We are also agreed that ridicule and satire are dangerous. They should be deployed carefully and not merely as ‘improv’. Waller and I both point this out. On the other hand when terrorists do something worth making fun of and we do not point it out we commit a dangerous act by letting their narratives and actions go unchallenged.

We seem not to agree about who should engage in this sort of communication. I don’t draw as sharp a distinction between PSYOP personnel and strategic communication professionals as you seem to. Both communicate to support a mission or some other set of goals. So if ridicule is a good tactic for one, it seems to me it’s a good tactic for the other too, again if it is used carefully.

Ridicule and satire are powerful weapons, but used inexpertly, and without thorough research of the target audiences, they can have terrible, unforeseen consequences. Efforts must be made to weigh the advantages of a successfully employed campaign using these modes versus the immediate fallout and ongoing ill-effects of unsuccessfully employed campaigns. Computers working in parallel have difficulty conceiving of second and third and nth order effects within populations, and the audience’s memory will be much longer than ours in this regard. We must therefore tread cautiously, and if we need to act rapidly, we need at least to keep an eye on the horizon, and to remain mindful of our impact – intended and unintended. This is not simply the risk of a joke falling flat, and an uncomfortable silence punctuated only by the sound of ice cubes being rattled in the drinks of a bored audience. People are put in harm’s way when initiatives are poorly conceived and precipitously deployed. This is no place for improv.

I suspect that more often than not, the use of ridicule and satire says rather more about us than we should be revealing. I suspect furthermore that concentrated efforts to understand and engage key audiences and populations in respectful, mutual and collaborative dialogues will in the long term bear greater fruit than tactical joke making. At the very least, let us be clear that these sorts of efforts that intent to provoke, demean, destabilize and deride reside more traditionally (and very often with a high degree of effect and success) in the toolbox of the PSYOP warrior, than in the hands of strategic communication professionals. This is not to downplay the former’s activities, but just to remember, to each trade its tools.

Dr Andrew Ritcheson

Thank you for the resources.

A good article from Sohail Inayatullah on the joke strategy, and a show from Pakistan:

Defeating the Taliban: One Joke at a Time – Sohail Inayatullah
http://www.metafuture.org/Articles/deafeating-the-taliban.htm

Pakistani comedians fight Taliban with humour
‘We should fight terrorism with humour.’
‘It’s a route to normalcy when all they see is inhumanity daily… with satire it educates the population in a palatable format that makes them see through the emotion and spin-ridden narrative of Pakistan,’ Zaka added.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/03-pakistani-comedians-fight-taliban-with-humour-ss-02