Satirized for Your Consumption Author(s): Ben Schwartz Source: The Baffler, No. 27 (2015), pp. 144-156 Published by: {none} Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43959027 Accessed: 09-03-2017 19:06 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Baffler This content downloaded from 67.115.155.19 on Thu, 09 Mar 2017 19:06:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ¿Models Satirized for Your Consumption cAp Ben Schwartz We live in an age of satirical excess. If econo- tors joined Twitter's online community with mists were to diagnose it, they might well a stream call of ironic, self-referential jokes. In it a comedy bubble. We currently have six March, late- President Obama appeared on Be- night talk show hosts, all nattily clad, life-of- tween Two Ferns , a faux public-access interview the-party, white-guy topical jokers- Conan,show hosted by a star of The Hangover com- Kimmel, Fallon, James Corden, Seth edies,Mey- Zach Galifianakis. Filled with funny, ers, and (come September) Colbert- to rude sum insults from both the president and his up, and send up, our day for us. We have paunchy four foil, Obama's guest spot brought the comedy news-commentary shows- Maher, then-troubled Affordable Care Act rollout to Larry Wilmore, John Oliver, and (for a thelittle attention of Galifianakis's young, millen- while longer) Stewart- and fake news nialfrom audience, who signed up in large numbers. SNL's Weekend Update , The Onion , ClickHole At Christmas,, The Interview , a lowbrow and several lesser lights. Vines, viral Funny foreign-policy or comedy from Judd Apatow, Die clips, podcasts, Twitter: each new Sethmedia Rogen, and James Franco, presented the platform generates stars of its own, ranging imagined assassination of a sitting foreign from seasoned comedians to everyday leader,office North Korea's Kim Jong-un, as slap- wits- often, people who have no intention stick offare. But as its premiere approached, seeking careers as professional humorists. the film It provoked a series of improbable, would be easy to sniff in condescending real-lifehigh- plot twists that steered it away from gatekeeper form and talk of the low signal-to- an Apatow buddy comedy and into a geopo- noise ratio of truly funny people to not, litical but farce owing more to the imagination of with 280 million active users on Twitter a alone,Terry Southern. First came a massive com- that still leaves a pretty big signal. puter hack on the movie's backer, Sony, which And as often happens with bubbles, evolved it into mysterious terroristic threats on burst. Last year, American satire took one our ofnation's theaters. The United States then the stranger turns in its long history of accusedmock- North Korea of the hack and threats, ing, ridiculing, and joking about our target-and the Obama White House instituted a new rich republic. We're used to comedians speak- round of sanctions on the rogue dictatorship. ing truth to power, to cruelly topical comedy In an end-of-the-year press conference, sketches and a steady diet of merciless politi-President Obama scoffed at North Korea for cal cartoons. But in 2014, comedy was overreactingstolen to something as absurd as The from the professional jokesters by their Interview-tradi- Kim Jong-un, he implied, couldn't tional targets and became, unexpectedly, take thea joke. But given the Obama Administra- new language of power, policy, and politics. tion's own history of comedy-policy, we might That's a bold claim, but consider a wellfew ask: Who did the president think he was representative instances. In June, just kidding? a few It's a serious question. After all, our months before the Senate Select Commit- own government leaders don't exactly laugh tee on Intelligence released its report out on loud when citizens kid about assassinat- CIA-coordinated torture, CIA administra- ing them; we live in a country where writing 144 30» 77* JJaffler [ no. 27} This content downloaded from 67.115.155.19 on Thu, 09 Mar 2017 19:06:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms RANDALL ENOS a farce about killing a U.S. president, Correspondents' or even Dinner while a U.S. Navy snickering about it online, could SEAL have team the invaded Pakistan to assassinate NSA hacking your computers, land Osamathe Secret bin Laden in his home. Kim Jong-un Service on your doorstep, and put youmay inhave fed- embarrassed Sony execs and punked eral prison. The