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‘Humour is Serious’ as a GeopoliticalSpeech Act: IMDb Film Reviews of SachaBaron Cohen's The DictatorJuha Ridanpää aa Department of Geography , University of Oulu , FinlandPublished online: 10 Feb 2014.

To cite this article: Juha Ridanpää (2014) ‘Humour is Serious’ as a Geopolitical Speech Act:IMDb Film Reviews of Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator , Geopolitics, 19:1, 140-160, DOI:10.1080/14650045.2013.829819

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Geopolitics, 19:140–160, 2014Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 onlineDOI: 10.1080/14650045.2013.829819

‘Humour is Serious’ as a Geopolitical SpeechAct: IMDb Film Reviews of Sacha Baron

Cohen’s The Dictator

JUHA RIDANPÄÄDepartment of Geography, University of Oulu, Finland

Humour is a manifold cultural institution through which societyand space become politicised. In this paper, the political natureof humour is discussed by dissecting the IMDb film reviews ofSacha Baron Cohen’s comedy, The Dictator (2012), a parodyof democracy in which the topics of racism, political incorrect-ness and sexism, as well as their relationship to the discourses ofNeo-Orientalism and the Global War on Terrorism, are present.The reviews are perceived as speech acts, which establish broaderinterpretative patterns through which audience may approach thequestions related to the serious and political aspects of humour.The analysis focuses on how the ‘humour is serious’ claim and sim-ilar arguments are expressed in order to condemn or support theuse of ‘immature’ and sophomoric humour within the context ofpolitically sensitive issues. Similarly, the paper scrutinises how IMDbfunctions as a stage on which opportunity for political participationbecomes accessible.

INTRODUCTION

The argument over how popular culture diverts people’s manners of con-ceiving the geopolitical world – the key argument of contemporary populargeopolitics – has gained momentum during recent years.1 At the same timeinterest has been roused as to how humour, regardless of its seeminglyinnocent nature, functions in manifold ways as a cultural institution through

Address correspondence to Juha Ridanpää, Department of Geography, Box 3000, 90014University of Oulu, Finland. E-mail: juha.ridanpaa@oulu.fi

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‘Humour is Serious’ as a Geopolitical Speech Act 141

which society and space become politicised.2 Although humour can be per-ceived as a geopolitical tactic in which political processes become shiftedaway from the realm of serious, in the cross-disciplinary debate over thepolitical nature of humour there has been a strong emphasis on how consid-ering humour as an innocent cultural practice, as an antidote to seriousness,is a flawed viewpoint by its very premises and even that no such thingas innocent laughter exists.3 It is fair to argue that in this cross-disciplinaryresearch a specific notion has slowly formed which underscores that ‘humouris serious’, an argument which attempts to criticise the insulting, subordinat-ing, racist and misogynist speech used in humour.4 In addition, the ‘humouris serious’ claim also espouses the viewpoint that humour is a (geo)politicallyembedded institution, for example, in terms of how ethnic stereotypes areregenerated in humour used in the media as well as in everyday jokingas well as how the wider institution of social othering is simultaneouslymaintained.5

In this paper, the political nature of humour is discussed by dissect-ing the film reviews of Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest comedy, The Dictator(2012), a film in which the topics of racism, political incorrectness and sex-ism are constantly present. The focus is not on the content of the film assuch, but rather on the linguistic manners used by the reviewers in theirevaluations and conceptualisations of the film. The studied material consistsof 286 IMDb reviews, published between 1 May 2012 and 12 April 2013.Through applying speech act theory the material is approached as a set ofperformative acts which not only reflect the multitude of dissenting and con-fronting viewpoints about the question of the seriousness of humour, but alsoput the processes of the politicisation of humour into operation. The analy-sis focuses on how the ‘humour is serious’ claim and similar arguments areexpressed both explicitly and implicitly in order to establish interpretativepatterns through which the matter of discussing politically sensitive issuesthrough the use of ‘immature’ and sophomoric humour is a) condemned orb) supported. The specific focus here is on the literary utterances throughwhich the condemnation or approval of humour becomes politicised, how(socio-)political settlements direct the manner in which the spectators maketheir statements concerning the humour in the film, and vice versa, howthe tastefulness/tastelessness of humour directs the political nature of theirargumentation. This includes discussions about the multifaceted nature ofneo-Orientalism, racism and sexism with the underlying question of on whatgrounds can the same joke be interpreted as an insulting and subordinat-ing or alternatively as socio-politically critical and emancipatory practice?Film reviews are perceived as storied interventions which construct widerschemes for approaching the politics of humour, a kind of interpretative‘guide book’ which the audience can use to evaluate the political and seriousnature of humour.

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HUMOUR IS POLITICAL, HUMOUR IS SERIOUS

The theorisation of humour has been executed mainly from four differ-ent perspectives. In the socially critical point of view, or what Sev’er andUngar call ‘power-based approaches’, humour is perceived as an activeparticipant in the processes where social inequality is maintained.6 Theother approaches include psychoanalytic theories, sociological approaches,in which humour’s communal role is emphasised, and classic incongruitytheories.7 When dissecting the debate on ‘power-based approaches’, espe-cially those in which the practices of humour and geopolitical processeshave been combined, it is notable how the emphasis has been on the seri-ous nature of humour, and how at the same time a new argument challengingthe assumption that humour is inherently good has gained credence. Lockyerand Pickering reason thus on the basis of three arguments: that humour caninjure people’s social standing, that humour can have serious political impli-cations and repercussions, and that humour is a distinct, universal modalityof human interaction.8 This argument about how ‘humour is serious’ includesanother argument as an implicit consequence, that humour should be takenmore seriously in critical research. Dodds and Kirby highlight how humouris a matter of concern which should be discussed more in critical geopoliticsand should be ‘taken seriously’, and also how laughter as well as unlaughtercontribute to the ways geopolitical subjectivities become made.9

In similar fashion to popular culture in general, humour can also beperceived as an example of what the banality of politics means in prac-tice. Humour is constantly employed in our everyday routines: we joke allthe time, we narrativise our personal histories through joking, while at thesame time we consume various products of the entertainment industry whichderive their attraction value from the inherent nature of human beings to gainpleasure from laughing. Still, recent critical debate on humour emphasises itsserious nature, and the focus has especially turned more and more towardsquestions about the limits of tolerance.10 Discussion about the Muhammedcartoon controversy has probably been the most flagrant example of this,and serves as an example of how confronting the viewpoints of the limits ofhumour ballooned into an international geopolitical crisis.11 Especially note-worthy in the Muhammed cartoon controversy was how humour turned froma mundane everyday practice into a political question on which basically allhigh-level administrative organs around the world had to take an ‘official’stance and pronounced their serious opinions.12

The serious aspect of humour and its relationship to political issueshas often been illustrated through the discourse over racist humour. Forinstance Billig has used the example of the racist jokes of the Ku KluxKlan in order to illustrate how humour and extreme political hatred becomeeasily entwined.13 Billig suggests that the playfulness of racist jokes and seri-ousness of hatred should not be separated from each other, since such a

