Article

Thesis Eleven
2023, Vol. 174(1) 81–97
The limits of satire, ª The Author(s) 2023

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of cultural politics DOI: 10.1177/07255136231154266
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Nicholas Holm
Massey University, New Zealand

Abstract
In the first decades of the 21st century, humour has been increasingly embraced as a
legitimate means by which to cover, analyse and intervene in political issues. Most fre-
quently, this political application of humour has been interpreted through the lens of
‘satire’: a term that evokes an idea of humour as a politically meaningful cultural act. Such
an account of humour connects satire with the long-standing theoretical tradition of
‘cultural politics’ that explores the ability and mechanism of cultural forms to inform,
inspire or enact political change. However, while satire may appear as the manifestation
or culmination of a cultural political agenda, I argue that the concept ultimately works
towards the closure of cultural political possibility. Drawing on the work of Georg
Lukács and Fredric Jameson, I argue that satire is better understood as a form of reifi-
cation that prematurely resolves how, when and why cultural forms can do politics.

Keywords
cultural politics, humour, political aesthetics, popular culture, reification, satire

Laughter can change the world. Well, it would be helpful – not to mention politically
advantageous – if it could. If comedy could overcome oppression and tear down
exploitative regimes. If jokes could set us free. After all, not only are the forms of culture
that give rise to laughter widespread and accessible, they also tend to be pleasurable to
produce and consume (although there are certainly exceptions). On that basis, if properly
harnessed, an effective politics of humour holds out the potential to build a better society
in ways that are not only inclusive, but maybe even enjoyable. Given this potential, it is

Corresponding author:
Nicholas Holm, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Massey University, Private Box 756, Wellington
6140, New Zealand.
Email: [email protected]
82 Thesis Eleven 174(1)

little wonder that popular humour has become a site of repeated and profound investment
regarding the power of cultural forms to enact meaningful political and social change in
the world.
The belief in the transformative power of the comic is especially apparent in relation
to that loose category of humour usually referred to as ‘satire’: a term that once named a
particular technical genre, but which in its current usage tends to inform a more general
claim about comic texts. Long since loosened from any precise definition, the category
of satire is now more commonly evoked in a broader fashion to describe forms of
humour that ostensibly manifest critical intention. Satire is now a way to name a mode of
comedy with the potential to make a change in the world. In the 21st century, this idea
of ‘satire’ has become a central concept by which we assess and address the political
potential of humour. It is a key term that orientates both the contemporary study and the
production of comedy as a matter of more than ‘just jokes’. In popular culture, the
centrality of satire has been cemented by the rise of what Robert Phiddian has called
the ‘satirical-industrial complex’ (2017: 253). This has given rise to a global glut of self-
ascribed satirical media content – from animated comedy to the political turn in stand-
up; to US late-night television and its international derivatives; to the ever-expanding
wealth of online comment and criticism couched in comic qualities. In this environment,
it seems increasingly difficult to find instances of humour that do not seek to lay claim to
the mantle of satire on some level.
The satirical turn of popular comedy has been matched by commensurate develop-
ments in the theoretical and philosophical literature on the topic, which have sought to
both explain and announce the political potential of humour to carry out political work.
In doing so, such theoretical work has evoked a wide range of thinkers ranging from
Bakhtin (Badarneh, 2011; Julin, 2018) to Hegel (Zupančič, 2008); Deleuze (Williams,
2018) to Adorno (Coulson, 2007). Beyond adding a valuable touch of intellectual
gravitas, such reference points have also served to connect the contemporary discussion
of satire to an older and wider tradition that has historically been known under multiple
names, including cultural politics, cultural Marxism, avant-gardism or political aes-
thetics. Regardless of the name, what these intellectual projects share in common is a
concern with culture’s ability to enact political praxis. Most fully developed under the
sign of modernism, this dream of cultural politics seeks to make of cultural expression ‘a
form of political and social revolution by means other than barricades and palace
putsches’ (Szeman, 2008: 313). Genuinely popular, affectively engaging and frequently
deeply cutting, satire holds out the possibility of realising that aspiration to achieve
meaningful and measurable social and political change through cultural forms.
However, in this article I will suggest that despite the popular and scholarly enthu-
siasm it has attracted, satire is not and cannot be the culmination of the tradition of
cultural politics, but rather works to prevent a more thorough and useful reckoning with
the relationship between humour and politics. I argue that satire is instead better
understood as the premature closure of the project of cultural politics because of the
ways that it reifies the relationship between culture and politics. In developing this
argument, I situate the contemporary conversation regarding satire in terms of the wider
historical sweep of cultural-political thinking as it has manifested through avant-garde
manifestos and critical theories of cultural politics. Locating satire in this theoretical
Holm 83

trajectory allows us to better perceive how the apparent power of satire can work to limit
– rather than expand – our ability to account for the multiple ways in which cultural
forms can do politics. Ultimately, it is only when we recognise the impasse of satirical
critique as a mode of cultural politics that it then becomes possible to attend in more
productive and sustained ways to how not only humour, but culture more broadly, might
act upon the world.

