The Daily Signal - How Humor Can Help Americans Overcome Their Political Polarization

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

Are you planning to talk politics at Thanksgiving dinner this year? Depending on your family’s dynamics, it can be fraught with danger. But filmmaker Rob Feld, director of a new documentary called ���Jesters and Fools,” says there’s a way to navigate such conversations without resorting to creating acrimony. “I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving with loved ones,” Feld tells The Daily Signal. “Don’t be afraid to talk about things, but there are good ways to talk about things. And it’s by asking questions of each other and not trying to repress that desire we all have to just attack.” Feld’s film, “Jesters and Fools,” challenges the popular media narrative that we are hopelessly divided as Americans. He recruited popular comedians like Colin Quinn, Jim Norton, and Rosebud Baker to tell the story. Enjoy the conversation! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To have the perception that the world is burning down around you and you must attack and kill everybody who just doesn't agree with you and make them disappear is not sane. It's not healthy for any of us. No matter what side you're on, politically. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday. I'm your host, Rob Blewey. And those are the words of filmmaker Rob Feld, director of a new documentary called Jester's and Fools. The film features popular comedians who have found themselves at the center of cancel culture. They reveal how media and technology are leading us to think were hopelessly divided and beyond repair.

The documentary is meant to challenge our assumptions with the goal of bringing Americans together, rather than further dividing us through online feuds. By turning to comedians, Feldhobe's humor can lower the temperature and reduce polarization. It's an audacious goal for a society so wedded to social media. Stay tuned for today's interview right after this. Hi, I'm John Carlo Canaparo.

And I'm Zach Smith. And we host SCOTUS 101. It's a podcast where you'll get a breakdown of top cases in the highest court in the land. Hear from some of the greatest legal minds. And of course, get a healthy dose of Supreme Court trivia. Want to listen? Find us wherever you get your podcasts or just head toheritage.org slash podcasts. Case is submitted.

Rob, thanks so much for joining the Daily Signal and congratulations on the new film. Oh, thanks. And thanks for inviting me to talk. talk to folks about it. It's part two of actually making it. It's telling everyone it exists. That's right. The distribution is how we all need to make sure that we get that message out to the broader American people. You say that our perceptions as Americans of the political differences that exist in society are quite different from reality. How do you know and why did you decide to pursue this project to tell the American people something that they might find a little bit

unconventional or counter to what they normally believe? Well, part one, I'll credit all to Chris Bale at Duke University. Chris is a computational computational social scientist, which is, I think, important. He found a polarization lab at Duke and studies online polarization. And he and others also in the field do a lot of data tracking and they scrape the different social media platforms and do a lot of surveys and follow people. And come to the conclusion that our perceptions are way out of whack, that it's really a small group of extreme personalities, relatively speaking, that are creating our perceptions of each other, dominating the media, taking up all the oxygen, and making us think that we have far more animosity and far more difference than we do.

The stat that I love is it's a Pew stat that it's 6% of all Twitter users create 73% of all political tweets, which, and then, of course, there's only a small percentage of Americans actually using Twitter. So you look at that and you say, so the news report, Twitter blew up today when someone did something stupid. And what does that mean if this many people are the ones making all the noise and everyone else is just quiet and wants nothing to do with this garbage? So that's just one example, but it leads us to, I think, the obvious conclusion that, you know, it is a small number of people who have a lot of other stuff going on in their lives, I think, that lead them to very extreme reactions into virtue signal or to want attention for themselves

online, make a lot of noise and create the impression that those people over there who may disagree with me hate me. And I therefore need to hate them out of my fear of that. So this is all so much data around this. I can do a deep dive. into this all day long. But what I wanted to do, you say why. I think like all arts, it's pain leads you to this pursuit. It's just not the environment that I grew up in. When I was a kid, we used to, look, arguing was our sport, and we'd sit in high school at the lockers, and we'd call each other's Tommy's and fascists, and then go get pizza and play handball. And that was fun in sport, and we loved each other. And that just doesn't seem to be how we're fun.

functioning now. A democracy cannot function if two people cannot express different ideas, but give each other the benefit of the doubt of good intention and come and be able to come back the next day with another idea, a better idea, improve and work through history together. So I'm just watching my country go through this, I've got two little girls leaving the country to them. This is not functional. So I asked, what story can I tell? And finally, as I was talking to different academics, and doing a lot of reading. I found Chris Bale at Duke. He was publishing his book

called Breaking the Social Media Prism, not my favorite title, but a fantastic book. And so we started working off of a lot of the research in his book to create a narrative that would tell a story

emotionally and dramatically with a little bit of humor and invite really everybody in to this space so that we can see. Most of us have holistic ideas, ideas that maybe one understanding over here, another one over here, but not all the way over here.

