Consider the following jokes. The first is by Sarah Silverman

The second involves Tig Notaro and Natasha Leggero. A little background is necessary: in 2013, Leggero hosted a self-produced show on YouTube called “Tubbing with Tash” in which she “interviewed” comedians in her hot tub. In the following video

https://youtu.be/8YNtDkgxNG0

This may seem like an innocuous, if somewhat odd, exchange (why would Notaro wear a suit in a hot tub?). However, the video was posted October 30, 2013. Notaro had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012 and had had a double mastectomy without reconstructive surgery.

I think that it is unnecessary to explain why considering rape “bittersweet” and asking a cancer survivor who has undergone a double mastectomy to wear a bikini in order to get more hits on YouTube is cringeworthy. These two examples have the advantage of being very short, but we will also examine part of an episode of the American version of the sitcom The Office, below. First however, we need to define “cringe humor” also known as “embarrassment humor.”

We live in the “age of cringe” (Schwanebeck, 2021). Schwanebeck puts the beginning of the age of cringe as the early 2000s. Of course, awkwardness has existed since Adam and Eve had to cover themselves up—that's not the point. The point is that awkwardness, embarrassment and cringe are one of the defining themes of humor from the 2000s onward.

Cringe humor is defined as humor in which the hearer experiences vicarious embarrassment on behalf of one or some of the participants in the humor (Hye-Knudson, 2018; Schwanebeck, 2021).

In this chapter, we will consider how the alt-right (see Chapter 1) uses humor to recruit new followers by presenting their propaganda under the guise of humor/satire/irony and tries to take advantage of the retractability of humor (“I was just kidding”).

Is the Right Even Funny?

The title of this section may seem peculiar, after all, why wouldn't the right be funny? Admittedly, the Nazis were not particularly known for their sense of humor, but surely we would expect less extreme forms of right wing groups to have humor. However, there is a general sense in the academic community of humor researchers that right wingers are just unfunny. In fact, Young (2020) is a book dedicated to explaining why conservatives prefer outrage to irony and satire. The problem is that indeed a lot of right-wing humor will be absolutely unfunny to the average reader because of the problems we discussed in Chapter 3 that is, the unavailability of the scripts required to understand the joke.

However, Sienkiewicz and Marx (2022) provide evidence, based on viewership data, that not only is the right producing humor and satire, but that it is quite successful (for example, Gutfeld! had excellent ratings of over two million viewers, beating all other late night satirical news shows, in 2021).

The Alt-Right Propaganda Machine

Having established that the right does produce successful humor and satire, Sienkiewicz and Marx argue that the right is using them to recruit and radicalize supporters. The idea, well developed in Sienkiewicz and Marx (2022; see also Greene, 2019), is that mainstream shows such as Gutfeld! or publications such as Babylon Bee, or podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience, through a complex network of promotions, recommendations and advertisement funnel an audience toward increasingly radical material that culminates in explicit white suprematism, Nazi propaganda and recruitment. For a more detailed discussion of Sienkiewicz and Marx (2022), see Attardo (2023).

This is not just speculation. Bowman-Grieve (2013) shows that “whites only” dating sites promote discussion, interaction and the formation of interpersonal bonds and relationships among white supremacists and therefore contribute to the recruitment and radicalization of the recruits in terrorist groups.

Du Bois and Africa

The fields of social science and humanities in the Western world developed with inherent biases about the hierarchical nature of civilizations, cultures, languages and customs. Du Bois, though he was trained by the West, appears to have some appreciation of this fact as he writes The World and Africa. However, there are a number of things that Africologists recognize today as Agency Reduction Formations that Du Bois did not have the theoretical foundation necessary to pinpoint as such. Nevertheless, his insight on the reduction of African agency was still profound. Recall, he once stated of an increasingly colonized Africa, “By the end of the nineteenth century the degradation of Africa was as complete as organized human means could make it.”

