Alfie Bown, "Post-Comedy" (Polity, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Pierre de Renssel. Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At the best, ribbing, roasting and insults were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge. Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humor and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people.

Our comedy is fraught with tensions like never before, and so too is our social life. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore. What if this is really true? This is the conceit of post-comedy, a new book by Arthur Bowne, who argues that the spirit of comedy is the first step in the building of society, but that the step has been lost in the era of divisive identity politics.

Comedy flers up debate about censorship and cancellation. This goes against the true universal spirit of comedy, which is becoming a thing in the past and must be recovered. Arthur Bone is a senior lecturer in digital media at King's College in London. His research focuses on psychoanalysis, digital media and popular culture. He has also worked as a journalist, writing for The Guardian, Paris Review, New Statesman, Tribune, etc.

His books include the PlayStation Dream World, Post Memes and Dream Lovers, the gamification of relationships. He is the founder of Everyday Analysis, which publishes pamphlets and essay collections on contemporary social and political issues. This conversation was recorded in late January 2025, following a live event to which we refer. Arthi, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. Good to be here.

Good to be here virtually instead of with you in the lovely gallery that you run. Super. Well, it's 10.15 in the morning, so I'm not entirely sure how funny we're going to be. But I did sort of prepare a joke at your expense to coax you introducing yourself. And the joke, which now is not at all funny, having known you for a couple of years, I can't quite decide whether I think you're a funny man or a jovial man.

Can you pick a side by which, I mean, would you mind introducing yourself to the listener in a kind of intellectual way? What has led you in your academic and research interests to thinking about comedy? Yeah, no, sure. I'd like to know what the difference between funny and jovial is in your mind. But I mean, jovial makes me think of those sort of

fat men in dickens novels that assess sort of a yeah sat at the dinner table coughing the drinks and smiling i didn't quite mean that yes so yeah i'm alfie so i'm a professor or a senior lecturer at king's college um in london here um and that's that's a new job yeah i'm in um media

department, media philosophy of media, basically. So although this book's about comedy, I'm very interested in the sort of relationship with memes and digital culture and online humor and trolling, as we've talked about before. And yeah, I did my PhD on the history of comedy. Some

10 plus years ago and that was a very you know academic study of all the different theories and philosophies of of comedy and laughter from aristotle through to freud through to the present day and so i studied that like long history of comedy and then i didn't didn't write about this for a long time um and um having like really seen what i think is a big shift um in comedy in culture over the last

short time, five years, I thought I should go back to this topic, which I know the history of, and try and understand what's happening with comedy today. So that's a brief story of my book. Well, maybe it would be good to go back to your PhD. Maybe not with the length of the PhD, but I'm interested to hear a lay of the land before the cultural shift. So what would you say the kind of

theoretical or psychoanalytic primarily because this is this is how your book is situated what kind of theoretically interesting things would we have thought about comedy 10 years ago that will be worth exploring and the changing nature yeah there's sort of two two answers to that really the first is to say that when you look at the history of people talking about comedy and one of the things you you notice straight away is that people like to do a sort of type theory

or separating out comedy and laughter, let's say, into types. And this is a really prominent example

almost every theorist of laughter kind of does this and I think this has to do with like how comedy and jokes can be quite troubling so we like them if we be really basic about it we like jokes and we love laughing with friends and colleagues and making jokes and being part of jokes but we also recognize they can be cruel and potentially influential I wouldn't say myself dangerous but lots of people think comedy can be dangerous and so because of this kind of

natural way in which we we are sort of fearful i don't everyone of course can can recognize being laughed at and and the sort of um the the feelings that that produces so we have this kind of double recognition of laughter as being like something positive and joyful you know you live laugh love and all this fridge magnet you might see um you know ideas of children laughing being innocent and so on and then we also have this kind of cruel cruel aspect of laughter this kind of um

this kind of potentially dangerous aspect of laughter. And so what that had led to was a trend, but more than a trend, a complete dominance of talking of laughter and comedy as if there were different types of it.

So we'd have this type, which was this innocent, joyful, whatever. And then this type, which was cruel to do with superiority, nasty, whatever. And all different theorists come up with different words for these different types. So that's one thing. But they always do the typing. Whereas, you know, we'll talk about this perhaps a bit later. My theory is that this is not a good way of doing it. I don't think there are types of laughter, good laughter and bad laughter. Right.

So that's the first point. And then the second point is, if there is anything that unites our theories of laughter from the past, from the last 2000 years,

um, I would say it's that laughter is associated with some kind of relief. Yeah. Um, and even when you're laughing at someone, uh, it can still be thought of in this way, like some sort of celebration of my subjectivity over there is at least I'm not being laughed at kind of things. Or when we laugh together, it feels, you know, it's to do with breathing out. It feels like a relief. And this is, as you mentioned, psychoanalysis, this is, um,

What Freud adds to the discussion is that, but it's also, it's not only Freud. He actually takes it from 18th century writers like Earl of Shaftesbury and people before, even if you go to Aristotle and the history of philosophy, there's this idea of laughter as being laughter.

an experience of relief. Now, the first day when I decided to go and write this book was the Oscar ceremony where there was the slap between Will Smith and Chris Rock, which you used as the poster for the in-person event you were kind enough to host.

