated communication to the participatory world of online communication.
In some online venues, the trickster has morphed into its ugliest, most anarchic
manifestation to date: the troll. Emboldened by the possibility of anonymity and the fact that
networked media have largely replaced content curation with popularity algorithms that reward
viral traffic above any other consideration, the Internet has developed a seedy underbelly of
aggressive trolling, rife with behaviors that aim to insult, incense, and trigger other people into
confrontation. The more incendiary the content is, the more likely it is to attract attention and go
viral, providing the clicks and page views necessary to sustain such venues, whose revenue
model often relies on advertising.
The impact of these trolling cultures spreads out of their anonymous safe havens - like
the long-running bulletin board service 4chan and Encyclopedia Dramatica, a wiki site that aims
to be the anti-Wikipedia, insulting and debasing every topic it takes on - into more mainstream
venues, through memes, discussion board posts, and other kinds of viral content. Once they go
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viral, they clash against the moderator-driven ethos of platforms that try to retain some
semblance of discursive boundaries and guidelines – Facebook, Twitter, or moderated comments
sections on various content providers’ websites. Content aggregators and patterns of viral sharing
often disseminate material stripped of its original context; as the material propagates across
different online communities, driven by different goals, identities, and discursive formations, it
undergoes remixes, recaptioning, and reencoding, to the point where its initial meaning may have
become unrecognizable.
These patterns of cross-talk and cross-creation should seem familiar to scholars of the
humanities, because they have been present in literary and journalistic culture for centuries, and
lie at the core of the strategies for creator professionalization and franchise diversification that
emerge in established media industries. Online affordances simply render these processes more
complex, more reliant on metrics of virality and sharing, and connect them to new temporal
configurations – the fragmentation of the news cycle, patterns of consumption that encourage
shorter attention spans, live commentary production and consumption on a screen secondary to
the main event, and the endless rediscovery and arbitrary reemergence of fragments of historical
content in new arrangements online.
High-circulation web comics combine benign yet wacky humor with an earnest
inclination towards instruction and reportage: Matt Inman’s The Oatmeal is an index of its
creator’s passions, which range from his dog and his new Tesla car to large-scale biographical
strips about Nikola Tesla. The enormous corpus of Penny Arcade is also a chronicle of the
vagaries of gaming and Internet culture over the past fifteen years; its creators Jerry Holkins and
Mike Krahulik have also managed to maneuver their online fame into organizing a highly-
successful yearly gaming trade expo / fan meet-up conference called PAX (Penny Arcade Expo),
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inspiring spin-off PAX events around the USA with tens of thousands of attendees. Andrew
Hussey’s Homestuck combines the web comic form with interactive elements drawn from text-
based adventure games and small animations; its complex plot, derived partially from
interactions with the fan base, reached a final conclusion this spring after seven years, over eight
thousand pages, and over eight hundred thousand words. Other examples abound, from Dinosaur
Comics to Perry Bible Fellowship, from Saturday Morning Breakfast Comics to Cyanide and
Happiness, A Softer World, Three Word Phrase, and so on.
One such web comic, xkcd, forms the perfect case study to map the complex
interrelations of the many disciplines that come together in the study of computational culture.
As such, I plan to use it to exemplify what would otherwise become an excessively theoretical
discussion of the complex rhetorical strategies available to creators in the environment of new
media. Publishing a new strip thrice a week since its debut in 2005, xkcd’s creator and former
NASA contractor Randall Munroe has been engaged in a programmatic exploration of the
possible rhetorical techniques and formal affordances of the web-comic form for over a decade.
Billing itself as a “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” xkcd has over time
grown from a modest repository of Munroe’s old doodles into an impressive and aesthetically
cohesive corpus of work that explores scientific subject matter as well as earnest emotional
longings, online and offline geek cultures, and the medium-specific vagaries of contemporary
communication. Munroe applies complex rhetorical patterns to these basic themes, combining a
pared-down, stylized stick-figure drawing style honed and refined over years of consistent
production with recursive play between the basic formal elements of his strips: abstraction and
figuration, composition and framing, intra- and extra-diegetic language within the strip itself, and
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a bonus caption embedded in every comic, which appears when readers hover their mouse over
the strip.
One of the most disruptive implications of the globalized, high-speed, networked
mediascape that emerged over the past twenty years derives from what danah boyd
106
has called
context collapse. This wide-ranging concept probes the ways in which new media
107
efface and
complicate the boundaries between discursive communities, at whatever scale / level of
granularity we might construe them. The issue of granularity is paramount. Linguistic or national
communities might have differing discursive standards. Different institutional environments or
social groupings will similarly have in-group modes of address, content and stylistic taboos, and
so on.
Many of us have the experience of negotiating the differences between different
discursive communities in our everyday life, as a core cultural competency. Linguists speak of
polyglossia not only in terms of the knowledge of different languages, but also different registers
of language: most of us would likely think twice before using copious swear words in a formal
workplace, or around our parents, even as we don’t have such filters around our closest friends.
Such discursive boundaries have eroded in many ways over the course of the past few decades,
as communities that would have been mutually isolated in the past come to clash in online
venues. The variety and variability of their respective discursive standards is highlighted by
context collapse, making it easier and more important than ever for consumers to explore,
internalize, and denaturalize the particular aesthetic and discursive codes of many such

106. Among others, but she does seem to have originated and certainly popularized the term. Her blog
post recollecting the term’s emergence and history can be found at
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2013/12/08/coining-context-collapse.html
107. and the patterns of interaction, communication, and resource allocation in which they are
implicated
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communities. The contemporary meaning of cultural literacy is deeply connected to the ability to
engage in, understand, and flip between modes of address and contexts of communication. Most
importantly, cultural literacy should rely on an understanding of both earnest and skewed,
comedically deconstructive cultural forms and modalities, regardless of the criterion we use to
define the community.
Another difficulty posed by the contemporary cultural moment lies precisely in the
definition of the word “contemporary,” in the context of accelerating developmental inequality
combined with the online erasure of space and the attendant sense of overwhelming, difficult-to-
parse simultaneity. One of the implicit goals of mainstream contemporary human-computer
interaction design is to attune a user’s perception to the temporality of the interface. Platforms
track interaction in a variety of ways, some more opaque than others. Clicks and other explicit
interactions with the interface (comments, shares, and reaction buttons) are logged in conjunction
with data points that the user produces implicitly (hovering the mouse over a particular segment
of the page, for example, or the amount of time a user spends looking at a particular piece of
content, or what kind of advertisement might make the user pause their feed-scrolling to take a
closer look). The back-end algorithms take all this into account in deciding which content to
display to individual users.
Intuitively, algorithmic curation might seem to be motivated by the desire to stem the
flow of an overwhelming flood of information, to pre-select the kinds of content that the user
would have eventually favored on his or her own. Yet, in practice, social networks view human
attention as their product, and their revenue comes from selling access to their users’ attention.
As Tim Wu explains in The Attention Merchants, online tracking quickly became a matter of
intruding on users’ privacy and pitching products to them based on individual worries,
57
weaknesses, and desires.
108
In effect, the past two decades of convergent media have left us with
ubiquitous devices whose only design imperative has been caught up in the circular logic of late
capitalism – to hold our attention, no matter what undesirable outcomes might arise from the
ways in which they disrupt social interaction. (for more on this, see Wu, Vaidhyanathan, Brown,
op.cit.) Adding insult to injury, the proliferation of software layers that enable platforms to
monetize attention has become a web-wide annoyance for end users, as Wu explains:

To make matters worse, the technology of behavioral advertising added layers of
complexity to the code of any website, causing the system to slow or freeze, and
sometimes preventing the page from loading altogether. According to a New
York Times study in 2015, despite the fact that every other technology had
improved, some websites were now taking five seconds or more to load; and the
situation was even worse on mobile phones, with their slower connections.
Videos had a way of popping up and starting to play unbidden; and the user
looking for the stop button would find it was the tiniest of all, and often oddly
located. And something of a ruse as well: if you missed hitting it directly, yet
another website would open, with yet more ads.
109

In effect, by the early 2010s, the Internet had already become a hodgepodge of weaving
cross-site surveillance technologies. Content that isn’t locked behind a pay-wall is made
available through economies of surveillance. Ad-blocking browser extensions, as well as some
ad-blocking technology built into browsers, allows users to limit the extent of tracking,
surveillance, and visual overload involved in the contemporary web experience. Yet advertising
is adapting: native content allows commercials to masquerade as journalism across venues, and
the economies of influence developing on social media are rooted in advertorial economics. The

108
Tim Wu. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble To Get Inside Our Heads. New York, NY: Knopf, 2016.
iBooks version. ref. 725
109
Wu ref. 725.5
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arms race over advertising technology is waged daily between advertisers, platforms, and content
creators, with end-users caught in the maelstrom.
These changes in surveillance and cultural technologies are not just overwhelming to any
individual mind; they are happening overwhelmingly fast, across a variety of boundaries that are
opaque to the end user: national borders, demographic spectra such and income, age, gender,
race, and position in social graphs, as well as more granular, subtler characterizations – aesthetic
preferences, purchase histories, and technological considerations. They are, as Wendy Brown has
suggests in Undoing the Demos, ways of nudging and conditioning individual behavior through a
variety of market-based mechanisms that have in effect turned the individual rational actor of
classical liberal political theory into homo oeconomicus, defined by its position in relation to
market forces rather than state sovereignty.
110
Neoliberalism interpellates its subjects and shapes
their worldviews through overlapping discourses across every aspect of social life, while the
logic of its targeting and interpellation remains ultimately opaque to the end user.
111

Even in the absence of willfully antisocial interventions from bad actors, the concentrated
agenda-setting and attention-manipulating power held by large contemporary online platforms
poses to the idea of individual choice as the fount of good citizenship. It turns out that the most
rational thing to do, especially in a world of humans whose myriad biases can be tracked
automatically, is to exacerbate and cater to such biases, insofar as they can lead users to irrational
yet market-friendly behaviors. “Divide and conquer,” under late capitalism, morphs into “divide
and microtarget.” In this context, the boundary-testing sensibilities of comedy might hold the key

110
Wendy Brown. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2015
111
For more details on how these modes of interpellation function, check Brown 2015 as well as Cathy O’Neil,
Weapons of Math Destruction,
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to a renewed sense of sociality – Critchley’s “dissensus communis” put into motion
simultaneously across a variety of media venues and channels.
President Obama’s deft appeal to comedic cultures stands as a perfect example of the
flows of comedy into and out of the loci of social power: aiming to increase enrollment in his
signature health care exchanges and smooth over the flawed roll-out of the federal enrollment
website, he reached out to young voters through guest appearances on The Colbert Report as
well as the online cult favorite Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, a tongue-in-cheek
parody of the low production values and halting rhythms of amateur video production. Obama’s
engagement with comedy should probably form the basis of a book-length study in its own right,
but it bears mentioning that he understands the complex overlapping contexts of comedy well,
and has also appeared in an in-depth interview on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, and performed
well-conceived and rhetorically powerful comedic routines every year at the White House Press
Correspondents’ dinner. I will pay special attention to his performance with Key and Peele’s
Keegan-Michael Key at the last such dinner in his second term, in which he frames his legacy at
the crux of reactive commentary, institutional frameworks, the ethical desire for progress, the
contradictory incentive structures of journalistic enterprise, and the undercurrents of racism that
have repeatedly dogged his presidency.
If we expand the context, again, we discover that Obama’s performance is simultaneously
topical, aimed at present concerns, and informed by multiple contexts depending on the time
scale we pick for analysis. A long history would take into account the role of the court jester and
carnivalesque freedom in pre-modern cultures, and see contemporary constructs as their
correlatives: the late-night host can publicly address taboo topics, somewhat protected from
retaliation; roasts allow the powerful to be unsettled through insult humor; the same kind of
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buffers operate in a roast room, or at the correspondents’ dinner. A medium-term history would
place Obama’s performance in contrast with Stephen Colbert’s speech at the 2004
correspondents’ dinner, which went viral and therefore marked the transition of these dinners
from a small-scale affair that allows the Washington elite to bracket their enmities for just
enough time to revel in the absurdities of their official patterns of communication, to a public
show that shapes public opinion. Finally, an even shorter history might consider Obama’s chosen
bit from Key and Peele, in which Key plays Obama’s “anger translator” Luther, within the
context of Key and Peele’s strategies, history, and political goals.
Colbert’s 2004 speech is also notable because it was, in effect, occasioned by a moment
of miscomprehension so ridiculous it seems contrived in retrospect. The event organizers
apparently had only a cursory understanding of Colbert’s comedy, and mistook the comedian
himself for the Stephen Colbert persona he developed on The Daily Show and The Colbert
Report – a hyperbolic parody that satirizes the logical inconsistencies, self-serving
rationalizations, and privileged imperviousness to reality that are endemic to the world of right-
wing punditry. Colbert obliged, showed up in character, but didn’t pull his punches; in a half-
hour at the podium, he ruthlessly deconstructed George W. Bush’s manner, worldview, and
ideological aversion to facts. The shocked audience reactions and the uneasy, uncomprehending
smile plastered on the president’s face as he sits a few feet away from the comedian, display the
disconnect between two different realms of comedy. Everyone expected toothless, kind-hearted
teasing, but Colbert took the opportunity to truly transgress, to make a statement, and the most
powerful man in the world had no choice but to sit and listen.

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The job of the professional comedian has also changed significantly in response to the
affordances of new media. For much of the past half century, the majority of mainstream
comedians moved between the stand-up stage, the TV writers’ room, and acting in film and
television. Each of these spaces demands a slightly different type of conception and
performance, and can be broken down into further divisions, which carry their own discursive
traditions and taboos. Depending on the level of granularity at which we want to survey the
landscape, we might talk about open mics and short sets in a group show at a bar as different
from headlining an hour-long routine in a large performance space; about the differences
between performing for an audience of aficionados in New York or Los Angeles, a general
audience in a small town, or a rowdy gilded crowd in a Vegas casino; or about the cultures and
expectations built into specific spaces at particular points in time: the Southern chitlin’ circuit,
New York’s Apollo Theater, or the Borscht Belt theatres that honed the talents of generations of
Jewish entertainers. The writer’s room similarly differs, from show to show, network to network,
and format to format, reflecting larger trends in American culture and the taste and sensibility of
the show runners, writers, performance, and executives attached to the project.
Throughout this chapter, I plan to foreground the formal and performative specificities of
the comedic act, arguing that the context and nuances of comedic utterances are essential to their
understanding across the continuum of reaction and reinscription to which they are subject in
online culture. The ubiquity of the comedic mode in contemporary culture begs for a name, and,
if I’m to do the trickster’s bidding, I can hardly aim for the staid, earnest image of gold or
diamonds. Instead, following that ethos, I have decided to provisionally dub it The Pubic
Zirconia Age of Comedy: a combination of bodily bawdiness, programmatic impropriety, and
performative play, hybridized by the commercial imperatives of capitalist media industries and
62
significantly disrupted by the patterns of production and consumption brought about by the
spread of networked media.
Case Study - The Internet Thinks (Itself): xkcd

In Randall Munroe’s web comic xkcd, the clash between humans and machines – or more
properly, stick figures and computers – becomes an endless fount of comedic premises. Munroe
has been publishing three strips of this web comic every week since 2005, resulting in over 1500
images over the course of the years. The topics range widely, from data visualization of complex
issues,
112
to humor, language, love, complex mathematical topics, and Internet culture. Every
comic also contains a tooltip, displayed when the user hovers the mouse over the image, which
functions as a caption, sometimes clarifying, sometimes nuancing, and at other times defusing
the content of the image itself. The comic has a loyal online following,
113
which has enabled
Munroe to retire from his day job as a NASA consultant, and focus not only on the comic itself,
but also an extensive series of essays titled xkcd What-If?,
114
in which he uses his quantitative
skills, background in physics and the natural sciences, and of course his skills as a comic artist to
answer quirky, unexpected scientific questions in a detailed, well-researched, and accessible
manner.
115

112
He has written one comic titled Money, in which he compiles a variety of econometric sources to visualize the
relative valuation of hundreds of objects, ranging from the level of the dollar to international capital flows on the
scale of billions and trillions of dollars. Randall Munroe, xkcd #980: Money, HTTP://XKCD.COM/980/
113
And his followers have been great at thoroughly documenting and decoding the complex references and
intertextual frames in the comic strip through collaborative work on a wiki hosted at http://www.explainxkcd.com/
114
Subtitle: “Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions”
115
Among my favorites: “What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?” and
“How quickly would the oceans drain if a circular portal 10 meters in radius leading into space was created at the
bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest spot in the ocean? How would the Earth change as water is being
drained?”
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I am inspired in this object of study by several antecedents. Barthes’s serious semiotic
discussion of a pasta ad in Rhetoric of the Image comes to mind, as well as the aptness of
semiotic methods, from Peirce to Eco, for
decoding the world of images. Even more so,
however, I am interested in the ways in which
Munroe builds medium-specific arguments in
his comic strips, finely tuned to the complex
issues surrounding Internet culture. Consider,
for example, even the following comic, much
simpler than most of his work, which takes
aim at the scourge of thoughtlessly aggressive
commenters on most web sites:
This, combined with several other xkcds that
focus on the cultural issues surrounding the
Internet, points to Munroe as a wry observer of the damages wrought by a culture that often
encourages (through anonymity) kneejerk responses and aggressive trolling.
The growing availability of Internet access in the 21
st
century has had significant positive
results, but it has also resulted in what psychologist John Suler calls the online disinhibition
effect. Suler argues that the online environment is a perfect storm of factors that incentivize
disinhibited behaviors that would never occur in face-to-face communication. Dissociative
anonymity, the impression of invisibility, the asynchronous nature of online communication,
solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination, and the appearance of minimized authority all
contribute to this effect. Some of its results are positive: online users can explore topics that are
xkcd #481: Listen to Yourself
Tooltip: "Man, I just wanted to learn how babby was formed”
"
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taboo in their social environment, find community and confessional freedom online, and even
engage in acts of generosity that would have been impossible in the offline world. On the other
hand, they might undergo a process that Suler calls toxic disinhibition, “an acting out of
unsavory needs and wishes.”
The concern that the cloak of untraceability or invisibility might result in antisocial behaviors
is hardly a new one. Plato’s Republic problematizes the issue through a conversation between
Glaucon and Socrates regarding the Ring of Gyges, a mythical artifact that renders its wearer
invisible, freeing him to behave amorally, without the fear of social reprisal and (in this case,
literal) ostracization. In The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells imagines a similar circumstance, as the
novel’s protagonist, doomed to permanent physical invisibility after an irreversible self-
administered experiment, plans to subject society to a “Reign of Terror.” The popular gaming
web comic Penny Arcade, like xkcd and many other artistic works that comment on online
culture, tackled the topic in a 2004 single-panel installment titled Green Blackboards (And Other
Anomalies). At the top of the eponymous blackboard lies the thesis: “Unreal Tournament 2004
lends incontrovertible proof to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.” The bottom
illustrates this “theory,” attributed to one of the comic’s two protagonists: “Normal Person +
Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.”
xkcd has many charms beyond its polemical impulse, however. Munroe excels at creating
medium-specific arguments that destabilize, invert, and illuminate the structures of meaning in
new media through pictorial representation. A short excursus on W.J.T. Mitchell’s work in art
history should help me contextualize this problem properly. Mitchell’s work throughout his
entire career aims to complement the semiotic and iconological traditions of image interpretation
with a thorough understanding of medium specificity and cultural coding, and illuminate the
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historical grounding of a variety of cultural assumptions at the core of the traditions of art
history, as well as the failures of totalizing high theory. His is a most specific brand of visual
analysis, delving into in-depth interpretation of specific artifacts to make larger points about
visual culture and its coding strategies. In his essay on images in Critical Terms for Media
Studies, he defines the image as both a phenomenon of physical apperception and of memory,
whose uneasy interrelation with the medium that contains it serves to illuminate the pathways of
mediation:
[…]the image is the uncanny content of a medium, the shape or form it assumes, the
thing that makes its appearance in a medium while making the medium itself appear as
medium.
116

In the way that we apprehend images, they seem to have what Mitchell, in continuation of
Erwin Panofsky’s iconology, calls “pre-iconographic content,”
117
which also explains their
emergence across media as the central element of media functions. This essential role of the image,
which feels real even as we know that it isn’t, is at the core of signification and representation.
Mitchell takes up one of the valences of this challenge inherent in images in his essay on the history
of interpretation of abstract painting as a purely imagistic realm, opposed to verbal structures of
meaning, “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and the Repression of Language.”
118
In this
essay, Mitchell deconstructs the historiography of modernist painting as a realm apart from
language, illuminating the ways in which that claim to pictorial independence is in fact the very
verbal content of abstract painting – it simply has to be provided from the outside, rather than the

116
Mitchell 2010, 40
117
Mitchell 2010, 39
118
W.J.T. Mitchell. “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and the Repression of Language.” Critical Inquiry, Vol.
15, No. 2 (Winter 1989), pp. 348-371
67
inside of the work, because of the wall that modernism tried to erect between visual and linguistic
expression. The construct of “art theory” was necessary in order to understand the polemic at the
core of American abstract expressionism, and therefore the aesthetic project of these works
depended on language like any other. As such, the discourses of theory were essentially embedded
in the regime of apprehension that the work demanded.
119
The “purity” of abstract modernist
images is thus revealed, in Mitchell’s interpretation, as an ideological project, linked to the
histories of modernism. Even more striking is the implication that I would draw from this
discussion that images don’t really speak apart from structures of language that are embedded in
them. We might see naturally, but we apprehend sociohistorically, that is to say, through language;
the task of the media critic is to illuminate this embedded language and its assumptions.
Returning to xkcd with this observation, I want to bring up one of Munroe’s most successful
comics, if we can still call it that: xkcd #1037, titled “Umwelt,” and published on April’s Fools
day in 2012. The tooltip on this comic contains the following text:
Umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up on different things, different animals
in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds. Everything about you shapes
the world you inhabit--from your ideology to your glasses prescription to your web
browser.
120

119
Mitchell 1989, 354-355
120
Munroe, https://xkcd.com/1037/
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The first time I saw this comic, I was living in Boston, and the following image displayed
on my laptop:
At first, I assumed that this was a Northeasterner’s joke about the variations in weather
perception between people from different parts of the country, and that in and of itself satisfied me
in relation to the tooltip. However, later that day I revisited the comic from my phone, and found
a completely different image under the same title:

Not quite understanding what was going on, I went online looking for an explanation.
Apparently, this image is displayed at times on web browsers that do not support JavaScript – a
nondescript, tiny hole, onto a wide universe that cannot be comprehended, just as the modern web
is simply not navigable without Java. Emboldened, I pressed on, and started collecting variations
of the comic. Apparently, Munroe had decided to express the concept of Umwelt through an
interactive comic that displays different images based on a wide variety of factors, including
location, time of day, a fair degree of randomness, the browser being used by the viewer, and so
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on. For example, various versions of the following image displayed on devices connected to IP
ranges assigned to corporate networks, from the New York Times to Microsoft and IBM:

Referrals from various social networks were aimed directly at the users of the network
(Twitter on the left, Reddit on the right):

The pattern continued based on a seemingly endless
number of variables: regional and national locales,
specialized individual comics for people at schools with large contingents of programmers (and
therefore Munroe followers), such as Carnegie Mellon and MIT, strips that picked up on school
rivalries like the one between Smith and Wellesley, different images that displayed on outdated
and unpopular web browsers (Netscape Navigator, Maxthon), different images that displayed for
referral links from other web comics, images that resized as the browser window was resized to
display several extra panels, and even a specialized variant of the first version I saw, which was
70
directed at astronauts on the International Space Station, and only displayed for users in that IP
range:

Each individual image can be read on its own and related to the content of the tooltip in
obvious ways, but Munroe’s most interesting appeal to us lies in the congregation of all these
individual images and our understanding of the new media structures that make them possible. The
small individual jokes, catered to the local parochial sensibilities of whatever geographical or
cultural identity the code of the comic has identified as appropriate for each particular user, pale
in comparison with the larger point made by the comic, in a completely medium-specific dialect.
Just as abstract modernist painters wanted to turn our attention to the form rather than the content
of the medium (and, in the process, actually made their works depend on a polemical verbal
decoding paradigm), Munroe wants us to be aware of both. His comic makes no sense without a
structural, linguistic awareness of the characteristics of the medium as a whole, and the
understanding that our media shape our everyday reality. The embedded theoretical content that
links all these images together is a variation on the concept of Umwelt, and the caption points us
towards the critical theoretical project of this individual comic. It shows that the ideological
framework of the web effaces the inherent contradiction between the personalization of content
71
based on various demographic and technological factors and the cyberlibertarian/cyber-utopian
rhetoric that casts the network as the ultimate, perfect, unbiased window onto reality.
A particular version of this argument has been made, for example, by Eli Pariser, whose
book The Filter Bubble
121
starts from the observation that we no longer have access to a
standardized version of Google search. Rather, the Google algorithm personalizes search results
based on tens of different factors, from location to browser and device, catering to the individual’s
preferences as they emerge from earlier search and click patterns as well algorithmic guesses at
various demographic and political factors. When the Internet knows too much about us, in its desire
to please (because ultimately, Google’s revenue stream relies on targeted advertising), it is willing
to present us with a vision of the world much too compatible with our own biases. Pariser’s TED
talk on the topic, given during the major Egyptian street protests that were going to result in
president Hosni Mubarak’s resignation and years of political turmoil, offers a poignant example.
Pariser’s version of a Google search for the term “Egypt” foregrounded the important political
news emerging from the region. When he asked a friend who self-identifies as conservative to
perform the same search, all he got was tourism information. This discrepancy points to the
political dangers of personalization in a web economy of viral content and individualized
preference: we are entering a world in which it is very easy to live in a cultural bubble of
unchallenged self-consistent ideological attitudes – and the transition has already started.
The tools and frameworks of new media thus enable us to access content with a speed and
depth never before seen in the history of media, but also carry a dark dystopian potential. Instead
of democratizing knowledge and enabling enhanced forms of citizenship, the corporate and market

121
Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. (New York, NY: Penguin, 2011)
72
power dynamics behind these frameworks, which love to project a self-effacing appearance of
impartiality, can silo us into closed communities of discourse. The task of the web critic and the
web artist, then, is more important than ever – as information targets us, we must learn to fight
back.
#TheDress

New media can either relativize or
totalize our conceptions of the world,
and my discussion of the xkcd
Umwelt comic hopefully points to the
ways in which I believe medium-
specific art can illuminate the vexing
characteristics of computational logic
combined with current industrial
formations. However, the logic of
virality – or, to use Henry Jenkins’s
unfortunately margarine-evoking
term, spreadability
122
- doesn’t
differentiate between such complex
political/rhetorical/aesthetic projects
and the products of happenstance; if
anything, it privileges the latter. However, happenstance can also break through boundaries of

122
Henry Jenkins. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. (New York, NY: New
York University Press, 2013.
Figure 2. The dress in question, as posted by Tumblr user swiked
73
perception, creating important educational moments. With this in mind, I want to turn my attention
briefly to a recent viral phenomenon that became so instantly popular that it overwhelmed even
Buzzfeed’s servers: #TheDress
123124
, a simple photo (reproduced above) that reverberated across
old and new media on and after February 26
th
of this year, and has accumulated over 38 million
views on Buzzfeed alone.
The photo of the dress was posted in concert with a question: what colors do you see in it?
At first, to me, it looked white and gold, and I was confused by the many online posts that seemed
to identify it as blue and black. Even with my training in the technologies of image production and
associated critical methodologies, I trusted my eyes. We know that we have to challenge stories,
to challenge interpretations of the world - but its apperception always seems more natural - perhaps
because it is so embedded in our being. We think our way through grand theories of the world -
and therefore we can challenge them through the same matter that creates them. But, in day to day
life, we are almost entirely defined by the seemingly natural framework of our senses. After first
seeing the photo, I went on with my day, slightly amused by the fact that the Internet had seemingly
reached peak trolling: the blue and black crowd was obviously engaged in a major emergent,
contrarian prank, driving everyone who didn't get the joke insane.
Imagine my surprise when I got home that night, and saw the dress pop up in all my social
feeds. Yet now, the same dress, the same exact image, looked blue and black. After getting my
bearings, I started looking for explanations and devising my own, based on various technological
factors (lens flare and color temperature processing in digital sensors) as well as the cognitive

123
Original source: http://swiked.tumblr.com/post/112073818575/guys-please-help-me-is-this-dress-white-and
124
Cates Holderness, “What Colors Are This Dress?,” Buzzfeed, Feb. 26, 2015. Retrieved from
http://www.buzzfeed.com/catesish/help-am-i-going-insane-its-definitely-blue#.ccJOa85oKY
74
framework that underpins our perception. What seemed more interesting, however, was the online
frenzy itself: this image, interpreted differently on basic chromatic terms by different populations,
challenged our seemingly natural
structures of perception. A rift, long
known to cognitive scientists, was
exposed to the world intuitively. The
image didn't only go viral just because it
naturally bred contrarianism. It went
viral because it immediately exposed
the disquieting facts behind the ways
our brain processes color to ensure its
constancy in a variety of lighting
situations. It showed, in no uncertain terms, that we do not see naturally.
This, I would argue, is the positive valence of virality: sometimes, the quirks of mass
phenomena can illuminate essential hidden patterns of that define our existence in and
experience of the world. Just as one of the major threads of the digital humanities attempts to
critique and illuminate the fraught assumptions hidden by an ideology of self-effacement in our
digital tools and frameworks, the same important theoretical work also takes place in the
complex encoding of various artifacts that speak of new media in medium-specific terms. And if
we are really in the late moments of a long transition from verbal and written ways of making
sense of the world to visual ones (the trend art historians call the pictorial turn), our role as
scholars is not to retreat into the safe haven of verbal traditions of interpretation, but rather use
those, in conjunction with new, medium-specific tools, to decode and situate the complex
Randall Munroe, xkcd #1492: Dress Color
75
emergent world of new media. We are privileged with early access to multimodal literacy – the
next step is to take it seriously and fully integrate it into our critical and educational practices,
lest we become stuck in an ivory tower of outdated methods and argumentative modalities.

