NO JOKE: Untangling the DNA Code of Alt-Right Comedy

1.

By persistent negativity of the fool’s caricature, comedy gives its hand to the mould of the reasonable person. It sculpts layer by layer, reshaping this faithful legal index. The detail of its image is the difference between security and exile, life and death. The American comedy trio Million Dollar Extreme (hereafter MDE) devotes itself to the building of a more reasonable worldview based on semi-feigned ignorance of world history and refusal to use the most advanced tools of the Western intellectual tradition to cultivate appreciation for the work of people who are unlike them. Exactly who is being addressed with the phrase, ‘DNA like yours and ours’? (See the MDE text discussed in Section 10.) The rallying of white men to a cause identified as theirs by dint of a supposedly shared racial heritage must be resisted and this essay does so largely through antithesis, describing what MDE really mean in their videos and public interventions. Staged as a mockery of liberal culture, MDE’s radical identitarianism grasps after fascism as the ideological vehicle by which to bridge the divide between the class interests and expressive means of a working-class base and the interests and means of the (middle class) alt-right.

MDE has been on the rise for a decade or so, building for itself a devoted internet following. In an interview with Jared Kushner’s Observer, MDE’s Sam Hyde discusses the ‘loyalty’ of their fans: ‘We only have 70,000 YouTube subscribers, but I can get a thousand of those people to go somewhere and do something.’ In the alchemical stove of public consumption and discussion, the group’s products have been undergoing transformation into liveable expression for some time now. These expressions, as they alter the characters of individuals, move to insinuate themselves into the collective work of reason’s definition. The group recently broke through to an audience of an altogether different scale when Adult Swim aired six episodes of the satirical alt-right comedy sketch show Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace (hereafter WP) from 5 August to 16 September 2016, each episode drawing an average of nearly 900,000 U.S. viewers. Hyde discusses the importance of expanding MDE’s exposure to the Adult Swim audience in his Observer interview: ‘the kids who watch Adult Swim really do drink up all of it. By exerting influence over that audience you may not have the widespread influence that you get through Disney or Nickelodeon, but you’re molding minds in a very serious way.’¹ At the time of this writing (November–December 2016), Adult Swim has nonetheless cancelled the planned second series of WP, but the work of understanding the material they broadcast remains to be accomplished, considering the historical confluence of its political extremism and the momentum it has acquired from a national television run.

MILLION DOLLAR EXTREME PRESENTS: WORLD PEACE IS A SUPER PURE TRAGICOMEDY ROSARY OF PIOUS PRAYERS BRINGING UNITY, JOY, AND EXCELLENT LIVING TO THE PEOPLE OF ALL SIZES, SEXUALITIES, AND COLORS STARRING MISANDROUS COMEDIOTERRORISTS SAM HYDE, NICK ROCHEFORT, CHARLES CARROL, AND DIRECTED BY ANDY RUSE. WORLD PEACE WILL UNLOCK YOUR CLOSETED BIGOTED IMAGINATION, TOSS YOUR INHERENT RACISM INTO THE BURNING TRASH, AND CLEANSE YOUR INTOLERANT SPIRIT WITH PURE UNAPOLOGETIC AMERICAN FUNNY_COM. OPEN YOUR EYES OR YOU’LL GET THUMB GOGGLES. FOR WHAT NAIVE SLOB EXPECTS HEMLOCK MEDICINE TO TASTE OF MILKSHAKE? FOR THE RECORD, NONE OF US PLAN ON KILLING OURSELVES AND IF WE DO IT’S CIA_MOSSAD

PRAY FOR WORLD PEACE.

BEST,

MDE²

Image: Pepe the Frog, unknown source

2.

