The ‘inflatable Trump’ balloon used as part of the anti-Trump protests is part of an important tradition of using subversive humour as a means of protest. Humour is an important part of the protest discourse and as such the Trump balloon is much more than a gimmick or childish act. It creates the potential for what is perhaps one of the most important weapons in a protestors arsenal: laughter. What follows is a brief essay tracing some of the elements of humour as protest.

A popular example of performative protest would be clowning. Historically the role of the clown and priest have been synonymous. Their functions were seen as the same — to mediate something of ‘another’ world. For the priest a divine transcendence; for the clown immanent ways of being in the world. Both ‘sacred’; one transcendent the other immanent. As subversive figures, clowns, used comedy and mockery, to confuse the accepted categories of normal behavior. They offer “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order” (Bakhtin, 1984:10), and in doing so “turn a situation upside down to reveal its absurdity: in doing so inviting contemplation” (Robb, 2010: 94). As Paul Bouissac shows in his book The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning (2015), the clown’s face exerts a force beyond that of mere representation.

This is a but like what philosophers Deleuze & Guattari (D&G) called “minor literature.” A literature working within and not outside of “major literature” — the dominant discourse of the day. D&G outline the three characteristics of minor literature as: the connection of the individual to a political immediacy” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986: 18). A clown’s “jokes tear holes in our usual predications about the empirical world” (Critchley, 2002:1), they take language apart teaching us to stammer in our own tongue; calling into question our preconceptions about the way things are. D&G write, “people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them in a firmament of conventions and opinions. But poets,” or in our case clowns, “make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the tear.” 

But this is only a temporary endeavor for,

“the crowd of imitators come and repair the umbrella with something vaguely resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the tear with opinions. Thus other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see”

(Deleuze & Guattari: 1994)

 

If, following Marx, the “political world can only be known through the activity of changing it” (Mackenzie, 2011: 4), then the role of the artist and performer in acts of political protest is of primary importance. Indeed, “theatre and performance were fully enveloped in both the destructive and creative energies of the events of May ’68” (Cull, 2009: 9). Dramatisation is not merely a response to the political but is critical to the method of protest.

Theatre for Deleuze should a performative act that unsettles and surges towards political change. As Deleuze shows in his work on the artist Francis Bacon, art is not merely representational but is affective — an event that puts into play forces that otherwise would not have existed (2015). “The use of dramatic techniques to intensify political causes has a long history: it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that every significant revolutionary movement, in the broadest sense of that term, has had its dramatic elements” (Mackenzie, 2011: 1). 

For example, The Zapatistas, a Mexican revolutionary group, use performance as a means of protest. Only ever appearing in public masked. “‘We hide our faces so that we may be seen’… their masks represent the politically invisible nature of some of Mexico’s poorest people.” In doing so they make a “statement about the failure of the Mexican political system to recognise part of its own population as legitimate members of ‘the Mexican people’ the system claims to represent” (Mackenzie, 2011: 1). Italian theorist and activist Franco Berardi describes this kind of ‘performance’ as a poetic act that is the

“emanation of a semiotic flow that sheds a light of non-conventional meaning on the existing world. The poetic act is semiotic excess hinting beyond the limits of conventional meaning. Simultaneously, it reveals a possible sphere of experience that was not previously experienced: the experienceable. It acts on the limit between the conscious and the unconscious in such a way that this limit is displaced, and that parts of the unconscious landscape — the inner ausland, the intimate foreign country — are lit up, or distorted, and re-signified”

(Berardi, 2015: 149)

 

An example of this kind of poetic performance-protest or “minor literature” are The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army; a clown group who utilise clowning methods as a means of activism and protest. They describe themselves as clowns “because inside everyone is a lawless clown trying to escape, and because nothing undermines authority like holding it up to ridicule.” Like the Zapatistas without real “faces or noses, we show that our words, dreams, and desires are more important than our biographies.” This they term their “rebel clown logic.”

Often found in highly tense political protest situations they tell the story of a particular protest at a G8 summit. During the protest the police formed a circle, surrounded them, putting the group in ‘lockdown’ (which itself is a beautiful and subversive image). But, in that moment of containment, of the enforcement of power, ideology and state technology, one clown noticed that in being contained a performance space had been created for them. They performed harmless and fun clowning acts to the police, in the end, defusing the situation. As such, their protest represented “a challenge to biopolitical processes of governmentality that attempt to generate normalizing behaviours and regulated conduct amongst people” (Foucault 1979). 

Another group that has been doing this are the radical secular order of Queer nuns from San Francisco – The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Founded in 1979, they began to dress as nuns in public to draw attention to social conflicts and problems in the Castro District of San Fransisco, such as violence and prejudice against the gay community, the spread of the Aids virus, issues around sexual practices and many other community-based issues. And they have continued to do the same since raising millions and millions of pounds and helping to lead in community activism.

The reason why I mention them is not necessarily because of what they do — as important as that is — but the means that they employ to do what they do. Using the loaded iconography of a religious order of nuns they engage in performative acts that even in SF totally disrupts the normality of everyday life and in doing so holds up a mirror to the city calling into question inherited belief systems and ways of being. One of the nuns Sister Irma Geddon said of their outfits: “The lightness of everything, in addition to the whiteface and the nun’s habits, are a mechanism to reach out to people. When we’re dressed up like that, kind of like sacred clowns, it allows people to interact with us.”

To laugh is no simple act. It can be both highly subversive and political. This we must not forget.