Must Online Joy File a Political Explanation?

At the WIRED World Fair in Miami after Democrats won Congress in the US midterms, Onion CEO Ben Collins and comedian Patti Harrison discussed what satire could offer during politically fraught times. Harrison described a “huge sigh of relief,” then noted that many people remained “truly radicalized.” Her next detail was less ceremonial: “They’re still out there drinking Mountain Dew.” The joke left room for relief without pretending the opposition had evaporated.

Collins, too, spoke hopefully about the election result. These were the speakers’ responses, not a national emotional census. Still, the exchange offers an appealing possibility: political comedy can provide company without requiring everyone present to declare the emergency over. Online joy has apparently cleared its probation period. Perhaps it need not submit a policy paper before being allowed outside.

Harrison called comedy a “pill-in-the-cheese way” to introduce ideas. The image admits that pleasure has a function, but the pleasure is not therefore fraudulent. A joke can make a difficult subject approachable; a familiar comic voice can make returning to that subject feel less solitary. Neither effect needs the extravagant claim that satire changes votes. The reporting supplies no such measurement.

The temptation is to inflate that sense of company into a recovered era: the internet is fun again, the familiar satirical voices are back, and the old room has reopened. Collins and Harrison both reflected on the internet as a lifeline while growing up in small towns. That remembered connection is worth taking seriously. But a lifeline is a relationship to other people, not proof that an earlier version of the internet was uniformly generous or can be restored by an election.

Collins’s own institutional problem resists the restoration story. The Onion’s effort to acquire Infowars remains in a legal battle after a federal judge in Texas struck down its bankruptcy-auction deal. Collins expressed hope that a different Texas attorney general might make a different decision. Hope describes a possibility here, not a completed transfer. Likewise, Harrison’s relief coexisted with her warning about radicalization. Neither speaker’s account requires a clean ending.

That incompleteness need not spoil the joke. Pleasure can be a reason to remain in conversation rather than a reward reserved for the moment every institution is repaired. A reader might laugh, follow the unresolved legal fight, and return for the next report. The promising version of online joy does not recreate an old internet or excuse departure from the present. It makes the present feel worth attending to with other people.