Our satirical century

Indicative of the growing consensus regarding the cultural political potential of humour,
satire has been increasingly embraced as a popular and legitimate means by which to
cover, analyse and intervene in politics in the early 21st century. On the one hand we
have the popular success and cultural resonance of political comedy, ranging from the
snide documentary showmanship of Michael Moore to the laughter-laden news-coverage
of The Daily Show under first Jon Stewart and then Trevor Noah (as well as that show’s
multiple imitators and inheritors [Baym and Jones, 2013]), from the deadpan absurdities
of The Onion to Armando Iannucci’s political comedy of errors The Thick of It and its US
adaptation Veep, to the 2020 revival of the UK puppet-based political parody, Spitting
Image, and the seemingly never-ending deluge of politically-tinted stand-up comedy.
Moreover, such professional output through legacy media channels is more than matched
by an up swell of online content: in terms of both anonymous unchecked political memes
and gifs that offer a new way to conduct political discourse, and the emergence of new
forms of political entertainment, most prominently comedy political podcasts, such as
Abe Lincoln’s Top Hat, Partly Political Broadcast, and Chapo Trap House. Yet, despite
the often-predicted end of political satire, the popular appetite for comic comment on
politics seems to be showing little sign of slowing even as its expression shifts to better
fit the advantages and affordances offered by new media forms.
On the other hand, the 21st century has also been witness to an ever-narrowing gap
between comedians and politicians proper. This can be seen in the increasing willingness
of prominent politicians to engage with and even indulge in comic performances
(Peterson, 2008). For instance, in the USA, there has been Barack Obama’s multiple
appearances on late night comedy shows, Donald Trump’s embrace of mockery and
ridicule as political tactics (Mercieca, 2020) and most recently Joe Biden’s cultivation of
an avuncular, folksy persona. This tendency also finds expression in the slightly
unnerving rise of the figure of the comedian-politician (Milburn, 2018). Most prominent
in this regard is Volodymyr Zelensky, who played the starring role in the Ukrainian
sitcom Sluga Naroda [Servant of the People] (in which a high-school teacher is unex-
pectedly elected to the position of President of Ukraine) before himself being actually
elected to the same position as the leader of a political party sharing the name of the show
(and then assuming the mantle of a war-time leader). Moreover, while Zelensky may be
the definitive example, he is far from alone in this regard. Other comedian-politicians of
note include Jón Gnarr of Iceland, Al Franken in the USA, Beppe Grillo of Italy, and the
former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose previous role as a waggish pundit
directly informed his political career as a libertine buffoon. No longer would a lack of
seriousness appear to be a meaningful barrier to electoral success. Indeed, there appears
84 Thesis Eleven 174(1)

to be a certain advantage to be obtained from the injection of joviality and jollity into
matters of state.
What we can see in such instances, then, is that across multiple constituencies and
cultures, humour has become an increasingly acceptable way to conduct, discuss and
do politics. Around the world, comedy has been widely embraced, and even celebrated,
as an important, popular and legitimate means by which to analyse and intervene in
political issues. Moreover, such professional texts are only the tip of the satirical
iceberg, absolutely superseded in terms of sheer content by the online explosion of
satire in meme culture, online videos and the festering snark-fest that lurks in the
haunted remains of Twitter: online spaces where it is now almost expected that critique
will be leavened, as often as not, with generous helpings of humour. This is true not
only in US and Anglophone contexts, where the latest versions of the culture wars rage
on in new comic shapes and forms, but also in places like China. where subtle comedy
informs attempts by everyday social media users to express political discontent. For
example, as was widely reported in 2018, in that year, Chinese censors begun to
remove all references to Winnie the Pooh from the Chinese corners of the internet, after
the character was adopted as a mocking stand-in for President Xi Jinping (Freudenstein,
2020). The larger point, here, is that satire now seems to be everywhere, all the time, as
an expected aspect of politics. It seems, indeed, that we have entered a new golden age
of satire.
Although the Trump presidency amidst the rise of global populisms generated some
concern regarding the limitations of comedy as a form of political action (Brooks,
2020; Phiddian, 2020), the predominant response to the ongoing satire boom has been
celebration, with the politics of humour hailed as simultaneously subversive, acces-
sible and entertaining (Farnsworth and Lichter, 2019; Henson and Jankowski, 2020;
Kilby, 2018; Rehak and Trnka, 2018). No longer restricted to the educated or the
especially engaged, satire renders critique an enjoyable and pleasurable activity and
thereby expands the public appetite for detailed engagement with political questions
and investigations. Key advocates of such an approach to humour and satire include
media and communication scholars such as Jeffrey P. Jones (2010), Amber Day (2012,
2018), Jonathan Rossing (2016, 2019) and James Caron (2021), as well as those like
Simon Critchley (2002), who frame humour’s political potential in broader philoso-
phical terms. This is a perspective that finds it’s perhaps most perfect expression in the
oft-cited Mark Twain quotation that ‘Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand’
(Holm, 2018).
However, this approach to humour is not just restricted to the academy alone. I would
also posit that it sits behind wider popular attitudes towards the role of humour in
political engagement: assumptions about what Alenka Zupančič refers to as ‘the
humanist-romantic presentation of comedy as intellectual resistance’ (2008: 4). Indeed,
so popular is this new mode of comic critique that, in many contexts, it threatens to
supplant the suspiciously sombre forms of ideology critique and affiliated modes by
which power was previously interrogated. As a consequence, there often seems to be
increasingly little time or taste for solemn denunciations and deconstructions of what-
ever political ills against which one wishes to take aim. Instead, almost everywhere,
a little laughter would seem to go a long way.
Holm 85

