Race, Racism and Political Correctness in Comedy

A Psychoanalytic Exploration

Jack Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367508937
• eBook ISBN: 9781000378092
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness.

By viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be 'politically correct', this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. In doing so, it engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to 'PC Debates', contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupan?i?, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC 'mockumentary', The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies.

Drawing from psychoanalysis, social psychology and philosophy, this book will be highly relevant for postgraduate students and academic researchers studying comedy, race/racism, multiculturalism, political correctness and television/film.

1

Political correctness and comedy

Political correctness and the ‘postmodern turn’: Comedy, humour and the problem of subversion

In the introduction chapter a brief attempt was made to offer some form of definition to the term ‘political correctness’ (PC). While various definitions abound, what has remained constant throughout its usage and history is its ability to be a contentious but also vague term that is grounded in predominantly negative and disparaging descriptions (Penhallurick, 2010). For this reason, Penhallurick argues that political correctness has often been conceived as:

an extremist movement dedicated particularly to the removal of all offensive and even potentially offensive expressions from the English language. People assume that it is an assault on their freedom of expression, and that the day will soon come when we are forced into not uttering words like short or fat or old. In fact, it’s already come. Political correctness gone mad!

(2010: 165)

Penhallurick’s reference to ‘freedom of expression’ bears a particular frustration towards those rallying against the dogmatism of political correctness. Consequently, though many have tied its emergence to the political left – originally the term was meant to refer to an excessive political gesture (Hall, 1994) – today it is often viewed, both positively and negatively, as a means for promoting one’s moral superiority as well as an advocation of one’s right to free expression (Thakkar, 2019).

However, while the term ‘politically correct’ has gained wider usage in the latter half of the twentieth century, ‘The tension between the right to speak freely and the right to live in a society where offensive communication is monitored and regulated has longstanding roots within the philosophical study of pragmatics and morality’ (Das and Graefer, 2017: 6). In particular, the management of ‘offensive communication’ bears a historical relation to the performance of comedy, with Kamm and Neumann highlighting how ‘As early as 1625, Francis Bacon in his essay “Of Discourse” admonished writers that certain subject matters should not be exposed to ridicule’ (2016: 12). Equally, Stourton notes how sixteenth century religious tensions between Protestants and Catholics could, today, be re-interpreted alongside contemporary debates on the restrictions that political correctness poses. In accordance with the concern that contemporary PC advocates are promoting a repressive ‘PC culture’, Stourton details how, in 1569, the performance of the York Mystery Plays¹ was ‘suppressed by the Elizabethan authorities for being too Catholic’ (2008: 7). Stourton argues that ‘Since Protestantism was the “politically correct” religion of the day it is reasonable to say that the plays were, in fact, victims of sixteenth-century Political Correctness’ (2008: 7). Consequently, while any single definition of political correctness can offer ‘only a partial understanding of a complex territory’ (Das and Graefer, 2017: 6), the management of offence and the suppression of that which is deemed to offend – be it a certain subject matter or an expression of one’s beliefs – suggests that ‘the idea of ideological “correctness”’ (Stourton, 2008: 8) posits a long and significant history within the marginalisation of certain ‘minority’ groups and in the management of forms of insult.

In fact, despite its varied history, debates on political correctness have continued to persist and, since the end of the Second World War, have become embroiled in a number of significant political and cultural confrontations, ranging from an over-zealous liberal bias in academic institutions to serving as a form of cultural Marxism bent on imposing its own moral agenda. Though the term remains tied to certain political agendas and conspiracy theories, its usage continues to bear an accusatory significance. Dunant notes that, ‘To call someone PC is less a description than an insult, carrying with it accusations of everything from Stalinism/McCarthyism to (even worse?) having no sense of humour’ (1994: vii). While political correctness is geared towards preventing ‘offence’, it has, in the case of right-wing politicians, been used as a way of emphasising the detrimental impact of forms of censorship on political actions that are frequently deemed to be in the interests of a ‘political elite’. Drawing upon the linguist Anna Szilagyi (2017), Quirk highlights how far-right politicians often ‘lin[k] “political correctness” to negative connotations’, including ‘the subordination of “ordinary people” by an intellectual elite’, the over-zealous promotion of forms of ‘censorship’, which seeks to manage what can and can’t be said, and an open disregard for ‘important issues [which] go damagingly unaddressed by politicians who fear that they will cause offence’ (Quirk, 2018: 59). It is against this backdrop that examples of political correctness draw together both politics and culture under a climate of fear, anxiety and frustration, with the hysterical nature of political correctness contriving to redefine any story, insinuation or representation into a debate on the correct type of label, description or language to use.

