Description
This paper interrogates the alt-right visual culture of memes, exploring how humour works politically within this context. While much of the literature on humour and global politics has focused on its emancipatory potential, this paper takes a more pessimistic approach by showing how humour, as it is used by the alt-right, serves a repressive and marginalising function. I conceive of three central mechanisms of humour to understand its role within alt-right digital spaces and make sense of humour’s specific politicality within this context: 1) humour does boundary work, 2) humour is performative, 3) humour is constructed as transgressive. I argue that through the everyday practices of humour, social boundaries are drawn and redrawn, subjectivities are constituted, and specific political claims are made. In doing so, I unsettle common sense assumptions underlying the discursive demarcation between humour and serious rhetoric. I argue that it is precisely this relegation of humour to the realm of the unserious which gives it the power to masquerade as benign or even inherently good, even when the humorous utterance is bigoted, discriminatory and violent. This undertheorisation of humour’s politicality is therefore implicated in its deployment as a rhetorical device by the alt-right.
