It has come to my attention that the word “satire” is under attack. No, it isn’t fundamentalist Christians who think satire is the work of the devil. In the urge to be edgy, incompetents have twisted the word “satire” beyond recognition. Not since Alanis Morissette discovered the word “ironic” have we seen such wholesale mangling of a word.
Unless you count “reality,” that is. At this point, I must digress to discuss the word reality, the abuses of which are even more egregious than my subject. Clear-cut game shows are being called reality TV. Reality TV isn’t even real. It’s disgusting, but I think that’s because our culture has lost all sense of reality, rather than a misdefinition of the word reality. Anyway, that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms, and so, I will return to discussing “satire.”
The abuse of the word first entered my consciousness when I discovered the April Fool’s issue of my school news-letter. They printed out a lot of fake articles, saving a space in the inside to explain that this was a joke. However, they went too far in their explanation. They managed to waffle on the issue of whether they were funny or not, but they held no qualms about broadly proclaiming this fake edition of the news-letter to be satire.
Excuse me? Apparently, printing anything that could remotely be considered humorous now can be called satire. It’s a sad, sad world for all of us who take satire seriously. Satire is more than just writing something funny. Satire needs to criticize; satire needs to say something.
I really do liken it to Alanis Morissette’s misuse of the word ironic. Irony is a humor based on opposites, on incongruity. If I gave Bill Clinton a “Most Faithful Husband in the World” coffee cup, that would constitute irony. In addition, (to borrow from Family Guy) if I were to have aromatherapy, stress-relieving candles burn down my house, that would also constitute irony. Meeting my cousin Bob, a trout-lover, at the local supermarket in the fish section is not irony. Neither is “rain on your wedding day,” to quote from Alanis’s song.
And so, a satirical novel is any tome with an irreverant tone. Anything that’s funny and doesn’t have a point is suddenly satirical. Any newspaper article that isn’t serious is satire. Jon Stewart (oh yes, I’m going there) playing a clip of a member of the Bush administration and then looking incredulous… that’s cutting-edge satire.
No, it is not satire. From this online article, The Purpose and Method of Satire, we can see that the true “purpose of satire is the correction or deterrence of vice, and its method is to attack hypocrisy through the ironic contrast between values and actions.” To be flabbergasted at the world is not enough. To write something unseriously is not enough. Satire needs to be artful. Irony needs to be truly ironic. Satire should have a target, and it should reveal truth through the incongruity between its target and the truth the reader knows.
I am here to yell stop: Stop the abuse of satire! Don’t let anyone slap the label “satire” on anything they want. Stop them before they ruin satire as they have ruined irony.