Har De Har Har

A fair bit on satire from Wyatt Mason of Harper's, here in the NYT.

The ancient Romans provide the beginnings of an answer, in large measure because that’s where satire has its beginnings. Just as Americans like to claim jazz as “our art form,” the Romans claimed satire as theirs. Gaius Lucilius (second century B.C.) was the first satirist, a writer vocal about the negative virtues of his fellow citizens — mostly the tendency to imitate their Greek neighbors in everything. As boastful as a modern-day rapper, Lucilius pointed to himself as the original Roman — not some Helleno-wannabe — as much because of what he lampooned (things Greek) as the fact that he lampooned at all. I am Roman, his writings say, hear me mock. And indeed, it was how such criticism was delivered that made satire different — and differently effective — from, say, a sermon. “A cultivated wit,” wrote Horace, a later Roman satirist, “one that badgers less, can persuade all the more. Artful ridicule can address contentious issues more competently and vigorously than can severity alone.” Sounding like the always-fulminating Lewis Black of “The Daily Show,” Rome’s Juvenal tells us: “It is harder not to write satire. For who could endure this monstrous city, however callous at heart, and swallow his wrath?. . .Today, every vice has reached its ruinous zenith. So, satirist, hoist your sails.” The idiot wind, blowing every time Rome’s hypocrites moved their mouths, drove her satirists, in their artful way, to bluster back, setting a course pursued by writers living in turbulent eras ever since.

The article misses the turn of satire from an affliction of the comfortable, and a powerful, artful expression of a culture's freedom into the transmission of politically neuter, all-encompassing cynicism, which regards all cultural expression as interchangably meaningless, and absolves the sharer of laughter from the necessity of action. (The CEO of Bullshit Rupert Murdoch loves the Simpsons, for example, even though we, and it's creators, might take it as a constant attack on the absurd structures of authority.) But Mason does peg satire as taking on a particularly critical function in today's political climate; our own stabs at it, not to mention our frequent citations here, suggests we demand important something from it. But is it a salve, or a soporific?

I heard this expressed recently as a speculative socio-biology idea that humans grew laughter in order to tolerate hierarchy. I've also heard that laughter evolved as a way to check the over-accumulation of authority by individuals in a group.

Which is it, Bitch?