And that was the moment where I thought something has changed here. And I should mention my friend Jela Krejcic because she initially gave me this idea when she was talking about

the new TV shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Sex and the City, which were remade over the last few years. And she pointed out in the Oscars moment shows that comedy has stopped being, in some senses, a question of relief and has become a source of tension. So my basic question for the book was, how has it happened that

I'm being a bit oversimplifying here, but just say there's any truth in this. For 2,000 years, comedy was an experience of relief, and over the last five years, it's become a source of tension. Now, that is not completely true, but it's a sort of provocative way of thinking about some kind of change, and that's what I wanted to start.

start exploring anyway. Yeah, I think, look, this is very interesting. I think I agree with you, kind of curbing the ambition of the book. I think it would be very difficult to understand the last five or ten years of cultural shifts through comedy in and of itself. But I'm going to read you a tweet from Shridhar Ramesh, who's just a sort of shit poster on Twitter, who reacted precisely to the event that prompted you to write the book, the Oscars punch-up.

and he's trying to be funny, and I'm not going to be able to give this tweet justice, but it turns out it was all staged. I've reversed Google image searched him, and the guy who punched Chris Rock is a professional actor. The reason I think this is not funny but interesting is that it nods to, quite presciently, the culture war staging of comedy as staging. So you start the book

Moving swiftly on, you start the book with...

with a jokey chapter title, A Reactionary and the Liberal Walk into a Bar, in which you compare styles of comedy from two comedians. One of them is James Eyekaster, an English comedian, kind of quite woke, quite social justice oriented, and Ricky Gervais, on the other hand. Ricky Gervais, who's sort of edgy and in the last couple of years has come out in the direction of being sort of anti-woke.

And even with those two quite simple examples, you sort of have this idea of pretty much the same thing happening, but yet them being staged in very oppositional ways. So I wonder if you could discuss this. I don't know whether my understanding of staging is correct or not, but I enjoy the fact that you post wokeness and anti-wokeness in comedy, it's two sides, or even in one side of a coin.

Yeah, exactly. No, no, that's very helpful. And I think it is useful to think about it as a question, the difference, because for me, the difference is to be found in the staging rather than in the comedy or laughter, shall we say. And I'll just explain. Yeah. So I do think that, you know, comedy, you mentioned there, James Acaster and Ricky Gervais, you know, I should say, personally, I find Ricky Gervais a lot funnier than James Acaster.

uh who i don't don't think at all but they were the two leading uh they were the two most watched um stand-up shows on netflix the year i um did the book um which i think was probably that's

That's two years ago now. So I found that interesting. And these positions, because when you start talking about comedy just in the pub with friends, it tends to be this. It falls into either the kind of like John Cleese style free speech brigade approach, you know, or it's all, you know, you shouldn't laugh at that. You know, humor should be progressive, which is essentially, you know, a cast as well.

But yeah, and it's interesting. Some comedians you've seen on apparently different sides of the spectrum here. Others seem to have moved over the last few years from one to the other. My favorite example of that is the Australian comedian Jim Jefferies, who I used to enjoy. And he's really migrated towards this sort of didactic humor of the progressive communities. All the jokes are about how stupid Trump supporters are or whatever, which I find extremely interesting.

wrong and unhelpful anyway, but he used to be kind of edgy and much more, he would have been mentioned in the same breath as people like Gervais and Dave Chappelle, but now he's gone to the other side. So you do see this thing. And I think in my book, I tried to use a couple of jokes as well to show, which I could retell very quickly. I think we probably have to, otherwise there'll be letters if this is too dark.

Just to sort of show how, because as you pointed out, my point here is that these are not as, these two sides are not as distinct as they seem or structurally they're often comparable rather than opposites. So, you know, one joke that, so I got two jokes about Donald Trump. They both come from the first or even maybe second Trump election, not this most recent one. But one was a joke told on the very much, you'd say, on the progressive side. It's a very simple joke and it basically goes like this.

So Donald Trump is giving a speech and he says that he's got his aide next to him helping him with what to say. And he says to the audience, the more immigrants we let in, the better. And the aide notices the mistake and he sort of whispers, the fewer. And Donald Trump says, I told you not to call me that yet. Right. So it's not particularly funny. And it turns on this newscast.

difference between the phrase the fewer and the fewer and Donald Trump saying don't call me a you know I'm going to be a the implication is Trump is a fascist and so on and uh we're supposed to find this funny because we agree with it as potentially progressives listening to the joke I doubt that Trump's supporters find this joke funny uh and and this is typical I would say of

The kind of humor found in James Acaster, where it's like jokes about anti-trans people, anti-trans positions and things like that, where we are encouraged to laugh or Jim Jefferies jokes about Trump supporters. We're encouraged to laugh because we agree with it.

rather than because we find it funny. And I think that, you know, we could say that there's a kind of Dunning-Kruger effect happening with laughter where our beliefs get affirmed and reinforced through these jokes, which is one side of it. On the other hand, I'll tell the other joke now, which I think is a much funnier joke.

This is a joke told more on the Republican side of the American online community. It's also a Donald Trump joke from the same kind of time. This joke goes like this. There's a guy in a zoo and he's wearing a MAGA hat. He's a Trump supporter. A kid wanders off into the lion's enclosure.

and the lion is obviously threatening to eat this child. And the guy with the MAGA hat, he jumps into the lion's enclosure and punches the lion in the face and throws the kid out across back into safety, climbs back over. Everyone's saying,

oh well done you saved the day and so on just so happens there's a local journalist there as well uh who who says to the guy right can we have a little interview whatever on a hero uh etc so fine he gives his interview whatever and uh he gets up the next morning and goes to read the local paper thinking it's my 15 minutes of fame i'm going to read the back the pages about what a heroic deed i managed to do in the in the zoo and he reads the headline

Trump supporting fascist punches African immigrant in the face and steals his lunch.

This one's mildly funnier. Maybe your heart was more in it in this one. Yeah, well, the thing is I've often said that, told those jokes and prefaced it by saying, oh, I prefer this one. But other people disagree, and it does tend to be the politics of the person which dictates whether they prefer one or the other. So this is interesting. Okay, so again, this is for...

not necessarily pro-Trump, but for anti-liberal media types to laugh at because it's a joke about how the liberal media spins everything as this, you know, pretending it's fascist and so on and how silly the liberal American press is.

