Satire in the Onion Age

Trying (and failing) to make sense of satire in the digital media and fake news era.

What is Satire?

One of the hardest — and most interesting — courses I took in college was called “That’s Seriously Funny,” a class that explored the important function satire plays in political discourse. People often have a general idea what satire means; they may even be able to point out what satire looks like when they see it, but when pushed, struggle hard to define it. Even after a 10-week college course on it, I still have difficulty in understanding what it really is myself.

A few months ago, I heard Malcolm Gladwell’s Podcast “Revisionist History.” In S1/E10, entitled “The Satire Paradox,” Gladwell discusses satire in the late-20th and early-21st centuries. I found a really great transcription here, but the podcast is really worth a listen.

Gladwell’s definition of satire draws upon some famous examples from across the world, from Loadsamoney in the UK, to Stephen Colbert & Tina Fey in the US. He finishes by referencing an Israeli TV show.

Gladwell eventually suggests that Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin impression is an example of somewhat weak satire. Gladwell believes that the SNL impression does not lift the satire above the level of “the joke.” He says: “looking back now, I don’t think it worked because Tina Fey is too busy being funny…They want the laugh, so they make fun of the way Sarah Palin talks. And the way she talks is not the problem.” The later inclusion of Palin herself on SNL reduces the effect of the satire by making her complicit in the joke — to the point where the show, he argues, humanizes her as sympathetic.

He also uses Stephen Colbert’s on-air, conservative alter-ego as an example of satire that is “hard to decode,” thought it is noteworthy that this is somewhat anecdotal, coming from Gladwell’s own experiences on the Colbert Report. Gladwell states: “That gap between what you, as the audience, know intellectually that he’s trying to do and the way his performance feels” creates a “biased perception”.

“I have a lot of liberal friends, especially in, you know, academia, but I also have a lot of friends and family members that are conservative and I started noticing that they would talk about the show as if it was equally funny but in completely opposite ways,” says Heather LeMarre on Gladwell’s podcast. The satire can be taken both ways: its intent isn’t outwardly clear. The audience can unload their own “biased perception” onto his performance to construe it as being either mocking towards liberals or conservatives. Colbert’s broad appeal — he measured well with both Liberals and Conservatives — is something Gladwell seems to view negatively. Colbert’s conservative talk show host, to Gladwell, isn’t obvious enough in its intent to be powerful satire.

He then goes on to use the Israeli TV Show “A Wonderful Country” to tell us what powerful satire does look like. “A Wonderful Country goes further than the kind of TV satire that we have in the US or the UK, maybe because the stakes are so much higher in Israel. Maybe in a country with a tortured history, suffering under constant threat, the boundaries that satire needs to push up against are more real,” he says.

He continues: “the sketch I saw is styled in the manner of a government funded documentary, a kind of promotional video for a new educational initiative in the schools. It’s set in a classroom full of adorable kindergarten students, seriously adorable, a warm and very compelling teacher’s at the front the room.

The teacher says, “Today, kids, we will talk about peace. Who can tell me what we need to have peace?” Then, the kids start to mouth every cliché that the Israeli right wing uses to justify not negotiating with the Palestinians, opposing a 2 state solution, or ignoring world opinion and continuing to build settlements in the occupied territories. A truly cute girl with curly hair says, “What peace? Who will we make peace with? There’s not even anyone to talk to on the other side.” The teacher replies, “That’s right, Lolly. There’s no one to talk to.” To Gladwell, this is the ideal of good satire: “I said I laughed out loud the first time I saw that sketch, but the second time I saw it, I didn’t laugh at all.”

He uses these examples to debate what powerful satire should look like and what it should achieve. Through this, I think he comes up with a pretty decent definition for it, the crux of which is as follows:

• Satire should fundamentally be “courageous.” It is not enough to “…just go for the joke.” There must be some political depth, some political courage. But, if the target of satire is “in” on the joke, the satire isn’t courageous enough.
• Satire should be, on the surface, funny — but eventually “something will touch you and you feel the pain…The fundamental truth, when you think about it, is kind of sad.”
• The intent of satire should not be “hard to decode.” It should be obvious what it is trying to achieve.

Gladwell contends that satire should force change, that it should be obvious and that it should not allow its target to become complicit in the satire. As I mentioned, I really liked this definition. A lot of time we try to think of satire in more abstract terms, but I think he does a good job of making it something tangible.

