The Death of Satire

“American reality has been so extreme of late that satire is almost impossible. Anything you could imagine actually happens. It would stump Jonathan Swift.”

-- Fran Lebowitz

That such a remark could come from someone who was born of the conjugal product of satire and contrarianism has sent shudders throughout the satiric community, not to mention outrage that her self-satirizing trudging, whining, and cigarette smoking appears to be an attempt to corner a market she has pronounced moribund.

Of course, the rumored death of satire is laid, as is everything else, at the (small), Florsheimed feet of Donald Trump, whose persistent self-parody has left satirists mowing their lawns, watching Tiger King, and spending time with their children. And while the Trump Administration will one day end, as would a dentist’s drilling or your neighbor’s lawn mowing on Sunday morning, it has left as its legacy a confederation of climate deniers, racism deniers, election deniers, vaccine deniers, Parkland deniers, open trade deniers, gasoline price deniers, and armed pizza joint marauders. Is this chaotic bushel of wingnuts fair game for satirists, or are they so predictably abominable they will do away with humorists the way artificial intelligence does away with work?

Satire’s been counted out before. When Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for finally ending a senseless war he had pursued ardently and spread illegally, the eminent satirist Tom Lehrer pronounced “satire was dead.” More than a mere statement of disgust, Lehrer backed it up with conviction, and wrote only a handful of unimportant songs thereafter, the most memorable of which was “(I’m Spending) Hanukah in Santa Monica.” It should be unsurprising Adam Sandler’s best moment turns out to be derivative.

But Lehrer underestimated satire’s resilience. On the ropes after Kissinger’s Prize, satire bounced back, from Gerald Ford’ spontaneous liberation of Eastern Europe in a Presidential debate to Jimmy Carter being attacked by a “killer rabbit” to George (Daddy) Bush not knowing how a supermarket scanner worked to Bill Clinton’s assignee masturbating with a Cuban cigar (and Brett Kavanaugh’s and Ken Starr’s lurid fascinations with it) to George (the Kid) Bush’s impromptu invention of nouns, verbs and intelligence reports, not to mention Gwyneth Paltrow’s Vagina Candle. If satire is dead today, it might have died of an overdose.

But is satire really dead? Let’s ask the people on the front lines, the lampooners and the lampooned.

“Oh, it’s a very real thing,” said Milton Whirlybird, Executive Director of the Fire-Starting Space Laser Coalition, a fictitious industry group. “There was a time when the simple mention of my fabricated name or the ridiculous premise of my preposterous industry association would not only produce a titter but a laugh, even a guffaw, but would launch a premise good for 1,200 always-excellent words by Monica Hesse on the Washington Post features page. It all but writes itself: Do space-based lasers have to file environmental impact statements? Is their logo Mrs. O’Leary’s cow? Do they shut down for Shabbos? Did Elon Musk build it? But now it seems like either a vapid trope not worth the sentence or a hasty dismissal of the fact there once was a psychotic in Congress saying this shit.”

“it’s a very bad situation,” says Wolf J. Flywheel, a Colonel in the National Tin Foil Hat Militia. “I think a lot of satirists figured they’d lost Trump back in 2020 but during the January 6 incident it looked as if we had thrown satire a lifeline, if you overlook the throw-up-in-your-mouth aspect of it. But then they started killing cops, which drains a lot of the humor out it, no matter what the set-up. A joke like ‘What did one Capitol insurrectionist say to the other Capitol insurrectionist? Let’s go hang Mike Pence!’--too soon? On the other hand, you could try a subtler approach: for example, If they actually had hanged Mike Pence, would Mitch McConnell have voted to convict?”

And if Trump has killed satire, it’s only because he’s made it too easy. The Internet now abounds in people replaying Trump speaking incoherently, falling asleep in the Oval Office, making ridiculous stuff up off the top of his head (although Reagan afficionados may resent that their man does not get credit for this pioneering technique), being prodded to wake up by a female assistant with a buzzer switch in her clothing, and farting, each presenter expressing smarmy superciliousness as they read their copy, which inevitably says only, “Watch this.”

And worse…AI, particularly the images, which can be described as mimicry, facetiousness, slime, self-righteousness, sanctimony, or smugness, but is it satire? Still, an image of Trump in a diaper is sort of amusing, even if it aims for the easy laugh. Like an Ann Telnaes cartoon.

The satirist must aim higher. “A satirist’s range is limited not by her imagination but by her stomach,” says Prof. Buck Bellson, Director of the Center for the Study of Very Angry People at the University of California, Cinders. “And while the January 6 rioters being described as tourists, or RFK, Jr. discrediting life-saving vaccines, or J. D. Vance accusing immigrants of eating dogs and cats, or America getting shamed by a bunch of bearded religious nuts in the Persian Gulf, excites the satiric imagination, they also turned a lot of stomachs, and now you have to be careful. It’s almost like telling Boko Haram jokes. Satire sees the truth and then exaggerates, and how do you exaggerate that? It would be like saying, “Holocaust toll revised to 7 million.” I think absurdity has some kind of Absolute Zero and we’re already there. Besides, let’s say it out loud--plenty of the satirists are scared shitless of the insurrectionists. After all, the mob has an arsenal of military-style weapons and…well, most of the satirists are Jewish.”

