A Golden Age of Satire 
I doubt I am alone in having noted that there is something horribly askew when one can argue that our best newspaper is a fake newspaper (The Onion) and our best news show is a fake news show (The Daily Show), both of which have been enormously successful, and the latter of which has spawned a best selling book and now a spinoff show, The Colbert Report, that consists almost entirely of that most familiar of satirical forms, parody (and which even has its own website).
When shells fall close and smoke is thick,
Real tough guys never run. They stick.
Or so says Five Deferments Dick.No wavering---no he's a brick.
To cut and run would make him sick.
Or so says Five Deferments Dick.Appeasers cannot take a lick,
But tough guys bite and gouge and kick.
Or so says Five Deferments Dick.
and the second, Atrios's citation of a Village Voice article describing the upcoming Showtime movie "Homecoming."
"This is a horror story because most of the characters are Republicans," director Joe Dante announced before the November 13 world premiere of his latest movie, Homecoming, at the Turin Film Festival. Republicans, as it happens, will be the ones who find Homecoming's agitprop premise scariest: In an election year, dead veterans of the current conflict crawl out of their graves and stagger single-mindedly to voting booths so they can eject the president who sent them to fight a war sold on "horseshit and elbow grease."[Much more on it at the links for those interested.]
The dizzying high point of Showtime's new Masters of Horror series, the hour-long Homecoming (which premieres December 2) is easily one of the most important political films of the Bush II era. With its only slightly caricatured right-wingers, the film nails the casual fraudulence and contortionist rhetoric that are the signatures of the Bush-Cheney administration.
How broad a spectrum does satire cover? Who else can we include among its greatest practitioners? Well we have cartoonists ranging from Tom Tomorrow to Tom Toles to the undermentioned and utterly brilliant two part "The Great Go-Goop War" by Tom Chalkey (part one and part two). But we also have works of "high" satire (though who can tell the difference anymore?) such as Tony Kushner's transcendent Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, a one-act play riffing off of Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" in which Laura Bush is confronted by the ghosts of dead Iraqi children. (If you haven't seen either the Chalkey or Kushner go. read. them. now.)
The blogosphere (and internet more generally) have proven a perfect medium for satire and direct parody, from works of pure parody like The General and whitehouse.org to those who like to dabble in satire, such as Billmon and the the Poorman. A quick look at just the nominees list from the most recent Koufax awards (both most humorous post and most humorous blog) can take hours to get through. The urge to satire and ironic humor is everywhere online (heck, even yours truly tries his poor hand at it every once in a while). Just read through any Eschaton comment thread -- heck they even have their own brilliant parody troll, the, um, sublime Merkin Patriot.
All of which to say is that I've undoubtedly failed to mention dozens of your favorite humorists and satirists, and so I'll open the floor to those that you find the funniest and the most biting (and are these always the same thing). (I'd also be interested in hearing other folks' thoughts on the hows and whys of flourishing satire.)
What say you?
-- Stu
KEYWORDS: Satire, Humor
Sign up for a Complimentary Member Account... Join the community! It's fast. And it'll allow you to take advantage of all this site's great features!
| < This I Believe | Media Reaction to Bush's 'New' Iraq Speech > |