A dream of cultural politics

To think about humour in such ways is to imagine it as the contemporary realisation of a
longstanding desire that I here refer to the ‘dream of cultural politics’. This dream aspires
to a form of cultural conception, production or performance that is able to bring about
changes in the lived reality of everyday life. In different manifestations, this dream has
been an important aspect of the production and study of culture since at least the turn of
the 20th century: from the artistic experimentation of the various Modernist avant-gardes
(Watson, 2002: 52–72) to the libidinous aspirations of 1960s rock and the politics of
noise (Miller, 2015), from the de-familiarisation of the Russian formalists to the critical
aesthetic theory of the Frankfurt school (Jay, 1996), to Raymond Williams’ cultural
materialism, critical feminism, queer theory and other iterations of critical cultural
studies. What unites these disparate intellectual, artistic and scholarly projects is a belief
that cultural works, in themselves, in their formal properties rather than just their rep-
resented content, can reach beyond themselves to enact a change in the world.
The mechanism by which this ‘reaching beyond’ becomes possible has been under-
stood in multiple ways. For some, this process is primarily cognitive, for others,
affective. At times, the natural medium for this influence is the interiority of the indi-
vidual. For others it is, by necessity, the structures and systems of shared society. At the
dawn of the 20th century, Francisco Marinetti – ‘the first artist of the manifesto’
(Danchev, 2011 [1909]: 2) – articulated the power of art as ‘a violent assault upon the
forces of the unknown with the intention of making them prostrate themselves at the feet
of mankind’ (2011 [1909]: 4), while, a few years later, Wassily Kandinsky hailed the
transformative power of art in explicitly spiritual terms (1966 [1912]: 26). For Viktor
Shklovsky of the Russian Formalists, art could shake the world through a process of
ostranenie or familiarisation, whereby the play of form and the difficulty of expression
could thwart the ‘habitualisation’ of perception (Shklovsky, 1965: 17–18). Martin
Heidegger looked towards art’s capacity to ‘found’ a new world that engendered a state
of existential disorientation akin to the uncanniness of an awareness of one’s death
(Vattimo, 1992: 50–1). For such thinkers, when properly executed in terms of technique,
composition and motivation, formal art had the power to transform minds, and thereby
transform the world.
However, it was in the work of those theorists and philosophers who would come to
be known as Western or cultural Marxists that the most fully developed account of the
political function of contemporary culture has been articulated. Marxist intellectuals
such as Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Henri Lefebvre, Lucien
Goldmann, and especially Theodor Adorno contributed substantially to our theoretical
language and frameworks for making sense of the social and political power of art and
literature by virtue of their conditional autonomy (Anderson, 1979: 75–8; Brown, 2019).
In this framework, art’s potential to prise out a space of critical distance from its capi-
talist context could allow it to express uncomfortable truths about the exploitative ways
of the world. Taking their lead from that earlier generation of political aesthetic theorists
– sometimes as a form of inspiration, at other times in direct opposition (Holm and
Duncan, 2018) – later scholars of culture and politics, including Raymond Williams,
Michel de Certeau, Linda Hutcheon, Guy Debord, Pierre Bourdieu and Stuart Hall,
86 Thesis Eleven 174(1)