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categorisation legitimises the usage of the ‘just a joke’ claim as an excusefor racism. ‘Only joking’ is a rhetorical device upon which offensive comicdiscourse relies.14 The racist jokes of leading politicians, recently often exem-plified by those of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, havegained critical attention and provoked a general discussion over the seri-ous or dark nature of humour.15 Humour may also contain a meta-mode ofseriousness, a certain meta-discourse, which, as for instance in the case ofthe racist jokes of the Ku Klux Klan, do not claim to be ‘just a joke’ but ratherexplicitly underline how a joke is not ‘just a joke’ but a matter of consciousand goal-oriented act of racist hatred.16

It is crucial to emphasise that there exists no such thing as universalcode of laughter or commonly shared sense of humour. The choice to laughis executed within certain cultural, social and political contexts and situa-tions, and ultimately the manner of finding a joke politically charged is amatter of one’s geopolitical condition and own personal taste. It has beenhighlighted how manners of interpreting humour differ between nations andhow national identities and sense of humour are therefore deeply connectedto each other.17 For instance the sociolinguistic dimensions of Islamic humourmay often be difficult to catch for ‘westerners’.18 In addition, especially inthe case of irony, the line between what is serious and what is funny mayon many occasions become blurred. For instance, although the Muhammedcartoon controversy is commonly considered a highly serious geopoliticalepisode, in the Western media the incidents were surprisingly often reportedwith certain ironic nuances.19

Purcell, Brown and Gokmen approach humour as a form of popularculture in the creation of geopolitical world views and discuss several man-ifestations of the ‘power’ of humour.20 Although the seriousness of humourhas primarily been approached through perspectives in which humour isperceived critically as a harmful and dangerous ‘weapon’, there is alsoan opposing stance which highlights how humour may cause positiveeffects: “While comedy may offer potential for the subversion of binarystructures and may allow a release of unconscious anxieties, laughter sub-sides. Comedic discourse may reveal the unconscious anxieties that existtowards race, while doing nothing to permanently alter the dominant psy-chic, socio-linguistic schema through which we become subjects”.21 Thefunctional role of humour is underlined especially in psychological and soci-ological approaches.22 In classrooms laughter has been used as a teachingdevice in order to enhance interpretative and communicative skills as wellas to raise students’ consciousness and critical discussion of social issues.23

Similarly in popular geopolitics it has been highlighted that humour entailsthe potential of reframing serious political issues, such as the conflict overIsraeli-Palestinian relations, offering people the option to realise and laughat the ridiculous nature of the conflict.24 Thus humour becomes a uniqueclass, an alternate lens through which the world may be perceived. Humour

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has also been considered as a tool for postcolonial resistance, which can beput into practice in a self-conscious but also unconscious or semi-consciousmanner.25

FILM REVIEWS AND THE NEGOTIATION OF GEOPOLITICALWORLD VIEWS

The film industry plays a remarkable institutional role in the process of howhumour becomes politicised. Films function as socio-political agents whichdivert the manners in which people conceive the political world.26 As impor-tant as it is to study how political world views and their connection tolaughter become represented in the films, it is similarly important to scru-tinise how people receive and reflect on the political contents of the movies.The political nature of an individual movie review can be approached fromtwo perspectives. First, film reviews represent multiform and multi-voicedreflections on how people conceive their political environments. On theother hand, and of primary importance as concerns this paper, all filmreviews function simultaneously as ‘guide books’ for the audience, offeringmultiple ‘instructions’, essentially implicit orders, about how to dissect thefilm in question and thus how to understand the political meanings relatedto it. In this paper the emphasis is on how reviews represent more thanjust the reflections of reception: film reviews reciprocally produce intertex-tual knowledge, wider schemes and guidelines that help the audience tounderstand the political nature of specific films. Films are not received andevaluated ‘as they are’, but within and against wider contextual frameworksin which film reviews play their own part. In this paper the political natureof humour is approached not as a representative characteristic present incontemporary popular culture, but rather as a set of multidimensional inter-pretative patterns which become established through speech acts in popularmedia, that is, film reviews.

The concept of ‘speech act’ refers to John L. Austin’s theory on howthe usage of utterances is, by its nature, not only constative but alsoperformative, as an ‘act’ of doing something. As an illustrative example ofwhat speech act can mean in its clearest, Austin has used the wedding dedi-cation utterance ‘I do’ in which the pronouncing of two words functions asa performative implementation and legitimation of certain social structures.Austin distinguishes three categories of speech acts: 1) locutionary acts, inwhich senses and references are uttered, 2) illocutionary acts, utteranceswhich contain forcing impact (orders, assertions, declarations, apologies),and 3) perlocutionary acts, which push forward certain effects on the audi-ence, for instance by convincing, pleasing or embarrassing.27 According tospeech act theory, naming equals producing, which in political context refersto, for instance, how the declaration of political strategies equals putting

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them, in a performative sense, into action. In performative approaches it hasbeen emphasised how political processes are not just social constructions butrather performative acts, and how geopolitics as well as geopolitical research,on the whole, is related to the performance of political acts.28 Performanceis the conscious intent of politicisation through speech.29 In similar fashion ithas also been argued that humour is performative by its nature.30 For instancethe use of irony, as a speech act, is employed in order to produce certainperlocutionary effects on the receiving end, to break the patterns of expec-tation, to involve them “in a type of verbal interaction that is characterizedby interpersonal distance”.31

In recent geopolitical research Austin’s conceptualisation of ‘speech act’has functioned as a theoretical foundation for performative approaches, thatis, as a methodological viewpoint based on the logic of causality in which thenotion of naturally existing subjects is contested.32 Performative approachesbecame useful and used amidst dissatisfaction with discourse analysis andMichel Foucault’s ‘methodological archaeology’.33 Although there are obvi-ous differences between the goals of discourse analysis and performativeapproaches, there are also some shared viewpoints over how the processesof constructing meanings and structures are perceived. Where Foucaultdefines discourses as groups of signs, “practices that systematically form theobjects of which they speak”, Judith Butler has used the concept of per-formativity to refer to “the reiterative and citational practice through whichdiscourse produces the effects that it names”.34 Following Butler’s definition,film reviews can be approached as performative interventions, as speechacts through which the effects of political discourses become named andframed.