So again, they seem like, and if you go back to your concept of staging, these two jokes, like the difference between Acosta and Gervais, the staging is totally different. They appear to be one and the other, left and right, whatever you might call it. But structurally, they both function in much the same way, which is, I think, this, a kind of laughter which is more dominant today than ever before, which might not even be real laughter or true laughter today.

is certainly not the laughter of abandonment or the laughter of Georges Bataille, for example, of headlessness and carnival, if you think about the ideas of Bakhtin, or relief, if you think about Freud. All these theories of laughter were looking for something else. But what we're looking at today, both the left and the right, or both the woke and the anti-woke approaches to comedy and laughter, is often this didactic approach.

kind of laughing at what we agree with type of thing. So this is part of what I was trying to suggest is kind of happening. Yeah. So I think the next thing that comes up is to do with the form of the joke, which is maybe a way to think about how the politics is kind of prefigured in any telling of any joke.

I'm going to try to, from memory, recite one of the jokes that you cite in the book, which is to do with the sinking of the Titanic. A couple of Jews are discussing the sinking of the Titanic, which is just figured in the newspaper. And he says, ah, iceberg. Oh, God, no, see, I've completely messed it up. You tell it. I think I've completely forgotten how it goes. Okay, yeah, I think it's this couple of anti-Semites in a bar and they're

uh one said to the other bloody hell have you read about the titanic um it's sunk you know oh the the bloody jews they've they've sunk that as well they ruin everything and the other one says look i don't think that was the jews it was it was an iceberg and the other one replies iceberg goldberg steinberg what's the difference right um

The only reason I wanted you to bring this up is because it's a joke that is based on a stereotype and is, in an unambiguous way, a racist joke. The way you told it, at least, I wasn't going to say that it's an exchange between two antisemites. Actually, in my brain, this was a conversation between two Jews who were lampooning themselves.

And what's interesting in thinking about a joke like this in two different ways, that you can wonder whether it's a racist or an anti-racist joke.

So you refer to Todd McGowan, for instance, who says this kind of a joke is an anti-racist joke because it highlights that it's the form that produces the racism rather than the content, because the content is absurd. I'm slightly lost how we can continue with this kind of analysis in our very Manichean times, in which things are either good or bad.

even though we're recording this conversation four days into Trump's second presidency. So God knows how culture is going to ferv from now on. But as of a couple of weeks ago, it was still...

We still kind of were encouraged to take positions. You know, is this a despicable racist joke or is there some kind of a space for distinction between form and content? How do you see this evolution? Work management platforms. Ugh. Endless onboarding. IT bottlenecks. Admin requests. But what if things were different?

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Yeah, this I think is the heart of the problem and the most complicated part of the sort of theorizing of laughter. And you're right, of course, that I deliberately wanted to include some jokes that could be accused of being, let's say, racist or I included the joke about, which was told to me by my transgender friend, which is a joke, which is an anti-trans.

trans joke i would say and i in particular wanted to include these and of course it does lead to like awkward conversations and people saying should you be um saying doing that uh often as you can imagine in our sort of quite identitarian culture those jewish jokes for example like the one we just told should only jewish people be telling those things uh you know should only trans people be telling jokes that are critical of trans people and so on and you know obviously i

Obviously, I don't want to get myself in too much trouble. But at the same time, I feel like... No, I mean, I didn't. I had a sense of trepidation about doing this kind of thing. But on the other hand, I feel like philosophically, it's important to, if you want to understand comedy and humour, I think you've got to approach this question of...

power and ideology and the power of humor and laughter. And it goes back to my first point when we started talking and I was saying that through the history of comedy, there's a dominance of typing laughter. And you just said it in your question, we're encouraged to take a position. Is this a horrendous anti-racist or a positive anti-racist critique of the form of racism? Or is it in fact racism itself, which we should avoid?

And I think that the problem with humor is it can only really happen, true comedy, true humor, can only really happen when it's both of those things. And I remember at the lovely event you hosted, I mentioned my uncle Mark telling me,

about Chinese people at Christmas dinner and stuff. And this is also interesting because it can be to him, he genuinely might, I mean, I don't know, perhaps Mark's thinking's progressed, but he genuinely might feel

feel that the British are superior to the Chinese. But the joke might, in another context, highlight the form of the silliness of British racism or whatever. So you can't really say what the joke does. It can certainly play one purpose in one place and another purpose in another.

um so obviously that that's that's all by the by um but important to say i think but my my theory of humor is is this that actual laughter actual comedy when it happens um it's ideology happening yeah and it's precisely by being ideology happening that it can show that process to us so um in other words what

what's the difference between a racist statement and a racist joke? A racist statement, it sort of claims to refer to a reality that's outside of itself. For example, if I say English people are better than French people, I'm just saying that. If I make a joke about French people, which celebrates the superiority of English people over them, I do a bit more than...

simply statement. I also reveal the form of the statement and the production of identities and ideologies and it sort of calls attention to form.

and to the production of reality and to a change in our understandings of reality. And now, again, with the question of stereotypes that you brought up with that joke, we can't answer the question, what came first, English people and French people or jokes about them, or Jewish identity, for example, which we spoke about there. Jewish humor is inseparable from Jewish identity in many cases and the history of Jewish identity.

So, you know, humor is not just a reflection of what already exists. It's also a part of forming identities, of forming dynamics, of forming friendships, of forming enemies, you know, all these things. And so I think that this is where it gets really interesting to me, that what is happening when we laugh, it's a sort of a change, a shift.