would then expand the scope of this theoretical project to increasingly encompass
popular and everyday forms of culture, as well as high art, in a variety of ways.
Sometimes culture was envisioned as the expression of the popular will or the raw
material for oppositional tactics, at other times it became the terrain on power struggles.
Regardless of the precise mechanism, though, culture was thought to be deeply inter-
woven into the political conflicts and opportunities of the time. In our current moment, in
the wake of a disenchantment with some of the more radical claims made for the political
power of the popular (Gilbert, 2008: 41–73), affect has emerged as the predominant site
for conceiving of the potential of culture to impact upon the world as expressed in the
work of a new generation of aesthetic theorists such as Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai and
Ben Highmore. The concern to develop a sufficient account of how cultural products
might have a bearing upon the world, and under what conditions, remains ongoing.
The reason for indulging in this admittedly only partial history is to begin to reconnect
the critical claims made on behalf of satire with the longer history of the dream of
cultural politics. The idea of cultural works as political interventions is not new, even if
often presented as such in discussions of satire: as if the judicious application of comedy
to change the world reflected a hitherto unimagined form of political practice. Instead,
contemporary claims for the power of satire harken back to that longer tradition: be they
framed in terms redolent of the violent edge of Marinetti’s aesthetic destruction or
Kandinsky’s careful composition. The historical ideas of cultural politics inform
accounts of the power of humour to reveal the lurking nonsense in the habitual or
expected aspects of our social lives (Rossing, 2019), to provide the basis for new
affiliations and communities (Doona, 2018), or to reshape our emotional orientations
towards the affective terrain of contemporary life (Berlant and Ngai, 2017). All of this
marks a continuation, rather than a break, with the history of cultural political thought.
Too often, though, this continuity is overlooked, because of the prevalence of a
different idea that offers to organise and explain the politics of humour. This is the idea
of satire, a key term for understanding humour as an accepted and expected aspect of
politics in the early 21st century. For those concerned with exploring the relationship
between culture and politics, one of the most obvious and apparent paths available today
leads through satire. The concept not only offers a way of making sense of how an
aesthetic and cultural category like humour could do political work, but also seemingly
holds out the promise of something even more significant as an actually existing example
of a properly critical form of contemporary culture in action.
Be it John Oliver’s laughter-laden calls to political action on Last Week Tonight,
Michelle Wolf’s controversial speaking of comic truth to power at the 2018 White House
Correspondent’s Dinner, or Jon Stewart’s role as America’s comic conscience during the
Bush administration, satirists have become ever more central to contemporary politics:
both in the USA, and around the world. When considered alongside a well-documented
and widely distributed sense of general political disenfranchisement, fears regarding
waning social solidarity, and the ongoing global consequences of economic inequality,
this utopian promise of satire appears as a rare glimmer of hope: a widely-consumed,
popular expression of political critique that promises to, in the words of Jonathan Gray,
Jeffrey Jones and Ethan Thompson, ‘encapsulate public sentiment . . . energize civic
culture [and] engag[e] citizen-audiences’ (2009: 4). In doing this sort of work, satire
Holm 87

promises to realise a particularly compelling vision of cultural politics, whereby

meaningful and measurable change is enacted through the production, circulation, and
consumption of cultural texts. More than simply the delivery of culturally-sweetened
political messages (which has historically been decried as propaganda), satire appears as
an aesthetic practice wherein the formal (comic) arrangement of the work is central to the
employment and expression of its political purpose. At the very least, this is a very
seductive story about the power of popular humour properly wielded to challenge pol-
itics as usual. It is certainly a story that has captured the attention, and indeed the
affections, of many scholars of both historical and contemporary humour, while also
aligning with what appears to be a genuine popular opinion. But my question today, then,
is does this satirical paradigm actually adequately account for the politics of humour at
our particular historical moment?
After all, if satire is not only the inheritor but possibly even the realisation of the
dream of cultural politics, we might wonder why – in these satirical times – our
political world seems to be tending, in general, in a different and less desirable
direction. This can be seen not least with the surge of global nationalisms and forms of
prejudice long since thought abandoned. It can also be seen in the increasingly
aggressive monitoring of the correct bounds and forms of comic speech in both
mediated and interpersonal communication, and in the use of legal and police powers
to prosecute humourists from Kenya (Gathara, 2021) to Hong Kong (Baptista, 2020) to
Russia (Dixon and Ilyushina, 2021). If satire is being not only consumed but also
produced and shared by millions if not hundreds of millions of people around the
world, then how might we explain what appears to be the decline or defeat of critical
thought and emancipatory politics? If satire has the power to do so much, then why
does it seem to have done so little?

Defining satire against ‘mere humour’

If we are to account for satire’s apparent failure as a form of cultural politics, then it is
first necessary to account for what exactly is meant by the term. This definition has been
postponed until this point of the discussion. Although there has historically been a degree
of variation and even ambiguity regarding the definition of satire (Condren, 2012), the
term has been consistently understood to name a form of cultural expression that both
entertains and criticises (Declerq, 2018: 218). For example, in his classic work The Art of
Satire, David Worcester argues that ‘the content of satire is criticism’ (1960: 16),
Leonard Feinberg asserts in Introduction to Satire that ‘whatever else [satirists] do, they
criticise’ (1967: 6), and in Arthur Pollard’s Satire, the author declares that ‘Satire always
has a victim, it always criticizes’ (1970: 73). Such authors and opinions are represen-
tative of a long-standing consensus regarding the social, cultural and political function of
satire that was codified during an intense period of scholarly activity in the 1960s (see
also Elliott, 1960; Highet, 1962; Sutherland, 1962). Drawing upon an established canon
of satirical writers – from Juvenal to Jonathan Swift – authors of this period traced satire
as a particularly literary historical form characterised by a restricted set of techniques
and specific generic features. Although more narrowly conceived than the contemporary
usage due to a particular focus on ‘formal verse satire’, even in this restricted form,
88 Thesis Eleven 174(1)

satire was nonetheless understood as fundamentally constituted by the intermixture of

