TY - JOUR
T1 - Dark Humour and Invasive Species Storytelling in the Age of Extinction
AU - Zong, Emily Yu
AU - Bisenieks, Daisy
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Hong Kong Baptist University Start-Up Grant (Tier 1).
Publisher copyright:
© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
PY - 2024/1/16
Y1 - 2024/1/16
N2 - This essay explores how humour, specifically dark humour, performs an affective politics of opacity in Australian comedies that invokes parody, absurdity and laughter to address the eco-social challenges of invasive species, including rabbits, brumbies, cane toads and red fire ants. The incongruity between jocular feelings and the gravity of extinction highlights humour?s ambivalent potential for violence and subversion. Through an analysis of cartoons and documentaries that bridge conservation science and the Australian cultural imagination, we identify three dimensions of environmental dark humour: (1) it questions human exceptionalism by foregrounding ambiguity, nonhuman agency and assemblage thinking beyond rational control; (2) it performs a cultural diagnosis of colonial legacies, including eco-nationalism and anti-immigration rhetoric, hegemonic White masculinity, and regional and cultural stereotypes; (3) it allows a cathartic release of affective dissent and taboo feelings by subverting culturally normative emotional attachments to invasive animals and mainstream environmentalism. By considering humour as a crucial technique for survival and ambiguity, we argue for its potential to inspire self-reflective, multispecies and decolonial modes of storytelling that can ethically account for human and nonhuman otherness in the age of extinction.
AB - This essay explores how humour, specifically dark humour, performs an affective politics of opacity in Australian comedies that invokes parody, absurdity and laughter to address the eco-social challenges of invasive species, including rabbits, brumbies, cane toads and red fire ants. The incongruity between jocular feelings and the gravity of extinction highlights humour?s ambivalent potential for violence and subversion. Through an analysis of cartoons and documentaries that bridge conservation science and the Australian cultural imagination, we identify three dimensions of environmental dark humour: (1) it questions human exceptionalism by foregrounding ambiguity, nonhuman agency and assemblage thinking beyond rational control; (2) it performs a cultural diagnosis of colonial legacies, including eco-nationalism and anti-immigration rhetoric, hegemonic White masculinity, and regional and cultural stereotypes; (3) it allows a cathartic release of affective dissent and taboo feelings by subverting culturally normative emotional attachments to invasive animals and mainstream environmentalism. By considering humour as a crucial technique for survival and ambiguity, we argue for its potential to inspire self-reflective, multispecies and decolonial modes of storytelling that can ethically account for human and nonhuman otherness in the age of extinction.
U2 - 10.1080/14443058.2025.2452176
DO - 10.1080/14443058.2025.2452176
M3 - Journal article
SN - 1444-3058
SP - 1
EP - 18
JO - Journal of Australian Studies
JF - Journal of Australian Studies
ER -