Satire isn’t comedy
Satire is easily misunderstood. Too often it is miscast as simple comedy, or, worse, children’s literature. I suppose that reasonable people can disagree about whether Alice in Wonderland or Peter and Wendy were written for children or adults. But no reasonable person can read Animal Farm and see it as a children’s story. Yet that’s the way that it’s made into movies.
Perhaps it’s too easy to equate animals with children. But even animal-free satires can be difficult to get. When Nabokov had Humbert Humbert describe twelve-year-old Lolita in terms of adult lust, Nabokov wasn’t saying that Lo was a hot babe. Yet that’s the way she’s been portrayed in two otherwise very good movies.
Satire isn’t funny. It’s about turning the normal world over to expose what’s underneath. It’s about taking bad ideas to their logical, over-the-top conclusion. It’s about provocation. You can’t recognize satire just by looking for the funny bits. As the creator of The Walkerville Weekly Reader satirical newspaper, I am sometimes amazed at the kinds of things people will believe. And the Reader’s satire is, by the end of the article, as plain as it could be without big red letters blinking “satire”. Could anyone possibly believe that John Ashcroft would end the drug war? And yet some people did.
Some satire is funny. Douglas Adams is hilarious. So are Bulworth, Team America, South Park, and Thank You For Smoking. But much of the best satire is not written primarily as comedy. Steinbeck is often funny in Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat, but comedy is not the purpose of those stories. Kurt Vonnegut’s works are often funny also, but they’re not comedies.
Hunter Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is funny much less often. What he is, is over the top. Neither Animal Farm nor Siege of Harlem are written as comedies. They are tragedies, Siege of Harlem classically so. What they are, are provocative.
Nabokov’s Lolita is not about the funny side of pedophilia. Lolita is extraordinarily unfunny, but it also contains some of the most brilliant, subversive satire ever written, so powerful that it has fooled two generations of filmmakers.
Vladimir Nabokov lived through both the Bolshevist takeover of Russia (he first fled St. Petersburg and then the Crimea) and the Nazi takeover of Germany (he left Berlin in 1937 and Paris in 1940). Part of his message in Lolita was the ease with which even the most despicable person can rewrite history in their favor. Humbert is a clearly unreliable narrator, and yet we believe him. Nabokov made Humbert so successful at it that at least two generations of filmmakers have succumbed to the Humbert version of Lolita: that she was a forward little vixen beautiful even by Hollywood standards, not a twelve-year-old girl.
But that’s one of the things that satire does: it shows us a part of our culture we’d rather remain unturned.
- Satire
- “Satire is a technique of writing or art which exposes the follies of its subject (for example, individuals, institutions, organizations, or states) to ridicule, often as an intended means of provoking or preventing change.”
- Vladimir Nabokov
- “He wrote his first literary works in Russian, but rose to international prominence as a masterly prose stylist for the novels he composed in English.”
- The Walkerville Weekly Reader
- Editors Sam Lee and Shaheen Hamedi cover national news from rural Virginia, providing a unique perspective on world events. “Sic Semper Hypocritae”.
- Buy Lolita
- A brilliant novel about perception, deception, and despotism set around a European scholar’s lust for a twelve-year-old girl.
- John Steinbeck
- One of the greatest of American novelists, “he found his stride in writing California novels and Dust Bowl fiction, set among common people in the Great Depression.”
- George Orwell
- Orwell is among the most widely admired political and cultural commentators of the twentieth century. He is known for his insights about the political implications of the use of language, decrying the effects of cliché, bureaucratic euphemism, and academic jargon on thought.
More John Steinbeck
- Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday
- These are the stories of cannery workers at their self-made “Palace Flophouse and Grill” in Monterey, magical stories full of adventure and nobility.
- Of Mice and Men
- From time to time you still hear talk of the coming of the “Great American Novel”. If there has ever been a great American writer, in my mind Steinbeck is it, and if he is, the great Novel with a capital N is “Of Mice and Men”.
- Tortilla Flat
- The first of Steinbeck’s novels to be set in the Monterey area, Tortilla Flat follows Danny, a paisano, from his inheritance of two houses through his “mystic end”.
More Warren Miller
- The Siege of Harlem
- This is a strange artifact of the sixties. Written in 1964, published in 1965, it tells the story of when Harlem seceded from the Union and built its own government. The cover blurb says “Beneath the hilarity is a clear warning: ‘Laugh at your peril. It could happen.’”
More George Orwell
- Animal Farm
- Animal Farm is billed as “a provocative novel”, but that just underestimates our ability to be completely blind when faced with uncomfortable ideas.
More writing
- A writer’s will
- Neil Gaiman and Miss Snark encourage even unpublished writers to make known their desires with regard to their writings. Mine will be transferred to an open license within five years after I die.
- Simone de Beauvoir on writing
- Simone de Beauvoir’s views on the folly of female writers applies disconcertingly to male and female writers today.
- Lessons from the Publishing Revolution
- Working with a publishing services provider, and how to plan for the chaos that ensues.
- Notes from the Publishing Revolution
- The self-publishing revolution is probably just more of the same for authors: yet another hurdle to overcome on the road to “being published”. I see a future where the major publishers will not even look at works that haven’t made a name for themselves in self-publishing first.