Caty Borum Chattoo and Lauren Feldman: <i>A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In January 2018, I co-organized a two-day workshop facilitated by the Yes Lab for Creative Activism to explore the potential uses and impacts of humour and creativity in social justice struggle.The workshop materials foregrounded the importance of experimenting and engaging more deeply with tactics, tools, and strategies capable of advancing social change across a variety of sites of struggle.Two months after the workshop, participants were invited to reflect on their experiences, especially in terms of their sense of the importance of media strategies in their work, the significance of humour in activist and social change work, as well as the perceived merits of media hoaxing as a social justice activist tactic (Reilly 2019).Two of the main insights of this study would materialize in relation to the overlapping realms of collaboration and praxis: respondents expressed a strong desire to see increased opportunities for collaboration between activists and artists in and across social change work, and enthusiasm for the inclusion of humour and hoaxing in the elaboration of activist politics.In having collaborated with the Yes Lab for the event, the focus on humour and activism could not have been more explicit.The Yes Lab, the brainchild of media activist group The Yes Men, was created in the interests of helping activist groups reach broader publics through media-friendly and attention-getting actions (see Hijinks).Together the event and companion research project highlighted a need to attend to the challenges and opportunities of harnessing humour in the service of social justice and social change.Nowhere in academic scholarship have these lines of inquiry been more pronounced and most well attended to than in Caty Borum Chattoo and Lauren Feldman's ground-breaking work, A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice.The book is at once a primer on contemporary networked comedy in a twenty-first century media paradigm, an overview of comedy's place in social justice activist politics, and a rumination on comedy's potential role in advancing progressive social change.As Chattoo and Feldman argue, comedy and social justice activism constitute "twin arts and practices that share values and mannerisms of deviant thinking, encouraging new ways of seeing and new ways of being " (p.198).It is precisely their coupling of these twin arts and practicesand their expansive treatment of the theory, scholarship, HUMOR 2024; aop
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".