Yesterday I wrote a post on the importance of Colbert’s act of defiance. But, today I read a great analysis by Michael Scherer of Salon, titled “The truthiness hurts”, which explains beautifully what I was trying to convey. The article breaks down, in detail, why Colbert’s White House Correspondence Dinner speech was so damaging.
It’s not just that Colbert’s jokes were hitting their mark. We already know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the generals hate Rumsfeld or that Fox News lists to the right. Those cracks are old and boring. What Colbert did was expose the whole official, patriotic, right-wing, press-bashing discourse as a sham, as more “truthiness” than truth.
It’s a tactic that cultural critic Greil Marcus once called the “critical negation that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems.” Colbert’s jokes attacked not just Bush’s policies, but the whole drama and language of American politics, the phony demonstration of strength, unity and vision.
Political Washington is accustomed to more direct attacks that follow the rules. We tend to like the bland buffoonery of Jay Leno or insider jokes that drop lots of names and enforce everyone’s clubby self-satisfaction. (Did you hear the one about John Boehner at the tanning salon or Duke Cunningham playing poker at the Watergate?) Similarly, White House spinmeisters are used to frontal assaults on their policies, which can be rebutted with a similar set of talking points. But there is no easy answer for the ironist. “Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function,” wrote David Foster Wallace, in his seminal 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram.” “It’s critical and destructive, a ground clearing.”
Satire can be damaging, and those who are attacked will always dismiss the satirist being unfunny. The humor comes only in what he reveals. Only those who see what was revealed will appreciate the humor. I did a little freshening up on satire by reading the Wikipedia entry thought the description was fitting.
Satire is a mode of challenging accepted notions by making them seem ridiculous. It usually occurs only in an age of crisis, when there exists no absolute uniformity but rather two sets of beliefs. Of the two sets of beliefs, one holds sufficient power to suppress open attacks on the established order, but not enough to suppress a veiled attack.
It’s only funny until someone loses an eye. Or, in this case, learns too much and actually tells people about it.
[begin sarcasm]
Knowledge is power until you do something with it. Then, it’s damaging.
[end sarcasm]