Indeed, although these debates have proved to be politically divisive, the significance of political correctness – both positive and negative – has remained central to post-war debates regarding one’s individual autonomy and one’s location in an increasingly globalised economy set within a varying cultural milieux. Accordingly, while, for some, political correctness continues to maintain a political importance, through its aversion to social hierarchies, culturally, examples of political correctness have heralded a cultural eclecticism, whereby the intermingling of high and low culture has taken shape within a commercially orientated cultural apex where the relationship between culture and capital is now inseparable (Adorno, 2003). This has seen political arguments increasingly steered by one’s cultural location, with social mobility being orchestrated by an ability to increase one’s ‘cultural capital’.

This change has proven particularly significant following the emergence of the post-war welfare state and the subsequent broadening of social democracy in the UK and Western Europe. As evident in the fight for civil rights in the US, the 1960s were notable for delivering a number of critical movements tied to issues of postcolonialism, anti-war and nuclear disarmament, gay rights and ‘second-wave’ feminism, where, for many, the ‘personal’ was now political. This diffusion of politics dispelled political action across a variety of fronts; a process that was echoed in critical theory’s shift from Marxism’s economic reductionism towards the importance of culture as an ideological tool (McMillan, 2013). Notably, the move towards ‘culture’ would serve to decentre ‘class struggle’, with criticisms of Marxism pointing to its crude economic reductionism. In doing so, the significance of ‘class’ would give way to debates on one’s gender, sexuality and race/ethnicity, as well as the various ways in which these were (and are) discursively produced both on, and through, the subject (McHoul and Grace, 2015).

As a consequence, these ‘New Social Movements’ would result in a political picture that was largely ‘post-political’ (Habermas, 1981). That is, such movements were not just concerned with political change, but with a wider social and cultural redefinition of how one could achieve and discover their self-realisation through a shift in one’s cultural outlook and through a potential array of available lifestyles. In principle, such redefining would steer clear of any top-down centralisation. Instead, a ‘protest from below’ would be enacted by deconstructing privileged interpretations through forms of radical plurality (Derrida, 1997). Working ‘outside’ the ‘normal’ and emboldened by a new focus on affect and a decentred politics grounded in one’s cultural well-being (and not just one’s material well-being), these movements would increasingly be perceived as ‘postmodern’ (Agger, 1994; Flisfeder, 2019).

Sharing in the subversive zeitgeist, which had been established across Europe and the US in the 1960s (Eagleton, 2003), the emergence of postmodernism would provide ‘a reaction to modern narratives of history, including liberal and Enlightenment narratives of progress, and dialectical models of change and transformation, particularly Marxist historical materialism’ (Flisfeder, 2017: 149). Positioning itself in stark contrast to the ‘grand narratives’ which had sought to explain and even predict the decline of capitalism (Jameson, 1991; Lyotard, 1984), postmodernism would redirect attention to the importance of language as an act of power. Specifically, the act of naming would be conceived as a decree of power, with postmodern politics focusing on the significance of discourse in both shaping and understanding cultural and historical texts as well art, language and aesthetics. The emergence of a postmodern approach to culture and politics closely followed broader changes in critical theory and Western philosophy, most notably in what would become known as the ‘discursive/linguistic turn’. By directing attention to the ontological significance of language (McMillan, 2013), and through extending the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, academic disciplines such as philosophy, literary studies, Marxism and psychoanalysis would find themselves paying closer attention to the relationship between power and language via new forms of critical inquiry that reconsidered the human condition and the study of reality. In part, this focus on language placed greater emphasis on the indeterminacy of meaning and power, with various political movements seeking to assert their own interpretations and understandings of society (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Importantly, the ‘discursive turn’ provided a renewed focus on culture and its impact on politics and identity. By reconsidering the use of ‘labels’ in approaching issues of human rights and free speech, debates on feminism and multiculturalism sought to trace the discursive effects of power relations on the subject, subjectivity and ‘human nature’ (Chomsky and Foucault, 2006; Foucault, 2002).

Significantly, these debates would consider the position of the subject in relation to ideological discourses, which both constituted and ‘subjected’ the subject to established identity formations and social relations. Alongside commercial culture, greater emphasis would be placed on the individual – both as a source of contention and as an aesthetic form of artistic creation (Jameson, 1991). This focus on the individual, grounded in forms of self-reflexivity and self-conscious understanding, underscored postmodernism’s critique of meta-narratives and fuelled its subversion of traditional forms of authority, with greater attention now paid to the ambivalence which permeated conceptions of the ‘self’ and the subject. In short, the sense of ambivalence, uncertainty and ambiguity which characterised the postmodern condition would be reflected in examples of ‘postmodern humour’, whereupon self-reflective modes of cultural expression would be enacted in comical forms that would confer a wry commentary on popular culture as well as humorously critique the boundaries that inh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Political correctness and comedy
• 2. Subversive comedy
• 3. Comedy, race and racism
• 4. Comedy’s real subversion
• 5. The Office
• 6. Conclusion
• Index