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  • Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern "Truthiness" and Civic Engagement by James E. Caron
  • Brian P. O'sullivan (bio)
Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern "Truthiness" and Civic Engagement. By James E. Caron . University Park: Penn State University Press, 2021. 284 pp.

Is the world getting too ridiculous for satire? If the news of the day all seems ridiculous, do acts of ridicule lose their point? On the contrary, James Caron makes a powerful argument about why and how satire remains relevant in the postmodern world and even in contemporary American politics. In Caron's terms, satire's continued relevance is best understood when satire is conceived not as political discourse per se but as a comic counterpart to political discourse, the "comic public sphere." In other words, satire is a primarily aesthetic phenomenon but with a crucial political and social role to play in protecting [End Page 179] communicative rationality within public discourse. It's an argument that should be of interest to scholars in many fields, including political communications as well as literary studies. But in the course of developing this highly topical and interdisciplinary argument, Caron also develops terminological distinctions that could bring greater clarity to the book's home field of humor studies—or, as it perhaps should be called in light of Caron's definitions, the field of comic discourse studies.

In his introduction, Caron begins with an intriguing example—the case of a protester being arrested for laughing at Jeff Sessions's confirmation hearing for attorney general. Caron treats this event as a kind of quasi-official certification by the federal government of his book's thesis, which he states with admirable concision and clarity: "Satire functions as comic political speech and signifies the presence of the comic public sphere" (2). Critically, by "comic public sphere," Caron does not mean a subdivision of the set of rational discourses described by Habermas as the public sphere but instead "a parodic counterpart" to that classic public sphere. In drawing upon the ridiculous and the ludicrous, satire (especially postmodern satire) does not explicitly practice the distinctly rational discourse associated with the "public sphere," and postmodern satire questions the possibility of a universal and transcendently objective rational discourse. Nevertheless, the comic public sphere asserts the norms of the classic public sphere by exposing and assaulting the degradation of reasoned discourse into "alternative facts," conspiracy theories, and screeds. The comic public sphere reaches further back than the neoclassical public sphere, as Caron links satire to the ancient Greek concept of parrhesia, or "speaking truth no matter the consequences" (2). Caron's book goes on to explore how laughter and the comic may be particularly well suited to achieve parrhesia in a postmodern environment.

Caron lays firm foundations for this argument in the three chapters of part 1, "Satire and the Public Sphere." In Chapter 1, "Defining Satire," Caron locates satire in a "particular neighborhood" within "The Comic," with "The Comic" understood as "a general discourse of and about the domain of the laughable" (20), including both the ridiculous (which invites us to laugh at the objects of the discourse) and the ludicrous (which invites us to laugh with the objects of the discourse) (21). By playing with social codes, this discourse has "the potential for … critique (and possibly subversion)" (22). Satire's "particular neighborhood" encompasses "those comic artifacts that actualize the potential and distill it within a laughter-provoking presentation" (22). [End Page 180] More specifically, satire is a comic discourse structured by two paradoxes—it is both serious and nonserious and is both a transgressive act of verbal violence and an act that may encourage peaceful social change. The latter is particularly evident in the recent phenomenon of "truthiness satire," mock news that criticizes fake news (23). Truthiness satire can work as "a reverse discourse, rescripting anti-public sphere discourse into comic public sphere discourse" (23).

The definitions in chapter 1 are predicated on the continued relevance of Habermasian discourse theory in this postmodern era, for which Caron makes the case in Chapter 2, "The Comic Public Sphere." Caron sees the Enlightenment values of the Habermasian public sphere as not wholly antithetical to postmodernism...

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