3103, 2015

Humor and Free Speech: Humor and Politics Meeting – March 31, 2015

Shaun King/ March 31, 2015/ Humor & Politics

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,

2402, 2015

Humor and Democracy: Humor and Politics Meeting – February 24, 2015

Shaun King/ February 24, 2015/ Humor & Politics

For this session, we discussed episodes of the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation and the BBC sitcom Yes, Prime Minister, with supplemental readings from The Onion. The conversation revolved around the limitations of democratic decisions-making identified in the different pieces. While Parks and Rec and the Onion articles mock the incompetence, ignorance or intolerance of the American electorate, Yes, Minister generally ridicules the corruption of bureaucrats and the weakness of elected officials. The list of episodes for the meeting was: Parks and RecreationSeason

2001, 2015

Humor and Totalitarianism: Humor and Politics Meeting – January 20, 2015

Shaun King/ January 20, 2015/ Humor & Politics

Our theme that month was “Humor and Totalitarianism” and we discussed the film The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin and the short play Largo Desolato by Vaclav Havel, with short theory selections from Hannah Arendt’s On Violence and Slavoj Zizek’s For they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. We compared Arendt’s account of jokes and laughter as undermining the authority of a totalitarian regime with Zizek’s more pessimistic view of entertainment as a way of maintaining the reigning ideology. We debated the meaning of the final speech in Chaplin’s

0412, 2014

Sex and Politics: Humor and Politics Meeting – December 4, 2014

Shaun King/ December 4, 2014/ Humor & Politics/ 0 comments

Our last meeting of 2014 was on the topic of “Sex and Politics” (suggested by one of our members) and we discussed Barry Levinson’s film Wag the Dog and Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Welcome to the Monkey House, with additional readings from Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. We looked at the role of sex scandals in American politics and whether the excessive attention to the private life of politicians is justified. We considered Freud’s theory about civilization and its basis in sexual repression and rechanneling of libido into more productive uses