The Issues with Satire in 2018

What actually got me interested in writing about this topic was that I recently found myself down a rabbit hole on R/NotTheOnion after seeing this article on the Reddit homepage:

There’s no way this is real, right?!

I think absurdity is an important feature of satire, because it typically means to take some part of reality and distort it. We understand Colbert, Fey, Loadsamoney & the Israeli Schoolchildren, because their performances have a sad, “fundamental truth” to them. The key here is that reality is used as a baseline, and then some facet of it is turned upside down, twisted or otherwise mutated. But it’s harder to distort something that’s itself silly and still have it be affecting.

Some argue that we’re at the point where real life is too absurd to be satirized properly.

Perspective | How do you write political satire when politics are a farce?

There are some really interesting quotes here from Armando Iannucci, creator of the TV Show Veep, that do a really good job of explaining this point:

1. “But reality has jumped the shark right now, and any attempt to present a fictional version of today’s events would never be as crazy as the real thing. The truth — in Washington, London or Moscow — is much more demented than fiction, signaling a full-on existential crisis for the comedy writer.”
2. “Last year, Prime Minister Theresa May stood before her party conference and had a coughing fit while the letters in the slogan “Building a country that works for everyone” started falling off the screen behind her. If that had been presented to me as a script idea, I would have rejected it as too childish.”
3. “Sometimes, Trump’s arbitrary and disjointed actions in the Oval Office accidentally align in such a way that if you squint, they could be taken to resemble a classic comedy storyline — just as a room full of an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters might one day happen to write ‘Hamlet’.”
4. “Perhaps the dissonant mixing of genres is deliberate, and Trump believes he’s producing some hybrid reality entertainment drama mixed with a suspense movie. He loves sudden disappearances, unforeseen plot twists and characters that look, as he reportedly said about members of his Cabinet, like they are straight out of ‘central casting’.”
5. “As for me, 2018 is too ridiculous to make any funnier.”

What’s being said here is that satirical comedy can’t work when the baseline — the thing being satirized — is itself too hard to believe. This changes how satire can be defined, how it can function, and how it should function. Or if it can even exist at all. The idea of reality being too ridiculous to satirize properly is an important one.

To complicate matters more, I think Gladwell’s idea of unlocking a “fundamental truth” related to the human condition is further blurred by digital media, social networks and pages like R/NotTheOnion.

The world has always had problems — and will likely continue to do so — but the political upheaval taking place over the past few years is unique because it has occurred alongside — some would argue because of — a growing belief that news or information can be subjective. It’s an interesting dilemma, and one that makes political satire harder to understand, because it calls into question the validity of what that “fundamental truth” being satirized is.

The near-ubiquity of social networks, and the proliferation of news through digital channels has created a paradigm shift. This manifests most importantly in what and how news is consumed. Barriers to entry are at an all time low: anyone with an internet connection and motivation can go and write something online, and have it distributed to the whole world. This ties back in to the idea of fake news and alternative facts. With such low requirements for creating content, consuming and making sense of news online is like going through a hall of mirrors. You’re not sure what is what. The “fundamental truth” Gladwell talks about becomes something of a misnomer, because fundamental truth in 2018 is subjective. This in turn makes it “hard to decode” satire.

In an absurd world — one made even more complicated because the terms news and fake news, or facts and alternative facts, could all refer to the same thing, blur into one, and be used interchangeably, where does that leave us?

Trump aides defend inflated inauguration figures as ‘alternative facts’

If you look back at the R/NotTheOnion post above, the Israeli embassy posted a Mean Girls .gif as a direct response to the leader of another country on Twitter. What?! My reaction was as follows:

• This can’t be real.
• *Checks the Twitter page to see if it is verified*.
• Oh, ok, it’s real.
• Wow, Twitter is being used as a medium to explicate foreign policy. The whole world can see this and be as confused as I am. There’s little to no context for what’s happening, and it’s all unfolding in front of our eyes.

But to someone else, this could appear to be a post by someone trolling. It’s hard to separate fact from fiction when the world is absurd, and even harder to do so when news is consumed online.

And so, in 2018:

• Real life is akin to a poorly written comedy. When the basis of news is so absurd, to lift it a level higher into satire is hard.
• Facts are subjective. It is becoming harder to distinguish reality from fiction. What is satire to one person can be fake news to another. What is false can be twisted into being an ‘alternative fact.’ News — the well of political satire — is essentially a matter of perspective.
• News is primarily being proliferated online — this opens up a can of worms for how people reach, consume and understand news. The internet also further complicates the ability to distinguish reality from fiction.

