Satire is what happens when attention leads to anger leads to action.
As a kid, I was drawn to MAD magazine. I couldn’t exactly tell you why at the time, but I believe it was because it chose to cleverly skewer the sacraments we as a society have come to hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, I have my own sacraments and can bristle at any challenge to them, but that doesn’t mean I am correct.
And too, I am by no means a scholar or expert on satire. I just know that I love it and I believe its expression is one of the purest forms of getting to the truth. But make no mistake: Satire is born of a perspective and can be, by its nature, divisive.
Some will see satire and clutch and fawn about days gone by. Those halcyon days either never existed or are drenched in a strange anti-history/nostalgia coating that serves no one.
Pointing fingers at the satiricist instead of those being satired seems to me an indication that something about the truth and perspective were lost along the way.
Extremity has no time for nuance but nonetheless, nuance exists. Instead of turning our heads from it due to the volume of the extreme we should instead point to the gradations of life and make clear that they exist, no matter the words and promulgations of the carnival barkers.
I have struggled with mental health my entire life. I have dealt with deep and horrible and all consuming fears and felt absolutely alone. I choose to mock the worst parts of me, vociferously and pulling little in the way of punches, because I am tired and sad and afraid and need to take the power from these fears — an illusory power at best — and throw it into sharp relief.
My humor can seem to have a sense of cruelty to it but I promise you the cruelty is only ever directed at me or what I believe to be rank hypocrisy and cruelty of those who would stand in the way of kindness, human progress, and inclusiveness.
Said another way: My humor is a defense mechanism, writ large. I make dark jokes at my own expense because I feel vulnerable and afraid and I want to shore up what support I have.
When satire is done well, it provides the practitioner with a weapon of wit and cheekiness, and it provides the reader/consumer with a brutally accurate and cutting mockery of real life. This is often what I am attempting to do.
I believe in kindness above all else, but my belief in satire is not too far behind.