Carter and McCormack propose that there are three different ways orlogics in which cinematic intervention can simultaneously be geopoliticalintervention: First, in cinematic scripting, through the representational logicsof film; second, as a matter of production and reproduction of particulargeopolitical logics and ‘ways of seeing’; and third, through performative log-ics, as particular modes and styles of acting.35 In terms of how film reviewsmay function as geopolitical interventions, the recent development of theInternet has played a significant role. In the context of communicative dif-fusion and mobility the Internet has probably been the most innovativeinvention of all times. The Internet has changed the political world dra-matically, especially in terms of how the realm of possibility for politicalparticipance has expanded. The Internet is a stage for political performances,an interactive forum on which political interventions can be established,practically by anyone.36 In their study on Youtube.com comments sections,Purcell, Brown and Gokmen emphasise how the WWW offers an openentrance for many, if not all, people to participate and contribute to non-elite geopolitics.37 The possibilities of giving a (political) statement havebecome opened, although it must also be remembered that in several parts

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of the world the Internet is inaccessible, which has become a new subjectfor further geopolitical discussion.38

In the case of film reviews, IMDb acts as an extremely popular stageon which political interventions become established. IMDb is a massivelypopular website with 42 million registered users and over 100 million userseach month, a voluminous container of movie-related information, and alsoa semi-interactive forum for audience to evaluate, judge and criticise basi-cally everything there is going on in the movie world. Although reviews inIMDb do not respond to others’ comments, they do include discussion overcertain shared topics in which varying dissective opinions and viewpointsare presented. The geopolitical dimensions of IMDb have been approachedfrom several perspectives, and probably the most predominant viewpointhas been how IMDb represents a forum in which fandom functions as aresponse to geopolitical processes such as terrorism and counterterrorism.39

Klaus Dodds has interestingly analysed the geopolitical nature of IMDbreviews from the viewpoint of audience reception dispositions, discussinghow IMDb offers a forum for individuals, in this case ‘fans’, to establishtheir own geopolitical interpretations.40 This is a part of Dodds’s critiquethat the material of popular culture far too often has been analysed in pop-ular geopolitics through textual studies, with less focus on audiences andconsumers.41 Correspondingly, through analysing IMDb reviews of the post-9/11 superhero movies, Jason Dittmer brings forward an interesting idea asto how the visual effects of films and the critical awareness of the movieindustry’s political nature are linked with each other in a nonrepresen-tational manner.42 In this paper film reviews are approached against thebroader situational discourses within which the geopolitical nature of pop-ular culture becomes established and performed. IMDb is approached asthe voice of the audience, as a stage on which political performances areenabled and conveyed as ‘speech acts’, offering a possibility for individu-als to become political actors. This comes close to Bore’s argument on howIMDb offers a strategy for individuals investing subjective opinions with asense of authority.43

GEOPOLITICAL CONTEXTUALIZATION OF THE DICTATOR

The Dictator (2012) is an American comedy film, directed by Larry Charlesand starred by Sacha Baron Cohen. The film, a parody of democracy, is situ-ated in the imaginary oil-rich African nation of Wadiya, led by an oppressivedictator named Hafez Aladeen (Sacha Baron Cohen), interpreted as beinga ‘take off’ on Muammar Gaddafi, the late head of Libya. The main storyfocuses on the events after dictator Aladeen is summoned to a UN assemblyin New York to address concerns about his country’s nuclear weapons pro-gramme. The humour stems mainly from the incidents that occur after the

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highly racist and chauvinist Muslim dictator has to share, of necessity, his lifewith an anti-racist feminist in ‘free’ America. The film feasts, in more-or-lessimmature and sophomoric ways, on stereotypes of Islam culture, society andpolitics, at the same time, however, making fun of Western society and thesystem of American foreign policies, especially that of the Global War onTerrorism.

The parody on dictatorship, as an administrative system, starts right fromthe beginning of the film, as it begins with a dedication to the late NorthKorean dictator Kim Jong Il. To understand the political dimensions of TheDictator viewers must not only be acquainted with Islamic culture and pol-itics, but also be able to dissect them as the antithesis of Western society,as a continuum of Orientalism, or as a parody of it. In his seminal workOrientalism, Edward Said argued that ‘the East’, or the ‘Orient’, is funda-mentally a creation of colonialist imagination, an imagination through whichthe Western world has legitimised its superiority through evoking simpli-fied black and white juxtapositions between the East and the West.44 Oneof the key arguments of Said’s work concerns how several cultural institu-tions of Western history have systematically functioned to create stereotypedimages of the Orient as inferior and different in relation to the Westernworld. Depending on the viewpoints, contemporary popular representationsof the East can be approached either as (1) reflections of what is goingon in the modern political world, or (2) subordinating socio-cultural per-formances which create a bipolar confrontation between two imaginativecounterparts. Derek Gregory, among others, has highlighted how in simi-lar fashion a continuity of military and popular cultural images of the ‘waron terror’ and colonial Orientalist representations still exists.45 The phrasing‘banal neoimperialism’ reflects well how the social structures of Orientalismcan be found in several forms of popular culture, The Dictator being agood recent example.46 The ever-present overflowing racist humour in TheDictator constantly finds its roots in the heritage of Orientalism.

All the way from his earliest works, the artistic career of Sacha BaronCohen has been politicised.47 As apparent in basically all reviews, thefilm has generally been dissected against the earlier work of Sacha BaronCohen, especially the successful mockumentary Borat: Cultural Learningsof America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2008). The film,containing a huge amount of foolish, conjured stereotypes about Kazakhstan,provoked not only fierce criticism but also reactions at the administrativepolitical level. For instance the Kazakhstani government threatened legalaction due to the negative image of Kazakhstani culture and people, and thefilm was also banned, with the exception of Lebanon in the “Arab world”and the Russian government discouraged cinemas from showing the film.48

Similarly, among Central Asian critical researchers Borat was highly disap-proved of and perceived through the theories of Michel Foucault and EdwardSaid as a contemporary example of latent Orientalism.49 The criticism was

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directed at how, despite modern globalisation, Western popular culture stilldoes not allow Eastern peoples to speak on their own behalf, but rathercontinues establishing a mindset in which the West is perceived superior atthe expense of the East. All the controversy surrounding Borat constituteda background against which the political nature of The Dictator was inter-preted, evaluated and judged, which did not come as a surprise since evenin the official trailer it was commercialised as “from the creator of Borat”.

Themes in The Dictator are programmatically planned to be politicallyprovocative, but also, in reference to Borat, audience expectations werepolitically charged in advance. Censoring of the film took place in severalpost-Soviet countries, just as Baron Cohen’s earlier film Borat had causedfierce criticism and censorship. The film was banned by the political lead-ers of several post-Soviet countries like Belarus, Turkmenistan and Tajikistanbefore its global première and the film was also later banned by Pakistanand Malaysia. The fact that in Uzbekistan the film was only shortened bytwelve minutes by state censors, but still shown at cinemas, was consid-ered “strange”.50 Similarly, as in in Kazakhstan, the film became banned onlytwo weeks after its première, and not before that, which was considereda surprise, since showing Borat is still illicit in the country.51 The causesfor banning the film have been considered obvious but official statementshave been relatively rare. According to Tajik movie distributors, the film wasbanned in Tajikistan due to “the mentality of people”.52 Daler Davlatov ofthe Tatan distribution company in Tajikistan commented: “It’s wrong to com-pare us with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and with other countries. It’s incorrectbecause we have a different mentality”.53 Parallel and common interpretationof the film has been that the manners and gestures of the main characterin the film came too close to the modus operandi of Tajikistan’s presidentEmomali Rahmon as well as other ‘dictatorships’ of Central Asia.54 This wouldindicate that the political nature of the film exceeded the level of banalityalready before the film was even published, being an issue of debate onthe level of what Ó Tuathail terms ‘practical geopolitics’.55 Baron Cohen wasalso banned from promoting his movie on BBC TV shows if he intended towear the costume of the dictator Aladeen, as Baron Cohen had planned.56

Similarly, there was an attempt to prevent Baron Cohen from performinga ‘red carpet stunt’ at the 84th Academy Awards, to which he was invitedto attend as part of the cast of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, nominated for BestPicture.57

