Satire’s war on stupid: This prank on the Democrats and an ACLU brief reveal our nation’s biggest battle
Satire is often criticized as partisan, but its real target is stupidity across the political spectrum
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Satire is cool and it’s smart. From Trevor Noah to John Oliver to Seth Meyers to Stephen Colbert to SNL’s Weekend Update, political satire in the United States is having a moment. Edgy satirists like Lee Camp and Jimmy Dore are informing viewers and covering stories ignored by the mainstream news. Political movements like Indivisible are encouraging members to use satirical pranks as a form of laughtivism.
Our nation has a long tradition of satire, but there is no doubt that satire is currently playing a bigger role in shaping public dialogue and debate than ever before. Facebook feeds and tweets are rife with satirical clips and memes that come to us from both professional satirists and what I call “citizen satirists.” These fun moments are more than silly snark; they actually tend to have an impact on how voters shape their views of issues. They also help build community among those who are the “it getters.” It is not an exaggeration to say that satire is the political idiom of many voters in the U.S., especially young ones. But perhaps even more importantly, satire fires up the mind and makes us smarter.
There are lots of reasons why satire is on the rise — a sensationalist news media, the significance of internet culture, and a president who is a joke — but the key motor driving the rise of satire in our nation is the cult of stupidity. Recent data shows that only a third of the nation strongly disbelieves in telepathy and ghosts. Even better, two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.” Almost a quarter of our nation believes that vaccines cause autism, and that Donald Trump won the popular vote. That same percentage of the population believes that Barack Obama maybe or definitely is the Antichrist.
The increase in satire is directly connected to this increase in gullibility. Satire depends on a smart use of irony, on saying one thing and meaning another, on pointing out flaws in logic, and on exposing folly, farce and bluster. When people in power promote stupid ideas like “alternative facts” and willing audiences swallow their lines, satire leaps to the rescue.
Most folks don’t get that point. Thus we have seen a common argument against satire that it is partisan and dividing our nation. In fact, Caitlin Flanagan went so far as to blame satire for the rise of Trump in a piece for the Atlantic. In “How Late-Night Comedy Fueled the Rise of Trump,” Flanagan argues that “Sneering hosts have alienated conservatives and made liberals smug.”
In a time when everything has become partisan, even facts and science, it is convenient to lump satire in with more of our red versus blue state drama. And while it is certainly true that we can count more left-leaning satirists than right-leaning ones, that split is directly tied to the partisan divide over reality.
As Kurt Andersen writes in a piece on America’s post-truth moment, the entire nation is slipping into fantasy, but the right is clearly more unhinged than the left. Recall that Colbert pointed out on “The Colbert Report” that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
And who can forget that before Kellyanne Conway’s reference to “alternative facts” we had Karl Rove talking about the end of “the reality-based community”?
“People,” Rove explained, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. . . .That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” That sort of lunacy has been a signature move on the right for years now.
Targeting that sort of insanity and the corporate news media that lapped it up is what fueled the rise of satire news shows like those of Jon Stewart and Colbert in the post-9/11 era. In those days, Stewart and Colbert were not only more trusted than journalists, their viewers were consistently more informed than those of other news shows.
The fact that the right was often the butt of the joke is the core of Flanagan’s argument that liberal satirists alienated Trump supporters and helped get him in office. But Flanagan misses the larger point: that the real war is over reality versus fantasy — or, to put it bluntly, smart versus stupid. Satire targets simplemindedness. It goes after lunacy. And it really loves to target hypocrisy.
Only if you understand that key feature of satire can you make sense of two recent satire highlights that prove that satire is an equal opportunity offender whose main target is our dumb nation.
The first is a brilliant prank launched by the Yes Men. The Yes Men, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, have a long history of staging pranks, mainly by impersonating people to infiltrate conferences, produce fake newspapers, hold press conferences and engage in other types of public stunts in order to expose “the wrongdoings of miscellaneous, mostly corporate evildoers.”