jest and judgement.
More recent scholarship has built upon this earlier definition to take into account the
emergence of a broader range of cultural forms that do not adhere to the strict formal
arrangements of those literary precedents but are nonetheless understood as satire
(Condren, 2012; Declerq, 2018; Griffin, 1994; Knight, 2004; Phiddian, 2013). This
contemporary reformulation expands upon the traditional definition in order to account
for how satire manifests beyond the narrow field of literature and across a range of media
forms, including editorial cartoons, television programming and social media posts. As a
result of the expansion of potential forms, contemporary scholars of satire argue that it no
longer functions as a clearly defined genre, but instead is better understood as a mode or
tone that can modify other forms of expression, rather than constituting a set body of
cultural works in itself (Knight, 2004; Phiddian, 2013). Moreover, when satire makes its
transition from a limited range of literary forms to the breadth of popular media, its
meaning also tends to lose some of that rigidity and clarity as regards its moral-political
critical function. Contrary to traditional models, a satirist in this sense need not operate
‘in a world of clear standards and boundaries’ (Griffin, 1994: 35), but rather can lampoon
and provoke without suggesting preferable alternatives. At the same time, although
historically satire was not thought to be necessarily humorous, in practice, contemporary
usage of the term tends to privilege humour as a constituent element of satire (Noonan
and Leggett, 2018). Satire is therefore no longer seen as simply a tool of comic moral
instruction expressed in prose, but becomes applied to any instance of humour that
potentially speaks to political or social matters.
For some authors, this loss of precise meaning represents a public failure to properly
understand the central critical function of satire that ought to be actively refuted in order
to protect the true and correct meaning of the term (Declerq, 2018). For others, this
decline in precision, while lamentable insofar as it dilutes the ‘moral seriousness’ of
satire, is inevitable and needs to be accepted as simply another aspect of the gradual
decline of Western civilisation under the assault of ‘mainstream, mass entertainment’
(Condren, 2012). However, there is an alternate way to understand this shifting and
broadening meaning, not as an expression of ‘faults in a system, or errors of feedback, or
deficiencies of education’ (Williams, 1988: 24), but rather as a result of shifting material
conditions in which satire operates. This way of approaching satire follows Raymond
Williams’ method in Keywords where ‘language change generally, and meaning change
specifically, forms part of and provides insight into the nature of social and cultural
transformation’ (Moran, 2021). Understood in this manner, shifts in the popular
understanding of satire are not simply the result of a public failure to adequate grasp a
technical term, nor even a record of the transforming nature of a dynamic but coherent
phenomenon. Instead, debates over the meaning of satire reflect active and ongoing
conflicts ‘that cannot be resolved by reducing the complexity of actual usage’ (Williams,
1988: 91).
Such debates are particularly acute in the case of satire, which, unlike the majority of
terms of cultural analysis, is a concept whose meaning can carry real material impacts
when it speaks to perceptions of originality, intentionality and responsibility in legally
meaningful ways (Condren et al., 2008; Godioli and Little 2022; Holm, 2020). Historical
Holm 89

shifts in the formal definition of satire thus do more than track a changing sense of how
humour can do politics. Rather, they express ongoing disagreements about how satire
works in ways that potentially carry real material consequences. Satire thus appears as a
specific form of humour that does more than simply provoke laughter, but instead
reaches beyond itself to articulate a point regarding its wider social or political context.
While the lack of clear formal cues has led some to argue that satire remains difficult to
define as a cultural form (Bogel, 2001: 4), this is meant only in the sense of the difficulty
in identifying any clearly delimited set of aesthetic techniques. Indeed, in the absence of
those particular formal cues, the idea that satire is essentially defined by its comingling
of (often comic) pleasure and politics has become even more central to the use and
meaning of that term. In general usage, ‘satire’ thus no longer names a specific set of
formal qualities, nor even a particular critical purpose. Rather it refers to a manifestation
of humour that is thought to be explicitly orientated towards ends and concerns beyond
amusement. In other words, humour that ought to be taken seriously.
However, if satire names a form of humour that ought to be taken seriously, then this
presumes the existence of another sort of humour from which satire is to be dis-
tinguished. This is a form of humour which does not reach beyond itself, which is not
political, and which therefore needn’t be taken seriously. I suggest that we refer to this as
‘mere humour’. This is a residual category that is called into being when satire is defined
as a meaningful and serious mode of humour. It is composed of those instances of
humour that are ostensibly purposeless and thereby fail to meet the satirical criteria of
critique or commitment and is potentially a particularly large set because it is the comic
remainder left behind once instances of the satirical have been identified and extracted.
This distinction between satire and mere humour informs the work of David Worcester’s
statement that ‘the laughter of comedy is relatively purposeless. The laughter of satire is
directed toward a preconceived end’ (1960: 38), while comedy comes to name the
broader purposeless forms of humour. This distinction is also important to Dieter
Declerq’s argument that satire needs to be distinguished from what he refers to as non-
satiric ‘frivolous mockery’: a term he uses to describe the comedy of panel shows that,
although they might take the business of politics as a subject for jokes, do not seek to
make any particular critical point about those politics (a similar point could be made
about late-night comedy in the USA which fills a similar niche in the local comedy
ecosystem). For Declerq, while this humour may be joking about politics, it is not
political joking, because it prioritises the amusement of its audience over their critical
enlightenment.
Most readers will have their own personal example of what such ‘mere humour’
might look like. Typical examples could include American or UK sitcoms like The Big
Bang Theory, Mrs Brown’s Boys, the eternal punching bags of Jay Leno or Adam
Sandler, or the even more eternal punching bag of punning, all of which frequently serve
to illustrate a mode of the comic that lacks ethical and political weight. These are forms
of humour that are regarded as light-hearted, diverting entertainment that do not reach
beyond themselves to pass comment on the social and political world. Such examples of
ostensibly mere humour are not only among the most widely-consumed instances of
popular humour. They also frequently rely heavily upon styles of humour associated
with less educated and less privileged groups (Kuipers, 2015). The distinction drawn by
90 Thesis Eleven 174(1)

