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  • Response to Bill Martin and Andrew Cutrofello on Irony in the Age of Empire
  • Cynthia Willett

What a pleasure to have such subtle thinkers and scholars as Bill Martin and Andrew Cutrofello reflect on the relation of irony and comedy to politics and philosophy through their commentary on my new book. To set the tone, Martin begins with a koan, or a parody of one, “What if a tree told a joke in the woods and there was no one there to hear it?” He means, I believe, to sound a warning on the limits of irony in our serious, or perhaps, Martin would say, our seriously idiotic, times. By the end of his discussion, Martin wonders if perhaps a politics of irony might not lead to greater cynicism in our morally upside-down times and if those Wall Street rip-off artists merit something more than satire—they may deserve straightforward moral condemnation instead. I would say that the Wall Street crowd is one group to contend with on our political scene; the broad sweep of Walmart republicans who were duped into supporting the Wall Street agenda is another. But then, perhaps before I say more in direct response to Martin’s and Cutrofello’s particular remarks, I should say a bit about the background concerns of the book.

At the time I was writing the book, Rush Limbaugh maintained, as he had for many years, the highest-rated radio show in the United States, with more than 13.5 million listeners a week. The secret to his power over [End Page 96] audiences is pretty much the same as that of the stand-up comedian. It was Rush Limbaugh who compared the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal to the Skull and Bones initiation and who earlier popularized the term feminazi. But his audience was not just laughing; they were also voting based on little more than what they thought was funny. In fact, even the history of “swiftboating” (to use the term from the 2006 election) in presidential campaigns should remind us how unlikely it is to rely on argument to counter what Harry Frankfurter precisely and analytically defines as “Bullshit.” On the contrary, some of the most effective questioning of the hubris of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration emerged in the counterpunches of satirists. Al Franken’s satirical book Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations exposed the inaccuracies of the neoconservative program with the kind of force missing in more straightforward forms of discourse. The force is that of laughter and irony, and we philosophers know it from that first stand-up comedian, Socrates.

But if my book began in part from this interest in irony and humor along with other forms of comedy as a way to break down defenses and open the mind to deeper forms of reflections, a more systematic study led me to appreciate comedy as more than a rhetorical approach and as essential to what philosophy does. The irony in satire, for example, is not an idle source of pleasure; it is vital for free thought. Laughter can liberate us from various forms of cognitive and emotional bondage. And even more, my contention is that the deeper glimpse that we have of social freedom in the United States is not in our liberal theory but in the pragmatic visions of solidarity and equality that appear in, say, our romantic comedies.

Freedom in the United States is less a principle or law than a style of speech and a gesture. The comic appears as a lawless element in queer camp; in popular films, the comic levels social hierarchies, giving us what Bahktin terms the carnivalesque. The comic, more readily perhaps than straight moral discourse, can alter a perspective and tip back and forth the balance of power; witness Tina Fey’s satires of Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential elections and Palin’s mocking of President Obama during this year’s tea party convention. Human nature being what it is, a screwball or satiric perspective can easily trump a self-reflective or rational or Kantian one, and I think that it is important for how we...

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