It is apparent that Du Bois understood that Europe, through power and force, had positioned itself as the superior culture between itself and Africa. Du Bois would state, “A system at first conscious and then unconscious of lying about history and distorting it to the disadvantage of the Negroids became so widespread that the history of Africa ceased to be taught,” and that “every effort was made in archaeology, history, and biography, in biology, psychology, and sociology, to prove the all but universal assumption that the color line had a scientific basis.” This “color line” would be famously voiced by Du Bois as the primary issue of the twentieth century. Many attribute the notion of the “color line” to arguments for social justice measures intended to bring about equal treatment and socioeconomic conditions among those of African and European descent.

However, Du Bois may have meant something a bit more than social justice. I argue that in this text, The World and Africa, Du Bois, despite his aforementioned ideological shortcomings, is actually advocating for cultural justice. Du Bois argues, and I agree, that the European world has distorted the facts of history in order to misattribute upon itself all notions of human technological advancement and intellectual heritage. As Du Bois put it, “Without the winking of an eye, printing, gunpowder, the smelting of iron, the beginnings of social organization, not to mention political life and democracy, were attributed exclusively to the white race and to Nordic Europe.”

This eurocentric masquerade has done its job at standardizing ways of knowing under a type of false universalism.

In this chapter, we will describe the “Cheryl's she shed” meme cycle. The term “meme cycle” is a deliberate calque on “joke cycle” the term used by folklorists to describe groups of jokes, usually thematically related. The theoretical purpose is to engage the concept of memetic drift, which we introduced in Chapter 2, in more detail and to go beyond it by introducing the idea of semantic bleaching and considering memes as syntactic constructions as the end result of memetic drift.

Joke Cycles

Consider this example:

This was the “original” light bulb joke, variants of which swept the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Light bulb jokes were centered around the “changing a light bulb” situation, which, as everyone knows, is normally performed by one person climbing on a ladder or chair and manually screwing in the light bulb in the socket. In the jokes, an unusually high number of people were required (e.g., six or seven), which is of course incongruous, and this incongruity was partially (very partially!) justified by the fact that they engaged in a very unorthodox way of doing so, which introduced another incongruity, for example by having one person stand on a table and the other six turning the table (or worse, the ceiling). The invited inference was of course that the group of people changing a light bulb in such an inefficient and counterintuitive way must be stupid, which was confirmed by the mention of the ethnicity of the group (Polish, in the original joke). The stereotype for stupidity was thus both confirmed and served as resolution (justification) of the incongruous behavior. I discuss light bulb jokes in some detail in Attardo (2001). For the shallow nature of such groupings, see Hempelmann (2003).

What made lightbulb jokes interesting to me, as a linguist, was not so much that these jokes targeted originally Polish-Americans, and the reasons behind this and other ethnic jokes, masterfully explored in Davies (1990).

Part 2 is concerned with memes, arguably the most Web 2.0 innovation in humor. The section is bookended by two slightly more technical chapters, in which I deal with memetic drift and with virality and its staying power, or lack thereof. The other chapters deal with more “fun” topics, such as Boaty McBoatface, Grumpy Cat, Pastafarianism and the Chuck Norris facts.

Du Bois and the Conundrum of White Scholarship

In the preceding chapters on Africa's classical antecedents, Kemet and Kush, Du Bois was highly critical of the way the Western academy has presented the racial question in regard to the people of the Nile Valley. However, in the chapters in which Du Bois surveys what we may call the generators of contemporary African civilization, his critique is much less about the question of their race but instead the ways in which the West has attempted to reduce the agency of African groups based on their race. But before delving back into Du Bois’ historical survey, I find it proper here to address the issues facing Du Bois on his path toward both writing this history and the shaping of his perspective along the way.

Du Bois borrows significantly from certain European scholars to write his histories on African people. But perhaps this would not be his choice if he had a better choice to make. For example, he leaves a footnote in his chapter on Kush explaining, “For the history of Ethiopia I have leaned heavily on [miscellaneous] material furnished me by Professor Leo Hansberry of Howard University.” In the foreword he expressed “regret that [Hansberry] has not published more of his work.” He also regrets that he could not use the works of Frank Snowden and that “classical journals in America have hitherto declined to publish his paper because it favored the Negro too much […] I tried to get Dr. Snowden to let me see his manuscript, but he refused.”

