Some Critical Reflections About Politically Incorrect Humour at Contemporaneity

Abstract

Humour discourse and its mechanisms of working has been constantly presented within several instances of quotidian life nowadays (pedagogical methods should be fun, most of the advertising invests in a humorous approach, political manifestations should have good humour involved, amidst many others) and in the last decades the so-called "politically incorrect humour" gained featured and has generated numerous discussions about it, such as: the limits or restrictions that humour should have to follow; what could be considered humorous or not; and the conflicts between that type of humour and the political correctness, which can be comprehend both as a extreme policy of language, thoughts and behaviours or as something necessary to proceed a normalisation on the public sphere. From these questions, I sought to reflect what politically incorrect humour is about and its dialectical possibilities of producing meanings and ability of reinforcing or attacking the current order. Once humour is composed by contradictions (can be at the same time: universal and particular, reactionary and revolutionary, etc.), I present the politically incorrect humour torn between two poles (critical and uncritical) formalising common features and consequences of both possibilities to think critically about how politically incorrect humour can impact into the mode we subjectify and relate with the others and the world.

Discurso Humorístico Cínico na Contemporaneidade: Perspective Histórica e Análise Retórica do Discurso

“…Since, the essence of cynical humour is just restating ideas and stereotypes rooted long before into social body, helping not just to strengthen them, but keeping them as well. This attribute can also approach cynical humour to what one of the authors of this article named as uncritical politically incorrect humour (Gruda, 2015(Gruda, , 2017. However, despite of all those points mentioned, cynical humour produces much fewer opposing demonstrations once it is presented as only and supposedly being playful and fun, and thus it is less focused as the object of concern and on questioning social movements and organisations, which frequently occurs in Brazil with the uncritical politically incorrect humour.…”

“…Unlike, discourse is a privileged place for demonstration and explicit or implicit materialisation of ideologies with which it is linked (Orlandi, 1999). Among many different types of discourse, on this essay we will focus on humorous discourse, which has its own particular mechanisms and modes of operation (Attardo, 2014;Palmer, 1994;Possenti, 2010Possenti, , 2018 and it is widely spread and disseminated into current times (Lockyer & Pickering, 2005;Gruda, 2015Gruda, , 2017. Even around the 1980s, Lipovetsky (2005) already analysed the massive presence of humorous discourse contents and forms operating mainly within advertising and fashion spheres, because of that this author have concluded: contemporary society is a "humorous society".…”

“…Moreover, it is possible affirming that humour cannot be labelled as being only "this or that", once humour is dialectical it should be "this and that" at the same time. For examples, humour can be conservative and revolutionary, critical and uncritical, and those features depends on which ideologies humour is linked and on with what kind of discursive, social, and psychological consequences it is producing (Gruda, 2015(Gruda, , 2017. Stressing that humour is dialectical because of such paradoxical contradictions as being universal and particular, social and anti-social and being analysable and resistant to any analysis (Billig, 2005).…”