A bit of cultural theory
Most people assume that satire is funny. That it necessitates yukking it up. That it’s more or less a form of comedy.
Nope.
In fact, satire is much more closely aligned with tragedy and, even more than that, with philosophy. And neither of those forms typically gets people rolling in the aisles.
Sure, satire involves humor in its polemic strategies. But if a piece is only playing for laughs, it’s not really satire. It may be travesty or parody or lampoon or simply stupid sarcasm—but it ain’t the real deal.
Why?
Because first-rate satire makes you think painful thoughts. Really good satire packs a tragic-philosophic one-two punch—even when you might also be chuckling a bit.
Likely, you’ve never heard of John Dryden (1631-1700). He was a big-deal English poet, playwright, translator, and literary critic—and appointed England’s first Poet Laureate in 1668 (see here). Dryden wrote a pair of very well-known satires and, in a long essay with the long title “Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (1693), undertook the first thoroughgoing account of the genre in English literary criticism. In that essay, Dryden discusses at length the saeva indignatio (savage indignation) of the Roman satirist Juvenal (circa 55-127 CE), who was notorious for his pounding attacks on human vice and folly.
Juvenal’s famous Satire X, usually given the title “The Vanity of Human Wishes” and often translated or imitated through the centuries, sets the standard for satiric-tragic-philosophic tirades (see here). (In fact, it’s what misery-guts Hamlet is reading as he mopes around the castle in Act 2, Scene 2.) In that satire, Juvenal delivers a torrent of withering observations, arguments, and exempla about the inane desires of people and how disastrously those cravings backfire. This vituperative stream—common in most of Juvenal’s satires—prompts Dryden to comment in his essay that Juvenal is always “on the gallop” and that “Juvenal ... gives me as much pleasure as I can bear; ... his spleen [bad temper, spite] is raised, and he raises mine.”
By these statements, I take Dryden to mean that his experience when reading Juvenal does not result in pleasurable pleasure, as might be the result of encountering more good-natured and mirthful humor, such as that of Rome’s other famous satirist, Horace (65-8 BCE). Instead, the levity available in Juvenal is only a gallows humor—unpleasurable pleasure verging on unbearable—educing, at most, grim and ironic laughter because the situation being treated is depicted as utterly dark and hopeless.
Such nearly unbearable pleasure, I would argue, is a hallmark of particularly effective satire. Wry and witty and mocking is enjoyable, to be sure. A real hoot. But funny that hurts? That kind of funny sticks to the ribs. Nails the landing. Lingers in the mind.
A French expression originating in the early modern era conveys well this idea: rire jaune.
Translating literally as “yellow laughter” but also meaning a “forced laugh,” the idiom signifies a strained, mirthless, unhealthy, or hollow laughter that badly conceals, in fact, agitation and discontent (see here and here and here). Another French expression, rire du bout des dents, means literally “laughter from the tip of the teeth” or, more plainly, a “half-hearted laugh” (see here). Again, the idea signals an uncomfortable, almost involuntary and painful form of humor that discharges grudgingly from the listener.
And there, maybe, is the crux of satire: the unwilling acceptance of an unhappy idea.
Applying this bit of cultural theory
So, we should be on the lookout for perturbingly memorable yellow laughter in satire, then, eh?
All right. Like what?
Well, when the officious Polonius comes snooping around to put Hamlet’s sanity to the test, the Melancholy Dane uses Juvenal’s Satire X to insult the doddering old busybody. Polonius opens their conversation with a bit of innocent-seeming chitchat, asking Hamlet what is the substance of the book he’s reading. The Prince replies:
Slanders, sir; for the satirical rogue [i.e. Juvenal] says here that old men have gray beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams; ... (act 2, scene 2, lines 214-218)
Okay. As someone pushing 70, I feel the bite of this quip. Aging is no picnic. But let’s go to the source. Let’s take a peek at more of what Juvenal says in his satire about the folly of wishing for a long life:
...and as for sex its now long-forgotten, / Or should you try, his limp prick with its swollen vein, just / Lies there, lies there though you pummel it all night long. / What else could you expect from such feeble white-haired / Loins? (lines 103-107)
Ouch. Funny, sure...but ouch.
