Defeat ISIS With Comedians

U2 frontman Bono told a Congressional committee that the way to defeat ISIS is to send in comedians.

From Watch: Bono urges Congress to deploy comedians to fight ISIS | Washington Examiner:

Rockstar and international activist Bono mulled over the idea of sending comedians to fight the Islamic State during a hearing before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee Tuesday, only he was not kidding.

“Don’t laugh, but I think comedy should be deployed because if you look at national socialism and Daesh and ISIL, this is the same thing. We’ve seen this thing before, very vain, they’ve got all their signs and it’s show business,” Bono said.

“The first people Adolf Hitler threw out of Germany were the Dada and the surrealists, like if you speak violence then you speak their language, but if you laugh at them when they’re goose-stepping down the street,” he added. “So I’m suggesting the Senate send in Amy Schumer and Chris Rock and Sacha Baron Cohen.”

Now I’m sure ISIS would make short work of Sacha Baron Cohen. And I’m not sure those particular comedians would have the kind of comedy that could bring down an evil ideology.

Bono’s suggestion is endearingly naive, but it has some truth to it. In classical thought, comedy was considered a very powerful tool for moral improvement and social correction. This is because comedy “ridiculed vice.” Those who laugh at bad behavior and bad ideas cannot take them seriously and do not wish to imitate them. Comedy as satire does have a great deal of power. When the Russian people started laughing at the absurdities of Soviet Communism, that system was doomed.

Unfortunately, much of today’s comedy ridicules not vice but virtue. This makes people not want to imitate virtuous behavior, making society worse instead of better.

Still, we would do well to recover the kind of comedy that can bring down false ideologies, like that of ISIS. We are already seeing campus postmodernism becoming the butt of jokes, which suggests that it may not be long for this world.

But, as scholars have pointed out, true satire requires absolutes, against which evil practices and absurd ideas can be measured, found wanting, and ridiculed. So this might be more difficult today in a culture that takes everything way too seriously. But it’s very much worth doing.