A few days back I wrote a little piece satirizing the truly crazy obsessions of the media with Sarah Palin. In the course of the piece, I assumed the “voice” of various media types who hate, not just her, but her children—and especially her disabled son, Trig—with the white hot passion of a thousand suns. I linked to one particularly despicable attack on Trig (whose author denied was fantastically tasteless and whose editors only removed from their site when the outcry from readers became so intense that sponsors began to pull out).
Most people saw the point of the satire but one good man wrote me in fury and told me, with perfectly understandable anger, that I better never meet him in person or he’d knock my block off (or words to that effect). His instincts where, I think, pitch perfect—because he has a disabled daughter and was defending her from the culture of death with a father’s righteous anger. He’d only skimmed the piece and had missed that I was writing satire. When I explained to him that my purpose was to hold up our Chattering Class’ sophisticated contempt for the disabled to broad daylight and heap upon it the scorn it deserved, he sweetly apologized and we parted as friends.
It’s a story that shows what a tricky business humor can be. Some people have the notion that humorous things are not “serious” things. This is, however, completely false. It was Chesterton who said that the opposite of “funny” is not “serious”. The opposite of “funny” is “not funny”. In fact, it is not possible to be funny about things that are not serious. All our best humor is about all our most serious subjects: sex, death, politics. Find any hilarious joke and you will find that it traces back to something serious.
With satire, there is a particular burden or duty that goes with the genre and it is simply this: the rule in satire is that it is open season on the powerful, but forbidden to mock the weak. That’s because satire is, in fact, the province of the underdog and often the only way in which the people on the short end of the stick get to cope with their situation. So when a Donald Trump, imagining himself suited to add the Presidency to his long list of bought-and-paid-for toys, tries to suddenly persuade us he’s had a Come to Jesus moment and really cares about abortion after a long career as a supporter of Planned Parenthood, it’s bombs away for those of us who enjoy satire. That’s why, when John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence, he joked that he was writing large so Fat King George would not need to put on his spectacles to read. It is a healthy thing to laugh at a tyrant.
But it’s a very different thing to laugh at, say, the desperate teenager who is terrified that her boyfriend will beat her if she doesn’t get an abortion and writes begging for help. To mock her would be a grave sin, because she is powerless.
Indeed, one of the markers of a culture that has begun to undergo serious rot is precisely the moment when the powerful begin to pervert satire into mockery of the defenseless—and especially when the general culture meets that mockery with a gush of popular approval. We saw precisely this, for instance, in the ramp up to the Holocaust as popular publications made Jew hatred the In Thing. We see it now as our manufacturers of culture make contempt for the weak trendy again. It’s endemic on the Left (as the contempt heaped on Trig demonstrates) and it is also visible in other ways on the Right, as Rush Limbaugh’s “Homeless updates” demonstrate as they make fun of the most wretched members of our society.
The Church’s teaching is clear: the measure of a society’s health is in how it treats its most defenseless members. Just as it is impossible to imagine Jesus joining the despicable chortles to be heard on the Left over “retards”, so it is unthinkable that Jesus would be joining in the general guffaws over the homeless and mentally ill who wander our streets.
When the powerful start to satirize the weak, not merely with impunity, but with the fawning admiration of sycophants and hangers-on who see such contempt for the weak as the next stylin’ trend in hipness, civilization is very near its end and tyranny of the rich and powerful is just around the corner. Something to consider on this day in which we celebrate our long history of liberty and justice for all.
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I think it’s safe to say that Rush Limbaugh’s Homeless Updates are not intended to skewer the homeless near so much as the welfare pimps who use them, e.g. Mitch Pacwa, who said that 3,000,000 homeless people die on the streets EVERY DAY. Prior to Rush, nobody tried to point out that this would have completely depopulated the US in three months.
Thank you, once again, Mark for stating a topic so clearly. Satire is an intelligent and complex humor and rarely goes well when attempted by those who are not - intelligent or complex.
Mark, you completely miss the point of Limbaugh’s “Homeless Updates”. As he himself has said repeatedly, he is not making fun of the homeless, but the goofy wing of the homeless advocacy. For example, he skewered a proposal by a city official (I can’t remember where at the moment) to provide shopping carts to the homeless in his community so that they wouldn’t have to steal carts from stores. In another update, he lambasted a judge who ruled that a public library couldn’t make a homeless man leave the premises even though he was being an active nuisance to the other patrons.
Arkanabar please give us a citation on where Fr. Mitch made this claim. With a simple google search I came up with nothing pertinent. I hope you did not just make this up.
I’m reminded of something Joss Whedon said, just before “Dollhouse” started its run, and he was anticipating some of the objections folks might have had to the subject matter (although, as it turns out, it was hard to sell the overall ickiness of the subject matter given the limitations of the actor he had cast in the lead role): “If you’re offended by it, you’re not wrong.” That one statement seems to me like it could almost be the creed of the satirist who has something important to say.
Arkanabar,
I think you have Mitch Pacwa confused with Mitch Snyder.
Mark,
Are you wearing a skull cap in the photo?
