Today I'm also linking to people analyzing the funny in very academic ways

While I'm at, Troy Patterson does a good job at Slate discussing what he calls "flabby satire. Then he and his readers delve a little deeper in chat form. It's all very interesting stuff, and makes me wonder about satire as a form and what's funny in general. So much of comedy comes from recognizing what's being said that simply repeating the cliche without any real reflection or depth is frequently the most economical way to "be funny."

[Full disclosure: I've done some lazy stuff of that sort on this blog, but then again I'm currently writing in my ostensibly free time to an audience consisting almost entirely of people who know me primarily as a means to make them come to this page and see my upcoming show times because it beats emailing people--hopefully folks get a chuckle and I get to be a little less diligent about asking folks to come out; I'd like to think I'd be a little more rigorous if this were my job. This is possibly self-deception or a poor excuse, but probably true. There's only one way to find out, folks who might hire me to write comedy professionally!]

In any case, I'm very predisposed to agree with the article because I made largely the same point almost ten years ago about SNL. My words were slightly different: "All parody, no satire." But they mean largely the same thing. It's comedy creation through a series of approximations and exaggerations of those approximations until the original gets lost. (Doonsbury sort-of-mocks-but-sort-of-participates in this by reducing politicians to little avatars rather than drawing caricatures. Bush is an asterisk, Clinton a waffle, Gingrich a bomb with a very short fuse, etc) What happens however is that eventually the comedians in a battle against the comedic law of diminishing returns end up exaggerating their own performances rather than continuing to build in an honest way on real world events (see also Carvey, Dana--George Herbert Walker Bush impression and). The results are often funny (again see Carvey, Dana) but cannot be considered "political satire" in any sense. Because the fiction conforms to our expectation better than the reality ever could, however, we now have a president that will likely be as remembered for something that he never said ("Strategery") as any of the ludicrous things he has said. That's mighty funny as sort of a society-wide art piece on collective memory, but it still isn't political satire.

Ultimately however the problem is that a high percentage of satire isn't funny and, even as one recognizes the inherent problems, the dumbed-down stuff is. It's great to explore the absurdities and ironies of politics on an individual basis, but when people try to do it for the masses it can often be a little cloying and self-important and self-congratulatory, or, alternately, blunt and crude and self-evident. Much like politics itself (which is a trite little self-important and self-evident joke itself). I'm reminded of the old feminist slogan "The personal is political"--there was more honest critique in Will Ferrell's "I DRIVE A DODGE STRATUS" guy than in all of his perfectly crafted faux-Bushisms. It feels more genuine to turn the lens on ourselves and expose our own foibles and in so doing critique our values and the power structures--familial, occupational, social--that influence our daily lives (see also Mooney, Paul--Word Association sketch and).

By the way this was not entirely an attempt to own the whole front page of the Four String blog. Not entirely anyway.