Spanning from TV news satire and print cartoons to irreverent memes and sarcastic musings on social media, political humour is a recurrent feature in our public culture. In today’s open, interactive, and emotionally-charged media environment, humour is used by political actors across the ideological spectrum for gaining attention, luring supporters and marking political cleavages. This research project brought together an interdisciplinary team from six Una Europa universities to investigate mediated humour controversies or “humour scandals” in the European public sphere. Humour scandals, like the Danish cartoon scandal (2005) or the attack on Charlie Hebdo (2015), are public controversies about transgressive humour. Integrating research on political scandals, media, politics and humour, our project aims to identify and compare the most notable humour scandals in Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, and Spain between 1990-2022. The team of researchers from 5 universities from the UNA Europa consortium: Catholic University of Leuven, University of Helsinki, University of Bologna, the Jagiellonian University and Complutense University of Madrid, focused specifically on humour scandals related to populist politicians and parties who often use (provocative) humour to draw attention and distinguish themselves from mainstream politics.

To map humour scandals in different countries, the researchers developed a codebook that combines definitions of a scandal (Allern et al. 2012: 31) and a humour scandal (Kuipers 2011: 68-69). Accordingly, a humour scandal is operationalized as a humour-related controversy that has been framed as “scandalous” (or in other related terms like crisis or controversy) and has been given broad media coverage in at least two leading media organisations (e.g. an article in a national newspaper or a news broadcast on national television) for five days or more. The five days of reporting do not need to be consecutive and the specific national media organisations may differ per scandal.

 

This definition excludes smaller public spats and sensations related to humour. Transnational humour scandals (e.g. the Muhammed cartoon scandal of 2005-2006) are counted as national humour scandals if they meet the criteria described above in a respective country. For example, the Danish Muhammed cartoon scandal was widely reported and discussed in the Finnish press for more than five days and thus it is both a transnational and a national level scandal.

 

Humour scandals may originate from texts or performances that are clearly framed as humorous or satirical before the actual scandal. This is the case, for example, in incidents where TV satire or political cartoons stir a humour scandal: people understand that the content is intended to be humorous or satirical. Humour scandals, however, can also be events where scandalous behaviour is afterwards framed as “only humour” or “just a joke”. This is the case, for example, when a politician calls his/her controversial slur sarcasm, dark humour, or failed humour.

 

Humour scandals should be separated from other topical humour because almost every significant news event today is joked about and turned into humorous memes on social media. Therefore, for example, humorous commentary about a “regular” political scandal does not make it a humour scandal.

 

The main source of data for mapping humour scandals in each respective country is the archives of news media organisations. Humour scandals are searched from archives of at least two important media organisations in each respective country (e.g. BBC, The Times, and Daily Telegraph in the UK). The actual data is thus news stories, opinions, and analyses on humour scandals (e.g. pdfs, images/screenshots, or other formats).

The Qualtric survey  was used to code the data on the humour scandals that have been collected.

The results of the project are available online in the form of a database..

Project funder: KU Leuven, Una Europa Research Acceleration Fund