No more jokes: Comic complexity, Adult Swim and a political aesthetic model of humour

Abstract

For such a complex cultural form, the politics of humour have historically been understood in highly reductive terms: either as an abstract political function (e.g. carnival or ridicule) or as a simple formal flourish that can be pressed into the service of any cause. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams and Jacques Rancière, I argue instead for a ‘political aesthetic’ model that grasps humour as a cultural formation, the politics of which cannot be determined in advance or in the abstract but only understood in relation to the political, economic and social elements of a wider conjuncture. This political aesthetic approach will be illustrated through a case study of the historical development of the internationally distributed Adult Swim programming block: an example of how shifts in economic and technological context can lead to shifts in the political meaning of a persistent comic aesthetic. At the forefront of an emergent comic formation in the early 2000s, Adult Swim’s once niche comic aesthetic now informs dominant models of online humour in ways that threaten to mitigate, or even reverse, the critical cultural politics of its earlier iterations.