And it's also revealing that change and shift. So I just want to jump really to my main point so that hopefully, so that maybe some people sort of, I don't know, agree or disagree, but this is why I think you can't have left comedy and right comedy. Yeah.

Is it comedy just is? The comedy doesn't care whether it's left or right. The comedy is the thing itself. It's change. We might say that. Comedy is just ideology happening. It's a change taking place. True laughter is a change taking place. That could be a change towards fascism, towards progressivism, towards sexism, towards multiculturalism. But that happens at the staging part of it.

But the actual core of humour, of laughter, is just change itself. And it couldn't care less whether you support Biden, Harris or...

Trump, Nigel Farage, you know, it's just the thing itself. If that makes some sense. I think we're going to have to examine this because as you noted, the last five years, I would say a little bit longer than that, have shown us that there is a lot of investment in producing a left humour and a right humour and drawing very sharp opposition between them. And

You have some very good examples in the book which I want us to get to in a moment, but let's dwell for a second longer about the idea of ideology production being revealed by humour. When the kind of examples of 'comedy goes too far', you know, 'despicable joke', as you called them, we have heard over the last 10 years that humour, or in fact speech, can cause real material harm. And you have a kind of interesting approach to

explaining why certain groups say in the reaction to the Dave Chappelle Netflix special in which we see lots of trans protesters saying these things must never be said because they cause real harm. You have this idea that

That particular group was claiming protection from humour because they wanted to perform opting out of capitalism. That's your kind of category. But they joined into an ideology of exception where, look, if we cannot be laughed at, we are exempt from whatever it is that the joke is trying to do. We will never have to

face the potential truth. I mean, following this, I think it's sort of a reaction which we observe in many aspects of a culture today, where people don't want to be, or groups, identities, want to make themselves completely separate from the bleeding obvious, from the fact that politics is not going to, capital is not going to accommodate that.

But the thing that's in a way that's sort of similar to the question of whether a stereotype is true or whether it's a fabrication, there was no escape from reality. And I think this is where the joke that goes too far becomes interesting. Does Dave Chappelle talking about Beyond Pussy, does shutting him up allow anyone to

escape from reality? Or is there an epistemic dimension to humour that we could discuss? Yeah, yeah. Well, the thing I find so interesting about this, and I think it is connected to

Well, okay. I might prefer to refer to it as capitalism, but you might say, I don't know, other people might call it a liberal culture or something. But I think this question goes back to the role of... And this is something else I really sort of, yeah, happy you brought up because I think it's an important part of this. I think that because of this power that...

laughter has to do things like produce ideology, but also produce, well, produce reality, really. I think it's a critical part of a society developing and learning to live together and with each other.

So one thing I really didn't like was the policing of laughter and jokes in the context of classrooms and school playgrounds. I find this an interesting sort of contemporary trend that is a concerning thing. And, you know, for instance, there was the kid who was expelled for...

I think he just said Andrew Tate. I think he just kept saying... I think he was like... You know how students do a cough and say... And then like... Ticket or something like that. I think he was doing this kind of in-class trolling. And it was something to do with Andrew Tate or whatever. The kid eventually was expelled because it was deemed that this was a sort of adjacent to dangerous right-wing YouTube masculine ideology, whatever Andrew Tate represents. Or supposedly represents...

But this, I think, is a real tragedy. I mean, not just to the personal kid that, you know, and being expelled, you know, this is a big deal. But also, and my daughter had a similar experience, I can't remember if I ended up writing about it or not, where the teacher had said, oh, I need a word with you or something. And I think she'd said, um...

She was only about four years old, she could barely do sentences. And she had said something like she was going to get an ax and chop her head off or something. I couldn't help finding this sort of funny, but the school were very concerned. But these are just tiny examples of what has been well reported, which is a sort of concern about trolling in general. It's visible in discussions online. I've been accused of trolling myself for what I thought was just a bit of harmless ribbing and fun.

And also in person, in classrooms and so on. And I think that because of how powerful laughter is, it's part of our social testing, our learning as young people, growing into adults, working out what a community is.

being laughed at, being the butt of the joke, making other things the butt of the joke. This is like normal social life and society developing, learning what rules are, what transgression is, what boundaries are. And it's extremely healthy and necessary to both do those things

and go too far often and be corrected or whatever. And this is how a society grows and learns to live together. I think humour does play, in my opinion anyway, a unique role in the formation of societies. That lines up with my sort of theory about its ideological power as well. And I think what we're...

What we're then seeing is, to go to your point, is what we're seeing two things. One is we're failing to be a society more and more, I would say. And this is reflected in, this is like, let's say, there's a high positive correlation between our policing of and our lack of humour and our inability to live together as a well-functioning, coherent society. I think that would be my

claim um and also as you pointed out the idea of groups the the state of exception uh the idea of say for example a certain group of people opting out um it would be like you know not being joked about you can't joke about this this this group that group whatever not being included

in the society of humor would amount to claiming exception and therefore not participating in society itself. And I think now we have a lot of that going on when actually, yeah, it's the universal-- and this would be my sort of more hopeful claim, I suppose, that humor is universal and doesn't matter whether you're gay, straight, black, white, male, female, what gender you are, whatever.