Chapter III. Satire and Worldbuilding

The breadth of the satirical imagination in the contemporary mediascape defies static
definitions and taxonomies. Although satire has been categorized as a genre over the course of
centuries of literary theory, most contemporary accounts of satire argue that it functions across
genres, inflecting many different forms of discourse and artistic practice. In his complex “re-
introduction” of satire, Dustin Griffin therefore calls it a “mode” or “procedure,”
125
exploring its
affinities with the functions and modalities of polemical rhetoric. Charles Knight similarly
writes not just of satire, but of a “satiric frame of mind”, combining two elements: “ironic
perspective on [a] historical subject and parodic borrowing of a literary form”
126
.
The satirical world-view therefore emerges primarily from a critical attitude towards the
content to be represented, combined with rhetorical strategies and formal devices that elicit a
comedic response. In the terminology of world-building, there are two aspects that mark any
particular world as satirical: first, the presence of structural characteristics that make a polemical,
politically-charged implied or explicit argument about the workings of the homologous
structures in the real world; and second, the use of humorous medium- or genre-specific devices
(jokes, gags, puns, caricature, hyperbole, absurdist contrast, word play) that explore the
divergence between the constructed world and reality. The world-building view re-frames
Knight’s insights in a more general formulation, highlighting the fact that contemporary satires

125
Dustin Griffin. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1994: page 4
126
Charles A. Knight. The Literature of Satire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004: page 8 et
passim
77
borrow not only literary forms, but rather world-building forms and devices that take up
medium-specific characteristics across the breadth of the contemporary, fragmented mediascape.
Much of the contemporary understanding of satire relies on parallels to its historical
correlatives: Greek satyr plays and Roman saturae, Horatian and Juvenalian verse and
Menippean prose, or the satirical polemics in the poems of Alexander Pope and the poems and
prose of Jonathan Swift. Drawing inspiration from these historical traditions, Dustin Griffin
insists that satire has historically functioned in the context of a larger cultural dialogue, either
through univocal interventions that are supposed to participate in a contextual debate, or
embedding within a single work multiple, distinct, satirical voices engaged in a polemical
dialogue.
127

Satires that derive their polemic power from complex world-building consequently rely
on a polyphony of voices, allowing the audience to come to their own conclusions regarding the
inconsistencies of particular voices within the represented world. They foreground a complex
interplay between univocal riffs on a single topic, back-and-forth battles of wit, and multiple,
partial views on the topics at hand within the constraints of a single work. In Griffin’s terms,
they enjoin the audience to seek out the satiric “truth” rather than locating it in the voice of a
single, reliable narrator.
128
As such, satirical worlds prompt their audiences to reconsider
received notions of goodness, truth, prosocial behavior, and the ways in which such notions
might be complicated by social negotiations.

127
Griffin, 1994: 32, 39, 41, et passim
128
Griffin, 1994: 41
78
Beyond their explicit targets, most satires also focus on processes of mediation as their
implicit object. A foundational world-building pattern of satire focuses implicitly on the
concentric processes of abstraction required to articulate the connection between the individual
body and the body politic: from the individual to the family, to formal institutions (workplace
and/or public space), to tribe, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual orientation. The satirical view
foregrounds the tensions and paradoxes that emerge across these different levels of identity
formation, highlighting the inconsistencies between a world-view defined in strict ideological
terms and the more complex reality of daily human interaction. Political abstractions such as
citizenship, legal frameworks, and institutions are, for the satirist world-builder, structural
patterns of social power that elide the complexities of human behavior, motivation, and
cooperation.
Origins of Satirical World-building

The comedies of the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes (circa 446-386 BC) form the
earliest surviving corpus of satirical work in the Western world. Aristophanes came of age
during the latter part of Athens’s Golden Age under the rule of Pericles (circa 461-429 BC). By
the time of Aristophanes’ plays, Athens had become embroiled in the Pelopponesian war (431-
404 BC), a protracted conflict between the city-states under Athenian hegemonic rule and the
Pelopponesian League led by Sparta. Aristophanes opposed the war, satirizing the perceived
moral and intellectual decay of the Athenian populace under the rule of Pericles’ successor
Cleon, a bellicose populist. Most of the action in his plays takes place in a satirically-heightened
version of the real world, interspersed with fantastic and mythological elements that allow
Aristophanes to critique Athenian politics and mores through fictional world--building.
79
Some of these departures from reality are quite cursory, contained in the words or actions
of a single character. The protagonist of The Wasps (422 BC), for example, is so obsessed with
his power as a juror that he compares himself hubristically with Zeus.
129
In other instances,
Aristophanes resorts to allegorical personifications of abstract concepts, which enable him to
explore large-scale political issues within the limitations of live theatre. His last play, Wealth
(388 BC), critiques the role of money in Athenian society through a personification of wealth
itself (Plutus) as well as poverty (Penia). Plutus is blind, and therefore unable to distribute his
bounty to the virtuous. Chremylus, the protagonist of the play, helps Plutus regain his sight,
banishes Penia (who argues that without poverty, there would be no slaves left and therefore no
labor to maintain the polis), and redistributes wealth to the virtuous. The traditional Olympian
gods send their messenger Hermes to register their displeasure at this new state of affairs, in
which humans have turned their attention from Zeus to Plutus. The play’s utopian vision comes
to fruition when the citizens force Hermes to work for them and install Plutus in the Acropolis,
replacing Zeus at the geographical and conceptual center of Athenian political life.
130
The same
kind of allegorical world-building undergirds Peace (421 BC), in which the worship of War and
his servant Havoc has displaced the traditional deities. The protagonist inspires the community
to take back their city, defeating War and liberating Peace, Harvest, and Festival, the deities that
War has maliciously imprisoned with the aid of power-hungry demagogues. Similarly, the
eponymous deities of The Clouds (423 BC), who preside over metaphysical sophistry, allow

129
David E. Konstan Greek Comedy and Ideology. New York, NY and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
1995: page 16
130
Konstan, 1995: 75-90
80
Aristophanes to launch an attack against Socratic philosophy, which the play portrays as
impractical and self-involved.
Aristophanes creates significantly more expansive satirical worlds in two of his plays:
The Birds (414 BC) and The Frogs (405 BC). In The Birds, two Athenians displeased with the
state of their city set off to found a new, better polis. They search for the Thracian king,
Thereus, who has been transformed into a hoopoe and therefore can guide them with the wisdom
of both earthbound and celestial beings. Upon finding him, they decide to found a city among
the birds themselves, for amusingly hegemonic reasons: by controlling the interstitial realm, they
can impose their will on both the earthlings below them and the gods above, the latter of whom
would starve if deprived of the sacrificial aromas wafting up from the ground.
131
David
Konstan notes the foundational irony of this utopian endeavor: in their search for a space
unbound by the legal and political strictures of Athenian life, the protagonists replicate in the
skies the hegemonic struggles that they were initially attempting to escape. The only major
difference between their project and contemporary, real-world Athenian naval expansionism
seems to be their direction of travel.
132

The Frogs is Aristophanes’s least typical play, and the one that has attracted the most
scholarly attention because of its complex meta-commentary on the conventions of the Greek
dramatic arts. As Leo Strauss notes in Socrates and Aristophanes (1966), the play signals its
departure from established tropes from the beginning: the protagonist is Dionysos, God of
revelry and theatre itself, rather than a simple human; the play opens with a dialogue between a

131
Konstan, 1995: 29-30
132
Konstan, 1995: 30-44
81
master (Dionysos) and his slave Xanthias, rather than a complaint; they discuss how best to make
an audience laugh, differentiating between the simple pleasures of physical comedy and more
refined forms of humor.
133
Xanthias, the everyman, is inclined to make physical jokes, which
Dionysos has come to abhor as boring clichés. Although this opening scene is relatively short, it
abounds in subtextual irony: in discussing physical humor, the characters are simultaneously
problematizing easy jokes and performing them for the audience.
The same pattern of ironic juxtaposition and knowledgeable meta-commentary structures
the entirety of the play, simultaneously engaging in the established conventions of the Ancient
Greek dramatic arts and subverting them. The overall plot is a parody of the katabasis, a
mythological trope present in many traditional cultures, in which the hero descends into the
underworld in order to return a character to life; the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is the most
prominent Greek example. As the patron god of the theater, Dionysos knows this, and his first
stop on the journey is at his half-brother Herakles’s abode, to ask for advice. In the conversation
with Herakles, who had retrieved the three-headed hound Cerberus from the underworld in his
own katabasis, Dionysos reveals that he intends to resurrect the tragedian Euripides, who had
passed away the year before The Frogs premiered, because there are “no good poets” left in
Athens. Herakles, as knowledgeable as Dionysos, suggests that he might as well bring back
Sophocles, who had also died in the months leading up to the play’s premiere at the Lenaia
festival.
134
Almost every line of their conversation is a laugh line, peppered with bawdy
physical and sexual commentary. Herakles mocks Dionysos for disguising himself with a pelt

133
Leo Strauss. Socrates and Aristophanes. Chicago, IL and London, UK: University of Chicago Press, 1966: page
236
134
Kenneth Dover. Aristophanes, Frogs, Edited, with Introduction and Commentary by Kenneth Dover. Oxford,
UK: Claredon Press, 1993: pages 6-9
82
and club, Herakles’s own attributes, but wearing that outfit over Dionysos’s traditional
androgynous garb. He lampoons the lines that Dionysos cites as proof to Euripides’s superiority
over still-living writers, whose work they also discuss. When Dionysos asks for an easy way
into the underworld, Herakles suggests three different ways that he could commit suicide, before
telling him to go to Lake Acheron, the boundary to the netherworld, and pay the mythical
ferryman Charon to carry him across in his boat. Throughout the conversation, they ignore
Xanthias, who keeps complaining about being ignored and aching under the burden of their
luggage.
Throughout its action, the play comments on and subverts the established tropes of its
established mythological world. Dionysos, albeit a god, is debased in every way imaginable,
from verbal mockery and abuse to physical punishment; even Xanthias the slave outmaneuvers
him at every step. As Dionysos crosses into Hades, even the frogs turn against him, driving him
to paroxystic rage with their cackling refrain, “brekekekèx-koàx-koáx”. Charon refuses to carry
Xanthias alongside Dionysos in his boat because he is a slave, and reveals that he can just walk
around Acheron — a stunning parodic rendering of the established myth, in which the border to
the netherworld is nearly impenetrable. When, after a protracted series of misadventures,
Dionysos finally makes its way to the depths of Hades, he learns that Euripides has challenged
Aeschylus, the grandfather of Greek tragedy during the Golden Age of Athens, to a ritualistic
battle of wits in an attempt to unseat him as the leading poet of the underworld. Dionysos
presides over their exchange of antagonistic barbs, which parody the stylistics, character types,
and poetic devices employed in their plays. Aristophanes’s version of Hades, devoid of the
gravitas that it used to hold in oral mythology and classic tragedy, becomes a staging ground for
a battle between Aeschylus’s old-fashioned language of soaring metaphors and larger-than-life
83
characters and Euripides’s more realistic, pragmatic, and colloquial style.
135
Dionysos
ultimately decides in favor of Aeschylus, as his high morality seems more appealing than
Euripides’s ambivalent equivocations.
The sheer intertextual density of The Frogs is astonishing considering that ancient Greek
plays were traditionally only performed once, during the theatre festival for which they were
written. The Frogs, as Erich Segal points out in The Death of Comedy (2001), is not only
responding to the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles and Athens’s impending defeat in the
Pelopponesian War; it is also a reflection of the momentous cultural shift between the transient
oral culture of the past and the growing impact of written culture.
136
Although it is packed to
the brim with the kind of easily understandable physical jokes that Dionysos decries at the very
beginning, it is clearly written with a knowledgeable and sophisticated audience in mind —in
other words, a literate audience. The ideal viewer would have been able to appreciate the
stylistic differences between the work of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, the mythological
and ritual references peppered throughout, as well as the underlying political message about the
decay of Athenian culture as a result of the protracted Pelopponesian war. The satirical
rendering of Hades in The Frogs creates an interplay between the real political world of post-
Periclean Athens, the imaginary worlds created by two generations of Greek playwrights, and the
established world of Olympian mythology transmitted through centuries of Greek oral culture

135
Erich Segal. The Death of Comedy. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2001: page
105
136
Segal 2001: 103
84
and religious practice. Although bewilderingly complex, The Frogs was an instant success, and
remains the only recorded instance of a play receiving an encore performance at Lenaia.
137

From Antiquity to Modernity

After the advent of writing, satirical literature diverged into two main categories. Verse
satires, whether Horatian or Juvenalian, were mainly univocal writings attacking a particular
individual or behavior, and did not engage in significant world-building. On the other hand, the
tradition of Menippean prose satire, which Mikhail Bakhtin identifies as one of the main
historical precursors to the novel, combined sustained plot development with the exploration of
well-developed real and fictional worlds. The structural patterns of Menippean satire draw
inspiration from the two genres concerned with the exploration of faraway worlds: mythology
and travel literature.
Although they are mentioned by several ancient sources, Menippus’s own writings from
the 3rd century BC are entirely lost. A version of Menippus, however, appears as the fictional
narrator in “Menippus” and “Icaromennipus”, two works by Lucian of Samosata, a Syriac-Greek
writer from the 2nd century AD. In these short stories, Menippus travels to Hades and the
heavens, respectively, in a failed attempt to come to terms with the implications of mythology
and philosophy.
138
Lucian’s most popular work, titled True History, is also an extended
example of Menippean satire. It begins with a short polemic against “the old poets,
historiographers, and philosophers” who present mythical and fantastic lies as truth. In contrast,
Lucian warns the reader that his “true stories” are lies, before setting off to recount a journey that

137
Segal, 1995: 106
138
R. Bracht Branham. Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions. Cambridge, MA and London,
UK: Harvard University Press, 1989: pages 14-27
85
includes various fantastic earthly realms, an episode in the belly of a whale, and the first
surviving instances of extraterrestrial travel in literature. His version of celestial realms includes
a satire of the human inclination for warfare: the armies of the sun and the moon are warring
over control of the morning star. Back on Earth, Lucian’s travels take him to the land of the
blessed, where his mentions of historical figures reveal his true satirical target: the high-minded
denial of pleasure. Plato, for example, is absent from the banquet halls of the afterlife, and
instead lives on his own, in accordance to the legal and governmental tenets of his writing. The
Stoics are also absent, because, even after death, they spend their time trying to climb “the height
of virtue’s hill”. Free love reigns, both heterosexual and homosexual; the only widespread
condemnation is aimed at Socrates, because he denies that his attraction to young men is sexual
in nature. Throughout these imaginary tales, Lucian elevates the pleasures of the imagination
and the importance of honesty over pretense.
In the The Anatomy of Satire (1962), Gilbert Highet dismisses Lucian’s worlds as
derivative and insufficiently well-developed, but provides wonderful in-depth accounts of the
writers who would take up the project of satirical world-building throughout the Renaissance and
Enlightenment. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is, of course, the genre’s landmark,
and Highet identifies the satirical target of every world in Swift’s opus. When Gulliver travels to
the shrunken land of Lilliput, and Brobdingnag, the giants’ abode, Swift is using these spaces to
comment on France during the reign of Louis XIV and Russia under Tsar Peter. The impractical
yet highly-learned flying island of Laputa, which dominates its earthly subjects from the skies, is
inspired by the British Royal Society. Balnibarbi, ruled over by Laputa, as well as the debased
humanoid Yahoos ruled over by the Houyhnhnms, recall the plight of the Irish under British rule.
The Houyhnhnms, described as horse-like creatures, are ideally rational, a cipher for the virtues
86
of the Enlightenment.
139
The flying island of Laputa, incidentally, highlights Aristophanes’s
foundational influence to the genre. Swift’s account of the island’s impractical research is highly
reminiscent of the anti-Socratic raillery in The Clouds, whereas Laputa’s celestial dominance
over its subjects recalls the airborne city of The Birds.
Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) also begins as a travel narrative, yet soon settles into an
in-depth description of the titular country. Many names in Erewhon are British names rendered
backwards; Erewhon itself is “Nohwere” backwards, a near-reversal of the literal English
translation of “Utopia”. Erewhonian customs, too, are usually mirror versions of the customs in
Butler’s native Victorian England, allowing him to indirectly comment on the unspoken
assumptions of his contemporary culture. Illness in Erewhon is tried in courts of law and
punished by imprisonment; crime, however, is treated as an illness would be in England.
Erewhon has outlawed mechanical technology, and its colleges teach “unreason” instead of
reason. These mirrored concepts make for fascinating thought experiments, but they at times
lapse into inconsistency. For example, Butler’s inquiry into the idea of treating crime as if it
were illness falls apart when we learn that “straighteners” —the moral doctors of Erewhon—
habitually prescribe enforced fasts and lashings; the medical solution to crime turns out to be
also rather punitive. Erewhon’s satirical approach has much in common with Thomas More’s
Utopia (1516), its evident forebear and mirror image. Both books explore the social organization
and mores of stable imaginary societies in considerable detail, providing the authors with an
opportunity to reflect on the implications of real-world social systems without fear of retribution.
More’s rational Utopia, as Highet points out, was a polar opposite of his own dogmatic

139
Gilbert Highet. The Anatomy of Satire. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962: page 159
87
society.
140
Butler’s unscientific yet stable Erewhon, conversely, was at odds with the
technologically-enabled colonialism and ruthless foreign trade practices of Victorian England;
indeed, the novel ends with England’s decision to expand its reach to the newfound land.
Yet satire is not always high-minded; it just as often juxtaposes the lure of the ideal with
bodily humor, vulgar realism, and the aesthetic of the grotesque. François Rabelais constructs a
world of absolute bodily excess in the five volumes of his Gargantua and Pantagruel cycle,
published between the 1530s and the 1560s. In the first two books, the titular giants move
between their homeland and places in medieval France, and Rabelais draws much humor from
the contrast between their physical excess and the scale of the real world. In the latter books,
they travel across a variety of fictional lands in search of the “Oracle of the Holy Bottle”, in a
bawdy disjointed parody that references elements of the Odyssey and the Arthurian search for the
Holy Grail.
141
A similar deconstruction of the worlds of chivalric adventure underpins the two
books of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote cycle, published in 1605 and 1615. Their
eponymous protagonist lives in a realistic, at times vulgar, version of medieval Spain; however,
he has read so many adventure tales that he believes himself to be a knight-errant questing for
adventure. Cervantes’s satire hinges on contrast between Quixote’s delusional, subjective
experience of the world and the reality of his surroundings.
142

Swift and Rabelais highlight beastly characteristics in humans, but stop short of rendering
entire human worlds in animal terms. Highet identifies one medieval satirical cycle that takes

140
Highet, 1962: 162
141
Highet, 1962: 115, 162
142
Highet, 1962: 116-119
88
place entirely in the animal kingdom, the fables of Reynard the Fox. These tales reproduce the
hierarchy of the medieval court, with animals standing in for every role: Noble the Lion is king,
and he is surrounded by Bruin the Bear, Isengrim the Wolf, Tybert the Cat, and Chanticleer the
Cock. Reynard the trickster, outside the official hierarchy, manipulates them all with cleverness
and wit.
143

In the considerably more domesticated 20th century, an echo of Reynard surfaces in the
figure of the cat in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). Orwell’s satire of Stalinism
reimagines the Russian Revolution as a revolt of farm animals against human owners, followed
by the pigs’ betrayal of the other animals and their progressive consolidation of power. The cat,
who continuously equivocates between political positions, retains its freedom of thought and
movement. It escapes oppression by refusing to accept the arbitrary boundaries imposed on the
other animals by the pigs. Just like Reynard the Fox, it transcends the social order that surrounds
it, by acting as an unbound, radically free trickster. The fox and the cat are therefore textual
instantiations of the satirical drive, avatars of the satirist that place the voice of satirical dissent at
the apex of the in-world hierarchy of satirical worlds.
American Satirical Worlds in the 20th and 21st Century

Satirical world-building underpins a rich tradition of critique and ambivalent political
dissent in American culture, cutting across ideological lines. As Amber Day explains in the
introduction to Satire and Dissent (2011), the satirical impulse can have both conservative and
progressive valences. The conservative interpretation focuses on satirists’ tendency to “ridicule

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Highet, 1962: 178-179
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non-normative behavior, thereby reinforcing existing attitudes.”
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Conversely, Day argues that
the work of liberal and progressive satirists has become a nexus for the formation of critical
counterpublics in the American public sphere.
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Day focuses primarily on explicitly activist
humor, but Stephen Kercher comes to similar conclusions in his wider-ranging discussion of
post-war American liberal satire, in which he shows that, although they are often avowedly
liberal, American satirists do not shy away from critiquing the political failures of liberal
politicians.
This political ambivalence is apparent in one of the most popular satirical worlds of
American folk culture, the hobo utopia that came to be known as Big Rock Candy Mountain,
after Harry McClintock’s 1928 recording of the eponymous song. As Hal Rammel shows in his
monograph Nowhere in America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias
(1990), McClintock’s humorous depiction of this land of plenty is just one of many renderings of
a utopian vision present across a variety of folk cultures ranging from Ancient Greece, through
medieval Europe (where it was often named Cockaigne), and into modernity. Rammel
chronicles the tension between the utopian visions of plenty that drew immigrants to the
American continent, American settler-colonialism, and the harsh realities of life on the American
frontier, thereby positioning Big Rock Candy Mountain at the center of the American folk
imaginary.
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Day, Amber. Satire and Dissent. Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2011, 2011: Page
11
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Day, 2011: 13-23 et passim
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Hal Rammel. Nowhere in America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias. Urbana and
Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990: page 19 et passim
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Political satire often highlights the dangers of such utopian visions of purity, revealing
the ways in which utopian visions of perfection mask a latent dystopian potential. Stanley
Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learn the Bomb (1964)
famously grounds its satire of Cold War politics and the threat of nuclear mutually assured
destruction in a character’s obsession with physical purity. Strangelove is situated in a
satirically-heightened version of the Primary World, but the same pattern equating the drive to
purity with fascistic warmongering lies at the core of Starship Troopers (1997), Paul
Verhoeven’s hostile adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel. Heinlein’s novel glorifies
authority and upholds a vision of citizenship rooted in military service. Verhoeven satirizes the
utopian militarism of the original through exaggerated world-building and directorial choices,
rather than direct commentary. The film’s version of Buenos Aires is populated by fair-skinned,
Aryan-looking actors surrounded by a militaristic culture that asserts itself through grandiose
propaganda videos steeped in fascistic imagery. The film’s overwrought melodrama, its
glorification of warfare and its portrayal of the alien enemies as a mindless, abject, insectile other
slowly gives way to the gruesome realities of the battlefield and the realization that the enemy is
in fact sentient. Behind the glossy façade of this world’s utopian self-image lies its dystopian
reality: endless, self-perpetuating warfare. An obsession with cleanliness also occasions the
dystopian world of David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest (1996), in which a pathologically
germophobic president in a near-future version of the United States has forced Canada to accept
a part of New England, irretrievably damaged by nuclear power plants, into its own territory.
President Gentle’s “experialism” gives rise to a spate of Canadian terrorist attacks, and the novel
strongly suggests the likely inevitability of a conflict of eschatological proportions.
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Many satirical worlds, however, steer clear of utopian and dystopian extremes. Perhaps
the most consistent satirical space in American television culture is the one opened up by
animation, whose deconstructive, experimental ethos has been a focus for critical theorists since
Walter Benjamin and Sergei Eisenstein.
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Since the beginning of the 1990s, spurred by the
success of The Simpsons (Fox, 1989-present), a wide variety of animated satirical shows have
relied on the contrast between their imaginary constructed worlds and the real one to engage in
satirical polemics on current affairs. Of the three broadcast networks, Fox has been most
committed to animated satire; shows such as The Simpsons, Futurama (Fox, 1999-2003 and
Comedy Central, 2010-2013), Family Guy (Fox, 1999-2002 and 2005-present), American Dad
(Fox, 2005-2014 and TBS, 2014-present), Bob’s Burgers (2011-present), and King of The Hill
(1999-2010) have expanded the representational vocabulary of the live-action family and
workplace sitcom, reflecting the changing societal mores and conception of the American family
on broadcast television. Cable shows, bound by fewer content restrictions than their broadcast
counterparts, were able to stretch the boundaries of satire even further. South Park (Comedy
Central, 1996-present), for example, deals with contemporary social and cultural debates through
the lens of its established location and cast of characters by producing a new episode, from draft
to final cut, every week over the course of its seasons. Its accelerated production schedule,
unique in the world of mainstream animation, allows it to respond to current events as they
occur. Other shows, such as BoJack Horseman (Netflix, 2014-present), The Venture Bros.
(Adult Swim, 2003-present), and Archer (FX, 2009-present) engage in satire through genre