The Onion as a Case Study

The Onion, for those that don’t know, is a news website that satirizes topics from current news to the everyday.

R/NotTheOnion is a subreddit dedicated to real-world news stories absurd enough that they could pass for Onion articles, like the Israeli embassy example above. The subreddit aims to highlight articles so surreal they could pass as satire. It perfectly encapsulates the issues Iannucci has with creating satire in 2018 — life itself is too absurd nowadays. For the most part, it used to be easier to understand that an Onion article is meant to be comedic in nature; that it is satirical.

However, when the lines between reality and satire blur, things like this can happen:

Ex-FIFA Official Cites Satirical Article From The Onion in His Self-Defense

Here is an ex-FIFA official, citing an Onion article as a means of defending himself on corruption charges. This article was of course later posted on R/NotTheOnion.

Unfortunately, things like this also happen:

'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

How Many Times Will The Onion Have To Repost This Article?

I’m quick to take a step back here a little bit and explain without getting too bogged down in the political debate this article posits. Whereas before, the Onion could be taken (at least personally) as a potential chuckle at some current event, we’ve now come to the point where their stories can be seen as a constant feedback loop: life imitating art imitating life. Real-world events and satire are seemingly at a point of convergence.

I mean, which of these headline seems more likely to be a ‘real’ article:

• “No Way To Prevent This” Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.
• Israel Responds with Mean Girls GIF After Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei’s Nuclear Threats.

Are These Headlines Real Or From The Onion?

The hitherto clearly demarcated line between reality and fiction is blurring, and people just aren’t sure what is what.

In each of the examples Gladwell gives, performance is a fundamental part of the satire. Loadsamoney, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert and the Israeli school children are all performers playing parts — though Gladwell contends some do this better than others. We know Tina Fey isn’t really Sarah Palin, but on the Onion, there isn’t that obvious “performance” — there is no-one acting as the barrier between the real and the satirical.

The Onion article linked is routinely updated with a new date, location and casualty numbers. Over time, it’s not the words in the article that have an effect, but rather the interchangeability of dates/times/locations and frequency at which the exact article is uploaded: each update serves as a reminder of the banality of mass shootings in America.

The Huffington Post article actually cites this article as a means of highlighting the cyclicality of mass shootings. Jack Warner cites the Onion as he believes it to be an actual news article. It’s not actually that hard to see where he’s coming from. The Onion looks and feels like a news website to the untrained eye. To the casual observer, the site could pass as being a legitimate news source. It isn’t all that hard of a stretch. Legitimate (“real”) news sources cite satirical article as a basis for their own stories. It can all be very confusing.

Without the obvious performance, which I think is central to Gladwell’s definition, satire becomes very hard “to decode.” Though Gladwell was critical of Fey & Colbert, I think to a certain degree he also understood the roles they were playing — though maybe in his opinion their performances fell short.

Without that performance entirely, we’re left without an obvious point-of-reference through which to measure satire. Again, this is not to say that digital or online satire didn’t exist earlier, but rather that it’s harder to distinguish between fiction and reality as they accelerate towards one another.

Even though Gladwell had a hard time decoding Colbert’s satire, the idea of the way the “performance feels” is still central. “You go to the studios; they’re in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, far West Side. You sit in the green room beforehand and Colbert comes in to say hello. He’s not in character. He’s this warm, charming, nice guy and I can’t stress the nice part enough. Everyone who meets Stephen Colbert thinks he’s nice. He chats with you and he warns you that when you go out on set, he’s going to be someone else but you don’t quite believe him because you see this really nice guy in front of you. Then you get on stage and he really is someone else. He’s now this aggressive, right wing talk show host,” Gladwell says in his podcast.

I think Gladwell’s a little tough on the Colbert Report, because here he states that there is a point-of-reference from which to view the satire. Colbert in the Green Room vs. the Conservative Talk Show Host, which is the distorted reality. Gladwell should be able to distinguish between the two, though states that he finds this hard when he is on stage facing the performance. Fair enough.

The Colbert Report persona Gladwell describes is possibly the closest analogue that can be drawn to the Onion’s satire, in that the disorientation Gladwell felt on stage is probably how consuming news online feels now. What is real? What is fake? What is satire? Even if someone tells us, we aren’t conclusively sure what’s what.

