Nothing enrages an authoritarian more than not being taken seriously.PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: THE GLOBE AND MAIL. SOURCE PHOTO: REUTERS
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. His latest book is Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations.
The aftermath of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk’s murder has been a confusion of claims and counterclaims about free speech. A Trumpian crackdown on “domestic terrorism” is afoot. Many fear a new age of cancel culture, this time prosecuted by a vengeful gangland administration armed with simmering grudges and self-serving notions of hate and civility.
“We don’t believe in political violence,” U.S. Vice-President J. D. Vance said on Mr. Kirk’s podcast in the days after his death, “but we do believe in civility, and there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.” So you should report anyone who does anything resembling that! Comedian Jimmy Kimmel didn’t actually celebrate anything, as the record shows. His deal-breaking line – aligning the alleged killer with MAGA – wasn’t even a joke.
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Mr. Kimmel’s late-night platform was restored, after much agonized hand-wringing over state-directed corporate censorship, but confusion and hypocrisy still reign. Everyone is a free-speech absolutist of their own preferences: free for me but not for thee. Speech is free like capital markets are free, which is to say, tightly regulated in someone’s interests, usually those already ample with money and power. In the U.S., there is the rhetorical surcharge of claiming that whatever you don’t like, whether speech or its suppression, is “un-American.”
A more significant feature of a healthy polity has been lost in the shuffle: the ability not just to speak freely, but to make fun. A seminar I’m leading this fall surveys a century of novels executing social critique via sly mockery. Satire grows more necessary daily, yet is becoming almost impossible to execute.
Confusion and hypocrisy still reign after Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show was brought back after a brief suspension.Reuters
Northrop Frye defined satire as “militant irony,” but the word itself comes from the Latin satur, cognate with sate and saturate – by association, well-fed with an array of comic sketches. Whatever the style, the militancy has always been the real point. Sometimes the most effective way to speak truth to power is to tweak its vanity and arrogance.
Prose fiction, with no burden of factual proof, has historically been a rich source, from Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1930) to Russell Smith’s novel Self Care, published this fall. The span shows a clear rise and fall of satirical energy in the American, British, and Canadian contexts from which these works spring.
The roiling absurdities of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) offer a gleeful denunciation of stupid wars and double-talking lackeys that is more relevant by the day. Martin Amis’s caustic early work Dead Babies (1975) constructs a madhouse looking glass for the dead-eyed screen-zombies of the new millennium. Margaret Atwood’s wry proto-feminist debut, The Edible Woman (1969), neatly brackets Mr. Smith’s sexually graphic woman-meets-incel morality tale in the same downtown streets and ravines of Toronto.
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Some of these novels would not, I think, secure publication today – not least for their casual racism and sexism. But more than editorial political correctness stands in their way. Our times are more constricted, but also more comprehensively insane. My students ask: can we still satirize in the age of memes and trolling, this attention-economy culture that forever cancels and counter-cancels itself? When the parodic headlines of The Onion are indistinguishable from reality, is there any ironic distance left to exploit?
Case in point: the South Park episode mocking Mr. Kirk just before his death. It was quietly pulled from some platforms without the vilification that was heaped on Mr. Kimmel, but its reception by the target was telling. Mr. Kirk greeted the send-up with joy at being singled out, even though his podcast celebration of the episode suggests he didn’t quite get the juvenile “master debater” joke that drives the segment. “They even got the Bible verses right,” he marvelled at the accurate rip on his Bible-thumping shtick. Mr. Kirk was clearly chuffed at this new feat of kaleidoscopic celebrity.
You can see that reaction as a robust lack of self-seriousness; I find it sad myself, a bleak comment on the meaning-tangles of our perpetually performative world. Mr. Kirk’s killer may or may not be in the grip of “leftist ideology.” He was more likely stewed in a toxic mix of tribal resentments and online-gamer hyperlinks. Authorities calling for the death penalty, meanwhile, seem unfazed by the darker irony that this sentence sits uneasily alongside pious denunciations of political violence. What more vivid exercise of political violence is there than state-sanctioned execution?
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Mr. Vance’s punitive civility is a similar conceptual knot. Charlie Kirk was polite, more or less, but he was not civil. His “Prove Me Wrong” campus spectacles of owning and destroying inarticulate undergraduates were bullying, carefully staged simulacra of discourse, not the real thing. South Park, by contrast, is impolite but civil. Its wide field of fire targets, in the general interest, every manner of puffery and cant. The show is a cultural outlier, closer in its omnipartisan irreverence to Britain’s Private Eye, Eastern European samizdat caricatures, or the notorious French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Really biting mockery is rare or comic-book fringe in America, as in The Boys, where the dominant patriotic figure is an unhinged superhero called Homelander.Amazon Prime
Some smug Brits – Canadians too – have long noticed that our American cousins can’t always recognize irony, militant or otherwise, let alone celebrate it. Really biting mockery is rare or comic-book fringe, as in the gruesome, hilarious The Boys/Gen V franchise, where the dominant patriotic figure is an unhinged superhero called Homelander. Ambrose Bierce noted the problem in his own satirical masterwork, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911). It contains the following self-ironizing definition of satire: “An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author’s enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness.” He adds: “In this country satire never had more than a sickly and uncertain existence, for the soul of it is wit, wherein we are dolefully deficient.”
Wit is another word for intelligence, and sharp intelligence is always part of satire’s tart ethical bite. This makes it suspect in any political culture that prizes anti-intellectualism, something political scientist Richard Hofstadter noted without irony as pervasive in American life. Homeland-style lowbrowism ranges from the bogus virility of “straight talk,” usually a veil for simple incompetence, to the aggressive, disdainful stupidity of a regime that regards expertise, knowledge, even logic as somehow effete and untrustworthy.
There is, alas, nothing more ironic than an elite of power-brokers and thugs who pride themselves on their own anti-elitism. It’s said that you can’t make fun of someone too dumb to see a joke. That may be so. One of my students noted recently that political satire is akin to “jester’s privilege,” the free rein given to court fools to taunt the great and good. Allowing this performance was a sign of regal strength, not weakness, just as the ability to gibe and deride still registers democratic health. But what if the would-be king is himself a clown?
The good news is that nothing enrages an authoritarian more than not being taken seriously. Let’s continue to prick that thin orange skin. This is as much for our own good as for political ends. The best satire has always been self-searching as well as critical. It teases and ridicules power, yes, but the real target is us: our complacency, distraction, and normalized obedience. Exposing those inner domestic threats is always necessary, and never over.