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Esther Leslie. Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde. London, UK: Verso,
2002
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parody, deconstructing American ideology and its conceptions of masculinity and authenticity as
reflected in the male prestige melodrama, adventure genre, and spy thriller genre respectively.
Netflix’s BoJack Horseman parodies the self-indulgent pathos of the male melodramas
that have come to dominate discussions of quality television in the first two decades of the 21st
century, such as The Sopranos (1999-2007), Mad Men (2007-2015), or Breaking Bad (2008-
2013). Its egotistic protagonist, a self-destructive, drunk, aging sitcom actor, happens to also be
an anthropomorphic horse. He lives in a Los Angeles populated by animal-human hybrids like
himself, courtesy of art director Lisa Hanawalt’s cute-yet-twisted aesthetic. Most of the show
focuses on BoJack’s destructive self-pitying pathos, and the pathologies of fame and fortune in
American entertainment, conveying a dark satirical image of contemporary Hollywood. The
show’s deconstruction of Hollywood self-important vapidity pervades every aspect of its
inventive world-building, down to cut-away scene endings and establishing shots. In the
background, we might see yoga aficionados shopping for sportswear at Lululemming, rather than
Lululemon, and note that the show has taken a jab at the group-think tendencies of trendy
Angelenos. At a coffee shop, a woodpecker sips on his coffee, then furiously pecks at the table
rather than work on his laptop, like many an anxious aspiring screenwriter might in the real city.
Produced quasi-independently for Adult Swim by writer-producers Doc Hammer and
Jackson Publick, The Venture Bros. is a parody of space-age adventure cartoons, primarily
Hanna-Barbera’s short-lived Jonny Quest (1964-1965). The Venture Bros., inspired by the
outsized hopes, dreams, and aesthetics of the Space Age, turns adventure tropes on their head
and traces the hidden impact of industrialist macho idealism through the generations. Currently
middle-aged, the protagonist (Thaddeus T. “Rusty” Venture, former boy adventurer) is raising
his own children surrounded by the decaying detritus left behind by his father’s “super-science”
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—a high-modernist compound littered with data tapes and death rays, supersonic jets and
automated laser sentries. He spills the frustrations of his childhood, spent under the Oedipal
shadow of his larger-than-life father, on his own spawn. His boys (fraternal twins Hank and
Dean), homeschooled and stuck in arrested development, keep getting murdered in various arch-
rival attacks, and their father resurrects them by downloading an outdated backup of their
consciousness into clone bodies. The show further engages in a mise-en-abyme of the same
themes through repeating narrative variations on the concepts of kinship and failure,
transgenerational flashbacks to the Space Age itself, as well as the ideological excitements of an
even earlier generation of adventurers —the explorers, leaders, and artists of the Industrial
Revolution, from robber baron caricatures to such high art mainstays as Oscar Wilde and James
McNeill Whistler. The Venture Bros. is one of the case studies to which I will return, using it as a
primary case study in Chapter IV.
A similar ideological critique lies at the core of Archer on FX. Archer reimagines the spy
thriller as a workplace sitcom, satirizing the ideological baggage and political inconsistencies of
Reaganism, and deconstructing the bombastic inclinations of American macho individualism.
Archer relies heavily on its audience’s understanding of previously codified genre tropes. The
title character’s hypermasculinity is both an exaggerated version of James Bond’s own and a
critique of discourses of masculinity in American culture as a whole. Archer’s employer, also
his mother, is a cantankerous alcoholic who sees the world through the purely self-interested
frame of Reaganite neoliberalism and engages in casual racism at the drop of a hat. Archer’s
partner Lana Kane, an extremely capable black female secret agent is simultaneously a
reimagining of Blaxploitation foxy action hero tropes and a powerful voice in favor of the
dissolution of those very tropes. Archer reveals reality as a set of power relations, mediated
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through cultural tropes; by deconstructing the latter, it implicitly critiques the former. The world
of Archer does not represent reality directly; it rather constructs its satirical view from the
overdetermined iconography of the spy thriller genre, which was one of the mainstream vehicles
for ideological grand narratives in the Cold War era. By caricaturing James Bond and his ilk,
Archer implicitly critiques the discourses of masculinity and the simplistic Manicheism at the
core of the late Cold War worldview.
As the selective, limited timeline set forth in this chapter suggests, satire has been
intertwined with world-building practices since its emergence as a creative modality in the
Western canon. In contrast with the univocal inclinations of Horatian and Juvenalian satire, the
Menippean mode of satire often approaches the object of its critique through extensive parodic
world-building. Satirical worldbuilders repurpose existing genre structures, established
mythological and religious worlds, and the earnest literary visions of their time, twisting their
components to construct polemical worlds that question the hypocritical orthodoxies of their
cultural milieu. As such, satirical worlds are often the conduit for transgressive critiques of the
social taboos and imaginative limitations of their historical context.
Through Pastel, Darkly: The Algorithmic Fall from Grace

In the following pages, I provide an in-depth reading of Nosedive, the first episode in the
third season of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology series Black Mirror. Based on a story by
Brooker, and written by veteran comedians Michael Schur and Rashida Jones (Parks and
Recreation), this episode represents a break from the unrelentingly bleak worldview of Black
Mirror’s first two seasons, locating the possibility of transcendent freedom in its protagonist’s
vertiginous displacement from an oppressive, social-media driven societal structure. Joe Wright
and Seamus McGarvey, who have previously collaborated on theatrical hits like Atonement
(2007), The Soloist (2009), and Anna Karenina (2012), bring the world of Nosedive to life
through evocative design and production choices.

Act I: Passive Aggression and Social Conditioning

Nosedive, the first episode of Black Mirror’s third season, approaches the issue of social
cohesion and the accumulation of social capital from the perspective of technological,
algorithmic ratings. Set in an anodyne world of pastel perfection, the episode follows a young
woman named Lacie (Bryce Dallas Howard) as her well-intentioned attempts to increase her
social standing lead her to ruin. In the world of Nosedive, social status has been reduced to a
single measure: a popularity score determined by a five-point rating system. Most of the
characters engage in this ranking game, doling out ratings after every social interaction,
regardless of its overall importance; those who don’t, as well as those who are burdened with
lower rankings, become social pariahs. However, not every rating has the same impact on the
score – ratings from higher-ranked individuals count more in the overall system than do those
from individuals lower down in the ranks.
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The world of Nosedive is a minor extrapolation from the current reality of pervasive
algorithmic decision-making. In her recent book Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil
surveys the many ways in which opaque proprietary algorithms have supplanted human decision
making to deleterious effects in various domains of American life. O’Neil’s case studies range
widely, from educational rankings and funding, through advertising and criminal justice, to
hiring practices, credit availability, and insurance pricing. She argues convincingly that the
widespread adoption of algorithmic sorting mechanisms across such disparate industries, driven
by the competitive promise of increased efficiency, has already had several undesirable
consequences: algorithmic models tend to encode racist and classist biases through proxy
variables that evade regulation;
148
they are prone to self-reinforcing feedback loops;
149
they
render legal concepts such as the presumption of innocence, due process, and probable cause
meaningless;
150
and they disproportionately affect the most disadvantaged segments of
society.
151
These dangers are amplified by the fact that most such models are proprietary, and
therefore opaque to public negotiation, and can be easily scaled to affect the lives of large
numbers of people.
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The rating system in Nosedive is precisely such a weapon of math destruction, taken to its
dystopian extreme. It pervades all aspects of social life, and evinces the damaging tendencies that

148
Cathy O’Neil. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.
Crown Books, a Division of Penguin Random House, New York NY: 2016. Pages 21, 24-26, 116
149
O’Neil 27, 53, et passim
150
O’Neil 84, 94, et passim
151
O’Neil 91, 111, 125
152
O’Neil 29-30 et passim
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O’Neil identifies in similar real-world mechanisms. The episode exposes its inner workings
through immersion rather than exposition, coaxing dark humor out of Lacie’s progressive
victimization at the hands of the system, and from the tensions between the characters’ natural
impulses and the fake, insipid forms of social behavior rewarded by the rating system. As we
explore the world alongside the protagonist, we become progressively more aware of the
system’s unfair, dehumanizing effect on its subjects. Success, in this world, is synonymous with
sameness, as high-ranking individuals’ lives are consumed by the dull game of picture-perfect,
performative conformity.
The opening shot sets the tone for the first act: in the lavender glow of the morning magic
hour, Lacie jogs towards the camera on a wide suburban street, lined with perfectly manicured
lawns and nondescript white houses. The score, a repetitive minor-key piano melody, underlines
her hopeful yet melancholy smile. She passes a group of joggers, one of whom greets her by
name. They tilt their phones towards each other, a gesture that will gain significance as we
progress: they’ve just rated their interaction. We then see her stop and lunge, snapping a selfie
mid-stretch and proceeding to rate other people’s posts on her smartphone: an odd intermingling
of life and mediated presentation, familiar to the social media generation. A few cuts later, she is
practicing social laughter in the mirror: even the most seemingly innocent social cue is an
affectation, constructed rather than natural. A close-up of her irises reveals an intricate web of
electronic circuitry, whose purpose becomes apparent when we cut to a point-of-view shot: she is
wearing electronic contact lenses that display an informational overlay on top of the real world.
The face in the mirror is Lacie, rated 4.2. This all-important number defines Lacie’s life. Even
her breakfast is a photo-op ripe for rating: she takes a small bite out of a smiley-face cookie, spits
it out, and places the larger part next to her cup of cappuccino, topped with a foam art tree
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pattern. She takes a sip and grimaces: she doesn’t like the coffee, but that doesn’t matter. Five-
star ratings are already pouring in.
Her strained, overly cautious interactions with other social climbers reveal the same
disconnect between her true personality and the bland, performative social norms that determine
her rating. At work, she shares an elevator with Betsy, a former coworker whose 4.6 rating marks
her as part of the elite. Lacie greets her with a cautious smile, simultaneously reviewing her
recent social media feed on her contact lens display in search of conversational openers. A video
of Betsy’s cat seems the perfect prompt: “How’s Pancakes?” “He’s hilarious. Such a funny cat.
He’s the best,” Betsy replies, and they both giggle artificially. These overwrought interactions
play humorously at first, but the repressed darkness that makes for picture-perfect presentation
becomes manifest as soon as Lacie sits at her desk. One of her coworkers, Chester, is making his
way around the office, offering pastel-green smoothies to anyone who is willing to interact with
him. “They’re from the organic stall at the Farmers’ Market,” he says with a glint of desperation
in his eye, as Lacie takes note of his rating, displayed on her contact lenses: 3.1. Her coworkers
stare her down while she uncomfortably gives Chester a five-star rating. As he walks away,
another colleague explains Chester’s fall from grace: he broke up with his boyfriend Gordon, and
they are all on Gordon’s side. Lacie’s phone beeps with incoming pop-up notifications of
anonymous low ratings. Evidently, she is guilty by association. Social pariahs are contagious in
this world, subject to a vicious cycle of feedback loops that circumscribe the norms of social
behavior.
The following scenes emphasize the all-encompassing power of the rating system,
showing how Lacie’s score hinders her dreams of upward social mobility. She visits a gorgeous
apartment in an exclusive neighborhood, but she cannot afford it. The real-estate agent tells her
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that she could qualify for their “Prime Influencers Program,” which offers a twenty percent
discount, if her rating were to climb above 4.5. A reputation consultant advises her to expand her
interactions from “low- to mid-range folks” to “quality people,” so she tries to butter up Betsy
with a fresh croissant in the elevator. Betsy refuses it, and gives her a three-star rating; the
consultant tells her she is trying too hard: “It’s impossible to respect. High fours can smell it a
mile off.”
Lacie’s carefully composed social veneer begins to crack, but she has a plan: she posts a
photo of Mr. Rags, an old homemade ragdoll, and waits for her childhood best friend, Naomie, to
react. Naomie, a 4.8, seemingly takes the bait and invites Lacie to her upcoming wedding, asking
her to serve as maid-of-honor. Lacie accepts gratefully, and the episode cuts from her elated
reaction to her wedding speech. In a tight close-up, framed by a slideshow of childhood photos
of the two friends, she delivers a maudlin tirade in a tearful emotional crescendo, ending on a
heartfelt declaration: “I love you, Nay-Nay.” As she wipes her eyes, however, we cut to a wide
angle and see that this is just a practice run. Regaining her composure in an instant, she asks her
sole audience member, her brother Ryan, “Is the tear too much?” His answer, straight and
poignant, dismisses the artifice of the game: “You fucking sociopath. […] There’s sugary, and
then there’s fucking diabetes.” Ryan is not a climber, wears his 3.4 rating as a badge of pride,
and is the first voice of dissent we encounter over the course of Lacie’s tale.
The tension between earnest expression and socially-sanctioned behavior forms the
undergirding framework of Nosedive’s first act. Its incipient form lies in the subtle, tentative
expressions on Lacie’s face as she goes through her day, contrasting her immediate, earnest
reactions against the socially acceptable ones to which she resorts in order to gain social
approval. It finds structural expression in the advice of the image consultant and Lacie’s
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elaborate plan to reconnect with Naomie. The climax of the first act re-renders it both on the
level of cinematic form and explicit dialogue. Lacie’s speech plays earnestly at first, cueing the
viewer to interpret it as the final delivery. As we cut to the wide shot and Lacie’s behavior turns
neutral, we are encouraged to reinterpret it alongside Ryan, as a calculated ploy for social power.
Ryan’s cynical assessment, coupled with his liberal use of profanity, calls into question the moral
validity of the social norms that structure power in this society. He speaks the truth, but has to
pay the price for it.

Act II: The Best Laid Plans

The vignettes that structure Lacie’s journey to the wedding, which form the second act of
the episode, reinforce Ryan’s view. As she leaves the house, distraught after their confrontation,
she bumps into a high-rated woman, making her spill her coffee; Lacie’s rating instantly drops.
Her cabbie, tired of waiting, also has to listen to Lacie’s shrieking phone call to Naomie on the
way to the airport; her rating falls a few more fractions of a point. By the time she reaches the
airport and finds out that her flight has been canceled, her rating is no longer high enough to
secure her a spot on the next flight. She has a public meltdown, drops a few F-words, and
receives negative ratings from everyone standing in line behind her; even worse, a police officer
temporarily docks her a full rating point for disturbing the peace. She decides to rent a car, but no
longer qualifies for the priority line, leaving her with an outdated electric car that runs out of
battery on the highway. Her dip turns into a nosedive.
The twists become funnier as Lacie’s desperation grows. At the charging station, she is
unable to find a charger adapter for her old car, forcing her to abandon it and hitch-hike to the
wedding. No one wants to pick her up because of her low rating, except for a similarly low-rated
trucker, who introduces herself as Susan, offers Lacie coffee, whiskey, and cigarettes, and
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regales her with her life story. Susan used to be high-rated, but turned against the system after
her husband, dying of pancreatic cancer, was denied treatment in favor of a patient with a higher
rating. After her husband’s death, she decided to speak her mind honestly, and her rating dropped
vertiginously:

It turned out a lot of my friends didn't care for honesty. Treated me like I had taken a shit
at their breakfast table. But, Jesus Christ, it felt good, shedding those fuckers. It was like
taking off tight shoes.

Lacie is not yet ready to absorb Susan’s lesson, but she gets a good night’s sleep in the
back of the truck, before Susan drops her off at a gas station, leaving her with a thermos of
whiskey – an “escape hatch”. In the third act to follow, her plan has obviously failed, but she
cannot give up her manic drive to see it through. She gets closer to the wedding’s location – first
faking her way onto a fan convention bus and then stealing an all-terrain vehicle – she gets more
and more disheveled and starts digging into the whiskey. Naomie calls her and tells her not to
bother to show up, revealing that her initial invitation had, of course, also been a ploy to improve
her own rating:

When I asked you to speak, you were a 4.2, okay? And the authenticity of a vintage-bond
low four at a gathering of this caliber played fantastically on all the stimulations we ran.
Forecast was a prestige bounce of .2, minimum. But now you're a sub-three. Sorry. That
just puts the stink on things a little too much. That just plays badly for us.

Act III: Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

Lacie, however, is so hell-bent on delivering her speech, so warped by the allure of the
social standing she can’t admit she has lost, that she perseveres. She hacks her way through the
woods that surround the wedding’s location to avoid the guards posted at the official entryway,
and arrives at the reception covered in mud, her dress torn to shreds, a wild comical apparition in
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the middle of the sanitized pastel luxury of the reception. She steals a microphone and delivers
two speeches simultaneously, all the while criss-crossing the rows of shocked wedding guests to
avoid the guards that are chasing her. Between the lines of her carefully rehearsed speech, she
blurts out the realities of her and Naomie’s friendship, laced with random outbursts of repressed
profanity. As the guards overpower her, she reaches a split climax, combining her prepared
remarks with what might well be Lacie’s deepest repressed realization – that Naomie had sex
with her high school boyfriend:

I… I just wanted to say, in this world, so caught up in our own shit, let's not forget what
matters. Happiness, fucking Paul and Naomie, and she's… she… she fucked Greg! I
know she did! I know you did. […] The little girl who, when we were just five-years-old
in art camp, started talking to me because she saw I was scared and helped me make Mr.
Rags. He reminds me of you and what you meant to me then! And I'm so honored to be
here to see this shit! I love you, Nay-Nay! I've always loved you! I love you!

After her tragicomic meltdown, a show of contrasts between repressed perfection and earnest
imperfection, Lacie finds herself in a jail cell. The police have seized her phone and removed her
contact lenses. She unzips her oppressively tight bridesmaid’s dress and drops it to the floor with
a sigh of relief. She can breathe now. Her face, streaked with mascara, is no longer torn between
competing expressions. Her tearful eyes are earnest and sincere, rather than strained and
performative. She watches the flecks of dust swirling in the neon light of her tiny cell. Tears roll
down her cheeks, but she is laughing. She is free. She turns to the man in the jail cell across from
her, lifts up her arm, and flicks her thumb across her empty, open palm, as if she were rating him.
He laughs: this gesture, so invested with meaning in the world of the algorithm, has no place
between two humans stripped of unnecessary accoutrements.

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Coda: Freedom, Honest Laughter, Shared Humanity

Lacie’s final interaction of the episode, her purest and most powerful one, brings into
focus a subtle running satirical thread that characters invested in the rating system would never
dare speak. The highest-rated characters throughout the episode are played predominantly by
white actors. There are a few exceptions: the woman who downgrades Lacie for spilling her
coffee is black, as are a few background characters at the wedding reception, implying a typical
tokenizing calculus in Naomie’s planning. This world of pastel perfection is predicated on white
supremacy, which conveniently hides its workings behind the ostensible racial neutrality of the
rating system. Two verbal cues, placed strategically in the first act, hint at the hidden patterns of
racism that pervade this world, and they are both linked to Pelican Cove, the exclusive
neighborhood where Lacie wants to rent a home. Firstly, the real estate agent projects a
hologram of Lacie, constructed from her photo feed, into the kitchen of the apartment she is
visiting. Starry-eyed Lacie falls for this image hook, line, and sinker, and giggles delightedly as a
second hologram of a fit, half-naked, light-skinned black man enters the room and hugs Lacie’s
hologram from behind. The realtor’s next remark instantly frames him as property, slyly
remarking that “he doesn’t come with the apartment.” If this subtext is too subtle to register,
Lacie’s brother Ryan makes it explicit in the very next scene, when he refers to Pelican Cove as
“a eugenics program.”
While any overt mention of racism would likely be construed as a faux pas in the
sanitized public discourse of Nosedive, the episode underscores the racial structure of this world
heavily, through casting choices and character interactions. Most of the lower-rated, working-
class people with whom Lacie interacts are black: the barista at her coffee shop, various
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restaurant servers, her cab driver, the airline agent and police officer at the airport. Chester, the
newly disgraced coworker who demeans himself for ratings by ferrying smoothies around the
office, is also black, and we are left to wonder whether there is a racial component in the
coworkers’ decision to align themselves with his ex-boyfriend Gordon, whom we never see.
Lacie’s interactions with airport officials, both of whom are black, seem to play out a passive-
aggressive script that goes beyond Lacie’s current offense, revealing the racial tensions that
simmer beyond the surface of polite acquiescence in Nosedive’s world. The airport security
officer explains her one-point penalty with an earnest, satisfied smile, and instructs her to exit the
airport in a joyfully sadistic monotone. As she walks away crestfallen, the airline agent
downgrades her, also with a cruel, satisfied smile, in contrast with her professional, empty smile
earlier in their interaction.
Robbie Collin, who interviewed Joe Wright for a Black Mirror production feature in The
Telegraph, quotes the director as saying that they filmed the episode in a “terrifyingly perfect
housing community,” located on South Africa’s scenic Garden route.
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While the decision to
shoot part of Black Mirror’s new season on location around Cape Town was doubtlessly based
on production and budgeting reasons as well as creative ones, it certainly adds a layer of political
resonance to the episode as a whole. Contemporary South Africa, still in turmoil over the
aftermath of colonial rule, remains racially and socioeconomically segregated decades after the
official abolition of Apartheid. The algorithm in Nosedive, which elides the obviousness of racial
segregation by providing an opaque and seemingly neutral way to measure societal standing, is a
black mirror of the structures of power that enshrine and protect inequality in the real world – an

153
Robbie Collin, “Making beautiful nightmares: meet the A-list directors behind the new series of Black Mirror,”
The Telegraph, October 21, 2016. Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/on-demand/0/making-beautiful-
nightmares-meet-the-a-list-directors-behind-the/
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analogue of the structural inequities that the abolition of legal Apartheid never came close to
solving in South Africa.
At the end of Nosedive, Lacie finds herself in a jail cell across from a cell in which a
good-looking black man in a dark button-down suit is imprisoned. Their interaction escalates
rapidly. They are both unbound from social norms, and can find more freedom in the jail cell
than they ever did in a world of social interactions motivated by the desire for high ratings. He
laughs at her rating gesture. “What the fuck are you looking at?” she asks, trying to hide her
smirk. “Just what I was wondering,” he replies, before they delve into a crescendo of back and
forth insults, each of them more absurd than the previous one. And with every insult, their smiles
grow wider, their connection stronger, their joy more apparent. The cuts grow faster, the frames
tighter, until the episode closes on frontal close-ups, flickering back and forth so fast that their
faces meld together. They are no longer forced to rate, so they can start liking, living, loving. In
the dystopian world of Black Mirror, this counts as the happiest of endings:

Him: You're a fucking asshole.
Her: Fuck you!
Him: Fuck you next Wednesday.
Her: Fuck you for Christmas!
Together: FUCK YOU!

Sentient Ads and Member Berries: South Park’s Theory of Trump

What is PC but a verbal form of gentrification?
Spruce everything up, get rid of all the ugliness in
order to create a false sense of paradise…
Only one thing can actually live in that world: Ads.
- South Park

The nineteenth season of South Park aired its first episode on September 16
th
, 2015, the
same night as the second Republican debate in the 2015-2016 Presidential Primary Election. In
the first debate, a month earlier, FOX News’s Megyn Kelly had pushed Donald Trump to
account for his history of derogatory comments about women. Trump’s unflinching response
would set the tone for the rest of his campaign:

I think the big problem this country has – is being politically correct. And I don’t
frankly have the time for political correctness. And to be honest with you, this
country doesn’t have time either.
154

Although he backpedaled slightly – “We have a good time […] and honestly, Megyn, if you
don’t like it, I’m sorry”
155
– days later, the man who would become President of the United
States after a gruesomely entertaining campaign season was on the warpath against Kelly. His
sexist attacks on Kelly are a matter of public record (“she had blood coming out of her eyes,
blood coming out of her whatever”), as is his consistent framing of himself as a victim of the
corrupt, politically correct, and overly liberal media. He never seemed to mind that Kelly is a

154
Maeve Reston. “Nobody Eclipses Trump at GOP Debate,” CNN, August 7, 2015. Retrieved from
http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/07/politics/donald-trump-republican-debate/
155
ibid.
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long-time FOX news anchor who has reported, from a conservative perspective, on imaginary
wedge issues, contributing to the radicalization of social conservatives nationwide. Her on-air
history ranges from the somewhat cogent to the laughable: segments claiming that Santa Claus
and Jesus were white have been widely satirized by her erstwhile Comedy Central nemeses Jon
Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
In comparison with many of her coworkers and the political pundits with whom she
interacts daily, Kelly is intelligent, incisive, and ideologically consistent. She often draws on her
educational and career background in law, and forms the sole major voice of dissent in the echo
chamber of Fox News’s reactionary blend of performative punditry, right-wing propaganda, and
white Christian identity politics, by occasionally challenging the platitudinous talking points
regurgitated by her on-air guests. Her limited form of dissent, grounded in non-intersectional,
conservative, Christian white feminism, would earn her a nemesis infinitely more dangerous than
Stewart or Colbert: the President of the United States. In her recent HarperCollins memoir, Settle
for More, she accuses Trump, his attorney, and his supporters of attacking her ceaselessly
throughout the past year, culminating with a series of death threats that have led her to employ
security guards for herself and her family.
156
Trump has also reportedly tried to bribe her as well
as other journalists:
“This is actually one of the untold stories of the 2016 campaign,” Ms. Kelly
writes. “I was not the only journalist to whom Trump offered gifts clearly meant
to shape coverage. Many reporters have told me that Trump worked hard to offer
them something fabulous — from hotel rooms to rides on his 757.”
157

156
Lorraine Ali. “Megyn Kelly’s ‘Year of Trump’: Armed guards at Disney World and ‘overwhelming and
violent’ feedback from Trump supporters,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 17, 2016.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-jc-megyn-kelly-book-review-20161117-story.html
157
Jennifer Senior, “Review: Megyn Kelly Tells Tales out of Fox News in Her Memoir, ‘Settle for More,” The
New York Times, Nov. 10, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/books/review-megyn-kelly-tells-tales-out-of-
fox-news-in-her-memoir-settle-for-more.html
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The bullying is unlikely to stop, now that Trump has been elected president. Her book
has already been targeted on Amazon by Trump-affiliated trolls, who organized on the Reddit
forum The_Donald to flood the page with negative feedback.
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She also faces a relatively
hostile environment at Fox News. Although Roger Ailes, the network’s former chairman, was
ousted in July 2016 due to repeated, public reports of sexual harassment he found a home in the
Donald Trump campaign and is likely to remain an adviser to him throughout his presidential
term. According to her memoir, Kelly was one of the targets of Ailes’s harassment. In the
Trumpian regime, not even a white, Christian, conservative, well-educated, multi-millionaire
woman with a direct line to the world of conservative politics is safe.
Kelly’s story, just one among many in a year of anger at established journalistic venues,
raises the question: how did American culture get here? The past two seasons of South Park, a
show whose creators have drawn substantial controversy over their two decades on air for their
commitment to being “equal-opportunity offenders”, are undergirded by an astonishingly
complex and relatively cohesive theory of Trump’s emergence and the fate of American media in
the age of Trump.
The cohesive nature of this theory, which reflects recent work in digital sociology,
political theory, and media studies, is all the more surprising in light of South Park’s peculiar
production schedule: unlike most animated TV shows, which take months if not years to
produce, South Park is written on a weekly basis by showrunner Trey Parker with the aid of a
small group of joke writers that includes co-creator Matt Stone, in response to the week’s events.

