Just a Joke? Humour, Gender and Radical Right Populism in the Italian (Northern) League

Humour is one of the most fascinating, complex and ambiguous forms of human communication. Conceptually and linguistically, its power arises from the sudden appearance of an incongruous element that violates expected scripts, meanings and cognitive structures, thus producing a form of enjoyment (Tsakona & Popa, 2011). One of humour's deepest and oldest relationships is that with politics: from ancient Greece to our contemporary era, humour has always played a crucial role in the representation of power and institutions (Wedderburn, 2021). Nowadays, humour is increasingly used in political communication (Brassett et al., 2021), being produced by a large and diversified spectrum of subjects in the public sphere, such as politicians, media, artists, but also common people (Morreal, 2005). Among this variety of subjects, the political family of the so-called populist radical right (PRR) (Mudde, 2007) seems to resort to it often in relation to two classic ingroup/outgroup and ideological markers: gender/sexuality and race/ethnicity (Brasset et al. 2021). From the numerous sexist outbursts of Trump to the anti-homosexual and/or anti-feminist jokes of Putin or Bolsonaro, the political use of sexist (and racist) jokes is becoming a habit in the contemporary political debate. However, in spite of its relevance, the topic seems to be largely ignored in the current scientific debate. With this paper, I aim to contribute to filling this gap, by focusing on the interplay between humour, gender and sexuality in an Italian PRR party. The Italian right has indeed been a political laboratory for the propagandistic, sexist and/or racist use of humour (Molé, 2013), particularly in relation to the key role played by some populist leaders (Belpoliti, 2009, 2012). More specifically, I will focus on the (Northern) League, one of the oldest and most voted-for formations of the European PRR, basing on a qualitative case study of a local branch, where I conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork. During my presence in the field, I started observing a frequent recourse to the humorous register in the interactions among militants, with strong sexual and gender connotations. This recurrence forced me to better scrutinize these "incidental" findings, in trying to answer the following questions: Why was humour so recurrent in the everyday interactions of the militants? What were its main contents and social functions? And how were these humorous performances connected to the broader ideology, identity and communicative style of the party? The paper proceeds as follows. Firstly, I connect the literature on PRR, humour, gender and organizational settings, exploring the interdisciplinary linkages between different debates. I then focus on my specific case study, discussing the eminent role played by the (Northern) League in the Italian switch to new populist, post-ideological and post-truth forms of political communication. After describing the research context and design, in the two empirical sections I illustrate the main findings and how the humoristic repertoires were employed in the local branch selected as case-study. In the final section, I reflect more broadly on the connections between humour, gender and PRR politics, sketching new lines of research.