Uncivil Mirth and Agonistic Respect: From the Stage to the Street

Whether on stage or on the street, changing social norms mean that ‘punching-down’ at social minorities is more widely regarded as unacceptable and unfunny. Our paper opens by reflecting on contemporary controversies over offensive humour by engaging with the stand-up comedy of Hannah Gadsby and Dave Chappelle in the context of the so-called ‘free-speech crisis.’ In this context, as Emily McTernan (2023) argues in On Taking Offence, taking offence at transphobic or misogynistic jokes can be an important way of defending one’s standing and resisting everyday social inequalities. However, self-avowed defenders of free speech often object to the perceived policing of public discourse (and people’s fun) by a censorious and sanctimonious liberal-left that is said to be strangling comedy. In practice, however, taking offence at jokes is not the exclusive purview of ‘woke’ audiences, as the furore over comedic references to the murder of Charlie Kirk demonstrates. We consider the political significance of offensive humour in terms of the concept of agonistic respect. Chantal Mouffe employs the concept of agonistic respect to recognise how those social and political norms, according to which we appear respectful (or disrespectful) to each other, are themselves contested and produced through our political interaction. From the perspective of radical democracy, civility is thus not only a condition of possibility for politics but also an achievement of politics. While the concept of agonistic respect provides an important opening for a radical theory of civility, however, some important objections have been raised. For one, it does not attend sufficiently to the unequal distribution of the burdens of civility: how the impact of civic contestation is disproportionately borne by members of oppressed groups whose civic standing is precisely what is often at stake in offensive humour. Moreover, it places an unwarranted faith in the emancipatory potential of political contestation rather than recognising its potential to intensify social inequalities. We address these criticisms by examining how offensive humour has the potential not only to violate democratic social norms but to constitute a space for politics through adopting a humorous rather than a serious disposition. We interpret the stand-up comedy of Hannah Gadsby and Dave Chapelle in terms of the incongruity theory of humour, according to which humour thrives on problematizing our norms of how the world should be, inventing situations that subvert or rattle those norms. In doing so, we aim to differentiate a radial conception of civility based on agonistic respect from what Tersea Bejan calls ‘mere civility’.