If you're a human, you can and do, you have the ability to joke and be joked about. It sort of is this universal thing. And I think it has to be that in order to sort of function healthfully. Whereas it seems, as we've said throughout, it seems lots of

whether it's people or forces or whatever, are intent to make it divisive, to make comedy divisive, as you see with the tension at the Oscars, which has to do with potential sexism or whatever it was to do with castration of Will Smith. Humour, I think, does resist this. I think our culture is doing its best to turn humour into didactic, divisive,

identity affirming, you know, state of exception, capitalism, whatever one might call it, but that humour actually does have a universal power that sort of fights back against that. You know, you can't eradicate humour from this

playground. You just can't. Hopefully, I think there's a universalism there that can still prevail. Okay, so let's take it into something that you don't discuss in the book, because you talk about comedy as - I think you even use the word 'material' as a material basis for society formation. You described in very optimistic, but not unconvincing terms, how your four-year-old daughter's trolling attempt is part of a normal upbringing. This is how people become socialised, through these kinds of interactions.

you say things to elicit laughter. But I have a very different kind of feeling. As much as I bemoan the collapse of humour in the political, and I would quite happily admit as an art critic that actually we've seen the mechanisms that you describe affecting all sorts of other cultural forms. So the visual arts and film have been sort of over the last 10 years or so captured by exactly this kind of

desire for didacticism that is sort of anti-universal. But the challenge I want to pose to you is that actually what we should be concerned with is the loss of a tragic culture rather than a comic culture.

And I don't quite have a kind of historical theory of it, but if I wanted to think about how a civilization is built, how a society is built, the thing that my classical European education brings me is the tragic. It's the fact that societies have historically faced adversity, drought, the wrath of gods, wars. It's a tragic culture that we've lost.

What would you say to that? Acknowledging that this is not the book at all. No, no, but you mentioned this before and I did try to think about it. But can you say, maybe not historically, but just in theoretical terms, what do you mean by tragic? What is tragedy? What is it? What is a tragic childhood? I'll give you one word which will put you on the track. It's the lack.

It's that our culture fundamentally is missing a way to reconcile yourself with the fact that we are not getting what we want. The state of exception, of course, is like, "Look, I'm opting out of capitalism." In your words, "I'm opting out of society. I can't be critiqued." We have one example after another of complete social inability to deal with the fact that we're not getting what we want.

Sure. No, I feel like comedy and tragedy in this sense, if you're taking it in that way, they are the same thing. I mean, there are two ways of orienting. Comedy and tragedy, you could say they're two forms of orienting oneself around lack and dealing with it. I mean, my argument really, as you say, I don't mention tragedy, but when I say the universalism of comedy, I think this has to do with failure. What is comedy ultimately? It's always about failure. And this is why I would say that

the didactic humor of let's just say James Acaster since he seems to be the sort of enemy today uh it it isn't about that it's actually about self-affirmation it's about uh saying laughing and saying we've got the right position is the failure is in the other um whereas I think comedy is only really comedy when it recognizes the failure of the subject you know and that's that's

That's what comedy is also about, whether it's falling over a banana or whether it's a very complicated, you know, highbrow joke or a cartoon in private eye. You know, deep down what is comedy about? It's about failure and recognising our collective universal failure, which points to the lack at the kind of core of subjectivity. And, yeah, as you say, I tend to follow the psychoanalytic ideas of Jacques Lacan, and it's precisely because I believe that

in contemporary capitalist society and in particular as I suppose you've been touching on this particular brand of cultural wars to an extent it fails to acknowledge this aspect of living as a subject so we are

are pursuing the fulfillment of the idea of a non-lacking, pure, successful subject precisely when, and this allows us to be very, you know, in my opinion, that this only leads to division and culture wars and this placing of the failure in the other. And that could be

you could talk to almost, yeah, look if you just go to any Guardian article, it's basically structured like this, right? So we've got a lack at the core of our society, our identities, and what tends to happen is we locate this lack somewhere else other than ourselves.

That is, you know, in psychonautic terms, quite a psychotic thing to do. Whereas in actual fact, the healthy neurotic thing to do would be to locate the lack within ourselves, to see ourselves as failed subjects and necessarily failed subjects. So, you know, I think that's what comedy, when it actually works, does. And it sounds like you're sort of saying that that's what tragedy does. So there probably is an distinction to be made, but in this case, it's maybe more the fact that they both

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We've been talking in these beautiful universal terms: all laughter is good, comedy and tragedy are great ways of facing the lack. But let's try to play with the requirements of our recent culture and ask whether indeed it is possible for a joke to go too far. I don't want to go into "silence is violence, speech is harm" kind of territory.

But we have seen the emergence of quite serious organized trolling. If, say, the anti-Semitic joke emerges as a way of decompressing after the Holocaust, not having experienced the Holocaust very recently - and we certainly don't have Palestinian jokes in circulation at the moment -

We do, however, see kind of organized, semi-humorous campaigns that come from serious trolling. There is 4chan, there's Kiwi Farms, communities that kind of go and organize sort of sarcastic, ironic pylons on Twitter.

on quite often individual subjects do happen. Is there a separate category? I mean, do we think about them in exactly the same ways or has some kind of breach happened culturally in the last decade? Yeah, it's a tricky one. I mean, when we talk about trolling, I really want to talk about the question of the milk, which I'll hopefully come to. But anyway, in direct answer to your question here, I think what's interesting here is that

To answer that question, I think we'd need a theory of the digital subjects because, you know, we were just talking in a different context about questions of tragedy and comedy and lack and failure. And I think that one of the critical things, this is something I haven't written about, but I think Helen has, Helen Rollins, which is that

The particular quality of social media is to do with what we identified before of a sort of repression of the lack at the core of subjectivity. So, you know, the subject, the digital subject is not lacking in the way that the human subject is. And that produces all kinds of anxiety and relationship to our objects and stuff like that. So, yes, when we see a really nasty trolling phenomenon,

let's say, if we see that as directed towards a human and we think about it from the perspective of that human

equally as that human being equally as flawed and, and, and, and riven with contradictions and failures as ourselves, then of course it is cruel. And there are cases where those have had tragic effects or whatever. But if we see that trolling happens in the digital space, precisely at targets, which are perceived not to be human subjects, it's, it's,

of what we believe to be complete subjects who aren't lacking, then I think it paints a sort of a different picture of it. It makes it more, I wouldn't say...