A Holla Forums post in a thread from August 2016 about the airing of WP reads: ‘When did this memes are magic thing start? I got out of Holla Forums around the start of 2015 and now that I came back this is everywhere.’ Which gets this response: ‘Well how do you think Holla Forums has turned so many semi-normalfags into National Socialists? Comedy. i.e. memes.’ A post on the same thread reads: ‘yes pander to the nazi forums that will boost the ratings!’ It is in various online discussion forums where ‘thousands of fans gather to decode World Peace’s complex, if winking, symbology, which many devotees are convinced expresses an anti-progressive, pro-white ideology’.³ The politics of MDE are made clear when Hyde discusses the political necessity of comedy in an interview with Mike Cernovich⁴ and also in an interview on The Needle Drop podcast:

There is an anger that is not fully expressed in the way that it needs to be, and I’m trying to correct that [. . .] I want to make something cool for people to sort of have as an umbrella. Like, shit’s coming down, but here’s this MDE umbrella, it’s gonna protect you to some extent, and keep you sane, keep you safe. And I’d like to do our small part to reduce the feminization of everything.⁵

MDE is a propaganda engine: its comedy generates slogans and narrative skeleton keys for the middle class white psyche tooling up to escape what is incompletely realised to be the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, an escape conceived as little more than an out-thrust against anyone who is not the possessor of that pale psyche. A cultural exercise meant to keep white men ‘sane’ and ‘safe’ is one meant to keep everyone else feeling psychotic and vulnerable. What is not understood here is that the implicit vulnerability of the white man is a product only of the advanced consciousness of those who see fear in the eyes of the powerful. Of course not all white men are wealthy and MDE’s refusal of unity across lines of difference testifies to their denial of the historical suppression of inter-racial solidarity of poor and working class people, of the history of dominations exacted on ‘the people of all sizes, sexualities, and colors’. The white supremacy of MDE will be glossed with two examples.

Image: MDE, ‘Sam Hyde @ Rutgers -- How to ‘Make It’ as an ‘Artist’ -- :) :) :) -- *ғʀᴇᴇ ᴘᴀɴᴇʀᴀ*’, 2015

Image: MDE, ‘Father Figure (Parts 1–3)’, 2013

3. (Example A)

An animation towards the end of an episode of MDE,‘The Power of Yellow (2/2)’ (2013?), features a first-person shooter where the ‘final boss’ is a nude black dancer in black and red cosplay armour firing digital explosions from his groin. The shooter fails to fire back and, losing the game, finds the words ‘Game Over’ framing a close-up of the dancer’s genitals. This image of the dancer is assurance that none like him will follow: his means of generation have been destroyed, not by the video shooter, but by the video authors, in a rhetorical murder. This is a game built to seem so easy to beat, that the secret to it is actually losing, which is to say enduring the dancer, living through your own death so that the ‘final boss’ can be delivered to a greater form of death. The end of the line has been reached. Similarly, the cover of MDE’s coffee table book How to Bomb the U.S. Gov’t (2016) promises protection against a list of threats including ‘Unarmed Bl_ck Men’, where ‘black’ is a dirty word because it is imagined, in the words of Frantz Fanon’s, as ‘the incarnation of a genital potency beyond all moralities and prohibitions’.⁶ The first-person shooter animation seeks to destroy the image of this potency by homophobic ridicule.

The larger narrative at work here is that ‘the feminization of everything’ makes it impossible for the strong to rule the weak. Vital punches are being held and those who feel that domination is their natural right have been disabled from doing so by radically PC prohibitions on free speech. What could be more unconstitutional? YELLOW here means ‘not cowardly’ (‘What STRENGTH means to me’): it is the yellow of warning, of the aggressor urging others to take cautionary heed of an explosive reference, a don’t-tread-on-me code for loyalty to a basically Aryan racial identity whipped up by a question that can only read: That smartass black Muslim stole the White House (for a second time), what are we going to do about it? The meaning of this reactionary identity politics is the kind of deportation fantasy (more massive in scale than what the right pretends the Obama administration has not enacted) at work behind a sketch in ‘Ideas Man’ (2013) where two white men in suits terrorise and assault a brown woman in her car, smashing out her windows with bats, manhandling her out of her vehicle, screaming and spitting into her face and finally, seeming to stash her inside her car’s trunk. No context is given for these images of violence: the point is for viewers to provide their own rationales, rationales which take on lives of their own in the safe havens from which users access online forums. The ultimate medium of the troll is political assassination (see Section 4) and we have arrived at a frantic moment where the difference ‘between the storyline and reality’ (‘Moms’, 2013), intervention and skit, hoax and non-fiction, liberty and tyranny, faeces and news, deportation and vacation, has been ground to a fragile blade.