In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) dishes out more yellow laughter than even Dryden, I would imagine, could bear. In “Part 2 – A Voyage to Brobdingnag” (where the people are giants), Gulliver delivers long narrations to the King of that country wherein the glories of English society are vaunted by our (at this point) diminutive narrator. In perfectly serious tones, Gulliver proudly brags about how English artillery can:
...destroy whole ranks of an army at once...batter the strongest walls to the ground; sink down ships, with a thousand men in each, to the bottom of the sea, and, when linked together by a chain, would cut through masts and rigging, divide hundreds of bodies in the middle, and lay all waste before them.
Moreover, when besieging a disobedient city, such artillery, “would rip up the pavements, tear the houses to pieces, burst and throw splinters on every side, dashing out the brains of all who came near.”
The Brobdingnagian King is horrorstricken by Gulliver’s description of such terrible engines of war. He flatly refuses this tiny man’s offer to construct such weapons for the island kingdom and forbids Gulliver, on penalty of death, from ever mentioning them again. As we witness currently the technological carnage escalate in Ukraine—tanks, drones, cruise missiles, cluster bombs—we can relate, perhaps, to the King’s supposition that “some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have been the first contriver” of such instruments of slaughter (Part 2, Chapter 7).
This same idea might dawn on moviegoers seeing Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s brooding film about the invention of the atomic bomb (although I suspect more people will go see Barbie).
Nor do Gulliver’s naïve descriptions of the glory that is English statecraft land any better with the gigantic monarch. The King sees right through the glowing accounts of England’s Parliament, Courts of Justice, and Treasury to the underlying incompetence and hypocrisy of them all. After listening closely to Gulliver’s gushing celebration of English government, the King declares:
You have clearly proved that Ignorance, Idleness, and Vice are the proper Ingredients for qualifying a Legislator. That Laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose Interest and Abilities lye in perverting, confounding, and eluding them.
Anyone paying attention to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives these days can be forgiven for forming a similar opinion of that august body of legislators. As for our current Supreme Court and tax code? Well...
After carefully listening to and cross-examining Gulliver’s patriotic account of his native land, the King cannot help but discern the “many Vices of your Country.” In summation of early 18th-century British society, the King tells Gulliver:
I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth. (Part 2, Chapter 6)
Swift does not mince words when it comes to his criticisms of the emerging modern state, especially its jingoistic militarism and political profiteering. Likewise, Rants abound with yellow laughter when offering criticisms of our current modern state.
In The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Margaret Atwood explores, in the character of the Commander (who owns and ceremonially rapes his Handmaid, Offred), the unthinking privilege of hegemonic men. At some level, vague even to himself, the Commander understands the constructedness of the evangelical Gilead state, acknowledging to Offred at one point that, “Better never means better for everyone. ... It always means worse, for some” (Fawcett, 1985 edition, page 274). Instead of pursuing this insight, however, the Commander retreats to his comfortable, self-serving Christian orthodoxy, maintaining that the Commanders govern not just according to God’s eternal laws but to the essential qualities of human nature.
Offred catches him out in this glaring contradiction, though, when the Commander enjoins her to dress up and accompany him for an evening at “the Club”—that is, the whorehouse for Gilead officialdom. When Offred questions the hypocrisy of such an establishment, the Commander excuses it by saying, “But everyone’s human, after all.” When she asks what that means, he explains: “It means you can’t cheat Nature. ... Nature demands variety, for men. It stands to reason, it’s part of the procreational strategy. It’s Nature’s plan. ... Women know that instinctively” (308).
Oh, how the powerful love to gaslight.
And how satire loves to snuff it out.
When Offred implies ironically that the whole purpose of the Gilead state, then, appears to be to enable these few powerful men to “merely have different women,” the Commander replies, without irony, “It solves a lot of problems” (308).
Cue the strained, mirthless, unhealthy, hollow laughter of the reader that badly conceals, in fact, agitation and discontent.
