"My Satirical Self" (a link)

Link to a great article in the New York Times yesterday about satire, irony, sarcasm, and our modern world. It's by Wyatt Mason, who is a contributing editor at Harper's.

"Satire, then, signals both the sickness and health of a society in equal measure: it showcases the vigor of the satirist and the debility of the satiree. As such, we might conclude, in America, that its abundance suggests a normal balance of destructive yin and creative yang, a human need to view the most vexing frailties of a culture through the liberating prism of lampoon."

All told, it's a good narrative that gets Juvenal, Swift, Franklin, Twain, Bierce, Parker, and on up to The Onion, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert, all in one article. (The subject comes up alot at Scienceblogs, and I'll just link to one such post. There are many more, and many good ones, from my fellow Sciencebloggers.)

Some more excerpts below.

...a high point both for "The Daily Show" and contemporary satire more generally came shortly after The New Yorker published Seymour Hersh's 2004 exposé, "Torture at Abu Ghraib." There was genuine shock, both here and abroad, that a prison taken from a dictator who had used it to torture Iraqi dissidents had in turn served as a forum for the torture of Iraqis by their American "liberators." Much of our high-flown rhetoric, billowing grandly over Operation Iraqi Freedom, collapsed on the mast. The irony -- uncomplicatedly galling -- seemed obvious enough, but its precise grade was measured nowhere more finely than in an exchange between Stewart and Rob Corddry, a player who has since departed. As Corddry explained to Stewart, his voice that of a schoolteacher instructing an uncommonly simple-minded child:

Jon, there's no question what took place in that prison was horrible, but the Arab world has to realize that the U.S. shouldn't be judged on the actions of a. . .well, that we shouldn't be judged on actions. It's our principles that matter; our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember, Jon, just because torturing prisoners is something we did doesn't mean it's something we would do.

This is not, as it is sometimes called, "fake news"; rather, blunt satire. Co-opting the patronizing, abstraction-rich rhetoric of the administration of which "The Daily Show" has often been critical, Corddry shined a bright light on an empty set of bromides. All too clearly, words can prove seductive -- but only to a point: the point where such seductions become fundamentally ridiculous.

and one more...

Can you take shelter in the ridiculous if everywhere becomes ridiculous? For the tools of satire, the sharp knives of sarcasm and the pointy shivs of irony and the toy hammer of lampoon are being wielded with widespread enthusiasm, and not merely by cunning builders of satirical speeches and stories. Rather, they are being lent to us all, to enable every possible construction. Did you hear, for example, the news conference President Bush gave in Germany over the summer? "I'm looking forward to the feast you're going to have tonight," he said to the German chancellor in a moment of folksy charm, "and I understand that I may have the honor of slicing the pig." This drew laughs, and when his remarks wound down, the president repeated, "I'm looking forward to that pig tonight." This before fielding the following from a reporter:

"Does it concern you," the man asked, stuttering, "that the Beirut airport has been bombed, and do you see a risk of triggering a wider war? And on Iran, they've so far refused to respond. Is it now past the deadline, or do they still have more time to respond?"

"I thought," Bush replied, "you were going to ask about the pig."

"Try to ignore, if you can, the image of the carcass of a pig, Bush poised, knife in hand, ready to carve. Consider instead that when asked on an international stage about real carnage -- about spreading violence in the Middle East, about a constellation of worries suggesting a world at the brink of war -- the president's reply did not take the questioner's inquiry seriously but, rather, sarcastically. His rhetoric sounded less like that of a steward of state -- one addressing serious matters with sobriety -- than that of a smartass. And this was not Juvenal's sarcasm, or Twain's, or even Colbert's: it was not elegantly tuned to a point nor artfully part of a formal design. It was, instead, almost perfectly inappropriate and, of course, not unindicative of the president's normal rhetorical mode.