158
Stephen Battaglio. “Trump supporters try to undermine Megyn Kelly's book with an onslaught of negative
reviews on Amazon.” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 16, 2016. http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-kelly-
trump-20161116-story.html
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Its recent move from episodic to serialized storytelling, combined with the weekly production
schedule, makes South Park’s tour de force in the past two years unique: Parker has to adjust the
threads of the storyline in reaction to news events, while simultaneously maintaining structural
cohesion across season-length story arcs. This means, of course, that in contrast with the
overwhelming structural ambitions of high theory, South Park’s implicit theory of Trump’s rise
arrives at a sense of cohesion through the weekly improvisational process, rather than a pre-
determined structural architecture. It allows for the existence of tensions, alternative means of
explanation, and even contradictory ideas. As such, it is a prime example of the idea of
provisional comedic truth.
Over the course of these two seasons, it becomes apparent that South Park’s satirical
outlook cuts deep beyond the surface of expression, exposing the cognitive biases, human
foibles, and patterns of social and economic exploitation that, in conjunction with a media
culture driven by viral content production and distribution, the expectation of anonymity online,
and the collapse of public space, have led to the loss of social cohesion and the rise of tribal,
white-supremacist extremism in the United States, as well as similar forms of right-wing
extremist nationalism worldwide.
In schematic terms, this implicit theory goes something like this: small-town America,
which has historically been culturally homogeneous and relatively isolated from the turmoil of
life in major cities, finds itself rudderless in the new global marketplace – both culturally and
economically. Small towns, whose economies had already been torn apart in the sixties through
“urban renewal projects,” and in the eighties and nineties through the dissolution of heavy
industry, are a wasteland of strip malls and reactionary politics. From the vantage point of the
small town, the media portrayal of big-city liberal culture feels chaotic and threatening. When it
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finally makes its way into the small homogeneous town – through legislation, bureaucracy, as
well as mass culture – it is embraced by many, but also engenders significant backlash from
aging, dispossessed adults with conservative views and settled social biases. The backlash is
exacerbated by the contemporary face of “urban renewal:” corporate economic gentrification,
which reveals the widening chasm between the haves and have-nots, and begins to price
residents out of their own community.
In the small-town world, the Internet is a double-edged sword: it allows some to
understand the outside world, build alliances with like-minded people, and enhance their
skillsets. It also exacerbates cultural fears. Advertising plays to people’s insecurities, and, in
combination with political propaganda, it leads to the dissolution of social cohesion. Granular
targeting through opaque, inscrutable algorithms, leads people to interact only with those who
hold like-minded views, in an echo chamber of increasing political extremism and tribalism.
Information overload and the lack of media literacy make things worse: people cannot tell the
difference between fact and manipulative fiction, and are prone to fear-driven behaviors.
Relatively benign changes and ideas snowball into conspiracy theories. Nostalgic cultural
stagnation is made possible by the targeted marketization of the news landscape and the death of
traditional news reporting. Online trolls, out to sow discontent, accelerate people’s natural
tendency to fearfully retreat into their own social group. In this landscape of lowered trust,
paranoia takes over, and the presidential election goes awry: a troll, good at branding and playing
on people’s fears, makes it to the White House completely unprepared, on a wave of anger,
resentment, and bigotry. America’s id prevails, and the world descends into chaos.
Parker’s established cast of characters, combined with the show’s setting in the fictional
small town of South Park, Colorado, gives him a broad canvas on which he can stage
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contemporary debates on a week-by week basis. The four main characters are middle-school
classmates: Stan Marsh and Kyle Broflovski are normal young boys: boisterous, at times more
aggressive and at others more reasonable, interested in the world around them, and often more
mature and direct than the adults who surround them. Stan is more liable to act due to peer-
pressure, while Kyle is slightly more analytical, but irritates his friends, classmates, and family
by staking the moral high ground and giving grandstanding speeches on the issues the boys
encounter. The third member of the group, Eric Cartman, is a selfish, gluttonous, aggressive,
unscrupulous sociopath: he insults everyone, attacks everyone, takes manipulative moral stands
and argues for them fruitfully when it suits his purposes, and torments his friends and family as
well as strangers.
In psychoanalytic terms, Stan is the ego, while Kyle is the superego, and Cartman the id.
By the same metaphor, the fourth member of the core cast stands in for the repressed,
unrepresentable Real. While Stan’s family is lower-middle-class, and Kyle and Cartman come
from middle-class backgrounds, Kenny McCormick is a member of South Park’s impoverished
underclass. His family is abjectly Irish-Scot white-trash: an unemployed, alcoholic, and violent
father, a bedraggled mother who works as a dish-washer at Olive Garden when she’s not helping
her husband cook meth in a home lab, a taciturn older brother, and a little sister whom Kenny
protects as much as he can. Kenny always wears a hooded parka, which muffles his speech: his
cohorts understand him, but the viewer cannot. In the first five seasons of the show, he was killed
in every episode, only to reappear with no comment by the beginning of the next, and take
another heaping dose of abuse from Cartman. Parker’s focus on these children and others their
age enables him to highlight the impact of major cultural issues, dealt with angrily and
aggressively by adults, on the younger generation: throughout the run of South Park, and
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especially in the most recent seasons, the kids, while far from innocent, bear the impact of their
parents’ own immaturity.

Humble and Brave: Political Correctness as Aggressor

Season 19 highlights the inconsistencies and power struggles of contemporary American
cultural politics. The relatively stable world of this small mountain town is turned upside down
in the season premiere, Stunning and Brave, by the arrival of a new school principal. His name is
PC Principal, a muscular white man with a goatee, and frat-bro mannerisms, including speech
rhythms reminiscent of Mark Wahlberg’s patter. In his first address to the assembled parents and
children, minutes into the season premiere, he sends students as well as teachers to detention for
offenses against political correctness, and denounces South Park’s history of politically incorrect
storylines and characterization. With Cartman gone to detention, Kyle takes PC principal’s side
in a conversation with other students, remarking that he’s glad that South Park can move into the
future, and that PC Principal is bringing to light conversations that they should be having. His
avowal of PC Principal is barely over, when he finds himself summoned to the office to be
disciplined. When Kyle’s father, Randy, arrives at school, PC Principal explains in an angry
crescendo:
Your son said some things to a fourth-grade girl that frankly make me wanna
puke! Now that I'm principal, I'm not gonna allow anyone at this school to be
made feel unsafe and harassed! […] You'll have to excuse my language. "I don't
think Caitlyn Jenner is a hero." This kind of transphobic and bigoted hate speech
isn't gonna fly here, bro!

Kyle and Cartman are in detention, but PC Principal has an effect on larger patterns of
discourse around town. He turns out to have moved into a fraternity house, where he parties and
checks privilege alongside a bevy of men just like himself: young, fit, and pathologically
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invested in virtue signaling, using the linguistic apparatus developed by academic cultural
studies over the past few decades. Cartman, in full sociopathic form, corners PC Principal in the
bathroom and threatens to frame him with molesting Butters, one of his classmates. PC Principal
doesn’t react to the substance of Cartman’s threats, taking issue instead with his use of language:
Cartman: This certainly doesn’t look good for you. I don’t need to tell anyone
about this. No, I think we have an understanding… capisci?
PC Principal: What did you just say?
Cartman: You mean, about keeping your dick out?
PC Principal: “CAPISCI?” You’re associating Italian-Americans with
intimidation tactics? You’d better watch your microagressions, bro.
Cartman: Okay… look, you don’t want to end up like the spokesman for
Subway, do you?
159

PC Principal snaps, not because of the substance of the threats, but because Cartman said
“spokesman” instead of “spokesperson.” He smashes Cartman against various bathroom objects,
pins him to the floor, and beats him up violently. The entire situation escalates rapidly, following
the clichéd structure of frat comedies: Randy, Stan’s father, rushes the PC fraternity, and is
initiated by leading a PC frat raid on Kyle’s bedroom while the little boy sleeps, drawing penises
on his face and filling his bedroom with pigs that have the word “biggit” painted on their sides.
When his son confronts him for bullying his best friend, Randy, hungover from the PC party,
lectures him on comparative privilege instead of discussing the issue openly, before running to
the sink to throw up:
Randy: Stan, straight white males in a capitalistic society have little-
understanding of victimization compared to injustices against the underprivileged.
Dicks on your face is a very first-world problem.

Cartman turns out to have his own agenda: he claims to believe that Kyle is wrong about
Caitlyn Jenner, and he leads a revenge plot against the fraternity, which he frames as a way to

159
this is a reference to Jared Fogle, who had recently been sentenced to a long federal prison term after pleading
guilty to possessing child pornography and traveling to have sex with minors.
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force a discussion through humor, and lead Kyle to embrace political correctness. He unleashes a
torrent of pregnant Mexican women and Syrian refugee children on the frat mansion during a frat
party, while firing a taco cannon at the building; former Subway spokesperson and convicted
child molester Jared Fogle makes an appearance as well. Witnessing the ongoing mayhem, Kyle
stops it the only way he can: by praising Caitlyn Jenner, in front of everyone, although his dislike
of her had nothing to do with her transition to begin with. The end of the episode finds everyone
except Kyle – the only character who has been reasonable throughout the episode – happy with
the newfound balance. His speech, although it contains the right words to stop the mayhem, goes
against his deeply held beliefs that Jenner is not a particularly good person:
Kyle: This is so wrong! I can't let it continue! This is not ever what I intended! I just
want to say... Caitlyn Jenner is a hero. There's no other way to say it. What she did took
bravery, and she is absolutely stunning.

Where My Country Gone: Virtue Signaling and Backlash

While the season premiere deals with the microcosm of the small town, the second
episode, titled Where My Country Gone, examines the same patterns of reactionary, bellicose
paranoia on a national level. The episode opens with Kyle, whose gesture against Cartman’s
bigotry avalanche has gone viral on social media, visiting the White House to be recognized by
President Obama for his “speech about his hero, Caitlyn Jenner.” Kyle looks displeased, but goes
along with the pretense, even as Obama brings Jenner to the stage as a surprise, and gives Kyle
the “gift” of a car ride back to South Park in Jenner’s car. As they leave, Jenner runs over an old
lady and speeds away – an action she repeats over the course of the following two seasons, and a
115
reference to Jenner’s February 2015 car crash, which led to the death of an elderly woman in
another vehicle.
160

Back in South Park, Mr. Garrison, the kids’ fourth grade teacher, is watching the
ceremony on TV while sharing his frustrations with a few friends: a glut of new immigrants is
taking over South Park, and Garrison is livid, blaming it all on the Obama rhetoric of openness
and acceptance. Garrison has a complex history on South Park: he is prone to anger and
resentment, has undergone two sex change operations, and has a long history of fractious
classroom behavior and misunderstanding of social change.
This episode was aired early in the Trump campaign, when most commentators still
assumed that he had no chance to capture the presidential nomination. In a slight perspectival
change, the immigrants turn out to be Canadian, rather than Latinos or Middle Easterners, but
Garrison’s rhetoric mirrors Trump’s from the beginning, as do his actions. His first anti-
immigrant action takes place in the classroom: he berates his new Canadian students for not
speaking English (they do, with a cartoonishly exaggerated Canadian accent), and rants about the
decline of the Roman empire in front of the classroom, explaining that it was brought about by
the empire’s acceptance of immigrant Goths. When the Canadian students interrupt the class to
perform a made-up religious custom (playing a Chuck Mangione song every morning, on
trumpets they always carry around in a small case), Garrison loses his temper completely and
screams at them: “Why don’t you Canucks go back where you came from?”
South Park’s version of Canada goes all the way back to the show’s earliest seasons, and
it’s featured prominently in the 1999 feature-length musical film South Park: Bigger, Longer,

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Park, Andrea. Caitlyn Jenner blames paparazzi for fatal car crash. CBS News, August 5, 2016.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/caitlyn-jenner-blames-paparazzi-for-fatal-car-crash/
116
and Uncut. It is a broad and frankly silly caricature, used primarily to satirize the American
penchant for xenophobic, nationalist extremism, even in reaction to innocuous and relatively
friendly peers. Canadians are physically simplified to an even greater extent than the other
characters on South Park, which replicate the show’s original design, driven by its low-budget,
cut-out animation: their eyes are beady dots, they don’t have mouths, per se (their heads split in
two when they talk), and the Canadian landscape and architecture, when depicted, are rendered
through plain, nearly-abstract geometrical shapes. The country’s biggest exports are Terrance
and Phillip, two comedians who hold to a simple shtick in all their productions: they fart, they
laugh, and they high-five. In the feature film, their work is an inciting factor: the parents in South
Park, in a mise-en-abime of South Park’s real-world reception, start an organized protest against
Canada, because they are convince that Terrance and Phillip are corrupting their children.
In Season 19, the Canadian immigrants take up the same position, as innocent targets of
Garrison’s xenophobic paroxysm. Over the course of Where My Country Gone, Garrison’s
hatred of the Canadians grows at an absurd pace. When PC Principal forces him to take
Canadian language lessons in order to cater to the new immigrants, Garrison fades into a
daydream montage that parodies the workings of xenophobia: faced with images of happy
Canadian immigrants going about their day in South Park, he sings a resentfully mournful
patriotic song eponymous with the episode. His nostalgia, just like Trump’s, comes through in
entirely negative terms: no actual content except for the idea of patriotic greatness, disturbed by
an immigrant influx: “There’s a great big hole in the liberty bucket / ‘Cause someone forgot to
tell the foreigners to suck it.” When he wakes up from his reverie, he has already assembled an
angry mob in the town square, and proceeds to rile them up:
Seems like everyone's afraid to speak the truth around here! Well I'm throwin' my hat in
and sayin' I'll figure this thing out! Now I might not understand politics, or immigration
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policies, or... the law. Or basic... ideological... concepts. But dammit I understand there
there's a bunch of Canadians here and I'm gonna do somethin' about it!

The reactionary behaviors snowball on all sides. Cartman accuses Kyle of conspiring to
bring Canadian immigrants into South Park, because Kyle’s adopted little brother is Canadian.
PC Principal holds a school rally, with the new Canadian students dressed up in costumes that
denote different periods from Canada’s history: First Nations, foreign settlers, Mounties and
Canadian soldiers, and so on. Garrison insults them as well as PC Principal in perfectly
Trumpian fashion (“Sorry, not sorry, it’s time for someone to say it like it is, and make our
country great again!”), forcing PC Principal to fire him. Garrison takes it further: “there’s only
one immigration policy I believe in, and that’s fuck’em all to death!” The Canadians get rightly
angry and walk out of the school, while Cartman proceeds to scapegoat Kyle for the escalating
conflict. The rest of the episode proceeds at breakneck pace. Garrison’s “fuck’em all to death”
message brings him media notoriety and increased attention. Butters, one of the schoolboys,
starts dating a Canadian girl named Charlotte, and finds out that the Canadian immigrants moved
to the United States after a figure similar to Garrison took over Canada, built a wall on the
American border, and proceeded to institute a quasi-fascist regime in Canada; unsurprisingly, he
looks just like Donald Trump, and he is the Canadian president (rather than the Prime Minister,
Canada’s actual highest-ranking executive office). Charlotte’s father explains:
There were several candidates during the Canadian elections. One of them was this brash
asshole who just spoke his mind. He didn't really offer any solutions, he just said
outrageous things. We... thought it was funny. Nobody really thought he'd ever be
President. It was a joke! But we just let the joke go on for too long. He kept gaining
momentum, and by the time we were all ready to say "Okay, let's get serious now. Who
should really be President?" he was already being sworn into office. We weren't paying
attention. We weren't paying attention!

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Garrison, angry at Canadian Trump’s decision to build a wall, leads a mob to the border.
He lashes out at the traditional politicians who are trying to keep everyone’s spirits calm,
shouting insults at everyone. His supporters seal him in a barrel and send him hurtling over
Niagara Falls. Once on the Canadian side, Garrison makes his way across desolate, abandoned
cityscapes, and reaches the Canadian President’s office, where they start screaming insults at
each other. Garrison rapes the Canadian president to death, before returning to his beaming
supporters in South Park. With their dictator gone, the Canadians return home, and Garrison
announces that he will run for President of the United States, choosing Caitlyn Jenner as his
running mate. Kyle, once more the sole voice of reason, makes his way to Garrison’s podium
and tries to address the crowd, explaining that the Canadians had obviously been motivated by
their own version of Garrison – rather than any nefarious purpose – when they made their way to
the United States. The crowd, as well as his friends, are annoyed: Kyle is grandstanding again.
Ads Masquerading as Humans

One of the obvious difficulties in producing a show like South Park, which reacts to news
events as they occur and is produced on a weekly turnaround, lies in the show’s plot
development process. There is only so much pre-writing that can be done, and much of every
episode has to be written and performed on the fly. As a result, South Park has historically had a
limited conception of continuity, resetting the world of the show in response to ad-hoc demands
on storytelling and character development. Yet in its 19
th
season, the writers of South Park
conformed their episodes to a relatively cohesive arc, setting up an explanatory paradigm that
captures some major cultural tendencies that led to the current American sociopolitical moment.
The element that turns the season’s episodic plot meanderings into a cohesive whole is
the show’s conception of a common pathology at the root of all the social ills in the eponymous
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town as well as the nation as a whole: the inability to tell the difference between humans and
advertisements. Indeed, there seems to be only one person left in the entire world who is immune
to the lure of PR pablum: Jimmy, the editor of the South Park school newspaper. As the rest of
the world erupts into flames through political unrest, anonymous hateful trolling, and the
upholding of various dubious characters as role models, Jimmy is the only one who can see
through the bullshit and call it like it is. He is not there to sell anything, he is simply there to
report on reality.
Unsurprisingly, Jimmy’s independent thinking lands him in hot water, at the center of a
race between various nefarious stakeholders to turn him from the last holdout of traditional
journalism into yet another flack. As the season progresses, advertisements turn out to have been
in the middle of the schoolchildren, manipulating their behavior all along: a young woman
named Leslie, present at key moments of the season, was herself an ad posing as a human.
Because of her, South Park has now undergone an escalating process of gentrification, pushing
away the real town inhabitants and replacing them with humans who are willing to live in a
world of ads.
Although Leslie is herself defeated in the season finale, the same pathologies would
follow South Park into its twentieth season, in which the show had to react in real-time to the
upset election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. Against this fractious climate
of mutual unintelligibility between town inhabitants, Season 20 adds one more plot device:
member berries, an addictive type of berry that makes its consumers yearn for a simpler time, by
playing on their nostalgia for old cultural texts. Over the course of Season 20, member berries
take over the world, push everyone to become a toxic troll, and lead to the election of Trump,
after which they reveal that their nostalgia was proto-fascism all along.
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South Park’s approach to satire is relatively simplistic, relying very often on reifying,
literalizing, and representing abstract concepts in the form of characters and world power
structures. So it is across these two seasons: Leslie the ad, the member berries, the hidden trolls
and the main cast members all manipulate one another, with deleterious effects to the fabric of
community in their small town. Yet South Park’s satire is reactive rather than proactive, and its
attempts at serialization often conflict with its aesthetic goals and the expressive possibilities
available in a show produced on a compressed weekly schedule.
The Venture Bros., which is the major case study of the following chapter, provides a
diametrically opposed approach to serialized animated worldbuilding. The Venture Bros. is
produced on a much slower schedule, with a new season produced every few years; its world is
consistent, open to real change and obsessed with consequence; its contemporary plot emerges
from a complex set of background circumstances, which are revealed slowly, in subjective and
sometimes contradictory plot moments; its backgrounds and locations are inspired by real-world
objects that carry complex aesthetic and historical connotations. As such, The Venture Bros. is
simultaneously farther removed from the flare-ups of contemporary cultural politics and more
adept at navigating their complexities.

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Chapter IV. Comedy and the Technological Sublime

Comedy as Hubris, Comedy and Transcendence: Can the Singularity Laugh?

“Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil, thou shalt not eat of it.” (Genesis 2:16-17)

“For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall
I know, even as also I am known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)

“The Singularity will allow us to transcend [the] limitations of our biological bodies and brains.
We will gain power over our fates. […] We will fully understand human thinking and will vastly
extend and expand its reach. By the end of this century, the nonbiological portion of our
intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human
intelligence.” (Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 17)

“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus, 7 (p.89)

“Not only are we not infinite, we are not even finite. […] the stuff that comedies are made of is
precisely this hole in finitude.” (Zupančič, The Odd One In, 53)

Mediated communication is structured by a fundamental paradox between transparency
and opacity, between the drive towards perfect knowledge and its ultimate impossibility. On the
one hand, novel forms of mediation promise access to knowledge: of others, of the surrounding
world, of new possibilities. On the other hand, the perception of immediacy is always mediated,
always imperfect, always bound to fail - not only because of the external processes of mediation,
but also the characteristics of the perceiving and communicating subject - in other words, by the
limits of human perception and cognition.
The lure of perfection in any formal system belongs to the aesthetic category that Kant
termed the sublime. For Kant, sublimity is an essentially relational aesthetic experience, which
arises not from simple sensory apperception, but rather from the mind’s ability to envision a
perfection that cannot be contained in sensory objects. The sense of the sublime arises from a
mental confrontation with an object “the representation of which determines the mind to think of
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the unattainability of nature as a presentation of ideas.”
161
In other words, it is a sensation that
simultaneously reveals the limits of individual perception and revels in the power of reason and
the freedom of will that allows the possibility of conceiving such limits, as well as an experience
that might transcend them. This sensation is aroused by objects that somehow exceed
comprehension, but, by aesthetic apprehension allow the mind to “become conscious of being
superior to nature within us and thus also to nature outside us.”
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It is simultaneously a
humbling, awe-inspiring experience, and a form of hubris.
In the realm of contemporary science-fiction and technofuturism, this hubristic epistemological
drive is often represented through the figure of the Singularity, variously imagined.
Mediated communication patterns space as well as time; technology contains within itself
implicit conceptions of reality that structure our experience of the spatio-temporal continuum,
and attune us to ways of seeing that are not necessarily natural to human experience. The clash
between conceptions of time underlies much of the tension inherent in contemporary mediated
communication. The internet, ahistorically, believes that it has somehow transcended the ways in
which narrative and iconography become religion. In fact, through targeting, its devices have
accelerated and overstimulated those patterns. They have also increased their users’ false sense
of mastery over the physical world - humans always return to hubris, by whatever avenue we
have at our disposal. Scientific wonder, from Galileo to Sagan and Tyson, has always relied on
the power of the sublime, and envisioned its utopian and dystopian potentialities as
fundamentally interrelated.

