The Satire Paradox
Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist
History podcast on the satire paradox touches on a number of
familiar themes, some of which are handled rather more surely than others.[i]
As Gladwell tells it, the paradox of satire is that because
different audience members will bring different assumptions and prejudices to
bear on the same material, what one person regards as satire another can regard
as a genuine expression of the position being satirised.[ii]
Heather LeMarre, an academic who has published on audience reactions to
satirists such as Stephen Colbert, emphasises the degree to which in effect we
see and hear what we want. To quote from the abstract of a paper she
co-authored on Colbert (back when he ‘was’ a rightwing wingnut),
individual-level political ideology
significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert's political ideology […] conservatives were more
likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant
what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire
and was not serious when offering political statements.
On the face of it, this example betrays fairly basic
ignorance on the part of conservative viewers,[iii]
given that Stephen Colbert (the comedian, not the rightwing wingnut) is quite
clear that he does not mean what he says, describing his character as a “well-intentioned,
poorly informed, high-status idiot”. I don’t have any specific reason to
doubt LaMarre’s findings, but I suggest that there is another sense in which
satire is often more open to interpretation than it might seem. Indeed, it is
quite predictable that this is the case.
Satire works by presenting an exaggerated version of its
target, inflating some of its distinctive features beyond their usual
proportions. The exaggeration is intended to make the target look ridiculous
(or more obviously ridiculous), but the exaggerated version can also be taken
as an outsized celebration of just these features. What’s more, people can take
it this way even if they are aware that the exaggerated version is intended to
look ridiculous. In other words, they can embrace the exaggerated presentation
of the target while simply ignoring the satirical intent. Hence hand-wringing
articles on The Wolf of Wall Street
being celebrated by the very bankers it targets. Hence also Al Murray’s
response to critics who accuse his audience of being too keen on his often ignorant
and bigoted Pub Landlord character: “I think the people who are sympathetic to him may well be enjoying
laughing at themselves, which is a thing people are allowed to do as well.”[iv]
After all, people who enjoy Woody Allen’s films very often share the views and
sensibilities he mocks, and very often are well aware of this. If this is possible
for left-leaning cultural elites, it is surely possible for boorish bankers or
UKIP voters as well.
Gladwell’s other main point concerns what seems to be one of
the results of the satire paradox: more often than not, satire is intended to bring
about some kind of change but fails to do so. One of his examples is Harry
Enfield’s Loadsamoney:
a broad satire of lower-middle-class mores in the
Thatcher years which ended up being co-opted by its targets and failing to make
any difference.[v] Gladwell goes on to raise questions about the
effectiveness and even appropriateness of satire more generally.
One problem with this line of criticism is that Gladwell
relies on a rather rigid view of the aims of the satirist, as when he suggests “Satire
works best when the satirist has the courage not just to go for the joke”. This
assumes that the primary aim of satire is political and at most secondarily
about comedy. But why should we assume this? It might be that some satire is in
effect political commentary or protest through the medium of humour, but there
are other examples that are better characterised as humour directed at political
targets.[vi]
The limitations of Gladwell’s view are exposed in his
criticism of Tina Fey’s spoofs of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live.
He
tells us that “SNL brought Tina Fey in to skewer Palin out of a sense of
outrage that someone this unqualified was running for higher office”. But it is
highly questionable if a sense of outrage was the primary motive for this
decision. For a commercial comedy show the imperative is to produce something
which gets attention and viewers. No doubt the liberals who make SNL dearly
wanted to take Palin down a peg or two, but that wasn’t the reason they wrote
those sketches, still less why Palin herself appeared on the show.
A more general issue here is how satire, on Gladwell’s view,
is supposed to ‘work’. If the satirist has the courage to not go for the joke,
what are they going for, and what constitutes success in their endeavour? An
obvious answer is: to bring about political change, by challenging established
ideas and changing people’s minds. As Gladwell correctly points out, satire
often fails to achieve anything like this. But this line of criticism is in
danger of stacking the deck, by tasking satirists with a responsibility out of
all proportion to their influence. Satire is for the most part an ineffectual form of
protest, but as Bob Mankoff drily responded, “for the most part, even protest
is an ineffectual form of protest”.
Gladwell suggests “real satire […] uses a comic pretence to
land a massive blow” – but a blow to what end? His own example of ‘real satire’
is the Israeli left-wing sketch show Eretz Nehederet (A Wonderful Country). But more than a decade’s
worth of ‘massive blows’ from Eretz Nehederet have accompanied a steady
rightward drift in Israeli public opinion.
This doesn’t mean that satire has no effect: it just doesn’t,
by and large, tend to change people’s minds. It is hard to believe that a
supporter of consumer capitalism would come to a radically different opinion after
seeing Loadsamoney. I suggest that when satire has a political effect, it tends
to do so in other ways: it can form or consolidate our opinions on someone, or
provide people with a prism through which a general sense of distaste or unease
can be focused. Gladwell does not discuss this kind of effect, but considering it
allows for a very different take on some of the examples he considers. For
instance, SNL’s send-up of Palin is not particularly vicious as satire goes,
but it undoubtedly had an effect in cementing the public’s view of her: as
Gladwell himself admits, it can be hard to remember the difference between what
was said by the real Palin and by her SNL facsimile. On the other hand, while
Eretz Nehederet has not been particularly successful at winning over Israelis
who do not share the liberal-left outlook of its creators, it may be a very
appropriate vehicle for expressing the frustrations of those who do. Satire engages
with political targets, but it has more ways of doing so than Gladwell
acknowledges.
[i]
Despite what I go on to say, the podcast is well worth a listen.
[iii]
Or it suggests they have adopted a complex and subtle view according to which
‘Stephen Colbert’ the rightwing wingnut is a ‘creation’ of ‘Stephen Colbert’
the left-wing comedian who is himself the creation of a person called ‘Stephen
Colbert’ whose own views are more in line with the first of these creations
than the second. This sounds rather too complex and subtle to be very
plausible, but perhaps as left-wing liberal elitist I would be expected to say
that.
[iv]
As opposed to those, most famously Stewart Lee, who charged that Murray’s
popularity meant that he attracted a following of people who missed his
satirical point.
[v] And
yes, it has aged rather badly.
[vi]
Of course, comedy with no political or social target would presumably not be
satirical at all, but this isn’t Gladwell’s point: he is discussing when satire
works or does not work, not the difference between satire and non-satirical
forms of comedy.