No. May I ask why you thought that?
Again, Mr. Shea: Thank you, thank you, thank you. As one who’s own sense of humor tends toward the satirical, I appreciate the wisdom of this piece. (And I am not being satirical.)
You are much better writing about Hiroshima.
Mark-you nailed it brother! Thanks!
It’s absurd to scowl censoriously at people who laugh at things you find tasteless. Humor is a gut-level response; one laughs involuntarily at something one happens to find funny, whether it is tasteful or not.
So I expect we can extend this to include priests who use the pulpit to marginalize defenseless parishioners?
Isn’t satirizing the defenseless the same as bullying?
One of C.S. Lewis’ “Screwtape Letters” is devoted to the subject of laughter and when it is (and is not) advantageous to the cause of “Our Father Below”. It is one of the best explanations of how to tell good humor from bad that I have ever read.
In a nutshell, Lewis (through Screwtape) says that there are four things that make people laugh: joy, fun, jokes, and flippancy. Joy and fun, from Screwtape’s point of view, are “disgusting”, incomprehensible (to demons) and of no use in ensaring souls. Jokes are not much good to them either, if they are based in genuine wit and perception of something truly funny.
The kind of humor that Screwtape likes best is flippancy—an attitude that treats everything, or certain things, automatically as jokes regardless of whether they are funny or not. This kind of humor, according to Screwtape, dulls instead of sharpening the intellect, and does not create any genuine bond between those who practice it.
All true. However, nobody is mentioning the man who feels he has the right to strike down people because he has a disabled child. Having a disabled child does not give you this extra “right”. Being in the right does not give you the opportunity to go tramping around righting the wrongs of the world. It is precisely this kind of self aggrandizement that allows liberals to strip away our human rights in efforts to “protect” minorities. It is being used to interfere with the Church’s efforts to instruct society about the dangers of homosexuality and abortion. Bishops are so afraid of people like this man that they are afraid to enforce Papal rulings. They are afraid they will offend some well organized minority group and be tarred and feathered in the media. This Political Correctness has handcuffed the Church, and here you are giving this man a free pass. He gets no free pass from me. His daughter (disabled or not) is a gift from God, not a cross he is expected to bear and crack across people’s heads. He needs to drop the chip off his shoulder, leave behind his minority status and join humanity.
Dear Mark,
I think that you’re spot on about the uses of satire.
I would like to piggy back on this post to comment on something you wrote in the comments section of the article you linked to.
Posted by Mark Shea on Wednesday, Jun 15, 2011 2:06 PM (EDT):“Of course, she’s sought the publicity. But here’s the thing: lots of narcissists seek publicity. That doesn’t mean the press need to comply. They are (allegedly) grown-ups with the capacity to choose how to budget their time and resources. But instead they capitulate to their own idiotic obsessions. They don’t even have the rationale that the public cares about this junk as justification. It is their own stalkerish loathing and fascination with Palin that accounts for it. Sin makes them stupid.”
It may be true that the public IN GENERAL doesn’t care, but as Ross Douthat argued well I think, there IS a market for these types of articles, because there is a sufficiently large group of people who “love to hate Palin” that when the press give into their obsession, they find a group of eager readers to encourage them.
Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/what-if/#ixzz1RJTQT1em
Mark—are you wearing a Good Humor Man hat in the photo?
Yes, Victor. Yes I am.
Excellent. Just making sure it wasn’t the hat of the Bad Humor Man.
I signed up for a dating site last night. One of the personal interview questions was “I believe that one American life is worth ten foreign lives” or words to that effect. I answered “No,” of course, and wrote “WTF? Are you kidding me? Thanks for the tip, Herr Hitler!” as a comment. Then I looked up one woman who’s profile interested me. Her answer was “Yes.” I don’t know if this was meant as humor, but I didn’t message her.
I am wearing a “Chock Full O’ Nuts” coffee can on my head, but am not pictured.
Humor makes me sick. Whoever said that the opposite of funny is not serious is a know-it-all. I despise anything that’s funny just as despise anything people who make fun out of serious things.
What an excuse for an author you are. You criticize schadenfreude yet you sound like you support things that should be taken serious. That’s hypocritical.
Satire’s one of my least favorite forms of humor. And why it’s allowed in this day and age is beyond me. Heck, it sickens me that lots of people in this day and age are obsessed with it. No wonder the world is messed up.
But just because I badmouthed humor, it doesn’t mean that I dislike all of it. My kind of humor is revengeful humor. You know? The type of laughter that you project at the misfortune of someone who did something bad without any remorse.
@Andy Nowicki:
“You think that it’s absurd to scowl censoriously at people who laugh at things that anyone find tasteless? What a blind liar you are.
Suppose somebody laughs at your misfortune. Would you think that’s great?”
One of the reasons why detest most humor is because lots of it is inappropriate nowadays and because of bullies. Heck, many bullies use that old excuse, “It was just a joke,” when picking on other people. Well, what if the joke’s on them? Maybe then, they wouldn’t be laughing.
I remember when I used to get picked on bullies a lot. That’s why loathe comedy.
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