Tactical Frivolity: When Protest Turns Playful

by Diane Irby

The whimsical protests we’re seeing in Portland are historically grounded in a long tradition of dissent. The idea that humor, satire, and even outright silliness can be powerful tools of dissent goes back centuries. Scholars call it tactical frivolity; a form of protest that uses comedy, absurdity, and carnival-like antics to challenge authority and expose injustice.

Portland, Oregon ICE Protest, October, 2025

In his book 'Rabelais and His World,' Mikhail Bakhtin examined how humor and the carnivalesque gave a voice to ordinary people in medieval Europe. During festivals and charivaris, raucous parades mocking social wrongs, the lower classes could laugh at the powerful, briefly turning the social order upside down. These bursts of irreverence weren’t just entertainment; they were social critique disguised as play.

Anthropologists have even found that many hunter-gatherer societies maintain equality through ridicule. Among groups like the !Kung and Mbuti, humor acts as a soft but effective check on arrogance. Anyone getting too big for their britches can expect a well-timed joke to bring them back down to size.

In 1980s Poland, the Orange Alternative used whimsical street theater, often dressing as elves, to defy the oppressive regime with laughter. Their absurd “happenings” drew international attention and helped sustain morale within the Solidarity movement. Later, in the 1990s, Britain’s Reclaim the Streets revived this spirit with carnivals against capitalism, blending art, music, and activism into one joyous act of rebellion.

And Americans have kept the tradition alive. In the 1980s, Austin locals countered a Ku Klux Klan rally with a “Moon the Klan” event; thousands of residents dropping their pants in collective mockery. In North Carolina, clowns tossing flour and chanting “wife power” drowned out the hate. In South Carolina, one man, Matt Buck, simply walked alongside the Klan while playing his sousaphone, deflating their menace with nothing but a brass line.

At its heart, tactical frivolity offers a zone of shared action, one that transcends barriers of physical condition, legal status, language, or social class. It opens space for people to act together in challenging the power of capitalism to dictate how we live. These playful protests interrupt the “business as usual” worlds of work and consumption, liberating social space for imagination and dissent.

Drawing on Bakhtin’s idea of carnivalization, tactical frivolity also strives to create a space of radical equality, collapsing the hierarchies and dualities that divide people, inciting a collective realization of our shared desires for a socially just world. Likewise, whimsical protests intentionally disrupt the expected solemnity of many demonstrations, using humor and creativity to capture public and media attention. From medieval carnivals to clown counterprotests, the message is the same: ridicule can be revolutionary.

© 2025 Diane Irby. All rights reserved.
To cite this post:
Diane Irby, “Tactical Frivolity: When Protest Turns Playful,” dirby.art, October 2025. https://dirby.art/blog/tactical-frivolity-when-protest-turns-playful.

Citations:
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984). Rabelais and His World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. pp. 303–436. ISBN 9780253348302.

Collins, Ben (July 22, 2015). "Meet the Man Who Beat the KKK With a Tuba". Daily Beast.

Eleanor Burke Leacock and Richard B. Lee (1982). Politics and history in band societies. Cambridge University Press. p. 10. ISBN 978-0-521-28412-7.

Ivins, Molly (May 1, 1993). "The Fun's in the Fight". Mother Jones.

Juliusz Tyszka. "The Orange Alternative: Street happenings as social performance in Poland under Martial Law." Cambridge.org, New Theatre Quarterly. vol. 14 (56), 1998. p. 00311

Lees, Loretta (2004). The Emancipatory City?: Paradoxes and Possibilities. Sage Publications Ltd. pp. 91–106. ISBN 0-7619-7387-7.

Wing, Nicky (November 12, 2012). "White Supremacist Rally In North Carolina Met By Clown Counter-Protest, 'Wife Power' Signs". Huffington Post.