And if most people feel empowered to not disappear from conversation, we can drown out the extremes. So that's really the goal is to show, hey, look, there's a place for you. You've got compatriots don't disappear. I want to come back to the point you made about social media. I think that's so critically important. But let me first ask you this. Was there a moment that really you often said, I need to do something about. this? There's a contribution that I can make, either through filmmaking or in working with

Chris Bale to tell this story, or was it something that just gradually you observed over time? I mean, I think it's, it's, I probably reached a critical mass of being around or experiencing crazy and not be, or feeling the kind of subconscious or almost just peeking into conscious restraint in conversation with people, concerned, well, if I say something rational, Is this person going to freak out or whatnot? And that's just, it's ridiculous. And then watching certainly how other people were going to war with each other, hearing friends, family members with kids on campus,

feeling like they're not having the robust discussions that I had when I was in school. I think just it all just bubbled up. And when I tell stories, there's no other story I want to. tell, like there's no other story to tell right now. And so that's, that's how these things happen. You just find yourself telling the story. And why did you decide then to use humor as the way of telling the story? Well, otherwise write a white paper, right? And no one reads those. So as I was, look, I'm interested in the data and all of that. And I can do that reading. But if you want people to see it and enjoy it and absorb it, you've got to use emotion. That's how storytelling is

given on emotion. I'm a journalist like trade and background also, so I need facts and data, something I can demonstrate. And humor is a great way to wrap it all in sugar. And there are so many, there's, look, there are so many reasons, right? In theory, humor should be a way that we can mediate through challenging ideas in society, right? It takes this hard idea that may, maybe tweaks you or makes you feel threatened, but it wraps it up, puts it on stage and with a little bit of a move, and lets you experience it and let it even two contradictory ideas. Irony can float through your head and sit there and let you work through it. And we should all be able to sit in the room and laugh at ourselves, laugh at each other with

good humor. And that is the great, that's what satires for, what humor is for. But if humor is being challenged or the ability to tell you, a joke and take it as a joke is breaking, which is currently is or seems to be for some people, you know, then the whole thing ruptures, the system ruptures. So, but really, I was thinking, well, how do I tell the story and I'll get a bunch of academics and I'll get a bunch of journalists, whatever, who do I want to hear talk about this stuff? It is comedians, and they are great on the subject.

They, they're natural social scientists themselves. They're deeply analytical people. And I think the best ones fire in every direction. They are not wed. Of course everyone has their political beliefs or understandings, but they're not wed to a side. It's not tribal for them, which is what I wanted to tack.

So what I did was I went to the owner of the comedy seller in New York, a gnome Dwarman, wonderful guy. I said, look, here's my idea. I need comedians. This is what I want to do. And he said, I can introduce you to some people here and there, but basically, come and sit here at the comedy cellar. Once we opened up for the pandemic, we opened for the pandemic, hang around the bar and just

you'll be like a fly on the wall, and people will slowly get to recognize you, and you can talk to them as within limit. So that's really what I did. I was, I would, we put my kids to bed, run to the comedy cellar and sit there for hours, nursing a beer. I'm kind of being Jane Goodall, just making me. No sudden motions being very quiet until someone went, what the hell are you doing it? And slowly talking to them, the ones who would say, look, I travel the country to tiny little clubs, and I don't see what is put on social media, what you see on media.

That's not the country I see. I see much more heterodox people. They're not so black and white. People largely don't freak out. Occasionally you get somebody in an audience, but what we're seeing in media is not really the country. And so they were really happy to talk and come share that experience and turn their, it was great to have them focus their lens on this, this idea. Can you share with our listeners who some of the comedians are? And if in particular there was a consistent message or theme that you picked up among those that you interviewed?