Interview's release- but who's to say he If North Korea is guilty as charged didn't by get our the joke? FBI, the biggest punchline of all is that Kim Jong-un may not be so crazy for taking A Greater Ameri- Fool Theory ca's new brand of weapons-grade humor It's a commonso se- complaint that the abundance riously. These days, we have a smirking of porn onlineCIA, has sexualized our culture, or a healthcare overhaul that was sold via vaude- that mean-spirited Internet trolls have coars- ville sketch, a State Department that, as we ened our national conversation. A similar ar- shall see, vetted and approved The Interview, gument can be made about online comedy, and a president whose signature moment is which has humorized our lives. In the 1990s, the night he cracked jokes at a White House Maureen Dowd seemed cheeky when she pep- The p^afHer [no. 2 ?] «¡14 5 This content downloaded from 67.115.155.19 on Thu, 09 Mar 2017 19:06:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms eí^íODELS pered her Times pieces with pop-culture gibes. rized for your consumption." Forget stodgy Today, reading her column feels a lot like di- speeches that begin with trite one-liners to aling up with a modem- you can't believe you break the ice. As the traditional targets of sat- ever thought it was fast. News, politics, policy, ire seek to demonstrate their relevance to our and cultural debate now reach us couched in wit-wired lives, full-on comedic performance jokes. Professional, unfunny journalists fret has become their principal disarming strategy. that young people get more of their informa- Soon after President Obama appeared on Be- tion from The Daily Show than from tradi- tween Two Ferns , Hillary Clinton bandied talk tional sources, and the only time you heard of a 2016 run at the presidency- on Jon Stew- about NBC's Nightly News anchor Brian Wil- art's show, not on Meet the Press. And when a liams, before he became our first casualty ofrecent blizzard in New York fizzled out ear- imaginary RPGs, was when he appeared on jo lier than forecast, leaving little snow but many Rock or Jimmy Fallon's show to slow jam the transit closures, Mayor De Blasio charmed the news. Comedians have so fully mastered the city by reading aloud from the Onion' dysto- language of reporting that when serious peo- pian parody of his snowmongering. ple get taken in by absurdist Onion stories, no And then, of course, there's the CIA. one is surprised. "Not the Onion " has become When the agency opened its official Twitter inside-the-Beltway shorthand for any offbeat account, it did so with a wry quip about its development in daily politics that seems like own institutional inability to tell the truth: farce but isn't. "We can neither confirm nor deny that this is The comedy culture all around us is also, our first tweet." increasingly, the framework of public debate. Not unpredictably, spy watchdogs and in- Several of the most heated arguments about telligence monitors raised a hue and cry over feminism in recent years have comedy as their the agency's puckish foray into social media. starting points, first in the long list of never- The CIA, after all, relies on the cover of of- serious Are Women Funny ? think pieces, and ficial secrecy to torture and assassinate, to then in the online firestorm over comedians pay off unscrupulous leaders and bagmen, to telling rape jokes. Arguably, the phrase "rape choreograph coups d'états, and to prop up cli- culture" came to the attention of many people ent states abroad. There's nothing inherently by way of humor, thanks to celebrity come- funny about such activities. More important, dians like Patton Oswalt (who dislikes rape it was more than a little jarring to see the jokes, and argues that there is a rape culture) CIA lay claim to the language of satire. We and Anthony Jeselnik (who tells rape jokes, assume satire is for the truth teller, not the and thus proves there is one). Allegations that truth obscurer. When George Orwell created Bill Cosby is a serial rapist went from impo- the irony-laden government-speak of Nineteen lite celebrity gossip to a loud national conver- Eighty-Four , his joke pivoted on one key dis- sation only after comedian Hannibal Buress tinction: we as readers, and not the gray and brought them up in his standup routine. earnest administrators of Oceania, recognize When Bill Maher first adopted the tagline its bleak absurdity for what it is.