The Republic of Gilead is founded far more on male sex drive than on devotion to Christ. Although the Commanders have convinced themselves that they follow God’s Word, their vaunted Christian republic is nothing more than a frat house manned by sexual predators. At that moment, Offred sees the Commander for the petty and ignorant man that he is. For the oppressed of the modern state, however, discovering the flawed character traits of their overlords hardly matters. Offred stands defenseless, late in the novel admitting to herself:
I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am abject.
I feel, for the first time, their true power. (368)
Even though ludicrous, Offred’s condition is nowhere close to being comical.
The same can be said for the character of Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) in Jordan Peele’s remarkable film, Get Out (2017). As we watch Chris struggle to escape the grip of the educated, affluent, white supremacist—and horrifyingly twisted—Armitage family, Peele reverses every malicious, overworked, racist stereotype of American society. Much of this ideological about-face is accomplished via yellow laughter. That is, throughout the film, the normality and American Dream ideal of well-heeled white people is acerbically mocked in ways that unmask it to be, in fact, the deranged and brutal exploitive behaviors of the hegemonic group.
In particular, Peele devises an extravagant climax to his movie where white audiences are inveigled into cheering for what they have been ideologically conditioned to hate and fear most: a young black man doing violence to a rich white family.
Were one to watch Chris’ killing spree inside the Armitage house without the benefit of knowing the horror plotline leading up to this finale, one might imagine the sequence an unusually macabre home invasion and car theft. After all, in countless ways overt and subtle American whites are taught to believe that young black men inherently are threats. Out of lust and poverty and a brute nature, so the doctrine goes, young black men are ever eager to rape and steal from and kill white people. Especially terrifying to whites is the idea of this violence occurring in their suburban enclaves, where they have intentionally retreated so as to be well removed from such troublesome racial unrest.
How amazing is it, then, to have cineplexes full of suburban white people thrilled and relieved to see Chris impale Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford) with a buck antler and stomp Jeremy Armitage (Caleb Landry Jones) to death? Even more amazing are the justifiable deaths of the evil Armitage mother-daughter duo, Missy (Catherine Keener) and Rose (Allison Williams). Far from being the conventional black thug taking white life, destroying white property, and defiling white women, Chris is our hero—the guy audiences identify with.
Wow.
I witnessed this phenomenon unfold in a movie theater filled, largely, with my fellow middle-class white folk—in central Ohio, no less. More than Juvenal, more than Swift, similar to Atwood, this scenario engineered by Peele provoked in me the most intense burst of yellow laughter I’ve ever endured. Through the magic of satire, Peele momentarily suspends the dominant racist ideology disciplined into whites so that they see Chris not as a threatening black marauder, but as an innocent victim courageously fighting back against powerful and immoral forces.
Namely, me.
So what?
Satire is not for the faint of heart. Even more so, satire is not for the faint of brain. By this, I don’t mean dumb people. I mean people who are unwilling to entertain ideas—particularly ideas that conflict with their well-worn worldviews.
The Florida Board of Education now wants to teach its students that slavery wasn’t all that bad. Really it was more like a particularly rigorous form of job training (see, among many examples, here). Like all the inane book-banning that’s going on these days, one of the main rightwing reasons for whitewashing slavery in this way is to protect white kids (our little snowflakes) from feeling bad or uncomfortable or—God forbid—guilty about all the brutality carried out by white people in the past.
Holy hell.
What a cowardly thing to worry about. What a condescending interdiction to impose. What a counterproductive educational policy to contrive.
You don’t protect children by shutting down their higher-order brain functions. You don’t prepare them for the world by keeping the world from them. You don’t produce the kind of educated citizenry Thomas Jefferson warned us is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people if you disallow students from wrestling with the grim circumstances and glaring contradictions of history. (To include, by the way, Thomas Jefferson himself as a slave-owner and sexual abuser—what a teachable moment for our little snowflakes to have to face!)
For a cult that venerates liberty and individuality above all else, the American radical rightwing sure doesn’t want anybody making up her own mind about anything.
Control masquerading as piety. Restraint dressed up as concern.
Hey, Florida. Start off the 8th-grade school year with a showing of Get Out. I dare you. Toss an intellect-bomb into your educational works. Let the discussion and the debate flow.
You have nothing to lose but your smug and panicked ignorance.