An escalation: Joe Jowitt's Descending, ascending, regular, irregular (two-out-of-three) (2025)

Last month I got a text, purportedly from the police, that told me my traffic fine hadn't been paid and was overdue. I did get a ticket for something recently, but I was sure I’d already paid it. Was the text spam? I couldn’t tell right away. It came with instructions to reply with the letter Y, then close the message and reopen it again to click a link to pay my fine. A convoluted, farcical process, but not unrealistic given the way some public agencies’ processes are designed.

I double-checked my bank history and, feeling silly, confirmed I’d already paid my fine a week earlier. I’d nearly been had by the type of scam I’m usually warning older family members about.

Satirical news site The Onion has been fooling people for years, but the need to be able to distinguish what’s real has become more pressing, especially as text-to-video AI models get better at generating people with the right number of fingers. “Fake news” has become so prevalent that the term has gone from being a descriptor of fiction masquerading as legitimate news to a post-truth dismissal of anything that doesn’t fit the favoured narrative.

So if you’re an unsuspecting pedestrian on Masons Lane, it might take you a moment to realise the public service announcement playing on the screen halfway down the steps isn’t quite what it seems on the surface. After all, why would you question the credibility of such a friendly man in a slim navy suit? There’s even a New Zealand Government logo in the corner of the video. It’s a bit of an unexpected channel to announce a new Bill, but government department posts are always coming up on your Facebook feed and the PM is doggedly trying to pop off on TikTok, so it must be a new comms strategy.

Joe Jowitt’s video work, Descending, ascending, regular, irregular (two-out-of-three), is a studied parody of the governmental public service announcement. Jowitt’s friendly character tells us about the introduction of the Regular Nothing to See Here Standards Bill, which will, among other things, reduce the number of stairs you’re legally required to have by one third.

What starts with an appeal to kiwis “grafting away”, inconvenienced by “nasty red tape and regulation” evolves into absurdity as Joe explains that one out of every three steps will be removed from public walkways, which can be put to use in new staircases elsewhere. (Some stairs will be replaced by “stairless walkways” so cars can make use of them, too.) In b-roll he clambers down the Masons Lane steps on his hands and knees, head first, before lying down on one of the landings so that a pedestrian has to step over his body.

Joe apes the insidious corporate rhetoric of the twenty-first century, no longer dry and risk averse but chatty and informal: where workers are not ‘staff’ but ‘our people’, and brands are your friends.

Public sector agencies are now competing for your attention with “more humour, more personality, more banter, and more fun”. The jazzy music and casual tone typical of these PSAs can gloss over the importance of the message—as Joe says, nothing to see here! We’re on your side, just trying to eliminate some of that pesky regulation.

The literal stair descent is mirrored in this film’s descent into absurdity. Or perhaps it’s better seen as an ascent, further mirroring the escalation of mainstream right-wing politics. The Regular Nothing to See Here Standards Bill is a clear analogue for ACT leader David Seymour’s Regulatory Standards Bill, which passed into law at the end of 2025. The real-life Regulatory Standards Bill, ostensibly in service of ‘good lawmaking’, has managed to enshrine the libertarian ideologies of that party in the foundations of future New Zealand legislation. In the same way, Joe’s governmental appropriation of stairways from pedestrians including students and the elderly in favour of “big business boys” and their cars reaches beyond a single bureaucratic moment and describes the neoliberalism at the core of Western politics today.

With such a partisan objective, how did the Regulatory Standards Bill make it into law? Its regulatory principles are heavy on protecting property rights and both private and commercial interests, with no mention of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, public health, environmental values or protection of marginalised groups. The Bill was widely criticised, but it didn’t receive remotely the same attention that ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill did earlier in the current term. It’s possibly because regulation is an unglamorous, dull concept; at best, it translates to “red tape”, which is an easy appeal to anyone who has come up against a council bylaw. But for most people, regulation is boring. When Joe starts talking about “schedule 1(a)” your brain starts to tune out; obscured under this veil of bureaucracy, the free market agenda creeps forward.

Joe’s work is funny, but that doesn’t mean it’s not serious—in fact the reason why it’s funny, and why parody works as a genre at all, is because it balances on the line of what’s believable. It draws attention to the threat of the right wing against the rights of anyone who isn’t already rich, ultimately validating our concerns. In a recent Comic Release podcast episode on CIRCUIT Joe proposes that humour can offer a space for care. And in a climate where the bad news keeps coming and the fight feels perennial, it’s no wonder that if you’re not on the side of the big business boys, you might feel tired and in need of a little care. Descending, ascending… insists on play in a way that shrinks that feeling of powerlessness, much as drawing a silly moustache and glasses on a photo of a politician in a newspaper helps, for a moment, in making you feel like you still have some agency. (Don’t try going for a swim to relax if you’re in Wellington, though—we got rid of the nasty regulation that Three Waters was going to bring and now there’s raw sewage in the sea.)

Writing about the value of parody in raising awareness of environmental crises, Nikolai Skiveren describes the “productive capacity” of humour: the power of a laugh to overcome apathy or exhaustion. This is a radical productivity that creates value not in financial terms for shareholders, but in connection and solidarity for the people (and the planet). Perhaps this resonates with me because my natural inclination in the face of difficult things is to make dumb jokes, but I like to think that if we keep laughing then we can keep believing that a different world is possible.