As a result, college students begin to unconsciously distrust government and politics. Today, the people who most famously do satire are purportedly liberal, like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but they are objectively very conservative, because what they do is pick out the stupidest things happening in any given day and make fun of them, and for the people who watch, especially college students, politics is just one long parade of stupidity. If you look at Jonathan Swift or Horace or traditional satirists, their general theme was to look at how heroic we used to be and how stupid we’ve become. There’s a vast literary tradition that says satire is inherently conservative because it holds the manners of today up against the standards of the past. Political satirists aren’t trying to do good-it’s just better than having a real job.ĭave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist and author of more than 30 books. There was a time when political satirists tended to make fun of the whole process of politics, and that’s where I still feel that I am. Satire has probably gotten a little more vicious, immediate, constant and more partisan than it used to be. I’m always amazed that people can look at it any other way. Skepticism is a good thing for the most part, and the tendency to mock the people posturing for us is probably pretty healthy. When I go to the political conventions, I look around at all the real reporters and think, “What the hell are they writing? How can they possibly make this appear to be serious?” To be ponderous about it, most people have a pretty strong sense of skepticism about the people who claim to want to run the country for the benefit of the people. I’ve viewed our political system as a form of entertainment for a long time. Robert Mankoff is a cartoonist, cartoon editor for The New Yorker and founder of The Cartoon Bank. But I think that would be confusing appearance with reality. Don’t get me wrong, I like political satire and would like to think that it has some effect other than tweaking the mighty and getting laughs. Furthermore, that populace is no longer just a passive recipient of Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Onion or an occasional New Yorker cover or cartoon, but is actively participating by blogging, Twittering and Facebooking their own material. There’s now a veritable satiric-industrial complex. Now, how did that pan out? More than two millennia later, political folly is still as much with us despite the fact that political satire reaches more of the populace than ever before, as part of the entertainment industry. The justification for this mockery, going back to Aristotle, is that by holding bad behavior up to ridicule we might, as it were, “laugh folly out of existence.” Syllogistically, a la Aristotle, it might be put something like this:ġ) Politicians behaving badly will be mocked. Political satire is ridicule dedicated to exposing the difference between appearance and reality in public life.
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