I mean, so this is all part of a larger documentary project I'm doing and this is the footage I had. So I like, let me, this takes forever. I'm still fundraising for the big one. Let me do some good today. So who I've shot so far and was able to put into the short, Colin Quinn, Mo Ammer, Jim Norton, Rosebud Baker, who's James Baker's granddaughter. It's a really interesting kind of relationship. Great young comedian and Nathan McIntosh and Dean Edwards. I did get to interview Lewis Black, but his material didn't fit into this, so I'm saving him for the big one. But look, they're all their own people, but I think the common thread was, this. This is insane. This is not a way to be in society, not a way to run a society, that when people are being so extreme, it's really not about the thing you're talking about, clearly. It's really about some other thing that they have going on, that it could be they've been shut in during the pandemic and they're just losing their minds. It could be they're shut in their mother's basement and they just want some attention or they're angry people and they want to just burn things. is down, it could be any number of things, but to have the perception that the world is burning down around you and you must attack and kill everybody who just doesn't agree with you

and make them disappear is not sane, it's catastrophizing, it's not healthy for any of us. No, no, of course. And in this age of cancel culture, it seems that comedians themselves have been subject to a lot of the changes that our culture is experiencing. How have, how has their business been affected and how have they approached their jobs, maybe differently as a result of the situation they find themselves in today? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I can't speak for them and they all have a different take on it, I'll say. I mean, I think that I have heard some people say, I mean, look, so there are people who

can't be canceled because they have their own audience. So if you are an Andrew Schultz, for example, or Tim Dillon or Wanda Sykes, anybody, Chris Rock, you can create, now with YouTube and just traveling, you can create your own audience and you can still, you know, you can still make a very, very, very good living. You don't need to hold any benefits for anybody. Where I hear people raising red flags is if you're an up-and-coming comedian or maybe kind of like the middle class, Massive comedians, yeomen, working people, but you're not in the firmament. There are colleges that are going to say you can't cover this sort of material. Many comedians won't play colleges anymore. The more pernicious thing I've even heard people talk about is, which is also a technological change, if you're young and you're up and coming.

You're putting a lot of material on Instagram, and that's where you're trying to get audience much more than working with clubs. And so you are going to develop your voice. by what plays on Instagram. And you might then, A, it changes your delivery. But B, you might hone your material according to what you think is acceptable, which means that you are going to perhaps sense yourself and not fully develop and push the boundaries that you should.

Different people have completely different takes on this. I mean, you will talk to comedians who say, you know, maybe you should be canceled for saying something terrible or people don't want to see you anymore. You know, that's, I don't, I think that's more challenging. If you can't go to a college and say something that, you know, somebody is going to get upset with, there's no guarantee you won't be upset by anything you hear in the world.

You know, I think that hampers humor and even our just ability to laugh and understand each other as long as you're coming from the right place, a place of, hey, we're here laugh at ourselves, which is all the things. You mentioned earlier the work of Chris Bale and, how it was very instrumental in the work that you're doing here with this film. I'd like you to explain in perhaps more detail how the social media and big media really interact with one another. So you would mention that a very small number of influencers on Twitter, now X, help shape the conversation. From my understanding, the preponderance of users on those platforms are people who work in the media.

So this is what they are seeing in their bubble. So how does that system kind of happen on a day-to-day basis, and why are we seeing this polarization than the way that we are? So I don't think Chris would say it's influencers or, and I don't know the percentage of people who work in media if we're talking specifically Twitter, each platform has its own things. But Chris Bale, he did a very particular project. It was a research, he was a study,

that he did at the Duke Polarization Lab, and then was replicated by an MIT consortium and someone else, I forget, but he wanted to look at this idea of filter bubbles or information silos, however we, whatever we call them this week, right? The idea that if you are of a certain political persuasion, you are going to be fed by the algorithms information that's going to please you. And you will never see facts or opinions or feelings of the other side. And therefore, we'll never understand each other. If you're in the left and all you see in your echo chamber there was stuff on the left or you're in the right, all you see is that, you'll never understand

or be able to have an interaction. So he wanted to test this idea. So he recruited a large number of Americans broadswath from across the country and political identity and infiltrated their feeds, their social media feeds. And basically, if you were, if you identified as being on the left, you were going to get information or articles that were center-right to far-right. And if you were on the right, we're going to get information on articles that were center left to far left and see what was going to happen. And what he found surprised him.

Rather than making people in surveys afterwards have more understanding or come towards each other, it actually pushed people further into their sides corners. And if you were a more centrist person, you just went silent and you completely disappeared from conversation. And so his reaction was this, I don't understand this, let me do this again. So they re-ran the experiment with more in-depth tracking and interviews. And the exact same thing happened. And what he identified was a number of things. There's a lot of great myth-busting. One is that we actually do see each other's information, or opinions or facts.

But a lot of what happens is that you will pay attention to the most extreme version of the other side, which you then recoil against. It pushes you further. You're more frightened of that person. You get better at articulating your own talking points. You get more tribal. There's a lot of status seeking that goes on because you post something in response

and then you'll get a couple people go, hey, that's a guess. We love you. And then you'll do something more hyperbolic and you get more response. So we end up with people who are feeding off of that. doing more and more and being more aggressive. And, of course, they'd never do it in real life.

