Political Humor, Deference, and the American Revolution
Rent from DeepDyveBeing laughed at is a humbling experience. When you're the butt of a joke, the people laughing at you briefly become members of a group that leaves you out. For the moment, as Hobbes and Freud have both reminded us, they bond in the sheer enjoyment of your discomfort.1 Your standing is undermined and the deference they have paid you temporarily disappears. In the words of one critic, ridicule shows "the sheer absurdity of taking [someone] seriously at all."2 The targets feel "the scourge of disgrace";3 they are "intentionally humiliated."4 Kept up over time, ridicule can isolate its objects; it leaves them with no standing at all.
Political humor, even the rather formal, printed humor that will be discussed in this essay, works the same way. Repeated thrusts of humor undermine the reputation of government officials and their political followers and ultimately weaken the deference paid to them in several ways. Humor can [End Page 363] suggest ways in which its targets may claim to share the values of a group but really do not; they are frauds and imposters. Ridicule bonds the group of laughers not only with a sense of distinct values but also with one of superiority. Moreover, since there is virtually no legal redress against it, the object of the laughter is shown to be virtually defenseless.5
We see the effects of political humor episodically throughout the first sixty-five years of the eighteenth century in the colonies when, as a critic commented, one of the principal uses of humor was "to see authority figures deflated."6 However, this was a period largely of peace when political figures could be weakened without threatening the stability of political institutions. Indeed, the humorists could undermine the deference paid to imperial officials while claiming absolute loyalty to the empire itself. Would humor have a similar effect in a period of revolutionary agitation when the institutions of government were themselves under threat?
Like much ridicule, political humor makes the people targeted look silly by taking their words or actions out of context and then transposing them to a fictitious situation in which they make no sense at all. In satire (the "attack form" of humor; its aggressive cousin) the transposition leaves the impression that the targets did not intend to make real sense in the first place; they must therefore be fraudulent, claiming to be something they are not. As a contemporary described it:
Satire, like a true mirrour to the fair
Shews not what we affect, but what we are
Plucks from the splendid courtier all disguise
And sets the real man before our eyes.7
In the case of colonial governors before 1765, satirists implied that while they claimed to share values with the colonists, they did not really have the [End Page 364] good will they asserted, and while they claimed to be deserving occupants of an exalted station, their behavior indicated they were not fit. The humorist's job was to make the colonists laugh at officials who boasted good breeding and showed very little, who claimed to empathize with colonial interests when they had no sympathy at all, and who claimed to be one of them at heart when they were outsiders.8
Click for larger view | Figure 1 "A Political, Anatomical, Satirical, Lecture on Heads and No Heads; As Exhibited at St. J________ms's 1766." This satirical 1766 British cartoon shows the Earl of Bute holding a bust of William Pitt. Courtesy of the British Cartoon Collection, Library of Congress. |
They did this by parodying the officials' self-serving political speeches and pompous proclamations, by embellishing political gossip through fables, silly poems, mock ads, fake news items, and ridiculous stories about governors whose characters were easy to spot. Governors Nicholson, Spotswood, and Dinwiddie suffered at the hands of humorists in Virginia; Shute, Belcher, and Shirley were undermined...
