Teaching American Satire: A New Piece for the Classroom from the Onion
It is fun to teach humor. Laughter keeps students awake more effectively than most things. The promise of relief or diversion from the cultural and personal stresses implicit in all humor (and explicit in much of it), to my mind, not only makes for more pleasant classroom discussions but also helps to make those discussions more productive. This I believe.
But I have my doubts when it comes to exploring satire. I have revealed my misgivings in this spot before (Teaching the Irony of Satire (Ironically); see also Sharon McCoy’s excellent response: Embracing the Ambiguity of Satire).
Within the overall umbrella of my courses on American Humor, satire demands its space, and rightfully so. But it’s harder to get through the material, and methinks many students pick up on my hesitations here and there. I don’t mind the difficulty factor, it’s the pain of the subject matter that wears me out. The suffering underlying much of humor in general stands foregrounded in satire. This is the nature of the art form. Satire cannot hide its rage, or its hopelessness, and as a result there is very little room for the pleasant relief of laughter. Satire is rarely funny “ha ha,” or funny “weird.” It’s just painful.
I have just read what I consider to be one of the most engaging pieces of satire on political and cultural intransigence that I have encountered since first reading Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer,” a work by the American master that is perfect both in its conciseness and its artistic vision.
Twain’s short piece, which has a stranger translate the prayers of a people on the verge of war, is powerful for its accuracy as a comment on the human capacity for making war in the name of god and its recognition that the commentary is timeless because the war making machine is timeless, and unending. Students will always study it because they will always understand its targets. The Onion has just provided another piece that seems, to me, worthy of being taught alongside Twain’s work.
It is an “Editorial Opinion” that first appeared on August 13, 2013 (Issues 49.33). The title is: “The Onion” Encourages Israel and Palestine Not to Give a Single, Goddamn Inch.”
Here is a link to the article: http://www.theonion.com/articles/the-onion-encourages-israel-and-palestine-not-to-g,33473/
Standing in opposition to “the international community” which has pleaded with the two sides to meet to discuss peace, The Onion satirically asks the sides to remain steadfast and persist in absolutist positions:
“Israelis and Palestinians, you must accept nothing short of total victory against those who threaten your religion and way of life. Sacrificing just one of your ideals would at this point be tantamount to compete and utter failure.”
The writers of The Onion then follow this assertion with details that simply recount the history of the last 60 years (and by implication 2,000 years?) in four concise sentences:
“If a settlement is built, you must attack it. If a settlement is attacked, you must rebuild it. Rocks must be met with bullets; bullets must be met with rocket fire; rocket fire must be met with helicopter assaults. This is the only noble way forward for either side.”
Noble. Forward. The writers know, and readers know, the words “noble” and “forward” serve as the key bits of irony here. There is nothing noble in the bloodshed, nothing forward looking about continued intransigence.
Building on this sardonic tone, the satire gets heavier and heavier, and the reader wants relief while at the same time knowing that none is forthcoming. As with Twain’s work, the writers are devoted to the point of the satire, which is the grotesque pointlessness of continued aggression. The secondary target of the piece, though, may also be the ever-present demands from the international community to urge the parties to sue for peace. Pointless. I don’t really believe that peace efforts are pointless, by the way, but it seems the accurate thing to say here in the context of The Onion satire, the art. If we are to teach such aggressive and unnerving satire, we must be ready to accept the full brunt of the hopelessness the piece addresses. And thus figure out a way to help students talk about it. I am open to suggestions.
I just know that as I read this, I wanted an outlet, some peek from behind the curtain from the jester. But it is not there because there is no peace ready to peek out from behind any curtains either. The article ends concisely and with a key repetition:
“Remain steadfast. Remain strong. And never give up your noble fight, even if it takes several more generations.”
That, my gentle readers, is first-rate satire. It is exhausting and no fun at all.
Sick Jokes After Newtown: Internet Humor as Media Counter-narrative
A poignant “too soon” joke
Matthew Daube’s recent piece pointed out The Onion‘s unique role in responding to tragic events like those in Newtown a few weeks ago. As he notes, the satirical newspaper, while performing comic bravery, still tempers its rhetoric with regard to stories of this nature. But while The Onion has built a reputation as a comedic first responder to tragedies of this nature, it is neither alone nor does it come close to showing the limits of “too soon” humor. Internet forums dedicated to sick humor offer limit cases in both speed and offensiveness. In this way, they offer a discourse that rebels against the framing offered by news coverage.
When tragedy strikes, American popular media tend to follow a script of information gathering, round-the-clock coverage, memorializing, and a tentative return to normal. Visual and audio cues like minor-key music and still photographs offer an emotive frame that distinguishes such events as more tragic and unique than the conventionally bad news that springs from war zones and more economically depressed areas. Eventually, dramatic fare – from films like Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) or Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) as well as television shows like Third Watch and American Horror Story engage with these events in ways that, while perhaps taking unique angles, more or less reinforce the dominant framing of these events as sacred moments of collective trauma.