POLITICS OF SPEAKING OUT THE DICTATOR

The film reviews discussed in this paper consist of speeches with a varietyof interests, all the way from professional analytic reviews to more fan-basedemotional comments. The reviewers were able to express their nationality

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if they wished but, although there could be found certain correspondencesbetween informed nationalities of reviewers with respect to the way theyformulated their interpretations of the politics of humour, here the identitiesor any social, cultural or national positions are not considered as groundsfor making further interpretations.58 The following discussion focuses onthe reviews which explicitly concentrated on the political aspects of thefilm, although it is sometimes problematic to make a strict division betweenpolitical and non-political content. If humour and laughter are assumed to beinherently politically charged issues, then all the reviews in which humour iscriticised or commented on can be considered as politically charged speechacts, while on the other hand, the argument that no such thing as innocentlaughter exists is itself problematic in many ways. What here is defined as‘non-political’ criticism of humour, mainly concerned the cinematic qualitiesof the film as well as the (still surprisingly small amount of) reviews inwhich the humorous aspects of the film were praised without bringing uptheir political nature.

Condemnation of Political Satire

In the case of The Dictator, being politically offensive is axiomatic. The filmis meant to be politically incorrect, racist and sexist, and the entire contentand logic of the film stems not just from being politically insulting but alsofrom the discursive background of political insult itself. It seems like the filmwas self-consciously aware of being politically incorrect, racist and sexist,and proud of it. If one presumes that all entertainment should be correctregarding sensitive issues, negative feedback follows automatically. The factthat the film is apparently racist, sexist and politically incorrect effectivelywas an explanation for why it was considered poor in quality, a line ofreasoning continuously repeated in the reviews through the rhetoric acts ofcondemnation, scorn, accusation and insult.

The film contains dozens of gags in which the stereotypes attached tothe leaders of administrative systems of dictatorship are attached with thoseof Islamic culture. The examples of these consist for example of how DictatorAladeen makes his attendants cut throats in a most arbitrary way and in anyrandom situation imaginable – as all the dictators of the world obviously do.When Aladeen enters the political meeting in New York, he rides a camelthrough Fifth Avenue with tens of luxury sport cars behind him in his massiveentourage. One common stereotype related to the facial appearance of maleMuslims, the long beard, in this case mockingly imitating that of Osama BinLaden, is a distinctive feature of Aladeen and described as being ‘iconic’and ‘supreme’. The jokes are often based on easily recognisable stereotypesin which racism, political conflicts and cultural differences become mergedtogether. In the film reviews condemnation of humour became a rhetoricdevice through which criticism against Orientalism was performed. Accusing

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utterances such as “there is seriously nothing funny about this movie at all”,“it will only appeal to you if you are a racist, sexist, American or under 12 andthink poo and willy jokes are funny” (author: felix1966 from Montreal) putforward an interpretative pattern of reasoning about how racist humour isnot humour, but rather encompasses the argument that a viewer needs tobe a racist to like it: finding racist humour humorous is a contradiction orat least it represents behaviour which should be prejudged.59 Racist humouris often considered as an act of aggression, while on the other hand, thecondemning of racist humour often is performed through speech acts ofaggression. Critical comments often contained certain ‘rhetoric aggression’,for example in the form of short poignant sentences: “Torture is not funny,overt racism and stereotyping is not funny” (author: Dr Hilary Rhodes fromAustralia). Similarly, capital letters and strong accentuation of the argumentthrough the simplification of expression is often used in order to give more‘power’ to expressed arguments:

This movie is incredibly OFFENSIVE. To Muslims, to Indians, and toArabs. I feel very disgusted by this movie, and how they presented othernations. It is presenting Arabs as cruel, disgusting, “ride camels on dailybasis”, unsympathetic, etc. (author: Iman Salam)

Equivalency with the rhetoric devices commonly used in political demonstra-tions is obvious. In several reviews the mock and scorn of the low cinematicquality of the film was linked with the accusations directed at the poor, polit-ically incorrect, sense of humour. This became specifically clear in reviews inwhich it was highlighted how the film, in its overtly controversial manner, isdesperate to offend, “trying too hard to shock” (author: st-shot from UnitedStates); “the stereotypes were overdone and probably have been repeatedin a hundred other spoof movies or episodes of Family Guy” (author: KrishSwamy). It is important to stress that disliking the humour of The Dictator,especially the matter of how combining political topics with sophomorichumour often turned into allegations of stereotyping and racism, does notmean that political satire, as a film genre, was being condemned as such.In fact, surprisingly often it became evident that the audience expectedand wanted a good political satire, but The Dictator failed to fulfil [sic]their expectations: “It is absolutely not a bad idea to based the comic onUS-Middle East relationships, but the ‘masturbation’ joke had nothing to dowith it” (author: Monika Kadlecova from Czech Republic).

A critical discussion related to condemnation of ethnic and religioushumour was also aroused, which based its criticism on the problematicnature of Baron Cohen’s personal background. In Borat a huge part of thehumour stems from extreme hatred against the Jews, which, when reflectingon the geopolitical history of the past hundred years, sounds like an outra-geous and disgraceful idea. Making fun of Jews continues in The Dictator but

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in this case the humour stems mainly from the political conflict between theIslamic world and Israel. Aladeen has the intention of developing a nuclearweapon to bomb Israel, while in his free time he plays a first-person shootervideo game based on the Munich Olympics on Wii.60 At the end of the film,Aladeen falls in love with an anti-racist feminist from the United States, butwhen they are getting married, on the alter it is uncovered that his bride-to-be is in fact a Jew. During the last images of the film Aladeen smiles andhugs the bride, at the same time giving a signal to his attendants to cut herthroat. No matter how disgraceful the making fun of Jews is or is consid-ered to be, it is seemingly justified by the fact that Baron Cohen himself is aJew, so the politically dubious satire, can be interpreted as self-parody andthus Baron Cohen succeeds in side-stepping accusations of being racist.61

However some viewers did not buy this explanation and rather condemnedthe manner how one’s own ethnic background is used as an excuse for beingracist, sexist and politically insulting:

Even though I knew he is Jew I could never imagine he would use hisreligion to make jokes in such a patriotic and primitive way. I’m notreligious and I really don’t care what religion someone belongs to. I’malso not patriotic, I find patriotism something simply ridiculously infantile.But with The Dictator it is as if Mr. Cohen had a mission to show to theworld how impeccable Israel and the Jews are. (author: Bossa Nova fromBrazil/Austria)

“Film is garbage”, “piece of crap”, “grotesque and childish”, “gross and dis-gusting” – these were all continuously repeated utterances which function asattributes attached to the discourses of the contemporary political world, towhich the name of the film explicitly refers, and which also ‘teach’ us aboutthe ‘correct manner’ of laughing at politically delicate issues, albeit nevernecessarily condemning it entirely. In these utterances humour is taken seri-ously, politicised, but this politicity of the reviews does not simply mean thatif a film is via its topics thoroughly embedded in the world of contemporarypolitics, the natural reaction to evaluating it would automatically be to makepolitically charged statements. The logic here rather is that through thesereviews an interpretative framework becomes established, spoken out, onein which it is argued that making fun of serious issues is not funny, thattopics such as ethnicity, sexuality, religiousness or international relations arenot topics to laugh at, and that if they are, there exists certain models andlimits according to which the (specific type of) laughter must be performed.

