Description
Building on recent developments in the study of politics and popular culture, this paper focuses on the relationship between US comedy and the politics of declinism. The paper engages with IR and IPE literature on US decline to argue that everyday understandings of decline have been neglected by mainstream accounts. Contemporary comedy in the United States has not followed the trajectory of British satire in the 1960s. British decline was understood, mediated and satirised by the comedians of the so-called 'satire boom'. Narratives of decline have not been a feature of American satire as decline has been a central premise of the panic-inducing content of the right-wing media. American television satire developed as a response to right-wing news media and, as such, does not directly engage with questions of US decline. Political satire instead has focused on the failures of the corporate and political systems, identifying corruption and vested interests without invoking the spectre of decline due to its capture by the Right. The paper argues that a focus on declinism, rather than decline, allows us to understand the political purpose of such narratives.
