Contribution short abstract:

Sitcoms have generally made use of humor in order to mock established hierarchies. However, the very popular Romanian sitcom "Las Fierbinti" uses social and political satire to ridicule the lower classes and promote neoliberal values among the audience, while also increasing social polarization.

Contribution long abstract:

From classical analyses to recent scholarship, humor has been shown to function both as defense from the tyranny of official worldviews and as tolerated offence to established norms and institutions. This paper will address a different situation, where humor is used to help consolidate the neoliberal hegemonic discourse in a society in which modern history and 45 years of Socialist rule have created antibodies to neoliberalism, particularly among the lower classes. I argue the sitcom "Las Fierbinti"s use of humor is an illustration of the aggressiveness of ridicule (Billig, 2005). Humor here is an instrument in the toolkit of a cultural elite working to educate the masses into a set of ideological values that would bring the Romanian society closer to the West. Comedy works as a didactic topdown approach meant to correct collective “blemishes of character” (Hoffman, 1963) of the lower classes. This is not however a mere confirmation of the hobbesian bleak view of humor as a strategy to display a sense of superiority, or of Freud’s view of ridicule as means to make sure that members of society comply with norms. I argue that it is rather an inversion of Bakhtin’s view , a postmodern hijacking of the subverting function of humor. Higgie (2017) has already shown how politicians co-opt popular satire in order to advance their goals; in this case, it is the producers of cultural discourse that hijack popular humor, including political satire, as part of an overall effort of the elites to change mentalities.