"It's just a joke": Why We Need to Pay Attention to Far-Right Humour

The role of fear and anger in far-right communication is well-established. However, far-right actors are not mad all the time. As A.J. Bauer notes, “their feelings of racial and ideological superiority are often experienced as pleasure, joy, or levity”. Humour can play an important role in far-right communications. Here, we examine the use of humour in the online animated series Please Explain, created for the Australian far-right party Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

As we show in a forthcoming article in Television and New Media, humour serves to test the waters of social acceptability, and make exclusionary and supremacist discourses such as racism, transphobia, homophobia, and sexism more palatable to wider audiences by presenting it as “fun”.  

Importantly, “humour” and “jokes” are social constructs: they are indicated by the claims of the participants, rather than our aesthetic (or moral) preferences as authors. We treat the Please Explain series as an instance of far-right humour not because we think it is funny, but because its creators treat it as such.

“It’s just a joke” and far-right humour

Far-right communication tends to employ a range of direct and indirect strategies, including euphemistic and ambivalent utterances, coded language, and intensified and mitigated rhetoric to conceal the exclusionary nature of their messages and to bolster mainstream acceptability. One form of strategic communication is humour. While humour can positively impact social cohesion by generating feelings of enjoyment through shared laughter, it can also be used to divide and marginalise, constructing and maintaining social distance and inequalities.

What makes humour particularly useful to the far right is, as Raúl Pérez writes, the meta-discourse of “it’s just a joke”, which justifies and excuses content that might otherwise be socially unacceptable. For example, racist joking is recast as merely (or at least primarily) a means of enjoyment, wherein the ironic distance afforded by humour is an attempt to shield the joke teller from accusations of racism by deflecting critics as humourless.

In this way, humour enables individuals to say things that might otherwise be considered inappropriate, testing the acceptability of exclusionary and supremacist sentiments, presented as unserious, and therefore harmless. At the same time, it serves to normalise such sentiments by signalling to audiences that these expressions are or should be acceptable.

Right-wing comedy has become a serious and significant cultural force, especially in the United States. As Sienkiewicz and Marx observe, right-wing comedy in the US has become a “robust, financially lucrative, and politically impactful” industry. Please Explain is a unique development in far-right comedy, given that it is a cartoon produced explicitly for political advertising and campaign purposes, by a political party.

Humour and racism in Please Explain

Described by One Nation as a “humorous yet sobering glimpse into the Australian political arena”, the series launched on YouTube and other social media in November 2021. In the series, the Australian parliament is re-imagined as an unruly classroom with far-right politician Pauline Hanson as the teacher. Each of the 2–3-minute episodes is structured around a particular theme or issue, ranging from the inane (“Please Explain Taxes”) to the explicitly ideological (“Please Explain The Woke Mind Virus”).

Through the Please Explain series, racism, and specifically, anti-Indigenous racism, is especially prevalent, and speaks to party founder and leader Pauline Hanson’s long-running anti-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander politics. For example, one episode mocks the 2008 Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples, a formal apology by Labor PM Kevin Rudd which acknowledged the harm caused by the forceful removal of Indigenous children from their families and community. In the Please Explain episode, the Apology is reframed as a performance of “wokeness” and anti-white self-flagellation by Australian progressives, rather than a historic symbolic gesture towards reconciliation. At the same time, the “joke” serves to reproduce a common far-right talking point in Australia, that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are not marginalised, but rather a “privileged minority”.

Elsewhere, the series uses more coded racist humour. For example, in one episode, Malaysian-Australian Senator Penny Wong is asked “what’s wong Penny?”. In another, the character of then-Coalition Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who is Jewish, is cast in the role of greedy banker in a game of Monopoly. Both “jokes” play to racist cues: disparaging accents and alternative pronunciations for English second-language speakers in the case of the Wong joke; antisemitic tropes of Jewish usury and control of finance in the case of Frydenberg.

Yet both have an element of plausible deniability and are open to multiple interpretations. To some, “what’s wong Penny?” may be seen as a harmless and playful pun on Senator Wong’s rhyming surname, whereas others may interpret it as anti-Asian ridicule. Likewise, One Nation against charges of antisemitism may argue that Frydenberg was characterised as the greedy banker due to his then-portfolio responsibilities as Treasurer, not because he is Jewish. This connects to the broader far-right communication strategy of ‘calculated ambivalence’ which, as Engel and Wodak explain, allows the far right to speak to multiple audiences simultaneously in a single message or utterance. If confronted with charges of racism, fans and the creators of the series can fall back on the logic of the ‘just a joke’ meta-discourse; deflecting such criticism by maintaining that some audience members simply lack the necessary sense of humour to appreciate Please Explain. This presence of doubt and ambiguity has utility for the far right in appealing to their base, while broadening their mainstream appeal and acceptability. It’s also a particularly potent argument in the Australian context given the centrality of humour to Australian cultural myths where being able to “take a joke” is an essential part of the larrikin spirit.

Why far-right humour matters

As the case of Please Explain shows, humour can be a powerful tool in the strategic communication arsenal of the contemporary far right. The comedic distance encapsulated by “it’s just a joke” helps deflect accusations of bigotry, while tempering the exclusionary nature of the content, making it more palatable to non-far-right audiences.

Importantly, much of this content is largely taboo in an Australian setting, and would attract significant criticism if communicated in a different and more “serious” setting, like a press conference or even a regular social media post. The strategic use of humour also helps the far right to present racism as a topic it is appropriate to joke about. In this way, far-right humour stretches the boundaries of what can be said in mainstream political discourse, and by extension the legitimacy of their ideology. As a core feature of the far right’s mainstreaming strategy, we need to be taking their use of humour seriously.