On Second Thought

Editors:Hannah Gadsby's Nanette has become a cultural phenomenon, and with good reason. Her stand-up special abruptly and shockingly transitions from a comic monologue to a frank and bracing soul-baring reveal of the violence she was subject to as a lesbian. In her discussion of Gadsby's performance, Beck Krefting puts forward the argument that the comedic frame of Gadsby's rendering of her experience necessarily demands elision and omission of certain events, “in the service of satire's form.”1 Krefting's thoughtful analysis raises more questions about ethics and efficacy: do Gadsby's stylistic choices in her deployment of (anti)satire implicitly say that there are some things we shouldn't laugh about? Does a full and honest reckoning with homophobia and its concomitant violence lie beyond the purview of satire proper? Is there a fundamental division between what we can laugh about and serious critique?Gadsby chooses to break from the typical stand-up form in relaying to the audience her trauma and violence, bringing forth a painful tension and “then refusing to assuage it” (100). This choice is a stylistic one, not a choice forced by a real-world state of affairs in which a joke lessens or undercuts the seriousness of an event or experience. Also a stylistic choice is Gadsby's version of a joke in which the reality of the violence is omitted or elided. Is her hand forced by the limits of satire as a form or by a personal sensibility that distinguishes between comedic material and that which demands to be heard as real? Are these two forms of discourse truly incommensurable? Certainly people can (and must) make these kinds of decisions and distinctions for themselves and their performances, but what does it mean to say that one's own distinctions between what's comic fodder and what's off limits reflect a universal divide? It seems to me to put us on a path to a limited view of satire's efficacy and its capacity for social critique and commentary.Jessyka FinleyPostdoctoral Fellow in American StudiesMiddlebury CollegeEditors:In “‘Deplorable’ Satire: Alt-Right Memes, White Genocide Tweets, and Redpilling Normies,” Viveca S. Greene clarifies the operation of satirical tweets and memes. This clarity opens up additional layers of complexity to ponder with regard to satire.Arguing against judging satire by authorial intent or audience reception, Greene concludes that instead “the contexts in which these tweets or memes were created and the discursive spaces in which they came to circulate are what make them satirical.”2 However, the relationship between the texts and the contexts is difficult to read. Greene notes that satiric utterances ironically “inhabit the discourses they seek to contest, playing on tensions between two meanings (a positive and negative valuation of a given group or set of political/social values)” (41). How the satire operates in the discursive space makes it satire, but this operation is precisely what can be so difficult to understand.Greene explains that, in the case of a tweet, “knowledge of the hashtags and topics … is likely helpful, as is familiarity with the Twitter accounts/ users responsible for the tweets” (50). Because knowledge of the account/user brings us back to a kind of authorial intent, I'm interested in sorting out the kinds of knowledge that are at work in these assessments. We can think about the identity of the Twitter account/user as an engagement not with an individual as author with conscious or stated intention but with the author function (Foucault's concept): previous tweets allow us to form an idea of coherent authorship by which to understand the tweet in question, regardless of what the individual understands or communicates about intent.Likewise, Greene shows the ways that audience reception can be misleading, “maintain[ing] that individual intentions are far less significant than social consequences in discussions of satire” (50). However, social consequence depends on audience interpretation, which determines how the satirical or not-satirical tweet or meme gains meaning and, thus, consequence in discursive space. In other words, although Greene discounts authorial intent and audience reception, some version of both come through context rather than individuals. Further, even context can lead to ambiguity because there is often wide disagreement about what consequences are and even about the basic facts of our social reality.We're left with several questions: Does the key to understanding satire reside in the movement away from individuals and into subject positions? Does satire's operation involve identity categories more than it does individuals? Does satire operate more clearly at the level of power relations than do other texts? How helpful might be literary theory for understanding both alt-right satire and progressive satire?Dale TracyAssistant ProfessorDepartment of English, Culture, CommunicationRoyal Military College of Canada

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