Supporting Offensive Humour

In the IMDb reviews of The Dictator there were basically two logics used tosupport the political offensiveness and incorrectness of the film. First, there

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was the viewpoint in which being politically offensive was considered botha cause and a synonym for funniness. This viewpoint was constantly per-formed through utterances in which a certain form of requisite self-defencewas clearly present. In the other viewpoint it was either explicitly or implic-itly stated that Baron Cohen’s offensive mockery actually slyly goes beyondthe discourses of being politically offensive, functioning rather as criticismagainst predominant political values and the practices of stereotyping. In thisviewpoint the utterances were charged with the strong tones of praise andalso, interestingly, an implicit argument about how the matter of compre-hending Baron Cohen’s humour is ultimately a matter of the viewer’s ownindividual intelligence and wit. If the first perspective contains the decla-ration that humour, no matter how politically charged, is something whichshould not be taken that seriously, in the latter viewpoint the political dimen-sions of the film are perceived as being, in an affirmative and constructivemanner, something which needs to be taken seriously.

When the film audience takes a defensive stance towards the ques-tion of the insulting nature of political humour, by conveying argumentssuch as “those type of jokes are offensive, but that’s the entire point!”(author: nickmesafilms (nickmesafilms@yahoo.com) from the United States)and “political correctness is off the table . . . and that was exactly why Iwent to see this film” (author: stephen_r_mills from the United Kingdom), itis tempting to interpret these reviews as functioning as performances whichattempt to naturalise and justify the heritage of Orientalism, in a latent orhidden way.62 In these reviews it was commented repeatedly, and literally,that political offensiveness contains a causal connection with funniness:

He takes aim at everyone of every religion and skin colour, and whilesome would feel the need to act all high and righteous and condemnthe movie, most normal people will just laugh from the heart, and I did.(author: Glock22)

Although it was a commonly shared opinion that the film is, or attempts tobe political satire, its strength is considered to lie in its crude and silly char-acteristics, “willy jokes”, and in the manner in which the film succeeds tostrafe the line between hilarious and offensive. According to this viewpoint,Baron Cohen’s humour diverges from seriousness as far as possible, andalso, in similar fashion, it is considered to diverge from any intelligence orwit – a perspective which has to be pronounced as self-defence, as a rhetoriccounterstrike against those who construe politically charged humour auto-matically as an insult. A contrasting, and probably more interesting viewpointwas how Baron Cohen’s humour was considered not only politically chargedbut also, in a witty and positive way, as a work of genius:

The Star attraction is of course, the satire aspect. Other satires may baretheir political teeth, but The Dictator sinks its whole jaw into themes

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of racial oppression, the contradictory nature of democracy, the recentworld economic situation, the rise of China and its own brand of ‘democ-racy’ etc. It is intentionally crafted to tick off the right people and entertaineveryone else. Crude without being overly offensive. . . .

One downside is that this film does require the viewer to have a bitof knowledge of current world socio-political issues. Failing which, agood number of the jokes and jabs would just fly over the heads ofthe ignorant such as a rousing climatic speech by Aladeen extolling thevirtues of dictatorship. (It is not as straight forward as you think. Thosethat get it will get it good). (author: s-neaverson from United Kingdom)

Speaking out these kinds of arguments demands the presumption thateverything that Baron Cohen does is irony. In irony, presented words areunderstood as being in opposing contradiction with intended meanings,which become revealed only after the meanings are willingly ‘misunder-stood’. It has been argued that irony becomes suppressive in a situation whenit is not understood, when its target becomes embarrassed and humiliated.63

This leads to a highly important question concerning whom the laughterin the film is actually directed at. Although the composition of the filmclearly alludes that the mockery is pointed at the culture and political sys-tem of Islamic society, it was relatively often interpreted that the laughterin the film is equally or even more so in reference to Western, especiallyAmerican society: “What was refreshing was the way his character took aswipe at both Americans and Arabs simultaneously” (author: amahlanandfrom Australia). One illusive and often-mentioned example of this ‘simul-taneous swiping’ was a sequence in which Aladeen and his fellow, thehead nuclear scientist Nadal, take a helicopter ride over New York withtwo American tourists aboard. Aladeen and Nadal have a loud and tem-pestuous discussion, in “Arabic”, over how Aladeen had absolutely crashedhis Porsche 911 (pronounced here as nine/eleven) and how he planned tobuy a brand new “911, 2012”. After this they change the subject and discusshow they should see some of the sights, such as Empire State Building andYankee Stadium and also see the fireworks over the Statue of Liberty, withAladeen imitating load explosions, giving high fives to Nadal and then anevil smirk towards their American fellow travellers. The sequence ends whenNadal asks Aladeen about his back problems and Aladeen shows Nadal hisself-made back brace, which obviously looks more like the explosive beltof a suicide bomber, after which they start demonstrating their developedEnglish speaking skills by counting down from five. When they get to zero,American tourists start to scream and Aladeen and Nadal find themselvesarrested and in jail. It is left for the audience to decide whether the joke hereis on the terrorist activities of Al-Qaeda or Americans’ prejudices towardsthe Islam world.

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In the case of political sarcasm, the incongruity between what isexpected and what actually occurs requires a certain level of critical pon-dering over one’s own discursive structures. In this light, irony can functionas a strategy for ‘discourse politics’, a methodic possibility for breaking ordeconstructing the inter-textual structures of society,64 an emancipatory strat-egy directed at variant power relations.65 If Baron Cohen’s film is arguedto be a work of critical irony, and not just an immature sophomoric slap-stick comedy, at the same time it establishes the argument that the film isactually critical of sexism, racism and the common tendency to conceive theworld through mis-justified stereotypes and over-simplifications. One often-referenced example attached to this argument was the scene in which thedictator Aladeen was giving his speech explaining to the American audiencethe positive aspects of dictatorship:

Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1% of the peoplehave all the nation’s wealth. You could help your rich friends get richerby cutting their taxes and bailing them out when they gamble and lose.You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education.Your media would appear free but would secretly be controlled by oneperson and his family. You could wiretap phones, you could tortureforeign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie aboutwhy you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racialgroup and no one would complain! You could use the media to scare thepeople into supporting policies that are against their interests. I knowthis is hard for you Americans to imagine, but please try.