Both Hansberry and Snowden were African American historians whose scholarship Du Bois apparently trusted and perhaps wished for their work to make up the bulk of chapters IV, V, and VI in The World and Africa, covering the peopling of Africa, and the histories of Kemet and Kush, respectively. Interestingly, Du Bois does not at all mention Carter G. Woodson, whose works at the time could have contributed greatly to a number of chapters in the text. Perhaps this was due to their personal differences which occurred a decade before the book was published. This incident shall soon be covered but first we digress to Du Bois’ conundrum with white scholars.

Introduction: No Time to Mourn

The words of Gamze Kubaşık above are from a conversation she and her mother, Elif Kubaşık, had with Onur Suzan Nobrega in April 2021. Gamze's father, Mehmet Kubaşık, was murdered by the NSU (Nationalist Socialist Underground) on 4 April 2006. Commemorating their loss, Gamze and Elif Kubaşık reaffirm their constant search for justice. Echoing other family members, relatives and friends of the victims of racist violence, they recount how they experienced a second racist attack after the loss of their loved one. The families of the victims could not withdraw and mourn on their own time and in their own way, as they were confronted with police investigations that treated them and their lost loved ones as prime suspects (Tribunale 2021). Additionally, access to the dead bodies of their loved ones was restricted and they were unable to mourn in accordance with their personal wishes and religious customs.

While the families mourned the loss of their loved ones, the German public remained mostly silent (Michaelsen 2015). There was no nationwide public mourning at the moment these racist crimes were revealed, nor did crowds gather in public squares to grieve for the loss of these members of German society. Despite their insistence on creating their own representation, vocabulary and analysis concerning the origin and nature of the murders and communicating this to the public, the families received no response or gesture of shared grief from the wider political and civil society (Utlu 2013). This environment has led to what Gamze Kubaşık defines as the impossibility to have time to mourn or what Çiğdem Inan (2022) describes as “dispossessed mourning”, defining the inability of a politics of grief under circumstances of racist violence. Yet, as I have shown throughout this book, the families, relatives and friends have continued to raise their voices and make their views known notwithstanding the hurdles and barriers confronting them.

A memeplex is a cluster of memes. The significant aspect of a memeplex is that the memes that form it are mutually supporting. For example, in the traditional patriarchal society we have a meme that considers husbands to be dominant over wives. We also have a meme that only men are allowed to be priests or preach. Clearly, then, these two memes mutually support one another and thus it becomes easier for both memes to replicate. At the upper end of the spectrum of complexity a memeplex is an ideology. At the lower end, trends in popular music or fashion are often a memeplex: think of the early Beatles’ music, their hairdos and their clothing. By providing a complete “image” their memes could spread more easily.

Pastafarianism is a humorous religion which has developed a series of related memes that support each other. Let's start from the beginning: in 2005, Bobby Henderson founded the religion to demand that Pastafarianism be taught along with evolution and intelligent design, in Kansas schools. The Kansas Board of Education had voted that “intelligent design” should be taught along evolution. Henderson's point was that if a religious viewpoint, which has no scientific standing, was going to be taught in schools, then why not teach that the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) had created the Earth, fossils and all? The FSM creation myth parodies the biblical creation narrative, but includes a beer volcano and mentions that Adam and Eve live in the Olive Garden of Eden (Olive Garden is a pseudo-Italian food chain, quite popular in the United States).

Henderson posted his letter to the Board of Education on his website, where it went viral (https://web.archive.org/web/20070407182624/http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/). In 2006, he published The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which has sold over 10,000 copies and been translated in several languages. Other books include The Loose Canon (http://www.loose-canon.info/Loose-Canon-1st-Ed.pdf) and The New Testament of The Flying Spaghetti Monster: Dinner 2.0 (https://unitarianchurchofpasta.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/for-free-here3.pdf). Henderson still maintains an active website (http://venganza.org). According to Bauer (2018), Pastafarianism has “tens of thousands” of adherents, primarily in Western countries (North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand).

