“Deep satire is a collision sport.”
The following essay is an excerpt from Chuck Klosterman's I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined), out now in paperback.
Chris Greenberg / Getty Images / Castle Rock Entertainment / Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed
There's a passage in the documentary The Pervert's Guide to Ideology where dialectic Marxist superstar Slavoj Žižek goes on a tangent about how to properly satirize institutional power. His point, in essence, is that you can't successfully erode an institution by attacking the person in charge. [I suppose it's possible that this wasn't exactly what he was talking about, because sometimes Žižek can be hard to follow. But this was my takeaway, and my interpretation is valid, even if it's wrong. Misinterpretations can still be accidentally true.] According to Žižek, attempting to satirize the public image of a powerful person inevitably proves impotent; this is because positions of power are designed to manipulate and displace a high degree of criticism. You can mock the president with impunity—nothing will really happen to him or to you. Part of the presidential job description is the absorption of public vitriol. It's a rubberized target. A comedic assault doesn't change perception in any meaningful way. ["It's not the respectful voice that props up the status quo," Malcolm Gladwell once noted. "It is the mocking one." Gladwell was subsequently mocked for noting this so respectfully.] Clear, unsubtle political satire on TV shows like Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report can succeed as entertainment, but they unintentionally reinforce the preexisting world: These vehicles frame the specific power holder as the sole object of scorn. This has no impact beyond comforting the enslaved. Power holders—even straight-up dictators—are interchangeable figureheads with limited reach; what matters far more is the institutional system those interchangeable figureheads temporarily represent.
So what does this mean, outside of an academic discussion about power? Well, maybe this: If you want to satirize the condition of a society, going after the apex of the pyramid is a waste of time. You need to attack the bottom. You need to ridicule the alleged ideological foundation an institution claims to be built upon. This is much, much more discomfiting than satirizing an ineffectual prime minister or a crack-smoking mayor. This requires the vilification of innocent, anonymous, working-class people. If you want to damage the political left, you must skewer the left's bedrock myth—the idea that all people are equal and that people want to be good (which implies enforced fairness would make everyone's life better). If you want to damage the political right, you must likewise skewer the right's bedrock myth—the belief that the human spirit is both sacrosanct and irrepressible (which implies unfettered freedom allows all people to prosper equally). To illustrate how either ideology is flawed, you must demonstrate how those central notions are moronic. And this requires the satirist to present the average citizen as a naïve sheep who fails to realize the hopelessness of his or her position. The successful social satirist must show a) how the average liberal is latently selfish and hypocritical, or b) how the average conservative fails to comprehend how trapped he is by the same system he supports. A world-class satirist knows the truth about his audience and does not care how exposing that truth will make audiences feel.
This is a difficult task (and if you need proof, just ask the tortured corpse of Machiavelli). Deep satire is a collision sport. It's a little cold and a little antihumanist, so most of its potential purveyors don't go for the jugular. But they went for it on Seinfeld, and they did so relentlessly. And they did it so well that most people barely noticed, no matter how often the writers told them directly.
Chris Greenberg / Getty Images / Castle Rock Entertainment / Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed
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