With all this information being thrown at you — some of it real, some of it fake but looking real, with some of it outright fake — what function can satire serve, and what should it look like?

Satirical Performance in the Current Era

So, in 2018, satirists have a tough job. The issues are twofold:

1. As Iannucci stated: “2018 is too ridiculous to make any funnier,” so what can they do exactly? Satire relies on humor, and if real-life is already too absurd to try and distort into satire, what more can really be done?
2. How can satirists find ways find ways to leverage the digital ecosystem to actually work for, rather than against, them as they tackle fake news and alternative facts?

Saturday Night Live has been a part of the zeitgeist now for decades, and becomes even more central to the national conversation during election years in America. Alec Baldwin got a lot of praise for his Trump impersonation, but looking back on this 2016 clip in 2018, I don’t find it all that funny. With hindsight being what it is, the performance feels a little heavy-handed, a little slapstick, too on-the-nose. But is this more a problem with what exactly is being satirized?

Trump himself is larger than life, and so can Baldwin do anything more than simply impersonate Trump? I think Iannucci would agree that it’s hard to raise something farcical to the level of importance Gladwell believes satire should serve. Is there really a fundamental truth to be unlocked by Alec Baldwin repeatedly uttering the phrase “GIIIIINA”, or does it just serve to highlight the absolute absurdity of the situation? Is anything lifted above the level of the joke?

Compare this to Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin:

Gladwell — quite rightly in his podcast — states that the intent of SNL’s satire may be a little off target. I agree. In both clips, the goal is to be funny, rather than to unlock that “fundamental truth.” Gladwell has a problem with how the satire aims to function in the Fey clip; he claims that there isn’t much to it outside of the joke.

The absurdity of Trump running for president is so tough to satirize that only an over-the-top, slapstick impression could try and do it justice — but doing so feels closer to parody or farce than Gladwell’s satirical ideal. And looking back now in 2018, that same over-the-top performance just doesn’t have any gut-punching effect. Reality is too ridiculous for this impersonation to be cutting, and we’ve moved past the point where Baldwin’s performance is satirical. Baldwin’s impersonation, I think, has a functional deficiency with what is being satirized. It feels too fart-jokey, for lack of a better descriptor.

Moving Towards A New Satire

Satire, at least affecting satire how Gladwell imagines it, is tough to accomplish in the current day. The idea of a performance is too central to his definition, and I think trying to outperform our current news cycle is in itself a tall order. So, I’d like to ask Gladwell how else he thinks satire could be defined today.

The New Yorker article below got me really interested in if satire can leverage digital media to work for it, and how it may differ from Gladwell’s definition.

A Political Satirist for the Internet Election

The article cites the videos of Vic Berger. Here is the gist of Berger’s videos, per the New Yorker Article:

• “Berger manipulates found footage to highlight and/or create moments of absurdity…re-cutting videos of public appearances to focus on stray utterances, awkward gestures, or facial tics that hint at weird cracks in their seemingly anodyne personas.”
• “His tamer videos are indistinguishable from the clips of notable campaign moments that provide endless fodder for political blogs. Sometimes, they’re picked up as news themselves, as with a video that shows Representative Steve King bizarrely mouthing along to a Ted Cruz speech.”
• Berger’s favorite technique is to isolate a tiny moment amid hours of video and work it over until it bulges with unsettling significance. “I boil down the candidates almost to their essence, in a way,”
• Marco Rubio’s face during a debate is digitally zoomed and repeated until it becomes a window into the emptiness of his soul. Jeb Bush peers over the shoulders of schoolchildren who are sitting at computers; the clip is looped to the sound of smacking lips, evoking the xenomorph stalking its prey, in the film “Alien.” Donald Trump opens and closes his fist for no reason. “Isn’t that nice?” he says to wild cheers. A Jeb Bush campaign-trail meet-and-greet abruptly climaxes in a flash of red, accompanied by low-pitched moans, as a voter’s face transforms into a mask of insane obsession.
• Three-hour debates are compressed into minute-and-a-half melodramas, in which Donald Trump repeatedly bullies his opponents into a collective punch-drunk daze to an infernal chorus of airhorns and chants of “Trump.”
• Berger’s comedy is impressionistic, conjuring up a mood, rather than offering an explicit critique. In comedy, editing sharpens something that’s already funny, cutting out superfluous material and shaping the rhythm of a performance. Berger’s videos are as unsettling as they are hilarious because, as an editor, he doesn’t appear to be making a joke at all; he is helping the candidates reach their true comedic potential.