161
Immanuel Kant; Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (transl.). Critique of the Power of Judgment. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2000. 5:268, p. 151

162
Kant 5:264, p. 147
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Sublime Visions: Asimov’s Singularities

The shared imaginary of the past century of Western culture has explored this kind of
techno-hubris and techno-religious inclination at depth. Science fiction literature abounds with
examples. Asimov explores it in various manifestations. In The End of Eternity, humans commit
hubris against time itself; through mastery of time-travel, they create a perfectly safe timeline for
humanity, dooming the species to mediocrity. A septic, unimaginative temporal concatenation of
worlds that are successively compatible; no great struggles, no great victories. In the Foundation
cycle, various forms of techno- and epistemo-hubris take each other out in successive ballets of
dialogic worldcrafting, a fractal of human failures and utopian transcendences cascading from
one another.
Perhaps the most thoroughly defined early conception of the Singularity as a desirable
outcome of human evolution appears in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation cycle, a series of
interconnected short novels that explore the distant future of humanity. At the beginning of the
Foundation cycle, humanity has spread across the stars, and has organized itself into an all-
powerful Galactic Empire. The premise of Foundation relies on the central conceit of
psychohistory, a fictional discipline that allows social scientists to make precise predictions
regarding the flow of history on a large scale, given thorough knowledge of the initial
circumstances. The first novel centers on Hari Seldon, the leading psychohistorian on Trantor,
the gleaming, milling seat of the Empire. Seldon and his psychohistorians have realized that the
Empire is about to undergo dissolution. Two options await: either a reign of darkness lasting
thirty millennia, or a shorter interregnum of about a millennium before the emergence of a
second Galactic Empire. Seldon puts in motion a long-term plan to ensure the latter outcome,
establishing the titular Foundation on an isolated planet, far-flung from the center of political
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power on Trantor, in order to gather and preserve human technical knowledge in a single
location, to become a new center of power after the Galactic Empire on Trantor fades.
Asimov consciously modeled the novels on Gibbon’s historical treatise on The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire, structuring his narrative content in cyclical patterns of expansion,
contraction, and progress. Over the course of the Foundation novels, the lure of power and the
idea of a collective human consciousness that might transcend the epistemic and physical
limitations become central tropes for the structuring of Asimov’s fictional universe, appearing in
several contrasting guises. First comes Seldon’s Plan, which seemingly puts its faith in the
preservation of technical knowledge on Terminus, as well as several pre-defined crisis points at
which Seldon’s advice nudges the Foundation to make decisions that would ensure the Second
Empire develops according to the Plan.
In narratological terms, this pattern allows Asimov to turn the singularitarian drive into a
structuring motif for the entire series, focused on the interplay between foreknowledge of events
and their manipulation, or, put differently, on limiting the possible contingencies that might
emerge if the foreknowledge of historical events were widely spread rather than carefully
compartmentalized. The Foundation on Terminus, to which Seldon entrusts the collected
scientific knowledge of humankind, only knows enough to carry its development from crisis to
crisis, with a new message from Seldon revealed at various key points in the civilization’s
development. They are, however, unaware of the fact that Seldon has also established a second
Foundation, in a secret location, focusing on the development of psychohistory and telepathic
ability. When the Seldon Plan is threatened by a preternaturally talented telepath known only as
The Mule who uses his ability to manipulate emotions in order to conquer a great part of the
known cosmos, the Second Foundation steps in and ultimately takes control of the Mule, leading
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him to behave as a benevolent despot for the rest of his existence. As the Foundation cycle
progresses, two more instances of the same drive towards unfettered power and knowledge
emerge as guiding factors in human history: a positronic android that has been guiding human
development from a base on the Moon, leading to the development of the Galactic Empire, and a
planet named Gaia, which is essentially a realized, utopian Singularity that wants to integrate the
rest of the explored world into its harmonious whole, giving birth to a new form of integrated,
intelligent life: Galaxia.
It may be worthwhile to note that the possible outcomes of the Foundation cycle are
filtered through Asimov’s programmatic humanism, the Enlightenment legacy that structures his
work. In other words, we get to see both the Mule and Galaxia from the perspective of human
protagonists. The only way in which the regular humans at the center of the plot transcend their
status as avatars of 20
th
century humankind lies in an exacerbation of human reason; through
psychohistory, they can access a degree of historical understanding that is only conceivable to
Asimov and his contemporaries in theoretical terms.
As such, Asimov sets up a utopian/dystopian divide between possible futures of
humanity, and explores its conceptual extensions through a series of manicheistic symmetries.
There are two Foundations, each of them following one pathway in a bifurcated plan that sets
their projects at odds with one another. Their historical convolutions are staged through both
geographical and developmental oppositions: they are supposedly placed at opposite ends of the
Galaxy (geographically separated, it seems at first), which turns out eventually to mean that the
Second Foundation is hiding on Trantor, the administrative center of the Galaxy, while the First
Foundation establishes its dominion around the outer rim, as the Galactic Empire loses its
sovereign grasp over outer territories. The Foundations develop in different directions – the First
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has technological might on its side, whereas the Second develops empathic and telepathic
abilities, disguising its activities under a veneer of bucolic simplicity.
At the end of the plot convolutions, the Foundations seem to have paved the way towards
the realization of Galaxia. Yet we are left with a sense of unease, one that I would posit is
inherent to the aesthetics of the sublime whenever they are embedded in any narrative container.
To put it simply, there seems to be little reason why humans should prefer Galaxia to the Mule’s
reemerging empire under Second Foundation control, as they both subsume human individuality
to the precepts and desires of an entity that they cannot understand, at least while they remain
recognizably human individuals. What makes Galaxia more desirable than the Mule is Gaia’s
own understanding of harmonious development, as it presents it to humans – in other words, it is
the spin of an interested, self-expanding vision of transcendence that guides the reader to see
Galaxia’s unrealized future potential as Utopia, while the machinations of psychohistory that
allow it to come into being are saddled with all the abject sins of development, and therefore
relegated to the realm of (necessary) dystopia.
It is worth comparing this vision to the one Asimov rejects in his early novel The End of
Eternity. Mastery over time travel, in that story, sets up a conundrum. The more control humans
have over the course of their historical development, the greater the temptation to avoid tragic
historical events: wars, pandemics, moments of environmental collapse, etc. By guiding humans
around the conflicts that would test their mettle, however, the time-travelers of Eternity
essentially ensure that humanity will avoid learning lessons through hardship. Time travel, in this
novel, makes harmony possible, and, as a side effect, makes development impossible. Humans
stay on Earth. They become indulgent, soft, contented. They are like the humans at the end of
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E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops: helpless pets to a power structure that they cannot fully
envision, and could not even begin to replicate in their current state.
This process of envisioning transcendent powers and rendering them on a human scale
lies at the core of humanistic speculative fiction, which inherits the impulse from earlier modes
of storytelling that posit the existence of a transcendent power. Religious literature is an obvious
forerunner of such fiction, as are the fantastic elements of folk storytelling and their counterparts
in secular literature. Superheroes and supervillains use their powers to shape human development
to either humanistic or hubristic ends, and their valences often fluctuate at various moments in
the development of genre cycles. Struggle and harmony flip valences on a dime, depending on
which side of the battle we are encouraged to take in particular moments of narrative
identification. Even within the realm of science fiction not concerned with Singularitarian
transcendence, the same patterns emerge; consider, for example, Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca
(1997), in which technological development subsumes humanistic concerns to the anti-
humanistic logics of eugenics, to deleterious effects.
Speculative fiction, in this context, is simply an extension of the fictive traditions of
tragedy and melodrama: human abilities are extended, hypertrophied, and mirrored in ways that
allow for narrative momentum, for conflict and action. Success, no matter how thoroughly
marred, is the stuff of melodrama; failure, at times abjectly beautiful in its evocation of the all-
too-human drive to transcend, undergirds the aesthetic regime of tragedy. Both modes are
artistically compelling insofar as audiences can suspend disbelief and engage with the
embedding of transcendent desires in the human will on its own terms. In their respective
architectures of meaning, in their inscription of utopia and dystopia upon the human self (or, in
certain cases, the human community), they allow us to accept the drive to transcendence as a
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structural characteristic of plot. In other words, they want readers to take transcendence
seriously, to bracket its absurdity until the plot structure brings its drive to an acceptable
resolution. Melodrama and tragedy therefore ask us to engage the sublime as either utopian or
dystopian, at both a personal and a societal level.
Alenka Zupančič claims that the deepest sense of comedy emerges not from the
realization that humanity is finite, from the contrast between the real and the ideal; rather, it
comes from the fact that, even when we accept finitude, we cannot think without thinking
beyond it. There’s a hole in our finitude, as she puts it.
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As tragedy and melodrama foreground
humans taking the encounter with the transcendent seriously, comedy is busy mucking up the
works, asking why we should accept the drive towards transcendence on its terms, even insofar
as it is required to make the plot, the characters, the world of the earnest modes of literary
production make sense internally. Comedy knows that there is a leap of faith involved in
accepting the basic characteristics of the earnest modes. In deeply humanistic fashion, it
programmatically aims to intercede in that leap, to trip us over ourselves before we even begin to
indulge those parts of us that think that envisioning transcendence is the same as participating in
it.
Finally, we come to the fundamental question: can the Singularity laugh?

163
Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2008: page 53
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Can the Singularity Laugh?

No, the Singularity cannot laugh.
Can the Borg Laugh, Though?

Nope, still not. But we can laugh – and probably should laugh – at the Borg. As B’Elanna
Torres says in Star Trek: Voyager, “the Borg wouldn’t know fun if they assimilated an
amusement park."
164

Singularities cannot laugh because, by definition, singularities do not have exteriors. The
subject-object division is collapsed, and within their architecture, knowledge collapses into
perfect self-knowledge, into stasis, into an eternal harmonious whole. Yet, for a Singularity to
come into being, it would have to undergo a transitional state of hypertrophic growth, before
they expand their sovereign sameness to all matter. Whether we envision them as Galaxia, as a
grey goo, nanobot-driven, distributed apocalyptic scenario, or even as an afterlife segmented
from our current consciousness, singularities assimilate variability and individuality. In their
drive to annihilate the subject-object divide, they present the only possible image of absolute
human harmony. Its price? Merely humanity.
For the same reason, the Singularity, as Ray Kurzweil and his followers envision it, is not
representable, per se. This is why the previous paragraph speaks of singularities, without
capitalization. When the Singularity, in its conceptual abstract perfection, is dirtied by the
limitations of mediation, it becomes merely a singularity, merely another sublime vision dressed
down in the insufficiency of human expression. Its categorical incompatibility with the very
matter of human thought, its theoretical sublime vocation, is brought down to the level of our

164
Star Trek: Voyager: Tsunkatse (Season 6, Episode 15)
130
comprehension. It becomes vulnerable to the quirks of humanity, it is tamed by plot. As this
process takes place, its ineluctable otherness shifts valence, its inhuman terror becomes
negotiable, and its boundlessness turns into a limitation. Mediation itself abjects singularity,
turning it away from the polar structures of utopia and dystopia, and bringing it squarely into the
realm of the ridiculous. A few words on the Borg, the Singularitarian construct that heralded Star
Trek’s transition into skeptical postmodernism, should make this structural pattern apparent.
The Borg, it must be said, are not initially ridiculous. They are scary, on a scale and in a
way that no other Star Trek villains have been. They are implacable because they are
existentially separated from most species in the Star Trek universe – a cyborg hive mind that can
assimilate any kind of life form, removed from the pesky constraints that individuality and
mortality impose upon other creatures. This sense of overwhelming scale can not be built over a
single encounter; existential dread, after all, must emerge from its uncanny hovering over
moments of existence that would otherwise seem mundane, from its presence in the background.
Such is the introduction of the Borg, early on in the series run of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The crew of the Enterprise, led by Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), are tossed into an
encounter with the Borg through the machinations of another nemesis, Q (John de Lancie). Q is a
trickster god, who takes human form to torment Picard and his cohorts by throwing them into the
middle of various encounters where he holds all the power, testing their reactions and whether
they cohere with the Federation’s stated principles.
The Borg encounter is a foreshadowing of the kinds of foes the Federation might have to
face in the foreseeable future, as it expands its reach across the galaxy. The Borg ship, a colossal
utilitarian cube that looks like Paris’s Centre Pompidou, without the color coding, is a perfect
metaphor for the species’ entire characterization. A labyrinthine meshwork of pipes and ducts
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delineates its exterior, while the interior is dominated by geometrical arrays of biological entities,
interconnected through cybernetic implants, the server racks to this spaceship-cum-data-center.
These are Borg drones – assimilated organisms from every reach of the galaxy that has come
under Borg control. They have no individuality. They don’t sleep in beds; they regenerate in
pods, whence they can emerge, if needed, to carry out operations for which the cube itself might
be too unwieldy. Even far afield from their pods, they are still avatars of the whole, connected to
every other element of the hive mind. When they speak, they speak not as individuals, but as
mere cogs in their collective. They will most often say a variant of the following:
We are the Borg. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our
own. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

Something mechanical encrusted upon the living. The Bergsonian moment of laughter
turns here into a defining characteristic of a foe supposed to read to the viewer as a postmodern
upgrade of Lovecraftian horror. The Borg are out there, awaiting their chance to strike, patient
because they know their own inevitability.
It would take a few years – and perhaps a bit more remove from the political
demonologies of the late Cold War, in which the Borg Collective stood as an allegory for a very
specific political adversary – for Star Trek to fully explore the expressive potentialities of the
continuum between human and machine implied by the conceptual construct of the Borg. After a
major attack on Federation forces that includes their temporary assimilation of Captain Jean-Luc
Picard
165
, we get a series of stories that explore the possibility of re-individuation among the
borg. In I, Borg
166
, a defective Borg drone severed from the hive mind regains individuality and

165
Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Best of Both Worlds, Part I and II (Season 3, episode 26, and Season 4,
episode 1)
166
Star Trek: The Next Generation: I, Borg (Season 5, Episode 23)
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chooses, of his own accord, to help the crew members of the Enterprise. In a two-part storyline
that bridges the final seasons of the series, this re-individuated drone returns. He has brought
individuality and division into the hive mind, therefore creating factionalism among the Borg and
allowing them to be taken over by Lore, Data’s evil “brother.”
167
Throughout these storylines,
small inklings of humor emerge in the interactions between humans and re-individuating drones,
yet the overall impact of the storylines remains firmly entrenched in the realm of melodrama.
The subsequent spin-off, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999), uses the Borg
sparingly, as an off-screen fount of character and plot motivation. In Star Trek: Voyager (1995-
2001), however, the Borg are finally cut down to human size. Voyager’s overarching plot
structure is that of the Odyssey: a Federation crew is stranded on the opposite side of the galaxy,
and they have to undertake a perilous, decades-long journey home. Deep Space Nine deepens the
geopolitical storytelling of the franchise, focusing on sequential, large-scale worldbuilding set
around a fixed point at the edge of Federation space; its worldbuilding is more intensive than
expansive. Voyager, conversely, returns the world-building to the exploratory mode of the
Original Series: the crew are subjected, perforce, to an endless journey through strange lands.
Along the way, the Voyager crew picks up a human Borg drone, segments her from the
collective consciousness, and in effect forces her to rediscover its identity as an individual. Seven
of Nine (Jeri Ryan) is introduced in the finale of the show’s third season, as a Borg drone elected
to coordinate the Borg’s temporary alliance with the Voyager crew against a powerful new
threat. The storyline carries through to the beginning of the following season, as Seven is
forcibly severed from the Borg consciousness and, after an initial push of resistance, begins to

167
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Descent, Part I and II (Season 6, Episode 26, and Season 7, Episode 1)
133
regain her humanity. Much of her storyline is rendered in the tenor of melodrama, as her biology
and early memories assert themselves against the drone implants, and she begins to experience
human imperfections. This process is peppered throughout by humorous plot moments that draw
on various incongruities endemic to Seven’s process of rehumanization. Assimilated by the Borg
at a very young age, Seven attempts to moderate between the residual, yet powerful Borg desire
for “perfection,” and the erratic impulses of her newly asserted humanity. The humor, of course,
emerges mostly from her latent Borg-ness, from that rather thick remainder of sublime
automatisms, which define her interaction with the other crew members. Consider the following
interactions. First, the mismatch between verbal tone and intention comes to the fore most
vividly in her interactions with children:
Seven, speaking to a child: Naomi Wildman, subunit of Ensign Samantha Wildman.
State your intentions.
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Seven, speaking to four children recently rescued from the Borg: Fun will now
commence.
169

In these interactions, Seven’s comic flaw lies in her inability to distinguish between
interlocutors, addressing them all in the same overblown linguistic register. At other times, the
same inability to gauge register results in her overly literal interpretation of figurative language,
a pattern of humor that draws on similar moments in Data’s characterization in The Next
Generation.

Janeway, teaching Seven how to sculpt: The first rule is: don’t be afraid of the clay.
Seven: I fear nothing.
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168
Star Trek Voyager: Infinite Regress (Season 5, Episode 7)
169
Star Trek Voyager: Ashes to Ashes (Season 6, Episode 18)
170
Star Trek Voyager: The Raven (Season 4, Episode 6)
134
Perhaps the most surreal moments of humor emerge from Seven’s interactions with the
Doctor, an Emergency Medical Hologram who has had to go full-time, replacing a crew member
murdered in the pilot. The Doctor is not human, but his personality is based on the (rather
curmudgeonly and intensely snobbish) personality of his creator. Having expanded his
personality over the course of four seasons, the Doctor assumes some of the duties of teaching
Seven how to be a human after her arrival onboard. Because of their respective characterizations,
they end up playing out threads of what might be best described as Turing slapstick – an
awkward back and forth between entities whose human/machine homeostasis is
programmatically out of balance.
The Doctor, role-playing a date with Seven in preparation for a real date: What are
your likes, your dislikes?
Seven: I dislike irrelevant conversation.
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The Doctor: Seven! Has anyone ever told you? You have a beautiful voice! It's a true
gift!
Seven: The gift is from the Collective. A vocal subprocessor designed to facilitate the
sonic interface with Borg transponders.
172

Of course, the Doctor’s own singing abilities stem from his own vocal processing unit -
yet the decision to make the character a singer derives from actor Robert Picardo’s classical
vocal training. At any rate, the same process plays out across a variety of interactions, in which
each of the characters is just a bit too machine-like to be taken seriously. The abject dystopian
threat of the Borg, assimilated back into humanity through the machinery of plot, reasserts its
otherness through comedic play. Two talented comedic actors, playing out machine scripts.

171
Star Trek Voyager: Someone to Watch Over Me (Season 5, Episode 22)
172
Star Trek Voyager: Someone to Watch Over Me (Season 5, Episode 22)

135
Ultimately, the tendency to make the Borg into a source of humor is a form of taming by
narrative negotiation. The abject other, by way of representation, is reintegrated into the kinds of
discursive sociality that the franchise prizes above all else. It’s a form of storytelling interested in
taming the machine – just as Spock (Leonard Nimoy) was in The Original Series, wavering
between the impulses of Vulcan reason and human emotion; just as Data, in The Next
Generation, enhances his neural nets with ever-more-refined approximations of human impulses
and behaviors; or just as Robert Picardo’s Emergency Medical Hologram, forced by contingency
to expand his programming when his ship is stranded light-years from home, spends his time
singing opera and learning about human intimate relationships. In all these premises, the
possibility for humor emerges from the process of matching up incompatible structures –
technology and biology – and speculating upon possible outcomes.
Even within the more abstract layers of formal analysis, the same process becomes
apparent: language is something mechanical – something human-made – encrusted upon the
living; trying to describe the world with automatisms, rather than viewing the world anew, we
expose it to mediation, to the mechanical. Also mechanical are the structures that delineate
Western conceptions of plot. The cinematic apparatus itself? Humans playing a plot to machines,
which, after further operation by humans to encrust upon raw footage the grammar of visual
storytelling, will be entrusted to a mechanical means of conveyance, and shown to humans in
their living rooms, as they follow the mechanical scripts encrusted upon them by consumer
capitalism – a TV dinner, under the fluorescent light of an LCD panel. Something living
encrusted upon the mechanical, encrusted upon the living, and so on: a laughable compulsion
played ad infinitum even as we recognize its compulsive trappings. Don’t even get me started
about television storytelling and ad breaks.
136
The final impression is that, at every level of mediated abstraction, the same laughable
compulsion plays out, as our minds dither between the possibilities of mediation and
interpretation. Melodrama, tragedy, earnestness – these are simply ways to limit the impact of
laughter, which rightly emerges whenever we stop to contemplate the absurdity of our means of
sense-making. What is funniest about humans is that somehow we find ways to not always be
laughing, when it’s machinery all the way down.

Case Study - When a Quest Turns into a Venture

Comedy in Animated Television

“Indeterminate biology […] has yielded an infinitely pliable body that
seems constantly subject to operations of physical law, both actual
and cartoony. […] Goofy demonstrates that what is really at work in
the world of cartoon physics is a reimagining of the body and its
relation to the world.”
- Bukatman, in Animating Film Theory (Beckman ed.)
173

Since comedy probes the edges of the representable, of the speakable, of the possibilities
of freedom in any particular society, it should be no wonder that it is one of the realms of speech
that is most often politicized, and as a result, censored. Conversely, the chilling effects of any
kind of repressive regime seem to manifest themselves first in the contentious spaces of comedy.
We have known for years that physical comedy travels well; the human body is a medium
that can be understood more easily than verbal jokes. The slapstick tradition, which relies on
contrast, mechanicity, and plain silliness of human bodily motion, makes its way easily across
national borders. The same traditions, buttressed by the added formal affordances of the
plasmatic image, formed a lot of the corpus of animated comedy in its classical and postclassical
manifestations. Hannah-Barbera’s Tom and Jerry cartoons, produced for MGM, rely on the
manicheistic, never-ending battle between a feline and a rodent, recognizable across national
barriers and cultural borders; their physical comedy relies on the slapstick tradition and enhances
it through the exaggerated physics, the stretch and squeeze, made possible by the animated

173
Beckman, Karen, ed. Animating Film Theory. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014
p. 304
138
medium. The same pattern holds for many of the most popular cartoon worlds developed under
the Hollywood studio system: Messmer and Sullivan’s Felix the Cat, Disney’s Mickey and
Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy, the Fleischers’ Ko-Ko the Clown, Betty Boop, Bimbo,
and Popeye, as well as the Warner Bros.-produced Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies
franchises. Yet contemporary animated comedy combines the graphic maximalisms of its
forerunners with similar kinds of maximalist aesthetics applied to every formal aspect of the
moving image, as well as the formal systems that define televisual storytelling: genre cycles, plot
structures, character delineation, conversational stylization, etc.
One of the most salient determinations in defining the aesthetic confines of an animated
project lies in its definition of boundaries on the continuum between animate and inanimate
objects; in other words, in character design. The issue of consciousness, a fraught topic even with
reference to real-world biological organisms, becomes further muddled when applied to beings
made from line, color, shading, and time. The animated image, in Eisenstein’s terms, is
plasmatic, always holding within itself the possibility of transmutation, and often fulfilling it.
Animated bodies are radically unruly compared to their meat-sac counterparts.
In classical Hollywood animation, this freedom leads to an expansion of expressive
possibilities. Winsor McCay animates Gertie the dinosaur, and in the process he resurrects a life
form that never existed, an imaginary being developed from a partial comprehension of the
archeological record, and a thorough comprehension of marketplace demands. Felix the Cat
emerges from Otto Messmer’s and Pat Sullivan’s pen as a mercurial trickster, readily
transmuting and shedding body parts into gag-friendly physical objects, before reintegrating
them into its form. Yet no matter how violently Bugs torments Daffy, no matter how many times
Jerry leads his feline nemesis into his own traps, they make their way back to their starting
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positions, ready for the sequel. In order to package anarchy into a marketable product, the
classical Hollywood animated short has to impose boundaries upon it. The plasmatic image, free
to morph as it may, becomes constrained by its success, by its development into a brand, into a
franchise, into characters that are legally owned by the studio, and emotionally by the whole
world.

The trope of a world that can be reset, ready for further disruptions yet resistant to permanent
change, followed mainstream animated cartoons in their journey from theatrical exhibition to
syndication on broadcast network television. Jason Mittell traces this journey thoroughly in the
third chapter of Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture, in
which he argues persuasively that early television programming reshaped cartoons into
children’s entertainment, losing the crossover, intergenerational audience appeal of their
theatrical heyday.
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As the classical studios disbanded their animation units and the bundling
model in which animated shorts would precede live-action studio films lost favor, studios
monetized their existing libraries of animated shorts through televised syndication, and animators
tried to develop a financing model that would allow for the production of animation directly for
television.
Unsurprisingly, this attempt to reinvent the cartoon for television led to corner-cutting on the
most expensive part of the production process, animation itself. Early made-for-television
animation often lacked many of the subtleties and expressive freedoms that distinguished
classical studio animation and allowed it to travel well in syndication. Motion cycles were
reused, backgrounds simplified, character designs abstracted, and their expressivity reduced.

174
Mittell, Jason. Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture. New York:
Routledge, 2004. Page 60-62 et passim
140
Although color television was introduced in the United States in the mid-fifties, much earlier
than in the rest of the world, early cartoons used for television often used a limited color palette
than their classical studio forerunners, to better match the limited color range of early television
sets, and still remain somewhat visually attractive on monochrome screens. In the most extreme
cases, Chuck Jones’s hostile characterization of this new paradigm of animated production as
“illustrated radio” seems inescapable. In Mittell’s words:

The production costs for typical animation were far too exorbitant to be justified for
the still uncertain television market — a typical MGM seven-minute animated short in
the 1950s cost between $40,000 and $60,000, while half-hour live-action telefilms could
be made for only $15,000.

The 1950s saw the rise of a new technique, called “limited
animation,” which minimized movement and repeated cels to decrease both the number
of drawings used and time required to animate segments, therefore reducing costs. […] a
number of shifts in animated form […] would become typical on television: minimal
visual variety, emphasis on dialogue and verbal humor, and repetitive situations and
narratives.
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Early made-for-TV animation therefore lacks many of the aesthetic qualities that attracted
critical theorists to animation as a medium. While animated studio shorts gained global success
as a visual form, layering their medium-specific experiments and plasmatic transmutations onto a
skeletal plot, TV animation created much of its meaning through dialogue and plot structure. In
the process of finding a ready home for animation on television, producers experimented with
ways to sidestep the aesthetic fetters of limited animation and draw viewers to animated
television. One of the approaches, pioneered by Hanna-Barbera, took advantage of the mass-
audience appeal of studio animation, and consciously targeted the visual aspects of animation to

175
Mittell 2004, 65
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children, and the linguistic aspects to adults. As Mittell explains, this early version of “kidult”
targeting was initially met with critical acclaim, although some of these early shows,
programmed in prime time, tend to be painted with the same broad brush as their Saturday
morning, kids-only successors:
The puns, malapropisms, and old jokes that may seem stale today, made Hanna-Barbera
cartoons appear groundbreaking in their intergenerational appeal. This goal of reaching the
“kidult” audience was achieved not through creating unified cartoons with universal appeals,
but by specifically aiming the visuals and “wacky” sound effects at the “moppets,” and the
dialog at adults. […] These programs that have long been condemned for dumbing down
animation were viewed at the time as actually broadening the genre’s appeal through
intelligence and sophistication.
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The Flintstones (ABC, original run 1960-66), of course, is the prime example, a success that
led to an immediate slate of imitators and the oversaturation of an immature market in a few
short years.
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Its innovation was a matter of genre hybridization. Drawing on the same
resurrective impulse as McCay’s Gertie, yet eager to encase it in a narrative structure that allows
for a large variety of plot developments, The Flintstones layers a pop-paleolithic skin on the
social institutions and spatial organization of postwar America, and in the process brings an
entirely new set of signifying possibilities and comedic distancing devices to the already-
established genre of the sitcom. The situational comedy of The Flintstones thus relies on two
patterns of formal estrangement, both occasioned by its setting and animation’s freedom from the
confines of physics:
(a) by displacing contemporary American suburban life into an inaccessible historical
period, it defamiliarizes and opens up to critique the peculiar living conditions and social
mores of postwar middle-class suburban white America; this happens on both a visual and

176
Mittell 2004, 69-70
177
Mittell 2004, 72-74
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narrative level, in sight gags as well as character and plot dynamics; and
(b) through its decoupling of the sitcom genre from the process of live performance, it
allows for more rhythmic experimentation and higher density of comedic content than multi-
camera sitcoms; in the long run, this aesthetic choice will loop back and influence live-action
single camera sitcoms in the post-network era, leading to a series of shows in the mid-2000s
that can be best understood as live-action cartoons, so textually dense as to require multiple
viewings. Some examples include Arrested Development on FOX (2003-06) and
subsequently Netflix (seasons released in 2013 and 2018), 30 Rock on NBC (2006-13),
Scrubs on NBC (2001-08) and subsequently ABC (2008-09), and Community on NBC
(2009-2014) and Yahoo! Screen (2015).
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I will return to these texts in the conclusion to this
dissertation, arguing that they are emblematic of the back-and-forth between the media
regimes that define the cultural status of contemporary animation, and therefore emblematic
of the impulse to turn the energies of comedy towards prosocial cultural endeavors.

178
Single-camera network sitcoms already existed at the time The Flintstones aired, and they have been
a constant presence throughout the history of American television. I am simply highlighting the ways in
which animation has influenced the aesthetics recent live-action single-camera sitcoms, rather than
establishing a parallel, continuous genealogy running from The Flintstones to contemporary shows.