Before moving on to the next example, the title segment leading into the first sketch in the WP broadcast should be mentioned. WP presents the members of MDE as ‘yellow’ in the more conventional racial understanding, placing their names under pictures of Asian women (with provocatively censored texts under each name), imposed over computer-enhanced scenes from rural Asia. What connects the WP title segment to the gym scene that follows it (see Section 5) is the figure of the American soldier, representative of the work of Asian genocide, not only in Japan, but in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and representative of the ignorance of the enduring damage, both at home and abroad, of America’s mass-aggressions. The irony is smoother than in ‘An Inconvenient Anime’ (28 November 2012) – Hyde’s presentation at a Vermont anime conference where attendees were trolled with a purposefully uninformed defamation of Japanese culture, complete with requisite boast about America’s nuking Japan. In a moment where so many peoples are maintaining such intensity of vigil in the city of the dead, MDE laughs off mass slaughter, intentionally denying the most basic facts of our history. What is clear is that their history is exclusively their own.

Image: MDE, ‘John Oliver shoutout! (joke video) (political commentary)’, 2016

4. (Example B)

In MDE’s ‘John Oliver shoutout! (joke video) (political commentary)’ (21 October 2016), a monologue is cut together from two parallel improvisations – ‘For the sake of argument, if you come at me, in a public situation, if I had to defend myself outside of your apartment, I’m watching you through your window and I have to shoot through a crowd of people to defend myself, it’s 2 AM, it’s a self-defense situation’ – during which a submachine gun bearing ‘THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS’ is fired and two parody newsflashes run along the bottom of the screen, the second reading: ‘Mayo Saxon tax expanded to include vouchers for getting nails did’. A racial slur for ‘white’ (where ‘Mayo’ is the abbreviated form of ‘mayonnaise’, perhaps roughly equivalent to ‘pasty’ as an epithet), and a mockery of a popularised usage from African American English are brought together to make the implicit claim that it is white workers who pay for the (abused) welfare of black women, making the system of taxed employment and paid unemployment the ultimate in structural reverse-racism.

Given such a state of affairs, parity is only ever reconstructed through the instructive hail of automatic gunfire. Trump himself said on 23 January 2016 that he could murder someone in cold blood and not only suffer no consequence, but lose no vote. The question is, who would he shoot? (The apple does not stray far from the tree.) Trump knows what it feels like to be the average white man: his media debut was as the subject of a racism charge and money, well he too has lost everything. But he has regained it: so he not only knows what it feels like to have your labour stolen from you, but he also knows what it feels like to steal it back and steal it back at huge multiplications of its original value – to dominate in turn.

So barring the possibility of actually stealing food stamps ‘back’ from their recipients (‘Fuck welfare we say reparations’, Dead Prez, ‘Hell Yeah’), cultural domination is attempted through ‘liberated’ speech by right wing fanatics and by any means necessary. Racial superiority is once again a public option, up-voted magically to the top of the search results. The supremacy of the straight Caucasian alpha male constitutes the lifeblood of MDE, an energy deriving ultimately from a frustration with the contradicted position of being dominated by capital, but not being subject to the discriminatory domination useful to capital because of its power to reduce the price of labour.

Image: MDE, ‘Ideas Man’, 2013

5.

We move now from work’s enforced absence to the workout. ‘Ominous chord strikes’. Following the self-yellowing intro scene, the first WP sketch takes place in a gym. Intersecting rays of black and gold are distributed hectically across a glowing blue floor, giving the impression of industrial shadows cast from above. ‘zone fitness’ shines from a digital sign on the left wall. The back wall and ceiling are black. A foil mirror on the right gives a blurred impression. A woman and a man cross paths as they enter the scene. The man gets the woman’s attention as she is listening to music, turned the other way. His olive green t-shirt and slick wig indicate a career in the military. Woman: ‘Oh hey, how’s it goin? You workin’ out today?’ Soldier: ‘Oh yeah, that’s why I’m here [that’s why I’m here]’. The repeated phrase here has been audibly repeated as a drawling echo, the video slowed for an instant, hard to accurately perceive, but suggestive enough to catch the man in his lie. He has not come to the gym to work out. He is an occupying force. There is a kind of awkward flirting. She praises his muscles and he loudly slaps his arm, as if to awaken his veins, saying ‘vascular’. He strikes dumbbell squats and she worries he will hurt his back, then he assures her there is no danger if you stick out your ‘fanny’. He emphasises the word and sleazily points at her as they move on to their respective workouts. The man seems disappointed, no doubt because he has to make good on his boast. The woman uses the stair climber, facing the man across the room and the man grabs the weights, turned to the blurry mirror. He takes his first dumbbell squat. The foreseen back injury announces itself, sending the man stumbling to the floor, humiliated in front of a woman who just predicted his injury and who continues her climbing, as if wilfully oblivious to the suffering of one who failed to heed her concern.

