While
the puffed up politicians vacate the streets and return to the nest to plan the
next round of shitting on us all, the UK’s city squares are left free for the real
pigeons to resume their similar public displays of proudly crapping everywhere
whilst simultaneously showing off their masculinity. Our media space, from
Buzzfeed to the BBC, has likewise been ‘politicized’ for the past few weeks, but
it will soon return to a stream of animal memes in which the pigeon once more
takes centre stage. We share our cities with pigeons, passing them on the
street every day, and now they litter our newsfeeds too, but an alarming lack of study
has treated these big questions: what cultural role does the pigeon play, and what
unconscious structures and ideologies control our responses to pigeons?
In an earlier article for The Guardian on the sad death of Jonathan the Giant Tortoise, Everyday Analysis discussed how the animal/human relationship almost always has to do with projection: we see the acts of animals in human terms. In the example below, with projection, the pigeon looks something like a Navy Admiral, or a proud rugby player, showing off his wonderful crest for the female (or rival male) to admire.
Perhaps we find pigeons a little bit funny because they appear to think of themselves as proud figures of masculinity but are often seen haplessly chasing retreating females, confronting us with a failed masculinity. Although we know this puffing-up is a part of successful mating, we laugh at its failure, the female on the run while the male follows in futility. It seems pigeons might be connected to failed masculinity in our language too, as with the phrase ‘pigeon chested,’ used to describe a man with a weak or effeminate chest, even though a lot of men would kill for a chest like that displayed above.
But this way of seeing it is problematic because it allows ideals of masculinity to remain in place. Laughter at unsuccessful masculinity (something we often see) allows for the affirmation of successful masculinity, creating a distance between the laugher and the failed masculinity that is the target of the laughter, the poor pigeon.
On the other hand, perhaps we are laughing, in a displaced way, at the behaviour patterns and identities of humans and not of pigeons at all. As the two wonderful memes below suggest, the posture and acts of the pigeon seem to display a particular human ‘character type’. The first appears to be wearing his bread like a rap star might wear a huge gold chain, whilst the second walks in the style of flamboyant campness or with the swagger of a woman confidently displaying a stylish outfit. Here it is the human identity that is mocked by the image of the pigeon. It may be this that is really behind our laughter at the mating pigeons too; what appears to be laughter at the pigeon’s failure could be a displaced laughter at the similar attempts of the human male’s wooing technique.
There is then, in a sense, what we might call a left- and right-wing response to the pigeon, just as there is left and right wing satire abound in our culture at the moment: one which treats the pigeon as a mere ‘other’ to affirm the superiority of the human, and another which sees the comedy as something that brings down our own structures of human identity, mocking ourselves. But is the gap between left and right really that big here?
Speaking of satire, eighteenth-century English novelist Jonathan Swift writes that ‘satire is a kind of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.’ For Swift, in satire we look at the object of laughter as a mirror in which we project the image of something we want to laugh at, but we leave ourselves intact and free of mockery. Whether it is the pigeon or the rap star with the gold chain we laugh at, the position from which the laughter is issued remains safe and is affirmed as above the target of the laughter. The cultural role of the pigeon seems to show this, that a lot of our satirical mockery, whilst it aims to mock all and everything, often leaves the identity of the satirist intact. This is an interesting lesson that could be well applied to the controversial politics of satire that we see playing an increasing role in television, print and online media. Perhaps western satire, while it claims to leave nothing un-mocked, is also keeping something intact.