As we saw in the previous chapter, memes are self-replicating units of meaning, the analog of genes in biology. What we did not discuss in the previous chapter is that genes and therefore memes are the locus of evolution. Darwin's splendid insight was the evolution depends on three mechanisms: variation, selection and replication. Variation is provided by the individual producing a new meme or a variant of an old one. Selection is provided by the choices of other users to adopt or share the meme, rather than another one. For example, as we will see in Chapter 15, the Chuck Norris Facts memes were preceded by the Vin Diesel Facts and by Mr. T Facts. However, at some point, the users selected the Chuck Norris ones and the Vin Diesel and Mr. T facts more or less disappeared. In other words, memetic selection is literally choosing which memes to share/modify.

In the case of internet memes, “replication” is not a direct equivalent of what happens in the biological world. Viruses “reproduce” by infiltrating a cell of the host, using the mechanisms of the cell to produce more viruses, until the cell releases the viral particles (and usually dies). None of that happens for memes (thankfully! I’d hate it if my head exploded each time I learn something new…). Replication for memes means the reposting, sharing, forwarding, etc., of a meme. This is primarily what we refer to when we say that a meme has “gone viral”: we mean that the meme spreads fast, like a virus.

Produsage

As we also saw in the previous chapter, internet memes are associated with the rise of social media and more generally of the web 2.0, that is, the active participation of the users in the production of content. The concept of produsage (Bruns, 2008), a portmanteau word consisting of production + usage, well describes the idea of user-led production of cultural artifacts (memes). Contrast, for example, a product, like Microsoft Word, or a script of a movie. These products are meant to be used, or enjoyed, rather passively. One can marginally customize MSWord, but, by and large, the software or the movie are finished products to be used.

Introduction

On International Women's Day, 8 March 2017, the Argentinean feminist movement #NiUnaMenos presented their manifest #NosotrasParamos—#WeStrike. In it they state:

The feminist mobilization against feminicide represented “un grito común” (a united outcry)—while also mourning the members it has lost to feminicide and violence against LGBTIQA+. It is this act of mourning that articulated the affective labor involved in the political manifestation against violence, voiced by the feminist strike of #NiUnaMenos. Women of all occupations went on strike for one hour in Argentina, initiating a social movement that went viral. The manifesto of #NiUnaMenos #NosotrasParamos—#WeStrike was written and signed by several political organizations, from grassroots groups to trade unions. It offers an analysis of violence against women as a specific articulation of contemporary neoliberal capitalism in Latin America and the women's strike as its political counterforce. This movement manifests a new potentiality of the political and resistance to structural cruelty (Gago 2020).

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the communal labor of mourning as political work against racist violence in Germany between the 1980s and the beginning of the millennium by naming, remembering and unraveling moments of antiracist resistance. Reconstructing some of the numerous acts of racist violence that have occurred in East and West Germany before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, I listen to accounts of grief and resistance and bear witness to the communal political labor of mourning of the families, relatives and friends of those who lost their lives, as well as the activist network NSU Komplex auflösen (Unraveling the NSU Complex).

Initiating Memory

Until recently, the memory of racist attacks and murders that occurred in East and West Germany in the early 1980s had faded into oblivion. In the aftermath of the creation of the Tribunal NSU Komplex auflösen / Unraveling the NSU Complex (2017), initiatives memorializing racialized and migrantized persons who lost their lives in racist attacks were formed. These initiatives join other projects of remembrance of the victims of racist attacks in the 1990s and early 2000s. To follow, we will attend to their communal political labor of mourning.