In real life, they're not yet most people or not, or most of even this group are not running up and yelling at people. But in their mother's basement, they will say all kinds of nonsense. So if you're in the center, you go, this is a dumpster fire. This has nothing to do with me. This is not worth my time or energy. If I say one thing that is somewhat rational, my own side is going to come and take me out for not being pure enough, right? So what ends up happening is all we see is the most extreme

versions. And then the media, which if it leads, it leads, it then trickles into a more mainstream media. And you can argue over, does one feed the other? And what's our elites, our political elites? Are they modeling good behavior for us? No. So it becomes this horrible feedback loop. but look, if this is how we view the world through these stupid frames now, someone or something is composing this for us, increasingly something. And we miss everything out here that isn't within this frame. And so our reviews of each other of our world, even of ourselves, are just fundamentally worked by this media experience. So then what's your takeaway? What is your advice for those who watch the film, or just even listen to

to this podcast. What would you ask them to do to make sure that they don't fall into that trap? Who am I? But, you know, I'll tell you what I do. I read newspapers. I read a diversity of newspapers. My children are not allowed near screens and will not be until they are well into their upper teens. There's no social media for them and will not be. It's deeply unhealthy, I think. Jonathan Haidt does a lot of work on that, certainly. And talk to people, human beings. watching cable news, stop getting information from your social media feeds. Actual newspapers, again, a diversity of them, still have good information. You just have to use critical thinking.

And the great hope is don't disappear. And there are ways to engage each other. If someone in your workplace at your school in any way says something crazy, that's just obviously hyperbolic, I think the hope is that we start to feel more empowered to not get into a head-to-head with them, but maybe not let the comment just go by frictionlessly. I don't really, isn't that really the thing? Because there's also kind of this too. And so you don't get into a head-to-head battle.

But there are ways to not let it just go. And to let other people around you hear, oh, I feel that way too. I'm not the only one. And so my hope for this short film is that people pass it to each other and share it because they go, say, don't you feel this way too? And we all start to kind of have an identity as the call it that you can be politically center or moderate. You can be temperamentally center or moderate. But that's where I think we need to find each other. And just remember, we're all Americans here.

You're nothing to fear from your neighbor most of the time. It's really, we are a community, we should be a community, and we can absolutely work through our problems together, but we can do it if we fear each other and if we just attack each other before asking. Tell me more. I'd like to hear, tell me more about why you feel that way. It's a great tool. Are you optimistic that we'll be able to do that as a country, Rob? Look, I'm from New York. I'm not a nag. Like, that's like, optimism is not a thing that we we do, but I have to be. I have to be because the data shows us that most people want this. And I think the real challenge is that media is so dominant in the way we experience each other

and our world that you must step out of it. Look, Thanksgiving is coming up. This is, and we even talk about in the film, there's a stat about how Thanksgiving dinners have been affected by all this in the last number of years. I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving with loved ones and talk. Don't be afraid to talk about things, but there are good ways to talk about things. And it's by asking questions of each other and not trying to repress that desire we all have to attack and be so angry. We have, and Thanksgiving is a great forum for us to get together, see people, family, we haven't seen in a long time, and be able to reconnect and remind each other, the love we have for each other, and show.

We will, of course, provide a link in the show notes to the film, but for our listeners, Rob, tell us how we can learn more about your work and watch the film. Well, I mean, the website the film lives on is gestures and fools.com. It's also bouncing around YouTube and ironically around social media channels as we speak. There's no way around that one, I'm afraid. But there's lots on the website. We have a lot of partner organizations that have great. tools for people as well. We're fundraising for the big documentary, so if anyone has ideas there,

by all means, reach out. But I hope you enjoy it. I hope it's useful. I hope it's useful to everyone as a way to spark conversation or just feel a little less alone. Rob Feld, the film is called Gesters and Fools. Thank you so much for spending time with the Daily Signal. We look forward to highlighting your work and making sure that our listeners are introduced to this film. And hopefully, as they're they're using social media and other platforms. I need some advice that you and the comedians you feature offer in the film. It's really appreciate it. Thanks, right.

And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to The Daily Signal podcast. Be sure to check out our evening show right here in this podcast feed, where we bring you the top news of the day. Also, make sure you subscribe to the Daily Signal wherever you prefer to listen. And help us reach more listeners by leaving a five-star rating and review. We appreciate all of your feedback. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.

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