In The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain describes laughter as the great weapon humanity possesses against the power of the tyrant: “Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”
And it’s not hard to see why this idea has become a truism—it’s so easy. By satirizing ridiculous ideas, we will make their ridiculousness apparent, and they fade away. Just by laughing, then, we’re making the world a better place.
This, of course, doesn’t actually work, and the limitations of satire as a tool for social change have been noted. Politicians do need to maintain a base level of support, and, if satire cuts into this, it can cause them to modulate their positions. The last twenty years have proven, however, that, as long as that base is firm, they can endure constant ridicule without altering their positions even a scintilla.
But a more insidious issue is how satire actually distorts its subject matter, to the point where it obstructs the comprehension of reality.
A case in point is a Saturday Night Live sketch satirizing claims of fraud following the 2020 American presidential election.
The episode focuses on the efforts to overturn the election results in Michigan. Near the end of the proceedings, however, two characters who are part of the Wolverine Watchmen, the paramilitary group that planned the kidnapping the Governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, join the protest. When asked by a state representative what they would do with the governor if they did succeed in kidnapping her, one of them shouts, “We’d yell at her!”
Now, of course this wasn’t their actual plan. That group was going to kidnap her and place her on trial, after which, presumably, she would be executed. If this proved too difficult however, their backup idea was to simply assassinate her.
So, why didn’t the bumpkin in the Saturday Night Live routine say that? My guess is that it’s because murder isn’t funny, and if the character actually said they wanted to execute her, the comedy wouldn’t work: it would become something closer to horror. And this, I think, is the limitation of satire—at least, the kind that normally appears on American television. It requires soft targets and works best when skewering characters for foolishness or venality. The domestic terrorists in the sketch, then, need to be dampened to fit the generic requirements of the form. As a consequence, they appear stupid and misguided, not lethal.
And this is where this kind of humor becomes derelict. By representing the terrorists in this way, the sketch fundamentally misrepresents reality: it posits a nation that includes fools, not fascistic militias fantasizing about armed insurrection and civil war. It also presupposes a universe in which such groups are capable of being laughed back into compliance with the status quo. These points are not true, and we believe them at our peril.
Resistance to mockery has been seen as a contemporary expression of power. Another way of approaching this point, however, would be to say that it’s not that satire is the wrong tool for responding to reactionary political unrest, it’s rather that satire fails because it is generically incapable to acknowledging the raw outrage that underlies such unrest in the first place—it cannot begin to speak to it because it misconstrues the point altogether.
On any current events discussion forum, the pervasiveness of humor is striking—the first twenty comments are usually one-liners. Humor presupposes culturally accepted norms and standards, from the perspective of which particular ideas or actions can be understood as aberrations. To what extent is this constant joke-making a form of panic, an attempt to laugh an assailed center back into being?
Travel Only By Night 