I would empathize or sympathize with it, but I would totally understand the idea of trolling and attacking a digital subject because, well, it's a sort of rebellion against this form of identity and subjectivity that is promoted in the digital sphere. And I think a lot of people feel that way about it, don't they? So-called keyboard warriors. They would, I'd like to think most people would be quite affronted or disappointed if they found out they'd had any real life effect. And this is the

the thing with firing off things from your keyboard. You don't perceive your target as an other, as a subject like you, whereas you do in the playground when you see them in person. And I think, so this is the sort of core of the issue here. It's not so much is trolling bad, good, should we stop? It's more just to see it as a symptom of a change in our interactions with each other that's sort of encouraged and facilitated by a particular kind of subjectivity that is promoted today.

digitally, which is at odds with, I think, a universalist and also ontologically factual existence of the failed human subjects that we all are. Yeah, that's interesting. The first thing you said about the kind of necessity of the theory of the digital subject is quite poignant here, because I would possibly speculate that the formation of the online troll, particularly the troll that organizes themselves into factions, like, you know, the

the milk drinkers, or Kiwi Farms, or 4chan, autistic activists. I would question whether we wouldn't need to develop a different approach, whether it's not just the recipient of the trolling that's being misperceived, but whether the troll themselves is separated from...

a complete lacking person dehumanizes the other. It's like two slightly non-human entities interacting. It's almost like it's not me doing it. And people do have anonymous or fake accounts. But even psychologically, it's almost like it's not you doing it, but another you that's the online one. But that comment you just made, it makes me, yeah, it's a good way for me to talk about this topic.

this milk thing, which I do think is a funny and also interesting way of talking about humor in culture and comes to exactly this point. So one of the things I did in the book was this analysis of three milky things.

Three milky moments. You should have scripted some jokes for this conversation, Alfie, by now. It's not the first time you've spoken about the book. I was expecting better delivery, better rehearsal delivery. Go for it. No, yeah. So I've got these three milky moments, which map onto, I'm half playfully saying, the psychoanalytic Lacanian categories of

pervert psychotic and neurotic and again to totally oversimplify things you know i'd say i mean this is this is quite vulgarization but i'd say that the best psych instructor to have is a neurotic you know worse than that is a a pervert which is you know tricky one but you can be sort of redeemed and the the the worst of the three in locating terms is the psychotic

Now, I looked at, and you mentioned that we're talking about trolling. One of my favorite instances of trolling, I think you probably know it quite well, is the sort of the one surrounding the he will not divide us movement.

Luke Turner and Shia LaBeouf, the actor, Booth, Booth, Beef. Yeah, they did this art project, didn't they? That was basically setting up a camera in Brooklyn, I think, which would be 24-7 people saying he will not divide us, referring to Donald Trump, which, you know, fair enough. Think what you like about that as a piece of art. But then it was more famous for being so successfully and interestingly trolled

by these kind of online communities, 4chan, et cetera, which used the space to... So it was in-person. People were, in fact, going there and performing silly little rituals and stuff and trying to mess up with it, but also posting it online and, you know,

gathering together these groups whatever and I'd say it was fairly harmless I think it also was fascinating how much if people are interested in like digital sleuthing and stuff like that because we ended up moving this art project to like the middle of nowhere and then

people on 4chan tracked it down using flight paths and crazy things like that so it was a real fun instance of that digital sleuthing and you know like a sort of don't fuck with cats type story going on but the thing that struck me as the most interesting anyway was the milk so one of the things that

these guys were doing. And they're obviously this, this milk, which is associated in some way with Trump and with the kind of American online, right. Um, so like, I think it starts because the, that guy baked Alaska, um, he got like maced, um, at a, at a, at a protest or at a rally and, um, poured milk on his face to alleviate the symptoms of the, uh,

the mace uh and then it became this symbol this this symbol for these particular groups of sort of uh right right leaning online advocates troll types and richard spencer for example used the milk emoji then the milk emoji became the cow emoji blah blah anyway these guys at the he will not divide us thing uh they were turning up on the camera and pouring milk all over their face and i would say it's worth having a look on youtube it's just quite bizarre and funny to see um

really odd kind of humor, something really bizarre about these fully grown men with their tops off just covering themselves in milk. It's a certain performance of masculinity. It's also very odd, babyish, et cetera. And I claimed or wanted to claim that this is a perverse structure because it's the desire to be told off. And in Psychoanalysis and good,

Good book on it by Stephanie Swales is about the subject supposed to know. So the subject who wants to be told off a lot of perverse acts, sending a dick pic, flashing your bum.

Anyway, not too well. There you go. Finally, you say something from which you may be cancelled. Well done. Yeah, but I do find the concept of a moonie just extremely interesting and good. But anyway, that's by the by. But, you know, there's this perverse structure, which is tell me off. And tell me off means castrate me. And castrate me means bring me into society. OK, so perverse acts. Yeah, they are transgressive. They are...

They often could even be harmful. But fundamentally, at the psychic level, what our perverse acts, well, in the Canaan Psychoanalysis, they are demands to be castrated, saying, make me like you, castrate me and bring me into, because castration is the condition of

Being in society, the condition of us all, as we've been saying, the lacking subject, the failed subject, the castrated subject. So I perceive this milk pouring as a, of course, it got a lot of attention as a sort of weird right wing symbol. But I think ultimately it's a perverse demand to tell me off, therefore include me, you know, bring me through castration into society. So this is where perversion lies.

