Ivo Nieuwenhuis implores us to take comedy seriously and to think deeply about humour scandals

Ivo Nieuwenhuis works as a Professor of Dutch literature at Radboud University in The Netherlands. He’s also a comedy critic for the national Dutch newspaper Trouw. He’s currently writing about the politics of humour, with a specific focus on humour’s political implications in terms of gender, race, and class relations. We talked about these implications, and the unresolved question of whether humour is inherently subversive, or just as often conservative and regressive. He’s published a bunch of articles on these subjects, but a main focal point of our dialogue was this new issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies that he co-edited with Dick Zjip, which contains some new approaches to the politics of comedy. The reason this issue is so exciting is that it comes at a time when, as Nieuwenhuis explains, the “post-political” worldview that characterized the zenith of liberalism has been supplanted by a sort of “hyper-politics,” the point-of-no-return moment we now occupy where everything is inescapably political and a more diverse panoply of funny voices can be heard in comedy. And one of the things Nieuwenhuis points out in this conversation is that while “there has always been humour,” it is “very difficult today” to be “humorless.” In today’s system of compulsive entrepreneurialism where cultural capital is a question of social survival, the “saturation of every aspect of life with comedy” has reached a unique stage. If comedy is everywhere and if humour is an obligation, can we still be critical about it? When we’re surrounded by forms of funny communication that are predicated on boundary-pushing and offensiveness, do we have to look at it as “brave” or “challenging,” or can we speak up and shut it down? This obviously opens onto this thorny situation that’s been crudely dubbed “cancel culture,” which we note is not just about cancellation of certain kinds of humour, but as often about the emergence of new comedic styles that do consciously criticize conventions in comedy. Fundamentally, Ivo says, comedy is still about power, but not in the assumed way that it’s typically been thought about: yes, comedy can challenge dominant power structures, but it can also, and often does, reinforce them… in fact, Ivo suggests that both things can often happen in the same comedy special! Because, as he points out, the “form [itself] is very persuasive,” we need to, as audiences and avowed appreciators of comedy, be critical about the “aggressive side” of humour, and the co-optation of its truth-telling function for pernicious purposes. Ivo is sort of an expert in the history of humour scandals. In this interview we talk about these moments as “flashpoints” – controversies that emerge as a way of allowing us to assess changing cultural norms. Politicizing mockery which claims that derisive stereotypes are somehow a form of inclusion, we look at the controversy surrounding Dave Chappelle’s horribly transphobic and unfunny Netflix special The Closer, we talk briefly about the flashpoint of Joe Rogan being officially sponsored by Spotify, among other key sites of struggle over what’s acceptable in comedy and what constitutes overt hate speech. And, beyond that, how the debate itself has been both accelerated by and attenuated by algorithmic media and platform capitalism, where corporations like Netflix and Spotify, ByteDance and Google, and an increasing number of other Silicon Valley behemoths, “make money from our debates.” It’s tough to know how to proceed in this context, when we feel compelled to identify and confront the defensiveness of the old guard, knowing that our discourse has been captured by a “binary model” that encourages individuated clashes for cash. The point, in part, is just to be conscious of how we’re ensnared, and go from there.