'Once upon a time there was a little blue egg...': A Multimodal Analysis of Political Humour in the Labour PEB 'Dave the Chameleon - The Debut'

The contribution focuses on the multimodal analysis of party election broadcasts (henceforth PEBs) as instantiations of political myths and collective social rites, viz. coronations, conquests and contests (Dayan & Katz, 1992). Into the latter category fall PEBs whose overarching interpretative construct is the framing of the election as ‘a fight against a common enemy’, often based on fear-arousing appeals and evident allusions to the horror genre as powerful persuasive devices. Alternatively, as is the case with the PEB under investigation here – produced by the Labour Party for the 2006 local election campaign and stigmatizing the Tory leader David Cameron as a political chameleon who says whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear –, the main persuasive strategy consists in twisting the verbal and visual conventions of the standard bio or profile ad used to introduce candidates to voters: the result is a clever satire wherein, thanks to a careful editing process, humorous verbal and visual hyperboles co-pattern with a series of sound effects as well as with the lyrics of the song on the soundtrack (Culture Club’s famous hit Karma Chameleon) in order to attract attention, create a favourable emotional disposition and enhance memorability, while tending to divert counterarguments and bypass negotiation. In line with the aim of the volume, and against the backdrop of the ongoing debate on the mediatization of politics, the paper also touches upon new forms of political communication on the Internet with particular reference to the linguistic (verbal and non-verbal) construction of the politician-voter relationship.