It is easy to admit that in this case the sarcasm is directed not at any dictator-ship around the world, but rather highlights the commonly voiced assumedflaws of American society. In the supporting reviews it was relatively oftenrepeated that the political sarcasm of the film had been misunderstood,which is linked to the general assumption that understanding irony requiresintelligence, sophistication and wit.66 By that means, these reviewers wantedto place themselves, in a way, above the ‘common’ audience while at thesame time praising the ingenuity of Baron Cohen’s humour. This perspectivepushes forward a strongly dissident viewpoint about how the film is actuallynot sexist, racist or stereotyping, but instead the exact opposite:

intention and basically the point of the film, if you can call it that, is toshow these types of racism, or intolerance to make people more awareof it in general and perhaps have a laugh about it while watching thefilm, but at the same time, feeling a little guilty and ashamed at ourselvesfor doing so. I think the message is clear that Cohen, is trying to shedlight on these issues and show just how foolish, or offensive someonecould look like, or sound behaving, or acting in this type of way andagain to make it more of a highlighted issue, so after the film audiences

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could talk about it and in some ways be informed about it a little more.There is certainly a message and method to Cohen’s madness. (author:cultfilmfan from Canada)

Thus Baron Cohen’s humour is considered to represent if not emancipatory,at least a certain level of educative impact and in this way the significance ofa film is considered to stand beyond the needs of the entertainment industry.Furthermore, the educative potential of humour is argued to be a seriousissue and, as insinuated in a review attached with a heading “Viva la Wadiya”,the film can actually be considered as the opposite of those contemporary“pointless rubbish” comedies, precisely what basically all the negative criticsconsider The Dictator to be:

Each one of Cohen’s films has explored a topic that is touchy andinstantly brews controversy, from stereotyping, xenophobia, homosexu-ality, and finally, varying political agendas. I have a feeling his work willgo on to be even more cherished as years descend into new ones, andcertain topics and disputes will have eventually simmered. Soon they willserve as time capsules for America’s touching naivety towards difference.(author: Steve Pulaski from United States)

The above reviews represent examples of what is usually not expected fromthe arguments in which the serious nature of humour is enunciated. Thesereviewers do not do what is expected and they re-hierarchise beyond expec-tations, two rules regarding which Janet Staiger terms a ‘perverse spectator’.67

Staiger has approached the politics of film reception with the concept of the‘perverse spectator’ in which perversion does not denote anything ‘cranky’or ‘peevish’, as in some dictionaries it has been defined, but rather signi-fying the willfulness of the spectator to turn away from the norm whilestill acknowledging its flipside: the spectator’s inability to do otherwise.68

Although perverted reception implies a political act, Staiger still emphasisesthat acting differently does not automatically equate to doing somethingpolitically progressive. Conceiving humour as innocent entertainment as wellas considering racist and insulting humour reprehensible both imply nor-mative modes of reception. But conceiving racist and insulting humour asconstructive and educative requires a more-or-less non-normative, ‘perverse’angle, one through which most of the audience could never even imagineinterpreting the film.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Although political discourses, policies and concrete decisions are commonlyestablished in the fields of practical and formal geopolitics, for ‘common

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people’ the geopolitical order becomes sensible and meaningful throughpopular culture.69 It provides an access to the events of the geopolitical worldin a simplified form, often ready digested and interpreted.70 The images ofconflict between East and West, the importance of the ‘war of terror’ andits connection to Islam as a religion, the iniquity embedded in dictator-ship as a political system – all these political discourses have entered thecommon consciousness through popular culture. Popular culture containsa massive amount of knowledge about our political world, which, throughits self-explanatory manner, is left unrecognised unless it is contextualised,conceptualised and spoken out.

In many cases the products of popular culture contain political mes-sages, but whether their intervening nature is acknowledged or not is amuch more complicated issue. In their study concerning the role of filmas an affective geopolitical assemblage, Carter and McCormack paid specificattention to how “geopolitical intervention is conventionally conceived as theoutcome of an elite form of popular practice, in which ‘the public’ does notreally figure”, and how “existing notions of intervention rarely consider therole of popular culture as an agent”.71 In the case of humour this becomeseven more problematic. In humour the motives of political intervening areoften un- or semi-intentional, presumable messages are often hidden andtheir contents left open to various degrees of interpretations. Whether theartist is politically incorrect for a specific, affirmative of destructive purpose,whether he/she conveys a political message or insult without any inten-tions – these are the questions which are often left purposefully open for theaudience to evaluate and interpret.

Humour is a politically embedded institution, a matter not so innocentas it would at the first glance seem, but the intention here has been toillustrate how the utterance that ‘humour is serious’ does not necessarilymean the same thing for different people. The same racist, sexist or politicallyincorrect joke can be perceived as innocent entertainment and not to betaken too seriously or as a socio-political highly relevant issue which needsto be taken seriously. In addition, as noted by Dodds and Kirby, there existvarious degrees of being politically insulting, and the question of whetherpolitically insulting or incorrect humour should be condemned or not isultimately a matter of individual choice.72 Still, as underlined in this paper, itis specifically these choices, individual interpretations, and their performativeexpressions which constitute the frameworks within which we make ourindividual interpretations.

IMDb represents a forum through which film watching becomes an actof politicisation. Van Zoonen has discussed how IMDb reviews offer a highlyinfluential route for people to perform their ‘political self’ or ‘selves’, empha-sising how the familiarity of IMDb performances can be seen “as evidencefor the position that popular cultural renditions of politics are a relevantand part and parcel of political sense-making and performances”.73 IMDb

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reviews function not only as a forum in which the political nature of themovie can be discussed, but also, like the Internet in general, as a stage onwhich the contextual frameworks for interpreting, evaluating and criticisingmovies become established. Recent changes in the Internet have opened thisaccess for more people around the world. It has been widely discussed how,for instance, new media tools have been adopted and have been allowed tobe adopted by general populations in the Middle East.74 This developmentcan also be observed from the IMDb forum, since more and more review-ers from outside ‘the Western World’ have entered to take their part in theconversation. Still, it has to be remembered that modern networks alongwith their forums are only ostensibly global, and are mainly used by Westernaudiences, produced by Western designers, and exist in order to serve theneeds of Western consumers.

Finding the laughter directed at the topics of racism, political incorrect-ness and sexism, and their relationship to the discourses of Neo-Orientalismand the Global War on Terrorism prejudicial or emancipatory, and espe-cially speaking out these opinions, means political entry, the establishmentof alternate interpretative patterns about the question of how the serious andpolitical nature of humour should be perceived, its serious nature acknowl-edged, legitimised or, more likely contested. This paper contributes to theunderstanding of how the politicisation of humour is ultimately a matter ofrhetoric acts, acts of doing something with your speech, of making the per-formances of naming equal to the practices of producing. As a speech act,politicisation of humour contains several illocutionary purposes which allsettle in their own ways upon the question of how seriously humour shouldbe taken. In film reviews there becomes established a multitude of opinionsand interpretations, at the same time diverting people’s manners of evaluat-ing films and their political nature. To disapprove, condemn, scorn or praise,all represent illocutionary speech acts in which humour becomes politicised,and problematise the claim that ‘humour is serious’.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola and the anonymous reviewers fortheir constructive comments and advice on this paper.

NOTES

1. J. Dittmer, Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Identity (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,Inc. 2010); J. Dittmer and K. Dodds, ‘Popular Geopolitics Past and Future: Fandom, Identities andAudiences’, Geopolitics 13/3 (2008); G. Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press 1996); J. Sharp, ‘Hegemony, Popular Culture and Geopolitics: The Reader’s Digest andthe Construction of Danger’, Political Geography 15/6-7 (1996).

