Chronicle of a death foretold of satire
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me, or is the pen mightier than the sword?
On the day they were going to kill her, Satire got up at half past five in the morning to wait for Air-force One on which Trump was arriving.
I’ll start by disappointing the readers: The previous sentence is completely paraphrased from the original, by Garcia Marquez. It’s all downhill from here.
Unlike Macondo’s creator’s certainties about the novel’s protagonist, throughout this chronicle, it’s never clear whether satire is dead, or if it’s on its way there. Nor is it clear whether the ending is a happy one. There are three reasons for this: at this point in the chronicle, I haven’t written it yet, I most likely won’t reach a conclusion by then, but this is no longer just my fault. Just like beauty, happiness is in the eye of the beholder, or of who lives it: a happy ending for me can be another’s tragedy and vice versa.
All I know is that, like Portugal and perhaps the rest of humanity, Satire has been in crisis since the beginning of time, probably since the famous offer of the apple by the serpent, which God didn’t find funny and ended in expulsion from Paradise.
The fact that satire’s death is cyclically announced isn’t unrelated to this perception of its death (perceptions are apparently the alpha and omega of today). For example, in an article by the Guardian in 2016, or this article in Prospect in 2014, or this one by the NY Times in 2019.
The reasons given for the death of satire are divided into various categories, from natural death to murder, with suicide in-between. In other words, not only can I not assure you that satire has died, but if it has, there are multiple explanations for it, which are apparently mutually exclusive, but not really, as they tend to be truly hybrid.
Basically, and until proven otherwise, it may well be that the reasons for Satire’s death are like the murder suspects in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (spoiler alert, they’re all guilty).
But is Satire truly dead? And if not, can we give it a death certificate?
In truth, how can we say that satire is dead if our view of politicians and their essence as human beings has been tremendously influenced, in my generation, for example, by series such as Yes, Minister, or Yes Prime Minister, as other generations would be by VEEP, or The Thick of it, by Armando Iannucci?
How can we think that when programs like The Daily Show, by Jon Stewart and co. have become the format par excellence for political satire all over the world, like Ricardo Araújo Pereira’s “Isto é gozar com quem trabalha” in Portugal, for example? How can we say, in the end, that it’s dead, when Charlie Hebdo continues to operate, after its editorial office suffered a horrific terrorist attack under the pretext that the satire it used was offensive?
On the contrary, how can we say it isn’t dead if it behaves like a Greek chorus, incapable of changing the actions of men and its targets are apparently protected by Teflon suits, impermeable and indifferent to its voice?
But what if it died because, as many maintain, it was overcome by the creativity of reality? I have plenty of imagination, but if I were to write that a member of the Portuguese parliament, known for his Catilinarians in the middle of the plenary session against the crooks that run rampant in his imaginary, blond Portugal, was going to dedicate himself to stealing suitcases from airports (one of the most video-surveilled places in the world), storing them at home and in his office in the Parliament, and then selling their contents on a used-clothing resale app with an account under his name, at 1€ a piece, no one would believe it. The satire would be too crude, too cartoonish.
Yeah, but it actually happened. Or allegedly.
But even the most optimistic of readers, who thought that satire could still go further than this, would have to bend under the weight of the fact that, a few days later, the MP warned that he was a victim of artificial intelligence, only to inadvertently do an interview to two comedians, in which he promised to continue defending the measures of the parliamentary group from which he had resigned, under physical threats, from Chega, because he belonged to Mário Machado, a neo-Nazi convicted of multiple violent crimes. “How does he belong to him?” asked the Young Right Wing Conservative and his faithful advisor, containing the luminous happiness of a thousand suns and continuing – “how do conjugal visits work?” To which the deputy replies, very homophobic, “I’m his, Mário’s. But none of that wussy stuff.”
Is there any satire that can stand up to this?
Judging by the Chega deputies’ jokes about their ex-freshman deputy (they entailed puns on suitcases and luggage), no.