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Nomen Est Omen

After six seasons aired over the span of fifteen years, no matter how closely you have
watched or re-watched every episode, you still don’t know who the titular brothers are. That’s
the first thing you should know. Hundreds of characters populate the palimpsestic world of The
Venture Bros., and its plotlines have explored over a century of mostly self-consistent plot
entanglements, yet showrunners Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer, who have written almost
every line and shepherded every worldbuilding detail to completion, have yet to reveal the full
plot implications of the title. There is a gap here, between title and story, one that paradoxically
deepens with every subsequent bro entering the fray.
This gap is purposeful, and purposefully expansive. From the beginning of the series, it
implies that its aesthetic regime is grounded in the negative space of what is presented onscreen:
every story hinges on a missing piece, one intimated but rarely revealed; every interaction grows
from a backstory that remains tantalizingly beyond reach; every character has a series of missing
or present doppelgängers; everyone and everything important seems to have slipped behind a
narrative curtain, allowing the visible melodramatic content to distract attention from the
structural conditions that set its machinery in motion. Negative space is the fount of storytelling
for the series, and, as the series progresses, it grows into a metatextual trope with implications
for storytelling across a century of industrial art.
The title evokes several generic connotations. Venture, supposedly a family name, is
simultaneously resonant and corporately blank. It is barely plausible as a last name, and it
directly engages the contentious trope of corporate personhood, especially in conjunction with
“bros.” Bros., in its abbreviated form, appears in writing only. When the words are spoken on the
show, it’s always as “brothers,” recalling the tension inherent in the idea of business-as-a-family.
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Abbreviated on signage, foregrounded in branding, this rhetorical trick suggests that the
corporation’s success, its very livelihood, is intricately bound up with the individual, with the
family. No matter how outsized a corporate conglomerate might grow, its
founders/owners/guarantors are exceptional individuals. Think Warner Bros., or, slightly subtler
but no less misleading, the Walton family’s *marts, kudzu to local enterprise across the
continent.
By the show’s debut in 2003, Hollywood itself was in thrall more to venture bros than the
Warner Bros. The Warner logo, still prefacing movie screenings in theatres worldwide, by then
referred to one of the three divisions of AOL Time Warner. This corporate agglutination resulted
from the 1989 merger of Warner with Time Inc., their subsequent joint purchase of most Turner
Broadcasting assets in 1996, and a much-publicized merger with AOL in 2000, at the height of
the ISP’s market penetration. Various parts of the conglomerate have subsequently been spun off
into independent companies and/or been acquired in waves of market consolidation. These
include AOL and Time Inc., although the main corporate entity has decided to keep the Time
brand in its own title as well. As such, Warner Bros. is, as of the writing of this dissertation, still
a division of Time Warner. If federal regulators approve their pending sale to AT&T, they will
both become a part of the cell phone and internet service provider that emerged from a regional
monopoly that in turn grew out of a company spun off by Alexander Graham Bell in the late
nineteenth century. Depending on litigation, the resulting entity may or may not be forced to
divest itself of either DirecTV or Turner properties, and if they do the latter, The Venture Bros.
may well no longer be owned by the Warner Bros., while Warner Bros. will most certainly still
be owned by venture bros.
The show is consequently concerned not only with the stories of The Venture Bros., but also
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the machinations, misrepresentations, and broken promises of venture capital, especially in
relationship to contemporary American masculinity. Although the whirlwind of mergers,
acquisitions, and spinoffs in the previous paragraph might seem overwhelming, it is barely a
sketch of ongoing corporate churn at all scales and in all corners of contemporary media
industries. In the early nineties, the Turner conglomerate acquired the assets of the Hanna-
Barbera animated studio, which included their MGM cartoons as well as the company’s
productions from the classical age of syndicated TV animation. This deep library of previous
releases would form the backbone of Turner’s programming strategy for its Cartoon Network
cable channel in its early years.
One of the assets at stake, the Jonny Quest franchise, is the most explicit intertextual
inspiration for The Venture Bros. Its original season, aired by ABC in prime-time in the mid-
sixties, was so successful in syndication that it led to the development of new episodes in 1986,
packaged for syndication as a continuation, rather than reboot, of the original series. A modern
reboot, including computer-generated effects for the portrayal of a three-dimensional, virtual
world within the world of the show, aired on Cartoon Network in the late nineties. Throughout
its iterations, Jonny Quest’s focuses on its titular protagonist, an eleven-year-old boy who joins
his adoptive brother Hadji, their genius father, and his special-agent bodyguard on their global
adventures. In the broad, stereotype-driven, and naively manicheistic tone of adventure pulp, the
show portrays Quest-fils as an intelligent and dutiful wunderkind, eager to grow into a version of
his role model, and take up his adventuring mantle. The name Quest, of course, is similar to
Venture in that it connotes exploration, novelty, purpose; or, to be a bit cheeky, ad-venture. Yet a
venture is not always a quest, and a failed venture, unlike a failed quest, seems to connotatively
lead to a heavier aftermath. When a quest grows up, when a quest has left its marks on the body
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and the world, when a quest has hired a lawyer and an accountant and an HR department, when
the excitement of the journey becomes the hassle of checking off items on a printed itinerary, the
quest has become a venture.
We thus return to that maddening gap, between title and story, between brand and function,
between trope and content, with even more questions. Are the Venture Bros. a business? Are
they a family? Are Ventures grown-up Quests? The answer to all these questions seems to be a
resounding “yes.” The main timeline of the show is roughly contemporary, accented by
technofuturist and fantastic elements drawn primarily from superhero and science fiction genres,
as well as a variety of flashbacks that set the contemporary storyline within a century of
historical context. Over the course of the series, we have sufficient information to at least suspect
that the following characters are all, to some extent, Venture brothers:
1. The show’s protagonist, Rusty Venture.
2. His children, Hank and Dean Venture
3. His secret child with a member of his fan club, and best friend of Hank Venture, Dermot
Fictel.
4. Jonas Venture Jr., Rusty’s twin brother, absorbed in the womb and birthed in middle-age
5. Jonas Venture Sr., who may or may not have been siblings with The Monarch’s parents, or
may be the actual father of the Monarch. If siblings, then also either the monarch’s father (Blue
Morpho) or his mother (villain identity not yet revealed, but strongly implied) will be a Venture.
6. The Monarch, whose status as Rusty’s long-hidden half-sibling is confirmed through a
trail of breadcrumbs and narrative convolutions that begin in the first few episodes of Season 1
and finally converge in the three-episode story arc that opens Season 7.
7. A variety of other characters, connected to the Ventures through somewhat looser
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narrative threads, but whose Venturedom might be plausible, especially in the context of so
many other characters whose relationship to the Ventures seems complicated by hidden familial
ties.
Cartoon Bodies and Death
In the last few moments of the first season of the show, having weathered every external
challenge and heedlessly traipsed through a range of dangers to life and limb unharmed, Hank
and Dean Venture die in a senseless accident. They are riding their hoverbikes a short distance
ahead of their caretakers’ car: Byron Orpheus driving, and Rusty, Brock, and JJ as passengers.
⁠1

The Monarch’s recurring henchmen, 21 and 24, are also driving down the same stretch of road,
bickering about the last remaining item on their “to do” list: they have to kill the Venture
brothers, and 21 wants to stop for ammo (by contrast, 24 thinks the Monarch meant this last item
“metaphorically”). 21 is complaining about his hair getting inside his goggles, about his inability
to see well while costumed. They notice the boys on their hover bikes, but don’t recognize them,
so they decide to ask them for directions. They pull up to their side, open the window, and shout:

Henchman 24: Where can we get a haircut?
Henchman 21, sticking the rifle out the window: And ammo for this?
Henchman 24: Hey, you’re on the stick shift! I can’t see the road!

There is a quick shuffle, 21’s rifle discharges, and the hoverbikes topple over, then explode.
Over a wide aerial shot of the flaming wreckage, we hear a passable impression of Bob Dylan by
staff animator Nick DeMayo, and watch the credits roll as the view tracks and pans away from
the wreckage, slowly fading to black:

Two angels are plucked
From the heavenly sky
In an instant they're gone
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In the blink of an eye
If you listen close
You'll hear cherubs cry
Oh, look away…

Every episode has a short tag, aired after the closing credits, commenting on the events of the
episode. In this case, the tag pans from a bawling, grief-stricken Dr. Orpheus over to Rusty and
Brock surveying the aftermath of the accident with a calm, neutral expression. Before the final
cut to company credits, Rusty says to Brock in an affectless tone: “All right, get their clothes.”
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How did we get here? Stuck with the officiously high-minded Orpheus for the evening, and
having interpreted their father’s ailment as a pregnancy sure to result in an unwanted younger
sibling, the Venture boys rebelled by running away from the compound on their hoverbikes, in
outfits reminiscent of those worn by the main characters in the indie cult favorite Easy Rider
(1969). It is this intertextual reference that actually determines the fate of the twins, rather than
any plot-based sense of causal interconnection. The ending sequence is actually a compressed
version of the ending of Easy Rider, rendered in the Venture world. The shot selection and
editing patterns in the final moments are a dutiful replica of Easy Rider’s depressing, senselessly
violent ending, as one can tell from the following shot comparisons:

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James Urbaniak, who voices Rusty, pronounces this word ambiguously. “Clothes” works well as a first read,
and is confirmed by the episode’s close captioning; however, “clones” has its own claim to plausibility, and becomes
the unavoidable read after the overdetermining events of the second season premiere.
149

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There are differences between the intertextual source and its pastiche in the world of Venture.
In Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper’s character flips off the men in the truck before getting shot at and
crashing into a ditch; the Venture twins, on the other hand, react to the henchmen with a friendly
wave. In Easy Rider, the murder of the two bikers is intentional and prolonged by the fact that
the truckers kill the bikers one at a time, returning to shoot Peter Fonda’s character as he
ministers to his friend’s lifeless body on the edge of the highway. Their death is senseless insofar
as there is no reason for it other than the truckers’ desire to scare the bikers, and their
determination to leave no witnesses once they have caused Hopper’s crash. Yet the scene can
easily be read contextually, as a culmination of the tensions between the mainstream and
counterculture of the American sixties, which form the structural armature of Hopper’s artistic
project in Easy Rider. The truckers may not have planned to murder the bikers, but once they
have caused Hopper’s character to crash, their decision to shoot Fonda’s character is more or less
automatic, predetermined. In no uncertain terms, we are informed that the bikers’ lives are
worthless to their murderers.
The Venture twins’ death is similarly senseless, but its contextual connotations are much
more difficult to pin down. The twins, at this point in the plot of the series, have not yet
outgrown their indeterminacy. They are relatively easy to swap in for one another, more
expressions of a trope (immensely unintelligent adventure kids in cartoons) than actual
characters. In other words, as graphic entities, the fate of the twins is sealed by their visual
characteristics rather than their presence/activity as plot catalysts. Although the death is
foreshadowed in the plot of the episode, in the Monarch’s early order to “kill the Venture
Brothers,” there is no causal relationship between that order and the accidental boyslaughter
described in previous paragraphs. Plot transitivity is a matter of contingency here, rather than
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causality: the henchmen do their job by accident rather than conscious action. Where melodrama
falls back on patterns of action driven by will, comedy responds with the absurdity of slapstick,
driven by context and embodiment.
The first season finale aired on October 30, 2004. Apart from a Christmas special the same
year, half-length and unconnected to the main events of the rest of the show’s timeline, the
Venture children’s senseless death would remain unexplored until the second season premiere on
June 25, 2006. For almost two years, fans were left to speculate freely as to the ultimate fate of
Hank and Dean Venture: are they really dead? Will they return? How?

Get Their Clothes / Get Their Clones

Brother and sister
Together we'll make it through
Some day a spirit will lift you and take you there
I know you've been hurting but I've been waiting to be there for you
And I'll be there just helping you out
Whenever I can, ooh

Rozalla, “Everybody’s Free,” Epic/Sony 1991

Rozalla’s Everybody’s Free, a synth-pop anthem from the early nineties, plays in the
background as Brock pursues Rusty through a succession of imposing mountain and jungle
landscapes. He finally tracks him down at a rave, and shuts down his protestations: Rusty must
return to the Venture compound, and properly deal with the death of his sons. It’s only after we
return to the compound that we are treated to the major revelation of the early season. The Hank
and Dean we knew are indeed deceased, but that doesn’t mean that Hank and Dean are gone.
Rusty, presumably enabled by his father’s scientific research, has a roomful of clones held in
suspended animation, ready to replace the originals we knew throughout the first season in case
they are killed. All he needs to do is imprint them with the memories of the previous Hank and
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Dean instances, and his children are back. Indeed, our Hank and Dean are not the originals - we
learn that there have been fourteen previous deaths, fourteen resurrections, fourteen sets of clone
slugs. One wonders how many memories were improperly transferred, how much of their lives
caught in that whirling vortex of forgetting between the most recent back-up and their eventual
resurrection, how much of it lost to data corruption and imperfect transfers. Either way, it’s no
wonder that the children seem clueless and glitchy. Their emotional and intellectual development
isn’t only stunted due to parental neglect and compound upbringing; the kids are simulacra of
their own possible selves by design, traumatized minds in lab-grown bodies.
One wonders whether Rusty is himself a clone, whether his own twitchy and glitchy self is
due as much to his nature as it is to his nurture. Indeed, the timeline of his and his children’s life
is unclear, and it remains so throughout the series, even as the slow drip of information regarding
the backstory of the contemporary plot continues to couple specific background revelations with
an ever-expanding array of unresolved points of speculative ambiguity.
How Can You Play With A Disembodied Head?

They’re henchmen! You don’t explain to them – they do your bidding.
When you say “Jump!” they say “What shark?”

- The Monarch
At one point in the second season finale of the The Venture Bros., “Showdown at
Cremation Creek,” two characters engage in a short exchange that epitomizes the show’s
aesthetic impulses: at once nostalgic and forward-looking, campy and earnest, unapologetically
silly but buzzing with the unmistakable whirr of truly original artistic creation. Starting from
that exchange, I will try to pin down some of the defining characteristics of The Venture Bros.,
linking it up with discourses in animation studies that praise the field’s attachment to play,
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metamorphosis, and the almost militantly modernist denial of representational verisimilitude that
undergirds so much of the history of animation.
We are in the middle of a two-part episode that showcases the breadth of the show’s
motley mishmash of character pastiche and engrossing narrative thrust: a supervillain wedding
between two of the main series antagonists, the Monarch (a monarch butterfly-themed, inept
malfeasant) and his lover, Dr. Girlfriend (the competent villain of the pair, who looks like Jackie
O. in her famous pillbox hat but has a deep male blue-collar accented voice) is besieged by the
bride’s former lover, Phantom Limb, a character whose four limbs went invisible after a botched
experiment, but who gained the power to murder anyone by simply touching them.
The pastiche should be obvious from the description, and we haven’t even reached the
title family yet. The Monarch fits neatly within the lineage of pulpy characters inspired by
crappy animals once the cool ones were all taken. Dr. Girlfriend (soon to be Dr. Mrs. The
Monarch) is a parody of the one-dimensional females that adorn, rather than function as true
characters, in so much of comic and cartoon history. Her utmost competence, masculine voice,
and general penchant for gleeful genderfuck belie her name and appearance – in one of my
favorite lines from this episode, she calls the Monarch “Mr. Girlfriend,” at once reversing and
reinforcing the already arbitrary signifier of her name, tethered as it is to her function as the
Monarch’s partner.
It should come as no surprise that she is led to the altar by a fictionalized version of
David Bowie (or, as we find out later in the show, a shapeshifter whose unaltered photo served
as the cover for Bowie’s Diamond Dogs), flanked by his two traitorous henchmen: Klaus Nomi
and Iggy Pop (“30 years of taking orders from you, man. 30 years of playing the idiot. Now
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you’re gonna be MY dog!”). Every other line in The Venture Bros. contains this kind of
intertextual wordplay – in this case in particular, both of Iggy’s lines refer to his music – “The
Idiot” is his breakout solo album, co-produced and co-written with Bowie during his Berlin
period, and “I Wanna Be Your Dog” is an earlier song from Iggy and the Stooges, the band he
front-lined before the beginning of his solo career. Integrating rock stars into a cartoon that deals
primarily with narratives of demythologized supervillainy might seem counterintuitive until we
consider the high-concept nature of style of the three chosen musicians, all of whom perform in
character, and whose acts depend on the creation of protean, surreal personas.
It also stands to the show’s peculiar version of reason that the wedding should be
officiated by Dr. Henry Killinger, a recurring character who is equal parts Kissinger and Mary
Poppins - or that the episode’s C story follows a mystical trio of superheroes – Dr. Orpheus, an
overly-fastidious necromancer whose pretense serves as the butt of many jokes, The Alchemist,
an aging gay alchemist, and Jefferson Twilight, a Blacula hunter. Of course, the show engages
directly with the absurdity of the roles it picks up from popular culture and exploitation
filmmaking, deconstructing the roles themselves while allowing its characters to transcend them
through personality and (over the course of the series) growth.
JEFFERSON TWILIGHT: Yes, I only hunt blaculas.
CANDIDATE: Oh, so you only hunt African-American vampires?
TWILIGHT: No, sometimes I hunt British vampires. They don't have "African-Americans" in
England!
CANDIDATE: Oh yeah, huh, good point.
TWILIGHT: So I hunt blaculas.
CANDIDATE: I was just trying to be...
TWILIGHT: Man, I specialize in hunting black vampires, I don't know what the P.C. name for
that is!

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In “Showdown at Cremation Creek,” the Monarch’s henchmen finally manage to capture
the Ventures and their bodyguard, a humongous bemulletted murder machine named Brock
Samson. However, because the Monarch has promised Dr. Girlfriend that he would quit arching
Dr. Venture and consider her a complete equal in return for her hand in marriage, he pretends to
have invited him to bury the hatchet and become the Monarch’s best man at the wedding. Rusty
plays the part and sends his boys off with the Monarch’s two recurring henchmen to change into
inconspicuously theme-appropriate butterfly costumes. Hank pairs up with Henchman 21/Gary
(who is one of the many breakout characters of the series), and has the following conversation
with him as they enter the henchman’s room:
HENCHMAN 21: Yeah I think I've still got an old costume you can wear.
And before you say it, I was much slimmer then.
HANK: I was gonna say you have more toys than a little girl.
HENCHMAN 21: What? Dude, there are no toys in here.
HANK: Oh what do you call that?
HENCHMAN 21: Alright, that's a maquette.
HANK: Doll. And that?
HENCHMAN 21: That is a collectable bust.
HANK: That -- is a toy.
HENCHMAN 21: How can you play with a disembodied head?
HANK: Well he could be like a, like an all-knowing head that, that tells...
HENCHMAN 21: Quisp?
HANK: That tells Quisp that he has to kill...
HENCHMAN 21: The micronaut.
HANK: Kill the micronaut.
HENCHMAN 21: [long pause] Huh. So do you wanna-
HANK: Only if I get to be that He-Man head.

The glee of childlike roleplay takes over, and the scene shines as a representation of the
incipient stages of the creative process. A ludic approach to existing artifacts, which may have
had a role as collectibles up to this point, brings new life to them. The Venture Bros. flatly denies
the taxonomizing preservation-driven fetishism of collector geekdom and replaces it with
something infinitely more powerful: the exciting moment when the geek starts to tell his (or her)
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own story, to build personalized narrative, to become a participatory creator rather than a
consumer of media.
This moment of engagement brings to mind an essential part of Esther Leslie’s analysis
of critical theorists’ engagement with animation as mass culture, which she chronicles in
Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde. Leslie’s study,
motivated “by frustration at the phoney war between high culture and popular or low or mass
culture,”
180
argues that much of critical theory as it emerged from the Frankfurt School was
highly influenced by popular culture – and that modernist problematics, such as “the flattening of
surfaces and denial of perspective
181
” simultaneously played out in the world of high art (through
early avantgardes, cubism, abstract expressionism, et al.) and in the world of mass culture
(through everything from cartoons to comics to animation).
182
In discussing Walter Benjamin’s
engagement with childhood and collectorship, she picks up on the fact that collecting is not
necessarily, or not primarily, a taxonomizing, archival act, but one that, at its purest point,
reengages old objects and brings them to life:
In play, and in learning, children animate objects, and Benjamin reanimates the objects of
the world in describing this process.
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In reanimating them he brings to life past energies
now slumbering in objects. […] Collecting aims not at the stockpiling of inert objects
[…] Such imaginative work of renewal of matter signals to Benjamin an originary
impulse to revolution that exists in the child. Perhaps the Disney films promised the
reawakening of decayed capacities in adults – the ability to empathize as much with
objects as with people, as much with animals and trees as with machinery; they also
relied on the delight in play and absurdity.
184

180
Leslie, Esther. Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and The Avant-Garde. London, UK: Verso,
2002. Print. Page v.
181
Leslie, page v et passim
182
The Venture Bros. fits very well in this lineage of forced flattening of perspective, as a hand-painted 2D show
that painstakingly recreates and breathes new life into the aesthetics of TV animation form the seventies
183
Note how the very act of writing about this (on Benjamin’s part) is also part of the discourse of reanimation.
184
Leslie 95-96
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Of course, the moment of creation represented in this scene – naïve, vulnerable, ludic and
necessarily lacking refinement, is not only at the core of the artistic process in general, but also
an ars poetica, a declaration of artistic method from the creators of The Venture Bros. Doc
Hammer and Jackson Publick (Christopher McCullough) are just about as independent as writer-
animators can be in the contemporary mediascape, writing, doing the basic storyboarding, and
editing the show themselves – which explains the relatively slow production schedule, with a
ten-to-twelve episode season released every couple of years. Even more strikingly, Hammer and
Publick voice the two characters in this scene – Publick plays Hank and Hammer voices Gary.
They have repeatedly mentioned in interviews that many narrative threads and character traits
emerge from simply playing their respective characters and riffing around playfully, until they
find something they want to pursue further.
The complex, layered, and incredibly expansive world of The Venture Bros., then, comes
from similarly modest yet playful beginnings. Hammer and Publick are pop-cultural magpies,
scavenging the reified remains of popular culture and bringing them to new life for the purposes
of their show. This explains why The Venture Bros. is light-hearted yet allows for substantial
character development, campy but also a brilliant examination of major humanistic themes,
pastiche-driven, but never disdainful of its pop-cultural background, no matter how silly it might
get.
There is even more of a mise-en-abyme of the concept of creation through play in this
scene. The two intertextual references, to Quisp and the Micronaut, both point to similar
moments of creation. Quisp is a space-age cereal by Quaker Oats that benefitted from an
animated campaign (with Quisp as a goofy space-sprite) quite popular in the seventies, created
by Rocky and Bullwinkle animators Jay Ward and Bill Scott. The Micronauts, on the other hand,
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were initially a toy line that subsequently inspired various comic book properties – again,
repurposed and recreated artefacts of play that are used to generate new worlds and new
possibilities.
185

Tom Gunning
186
and Scott Bukatman
187
both pick up on the thread of animism that
influenced early animators in their desire to bring every possible object in the frame, whether it
represent live characters or props and décor, to life, an argument filtered through Sergei
Eisenstein’s writings about early Disney cartoons. In comparing his take on this kind of plasticity
with the work of content and ideology based scholarship and its anxieties about free formal play,
Bukatman joyfully rebukes: “none of that for me! I come not to bury the plasmatic
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but to
praise it. I stand with Eisenstein in defense of cartoon physics and the freedom from once-and-
forever allotted form.”
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In the context of The Venture Bros., we might even interpret such
freedom from form on two levels: first in the plasticity of the picture frame itself, then in the
plasticity of meaning – every scavenged remain of pop culture being revalorized and reformed to
build a world that functions both as a winking postmodern space and a place for real character
development.
Both Gunning and Bukatman take seriously the idea that motion and morph, rather than
the automated reproduction of reality, is at the core of the cinematic image – or at least as
important a determining factor as the lure of the automatism, which has structured most realist

185
InnerSpace Online, a hobbyist website that deals with the publishing history of Micronauts comics, transcribes an
article from Amazing Heroes #7 that refers to an early piece of writing by Micronaut creator Bill Mantlo in Comics
Journal, which in its turn recounts this narrative. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to track down the primary source
yet. Amazing Heroes #7, retrieved from http://www.innerspaceonline.com/AH7.htm.
186
Gunning, Tom. “The Transforming Image: The Roots of Animation in Metamorphosis and Motion,” in Pervasive
Animation: an AFI Film Reader, ed. Suzanne Buchan. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013. Print. P. 52-69
187
Bukatman, Scott. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit. Berkeley and Los
Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2012. Print.
188
Eisenstein’s term for the metamorphic flow that undergirds animation
189
Bukatman 20
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film theory. Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay on The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological
Reproducibility partially deals with this issue, as does the vein of film criticism followed most
prominently by Andre Bazin in his work on the ontology of the photographic image and Stanley
Cavell in his theories about automatism. However, Gunning and Bukatman both aim to
revalorize in the moving image its experimental potential, its plasticity and essentially protean
quality. Without the space to delve deeply into their analyses, I can only end with Gunning’s
near-lyrical evocation of the potential of animated form, as opposed to photographically
representational cinema:
[…] the wonder and fantasy aspect of animation derives from the other pole: the fantasy
of endowing something inert with life and movement in a way that exceeds the natural:
toys that come to life, everyday objects that dance and sing, bodies whose contours
exceed the possible, that swell and expand, or collapse and shrink fantastically. Imagine
that prior to the illusion of fully developed naturalistic motion of bodies moving through
space we have an image filled with an endless potential for various motions, in effect
vibrating with the possibility of change, unstable in its identity and clearly different from
the inert and static form of the traditional picture.
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I would posit that this is one of the essential impulses behind The Venture Bros. – taking
the world not for what it is, and not for what it has been, but for what it might become. Each little
bit of the Venture universe brims with potential – which is why the show has an ever-expanding
cast of characters, and every time a new one is introduced, careful viewers are liable to recognize
him or her from the background of an older episode. Recycling, rebuilding, reanimating: that is
where the wonder lies.
HENCHMAN 21: [long pause] Huh. So do you wanna-
HANK: Only if I get to be that He-Man head.

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Tom Gunning. “The Transforming Image: The Roots of Animation in Metamorphosis and Motion,” in
Pervasive Animation: an AFI Film Reader, ed. Suzanne Buchan. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013. Print. Pages. 52-
69. Page 57
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Art Takes A While: The Long Tail of Toxic Masculinity

The Venture Bros., due to its irregular airing schedule, provides an aesthetic experience
strongly at odds with the imperatives of contemporary TV content. The test pilot, unconnected to
the consistent world-building of the series, aired in February, 2003. Full seasons have aired on a
relatively leisurely schedule, with two to three years’ worth of production time between the
seasons, and with several gaps in the weekly airing schedule. Several specials, focused on major
narrative shifts, have been aired while the series itself was on hiatus, functioning as an amuse-
bouche for upcoming seasons, as a rallying signal for the show’s loyal long-term audience.