Naming racist attacks: 1980s Western Germany

Postwar Western German society has been characterized by different migratory movements, from German refugees arriving immediately after WWII in Western Germany, fleeing from formey occupied territories in Eastern Europe to the systematic recruitment of Gastarbeiter from Turkey, Italy, Greece, Spain, Yugoslavia, Morocco, Tunisia and Portugal between 1955 and 1973 as well as miners and nurses from South Korea from the late 1950s onwards. During this time, the number of migrant workers from these countries increased from 280,000 in 1960 to 2.6 million in 1973. In the 1980s and 1990s, refugees, particularly from the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and other countries of the Middle East, also arrived in Germany. The moderate increase of migrant workers in relation to the German population in the early 1980s was perceived as a threat to German society in public political debates. Fueling what came to be known as Ausländerfeindlichkeit (hostility to foreigners), the dominant political parties proposed curbing migration by restricting family reunification for migrant families. To this end, a reward scheme (Rückkehrprämien) was proposed for Gastarbeiter to hasten their return to their countries of origin in exchange for a lump sum of money (Thym 2018).

This final part of the book attempts to cast some light on some of the darkest, most disturbing corners of the internet.

The first chapter of this part, “The use of humor by the alt.right,” considers its strategy used to recruit new followers to present their propaganda under the guise of humor, taking advantage of the retractability of humor (“I was just kidding”).

The second chapter considers some of the humor on 4chan, a website that allows anonymous posting. In particular, we examine the practice of trolling that is, the posting of deliberately inflammatory posts to elicit outrage, and lulz, the laughing at the victim of a trolling incident.

The last chapter considers the adoption of cartoon mascots by right wing groups.

In many ways, these were the hardest chapters to write. One of the nice perks of studying humor is that one's data tend to be fun, amusing and entertaining. The humor we will consider in this section is rarely so wholesome. In fact, short of snuff movies, it comprises some of the vilest, most disgusting, most depressing material in circulation. Yet it is crucial that it be examined and brought out into the light.

Nietzsche said: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster … for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.” As I delved into the cesspool of the alt-right humor, I found myself fondly remembering the “asteroid for president” memes I had seen in 2020 (Figure P4.1). Perhaps humanity is not worth saving, if we go by these specimens.

It is very difficult to maintain a detached, objective, dare I say, scientific stance when dealing with this sort of material. I tried my best to do so, because to simply reject trolling or racist humor as not funny means forgoing the possibility of understanding the phenomenon and/or understanding why some people find it funny, let alone what they do with it. Having said this, I will issue a blanket disclaimer: I do not endorse, approve or even find funny any of the humor discussed in this part. So, holding our noses pinched firmly shut, let's dive in.

Coining “Afrocentric”

What I have offered in this analysis is a clearer lens for examining Du Bois’ scholarship, particularly as it pertains to notions of cultural-political centeredness. As aforementioned, The World and Africa is an important text when considering the time in which it was written and the issues that it raises. However, Du Bois’ scholarship was often seriously limited by Eurocentric ideals of civilization and progress. In his early year, such shortcomings were clearly displayed in the lexicon he chose to describe African people and their social, political and economic conditions. Further, he was not able to produce within the text a cultural-historical matrix and, without such, his arguments for political unity became somewhat superficial. To base an argument for unity purely based on the circumstances of a common oppressor limits the range of agency for African people.

To be sure, it is certain that unity in the face of shared oppression can occur between even the most antithetical of groups. However, Du Bois, to the best of his ability, penned a history of the African world. He intended to use this history as the basis of his argument for what it meant historically to be an African person and how African people have contributed to world history. Thus, Du Bois was acknowledging some notion of a composite African ontology comprised of various historical and contemporary African groups. His analysis displayed some understanding of historical cross-cultural relationships within the African continent, particularly as it related to his discussion of the Bantu migration. Du Bois would attempt in the last chapter, and in several works following this text, to use this historical argument of the achievement and character of the composite African identity in order to argue for Pan-African unity.

