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Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.7.1.0214

2333-9934

Grace Heneks,

Humor Studies and Applications

Dannagal Goldthwaite Young's Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States is an interesting addition to the scholarship of political humor. Young, a professor of communication who has published widely on the effect of political humor on audience and who is also a member of an improv-comedy troupe, writes engagingly about the rise of televised liberal satire and its seeming opposite, conservative opinion programming. Her book is of particular interest for those working in the history and psychology of political humor.Young begins her book with a brief prologue that asks a rather shocking question: “Are Samantha Bee and Glenn Beck the same?” (3). That is, are liberal satirists the same as conservative talk radio personalities? This question becomes the impetus for the book's larger argument: that televised political satire and conservative political opinion programming, what Young labels “outrage” programming or simply “outrage,” are not the same but serve similar needs for their audiences. She advances the notion that liberal political satire and conservative “outrage” have parallel psychological effects on their audiences and concludes that they look different because of “the different psychological frameworks of liberalism and conservatism, which account for distinct psychological traits and aesthetic preferences among their creators and audiences” (5). Ultimately, she declares that both liberal political satire and outrage programming are necessary for a properly functioning democratic society and that outrage programming can mobilize its respective audience in a way that liberal satire cannot.The book contains eleven chapters and a prologue. In the first three chapters, Young explores political satire and outrage in the United States in the 1950s-’60s, discussing the changes in media regulations, technologies, and political polarization and how these changes created the need for a second generation of satire and outrage at the end of the twentieth century. Chapters 4 through 9 investigate the psychological effects of irony and satire, covering how irony and satire are comprehended by the brain, how audience characteristics contribute to the appreciation of them, and the psychological roots of political ideology. Young connects the psychological characteristics and aesthetic preferences of liberals and conservatives to their affinity for (and production of) satire and outrage, respectively. Young ends this section by taking up the question of why people consume satire and outrage programming and how they perceive it. She argues that many of the functions and consequences of satire for people on the left are quite similar to those of outrage for people on the right, despite their obvious differences in both content and aesthetics.Chapter 10 looks at two instances of liberals and conservatives engaged in “playing against type”: the failed liberal attempt at outrage radio (Air America) and the failed conservative attempt at political satire (Fox's ½ Hour News Hour). Young also considers how political satire and outrage changed under the Trump presidency. The final chapter insists on rethinking these genres, their correlating ideologies, and the people who create and consume them. Young states, “Instead of hating or condemning the other side for holding contrasting views, one could think of these two ideologies and their accompanying psychologies as necessary subsystems that allow society to function as a whole” (6). However, Young also insists that conservative outrage is better at fostering elite social and cultural propaganda due to its internal logic and the nature of its audiences and that it is therefore better at mobilizing its respective audiences, while liberal satire remains a more efficient genre for subversion and rumination.The biggest strength of Irony and Outrage is that it breaks complex subjects down into easily digestible chapters. For example, in chapter 4, “The Psychology of Satire,” Young explains how the cognitive processing required to understand and appreciate a joke is actually quite burdensome, making people less likely to challenge or scrutinize whatever argument the joke suggests. She calls this the “resource allocation” hypothesis of humor, which, she explains, accounts for why arguments made through humor elicit less resistance than those made through “serious” discourse (77). Her explanations of these and other psychological effects are easy to understand because of her conversational writing style as well as her use of examples from the media, including jokes made by Stephen Colbert and Conan O'Brien in their respective late-night talk shows.Irony and Outrage proves most useful for those scholars of American humor in the fields of psychology, political science, and communications. For historians, the first few chapters tracing the development of televised liberal satire and conservative outrage programming are most useful. Chapter 1, for example, explores how the radical counterculture comedy of the 1960s contrasted with conservative talk radio, whose hosts included Clarence Manion and Dan Smoot. For those historians more interested in the technological, political, and regulatory advances that made these two genres possible, chapter 2 provides a useful discussion of the history of the cable television industry and political polarization in the US.The downside of appealing to so many different fields of study results in a book with a lack of focus or clear purpose. Each chapter uses a range of approaches and discusses multiple ideas, so that many chapters lack depth, especially those chapters consisting of fewer than twenty pages. This expansive brevity is mitigated to an extent by the comedic anecdotes Young includes, often at the beginning of chapters, which she then refers to and draws on throughout, creating some cohesion within the chapters and book. These anecdotes are particularly useful in the chapters devoted to the psychology of humor because they allow the author to present each concept to a multitude of readers. Overall, despite its inconsistencies, Irony and Outrage is an insightful addition to political humor studies and an interesting read for both the serious scholar and the casual reader.