“Careers in Science,” S1E2, follows the Ventures as they visit Gargantua-1, a space station
built by Jonas Sr. during Rusty’s childhood. Summoned to respond to a maintenance problem –
literally a blinking red light under a sign that reads PROBLEM - Rusty assumes that his space
suit has a waste collection pouch and consequently pees himself, accidentally opens the bay
doors, ejecting his nanny-robot H.E.L.P.e.R. and exposing Brock to outer space, then promptly
knocks himself out playing with the station’s gravity controls. He hallucinates an oversized
version of his father, addressing him as if he were still a child, and expecting him to know how
to fix the station. Finally, when he wakes up, he finds the source of the error by pure chance: he
notices some melted orange plastic on the side of a panel, and opens it to find a plastic cowboy
figurine melted atop the wiring. The grown up Rusty then removes one of his favorite childhood
toys, lost for years, from the machine, and the station resumes its normal functioning. It turns out
his father was right all along: Rusty knew how to fix this, the power was within him.
It would take six seasons, produced and aired over a fifteen-year span, for the show to
finally provide an unambiguous payoff to this early set-up. Over the course of these seasons, we
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have continuously assumed that Rusty’s defining trauma – growing up under the outsized
shadow of his father and subsequently losing him in unspecified tragic circumstances – has been
an – unambiguous established fact of the show’s world. Yet, in the premiere to the show’s
seventh season, we learn that Jonas Venture Sr. survived said tragic circumstances, and lived on
as a disembodied head, preserved at the core of the computer system that powered the Gargantua
space station. The mysterious PROBLEM light, mocked in the first season for its lack of
specificity, turns out to have been hyper-specific all along. It is pronounced “pro-blem” and is an
old-fashioned branded acronym, standing for another of Jonas’s inventions: PROgressive
Biological Life Extension Module. Over the course of the three episodes, we get a storyline that
explains one of the major negative-space gaps in our understanding of this world.
To summarize: Jonas Venture Sr. did indeed die, by most standards, on the day when
everyone assumed him to have died in 1987. A group of up-and-coming supervillains decided to
take him hostage on a day when the entire Gargantua-1 crew gathered in the pod bay for their
recurring movie night. They made their way to the space station and infiltrated the crew.
According to Red Death (one of the villains in question, voiced by Clancy Brown), at one point,
something in the plan went wrong and someone – Red Death strongly implies it to have been one
of the other villains, named Vendata – opened the pod bay doors and spaced every member of
the Gargantua-1 crew. This event, subsequently dubbed the Movie Night Massacre, set in motion
the defining events for many in the Venture main cast. Rusty lost his father, and was forced to
take over his aging, decaying business and real estate empire. In the aftermath, the attack was
blamed on one of the major crime syndicates of the time, called SPHINX, which led to a major
war between them and OSI – the Office of Secret Intelligence. This war eliminated SPHINX
from the map of organized supervillainy, strengthening the position of the Guild of Calamitous
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Intent, the main supervillain organization we have seen in action over the course of the seasons.
It also brought Brock Samson, the Venture family bodyguard, into the fight, leading him to enlist
with OSI and begin his own slide into the world of government and military service.
In effect, that means that the motivational structures for two of the major characters of the
series turn out to have been based on misunderstandings and misinformation all along. But the
changes do not end there – they also confirm another long-standing strand of speculation
regarding the matter of the show’s worldbuilding, present since the first season. The Monarch,
Rusty Venture’s sworn enemy, is also his half-brother, and therefore a bastard Venture himself.
Again, this storyline has been hinted at in flashbacks over the course of the seasons, but the first
three episodes of Season 7 confirm previous speculations. The Monarch’s father was a vigilante
who fought crime under the assumed identity of The Blue Morpho, which partially explains the
Monarch’s obsession with butterflies. At one point in the past, he saved Jonas Venture and his
original superhero team from a villain’s lair, and started to collaborate with Jonas on his projects.
One of the defining worldbuilding tropes in The Venture Bros. is toxic masculinity, as the
fount of all the maladies that define the generations of Ventures and those around them. Rusty’s
father, missing for the entire duration of the show’s storyline, is an oversized hypermasculine
presence in his life, and determines Rusty’s own psychological insecurity, both in relation to the
world at large and in his inability to form lasting relationships with women. We never learn
much about Rusty’s mother, or about mothers in general; they remain in that maddening negative
space of the show, their defining presence obscured by layers of narrative hypertrophy and by
partial perspectives on background events gleaned from the stories that various characters tell
about their past. In the negotiations of the men, we can glimpse the women and their travails.
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In this case, the woman in question is Malcolm/The Monarch’s mother. She is presumed
dead after a traumatic plane crash in Malcolm’s childhood, revealed early in the first season.
Malcolm is the lone survivor, and his mythologized version of the events is his origin story:
stranded in the New Jersey Pine Barrens after the plane crash, he says he was “raised” by the
Monarch butterflies roaming through the forest, and takes up his new identity as the Monarch
when he decides to become a supervillain. He grows up and, once he gets access to the trust fund
left behind by his parents, he dedicates his life to the single-minded pursuit of arching against
Rusty Venture.
The trauma of the plane crash, however, cannot explain the target of his overwhelming
hatred; as far as we know before the beginning of Season 7, Malcolm’s hatred for Rusty is deep-
seated, was already present when they were college classmates, and seems to have its origin at
some point in their early childhood. Indeed, in an episode of the fifth season, Malcolm discovers
a photo of himself and Rusty playing in their youth, and reacts to it with confusion; he does not
remember this moment ever taking place. This suggests that Malcolm has some memory gaps,
repressed over the course of the years, and that his unprocessed memories are at the core of his
hatred for Rusty.
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Figure 3. Screenshot: The Venture Bros., Season 5, Episode 3: Sphinx Rising
We get a better sense of the chain of events as the series progresses, leading to the
revelation that Jonas Sr. is most likely Malcolm’s biological father. We learn that, after the Blue
Morpho saved team Venture, he started acting in Jonas Sr.’s interest, although the world at-large
still identifies him as a vigilante rather than a superscientist/superhero. We also learn, alongside
Malcolm, that his father was unfaithful to his mother, and had group sex, on tape, with Jonas Sr.
and two supermodels/starlets at one point in the 1970s. Jonas Sr. proceeded to blackmail the
Blue Morpho with the tape, forcing him to do his bidding. In the aftermath of Blue Morpho’s
infidelity, he tells Jonas Sr. that he is feeling enormous guilt, especially since he and his wife
have been trying and failing to conceive. Jonas tells him that fertility science has been
progressing apace, and asks him to send his wife over to the Venture compound for help. Ten
months later, Malcolm / The Monarch is born.
Some of these revelations are peppered, in small bits and pieces, throughout the series.
Indeed, speculation about the Monarch’s Venture-ness has been rampant since the first season of
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the show, continuing apace throughout, and revived in the era of online mass reception,
especially after the photo reproduced above was aired in Season 5. In the foreground, Rusty is
playing with a car while Malcolm is crying – a laughably lightweight version of the Monarch’s
defining trauma might have to do with toddler Rusty stealing one of his toys. In the background,
Team Venture is playing pick-up football, while Jonas Jr. and the Blue Morpho are arrayed on
either side of Blue Morpho’s wife. Their body language speaks volumes. She is facing Jonas,
with her back turned to her husband. Her husband has his hand on her back, and his facial
expression seems polite yet close to neutral. He isn’t drinking, but Jonas and his wife are. He is
barely smiling, while the other two are laughing out loud. He is the obvious third wheel in the
composition, left out of what seems to be a riveting conversation between his wife and the man
we suspect might secretly be his child’s father.
Jonas Sr.’s toxicity does not end here, however. Most of these revelations take place in a
series of flashbacks embedded in the first three episodes of Season 7. After Blue Morpho’s death
in the Pine Barrens, Jonas Sr. retrieved his body and turned it into a cyborg lifeform, which he
hoped to mass produce and sell to the military under the name Venturion. Venturion is
supposedly a blank slate, programmable for whatever behavior the buyer might desire. However,
Jonas Sr. kept the prototype on the Venture grounds, until – due to a resurfaced memory of his
child crying when Rusty took the toy away from him, the same scene portrayed in the mystery
photo – he attempts to kill Rusty and gets dismantled by his former bodyguard and current
member of Team Venture, Kano. In the aftermath, Jonas Sr.’s nemesis, Dr. Z
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steals the body
and reprograms him for evil, giving birth to a villain he calls Vendata. Because Dr. Z is himself

191
a transparent intertextual reference to Dr. Zin, the villainous nemesis of the Quest family in the original Jonny
Quest series
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arrested just as he is about to set Vendata loose, the newly evil cyborg wanders off, joins the
Guild of Calamitous Intent, and rises through its ranks over the years, leading the group of young
villains in their assault on Gargantua-1, which would eventually become the infamous Movie
Night Massacre.
If the deluge of details seems overwhelming, that is because The Venture Bros. does its
best to create complexity on every level of worldbuilding and narrative construction. In a very
real sense, it is irreducible to language, open to interpretation and speculation but difficult to
summarize. Every single piece of the puzzle brings up a constellation of other events, speculative
explanations, and interconnections between the oversized main cast of characters. Every
sentence in the preceding paragraphs could be annotated with paragraphs of information, ranging
from character motivation, design, visual and narrative intertext, and so on. The maddening
complexity of this world and its timeline is designed to encourage an all-engrossing relationship
to the show, in which, no matter how close we seem to get to the revelation that might explain
everything, the actual explanation recedes towards a vanishing point, the goalposts move, and the
gap at the core of the show grows even more maddening.
So it is with these first three episodes, which raise more issues than they resolve. By the
end of the tryptich, the fathers in question – Jonas Sr. and the Blue Morpho are once more
presumed dead. I say “presumed,” because their remains go back to their respective
organizations – Venture to the OSI and Morpho to the Guild of Calamitous Intent – where they
may well be resurrected once more. Neither Malcolm nor Rusty get their final answers – just one
more trauma, of having briefly interacted with their fathers right before they were once more
taken away. Malcolm doesn’t know that his father is likely Jonas Jr., which means that he has
still not processed any of the feelings that led him into supervillainy. And although we get a
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partial explanation of the Movie Night Massacre from Red Death, we are left with the uneasy
knowledge that the Blue Morpho-as-Vendata had some flashbacks of his previous life resurface
right before he presumably threw the switch that sent everyone hurling into space. Nothing in the
Blue Morpho’s characterization suggests that he would have actually thrown that switch, and
Red Death stipulates that the culprit was wearing a space suit, making him impossible to
identify. Needless to say, in the flashback, we don’t see Vendata in a space suit; he is simply
wearing a Gargantua-1 crew uniform. All in all, even with the resurrection of two principals
involved in the key traumatic events that form the backdrop of the series, we are left with more
questions than answers.
The World of Venture

The only fantastic aspect of the Ventures’ world, indeed the only divergence from the
timeline of real history, seems to lie in the existence of super-powered individuals. In this aspect,
it doesn’t differ much from the established patterns of contemporary genre storytelling, which
often uses versions of the same trope: exceptional individuals with exceptional abilities provide a
plausible disruption to the patterns of power in the existing world, thus allowing the fiction to
envision a world with fewer limitations, to tell stories that might seem unlikely in the absence of
a supernatural conceit. Even if the power doesn’t change the world, it at least changes the
individual’s relationship to the world, and offers up a glimpse of the possibility of progress.
On the other hand, The Venture Bros attempts to take the disruption seriously, chronicling its
aftermath in detail, and recognizing the ways in which concentrated power warps story patterns,
turning conceptual character development into an arms race. A world of super-powered heroes
and villains is, at its core, a narratological hyperstimulus, employing all the tricks, pulling all the
stops, to provide the audience with an extreme experience, while simultaneously blocking the
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possibility of real danger. As such, it abstracts the large-scale power of cultural desires and
inclinations into characters and groups, then literalizes those abstractions into the explosive,
visually compelling outburst of the agon. Yet various cracks appear when individual worlds turn
into interconnected franchises. Regular humans with super-powered weapons end up clashing
against superpowered beings, with no regard for the plausibility of a particular match-up across
story iterations. Black Widow punches a robot, and then a god, but she stays around, because she
is too big of a box office draw for Marvel to remove from their universe.
It is in this sense, I would argue, that The Venture Bros. constitutes the foremost animated
challenge to the aesthetics of the sublime, which it conceives as thoroughly imbricated with
hubristic toxic hypermasculinity and architectural and technological hypertrophy. The world of
Jonas Sr. is that of corporate capital accumulation, which is to say the world of Space Age
modernism and its associated patterns of storytelling. The Venture compound takes its stylistic
cues from the GM buildings at the 1964 Worlds’ Fair in the Flushing Meadows – Corona
neighborhood of New York City, and the wider stylistic range of mid-century modernism and
Space Age futurism. The most pretentious villain in the series, Phantom Limb, makes his home
in a house inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mayan Revival appliqué buildings in Los Angeles,
which is surrounded by other supervillain mansions in a gated community called Malice.
Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch is the model for a superhero’s abode. The supervillain space
base, named Meteor Majeure, is modeled after the Yugoslavian Ilinden memorial, in Kruševo,
contemporary Macedonia. The list could go on almost indefinitely, but the implication seems
obvious: superheroes and supervillains are defined by opposing roles, but their taste in high-
modernist design, in its erasure of human scale, cuts across the arbitrary roles they take on in
their solipsistic endeavors.
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Their impact on the world is also deeply felt in the corporate empires they leave behind, in
the subservience of the rest of the world to their goals. The contemporary characters are simply
caught in the middle of a cat-and-mouse game that they have no choice but to join, if they are to
maintain their importance. Caught between the decaying remnants of their forebears’ activities,
they define themselves in relation to the absent godlike entities that brought them into their own
world, and thus become pawns in a game that they do not even desire to fully understand. They
trudge on, and they inflict upon their children, peers, and subordinates the same traumas that
stunted their own growth.
Too big to fail: that’s what the contemporary marketplace for superpowered storytelling
looks like, and it is this construct that The Venture Bros. has been satirizing since 2003.
Individual superheroes are not really characters on quests, they are assets in a venture, ready to
submit to the demands of monetization. Once they’ve grown to be a brand of their own, once
they can attract a built-in audience, worlds and characters are caught in an endless struggle
between their existence as a structurally consistent narrative conceit, and their potential for
renewal, either in a property based on them, or in conjunction with a new idea or another existing
pre-sold property. The latter kind of remix is called synergy when applied to properties rather
than tropes, and synergy is of course pure catnip to venture bros.
The Venture Bros. is, to my knowledge, unlike any other animated show on television. It
is written primarily by its two co-creators, Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer, without the aid of
a writers’ room. It continued its project throughout a series of long-term industrial shifts, and
maintains a loyal returning audience after a decade and a half on air. It is so dense, so complex in
terms of plotting, worldbuilding, verbal intertext, and visual intertext, that it resists reductionistic
interpretation. Its growing universe and tight continuity are a barrier to entry unparalleled in the
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world of adult animation, a world that it helped construct by being the first fully animated
original show aired on [adult swim]. It resists easy definition, and never exhausts its material
upon immediate apprehension. It is a show that demands careful spectatorship, continuous
grappling with its subject matter, and through its negotiation of negative space invites its viewers
to reinterpret its previously aired seasons with each subsequent addition to the series. Even more
daringly, it does so by asking us to negotiate two competing timelines in every encounter: the
show’s background world extends back to the Victorian era, while the contemporary timeline
tracks with its airing schedule, and projects the main characters into the future, allowing for
individual growth and major plot changes. Its characters grow, they change, they mature, while
seemingly unable to transcend the scars left upon them and their environment by their ancestors’
irresponsible adventure-seeking. It is this world, defined by the inability to live up to the sublime
visions left behind by a previous world of solipsistic searchers, that The Venture Bros. finds a
way to turn failure into art.
Conclusion
The Legacy Genre and New Media: Sitcoms as Prosocial Comedic Containers

In the introduction to this dissertation, I noted that comedy should be considered,
dialectically as the converse of earnestness, rather than melodrama or tragedy. The first corollary
to that observation, as I’ve tried to show throughout my writing, is that the melodramatic and the
tragic, as ur-genres, are rooted in the attempt to say something earnest about the world. Yet we
are all familiar with attempts at tragedy that veer away from the dominant codes of earnest genre
media, therefore creating a rupture between the represented content and the mode of
representation. Bertolt Brecht calls this disjunction the alienation effect, or the “A-effect,”
(Verfremdungseffekt in the original German) and he posits it as one of the core characteristics of
epic modernist theatre practice, meant to force audiences to engage with the represented content
in depth, rather than simply be entertained by technical flawlessness and addictive, simple forms
of mythical storytelling.
Brecht’s A-effect, the core of aesthetic program for communist art, seems anathema to the
world of commerce and its desire for seamless perfection and neat market segmentation.
However, after Hollywood’s classical period (and sometimes even during it), A-effects became
part and parcel of the expressive vocabulary of dominant media industries. Unsurprisingly, as
Robert Sklar makes the case in Movie-Made America
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, this shift in the rhetorical toolkit of
Hollywood filmmaking became progressively more apparent as the oligopoly of the studio
system decayed due to rising competition from the television industry, the representational

192
Sklar, Robert. Movie-made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage
Books, 1994.

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limitations of the Hays Production Code, and the anti-trust impact of the Paramount decree,
which prohibited the dominant studios’ attempts to stifle competition through vertical
integration. As the media marketplace became progressively less consolidated, a similar interplay
between consolidation, anti-trust legislation, and technical disruption affected the burgeoning TV
industry: the codification and subsequent dissolution of FinSyn anti-trust legislation from the
seventies to the early nineties, the impact of cable and Internet technologies (and the attendant
move towards narrowcast creative content), as well as the growing influence of international
corporate capital on the media industries, have splintered larger audience blocs into evermore
targeted niche segments, some of which enjoy the aesthetic possibilities of the A-effect.
Some such niche segments carry quite a bit of cultural currency. The international art film
scene, for example, or the types of video art and avant-garde film projects one might encounter
in the halls of a museum rather than a multiplex, render the experimental ethos of high
modernism in cinematic form. Yet the conceptual purity of this kind of modernism - whether
instantiated in the film output of Jean-Luc Godard, Chantal Akerman, Robert Bresson, Yasujiro
Ozu, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, or any of the other undeniably valuable leading lights
of international art film, rests partially on the institutional power of academic validation,
museum curation, and the international film festival circuit. In other words, the modernist art
film might be intrinsically deconstructive and aesthetically valuable, but it relies on the
contentious effect of taste formation in conjunction with social class stratification. As Pierre
Bourdieu proves decisively in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
193
, taste
formations, whether or not they hold any intrinsic value, are always determined extrinsically by

193
Pierre Bourdieu. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1986.

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structures of socioeconomic power. In very general terms, Bourdieu’s taste critique reveals a
foundational inconsistency between the aesthetic ambitions of modernist art film, which aimed to
develop deconstructive, emancipatory aesthetic practices yet reproduced a secondary form of
cultural elitism in its actual circulation. Of course, Bourdieu’s critique of taste is highly specific
to his Parisian research milieu, and much too nuanced to summarize briefly. Yet it marks
something of a paradox, a Catch-22 of artistic avant-gardes: to make a large enough impact on
society, even the most extreme forms of aesthetic asceticism must participate in a complex and
problematic marketplace, as well as their attendant taste formations, many of which pose issues
for the aesthetic integrity of their project.
Gilberto Perez, one of the most perceptive academic researchers to have written about
cinematic modernism, notes a further flaw in the modernist drive towards aesthetic purity, which
he frames in terms of the theoretical impact of the journal Screen. In Self-Illuminated, Perez’s
essay on Colin McCabe’s critical biography of Godard, he notes that the anti-narrative
deconstructivism championed in the pages of Screen was intrinsically ill-advised, inconsistent in
its attempt to bridge anti-aesthetic alienation with emancipatory politics. Screen theory,
mesmerized by the totalizing perfection of the modernist aesthetic project, was never truly
Brechtian, because to eschew narrative is to eschew popular appeal:
Aiming to politicise art, such theory assumed that its anti-aesthetic posture was the same
thing as a political position, and so, in its negative way, it wound up aestheticising politics.
Its proponents invoked Brecht as a model for political Modernism, but neither his theory nor
his practice accorded with their notions. Brecht never thought that Modernist distancing or
deconstruction would be enough to make art political, and his ‘epic’ theatre was very much a
storytelling theatre. Politics entails action, and the representation of action in art calls for
narrative of some kind. […] That Godard is more of an essayist than a storyteller has often
been said; something of the kind could be said about Modernism in general.
194

194
Gilberto Perez, “Self-Illuminated.” The London Review of Books, Vol. 26 No. 7 · 1 April 2004
pages 3-6, retrieved from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n07/gilberto-perez/self-illuminated
174

In other words, the aesthetic project of modernism rejected the illusory seamlessness of
mainstream narrative filmmaking, only to fall prey to the theoretically refined abstractions of
aesthetic theory, itself an illusorily seamless framework for understanding aesthetics. In doing so,
it lost track of its deepest professed aim: to create an emancipatory popular aesthetic. The writers
of Screen, as well as some of their Frankfurt School forebears - most notably Adorno - were so
opposed to the illusory qualities of popular culture, that they fell into the trap of creating a
culture whose only shot at popularity was through side channels of the mainstream they
despised, and whose major audience was to be found not in the streets and beer halls, but the
decidedly more elitist grounds of institutional cultural cachet mentioned earlier: universities,
museums, and film festivals.
Broadcast sitcoms temper their novelty and critical edge through character development and
expansive worldbuilding. Thus, the broadcast sitcom holds within its structures a set of artistic
and dramatic impulses that are at odds with one another. On the one hand, the industrial
imperatives and production strictures of broadcast television reward shows that evince a pro-
social, mainstream aesthetic sensibility. On the other hand, the critical impulse of comedy will
often lead its practitioners to challenge and interrogate the assumptions of such mainstream
sensibility. The uneasy balance between these divergent determinants - the anarchic inclination
of comedy and its reinscription into a socially desirable form of mainstream storytelling, the
sitcom - forms the grounds of each individual sitcom’s construction of its subject matter.
In the broadcast era of American television, this arrangement led to a slate of pro-social
sitcoms, produced in a traditional three-camera live format, performed on a soundstage in front
of a live studio audience. The FCC’s Financial Interest and Syndication rules (commonly
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abbreviated as Fin-Syn), adopted in 1970, ensured that the three major broadcast networks had to
fill their prime-time schedule with independently-produced programming, which led to the
proliferation of powerful independent production houses competing to innovate on matters both
formal and thematic. Cable television rose to prominence in the eighties, and throughout the
nineties, basic as well as premium cable channels saturated the marketplace for niche targeted
television. International corporate consolidation, combined with steady economic growth and the
attendant operations of consumer capitalism (the development of ancillary markets for licensed
merchandise and transmedia adaptation of successful properties, syndication revenues in
emerging markets, the saturation of the educated labor market for media production combined
with inadequate labor protections) led to a boom in cable production as well as the market
penetration of cable content.
The growth of early television had a twofold effect on the classical Hollywood studio system.
On the one hand, by offering a cheaper, more accessible simulacrum of the theatrical experience,
it competed for the same audience, and as such affected theatrical attendance numbers. On the
other hand, it provided a steady alternative cash flow to the studios, as networks licensed existing
properties to fill airtime; this practice also implicitly increased popular knowledge of film
culture, leading to aesthetic and technological change in the practices of the film industry.
Unsurprisingly, the same patterns of competitive pressure, niche growth and subsequent wider
adoption of successful structural and aesthetic practices, technological development, and
speculative investment have found new expression within the media-industrial landscape of the
past quarter-century. Amanda Lotz calls this period, from the emergence of cable to the current
industrial patchwork of digital production and distribution of media content “the multi-channel
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transition,” a helpful term that adds an industrial and legal historical dimension to contemporary
discussions of media convergence.
195

The history of comedy and mediation, imbricated with larger issues of semiotic freedom and
the legal frameworks of American media production, illuminates these industrial patterns from a
skewed perspective, as a privileged space where the solipsism of original, individual artistic
creation clashes, sometimes productively and often contentiously, against the discursive
boundaries of public (and therefore politicized) discourse, as well as the aesthetic boundaries of
mass art. Across media industries, the playful transgressions of comedy represent the
unrepresentable, hint at the unspeakable, and critique the industrial order that makes them
possible, churning failure itself into a viable marketplace product. In other words, the network
sitcom has several expressive peculiarities that emerge from its status not only as a product to be
consumed, or a text to be interpreted and understood, but rather its contextual social role at a
particular cultural moment. In its focus on the possibility of semiotic slippage between sender
and receiver, encoding and decoding, the sitcom is always already a critique of existing media
structures and their associated patterns of meaning-making.
The convergent ecosystem of contemporary media elides the palimpsestic layers of
knowledge and expression that define the production of contemporary comedy and its
subsequent packaging into a market-friendly object. Subjected to the unifying affordances of
various feed-based social media platforms, bits and pieces of contemporary media are
distributively remixed and recontextualized, divorced from their original contextual setting. Even
within the context of the social media feed, various memetic forms emerge into prominence and

195
Lotz, Amanda. The Television Will Be Revolutionized. (New York, NY and London, UK: New York University
Press, 2007)

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subsequently undergo developmental processes akin to pre-digital genre cycles, until their
expressive potential exhausts itself in a web of self-reference. The phenomenon of social media
popularity appears to the user as an emergent feature of the medium itself, subject to positive
feedback loops of reinforcement. Less visible to the consumer, although as salient to the
emergence and circulation of material on social media, is the back-end algorithmic sorting,
always changing and platform-specific, that might privilege certain types of content over others,
and therefore tilt the scales in their favor.
We can easily envision the analogue version of such algorithmic sorting, because it has long
been part and parcel of our world’s patterns of power. In the classical studio era, for example,
producers accounted for both marketplace considerations as well as individual studio identity and
content priorities when choosing their products. As such, aesthetic and personnel determinations
endured within the production process alongside the ever-present yet mundane profit motive. The
contemporary connected social media sphere, however, is subject to an accelerated temporal
regime that bears little resemblance to the temporalities of analog media and its attendant taste
formations and industrial power structures.
The revenue model of online media, although arguably an extension of the advertising-driven
revenue model of broadcast television, leads to significantly different patterns of creative
production and consumption. To put it bluntly, traditional broadcast media is a way to deliver an
audience to advertisers. Ad slots are priced accordingly, based on overall viewership numbers as
well as more granular modeling of the socioeconomic status and viewership habits of a particular
program’s audience. The same process underlies media buys on cable television, yet the
narrowcasting sensibility of cable shows allows advertisers to reach more specifically defined
audiences. In the US, these processes are usually filtered through The Nielsen Company, which
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collects and models viewership information, both through direct survey sampling and, more
recently, analysis of proprietary platform-specific data. As Nielsen moves to ever-increasing
granularity in its data collection and analysis, and as its insights become increasingly opaque to
the audience at large, the structures of meaning in cable television and online video production
continue to morph closer to the narrowcast sensibilities of online media at-large. Divergence in
taste cultures can be monetized, and clashes between taste cultures draw attention to a product
much more readily than traditional forms of advertising and public relations.
As cable and online television is becoming progressively more fractious, it is worthwhile to
take a step back and draw inspiration from the ways in which the network sitcom packages the
transgressive, critical impulse of comedy in a prosocial container. In the following pages, I offer
a brief survey of three network sitcoms that have dealt explicitly with the fracturing of the
contemporary mediascape and the totalizing impact of granular data-collection and interpretation
on individuals. Every one of these shows engages in an explicit critique of contemporary
American culture, and its contentious processes of identity formation. Every one of them creates
a world in which the main characters are beset on all sides by challenges to their personal
growth, vocation, and sense of community – in the shape of institutions and power structures that
attempt to define their lives and values for them. And in each of them, the characters take on
power structures that determine their lives, powers which they cannot fully understand, and
prevail over their hostile environment through a renewed commitment to their immediate nuclear
community.

