"People only share videos they find entertaining or funny." Right-wing populism, humor and the fictionalization of politics. A case study on the Austrian Freedom Party's 2017 online election campaign videos

The article deals with the use of humorous and entertaining elements in online election campaign videos of the right-wing populist Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). We first discuss the role of humor in political communication and advertising. Subsequently, the visual and multimodal design of humorous messages is discussed with a special emphasis on how humor and visuality can contribute to attack political opponents and foster anti-immigrant attitudes. Applying multimodal discourse analysis on humorous campaign spots, we reconstruct the multimodal meaning-making in the audiovisual narration, connect the individual media texts to the broader discursive structure, and show in detail how humor is instrumentalized and functionalized for political persuasion in the context of right-wing populism. For example, in the episodic video series “The Hubers’” images in the literal sense and linguistic images (metaphors) were strategically deployed inside a humorous narrative as collective symbols to convey fear appeals combined with simple anti-immigrant messages.