Satire and Geopolitics: Vulgarity, Ambiguity and the Body Grotesque inSouth Park

Abstract

Humour and laughter have become the subject of recent geopolitical scrutiny. Scholars have explored the affirmative and liberatory possibilities of humour, and the affective bodily dimensions of laughter as tools for transformative action in critical geopolitics. Humour that is vulgar and politically ambiguous is yet to be explored as a potent geopolitical avenue of enquiry. Studies of satire have suggested that rather than contesting entrenched geopolitical beliefs, satirical shows can serve to further divide audiences both amenable and antagonistic to the satire in question. I argue that this should not involve a wholesale rejection of satirical shows, as humour that uses irony, subversion, and other discursive techniques is just one way satirical media becomes an effective commentator on political issues. I examine the show South Park and argue its satire combines bodily and scatological humour with more traditional satirical techniques to produce a comedy that ridicules contemporary issues by reducing complex politics to the most basic and crass condition possible. This is defined in a Bakhtinian sense of the body grotesque, a social inversion through reference to the common bodily functions of all human beings.

Dawn of the debt: Tactical performance, humour and the practice of alter-geopolitics

“…The Dawn of the Debt action attacked the object of focus (shopping under capitalism) using exaggeration, caricature and ridicule to create humour (see Thorogood, 2016;also Dodds, 2007). In this context humour acts as an exclusionary process that differentiates between self and other, through nurturing complicity and creating a shared space of laughter ('we' get the joke, while 'they' are the butt of our humour) (Terrion and Ashforth, 2002;Taylor and Bain 2003).…”

The Grotesque Protest in Social Media as Embodied, Political Rhetoric

“…In his article on satire and politics, Thorogood (2016) asks, “In what ways might fart jokes be geopolitical?” (p. 215). As Thorogood unpacks the role of “satirical humor that generates laughter that is politically ambivalent, vulgar, and messy” (p. 217), he identifies the grotesque as a common aspect of geopolitical critique.…”

“…According to Dodds (2007), satire often relies on grotesque bodily humor to be effective. Thorogood (2016) argues that in order to affect the audience, the political message must be funny, repulsive, or vulgar. We understand the grotesque as exaggeration of the vulgar for use.…”

“…Physically embodying resistance to attempts aimed to control bodies, these individuals use existing structures (e.g., the U. S. Postal Service) to deliver their body’s fluids to the desks of elected government officials. Through the grotesque protests, we explore what Thorogood (2016) calls for: an “attention to the relations between corporeal, material phenomena and representations in popular culture” (p. 221). Although other strategies are available to react to potential threatening laws and lawmakers, the grotesque protest is unique because it calls upon individuals to use the very thing that is being regulated—the body—to push back, to resist, to dissent, to protest.…”

‘That’s the way to do it!’: establishing the peculiar geographies of puppetry

“…By contrast, very little geographical work addresses puppets explicitly and when puppets do feature, this is in a passing or metaphorical fashion, as in labelling post-conflict states 'puppets' if they remain tied to a patron state 17 . Specific puppet figures have occasionally featured in such geopolitical work, either to establish a genre lineage from the Punch magazine 18 or comparing the comedic vulgarity of South Park with Spitting Image 19 , but puppets as a cultural form or geographical phenomena are not directly interrogated. Finally, although there has been some experimentation with puppets in a teaching context 20 , these examples are also rare.…”