Christopher J. Gilbert

Trumping Tropes with Joke(r)s: The Daily Show “Plays the Race Card”

The race card is at once a trope and a topic that reductively prefigures racial meaning and performance. As a trope, it frames most racial discourse as a cheat or violation and thus prevents deliberation over material realities of race. As a topic, it exists as a resource for diminishing the social and political significance of persistent racial problems. We argue that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (TDS) deploys political humor as a troping device that disrupts the contradictory logics of race card rhetoric and disorders a range of reductive commonplaces and figures of racial discourses. Specifically, we maintain that TDS pushes the boundaries of everyday negotiations of race, performs alternative conventions, and models manners of thinking, speaking, and acting useful for contemporary understandings of race. This essay therefore enhances the contemporary body of scholarship on politics and humor while expanding upon analyses of the rhetoricity of race and race relations.

Playing With Hitler: Downfall and Its Ludic Uptake

A few years after the release of the film Downfall (2004), which portrays Adolf Hitlers final stand and the subsequent fall of the Third Reich, so-called “Downfall parodies” overtook YouTube. The bulk of the parodies riff on a scene that has Hitler holed up in an underground bunker learning of the Russian armys breach of Berlin, recasting Hitlers outcry with subtitles that encompass the most politically consequential topics as well as the most trivial social matters. Given their multiplicity, plus their singular standpoints, the parodies constitute a unique instance in which the value of rhetorical play with Hitler can be examined in terms of representational (and, to be sure, misrepresentational) politics. This essay approaches the image of Hitler as a complex and collective articulation on which numerous representations converge. I argue in particular that, in playing with (texts) of Hitler, Downfall parodies trouble a powerful cultural configuration that operates on a dynamic, and indeed disturbing, interplay of dour historical realism and utter drollery.

In Dubiis Libertas: A Diogenic Attitude for a Politics of Distrust

Cynicism is generally considered anathema to democratic politics. This essay argues that it is a potential wellspring of constructive distrust. Diogenes of Sinope, the fountainhead of Cynic philosophy, is recollected as a means for recuperating cynicism as an attitude, and thus a mode of civic being, rather than simply a social condition. Particular attention is paid to the liberatory promise of the Cynic exercises of parrhesia (truth-telling), askesis (training), and ponos (hard work), as well as the use of chreiai (anecdotes) as critical rhetorical devices, in order to approach a more charitable and humane politics. Street and graffiti artist, Banksy, is situated as an important figure of contemporary cynic citizenship.

Standing Up to Combat Trauma

The trauma of combat is as much about the pain of war as it is about the painful return of soldiers to civic life. Of particular concern is the contemporary normalization of wounded warriors as ordinary occurrences in modern warfare. This essay engages the stand-up comedy of Bobby Henline, a severely injured veteran, in order to examine combat trauma as a problem not only of soldiers in arms, but also of a broader war culture. Henline is significant because he corrupts through his abject body the contours of bodily intelligibility, amplifying his own injuries as evidence of the instability of nationalistic appeals to the manliness of suffering through war and its aftermaths. In performing the (comic) ugliness of combat trauma, Henline exposes our (un)spoken and (un)seen constructions of able-bodied soldiers. Thus, while stand-up serves as a mode for enabling a disabled performer to both revile and make risible the social trauma of recovery, it also runs the risk of reifying as a personal problem the manly work of coming home. Consequently, Henline is approached as both a pleasure for and a pain on the body politic.

Rhetoric, Race, and Resentment: Whiteness and the New Days of Rage

With the 2008 election of the first African American president of the U.S., race as both subject and object has infiltrated national conversations in myriad ways. As the reality of his ascension unfolded, a counter challenge emerged. How does an enlightened society deal with the inherent contradictions of maintaining a rhetoric of racism, while insisting that the country has moved smoothly, virtually invisibly, into a postracial state? In their 2011 volume, Critical Rhetorics of Race, Michael Lacy and Kent Ono argue that altered cultural conditions and changing technologies have created new contexts for understanding the shifting performances of race and racism in contemporary discourse. As such, these conditions have signaled the emergence of a new “racial formation” invoked by Obama’s election that, in part, offers new permutations and revisions of old legacies of “racial projects from the past” (Lacy and Ono 3). While much scholarly inquiry has explored what goes into the construction of racial pathways of identity, little of that inquiry has considered the deliberate ways in which rhetoric has been used to foment racial hate and dissension. These expressions often reveal themselves not in the grand occasions of celebrated oratory, but in the familiar expressions surrounding us. As Keith Gilyard observed, “ . . . every use of language tells us something, often significant, about the user and human drama” (1). This symposium seeks to push harder past our understandings of what racism is, or how it manifests itself, to explore questions about how rhetoric has been used, with intentionality and skill, to disrupt a sense of “order and rightness,” even when these are in direct opposition to a public discourse that states otherwise (Royster 3). Yet because constructions of race and racism are inextricably tied to structures of power and privilege, it is important that rhetoricians peer deeply, even uncomfortably, into the ways that discursive, semiotic, and symbolic skill are being used to maintain those power structures at all costs. Rhetoric Review, Vol. 36, No. 4, 255–347, 2017 Copyright

