LIVE, LAUGH, DIE? | Binge Thinking BOS
About this Event
Welcome to Binge Thinking. We invite professors and experts to give lectures in bars around Boston, NYC, and DC!
In a world of AI slop, doomscrolling and brainrot, Binge Thinking brings real experts into real places for nights of learning, conversation, and community.
Think Responsibly.
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TOPIC:
Live, Laugh, Die? Theories of Dark Humor to Survive a Military Dictatorship
SPEAKER:
Dr. Florence Madenga, Boston College
When the news gets bleak, we joke about it. The meme about tanks rolling down Main Street, the parody account that sounds a little too real, the sketch that makes you laugh and then feel slightly weird for laughing. But what happens when humor becomes one of the only safe ways left to talk about power?
In places where criticizing the government can get you censored (or worse), dark humor turns into a survival tool: a way to say the unsayable, process fear, and poke at authority without saying it out loud. And it turns out humorists in Zimbabwe and the United States, two countries that seem worlds apart, are wrestling with surprisingly similar questions about citizenship, militarization, and who really holds the power.
In this talk, Dr. Florence Madenga unpacks how dark comedy helps us make sense of living under (or drifting toward) military rule, and why the same jokes that help us cope might also be quietly getting us comfortable with autocracy.
Topics include:
How dark humor lets people talk about governance when speaking plainly is risky
Why comedians in the US and Zimbabwe share a strange ambivalence about their own citizenship
How military aesthetics went mainstream through memes, satire, and comedy content
When laughing at power helps us spot a dictatorship coming, and when it just makes it feel normal
Beyond the punchlines, this is a story about how people hold onto their voice.
From satirical news in Zimbabwe to viral parody in the US, humor has long been a way for ordinary people to push back, stay sane, and find each other when official channels go quiet. But pleasure is powerful, and sometimes the thing we laugh at is the thing we stop questioning.
This talk asks a question worth sitting with over a drink: when we laugh at power, who’s really winning?
About the Speaker
Dr. Florence Zivaishe Madenga (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and the African and African Diaspora Studies Program at Boston College. She studies journalistic practice, especially how journalists and everyday media-makers push back against, or get caught up in, state censorship online.
Her recent research explores humor and journalism in tricky political contexts: satire journalism as a tool for freedom (and its limits) in Zimbabwe, where she grew up, “Black journalism” in the United States, and popular culture across the African diaspora. Her work has been published in Information, Communication & Society; Media, Culture & Society; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; the International Journal of Communication; and other journals.
Dr. Madenga earned her B.A. in Journalism and Politics and an interdisciplinary M.A. in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University, then her Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Before academia, she worked as a freelance writer in the US and abroad, with literary journalism in BuzzFeed, Chimurenga, Narratively, and more. Before joining Boston College, she was a George Gerbner Postdoctoral Fellow at Annenberg and a visiting instructor at Swarthmore College.
Agenda
7:00 PM - Doors Open (Grab a seat and drinks!)
7:30 PM - Lecture Begins
8:10 PM - Audience Q&A
8:30 PM - Drinks & Conversation
9:00 PM - Event Ends
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 32.99
