Satirical sword

I believe in satire. It can be a dangerous weapon, capable of cutting through politicians and the cultural zeitgeist as it entertains. It’s like stealth education. Medicine covered in chocolate. Something seems to be changing, though.

Somehow satire has become lost, constantly being mislabeled the way irony has been misused since Alanis Morissette made a Top-40 song about it. For the sake of snarky college hipsters everywhere, we need to set some ground rules.

Rule No. 1: Blatantly offensive comments do not automatically count as satire. If I wrote a column titled “I hate black people,” it would be horrendous of me to claim it was a commentary on race relations. Comedian Louis CK once commented that white people say the “n word” to get away with saying “nigger.” That seems akin to the recent abuse satire has suffered: finding an excuse to say horrible things that would otherwise merit ostracism.

Rule No. 2: If you create a satirical persona, you must show the character’s flaws in his statements to illustrate the absurdity of his argument. Stephen Colbert plays a caricature of a conservative pundit. When he makes an outlandish statement against a group, we aren’t offended because his next story is about something outlandish, like polar bears causing global warming. We see Colbert as a hilarious person who’s wrong.

Rule No. 3: Lower your expectations as a media consumer. Not every entertainer is a master of wit and a creator of false realties. Tucker Max, for the sake of comparison, is not a satirist. He’s a self-proclaimed “dickhead,” but his stories exalt him. They do not critique his lifestyle or parody his character. Lady Gaga has been heralded as a mocking critique of pop music, but all I can see is exactly what Britney and Madonna did before her. I hate to be so cynical, but is it that hard to believe our pop culture icons are just insane rather than visionaries?

There’s something tragic about the middle ground of popular ideas. Someone truly revolutionary like Andy Kaufman is likely to go unrecognized until post-mortem while we spend time analyzing the deeper meaning of Ke$ha.

Meanwhile, aspiring thinkers (myself included) are middling in between quality and quackery, not bad enough to be considered genius, not good enough for anyone to care. Is it still too early in this semester to turn my column into a request for PayPal donations?

There will come a time when kids who dream of doing something amazing won’t want a beautiful singing voice or an eye for political analysis. They’ll merely want extreme delusions of grandeur so they can stumble their way into the annals of history.
 

E-mail: cquandt@indiana.edu