Image: MDE, World Peace, Episode 1, 2016

6.

It turns out the soldier came prepared. Pulling up his t-shirt, he reveals an emergency reboot implanted into his abdomen, resembling a start button and marked ‘Fozzy Contin’ (fuzzy/foggy continue and opiate addiction has already been suggested). Self-repair lifts the man into a superior state, not only enabling him to support himself, but refiguring the structure of his face. Bulging mounds, the base of his new green and red eyes, can only signify Pepe the Frog, who has made some impressive cameos recently and in the run-up to Trump’s victory came to symbolise a new form of political comedy: the spell-casting troll doing whiteface with memes, wearing the uniform of racial supremacy as open affront to liberal decency, daring to be refused their special claim to a unique victimhood, refusing to be forgotten in the most disgusting terms possible. The transformation leaves the figure straddling an old and a new consciousness: the rules of the game have now undergone a drastic alteration, where any reasonable degree of restriction on the man’s behaviour towards the woman in front of him has been lifted and released, along with his id. The two have become truly alone together for the first time, where the rule is might over right: while the woman was correct in her vision of the man’s injury, it is the man’s muscularised perception that now dominates what is real and what is not.

Images: MDE, World Peace, Episode 1, 2016, contrast in second image retuned to reveal star formation

7.

Seeing with Pepe’s eyes reveals what was not visible before: A false infinity mirror-effect extends the gym scenario by three receding iterations of itself. Crucially empty, the man and woman are joined by no other exercisers, nor iteration-reflections of themselves. An orange ceiling with overhead lighting hangs above each of the gym space images. What must stand out now to the new amphibian, in the implicit visual display of this repetition of the room in which he stands, is the corollary to the six lights over each of the room-images: the six-pointed star that has been hidden in plain sight since the scene’s first shot, centre-stage in yellow on the blue gym floor. (Yellow begins now to signify the yellow badge, exclusionary marker of a people accused of owning more than they deserve, where yellow is symbolic of wealth as gold, shameful because acquired through inhumane means.) This Star of David (or is it a square and compass?) is overlaid with a crucifix (or negatory X). From the elements of this superimposition, a swastika may be drawn, branching off from the central cross. In the present moment, swastikas in broad daylight are less useful to those who wish to draw and glorify them: the entangled image declares not itself, but its potential and critically requires the fanatic’s activation by careful disentangling.

What this interpretation leaves out is the length of the lines, the fact that they are not contained by the figures it is claimed they combine to articulate. This floor display exemplifies the rhetorical evasions of MDE, the play of deploying and retracting statements, gas-lighting in show-dialogues constructed from oppositional personas of assertion and denial. Extension and retraction of moral thresholds destabilises the psychic environment, leaving room for the comedy to perform its didactic moral labor. The achieved result is that the envelope is pushed so far that a monstrous political intent is blatantly obvious. This is what some people call not funny and that is the point: the point is not something funny, but something intentionally dangerous. This is the meaning of the hemlock reference in the Adult Swim WP promo text – ‘FOR WHAT NAIVE SLOB EXPECTS HEMLOCK MEDICINE TO TASTE OF MILKSHAKE?’ – that MDE are claiming the moral philosophical position of Socrates, the grand patriarch of Western philosophy, put to death for his ideas. To protest the cancellation of WP as an injustice is to not understand that MDE set themselves up for this, at least half-knowingly, indeed as in a ‘SUPER PURE TRAGICOMEDY ROSARY’, to be so persistently wrong that their corporate patrons could no longer countenance them, in an age where getting sacked is the new ‘death’. To be axed, presumably for questions about the moral integrity of their relatively popular intellectual property, must mean that they are onto something that is essentially primary, hugging the root of important questions that the corporate media wish to leave unasked. Right?

