Comedy and humour are often looked upon as abstract concepts. However, laughter is a physical response caused by several chemical processes in the brain which can, in quite certain terms, be explained by science. Comedy, therefore, does not exist in the abstract. It is instead a science and an art form founded on three basic principles: shock, surprise, and, as physicist Richard Feynman has coined it, the “kick of the discovery” (leading an audience toward one conclusion or meaning and shifting suddenly to an alternate conclusion). In other words, comedy is a proverbial balancing act between denotation and connotation, and between what is encoded versus what is decoded by the audience. The concept of encoding, outlined by Stuart Hall, is the process of putting events, information, and/or ideas into a “message” that can be circulated and received by an audience. Conversely, decoding is the process of deciphering the meaning or importance behind a message that had been encoded. In so doing, the recipient of the message is imparting it with their own views, experiences, ideologies, and understandings. A comedian’s job is to encode a message and anticipate what the audience will decode only to guide them in another direction. This juxtaposition between the message which is initially decoded and what is ultimately meant to be decoded is not only comical, it also reveals a deeper message about individuals and society.
Because the success of a joke is so dependent on what the audience decodes, and, by extension, the lens through which they view media, comedy can very quickly go haywire. In 2017 comedian Kathy Griffin’s photo of herself holding what appeared to be the disembodied head of Donald Trump exemplified the importance of the different positions from which audiences view media. One of which, according to Hall, is the oppositional code in which one “detotalizes the message […] in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference” (Hall p.14). Considered from this position, Griffin’s photo could be, and has been, taken as a threat to the President of the United States, and as such, has been labelled un-American, Treasonous, and criminal. Others who subscribe to the negotiated code in which the legitimacy of the encoded meaning of a particular piece of media is considered in addition to its downfalls may have simply deemed the photo distasteful, but far from criminal. Unfortunately, many people encoded Griffin’s photograph according to the two aforementioned codes which resulted in the comedian being blacklisted by the entertainment industry in the United States and abroad. The final code by which one considers media is the dominant-hegemonic code in which the recipient “takes the connoted meaning […] and decodes the message in terms of the reference code in which it has been encoded” (Hall p.12). From this position, which incidentally is the position I take, one might see the photograph as a response to the violent and hateful language of the President himself. One might consider how the fake blood coming from the eyes of the mannequin head could be in reference to the president’s vulgar words toward journalist Megyn Kelly. In short, from this perspective one would take the photo as Griffin intended: a satirical statement about the president’s behaviour, language, and policies.