contemporary celebrations of satire – between meaningful and mere humour – thus

traces an older division between ‘legitimate’ and ‘lowbrow’ comedy that has long
historical roots in Anglo comic traditions (Friedman, 2014). This correspondence
highlights the barely suppressed class elements of the satirical distinction whereby
satire becomes a term by which to re-inscribe ‘symbolic boundaries’ between those
who possess sanctified comic taste and those who do not (Friedman and Kuipers,
2013).
Mere humour, then, is humour that is seen to be less valuable because it is without
particular purpose, beyond the immediate task of prompting its audience to laughter, or
at the least amusement. It is humour that is (or at least is deemed to be) concerned with
amusement and laughter, rather than criticism and intervention. In the context of our
satirical century, satire emerges as a heroic and engaged mode of humour, defined
against the backdrop of a morass of detached, apolitical ‘laffs’. Satire stages this comic
incongruity while simultaneously defining itself against the backdrop of ‘mere humour’.
The definition of satire against ‘mere humour’ thus acts as a ‘convenient working dis-
tinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not’
(Jameson, 1986: 20).

The reification of cultural politics

The entanglement of satire with structures of distinction and cultural privilege should
give pause to any who seek to designate it as an exceptionally political form of popular
culture. However, the limitations of the satirical model of cultural politics are not simply
a consequence of its alignment with particular class interests. Rather, they manifest at a
more fundamental formal level and do so in ways that threaten to foreclose a full
reckoning with the complexity and diversity of ways that not just humour, but all culture,
can do politics. This closure of cultural political possibility is the result of an act of
reification that draws a clear and apparently objective distinction between political and
non-political forms of comical culture. The concept of reification – as developed most
influentially in Georg Lukács and then expounded upon in the work of Fredric Jameson –
refers to a process whereby social relations, activities and categories become understood
as objective things in themselves, rather than as the products of human behaviour
(Lukács, 1971: 83–5). Reification is predicated on the extension of the abstract logic of
the commodity-form – which mistakes relations between objects for relations between
people – to society and subjectivity more broadly. In doing so, reification rationalises
and reduces the ways we understand and interact with the world to a matter of distinct,
durable, and discrete social and psychological units, rather than understanding our social
environment as a contingent, dynamic, and deeply interconnected assemblage (Lukács,
1971: 101–3). At the most basic level, to argue that satire reifies cultural politics is to
suggest that it reduces the complicated, dynamic and above all human terrain of cultural
politics to a set of stable categories, fossilised relationships, and rote moves.
Central to this reifying process is the foundation of the separate, stable categories of
satire and ‘mere humour’. This act of partitioning is premised on more than just a series
of differences in formal expression or textual purpose, but rather operates via a politi-
cally meaningful distinction between two separate domains of culture: one where politics
Holm 91