Now, another version of the milk, which I got interested in, was the vegans pouring the milk in Selfridges and department stores as a, you know, protest against the dairy and stuff. Have you seen those? Yeah, yeah. It's kind of a bizarre performance art, of course. Right, right. The critique and the self-defeating and it's...

So here I felt like, and this is maybe it sounds controversial, but I think this is way worse than the milk pouring at the Liberal Art Project because it's psychotic in structure. And the reason, the difference is that, and again, this is, you know, paraphrasing and borrowing from this tradition of

psychoanalytic theory um the psychotic is unable to see the lack in themselves they don't perceive themselves as castrated they perceive uh the gap the failure the lack to be in reality itself yeah um and so they look outside for the whole in society they feel like the rest of us

inadequate, failed, lacking, but they don't see that as locate that lack, that failure within themselves as comedy does. They perceive it somewhere else outside, a hole in reality that needs to be filled. And this conspiracy theory is a good example of this. You know, the QAnon stuff would be an interesting example of this.

But also this, a lot of some of the rhetoric around climate and this vegan milk pouring is saying the problem is not me. It's not saying, it's saying you need castrating. You meat eaters, you self-ridges shoppers, you're the ones who need castrating. I am the full pure subject or whatever. The problem is there. The problem is that if we could close the gap, if you would not be you, then we could close the gap in reality and we'd be fine.

be better off. Now, obviously, I've not got any opinions on whether it's good to eat dairy or not, but I think at the psychic level, this is a more dangerous position to take. And I think it's a much more, to try and tie it together with some of the things we've been talking about, it's a much more James Acaster type, didactic type position.

position to take which is that the problem is is elsewhere and i'm actually going to write a book next called psychotic capitalism which basically try and explore these things um so yeah that was my my second example and then finally very quick one just a very popular meme which shows a woman with her hair pulled back and a jug of milk being stuffed forced down her throat and next to her it says a bus driver and on the milk it says thank you

So I think this is a very funny meme and it implies that, you know, when you thank the bus driver, when you say thank you to the bus driver, you're sort of aggressively stuffing the face full of your notes. And what I like about it is completely universal. We've all

We all do it. And I'd say it's extremely neurotic in structure, which is to see ourselves as failing. We're trying to communicate with someone. We're saying thank you to a bus driver. But every communication is a failure. We're both, you know,

uh, not getting what we want from it and, and so on and so. So these, these, my, my three milky moments, uh, sort of, um, show, um, yeah. And I think as a final point, why, why milk? Why is milk funny? Why is milk interesting and attractive to talk about? You know, um, milk is the universal, um, milk is what we all have as a baby most, whether it's real or fake milk. You know, there's also a lot of theory of psychoanalysis around castration and milk and,

You know, it's the one thing we do all share. So I think that, again, this whole story of milk, it sort of embodies the cultural moment we're in. How is it that the thing we all share becomes a thing which divides us? And that's the question we've been sort of grappling with all through this conversation. Sticking with trolling for a moment longer, I wonder whether I could engage you with a little bit of a prognostication.

So, as I said, we're a few days into Trump's second presidency. There is the sense from at least the American side that the cultural shift has taken place almost overnight. That's not yet visible in the UK. There is kind of post-2016 resistance is beginning to emerge.

I want to think about a very recent example of trolling from a couple of days, or that kind of bilateral trolling. I wonder whether this could help us develop this kind of theory of how the call and response in psychoanalytic terms might happen. A couple of days ago,

There's a group called Led by Donkeys, which is an activist group that performs street humour, billboard campaigns. They have been anti-Brexit, anti-the far right. They have staged a performance where they projected the image of Elon Musk, supposedly

with his Hitler salute onto the facade of a Tesla factory just somewhere outside of Berlin. And the caption was, Heil Tesla. So we have trolls meeting trolls. So there's one reading of Musk's gesture as just like utter trolling. This highly autistic man, probably,

having a joke at the expense of the liberal masses. This is precisely what Led by Donkeys are doing. They would probably defend themselves saying, "No, this is very important. I did propaganda. We are resisting fashion." But they're not situationist international. The way that they do their public performances is precisely to troll. They have staged performances that are very similar to the ones that you've described.

well what is it like is everyone a troll now that's how we interact then interesting i mean yeah so um i'm uh yeah i i've sort of obviously like everyone's seen this um

picked this meme going round of the fascist salute. I hadn't realised it was the 'Led by Donkeys' thing that started it. No, no, no, no. So it's 'Led by Donkeys' responded to the mask salute. Oh yeah, no, yeah, sure, of course. But my question is, is the salute, was the salute just, he was just gesticulating? You know, I kind of can't bring myself to um and ah about it. Yeah. I mean, we, you know, I already said that I believe this is an autistic man who is a troll. Yeah.

And whether it's subconscious or whether it is intended to get the reaction. I mean, we have enough evidence of his behaviors. You cannot be surprised that this is part of his repertoire. Does he mean fascism by it? Well, I think that's a completely different conversation. That is sort of wasted on being had

over this particular detail. Yeah. Like I'm not going to say that that fascism isn't isn't something we should have at the back of our mind as political changes sort of sweep through the Western world.

But I don't think the kind of, I don't think the meme is what's going to usher it in. No, no. But the, yeah, it's a good point. I mean, I agree. And I, the interesting, the reason I asked that was because I think it's interesting that that echoes the very first thing we talked about, you know, the joke about the liberal media, you know,

saying that the MAGA hat guy from the zoo has, you know, I think this, you know, oh, the point of this presumably led by donkey's thing is that let's laugh together in agreement because we sort of oppose this fascist Elon Musk or whatever. And, you know, I do find...