That is the political fantasy that MDE has been weaving over the past four years, casting out antagonistic ironies in a messy pile of intertwining threads. A self-contradicting knot of expressions and symbolic characters will always risk being read the ‘wrong’ way (especially when its authors frequently make anti-Semitic jokes and remarks across all of the artistic and social media outlets they command). Symbolic overlays, charged with the triumph of conspiracy revelation and the false irony of cultural/racial disgust, as in the credits to ‘Murder Charls’ (2013), are central to MDE’s repertoire of offensive sign-making. Two useful examples of this follow, before we turn back to the room where everything is laid bare.

Image: Composite image from unknown source: notebook of mass shooter James Holmes, screen-shot of uncensored WP teaser

Image: Website of collaborator Andrew Ruse, featuring projects affiliated with MDE

8. (Example A)

The image at the centre of the original logo for WP, censored for broadcast to a peace sign (‘World☮Peace™’), was born as a symbolic equation conceived by Colorado theatre shooter James Holmes: a circle encompassing an overlay of infinity and one, where all deaths (but not lives) are equivalent, one-zero-infinity. (Note the title of WP’s third episode, ‘3 Down 47 to Go Countdown to Mass Funeral’.) The bold contradiction of the logo’s expressions is born of a desire to explode the civil order, to acquire at least a better position from which to fight to regain the liberties lost to the tyranny of ‘cultural Marxism’. The one and the infinite combine pictographically to form an eagle whose wings command infinite domination, uniting the globe’s four corners and rewriting history in the revenge-image projected from its wielders’ alienation, where glory is to be reclaimed on behalf of present and future injuries to the dominators.

Images: MDE, World Peace, Episode 2, ‘Jews Rock!’, 2016

9. (Example B)

In the WP music video ‘Jews Rock!’, the central projection in yellow on pink is an upside-down peace sign overlaid onto a mirror image of the western hemisphere. As forum users point out, the peace sign in this incorrect orientation produces the Algiz rune, signifying life, a character adopted in Nazi and white supremacist symbologies. The overlay is a clear display of Aryan supremacy, as a user on the Holla Forums thread recognises: ‘You guys missed the sneakiest symbol of them all. The “peace” sign is actually, when right side up, the nordic symbol, over a image of the world. Nice one sam.’ To which one response reads: ‘Or rather the peace symbol is an upside down life (algiz) rune. A symbol of submission and slavery!’ The propagandistic imperative in MDE’s juxtapositions is fortified by resolute suggestion, both subliminal and overt. See the footage in ‘Ideas Man’ (2013) from a university lecture hall performance where – ‘Pull the band-aid off a little too fast and tell ‘em something that they don’t want to hear’ – is spoken as a swastika is drawn on a chalkboard, cut with menacing reversed footage of an Ace of Clubs being ripped in half. The reparation of the Ace of Clubs is made purposefully vengeful, the band-aid image is a flash-fry model of youth politicisation (or of the swift abolishment of the welfare state) and the swastika inscribed on the symbolic medium of the teacher. The use of a swastika in a work of art is not a problem in the abstract: it is the clarity of the objective being arrived at through this particular use of the swastika that is the problem. Enough elements of the equation are always present in MDE’s work, both under and above the surface, to recognise the proposition of a thesis, clear through any apology referencing the messy semantic plurality of subversive-absurdist invention.

Image: MDE, ‘Antiques’, 2012

10.

Back in the gym, an extremist new vision reveals modern history as a pattern of conspiracies laid out against the scene’s protagonist. Iteration of the same produces clarity of the underlying image: a stage of inescapably Jewish supremacy whose furnishings punish and degrade the goyim, usurping flesh by the pound, where losing weight and gaining muscle mass are analogies for the desired accumulation of wealth. It is only by recourse to a technological power confluent with his own white skin that the damaged soldier becomes amphibious historical visionary. A prose block appearing on the screen for no more than seven seconds at the end of ‘Antiques’ (2012) begins:

Western civilization is nearly over. The great flood is coming, only this time the ‘flood’ will wipe the genetic slate clean, and DNA like yours and ours will be swirling around the toilet for one final flush, just as it should. Orwell said, ‘if you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face - forever.’

