A few weeks ago, I came up with a mind-blowing idea for a satirical essay. It was to be titled “MAGA Latinos in Salvadoran Prison Request Absentee Ballots to Vote for Trump’s Third Term.” It was perfect, if a bit wordy.
The inherent jokes were that (1) Trump would arrest Latino citizens who voted for him and deport them to El Salvador without cause, (2) those same citizens’ MAGA ardor would remain undimmed by the ordeal, and (3) they’d be thrilled to support something as blatantly unconstitutional (beyond depriving them of habeas corpus) as Trump running for a third presidential term.
It was ridiculous, hilarious, stupendous. The article would’ve deluged me in liberal praise and conservative rage. My follower count would blast through the roof while my inbox overflowed with threats of violence. I’d net a literary agent, book deal, Pulitzer, Peabody, Oscar (why not?). I’d be set for life, able to spend the rest of my days cleaning the mangroves, my nights typing out silly little ditties on my laptop, and the rest of the time waiting for ICE to knock on my door.
Then reality caught up. No, I didn’t gain a sudden, proportional sense of self. Instead, Trump straight up announced that, not only did he want to deport U.S. citizens without due process, but he also really fancied the idea of running for a third term.
What. The fuck.
Forget what the Founding Fathers wrote in literal black and white, the real constitutional crisis is the leaden ball of helpless stupefaction that drops into satirists’ stomachs when we are routinely outdone by MAGA.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the theory of satire lately. The thing about satirists is most of us (I’ve asked) don’t really have a theory for what we do. Much like pornography, we know it when we see it. Also like pornography, we do what works for us without asking too many questions. No need to investigate the mechanics if you get the desired outcome.
So, I took the ill-advised step of delving into the peer-reviewed theory of this thing to which I’ve dedicated my creative career. This was a particularly imprudent thing for a satirist to do because said theory is so BORING. It’s crystal clear that the scholars (all five of them) who study satire have never once written it in their lives. The work is a dull, desiccated rhetorical wasteland of contradictory, cross-cited controversies about the centrality of Latin hexameter, with nary a pun, gag, or even fart joke anywhere on the horizon to break the monotony.
But my slog across the academic equivalent of the Gedrosian Desert helped edify what I consider some of satire’s most important constituent parts. First up is irony. It’s also the first thing out the window in Trump’s America.
Dramatic irony is a rhetorical device by which the audience, reader, watcher, etc. knows the outcome of a situation while the character in a narrative does not. This contrast between characters’ expectations and the audience’s knowledge is used by satirists to produce humorous and/or poignant resolutions to conflict at the heart of the narrative.
To work, irony must first have an audience. Well, most of the planet is currently locked into a hate-watching trance as it wonders if America’s next unmeditated spasmodic flail will destroy civilization. So, check audience. Next, there must be some sense of catharsis or resolution when the roof collapses and the characters realize their folly has real-world consequences. For this to occur, they must also be capable of some sense of self-reflection and—dare I say—shame for the full weight of their actions to hit them. When your villains get their comeuppance, you want them to feel it, but therein lies the problem.
Did your idiotic tariffs crash the stock market? Dealmaking masterstroke. Did you deport a legal U.S. resident to a Salvadoran gulag with no cause? He had it coming. Did you include the editor of the Atlantic in a group chat that discussed upcoming war plans? Blame… I don’t fucking know… the gays or some shit. Any residual shame in the upper echelons of this country’s government has long since been shot in the back, buried, exhumed, incinerated, reburied, forgotten for millennia, atomized by a supernova, seeded onto a new planet, re-atomized by a hypernova, and plunged into a black hole where it’s been permanently lost to the universe as we know it.
Which brings me to hyperbole.
Strictly speaking, hyperbole is simply exaggeration for dramatic and comedic effect. It’s also one of the most important tools available to satirists, as it allows us to take stupid and/or malicious ideas and stretch them to their extreme, logical, and horrifying conclusions. This was best exemplified by Jonathan Swift who, when the English couldn’t care less if their policies killed thousands of Irish babies, modestly proposed those same babies be factory slaughtered, seasoned, broiled, and served to upper class Brits so they’d at least derive some caloric benefit from the human catastrophe.
Unfortunately, as stated at the outset, hyperbole keeps getting overtaken by unfettered malicious idiocy. Likewise, irony seems incapable of gaining any purchase among those whose brains’ shame centers were surgically removed during the many rounds of surgery necessary to attain their Mar-A-Lago faces.
So, what’s a satirist to do in this situation? How can we possibly get our points across?
We. Get. DUMBER.
We out-idiot the idiots, unthink the unthinking, obliviously bum-rush the incomprehensible. When they go low, we satirists must wantonly slam our heads into the ground until we tunnel to the other side of the planet.
The people running the MAGA movement are terrifying sycophants who gaslight the world into ignoring reality should it remotely contradict their Dear Leader’s minute-by-minute whims. Satirists are the undisputed champions of crude, bass mockery of power. We produced South Park, Borat, Dr. Strangelove, Catch-22, Monty Python, Veep, Slaughterhouse-Five and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! Are we really going to let ourselves be outdone by an omni-directional grievance machine at the head of a battalion of smug, alt-right 20-somethings in Patagonia vests?
We’re funnier than them, we’re smarter than them, and yes—believe it or not—we can concoct far more stupid scenarios than they can ever will into existence via executive order. It’s a scientifically proven fact that we live in the most inane possible timeline. It’s time satirists stepped up, turned off our brains, fired up our laptops, and gave reality a run for its money.
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