No Billionaire Left Behind: Satirical Activism in America by Angelique Hagerud, and: Pranksters: Making Mischief in the Modern World by Kembrew McLeod (review)

In an era when ironic memes, funny chants, and visual gags are prevalent in our political culture, Angelique Hagerud’s No Billionaire Left Behind and Kembrew McLeod’s Pranksters take seriously the increasingly humorous nature of social protest and activism. Although each book is significant in its own right, their overlap is hard to deny. Satirical activism, in many ways, is all about pranking. It involves using humor to shatter expectations and capitalize on cognitive dissonance to change media discourses and reframe political debates. And pranking, insofar as it is beneficial to public culture, is all about activism. Good pranks move audiences to new perspectives on old situations; good pranks prepare the way for change. For these reasons, Hagerud and McLeod are very much in dialogue with one another, albeit indirectly. Their approaches are different in terms of research subject, theory, and methodology, but their shared concern for the role of humorous discourse in public culture binds them together in an important and timely conversation for contemporary humor studies.

No Billionaire Left Behind offers its reader an in-depth, ethnographic perspective on one of contemporary culture’s more interesting protest groups. The Billionaires (for Forbes, for Bush, for Gore, etc.) engage in a unique brand of satirical activism that parodies and pokes fun at traditional forms of political and social protest while simultaneously engaging in a very serious intervention regarding the role of money in American politics, income inequality, and the ever-widening wealth gap.

An associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, Angelique Hagerud spent eight years observing, interviewing, and researching the Billionaires. Attending meetings as “Ivana Itall,” Hagerud and her research team collected data on the organization from the inside out. The interviews with prominent Billionaires including cofounder Andrew Boyd, as well as with passersby at actual Billionaire events and activists from traditional protest organizations who often perform their politics alongside the tuxedo-and evening-gown-clad pranksters, offer a unique perspective on both the machinations of contemporary protest groups and the rhetorical potential of satirical activism.

After moving through her brief introduction and description of the economic unrest plaguing the American public, Hagerud offers a unique theoretical synthesis of humor studies, democratic theory, and economics. Her analysis begins with an historical take on the Billionaires before they were Billionaires and the other satirical groups that prepared the way for their emergence. In the remaining chapters, she addresses the construction and maintenance of the Billionaire brand, the efficacy of the group’s irony, and their particular approach to using the media to their advantage. In her conclusion, Hagerud appeals to the politics of play and argues that in times of structural precariousness satire offers a hopeful alternative to traditional modes of social protest.

In her analysis of the Billionaires’ satirical activism, Hagerud identifies several commitments that are responsible for the group’s continued success. The most significant among them is the group’s hyper-focus on issues of wealth and income inequality. Again and again in the interviews and analysis, Hagerud returns to the notion that the Billionaires, regardless of who or what they are “for” in any given moment, are always Billionaires. The consistency of their caricature, in this way, provides the reference point to understand their satirical protests. What is more, by maintaining message consistency the Billionaires have been able to step out of character and move beyond satire when appropriate in order to offer commentary connecting their pranks back to the rift between the ultra-wealthy and the ordinary citizen.

This commitment to a single issue also relates to the importance of the visual in contemporary protest. The Billionaire brand name has been carefully constructed and maintained in ways that those of other contemporary protest groups—Occupy Wall Street, for instance—have not...