Humor and Free Speech: Humor and Politics Meeting – March 31, 2015
For this theme, we discusses the 2004 mockumentary “The Confederate States of America” and Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”. We also considered contemporary French issues surrounding free speech and humor – namely, the Charlie Hebdo shootings and the comedy of Dieudonne M’bala M’bala. We had a brief presentation from one of our undergraduate students Daniel Stublen. He shared his senior thesis research in a short talk entitled “The Limits of Humor in France: a case study of comedian Dieudonné”. Our discussion was fairly serious, touching on issues such as slavery, racism and anti-Semitism and the role of political satire and comedy in either perpetuating or undermining xenophobia and other forms of intolerance.