A typical picture of satire: a mayor outraged by the low productivity of the capital’s criminal sector, questions the police reports that prove it. It would plagiarize reality.
Maybe that’s the secret of satire: behaving like Schrödinger’s cat: for every side that wants it dead, there’s an opposite side that keeps it alive. But this is just a maybe, I barely know enough about humor, let alone physics, to know if the metaphor is actually applicable.
As an illustrious Portuguese thinker, Lili Caneças, used to say, being alive is usually the opposite of being dead and, from that point of view, is satire more like Lazarus than Lazarus himself, a phoenix always ready to rise from its own ashes or, as one of its most illustrious connoisseurs, Mark Twain, would say: “reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated?”
Maybe they are, but there are certainly attempts on the life of satire.
For example, on the social network formerly known as Twitter, now X, one of its owners, Elon Musk, self-proclaimed world leader in the defense of freedom of expression, proclaimed urbi et orbi that anyone who made fun of him would have their account blocked, while at the same time declaring that it was necessary to liberate comedy (that wasn’t about him, of course). A decade ago, Islamic extremists invaded Charlie Hebdo’s headquarters and literally massacred part of the editorial staff.
A few weeks ago, one of the veteran cartoonists at The Washington Post, hailed as a beacon of freedom for decades, the place where the reports on Nixon and Watergate came from, where the motto, displayed below the headline was “democracy dies in darkness” had to resign, after a satire of hers about the newspaper and its owner, Jeff Bezos, was censored.
Bezos would later announce that, going forward, the opinion section of his newspaper would only have opinions that agreed with his, which led to the resignation of the section’s director.
Jon Stewart had to cancel his show on Apple TV because Apple’s management wanted to ban him from inviting an American state regulator with whom they were having problems.
If in Russia it’s very difficult for a satirist to get life insurance, it’s no less true that in Portugal, whether under dictatorship or not, the life of satirists is not a bed of roses. Such was the case of Herman José, for example, or more recently Joana Marques, who was sued for making a joke.
As with all forms and styles of humor and even freedom of expression, our feelings and even convictions about the usefulness and urgency of satire and its necessity or vain gratuitousness depend too much, if not entirely, on a factor rarely assumed by everyone: Satire is great and courageous when directed at others, especially those we oppose, yet it’s a nameless shame, an indecency with no social value or justice, if it’s about our own and, as such, should not exist.
A very clear example of this is the case of the Egyptian “Jon Stewart”, Bassem Yousseff, a cardiovascular surgeon, who became the comedian at the epicenter of the “Arab Spring”. With indomitable courage, Bassem Yousseff’s satire was seen as one of the reasons behind the regime’s downfall and hailed as such. By exposing Mubarak’s dictatorship to ridicule, especially in the eyes of Egyptian youth, he corroded the very core of the institutions that sustained the dictator’s power.
Mubarak fell and the new regime naturally considered that the need for satire had disappeared the moment they took power. The show was canceled, threatened from all sides, and Bassem Yousseff had no choice but to emigrate to the USA, before being made, at the very least, a political prisoner. Hailed as a satirist (he’s really good), he became an American citizen.
One would think that, once there, his days would be peaceful.
Nothing could be more wrong than that. Many of those who thought he was a genius, especially on a certain American liberal left, are now furious at his support for the Palestinian cause and have rained down accusations, absurd in my view, of anti-Semitism on his humor and activism. His satire is now illegitimate in many circles. It must be exterminated. It’s tragic that this is the rollercoaster of his career.
Myths about Satire, or the motives of crime.
One of the myths about Satire is its relevance. From the children’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” in which a child dares to see and call out what others refuse to observe and acknowledge, to the “court jesters,” the only ones authorized to tell “the truth” to sovereigns and their entourage, satirists seem to have the power to reduce the owners of all this to the level of the laughable. It is their task, as the slave of a Caesar, to remind the wielders of power that they’re not divine, that however much they escape the laws of mortals, they’re still and always that, mortals, full of defects and, as such, legitimate targets for the humorous acid of satire.