Whereas Gladwell’s mode of satire required an actor to play a part, Berger’s videos are powerful because they completely take the “actor” out, leaving our warped reality in place while “sharpen[ing]” its edges. The editing cuts out the “superfluous material… shaping the rhythm of the performance.” It’s genius. The object of satire plays him- or herself.

And it works so well, because as the New Yorker article so eloquently states: “When multiple news organizations have earnestly fact-checked the size of Donald Trump’s penis, how can satire compete? As the absurd becomes commonplace, Berger’s work suggests, comedy has to be found in the mundane.”

Sure, Berger’s clips may not have the same devastating affect that Gladwell believes the Israeli school children’s satire does, and they may not try to drive political change in the same way. But they do reveal the uncomfortable humanity of America’s potential political leaders without devolving into slapstick comedy. Could this be enough for Gladwell?

Instead of trying to find something to perform, reality is shaped into performance-art. In foregoing larger-than-life performance and ending up with farce, Berger’s videos focus on the mundane and magnify bits and pieces. The performance comes through curating reality to create an unsettling mood.

Looking back now, I would argue that the consistent reposting of the ‘No Way To Prevent This’ Onion article is similar to Berger’s work — changing the locations/dates/numbers makes the “work bulge with unsettling significance;” this is the real driver of what makes the article so cutting. Yes, the article itself is great, but the power comes through the banality of how frequently the article is updated. Treating the dates/times/locations as completely arbitrary and interchangeable makes each shooting seem commonplace, everyday, mundane. And that is what’s unsettling.

Both the Onion article and Berger’s work draw out affect not in spite of — but precisely due to — their lack of “traditional” performance. I stated earlier that reality and satire were at a seeming point of convergence. I think this Onion article and Berger double-down on this, instead of shying away from it. While SNL uses Alec Baldwin to try and impersonate someone already cartoonish, these pieces of satire perform in a way that massage the absurdities out of reality without a ‘performance’ demarcating fact from fiction. They manipulate reality (through camera editing or consistent reposting with minor tweaks) to magnify the discomfort in what already exists. They highlight that real life and fiction aren’t all really that dissimilar.

There are parts of Gladwell’s ethos sprinkled in, however. These works may not be “courageous” in the context Gladwell believes good satire should be, but they highlight the “unsettling significance” found in the everyday: micro-moments that are affecting not in one fell swoop, but gradually over time. Their uncomfortable quality may not reveal a fundamental truth in a political sense. But they amplify human nature by magnifying the mundane instead of aiming to tackle something as obviously courageous as the Israeli school children do.

And they are tough to decode, but that’s a feature, not a bug. Nothing about either of these works is obvious, and that’s partially what makes them so unsettling. It’s the type of comedy that thrives online, at the convergence point of reality and fiction, without a traditional performance tethering its impact or reach. It aims to disorient, evoking the feeling Gladwell had on the Colbert Report.

And so, unfortunately having now having written this, I think Gladwell’s satire is mostly dissonant with Berger and The Onion’s work. Gladwell depends too much on that traditional performance in the foundation of his definition, and a similar performance simply doesn’t exist online in Berger or the Onion’s articles. Should that be an issue? I don’t think so.

Because the goalposts have moved. Whereas Gladwell’s idealized satire as being a driving force for political change by unlocking a “fundamental truth” through comedy, the idea of “fundamental truth” is challenging in with the information overload we find online, where separating “truth” from fiction is very hard. And at the intersection of reality and fiction, life itself becomes art.

Berger and The Onion leverage this. Their work begs the question: “Wow, is this real?”And the answer to this, I think, is “who cares?” The New Yorker article claims that Berger’s work “is impressionistic, conjuring up a mood, rather than offering an explicit critique,” and when that mood created makes the viewer/reader uncomfortable, surely there is some value, whether the work is real or fiction?

It may not be as valuable as outright political change, but both the Onion and Berger’s works evoke the most elemental of feelings. In the case of the Onion article: “this keeps happening, and nothing is changing” and in the case of Berger: “those in power have tics, warts and deficiencies, just like the rest of us.” Perhaps this is the best we can hope for today — to create a mood, to elicit some discomfort and hope this germinates into something greater, which to me is worthwhile. I wonder if Gladwell would agree or not.