Paul Flaig, ‘From the Tramp to Trump: On Sovereignty and Screen Comedy’, in William V. Costanzo, and Peter C. Kunze (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Screen Comedy, Oxford Handbooks (2025; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 Aug. 2025)
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197675502.013.0026
Abstract
In recent years, critics and scholars have anxiously observed that the subversive force of satire, jokes, and gags on-screen has become not only toothless but positively embraced by populist leaders and political demagogues. From Silvio Berlusconi to Donald Trump, Boris Johnson to Jair Bolsonaro, the figures of the sovereign and the court jester have merged into what Michel Foucault, in a prescient passing phrase, once called “grotesque sovereignty.” In this chapter, I build on Foucault’s concept to situate this recent entanglement of comic subversion and sovereign power within a wider genealogy of screen comedy. If sovereignty has, over the last century, become defined by a grotesque excess it has been, in large part, through the mediating power of screens, whether cinematic, televisual, or viral, which have produced, in turn, comic forms of satire and parody as inevitable blowback. Yet far from understanding sovereignty and comedy in opposed terms, I emphasize their shared status as states of exception in which sovereign and clown appear as inverted, reproducible images of one another.
Emphasizing this complicity of sovereignty and comedy, I begin by tracing the essential relationship between theories of sovereignty and theories of humor before turning to three case studies of grotesque sovereignty as it has been comically fictionalized on screen: Hollywood’s crazy dictator films of the early 1930s, the comedy of sovereignty’s media apparatus as portrayed in the works of Armando Ianucci, and the sovereign’s double as embodied by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator.
Keywords: sovereignty, satire, Chaplin, Foucault, Ianucci
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