A Comedian Insults Someone and the World Goes Mad
Jonathan Swift recommended the eating of Irish children as a way to address the poverty of the Irish in England.
Jonathan Swift recommended the eating of Irish children as a way to address the poverty of the Irish in England.
Jonathan Swift - National Portrait Gallery
by studio of Charles Jervas oil on canvas, feigned oval based on a work of 1709-1710 © National Portrait Gallery…www.npg.org.uk
Dante, in The Inferno, placed his political opponents in the varying circles of hell, sentencing them for their various sins against Florence and humanity. His critique was personal and vicious, but we still read centuries later.
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Ben Franklin — all engaged in satire, pressing up against the edges of propriety in a way that’s difficult for us to see from our contemporary vantage point.
Satire, as one can tell, has a long history, and it’s one that continues to raise the most gut-level responses. Samuel Clemens, Thomas Nast, Will Rodgers, Mort Sahl, Mom’s Mabley, Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory. George Carlin. Saturday Night Live. Margaret Cho. Swift. Dante. Chaucer. Shakespeare. Veep. Charlie Hebdo. Bill Maher. Roseanne Barr. Jon Stewart. Stephen Colbert. Richard Pryor. All have been transgressive, political, nasty. Each of these comedians, satirists and writers has skirted past the line of propriety. Some have paid an extreme price. Lenny Bruce was repeatedly jailed. The Charlie Hebdo offices were bombed. Cartoonists in India, Equatorial New Guinea, Iran, and Malaysia have been imprisoned often in recent years, generally for mocking political leaders or powerful political regimes.
We like to think of ourselves as different in the United States, as freer — which is true, at least to a degree. Cartoonists and comics are not being jailed, but their acts are being policed, being measured against an invisible line of propriety.
I write this in the days following Michelle Wolfe’s performance at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner — a performance that has elicited a collective groan from the mainstream press and political classes, and a level of shock and anguish among previously brave anti-PC conservatives over Wolfe’s supposed transgressions.
I haven’t watched her set. This is purposeful. I don’t want to get into defending whether it was funny or appropriate. My point is that comedy, especially satire, crosses lots of lines. British artists William Hogarth and James Gillray skewered the pretentious of the British elite in the 1700s. Gillray’s work, at one point, was deemed so personal and viscous that he was arraigned on blasphemy charges for The Presentation — or — the Wise Men’s Offering, “a 1796 cartoon depicting the Whig opposition led by Fox and Sheridan kissing the bottom of the Prince Regent’s newly born daughter, Princess Charlotte.”
This is how satire works. It uses accepted norms and shibboleths to subvert those norms and the generally accepted wisdom that stifles creativity and dulls descent. Language, therefore, is key. Swift plays his assault on the uncaring English upper classes close to the vest. His essay reads as any other modest proposal crafted in somber tones and upright language. Except, it is far from sober or serious. The proposal — that Irish kids be rounded up and ground into hamburger meat to feed the rest of the poor — violates the cultural prohibition against cannibalism and is meant to elicit first shock and horror among the upper classes, and then a dawning sense of complicity for the plight of the poor.
Another classic bit of satire: Chris Rock’s “Nat X” routine on SNL. The character was both brilliant and discomfiting, displacing all expectations in its path by leaving in its wake shock and awe. His over-the-top Black Nationalist skewered all viewers, all Americans — though it hit the middle-class white liberals who used to make up the show’s main viewership the hardest because they couldn’t be sure if they were the target of the joke, which was a role they were not used to playing.
These are classics of the genre. Not every attempt at satire will work, and not every essay or routine deserves our attention. I am totally open to criticism of the Michelle Wolfe performance, or to Charlie Hebdo or the new Roseanne. I find Andrew Dice Clay vile and sexist, Howard Stern supremely unfunny, Bill Maher tedious and bigoted.
So, it is possible to criticize the content without resorting to the kind of faux outrage we’ve been subjected to by the Washington press corps (journalism’s least adventurous group), the political classes, and Trump supporters. They apparently want easy humor and they want their targets firmly ensconced on the other side of the aisle or to have more melanin in their skin.
Charlie Hebdo offers a useful example. I can defend the right of that magazine to skewer whatever target it wishes to skewer in whatever way it wishes, while also being critical of the content.
That’s how I approached the Charlie Hebdo back in January 2015. Here is what I wrote on my Channel Surfing blog:
The terrorist attack on the French satire magazine, Charlie Hebdo, was not just an attack on a particular business or publication. It was an assault on the notions of free expression and free thought.
I then made it clear that I supported those any publication that chooses to reprint the cartoons as a show of solidarity, adding that “free expression requires that we acknowledge that the choice must be left up to each outlet” and “that free expression includes the right to determine what one expresses, when and how.”
My concern in this post was that we (a) defend the right of all critics to write, draw, perform, etc.; (b) acknowledge that discomfort and offense are part of the satirical project; and © that ”the satirist needs to consider his or her own motivations — is the goal to dismantle shibboleths or is there something else, a racial, ethnic or religious animus, or a personal attack? (Ross Douthat’s post today offers an interesting discussion of some of this.)”
Criticism of satire is not an attack on free speech, but an extension of it. Satirists need to acknowledge this and engage with their critics. What happened yesterday, however, was not criticism. It was murder and terrorism designed to stop the discussion.
I am not a fan of Charlie Hebdo — I think they have spent far too much time “punching down” (i.e., targeting the less powerful), though I appreciate their willingness to skewer any and all religious groups. It is interesting just how quickly the Je Suis Charlie crowd abandoned the magazine when it (from Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept) “published a characteristically vile cartoon depicting drowning victims of Hurricane Harvey in Houston as being neo-Nazis, with the banner that declared “God Exists”: because, needless to say, white people in Texas love Hitler, and it’s thus a form of divine justice if they drown.”
The magazine was being consistent, though the responses from (mostly) conservative commentators saw this as demonstrably different than what had been done before. Charlie Hebdo crossed a line, going after white Christians in Texas — a line that the same critics said didn’t exist when the magazine was running cartoons that were aggressively anti-Islam or anti-Semitic.
That’s why much of the outrage from the right and Trump supporters strikes me as disingenuous. These are the folks who have tossed the word “snowflake” around like an epithet and praise President Donald Trump for openly being politically incorrect (i.e., hurling sexist and racist vitriol at his political and personal targets). The hurt feelings from the press corps are different, though it is important to note that they kind of brought this issue on themselves, because — as I said — comedians tell jokes and have a tendency to be offensive. That’s their job, propriety be damned.