This is an expression of desperation signalling the crushing defeat felt by racists when Obama won his second term. ‘DNA like yours and ours’ is the kind of thing that racists say when they feel confident they are in the company of those just like them. MDE stepped out of their Caucasian niche with its Adult Swim gig, expanding their audience to the so-called ‘people of all sizes, sexualities, and colors’, a public debut of a project that was developed in the exclusive hothouse of white nationalist indignation. ‘GO ANTIQUING!’ is a directive for MDE’s devotees to excavate those relics of discredited, unscientific thought which are deemed necessary for the amplification and political ascendancy of the far right. With the rise of Trump, the example of the ‘Antiques’ text has proven true: raw chauvinism as requisite disguise, casually horrible, contemptuously misogynistic, racially pragmatic and always ready to backtrack with the aid of a gaslight, hallmark of a being too self-possessed to do the actual work of atonement. The power activated by the soldier is drawing on this energy, the same energy that redefines the word ‘COLORS’ as an acronym for ‘Come On Let’s Orchestrate Radical Shit’ (in one of MDE’s animated ‘spells’ from the video ‘iSuck and iSuck Pro. Suck different’ (20 June 2012)), where ‘Radical’ means pertinent to the advancement of those with ‘DNA like yours and ours’. The soldier’s power is expressly white, characterised by the internet-lubed mechanism of a middle class, right wing solidarity, its adherents full of hope for the emergence of a future that lifts them up as vanguard expressionists driving a wave of working class political fury.

Images: MDE, World Peace, Episode 1, 2016

11.

Far from desperate, the beginning of WP expresses an assurance grounded in a technologised whiteness represented by an invisible human labour at work in the unpopulated receding images of the gym. The revelation is of a labour without representation, whose machines are haunted by a chilling spiritual music: a rendition of the internet as a tool for the reclamation of a chauvinism conceived as the primary attribute of a correct historical protagonist. In what could be an analysis of this scene, a Holla Forums post in the WP thread reads: ‘The old edifice of deceit is crumbling under the weight of its own hubris. New, more accurate perceptions of reality are spreading to the four corners of the earth. The World isn’t ending…the controlled mainstream perception of reality is ending.’ The scene cuts out to the sound of a woman’s screams, with censored text imposed over an aquarium whose floor is a luminescent grid. This is the World and there are indeed plenty of fish for those with ITNESS streaming out of their heads. The woman’s screams are followed by a deep voice: ‘Yeah, baby’.

MDE’s parodic horror supplies a fascist future with the cultural material it needs to popularise its ‘New, more accurate perceptions of reality.’ What must be understood, however, is that these perceptions are fantasies paraded in the psychic costume of perception, evidence of a defence mechanism protecting its users from facing up to the inescapable objective data of the world as it is. The abundance of suppressed history is staggering, especially as it concerns the exploitation and destruction of the working classes, women and people of colour. The suspense by which much of MDE is pervaded is most especially marked by the radiation of imminent violence by white men, typically to be performed against women, but also manifest in a more lurking sense of danger, legible as an emergent political violence distinct from specific acts.

Image: Wolfsangel, unknown source. (The wolf trap is ideological lurecraft, a half-swastika plunged into the gut, the other half lodged in the head. What can be seen in the Wolfsangel demonstration image is not the meat-bait, but the baited brain-meat.)

12.

The lush audio-visual design of WP and much of MDE, particularly its animated inter-titles, raise questions about the aesthetic vehicles by which a leftist art can be accomplished without getting fast-forwarded to the opposite horizon. Bands featured on WP have since denounced it, attributing their failure at sniffing out a political enemy to being blinded by the opportunity of an Adult Swim feature. Trusting our instincts cannot provide the art of refusal with all of the evidence that it requires: antifascist artists must be vigilant scholars of the histories of their venues, curators, editors, publishers, collaborators and exploiters. That the market for fascist cultural production is growing cannot surprise us any longer: it is through acts of solidarity and refusal, as well as through more furiously left-wing satirical art, that we will successfully oppose it. For now, the revolting odour of Million Dollar Extreme remains suspended in the light of antifascist contempt.

BIO

EG Daymare is the name of this author. For more information, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWTaSNQULHE

FOOTNOTES