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2. See D. Hammett, ‘Resistance, Power and Geopolitics in Zimbabwe’, Area 43/2 (2011); D. Purcell,M. Brown, and M. Gokmen, ‘Achmed the Dead Terrorist and Humor in Popular Geopolitics’, GeoJournal75/4 (2010); J. Ridanpää, ‘Geopolitics of Humour: The Muhammed Cartoon and the Kaltio Comic StripEpisode in Finland’, Geopolitics 14/4 (2009); J. Dittmer, ‘Humour at the Model United Nations: The Roleof Laughter in Constituting Geopolitical Assemblages’, Geopolitics 18/3 (2013).

3. See M. Kuus, ‘Švejkian Geopolitics: Subversive Obedience in Central Europe’, Geopolitics 13/2(2008); J. Palmer, Taking Humour Seriously (London: Routledge 1994).

4. See, e.g., P. D. Bougen, ‘Joking Apart: The Serious Side to the Accountant Stereotype’,Accounting, Organizations and Society 19/3 (1994); K. Dodds and P. Kirby, ‘It’s Not a Laughing Matter:Critical Geopolitics, Humour and Unlaughter’, Geopolitics 18/1 (2013); E. Zandberg, ‘Critical Laughter:Humor, Popular Culture and Israeli Holocaust Commemoration’, Media, Culture & Society 28/4 (2006).

5. Cf. L. G. Perks, ‘Polysemic Scaffolding: Explicating Discursive Clashes in Chapelle’s Show’,Communication, Culture and Critique 3/2 (2010).

6. A. Sev’er and S. Ungar, ‘No Laughing Matter: Boundaries of Gender-Based Humour in theClassroom’, Journal of Higher Education 68/1 (1997).

7. See more: R. R. Gouin, ‘What’s So Funny? Humor in Women’s Accounts of Their Involvementin Social Action’, Qualitative Research 4/1 (2004).

8. S. Lockyer and M. Pickering, ‘You Must Be Joking: The Sociological Critique of Humour andComic Media’, Sociology Compass 2/3 (2008). Although humour and laughter are, indeed, in several waysuniversal, it needs to be remembered that, as Billig has highlighted, the general appreciation of humour,the belief that ‘it is good to laugh’, is a relatively new phenomenon. See M. Billig, Laughter and Ridicule:Towards a Social Critique of Humour (London: Sage 2005) p. 2.

9. Dodds and Kirby (note 4).10. S. Lockyer and M. Billig (eds.), Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour (Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan 2005).11. B. N. Bonde, ‘How 12 Cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed were Brought to Trigger an

International Conflict’, Nordicom Review 28/1 (2007) pp. 33–48; S. Lægaard, ‘The Cartoon Controversy:Offence, Identity, Oppression?’, Political Studies 55/3 (2007) pp. 481–498; P. Lewis (ed.), ‘The MuhammedCartoons and Humor Research: A Collection of Essays’, Humor: International Journal of Humor Research21/1 (2008) pp. 1–46.

12. Ridanpää, ‘Geopolitics of Humour’ (note 2).13. M. Billig, ‘Humour and Hatred: The Racist Jokes of the Ku Klux Klan’, Discourse and Society

12/3 (2001) pp. 267–289.14. Lockyer and Pickering (note 8) p. 812.15. Dodds and Kirby (note 4); Lockyer and Pickering (note 8).16. Billig, ‘Humour and Hatred’ (note 13).17. S. Vucetit, ‘Identity is a Joking Matter: Intergroup Humor in Bosnia’, Spaces of Identity 4/1

(2004) pp. 7–34.18. I. Muhawi, ‘The Metalinguistic Joke: Sociolinguistic Dimensions of an Arabic Folk Genre’, in Y.

Suleiman (ed.), Arabic Sociolinguistics (Richmond: Curzon Press Ltd. 1994) pp. 155–176.19. J. Ridanpää, ‘The Media and the Irony of Politically Serious Situations: Consequences of the

Muhammed Cartoons in Finland’, Media, Culture & Society 34/2 (2012) pp. 131–145.20. Purcell, Brown, and Gokmen (note 2).21. T. Atluri, ‘Lighten Up?! Humour, Race, and Da Off Colour Joke of Ali G’, Media, Culture and

Society 31/2 (2011) p. 212.22. See Sev’er and Ungar (note 6).23. D. Alderman and E. J. Popke, ‘Humor and Film in the Geography Classroom: Learning from

Michael Moore’s TV Nation’, Journal of Geography 101/6 (2002) pp. 228–239.24. Dodds and Kirby (note 4).25. See Hammett (note 2); J. Ridanpää, ‘Laughing at Northernness: Postcolonialism and Metafictive

Irony in the Imaginative Geography’, Social & Cultural Geography 8/6 (2007) 907–928; J. Ridanpää,‘A Masculinist Northern Wilderness and the Emancipatory Potential of Literary Irony’, Gender, Place &Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 17/3 (2010) 319–335.

26. R. Carter-White, ‘Towards a Spatial Historiography of the Holocaust: Resistance, Film, and thePrisoner Uprising at Sobibor Death Camp’, Political Geography 33/1 (2013) 21–30; Dittmer and Dodds(note 1).

27. J. L. Austin, How to do things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1962).

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28. L. Bialasiewicz, D. Campbell, S. Elden, S. Graham, A. Jeffrey, and A. Williams,‘Performing Security: The Imaginative Geographies of Current US Strategy’, Political Geography 26/4(2007) pp. 405–422; S. Dalby, ‘Calling 911: Geopolitics, Security and America’s New War’, Geopolitics8/3 (2003) 61–86; R. Sullivan, Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography (Farnham: Ashgate2011) pp. 123–150.

29. E. L. Schieffelin, ‘Problematizing Performance’, in F. Hughes-Freeland (ed.), Ritual,Performance, Media (London: Routledge 1998) pp. 194–207.

30. Palmer (note 3).31. H. Haverkate, ‘A Speech Act Analysis of Irony’, Journal of Pragmatics 14/1 (1990) p. 77.

According to Haverkate, irony can be used as a mitigating device, as a special form of politeness whichhelps communication in cases where interpersonal distance is involved, especially when the message isin some way negatively charged.

32. Bialasiewicz et al. (note 28) p. 408.33. M. Müller, ‘Reconsidering the Concept of Discourse for the Field of Critical Geopolitics: Towards

Discourse as Language and Practice’, Political Geography 27/3 (2008) pp. 322–338.34. M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock 1972) p. 49; J. Butler, Bodies

that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge 1993) p. 2.35. S. Carter and D. P. McCormack, ‘Film, Geopolitics and the Affective Logics of Intervention’,

Political Geography 25/2 (2006) pp. 232–233.36. R. Kahn and D. Kellner, ‘New Media and Internet Activism: From the ‘Battle of Seattle’ to

Blogging’, New Media and Society 6/1 (2004) pp. 87–95.37. Purcell, Brown, and Gokmen (note 2).38. For instance in Middle Eastern countries access to worldwide media has been restricted by state

government and, interestingly, there have been several arguments that the recent ‘wave of liberty’ in theMuslim countries of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula has been in direct correlation to the increasingusage of information technologies. In the Egyptian revolution, social media, especially Facebook andTwitter, had key roles in how resistance was arranged in practice. D. F. Eickelman and J. W. Anderson,New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press2003); J. Jarvis, ‘Facebook, Twitter, and the Egyptian Revolution’, The Faster Times, 30 Sep. 2011.