Comedic responses to such events tend to be more dynamic and varied. Because of its temporality, wider range of generic registers, and many other reasons, television comedies tend to engage with such events more than does cinema. And television varies widely in this regard. While sick jokes about the Challenger explosion in 1986 certainly existed, my research has yet to uncover any such humor on television. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, David Letterman’s famous return episode, while somber, offered moments of cautious, comforting humor. After some more time, South Park offered a mix of patriotic and critical humor, pointing the way towards more politically daring humor as well as those designed more purely to evoke laughing offense.
The Onion and How Comedy Deals with Tragedy (Or Not)
The most famous edition of the satirical newspaper The Onion has to be its 9/11 edition. That issue was also the first that they published after relocating from Madison, Wisconsin, to New York City. The headlines were shocking to a nation that had not yet returned to its usual fare of late night shtick or our then-new love of “reality” television. (Survivor premiered the year before and American Idol began the year after.)
The Onion writers, however, did not leap into addressing the attack with abandon. According to Onion John Krewson, the humorists were stymied until one of them suggested the headline “America Turns into a Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Film,” after which the dam burst and they felt capable of turning a comic eye on a national tragedy.
Knowing this, should we be surprised that The Onion has already covered the horror of the Newtown, Connecticut, massacre? Here is a snippet from an article they published on Friday, the very day of the shootings.
As with 9/11, The Onion attempts to signal their understanding of the seriousness of the situation by employing epithets. Still, there are multiple ways in which The Onion’s response to Newtown differs from their earlier response to 9/11. For one, the fact that the Newtown victims were predominantly children makes for a greater risk of looking like one is taking a light-hearted perspective on the heavy-hearted matter. In addition, The Onion’s response to 9/11 came from New York City itself. And finally, there is the fact of timing. Remember, The Onion actually cancelled the print edition originally scheduled for 9/11, and they issued the above headlines in late September. In today’s online news world, The Onion could respond within hours.
Happy Halloween!
While watching scary movies this weekend, I noticed the similarities between horror and humor: suspense released through an emotional response, expectations build up and often end in surprise, and lots and lots of blood…
*Seven Graveyard Smashes…our own music editor, Matt Powell, on Halloween music.
*Michael Collier’s “All Souls”
*Will Rogers in “The Headless Horsemen”
*Halloween on Parks & Rec
*Halloween music, via Nine Kinds of Pie
*the origin of Halloween traditions…
*Werewolf Bar Mitzvah, spooky scary….
*A great version of Poe’s “The Raven” mixing humor and horror.
*Congratulations to the St. Louis Cardinals San Francisco Giants …via funny baseball quotes.
*Finally, some political cartoons from the past few years, as Halloween tropes are recycled to address new fears and old.
2014
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2011
“Happy Birthday” and “Productination,” together at last
Happy Birthday and Good Morning to Pee Wee Herman, fifty-eight years young.
(I don’t make monkeys, I only train them…)
“Work” to help you avoid “work”:
- David Sedaris is not running for President
- A Japanese author on the recent Mark Twain conference in Hannibal, MO
- Another description
- Susan Harris talk at the Mark Twain Boyhood Home
- Witstream–a compilation of comedians tweeting
- Dave Chappelle give an interview
- A podcast on comedy, featuring guest Patton Oswalt
- On Vonnegut banning, more
- On the fate of comic novels in a comedy world
- On the Final Destination movies as comedy
- Ever think you could cartoon for the New Yorker?
- Muppet diagram!
- Molly Ivins on Governor Goodhair
- Hey, you could write your own review of this for this blog! (or of a lot of other stuff…)
- Onion article of the week? This is appropriate for the beginning of school, but this struck me as much more funny.
Productination
the managing editor.
productive + procrastination = productination: a collection of links about humor to spend your time not working in a semi-productive manner.
- On comedians who took alternate routes
- Anyone want to blog on Two and a Half Men?
- Lucille Ball at 100
- Two on Catch-22, and one more
- Comedy in Brazil
- 29th International Society for Humor Studies–a review
- Slaughterhouse-Five banned!
- How to Speak Hip
- Two on Jerry Lewis
- A new book on humor
- Analyzing literature via computer
- Everyone loves the Muppets
- Onion story of the week
- and finally, I found this site, which is a lot of fun reading
Productination
Tracy Wuster.
The portmanteau is one of my favorite forms of humor in everyday life. I combine words constantly around the house. Sometimes the result is humorous; sometimes it only causes my wife to laugh at me. But one portmanteau has found its way into my everyday lexicon and spread to friends and family: productination = productive + procrastination.
Never does doing the dishes, filing paperwork, or writing a blog post sound as good as when one has a deadline for an essay, or even better, a stack of papers to grade. In this spirit, we will offer a regular feature of articles and links on humor-related topics to allow you to productinate when you have better things to do. If you have links of articles or sites to look at, please email me at wustert@gmail.com or add a comment to the post.
- A brief article on Tina Fey and women in comedy
- The continued intrigue of Dave Chappelle
- A review of Twain’s autobiography and other recent books on Twain
- A review of a book on seriousness, the reputed opposite of the humorous
- On William Cowper, wit, and poetry by Robert Pinsky
- A nice reading of a Marx Brothers scene
- Onion article of the week
Humor in America 