I mean, there's lots to say about Elon Musk and so on, but I personally just take this position. Whenever it's talking about these individuals, if it wasn't Elon Musk, it would be something else. It's structural problems that we've got, not individuals. And the whole concept led by donkeys, as if we replaced them with

I don't know what's the opposite of a donkey, you know, but this is a stupid way of thinking about it. And because these are what we have are structural and social issues, not the wrong individuals in the wrong places, which both the name led by donkeys and the critique of the law kind of implies. So, you know, so to your question of like, are we only going to have trolls? Well, if yeah, I mean, if trolling means perceiving the world as attacks on on individuals while repressing the

the structural and economic and material realities that actually are a problem and need addressing uh then yeah i think that we're increasingly uh uh yeah a world of of trolling um you know and the same could be said of the trump thing i'm not saying there's nothing wrong with donald trump but but this is the the rhetoric of the moment is to complain about the wrong individuals being in

the correct slots but problem is the slots themselves so yeah maybe trolls miss that point often

Okay, I think you've brought us to what will be my final question, I think a point of disagreement, because you talk about structure and I know you're referring to capitalism and your position would be that capitalism is what produces every single one of the problems that we've mentioned so far and more. So I was quite surprised that you conclude almost the book with not the liberating potential of dancing on TikTok.

I just couldn't operate myself to take this seriously. As much as you have this historical example, so my snowboard was tickled a little bit because you talk about some pictures, dances, the 14th to 17th century phenomena of people

dancing themselves to death choreomania. And this is a beautiful kind of quaint late medieval thing that people do. But TikTok has reproduced this idea of organizing hundreds of thousands, millions of people to perform sort of choreographies, to perform sort of robotic gestures.

And you found that this was kind of productive. And I hate, I'm going to just to finish my question. I'm kind of accusing of being a terrible leftist because I remember someone else's critique of TikTok in which they said that this dance, this is a forced labor.

where rather than kind of lose themselves in madness, the participants in these trends are being forced to perform unremunerated labor. How can we square this? Okay, I think...

I'm not, yeah, you're totally right, of course. And, you know, the free labor of social media. Yeah, but I mean, I suppose, yeah, of course, it's the free labor of social media and, you know, that we all do, even in podcasting, for example, in platforms, you know, is obviously a sort of, well,

well, a materialist or whatever Marxist issue. And I obviously don't think in an overall sense that dancing on TikTok is liberation. So you're right. But what I was saying there is that you see these little moments in culture of people sort of crying out for something

social universality or whatever we might call it so it used to be this little british um quirky thing that at 7 45 every night um during the week there'd be there'd sometimes be localized power cuts um to electricity and this was because the british population was so predictable that it watched coronation street at 7 30 and at 7 45 it put the kettle on to have a cup of tea

which overloaded the local grid and caused a temporary power cut. So the charmingness of that story is that it speaks to like a Britain that had a sort of habitual pattern that was so predictable that everyone was pressing the on switch of the kettle at the same time. Fast forward to now with the impact of streaming services,

the switch the digital switch over even sky tv etc historically and you have a situation where no two people are ever doing the same thing at the same time so i think that this sort of um you know percolation of activities or whatever sold to us as you know commodity choice etc does pose a real challenge to a sort of a society um

and its ability to have that. I think in these very stupid, of course, and also capitalist, you know, social media moments, like trying to do these silly little dances on TikTok and share them around and copy each other, we do see a kind of crying out for shared ritual.

And that's just a grain of something I like in a bad thing. Not that overall it's a great thing, but that we see these moments of people crying out for that kind of social cohesion that perhaps, well, didn't necessarily exist before, but from our perspective now appears to have existed before. All right, let's close by giving you an opportunity to play us out of your best joke, Alfie. Oh, my best joke?

Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. You need me to edit out a long silence. Yeah. No. Okay. Well, I won't give too much analysis, but I do feel this joke embodies my theory, but I guess I won't. Maybe it won't explain why. So, yeah, it takes place in Scotland. So hopefully people aren't offended by accents. And it's in a school. And we've got the teacher here, Miss McCready. And Miss McCready says to her class,

Right, children, can anybody give me a sentence with the word definitely in? And Mary's hand shoots straight up. She's the keenest student in the class. She's desperate to answer. Miss McCready says, OK, Mary, go ahead. And Mary says, Miss McCready, you are definitely the best teacher in the school. Miss McCready says, OK, Mary, thank you very much.

Duncan, can you give us a sentence with the word definitely in it? And Duncan says, at the back of the class there, he says, oh, I miss, I definitely think Mary has got the biggest tits in the class. And Miss McCree says, Duncan, go to the back of the class the second, that is not appropriate. And so she goes back to her lesson and she says, oh, okay, everybody, can anybody give me a sentence with the word indefinitely in it?

And once again, Mary's hand shoots up. She's desperate to answer. And Miss MacReady says, OK, Mary, go ahead. And Mary says, Miss MacReady, I could go on listening to you indefinitely. And Miss MacReady says, oh, Mary, OK, all right then, thank you. And she says, Duncan, could you like a chance to redeem yourself?

And Duncan turns around the back of the class and says, oh, I'm a scientist. Go ahead then, Duncan. And Duncan says,

When I can feel my balls smacking against Mary's backside, then I know I'm in, definitely. I feel so tempted to just cut it right here, not even with a snigger from either of us at the end. Well, in the book, it explains why this joke is of theoretical importance. Well, yeah, let's leave it precisely there. Alfie, thanks so much for joining me. Okay, thanks so much, Pierre. It's been really nice.

Post-Comedy by Alfie Bann is published by Polity. Thanks for listening and join us next time.