The Death of Satire

It’s not that we’re too politically correct for satire these days; it’s just that no one knows how to do it right. We’ve infused irony into everyday media experience, detaching ourselves from the genuine and blurring the line between the beautiful and the kitsch. Recent successes of “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report” and the film “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” illustrate the power of irony in a modern context: Straight political commentary too often falls on deaf ears, but political satire can be a hit. The key to a satire is its tone—a delicate balance of perspective, context, diction, and absurdity. TV and film have far more tools (i.e. mood music, setting, costuming and body language) than print. We have words. And far too few writers know how to use them.
It’s not to say that a writer should hide within the safe borders of social convention—in fact the minute we stop trying to push our readers is the moment we become useless. But the thing about pushing the envelope is that is has to be new and engaging. Too often, a writer will merely transgress common decency, as one opinion writer from Central Connecticut State University did recently when the student newspaper, The Recorder, printed his commentary on what he describes as the sociological benefits of rape.
http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-nebccsu0209.artfeb09,0,4411698.story?coll=hc-headlines-local
The editorial staff at The Recorder defended the piece as a “satirical jab at the sensationalistic nature of the modern news media,” as the Courant reported the story I found on Romenesko this week.
Even though the article was repulsive, it’s not necessarily because of what it was trying to do. It would take an incredibly skilled writer to make a satire of rape—and I mean Jonathan Swift meets Ambrose Bierce meets Oscar Wilde kind of good. No topic is ever out of bounds, thank you First Amendment, but as readers we get to decide what works and what doesn’t. As over-stimulated and desensitized as we may be, we’re not so dense as to mistake bigotry for irony: We know the difference, for example, between political humor aimed at religious extremism, and political cartoons that portray a sacred Muslim icon as a terrorist.
What makes Swift’s invocation of cannibalism brilliant is the genuine social message underlying it. The absurdity of his “modest proposal” matches the real absurdity of the state’s indifference to the suffering of the poor. The essential problem with The Recorder’s opinion piece (and countless other failed attempts at satire in print) is that it had nothing driving the surface of the message, no heart, no cause, and definitely no intellect.
The president of the university said in the Courant article that the commentary had crossed the lines of journalistic freedom. Now, to be fair, the piece crossed many lines, but the one it didn’t cross was that of journalistic freedom (he only gave it a bad name). He should lose his job for being an idiot but not for publishing his work. He should be socially chastised for his bigotry, but the newspaper and journalistic freedom aren’t going down with him. The only winner in this entire situation is journalism, if only because its freedom kept this writer from getting away with his own ignorance. Next time, he’ll know better.