Ah, Satire

Apparently I'm not the only person who looked at the news yesterday and reacted with alarm. Over at Salon, their War Room columnist had almost exactly the same take on it all, with better detail; while on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart wrestled with the thorny problem of finding humor in the beginning of "World War III," and solved the problem with Jason Jones's beautiful "Emotional Weatherman" segment, featuring "Shrapnel the Despair Penguin."

Meanwhile, also on Salon today was Rebecca Traister's report on a guy named Pete, an anti-abortion activist who made the unfortunate mistake of taking an Onion story seriously. Liberal bloggers went all crazy-like and have been making fun of the guy all week, and really, how can you not? Trouble is, it's too easy a target. And we all get fooled from time to time, and it's really gonna suck when one of "us" gets something wrong and is mocked across the worldwide web for days on end.

Sure: Pete didn't understand that the piece was satire. A lot of folks didn't quite understand that Jonathan Swift was kidding when he suggested the Irish eat their children, too. That's one of the reasons why we like satire: every once in a while someone doesn't quite get the joke, and then we can have the fun of explaining it to them. It may kill the humor, but it still gets the point across.

Which is one of the things our man Pete still isn't quite getting. In attempting to defend himself, which he (mostly) did with an admirable sense of humor about the whole thing, he asserted at one point "Do you see how they slip their agenda into a 'satirical' piece?" His point was that this piece of humor still had an agenda, which again reflects a complete misunderstanding of satire. Of course it has an agenda--that's the whole point. Satire is really just another weapon in the arsenal of argumentation and, as has been proved time and again by Mark Twain, Bernard Shaw, Stephen Colbert and a host of others, very often this humor-with-a-hook is the most effective way of making a point. The hook catches and sticks, the entertainment of the humor wins you over and then suddenly you realize what you've been won over to.

(By the way, I never commented on Colbert's Correspondent Association speech, but it was brilliant, and all the more delightful for being done right in the face of the President, and it's well worth watching the whole thing.)

But. Let's leave poor old Pete alone, shall we? As Ms. Traister notes, a lot of the reactions in the blogosphere have been just plain insulting; and calls to the man's house are way over the line. The guy made a mistake, and he happens to be on the other side of the ideological line; but I'm telling you, it's awful tough to take the moral high ground on things when you're calling some guy's house just to abuse him. That's a shitty way to make a point, and it only works against the point you're trying to make by causing others to write you off as just another asshole liberal. In other words, you can't get all highfalutin' about Dick Cheney being an asshole if you're an asshole too. So let's just get off Pete's back and get back to business. Enough is enough.

Okay, not quite enough. My favorite bit in the whole thing? It's Ms. Traister's very last paragraph, where Pete suggests that because he grew up in Germany, where the natives famously lack a sense of humor, he has been a complete sucker for satire all his life. Now that's effin' hilarious.