The Ridiculous in Rhetorical Judgment

This essay makes a case for ridicule as a vehicle for humoring rhetorical judgments. With an eye to the “ugly,” the “laughable,” and the “distorted” as longstanding topoi for defying conventional appeals and wrongheaded standards, I build on contemporary interest in the politics of comedy by providing a provisional map of some of the tensions that emerge out of ridiculous appeals in public discourse. The general orientation is toward comic forms that seem to evidence the civic virtue in vulgarity. Specifically, this essay considers how ridicule bends the rules of rhetorical judgment in the formation (or reaffirmation) of cultural values. Stephen Colberts stunt in establishing a political action committee is put forth as an example of how particularly comic judgments test the grounds of what tends to pass for acceptable political speech. In addition, broader economies of ridicule are engaged in order to consider some of our current politics of offense, the importance of occasionally disidentifying with so-called common sense, and laughter as a powerful rhetorical force in judging matters. The essay closes with a critical reflection on the stress that comic ridicule seems to put on rhetorical judgment as a site of civic education.

The Press of War Imagery

At some point and somewhere in autumn 1862, poet Emily Dickinson saw a parade. The parade was a send-off for soldiers. One can imagine the scene: waving flags, hats, and handkerchiefs; gay explosions of drums and fifes; and companies of troops marching in lockstep before breaking with their regiments to bid families and friends goodbye. In short, one can imagine a spectacle. Dickinson herself was taken by the corruption of Pageantry—or, more specifically, the cooptation of vision. The spectacle, she wrote in “Inconceivably solemn!,” imposed “order on the eye,” leaving people pricked “by the very Press /Of Imagery” (Poems 437). Her observations are about not only how we make sense of what we see but also how war itself can become an ordinary way of seeing. Yet as she wrote in a letter to soldier, author, minister, and radical abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1863, war is an “oblique place” (Letters 423). On parade and thus in public displays, war comes at us indirectly, at angles, sideways, and distorted, even as it encircles us. The challenge is to see through imagery that imagines war askew. A capacity to see through war imagery—pervasive as it is in U.S. public culture— might require what Ned O’Gorman dubs an “iconoclastic imagination” about our most pressing images of warfare. A good deal of attention has been paid to modalities of seeing and watching armed conflict. Like much recent scholarship, the books under review here engage visual representations.1 They also operate on a normative

Bringing War Down to Earth: The Dialectic of Pity and Compassion in Doonesbury's View of Combat Trauma

Post-traumatic stress disorder among returning veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has invoked all manner of public responses, not least of which is a sense of pity that begins and ends with the moment of recognition. As such, the publicity of soldier sufferance ironically mitigates the need for a more complex socialization to the pain of war that might be animated by a more nuanced emotional response rooted in the disruption of common narratives about sacrifice, service, and heroism. This essay argues for the potential of Garry Trudeaus trilogy of cartoons, collected under the titles of The Long Road Home, The War Within, and Signature Wound, to depict a dialectic of pity and compassion while underscoring the inadequacies of discourses of trauma through the use of bathos—a verbal–visual descent that emphasizes the commonplace in the seemingly extraordinary through the trope of the ridiculous.

The Court of Comedy: Aristophanes, Rhetoric, and Democracy in Fifth-Century Athens

At a certain point in Acharnians (425 bce), Dicaepolis proclaims to the chorus that comedy can occasionally clarify what is right and good. Tellingly, Aristophaness protagonist adopts numerous rol...

TOWARD A COMEDIC COMMONS

configurable culture’s unique codes of resistance and structures of authenticity. Mash-up music is already a form of reverse cooptation, reconfiguring existing material manufactured by the dominant culture (this in contrast to Frank’s complication of the narrative pertaining to the dominant culture’s appropriation of ‘authentic’ 1960s countercultural codes) (pp. 189 192). All told, Mashed Up provides a necessary addition to emerging concerns within Cultural Studies regarding issues of intellectual property. The primary value of Sinnreich’s intervention within this conversation is his exploration of both the specifically legal and the broader discursive parameters of creative expression in mash-up music. The book is a significant contribution to studies of the reproduction of cultural objects in the digital age. Sinnreich provides a detailed account of configurable music culture’s reverberations in the realms of practice, industry and law, and the many generative questions he asks all point to areas where important work still needs be done.