Reality has the usual effect on this myth as it does when it encounters myths. It doesn’t go well for them.
Two examples: there is a consensus that during the 20s and early 30s, the German comedy scene, especially cabaret, the much more stylish equivalent of today’s stand-up, was thriving and ferocious, and ridiculed Hitler and his cronies to the extreme (the myth that Germans don’t produce humorists, when Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitch came out of there is obviously silly, not to mention the genetic origins of a certain Herman José). Those who saw, read and reported on them say that the satires were devastating.
But the satires were merely words, rhetoric and wit. Being jokes, they lacked the essential: brute force. They were of little to no use, apart from a little bump or annoyance. They and their creators were crushed, first “democratically.” After the consolidation of Nazi power, satire was banned and its practitioners put on the run, persecuted, tortured, stuffed into concentration camps, executed if caught.
Satire was totally powerless to prevent or stop the rise of Nazism and other fascisms. It still is, apparently.
Unfortunately, and paradoxically, power doesn’t think so. It hates satire.
I’ve told it elsewhere, but I’m happy to repeat a famous joke by Robin Williams, interviewed on a talk show in Germany, which illustrates the point. When asked by a German interviewer “Why do you think there isn’t so much comedy in Germany?” he replied: “Did you ever think you killed all the funny people?” I leave the silence in the studio to your imagination.
Did they kill everyone? No, not all of them. There are also, as I mentioned above, German comedians, especially Jewish ones, who fled to the US and migrated to Hollywood.
Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of examples of satire’s apparent impotence throughout history. Today’s USA is a clear example of this.
In the midst of a complicated contract renewal with NBC as a reality show host, “The Apprentice,” Donald Trump decides to increase his commercial value by announcing a potential run for the US Presidency.
For decades there has been a tradition at the correspondents’ dinner in Washington DC of a guest comedian and the President giving a roast (a form of stand-up in which the satire of the guests is particularly incisive and “no-holds-barred”) to those present: the finest of the capital’s political players, from lobbyists to congressmen, including television stations and their personalities.
Donald Trump spent just over an hour being epically mocked, both by Obama, with a serious case of joke-delivery talent, and by Seth Meyers, former editor-in-chief of Saturday Night Live, and host of Late Night with Seth Meyers.
It’s hilarious, quite cruel and can be seen here:
The rest is history: not only did satire fail in its mission to combat Trump’s rise, but it unwittingly became part of what, in superhero comics, we call the origin story, in this case of a supervillain.
To what extent hasn’t satire had precisely the opposite effect here? Instead of crushing Trump, bursting the balloon of his vanity and reducing him to his minimum expression, a racist New York real estate developer, an heir capable of bankrupting his own casinos, didn’t it make him, in the eyes of many of his fellow citizens, an anti-establishment martyr to the American intelligentsia’s elitist pride? More seriously, wasn’t it because of the satire that Trump, the first vehicle powered exclusively by ego, coca-cola and big macs, was left with no choice but to run for office and go all the way?
Trump’s relationship with satire is probably the main reason for this latest wave of declarations of its death.
Therefore, we can conclude that satire can not only be innocuous and ineffective in combating authoritarianism in its incipient version, but it can even reinforce it, serving as proof of the existence and danger of phantom enemies, which the regime swears are the threat to the homeland and against whom the people must unite under its command.
Faced with this, do we kill satire by giving up on it? After all, if it’s a placebo, or worse, a disease vector, isn’t it better to euthanize it?
Two heavyweights, absolute geniuses of humor, oppose this opinion.
Chaplin did it in his The Great Dictator. He fought Hitler with the weapons at his disposal. If nothing else, it turns out that the Führer was a fan and being ravaged like that by an idol must hurt.