Satirists everywhere admit they are feeling the squeeze. “Let’s be truthful--we rode Trump like a share of GameStop and in 2020, we had to face the consequences,” said Cuthbert Twillie, an expert in on-line wit. “What the hell was funny about Biden, his age? His little microblackouts? His handing the Presidency back to Trump because his old lady didn’t want to leave the mansion? Biden’s biggest satiric vulnerability was once his hair plugs. Hair plugs are easy--you can set them up with a ‘two kinds of people’ joke, like ‘There are just two kinds of people--people who think hair plugs are ridiculous, and the douchebags who have them.’ Then maybe you can take the premise somewhere, like how Biden has been receiving strange radio messages through his hair plugs, instead of through the fillings in his teeth, right? But then you’ve got the punchline problem--what are the radio messages saying? Because all I can think of is ‘stop racist policing’ or ‘end family separation.’ It’s like driving for a couple of hours and ending up in a cul-de-sac.”

The current environment also strains the dominant theories of humor, which works to the advantage of fringe groups such as the Improvised Biology League, according to their spokesman, Joe Strawman. “James Thurber is said to have been walking down the street when he saw a woman walking her dog while carrying a bag of groceries in each arm, when the dog suddenly fell over dead and the poor woman could not figure out a way to carry both the two bags of groceries and the dead dog. Thurber broke out into laughter and realized laughter was the reaction you had when you could not bear any other reaction--that the underlying reality, whether it was a deranged puffin like Jack Donaghy exercising actual social and economic power on 30 Rock, or General Ripper blowing up the world because sex left him weak, was too terrible to contemplate. Or consider my organization. For example, we are against measles inoculation, so right away the reader is looking to a joke for relief from the discomfort that somebody could be as stupid as we are. Maybe we could have a funny slogan like “Don’t Let Antiquarian Quacks Like Edward Jenner Change Your Chromosomes!” or “Don’t Let Them Turn You Into Sheep.” But you’re going to have trouble there, because most of our readers think Edward Jenner won the Olympics and then had sexual reassignment. Or maybe something in our defense, like how we’re against inoculating for smallpox but our minds are open about big and medium size pox. But it all seems like pretty thin soup when compared to how batshit crazy we really are. And that’s before we get to the Hassids.”

Egbert Scarecrow, a spokesman for the Stop Body Cameras Now! coalition of ICE agents, prefers renowned drama critic Eric Bentley’s views on the origins of humor in his classic Life of the Drama, which built on Jonathan Swift. "Bentley saw comedy as structured around the interaction of knaves and fools,” he says. “Knaves attempt to victimize fools, but in the end are victimized themselves--e.g., the salesman is going to victimize the farmer’s daughter but is himself victimized, perhaps by a shotgun or a threshing machine or woodchipper or, in more contemporary tellings, the daughter being a Lesbian. In a drama, the “hero” is a fool who bests a knave but there’s nothing funny about it--at best, it’s a slasher movie, or with some luck, Promising Young Woman. But in satire, the knave’s comeuppance is played for laughs. For example, look at Trump. He was the classic knave, buffoonish in a sociopathic way, but now his knavery is being rewarded with his comeuppance as he sits, broke and in Allenwood as the Senate votes overwhelmingly to convict him, his supporters abandon him en masse, and his most radical supporters--Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and so on--are pursued to the ends of the earth and imprisoned by law enforcement and have all but disappeared. Oh, wait. None of that happened. You see? That’s not satire--that’s sarcasm.”

So, is sarcasm the new satire? Instead of wit, have we descended to smarm and unction? “Absolutely,” says Melville Poptopowitz, Professor at Yeshiva University’s School of Creative Writing. “Believe me, we get it. Joseph Smith said he found a pair of golden Egyptian plates buried somewhere with strange writing he translated with the help of the Holy Spirit and a smooth, egg-shaped stone, which makes as much sense as trying to figure out what’s going on in Interstellar with a pair of salad tongs. And then he gave the plates to the Angel Moroni for safe keeping, which has a few good jokes in it--Oh no, Moroni, my buried, golden plates were written in Egyptian, these are in Cuneiform. Or will angels give you back your buried, golden, Egyptian plates if you’ve lost your claim ticket? Good jokes, but are they genuine satire or a literary beating of a dead horse?”

“There is a difference,” offers Dudley Righthead of the Institute for Correct Thinking, an entity that appears towards the end of essays to deliver the point. “Kant felt human dignity was innate, that it could not be earned or forfeited. That’s the dividing line. Sarcasm dispenses with human dignity, satire makes its point because it rises to its defense.” And how is the reader supposed to know the difference? “Oh, it’s easy. The best satire leads the reader to a wistful, almost prayerful, how true! reaction that feels like intellectual endorphins. Sarcasm leads the reader to want to hit somebody.”

Or, as the satirists you meet each day at Starbucks, or doctor’s offices, or on smartphone help lines after an hour’s wait tell you, “Have a great one.” In the face of everything we’ve discussed in this essay, that might be the greatest satiric remark of all.