39. P. Brereton and E. Culloty, ‘Post-9/11 Counterterrorism in Popular Culture: The Spectacle andReception of The Bourne Ultimatum and 24’, Critical Studies on Terrorism 5/3 (2012) pp. 483–497; K.Dodds, ‘Screening Terror: Hollywood, the United States and the Construction of Danger’, Critical Studieson Terrorism 1/2 (2008) pp. 227–243.

40. K. Dodds, ‘Popular Geopolitics and Audience Dispositions: James Bond and the Internet MovieDatabase (IMDb)’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31/2 (2006) pp. 116–130.

41. Ibid., p. 119.42. J. Dittmer, ‘American Exceptionalism, Visual Effects, and the Post-9/11 Cinematic Superhero

Boom’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011) pp. 114–130.43. See I. K. Bore, ‘Reviewing Romcom: (100) IMDb Users and (500) Days of Summer ’, Journal of

Audience and Receptions Studies 8/2 (2011) pp. 144–164.44. E. W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge 1978).45. D. Gregory, Colonial Present (Malden: Blackwell 2004).46. For a discussion on ‘banal neoimperialism’, see S. Flusty, J. Dittmer, E. Gilbert, and M. Kuus,

‘Interventions in banal neoimperialism’, Political Geography 27/6 (2008) pp. 617–629.47. See extensive study on the political dimensions of Baron Cohen’s earlier work: R. Saunders,

The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen: Politics, Parody and the Battle over Borat (Lanham: LexingtonBooks 2008).

48. Lockyer and Pickering (note 8) p. 816. The negative portrayal of Kazakhstan’s national identitywas considered an insult and the government of President Nazarbayev threatened Baron Cohen withlegal action. Baron Cohen responded to these threats, but in the person of Borat. The manner of howa fictional person is able to establish a mass-mediated geopolitical dialogue with administrative organshas been considered unique. R. Saunders, ‘In Defense of Kazakshilik: Kazakhstan’s War on Sacha BaronCohen’, Identities: Global Issues in Culture and Power 14/3 (2007) pp. 225–255.

49. G. Zhussipbek, ‘The Resurrection of Orientalism? The Case of Central Asian States: AttemptTo Explore The Intellectual Background of “Borat” Movie and “Nasha Russia”’, USAK Yearbook ofInternational Politics and Law 3 (2010) 521–525.

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50. ‘The Dictator shortened after censorship in Uzbekistan’, Uznews.net, 25 May 2012, available at<http://www.uznews.net/news_single.php?lng=en&sub=top&cid=33&nid=19906>.

51. ‘The Dictator Banned 2 Weeks after Premiere in Kazakhstan. In Pakistan, Only theCensored Version Has Been Released’, Tengri News, 1 June 2012, available at <http://en.tengrinews.kz/cinema_and_music/The-Dictator-banned-2-weeks-after-premiere-in-Kazakhstan-10444/>; ‘“The Dictator”Movie Not Banned in Kazakhstan, Instead “Disappears”’, Caravanistan. A Silk Road Travel Guide, 1 July2010, available at <http://caravanistan.com/background/dictator-banned-kazakhstan/#sthash.0HTZ7Sdb.dpuf>.

52. ‘“The Dictator” Banned in Tajikistan’, RIA Novosti, 18 May 2012, available at <http://en.rian.ru/world/20120518/173528111.html>.

53. L. Harding, ‘Tajikistan Bans The Dictator’, The Guardian, 18 May 2012.54. J. Phelan, ‘“The Dictator,”’ Sacha Baron Cohen Spoof, Banned in Tajikistan (VIDEO)’, Global

Post, 18 May 2012, available at <http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/hollyworld/the-dictator-sacha-baron-cohen-banned-tajikistan-video>.

55. Ó Tuathail (note 1).56. E. Reynolds, ‘Has the BBC Banned Comic Sacha Baron Cohen’s Dictator Character from Its

Shows?’, Daily Mail, 3 May 2012, available at <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2138799/Has-BBC-banned-comic-Sacha-Baron-Cohens-Dictator-character-shows.html>.

57. J. J. Anisiobi and S. Bull, ‘Sacha Baron Cohen BANNED from the Oscars over Plans for TheDictator Red Carpet Stunt’, Daily Mail, 23 Feb. 2012, available at <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2104841/Oscars-2012-Sacha-Baron-Cohen-BANNED-Oscars-red-carpet-plans-The-Dictator-character-stunt.html>.

58. Although the informed nationality of a reviewer (e.g., Saudi Arabia) can be understood asa performative component which situates a written review into a certain political framework, to avoidmaking any hasty politically charged over-simplifications, informed nationality is not taken into accountas an explanatory factor here. As for instance the 2,106 mosques (in 2011) in the United States canexemplify, the nationality of a reviewer does not necessarily indicate anything about one’s politicalstance. In addition, as a research material, it is obvious that IMDb with its pseudonymous nature makesits own specific limitations. As Dittmer notes, the information concerning posters’ subjectivities remainsusually unknown and embodied reactions that would occur during face-to-face encounters do not becomepresent. Dittmer, ‘American Exceptionalism’ (note 42) p. 124.

59. M. Billig, ‘Comic Racism and Violence’, in S. Lockyer and M. Billig (eds.), Beyond a Joke: TheLimits of Humour (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2005) pp. 25–44.

60. The 1972 Munich Summer Olympics was overshadowed by an unfortunate episode, known asthe ‘Munich massacre’, in which nine Israeli athletes, coaches and officers were kidnapped and killed.

61. Similarly there was a controversy surrounding Baron Cohen’s former TV show Ali G which wascharacterised by the difficulty of identifying the objects and subjects of parody, since the character himselfis a complicated, layered mix of ethnic stereotypes, performed by an actor who himself is an educatedJewish white man. Locker and Pickering (note 8) p. 815.

62. See more of Edward Said’s categorical distinction between ‘manifest Orientalism’, ‘latentOrientalism’ and ‘unconscious Orientalism’, in Said (note 44) p. 206.

63. L. Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge 1994).pp. 40–43.64. L. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge 1992);

Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge (note 63).65. Ridanpää, ‘A Masculinist Northern wilderness’ (note 25).66. K. Barbe, Irony in Context (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company 1995) pp. 4–5.67. J. Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of film Reception (New York: New York University

Press 2000) p. 37.68. Ibid., pp. 31–32.69. Dittmer, Popular Culture (note 1).70. Ó Tuathail (note 1); Dittmer and Dodds (note 1).71. Carter and McCormack (note 35) p. 231.72. Dodds and Kirby (note 4).73. L. van Zoonen, ‘Audience Reactions to Hollywood Politics’, Media, Culture & Society 29/4

(2007) p. 545.74. B. J. Muller and J. H. W. Measor, ‘‘Theatres of War’: Visual Technologies and Identities in the

Iraq Wars’, Geopolitics 16/2 (2011) pp. 389–409.

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