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Parks and Recreation: A Flawed Town

Parks and Recreation, at its core, is a meditation on the complexities of contemporary
American political life. The main cast works in the titular department of the small fictional town
of Pawnee, Indiana. Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) is the series lead, a driven and idealistic young
public servant and assistant director of the titular department. Her boss, Ron Swanson (Nick
Offerman), is the show’s attempt to reconcile the ideals of libertarianism with its positive
rendering of community. He begins as a caricature of small-government conservatism, concerned
primarily with limiting his department’s involvement in matters of public space that he considers
to be the province of the marketplace. As the show progresses, his antagonistic attitude towards
government becomes more nuanced, and he develops into a loyal mentor and friend to
departmental staff.
Rounding out the main cast are a bevy of coworkers, each of whom begins as a deeply
flawed yet interesting character who undergoes a long, slow growth process by the series’ happy
ending. The show’s idealistic rendering of the power of liberal progressive politics is pinned to
Leslie’s own political journey. She progresses through the ranks of politics slowly, in fits and
starts, relying on the support of her immediate network as well as her heartfelt belief in
government, even as she bumps into a variety of caricatural, yet realistic antagonists: disgruntled,
bellicose and clueless constituents, nefarious higher-ups who impose budget limitations and use
their public positions for personal grift, local old money as well as corporate new money.
In the show’s seventh and final season, aired in early 2015, the narrative jumps forward by
two years, allowing the writing room to tackle slightly speculative technological scenarios. A
behemoth online services corporation named Gryzzl moves into Pawnee, and provides free
wireless Internet access to the whole town. Over the course of a few episodes, their nefarious
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intentions and practices are revealed: they are using the information they gather from personal
data mining to affect policy-making through individually targeted appeals to town stakeholders.
Over the course of the season, the show envisions a fractious version of the year 2017, yet in
retrospect reads as naively optimistic. The main cast of characters manages to force Gryzzl into
an arrangement that is mutually beneficial for the company, the town, and the country as a
whole. Gryzzl locates their new headquarters in an old industrial area of the town, bringing along
the possibility of commercial renewal. They donate the piece of land they had initially purchased
to build a campus outside Pawnee to the National Park Service, allowing Leslie to turn it into her
landmark public achievement.
In the end, everything works out. By the season finale, a series of flash-forwards suggests
that every character in the main cast is going to live a long, fulfilling life. Leslie and her husband
Ben make the jump to a successful career in national politics, and a Secret Service escort in one
of the flash-forwards implies that one of them is destined to ascend to the presidency.
The happy ending, a requisite trope of network sitcoms, feels well-earned because of the
long-term character growth and strong audience identification built up over the course of
seasons. Every character has grown over the course of the series. They have come to understand
their values and desires better through the negotiation of various plot circumstances. They have
become a family, and in the process raised themselves up as well as their community. If we think
of the American network sitcom as – at its best - a formalized means of mediation between the
layers of abstraction that stand between the individual and the community at large, Parks and
Recreation fulfills its mission with brio. Its vision of sociality is very much that of the American
project: individual differences are productive, positive elements of a society. In their clash, they
help improve not just the individual, but also the society at large.
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A Perfect Hell: The Good Place

In contrast with Parks and Recreation, the pilot of The Good Place takes place in the
aftermath of a traumatic event. The show begins with a close-up of the protagonist’s opening
eyes, then cuts to a medium frontal shot of her as she takes note of her surroundings. In the
following reverse shot, we see what she is seeing: a plain white wall, framed on the sides by
flower pots set on elegant wooden columns, inscribed with a message in large green lettering:
“Welcome. Everything is fine.” An elegantly-dressed man opens the door, and invites her into his
office. This is Michael (Ted Danson), and he is about to tell our protagonist Eleanor (Kristen
Bell) that she is dead. He answers a few of Eleanor’s questions: she can’t rememeber her death
because that memory is erased in the case of “embarrassing” deaths; every religion got some
parts of the afterlife right, but only a stoner kid named Doug Forcett ever came close to
describing the actual setup. And, in response to that most pressing of questions:
Well, it’s not the “heaven” and “hell” idea you were raised on. But generally speaking, in
the afterlife, there’s a good place, and there’s a bad place. You’re in the good place.
(smiles warmly)
You’re okay, Eleanor. You’re in the good place.

- Michael, The Good Place, “Everything is Fine” (Season 1, Episode 1)

Michael – like Dean Pelton in Community - is an authority figure in his domain, and
consequently functions as a vector of expository worldbuilding in the initial setup of the show.
The difference, as we find out over the course of the season, is that Dean Pelton is earnest almost
to a fault, whereas Michael is almost always lying to further a hidden agenda. The Good Place
delays the revelation of Michael’s duplicity until the first season finale cliffhanger, leaving its
aftermath to be resolved in the second season, as well as offering an alternative decoding key
that substantially overdetermines, and in the process nuances, the complete narrative arc of the
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season. Before we consider the finale twist, however, we have to sketch out the narrative arc and
comedic patterns of the season, as they come across on a first viewing, before the finale.
Picking up where we left off: Michael has just told Eleanor that she is dead. In the following
few scenes, we are introduced to the world of the show as Eleanor experiences it. Michael tells
her that the “good place” in the afterlife is structured as a series of neighborhoods, each of them
a bespoke utopia tailored to the needs of its inhabitants (yet every neighborhood must have a
frozen yogurt place). In an introductory address to the neighborhood, he elucidates the
algorithmic system that has selected the top of the crop for eternal bliss: every decision made in
life carries with it either a positive or a negative point value; at the end of life, the scores are
added up, and everyone is assigned a place to go to, whether good or bad. The process is
painstakingly selective, and only the best people make it to the good place. Eleanor, a human
rights lawyer who dedicated her life to prosocial causes, should fit right in. And, to make things
easier, everyone in the good place gets to live in their own dream house, and has been assigned a
perfect soul-mate by the system.
Over the course of the pilot, we meet the main cast alongside Eleanor, who is the most recent
addition to the neighborhood. Her soulmate, Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), is a
Senegalese professor of moral philosophy. The other main couple consists of Tahani al-Jamil
(Jameela Jamil), a socialite who spent much of her life raising money for philanthropic causes,
and Jianyu (Manny Jacinto), a Taiwanese monk who has taken a vow of silence, to be continued
in the afterlife. We also learn, from Eleanor, that a mistake seems to have been made. After
Chidi promises to keep her secret, she tells him that she was not the selfless human rights lawyer
that Michael believes her to be. Her name is, indeed, Eleanor Shellstrop, but she is a self-
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centered Arizonan whose job, at the time of her death, was to cold-call the sick and elderly and
sell them fake medicine.
Chidi and Eleanor maintain the charade with difficulty. As a professor of moral philosophy,
he is caught between the imperative to never lie and the equally powerful imperative not to
betray Eleanor’s confidence and therefore send her to certain doom. The humorous encounters
set up by this informational asymmetry, in which only Eleanor and Chidi are aware of her illicit
status, are enhanced by the revelation in the third episode that Jianyu the silent monk is also an
interloper. He pleads with Eleanor to help hide his status, explaining that, far from the asceticism
implied in his character introduction, he lived life as a struggling EDM DJ and small-time crook
in his native Florida. Unlike Eleanor, he decides to keep this information hidden from his
“soulmate” Tahani, who is confident that she belongs in the good place.
Over the course of the season, various scenarios play out that derive from this primary
informational asymmetry. As the plot progresses, more characters are induced into the
conspiracy: Tahani, of course, but also the good place’s resident factotum, a software genie that
has taken human form to keep the residents at ease, and eventually Michael himself, who claims
to be at risk because of his status as an apprentice architect. In the ensuing plot shenanigans, the
main characters find none of the peace that they might rightly expect in heaven. Instead, they are
in a permanent state of conflict and crisis, arguing among themselves and hiding their travails
from the rest of the neighborhood, living in fear that their true identities and motivations might
soon be discovered.
At the end of the season, Eleanor finally realizes Michael’s charade. They are not in the
good place. They have instead been placed inside someone else’s utopia, a bland simulacrum of
desirable surroundings, and driven to torture each other and themselves in an attempt to live up
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to their role here. Eleanor and Jason were tortured by the sense that they don’t belong in this
utopia, and have never lived up to its expectations. Chidi and Tahani, on the other hand, are
tortured by the fact that they feel like they do belong in this utopia, yet are failing to leave their
earthly flaws behind. The web is tangled, and magnified by the expectations and nudges coming
from Michael and his team, who run the neighborhood like the disguised panopticon that it is.
The good place – the afterlife neighborhood rather than the show – is itself a meta-televisual
construct, exposing the abstract structures that underlie traditional televisual worldbuilding and
exploring their contradictory valences. Michael, the architect of the good place, shares a first
name with Michael Schur, creator and showrunner of The Good Place. His dominion over the
other characters is that of a showrunner, which is to say that of a world builder: he defines
everyone’s roles, and sets in motion their travails. He withholds information from some of them,
and provides information to others, using the asymmetry to construct conflict and keep them
from building solidarity. He pretends that he is on their side, and works their biases and innate
tendencies against one another and against themselves. He heightens the stakes, throws the world
out of balance, concern-trolls his way around the neighborhood, and observes the chaos he has
set in motion gleefully.
In this context, it is no surprise that the aesthetics of the good place follow the architectural
typology of contemporary high-end commercial spaces in Southern California. Shot at the
Huntington gardens and enhanced into a twee pastel palette in post-production, the good place is
an instance of a scripted space, a term developed by critics in the nineteen-nineties to denote
spatial arrangements that simultaneously function as “packaged entertainment.”
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In The
Language of Scripted Spaces, Richard Hertz and Pamela Burton define the concept while

196 Hertz and Burton, 25
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drawing close attention to the tension between the symbolic value and use value of scripted
space:
A ‘scripted space’ is a type of pedestrian space which replicates the complexity of urban life
within highly staged ‘maximum security’ compounds. These spaces are refuges from the
apparent messiness and dangers of urban life, providing a ‘safe’ environment in which to
indulge in the pleasures of the marketplace. A scripted space resembles a rolercoaster ride
where control is interpreted as consumer protection - with only the pretence of danger.
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What Hertz and Burton call the pretense of danger is, in fact, the symbolic content of the
scripted space experience, and the same dynamic underlies a variety of forms of aesthetic
experience. As audience members (or, in the marketplace discourse that determines the
production of large-scale industrial aesthetic experience, as consumers), we are enjoined to
participate in a spatial story designed to maximize particular cognitive and emotional responses,
without subjecting us to their inherent real-world implications. In a scripted space, in other
words, we are sold the symbolic content of an experience and are encouraged both implicitly and
at times explicitly to ignore the real factors that make such an experience possible.
In a sense, this season-length arc aims to respond to the imperatives of the contemporary
convergent mediascape. Although The Good Place has half-length seasons (the first one is
thirteen episodes long), it encourages the viewer to re-watch it at least once, with the final
revelation in mind. By withholding an essential element of the setup from the audience, the show
therefore enjoins the viewer to consider the entire narrative arc of the first season, first from the
perspective of the dead protagonist quartet, and subsequently from the perspective of the
architect and his aides. It is a remarkable feat of narrative encoding, allowing for two discrete
viewing passes in which the valence of Michael’s behavior – and by extension the behavior of all

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Hertz, Richard and Pamela Burton. “The Language of Scripted Spaces,” in Landscape Review, 1996:2(3), pages
24-32; Page 25
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the other neighbors, who are working in conjunction with him – changes diametrically. Every
joke, every appeal to solidarity, every moment in which he plays on the weaknesses and
insecurities of the main cast is revealed as a cynical play in a rigged game.
However, through character interactions and growth, the main four characters escape the
confines of the scripted space in which they find themselves. Their chance at salvation derives
from their ability to learn from their torture and reject the behavioral scripts that their immediate
surroundings expect. They do so by trusting each other, by building a community, and by
rejecting the pressure to conform to their roles, by trusting one another even though they
understand that they are all deeply flawed. The Good Place, like the last season of Schur’s
previous NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation and Nosedive, the Black Mirror episode penned by
Schur and Rashida Jones, explicitly tackles the theme of the quantified self, and the ways in
which the reductionistic impulse of quantification is deleterious to the workings of community.
The main cast of The Good Place finds a way beyond that reductionistic impulse, refusing to
allow a panoptical power structure to turn them against one another.
These concerns are not new in the history of the moving image. The Good Place recalls in
some ways the slate of films and television series concerned with the producing ethics and
performative complexities of reality television, and the impact of pervasive quantification and
mediation on processes of identity formation. In film, this trajectory is perhaps best exemplified
by Andrew Niccol’s high-concept films of the nineties and early aughts. In Gattaca (1997),
Niccol envisions a dystopian future in which the fate of individuals is sealed at birth through
genetic testing, and anyone deemed genetically imperfect is condemned to a limited existence. In
The Truman Show, written by Niccol but directed by Peter Weir, we follow the namesake
protagonist as he realizes his entire existence, from birth through his thirties, has been broadcast
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live to a worldwide audience. His sleepy hometown, as well as every one of its inhabitants, is a
simulacrum of a simple, comfortable life, a Mayberry that runs its fantasy vision 24/7 for the
benefit of one unknowing protagonist and the pleasure of an entire spectating world.
The great implied secret of the good place is that, as long as humans continue to be mutable,
as long as identity refuses to crystallize into predetermination, they have the opportunity to
transcend the conditions imposed upon them by their surroundings. Michael’s failure as an
architect of torture is incomprehensible to him as well as his mysterious higher-ups and impish
subordinates, because the design of the system depends on a structural flaw in its very
conception: the idea that, after dying, people can no longer change. Because Michael is himself
immutable, he fails to see, at least for the length of the first season, that humans can change and
cooperate, therefore bypassing the soft bounds placed upon them by the neighborhood torture
apparatus.
This recurrent trope of immutability is a constant challenge to fantastical stories that imagine
the afterlife. If the characters have, as a story premise, reached a state that transcends the
limitations of time and entropy, then the causal patterns that underlie plot-driven storytelling
need to be reimagined in relation to the stasis of utopian bliss. Or, to put it differently, the
harmony of utopia is inhospitable to dramatic storytelling, which requires contrast and conflict.
As such, utopias lack the possibility of growth and change. This leaves us with several patterns
for incorporating utopia into storytelling. The standard one is aspirational: utopia-as-
transcendence is possible, yet it functions as a motivating, rather than statically determining,
paradigm for the protagonist’s journey. Heaven functions this way in earnest renderings of
Christian myth, as do similar topoi in other religious traditions. In secular storytelling, the same
drive towards transcendence becomes a conduit for individuated melodrama. At various scales,
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such stories attempt to imagine a way beyond the powerlessness of ordinary human life, to tempt
us with a utopian dream realized. The superhero origin story, the hagiographic biopic, the
political campaign narrative, or the corporation that claims to understand and shape the world
through big data analysis, all derive their storytelling patterns from the desire to transcend.
This pattern is flipped, but its storytelling function remains similar, when the nostalgic
incarnation of utopia imagines a paradise lost, and yearns for something that never was as if it
were. In this reactionary, conservative guise, utopia imposes its sublime lens on a past that is
often so removed, or so politically contentious, as to become rhetorically mutable. As it projects
perfection onto an inaccessible spacetime conjunction, this version of utopia motivates, or
overdetermines, contemporary actions in ways similar to the aspirational pattern delineated
above. True to the etymology of the term, these versions of utopia imagine it as a place
elsewhere, less a setting than a motivating mirage, always safely yet bewilderingly beyond reach.
For the same reason, The Good Place offers up substantial and recurrent hints as to the nature of
the bad place, but no inkling of the actual good place, if such a place exists. Utopia is, by its very
nature, a faraway mirage; representation surfaces its cracks, and allows for plot struggles to
override its stasis, while simultaneously creating humor through its exacerbation of the contrast
between the ideal and the plausible.

Community: Spaces to be Used

Community and The Good Place are, to a certain extent, mirror images of one another. Both
shows center on the idea that flawed characters can productively face their flaws and grow as
individuals when they are surrounded by a close-knit community. The main difference lies in
how they envision the world in which the motley main cast of characters becomes a community:
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Community is explicitly set in a remedial environment, a transitional space for people trying to
reinvent themselves and overcome the very conditions that have led them to enroll in the titular
community college. The Good Place, on the other hand, takes place in a genericized version of
the afterlife. In abstract terms, Greendale Community College is an immanent heterotopia,
whereas the “good place,” at least at first glance, presents itself as a transcendent utopia.
These generic settings set up divergent character dynamics. The characters on Community
become a community not just because they share the same academic and institutional obstacles,
but because they recognize their diminished, abject status as a form of kinship, the radical
freedom of unformed potential subject to low expectations. The main characters are misfits
surrounded by other misfits, students and faculty alike, as the dean of the college makes perfectly
obvious when he addresses the student body at the very beginning of the pilot:
Good morning.
Many of you are halfway through your first week here at Greendale, and as your
dean I thought I would share a few thoughts of wisdom and inspiration. What is
community college? Well, you've heard all kinds of things. You've heard it's loser college
for remedial teens, middle-aged divorcees, and old people keeping their minds active as
they circle the drain of eternity. That's what you've heard. However… I wish you luck.
Okay, you know Uh-oh. Okay, there's more to this speech. There's actually a
middle card that is missing.
-Dean Pelton, Community, “Pilot” (Season 1, episode 1)
Misplacing the cue card is the dean’s second flub in thirty seconds; the episode begins
with him attempting to turn on the PA, accidentally playing a Busta Rhymes song, and generally
flailing about like a dashboard figurine on a gravel road. Similarly, the primary student
characters begin their journey from a relatively low point in their individual lives, yet they come
across consistently as saner than their surroundings, more sensible than the authority figures. Jeff
Winger (Joel McHale) is a smooth huckster in his forties whose law career imploded when his
employers learned that he had falsified his academic credentials. Britta Perry (Gillian Jacobs), an
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activist-high-school-dropout, has returned to school as a thirty-something to boost her
employability. Shirley Bennett (Yvette Nicole Brown), a middle-aged mother who has just
divorced her cheating husband, wants to learn how to run her own business. Pierce Hawthorne
(Chevy Chase), the septuagenarian heir to a lucrative baby-wipes business, is trying to stave off
the loneliness and irrelevance of old age. Three traditionally college-aged students round out the
main cast. Troy Barnes (Donald Glover), a high school football star, is at Greendale because he
injured himself partying and lost his college football scholarship. His former high school
classmate Annie Edison (Alison Brie), a type-A overachiever, had to settle for community
college after an Adderall-induced mental breakdown her senior year. Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi), a
pop-culture savant whose characterization codes him as moderately autistic, is the only main
character who seems to have freely chosen to be at Greendale, rather than arriving at the
institution due to an easily-identifiable traumatic event.
When flawed humans are placed in an outwardly hospitable utopia that is actually structured
to drive them insane, they can only win the game by rejecting it. Again and again, the humans on
The Good Place find a way to work together and break the experiential bounds placed upon them
by those in charge. In doing so, they turn their post-mortem adventure into an opportunity for
growth, rather than accepting it as the blissful stasis it pretends to be. Because the game is
rigged, their only chance at breaking the cycle of twee torture is to cheat, copiously and
repeatedly. By contrast, Greendale Community College is a substantially less competent spatial
foe, and the main cast members differ widely in their attitude towards the school, over the course
of the seasons. Their differing attitudes, however, are mediated by the structural construct of the
study group formed in the pilot, which becomes the conduit of their collective identity as far as
the other characters on the show are concerned.
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This conceit is also a meta-televisual opportunity for generic humor. Community was, at the
time of its airing, the most experimental sitcom on network television. Many episodes, especially
in the second and third seasons, were based on a high-concept premise, which structured all the
formal aspects of the episode in question. An episode that focuses on the study group’s gambit to
monopolize cafeteria chicken strips employs an explanatory voiceover layered over smooth
Steadicam cinematography, all reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s film work. Episodes focusing
on a paintball competition are shot and structured like Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns and
contemporary survival horror films. Ken Burns’s documentary styles make an appearance, as do
Dick Wolf’s televisual procedural stylistics. The show pulls off these compressed versions of
other accomplished filmmakers’ aesthetic choices by relying on a stable of accomplished
directors, many of whom either had or have since had experience directing major feature films:
current Marvel darlings Joe and Anthony Russo (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain
America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War), Justin Lin (several films in The Fast and The
Furious franchise, Star Trek: Beyond), Anthony Hemingway (Red Tails), and Richard Ayoade
(Submarine, The Double).
Because of this variability in dramatic structure and formal means of expression, Community
also relies on a plot infrastructure borrowed from earnest melodrama to create the prosocial
message at the core of the series: that even in a community of deeply flawed individuals,
togetherness and teamwork leads to their transcending the powers that keep them in check. Parks
and Recreation saw the challenge to community as embedded in the world of commerce, and
therefore solvable through negotiation and politics: when Gryzzl uses the town’s personal data,
previously fractious constituencies come together and push back as a group, leading Gryzzl to a
compromise situation that they can spin as a PR victory. In The Good Place, the enemy is
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immanent in the worldbuilding, and characters can only fight it by relying on one another, and
coopting Michael, the architect responsible for the failed experiment of this perfect hell, in their
pushback. In Community, the enemy seems distributed across the formal characteristics of the
world, whether in the shape of genre and stylistic components, or of the power structures against
which the students must push to gain some degree of growth in interdependence. Through the
character of Abed (Danny Pudi), they are constantly made aware of the fact that they are
participating in a form of storytelling, even as they push against his metacommentary; the truth
is, of course, that they are characters rather than real humans, just as Abed suspected all along.
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Conclusion

Recombinant forms of serial storytelling will eventually develop metadiscursive patterns
given a sufficiently long run. And the same attitude of knowingness that they package for us is,
at a certain level, a required skill for the crafter. In other words, to write good television,
television that breaks the boundaries of the form while winking at them in passing, to mass-
produce the hyperstimulus, the creator needs to be a refined consumer at the same time. A lot of
skill, a lot of labor, and untold quantities of human ingenuity lay at the core of the sitcom
throughout its various incarnations. To help us laugh, help push away the maelstrom, help us
understand without losing faith in the possibility of new worlds, the humanistic traditions of
comedy should not be discounted – even as their transition into new media has unhinged them
from the demos.
The aggressive verbal and representational stylistics of comedy appear in their rawest form
across the emerging landscape of new media, where the critical impulse of jokework is at times
bent to prosocial impulses, at other times wasted on mere cruelty and vitriolic hatred. The
cultures of those raised online have a different sense of the extent and impact of trolling than do
traditional media cultures, and the erasure of boundaries both spatial and temporal, flattened to
hyperactive network flows, leads to context collapse as well as continuously exacerbated cultural
clashes. The fact that clashes draw attention, an invaluable asset to current networked economies,
means that platforms come to encourage fractious behaviors from their users through hidden
sorting algorithms and content curation practices, as well as visible choices in their human
interface design. Yet the online world has also developed its own version of an immune system,
in the form of the metadiscursive patterns that resist the meaning-making structures of the
monetized web. The webcomic xkcd is the prime example, as I explain in a short interpretation
194
of a minimal part of Randal Munroe’s creative output in the second chapter. His entire output –
which may well be one of the essential artistic creations that chronicles the growth and change in
online sensibilities as well as affordances in the first two decades of the new millennium – is a
fertile avenue for further exploration, and likely to give birth to reams of exegesis in the decades
to come.
In the third chapter, as well as throughout the subsequent chapters, I deal with the issue of
satirical worldbuilding, and the ways in which it has reacted to the new forms and cultural
formations of the contemporary networked era. After a historical overview of satirical
worldbuilding and a brief excursus through a selection of contemporary works that engage in its
practices, I delve into the examples in depth: an episode of Black Mirror titled Nosedive, as well
as the attempt at serialization in Season 19 of South Park. The implications of their divergent
forms of satirical worldbuilding are manifold, but they show a reaction to a common foe: the
attempt, on the part of various vectors of sociopolitical power, to reduce various aspects of lived
experience to their mediated representations.
In the fourth chapter, I identify within this tendency two interrelated valences, both
motivated by the lure to perfection in formal systems: the representation of perfection as either
sublime or dystopian. In discussing the imaginary that surrounds science-fiction representations
of the Singularity, I demonstrate the ways in which the Singularitarian drive, incomprehensible
to human(istic) thought by design, becomes vulnerable to the deconstructive tendencies of
comedy as well as the plot machinations of melodrama when it undergoes representation. I then
chronicle the ways in which the same drive towards transcendence becomes imbricated with
discourses of toxic hypermasculinity and leads to aporia in the [adult swim] animated series The
Venture Bros. In The Venture Bros., we can find a mature, well-reasoned negotiation of the
195
problems surrounding technological boosterism, corporate consolidation, and their associated
ills; through its satirical worldbuilding as well as its commitment to change and reinvention, to
revalorizing the objects whose impact it critiques, we may glimpse a way forward, even as the
derelict remains of the past threaten to swallow us whole.
Finally, I return to the network sitcom, which occupied a privileged space in the American
imaginary, allowing for nuanced deconstructive discussion of the workings of community, while
simultaneously engaging in a redefinition of the discursive boundaries of the topic. In three
contemporary sitcoms, I once more find that the negotiation of community at the point of
inflection between the legacy medium of television and its various reflections against the
landscape of new media focuses on the same old enemy: the tendency to define identity as static,
to quantify it, and to sell that quantified knowledge – and by extension the people over whom it
holds power – to the highest bidder. In their rejection, deconstruction, and renegotiation of
community, these sitcoms also provide a well-defined picture of the foe’s mechanicity.
Pushing against the powers that be, we laugh at these revelations. It makes sense. The enemy
of community is also the locus of laughter: something mechanical encrusted upon the living.

196
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Creator Carstocea, George (author)

Core Title The world, abjected: contemporary comedy across media

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 11/05/2020

Defense Date 09/05/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag #thedress,animation,Black Mirror,Cinema and Media Studies,comedy,Community,new media,Nosedive,OAI-PMH Harvest,parks and recreation,satire,Singularity,sitcom,social media,South Park,television studies,The Good Place,The Venture Bros.,Twitter,xkcd

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Advisor Seiter, Ellen (committee chair), Connor, J.D. (committee member), Kuhn, Virginia (committee member)

Creator Email carstoce@usc.edu,gcarstocea@gmail.com

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