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In this article I argue that dark comedy is an important democratic resource for challenging ideology. I build this argument by drawing from two voices—trans YouTube activist Natalie Wynn and feminist science fiction writer Joanna Russ. I begin by conducting a close reading of Wynn's video \"The Darkness,\" in which she discusses the hypocrisies of free speech ideology. Critically responding to a transphobic performance by comedian Ricky Gervais, Wynn shows how the language of political correctness and free speech are used to conceal deeper structures of oppression. To think about this problem, I look at Joanna Russ's satirical \"How to Suppress Women's Writing,\" a mock instruction manual for preventing women and people of color from becoming published authors. In this text, Russ theorizes ideology as an organized and escalating progression of responses to anti-hegemonic action. Russ's use of satire to expose these uses of ideology, however, has the effect of undermining their political projects. Drawing insight from this example, I conclude by returning to Wynn's case for the importance of comedy created by marginalized people (she terms this type of comedy \"the darkness\") as a political tool. While some leftist responses have tended to argue that the medium and structure of comedy facilitates bigotry and erasure, Wynn makes a case for dark comedy as a means of transcending these structures. She shows that dark comedy is an antidote to dominant ideologies, and is a political tool that is more readily available to the oppressed than to their oppressors.

From an artist's perspective, being able to be creative and support your idea or even in business to be able to commit to a project you know the audience will relate to is the part that I get off on. When you reach that point, you start to focus on philanthropy because people who help people resonate the strongest in their absence.