takes place and another where it does not. In doing so, satirical thinking reproduces the
wider structural pattern of a reified society – where it is presumed that culture and
cultural forms are distinct from matters of politics or society – within the sphere of
comedy. When satire makes a claim for its status as politically meaningful culture, it
does so only on the basis that it is an exception from the general tendency. Satire’s claim
for political status is premised on the assertion that other forms of comedy are not
political. Thus, the celebration of satire as a privileged site of political commitment
comes at the expense of the vast remainder of mere humour (and beyond that mere
culture) that is thereby consigned to the apolitical realm of un-invested entertainment. In
doing so, the rationalisation of satire transforms critical comic practice from a familiar
aspect of everyday life into both a vocation and a genre.
In terms of a vocation, the concept of satire enacts a division of labour that separates
out comic critique as a particular skill possessed by a specific few as the basis for
industry and profit, rather than as something shared in common by virtue of being
human. In this way, ‘satire’ entangles humour’s critical qualities with the semi-industrial
logics of production and mediation and thereby separates them from everyday practice.
Satire, that is to say politically-meaningful humour, thereby becomes no longer some-
thing that regular people do themselves, but rather something that they experience and
consume through mediated channels and professional performance. Satire transforms
cultural politics into something that is observed and consumed, rather than enacted and
engaged with in potentially transformative ways.
However, the reification of satire is more than just a restriction of access but can also
be grasped on the formal level as a question of genre. To address satire in these terms is
to understand it in terms of what Jameson refers to the ‘ideology of form’ whereby a
given aesthetic form, style or genre is understood as existing in determinant relation to its
underlying social and economic conditions (1986: 98). Such a perspective illuminates
how the changes in the definition of satire are more than just the latest series in a shifting
game of form but can also be placed into conversation with the underlying material
conditions of the era. This approach raises that question, then, of why the particular
understanding of satire as a mode of especially political popular culture might emerge at
in the historical-economic conditions of the early 21st century. One way of answering
this is in terms of satire’s style or sensibility, what Jameson refers to as a ‘semantic’
understanding of genre. For example, Tragedy is characterised as a narrative form
concerned with ‘the triumph of an inhuman destiny’ (Jameson, 1986: 116), whereas the
Romance genre is constituted by the fundamental operation of a binary opposition
between good and evil forms (Jameson, 1986: 111). In contrast, having abandoned
‘moral seriousness’, in its contemporary mode satire has relatively little concern with
such ethical questions. Instead, as previously established, satire adheres to a more
anarchic, transgressive worldview: a particular vision of cultural politics where laughter
is presented as a threat to political structures. As a generic sensibility, satire is thus
defined by the assertion that humour, and cultural consumption in general, can be
apprehended as a way of doing politics. This worldview has the potential to be partic-
ularly appealing in an environment where other means of political praxis seem
increasingly closed off or impotent (Dean, 2009; Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014).
92 Thesis Eleven 174(1)

Burning the bridge between culture and politics

An account of satire as a particular style or sensibility does not exhaust its political
work, however, especially in terms of reification. Instead, the satirical genre also
needs to be grasped as a structural category that manifests a particular arrangement of
textual relationships and movements (Jameson, 1986: 107–8). Beyond the discursive
construction of satire as a particular form of comic politics, there is the question of
how satirical texts are actually formed, which takes us back to satire’s foundational
division between culture and politics. The relationship between these two spheres in
relation to satire has been most fully theorised in the American Communication and
Media Studies tradition by influential writers such as Day (2012, 2018), Jones (2010;
Jones et al., 2012), Rossing (2016, 2019) and Geoffrey Baym (2013, 2014). In this
account, the political promise of satire is realised through the subversion of the
otherwise inviolate barrier between the separate worlds of popular entertainment and
serious politics. Satire is thus seen to perform its fundamental politics by transgressing
the line that would normally keep the political separate from the popular and the
cultural and thereby wreaking a form of progressive havoc that unsettles dogma and
upends hierarchy. For those who usually experience the division between popular
culture and politics as a clear, common-sense and normative distinction, this satirical
subversion of the politics-culture boundary appears as a radical act where satire acts
as a utopian form able to overcome the partition between political action and
cultural consumption.
In doing so satire appears to be doing the same work that underpins the longer tra-
dition of cultural politics considered earlier: dismantling the assumed partition between
culture and politics as separate realms. And if we were to leave off the argument here, it
would thus appear that satire ultimately opposes rather than enacts reification because it
acknowledges the continuity between cultural and political aspects of life. However, this
conclusion is unfortunately premature insofar as it does not consider the aforementioned
way in which satire characterises the broader relation between itself and other forms of
popular culture. White satire may gesture towards the possibility of doing politics with
culture, it does so while simultaneously presenting such interventions as exceptional.
Indeed, it is the apparently exceptional nature of the culture-politics encounter that
renders satire comic: the fundamental comic incongruity here is the unexpected
encounter between serious politics and otherwise trifling culture. According to this logic,
then, while individual satirical texts can transcend the ostensible gap between the spheres
of politics and mere entertainment, they do so only on the assumption that the two are
otherwise properly separate. Satire challenges structural divisions between entertain-
ment and politics only as a provocation – one that produces and is resolved in the shock
of laughter – rather than a revelation of their deeper continuity. What this means is that
satire only appears as a radical challenge to the status quo on the basis that politics and
culture ought to be otherwise regarded as incommensurably separate categories. Satire
stages its apparent revolution on the presumption that no other cultural form (especially
any comic form) is of political significance.
Furthermore, the claim that satire is humour doing politics is premised on the
assumption that humour (or indeed any cultural text) may not be political in any other
Holm 93