This argument involves a useful cultural composite illustration that is no different from the historical-cultural connections, and modern sociopolitical unity, Du Bois mentions in the earlier chapters of The World and Africa regarding Europeans. Nevertheless, Du Bois failed to capitalize on the cultural argument regarding African people and instead focused more so on arguments which could valorize Africa to the Western world. This effectively weakened his contention that African people should seek to “save” Africa.

Du Bois’ Andromeda Complex

The year was 1911; W. E. B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk had apparently found itself on the international scene and drew a response from J. E. Casley Hayford, one of coastal Africa's most prominent theorists of Ethiopianism—a social-cultural movement that was partly religious and centered Ethiopia as the redeemer of the African race. Hayford wrote in his manifesto, Ethiopia Unbound, a critical response to Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness, and regarded the theory as “one of the most pathetic passages in the history of human thought.” Du Bois perceived “a world which wields him no true self-consciousness […] this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American and Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” This thinking apparently sat in sharp contrast with Hayford's self-conscious Ethiopianism. Hayford's retort was piercing:

Hayford's critique of Du Bois at this time differs very little from Carter G. Woodson's indictment decades later in which he proclaimed that, ostensibly unlike Du Bois, he didn't “accept the gifts of the Greeks.” This, of course, was in response to Du Bois’ position that he must make use of the money, and, subsequently, the opinions that came from with that money, being offered by whites in order to create the Encyclopedia of the Negro. To be fair, Du Bois too was quite critical about the project and viewed the whites who headed it as “the enemy.”

Consider the following headlines:

• 1) Louisiana Man Arrested for Possession of Too Many Sharks, Meth in Bayou

• 2) Drunk Partygoer Falls Off Roof Attempting To Jump Off Roof

• 3) Embryos can be listed as dependents on tax returns, Georgia rules

• 4) Police Did Great Job, Police Say

• 5) Upset over LGBTQ books, a Michigan town defunds its library in tax vote

• 6) Study Finds Fewer Millennials Choosing To Become Good Parents

• 7) Meta warns its new chatbot may not tell you the truth

• 8) Biden: U.S. Won't Rest Until Brittney Griner Returned Home To Serve Marijuana Possession Sentence

Which ones are real headlines from real newspapers and which are fake headlines published in the Onion, the famous satirical news website? The answers are in this footnote. The very fact that a quiz like the one above is possible and the very real probability that you—dear reader—will get some of the answers wrong is one of the biggest differences between humor in the digital age and humor “before the internet.” But before we get to this, let's back up a little and start by defining what defines satirical news as opposed to fake and real news.

Wikipedia's definition of Satirical News Website is as follows:

Wikipedia gets it right: satirical websites pretend to be the news to satirize the news or the newsmakers. Fake news websites pretend to be the news to trick their readers into believing something false or misleading and/or profit from their attention, either through advertising exposure (ads on the same page) or pay-per-click payments.

Introduction: (Con)Dolence and Accountability

Gina Best describes the unintelligible pain of losing her 27-year-old daughter India Kager in the webinar “Under the Blacklight: Say Her Name—Telling Stories of State Violence & Public Silence” (Pt. 11) on 17 June 2020, organized by the #SayHerName campaign, Kimberlé Crenshaw, the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy at the Columbia Law School. I listen at home while Best recalls that India and her partner Angelo Perry visited his family 5 September 2015 to introduce Roman, their four-month-old baby, to them. After the visit, they were sitting in a Walmart parking lot when police officers fired 50 bullets into their car. Angelo and India were killed immediately; Roman was left disabled and now lives with his grandmother, Gina.

The police failed to immediately inform Kager's family about her killing, leaving her body on the ground of the parking lot overnight. In a statement, the police admitted that India and Angelo were killed because they mistook the latter for a wanted offender (Pt. 11). In the webinar, Best raises questions about the police's responsibility for the murder of her daughter, the failure to care for her dead body and the negligence displayed in dealing with the families’ grief and need for information, clarification and a thorough investigation. India “was in her own car with her own baby, going about her life” (ibid.); thus the question of why her life was violently ended by police brutality remains unanswered.