On Analyzing Humor and the Right: Roundtable Discussion

A roundtable discussion on humor, which has increasingly become a prominent tool in right-wing politics and media ecosystems in the US and globally—from comedians, late-night shows, podcasts, and satirical outlets, to online platform rhetoric, far-right radicalization and meme cultures, and as an overt and covert form of political engagement and propaganda used by political leaders around the world. In turn, the deployment of humor is used to spread and normalize far-right ideas, affectively engage and enroll broader publics, and set social, political, and ideological agendas. As a result, such humor is centrally entangled with discourses and ideologies about race, gender, LGBTQI+ communities, immigration, climate change, white nationalism, political economy, and “anti-woke” politics.