The great Mel Brooks goes even further, in the extraordinary comedy The Producers. The musical that said producers are trying to put on in order to go bankrupt is nothing less than the product of a Nazi’s imagination: Springtime for Hitler is the song that gave the show its name, here in the original movie:
He’d be right back with Hitler’s Rap
Brooks is Jewish. Here he breaks the taboo of not being able to joke about Nazism, because that means disrespecting the victims. The underlying idea is that satire would make a camp version of Hitler almost palatable, because he’d be funny.
Even in the movie, the audience’s first reaction to the play is horror. Some leave the premiere, in what we would today call virtue signaling, but they gradually return as they hear the laughter.
Brooks explains that satire on Hitler and the Holocaust, contrary to what its critics claim, doesn’t reduce the monstrosity of what happened, but dismantles those responsible, strips them of their mythological status. It brings them back to being human. This is no less terrible; on the contrary, it is the banality of evil that Hannah Arendt speaks of.
But knowing that it’s possible to mock Hitler, to make fun of him, erodes his solidity and contributes to his downfall as an icon. If ridicule doesn’t kill, it grinds away. A lot.
Satire and humor as a rematch for the weak, oppressed and persecuted. Would that alone make it worth it? Perhaps, but the truth is that they also have another function, according to Brooks: laughter chases away fear. Therefore, there is no better antidote against it, nor is there a better vitamin for courage.
Another of the most common myths about the death of Satire is mainly linked to Art or, if you prefer, the aesthetic appreciation of the comedy genre.
This myth is that ridiculous politicians are easy to ridicule and thus fertile ground for satirists, and humorists in general. It is claimed that the joke was already made. So it’s easy, so it has no artistic value whatsoever. The equivalent of “my five-year-old son could paint that.”
It’s not true. At least not for good satire (don’t worry, I won’t go there, the article is almost over).
Believe me, the ease that ease generates is only apparent. When the caricature is always surpassed by the caricatured, sometimes enthusiastically, it loses its freshness and ability to surprise. The distance becomes so short that the public, the citizens, become numb to the original material. And if you don’t care about the original, why should you care and laugh at its caricature and denunciation?
In short, if reality surpasses fiction in imagination, what is fiction good for? To create a territory of normality? To fix reality? One thing is for sure, Satire as an art form is no good at all.
There’s also something else that’s often forgotten: comedians, or rather most of them, are like other people. They prefer to live in safe, prosperous places governed by people who aren’t serious when they say they’re going to invade Greenland. In general, they prefer not to live in post-apocalyptic dystopias, with their lives permanently at risk or subject to the moods of religious fanatics or leaders who put their effigies on long red cloths in places like the Kennedy Center.
They are citizens before satirists. They would prefer to make jokes about other subjects, not least because the well of the ridiculous and human weakness is bottomless. They would never be short of subjects. And if they were, there’s one thing that never hinders these matters of art: imagination.
But what if I’m wrong and satire as an art form should be subject only, as Wilde would say, to its aesthetic evaluation, ruling out all other forms of evaluation? Could it be that, as so many comedians say, satire should be subject exclusively to whether it’s funny or not?
I warned you that you wouldn’t come out of the chronicle knowing more than when you went in, but just to add to the confusion, I’ll add something that the patron saint of satirists, George Carlin, said: that his indifference to the outcome of human experience was what truly gave him the necessary distance to exercise his art (comedy, satire).
His daughter disagreed, and confronted him: “If you don’t care about anything, why do you keep doing this?” To which he replied: “You’ve got me there.”
After all, as he had said before: “Inside every cynic, there is a disillusioned idealist.”
PS:
Perhaps few images better symbolize the blurred lines between satire and reality than the iconic photograph of Trump with Zelensky in the Oval Office, which illustrates the chronicle and has also been satirized around the world and, of course, by the longest-running American satire show, Saturday Night Live:
It’s the trailer for the second season. Whether this means that satire died or, on the contrary, that it is immortal is something we’ve already figured out and this chronicle hasn’t solved.