way. Satire’s conscious and critical engagement is presented as if it were the only viable
manifestation of a political popular humour in a manner that excludes the broader range
of politically-meaningful interventions that humour – even and especially ‘mere
humour’ – can enact. For example, absurd humour can intervene in politically-
meaningful disputes over what is seen to make sense and what is not (Dodds, 2022),
while awkward humour can be used to encourage or forestall affective connections
through the orchestration of empathy (Sawallisch, 2021). When employed in repre-
sentational contexts, humour can shape and steer the articulation of identities in complex
and potentially counter-intuitive ways (Davies and Ilot, 2018) or be employed to make
controversial or upsetting topics both legible and palatable (Lionis, 2021). In contrast to
the liberational model assumed by satire, humour can even contribute to the building of
consensus and the mobilisation of discipline (Nieuwenhuis, 2022) or to nihilistic
opposition of all community (Zijp, 2022). It is these forms of diverse, subtle and
potentially powerful forms of cultural politics that are eclipsed when the politics of
humour are over-determined by the category of satire, which renders other forms of
comic politics invisible and reduces the political function of the humour to variations on
critique, transgression and subversion. For these diverse and contingent strategies of
comic politics, satire substitutes a singular political aesthetic strategy that presents the
encounter of culture and politics as a comic provocation rather than a necessary
intervention.
The failure of satire is thus twofold: even as it own internal formal logical presents the
possibility of cultural politics as a comic scandal, it simultaneously denies the possibility
of other forms of meaningfully political humour. The popular politics of satire – and the
comic ‘scandal’ of the non-serious treatment of political issues in satire – are thus
orientated against a broader politics of humour in a manner that works to contain and
mitigate the wider promises of cultural politics. This explanation furnishes a theoretical
mechanism for the widely observed and lamented observation that, in practice, satire
does not appear to do much of anything (Baumgartner and Morris, 2006; Higgie, 2017;
Phiddian, 2017), because satire encounters the grand promise of cultural politics as a
joke, rather than a dream. The dominance of satirical thinking does more, then, than just
create a reified distinction between political and mere humour. It enacts a premature
shutdown of any broader reckoning with the possibilities of affective, ideological, aes-
thetic forms of politics of humour.
The popular politics of satire thus obscure a deeper political truth: that in many
meaningful ways the cultural and the political are always connected and it is in this
deeper connection that the ‘true’ and potentially less desirable, uglier, more reactionary
politics of satire lie. Or, to put this another way, satire is the reification of cultural
politics. It is the transformation of cultural politics into a pre-ordained, pre-given thing,
rather than as a process of a struggle and ongoing development. At a moment of comic
expansion, when humour is increasingly integrated in multiple forms of politics, the idea
of satire prematurely shuts down the possibility of the grander, utopian visions that have
historically emerged from the confrontation between aesthetics and politics. Even as it
aspires to meaningful critique, satire’s ultimate outcome is to burn the bridge of cultural
politics behind itself.
94 Thesis Eleven 174(1)

Conclusion
The failure to properly characterise the cultural politics of satire is a consequence of
an insufficiently dialectic approach that emphasises the critical at the expense of the
ideological aspects of the form. This critical vision constitutes ‘the promise of the
real and indeed fully visceral pleasure of utopian transformation’ that underpins
the appeal of satire (Jameson, 1986: 62). But satire is not simply the appearance of
critique. It is also the fantasy of critique that would be possible if we had not
divorced culture from economics, from the lived experience of life. Without a more
abstract shift in cultural political consciousness, satire is therefore only capable of
functioning at an aesthetic level, where political and social critique becomes the
impetus for humour, to be thereby resolved through amusement. Although satire
contains the utopian promise that the production and consumption of popular culture
can change the world, it then carries out the ideological work of explaining that this
has already been successfully achieved by the comic resolution of the text. This is a
paradigmatic example of ‘a projected solution, on the aesthetic or imaginary level,
to a genuinely contradictory situation in the concrete world of real life’ (Jameson,
1986: 225). Satire thus stages a conflict between the political and the non-political
aspects of culture which it then resolves within its own comic form. In this way, the
satirical form thus appears as both the expression of, and utopian compensation for,
a context in which the political value of culture is denied at both an intellectual and
material level.
Advocates of satire imagine it as a critical cultural form capable of effecting social
and political change when properly wielded. From this perspective, the lack of concrete
change is a problem of execution, rather than conception. However, the failure of satire
to instigate political change is not the result of a failure of application but rather an
expression of the underlying logic of the form. Satire’s claim to be a form of political
critique is predicated on the denial of a deeper connection between politics and popular
culture: between politics and everyday life. Satire acknowledges, or perhaps more
accurately assumes, that those spheres are now experienced as separate, even as it feigns
to combine them. Thus while satirical humour is often understood to be breaching a
boundary between the serious business of politics and the vulgar world of the popular, in
practice to understand satire as critique is to understand it as the exception rather than the
rule. Satire reifies and reduces (cultural) politics to the skewering of opponents or the
bringing down of the abstract and ethereal into the lower realm of the everyday. In doing
so, it calls on us to abandon the ideological terrain on which the larger and more
important work of cultural politics is done. It is for this reason that the ascendance of
satire as both a concept and a form should not be considered a moment of triumph of the
dream of political culture but rather a troubling and ongoing challenge for those who are
concerned with the broader idea, the broader dream, perhaps, of not just a politics of
humour but the politics of culture.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.
Holm 95

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Author biography
Nicholas Holm is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Massey University, New Zealand. He
writes on political aesthetics and popular culture. His most recent publications include articles on
bureaucratic boredom in New Formations (2020), the politics of fun in Cultural Studies (2021) and
the ambiguity of online humour in New Media and Society (2021). His most recent monograph is
Humour as Politics (Palgrave, 2017).