I start off my day with a cup of green tea and three syringes of bovine colostrum. I’ll make my husband a sandwich from scratch (harvest the wheat myself, of course). What if you went on a date with the worst guy in the world? What if – and bear with me here – millennials were cringe? Voting is stressful! Wouldn’t it be easier if you just didn’t have to worry about that anymore? I got my boyfriend a glass of water, and I made the ice myself. We don’t let our children read pagan literature, just the Good Book (Hillybilly Elegy). I’ve had twelve kids and I could keep going. Had to schedule my epidural to make it to the beauty pageant on time. Stuff was dripping everywhere. I’m on an ancestral diet, and my groceries cost more than your rent. I eat breakfast (raw horse liver) with my toes in the grass and watch compilations of bridge collapses. My balls were filled with microplastics…but then I started holistic biohacking. With this life, you’ll never have to want. You’ll never have to ask: what if it was all real?
Recently, I came across a video of a woman wrapping herself in tin foil before going to the grocery store. The caption explained that this was a reasonable precaution. You can’t risk contamination. You can’t risk surveillance. I guess that’s why she made the video on her iPhone, with minimal data encryption, for an audience of one million voyeurs. This contradiction felt immediately apparent, so I visited her page to get to the bottom of things. Was this video satire?1 After some comment stalking, I thought I’d determined that it was. You wouldn’t know from her profile, which seemed pretty interchangeable from her authentic counterparts (Ballerina Farm, Nara Smith, etc). I had a surprising reaction to learning that the page was satire. I was disappointed. These days, Reels is full of pages sporting extreme stances and lifestyles. There’s one woman who eats nothing but raw beef, dates, and something called Greco Gum. Her life, while hyperbolic and condensed for engagement, is also strangely genuine. It offers the same shock response as a comedy page, without the safety net of satire. There is a promise that the behavior you’re witnessing reflects something honest about its subject. The sincerity of these videos is the best thing about them. They’ve accomplished something unexpected. They’ve made parody obsolete.
A while later, I came across another, similar page; a holistic lifestyle influencer who eats raw, works out, and, in one video, shows himself starting the day with a “healthy spiritual release” (complete with toilet flush). His voiceover is something of a caricature; soft-spoken, faux-tranquil, full of health vernacular. The page has all the trappings of satire, but when you click on the link in his bio, low and behold…there’s the seventeen-page handbook he wrote about his lifestyle, replete with guidance towards “entrepreneurial success”. He’s got a website! The page is hyperbolic, satirical even…but the person behind it happens to practice what they preach. It’s so extreme that there’s nothing left to parody.
I returned to the other page (Lis Daily) and found evidence of a similar kind of self-hyperbole. A quick visit to her Linktree and YouTube seemed to clear it up: I — and the thousands of commenters — had been wrong about the page being satire. Or, sort of wrong. She is a Christian homemaker, wife, and mother. She does not (as far as I can tell) actually wear tin foil to the grocery store. While the videos aren’t an exact rendition of her beliefs, they seem to offer an open door to a less extreme, more palatable version of the satirized lifestyle. Rather than satirizing beliefs to illustrate their extremity (like in traditional political satire, where points of ridicule are heightened), these pages lean into extremity and appear reasonable by comparison. They satirize a rendition of the lifestyle that outsiders might initially interpret as reality. Viewers are drawn in at first by the absurdity, and then by the evidence of self-awareness.
I started to think about the role of satire in our current cultural and political climate, a climate that increasingly exists in extremes. If we define satire as “the art of making someone or something look ridiculous, raising laughter in order to embarrass, humble, or discredit its targets”, then what exactly is accomplished through self-satire? How can satire function in a culture of extremity that, by existing, defies it?
Satire has played a role in the social and political landscape throughout history. Originally coined to describe a genre of commentary that emerged during Roman times, satire has evolved into a few distinct forms and has continued to atomize in recent history. There’s Horatian Satire, lighter, more focused on humor than evaluation (reels poking fun at lifestyle influencers would probably fall into this category). Then there’s Juvenalian Satire, concerned with the more sharp and exacting political critique. This kind of satire is intended to reveal a fault and draw attention to moral violation by employing strategic hyperbole. Across the board, satire is dependent on an audience recognizing the form, and understanding that what they are watching is intentionally exaggerated to illustrate a specific point. I think this is one of the main things that’s absent in contemporary satire. The punchline has gone missing.
If you’re watching a skit on SNL you’re probably not questioning whether or not it’s satire. However, when satire is embedded within a landscape of authentically hyperbolic and radical beliefs (such as on Reels), the message, the ethos of satire – to impart a pointed critique or observation – is lost. The interchangeability between satire and the content it satirizes reflects a broader cultural and political trend toward extremism. Rather than inhabiting a limited form like a skit, satire on social media is ongoing. The curtain never falls, the spotlight never rests on the rug as it’s pulled out from under you. Instead, we get satire in vitro.
Another contention with contemporary satire concerns the subjects themselves. Increasingly, we are living the kind of political atmosphere for which there is no hyperbole. There’s no better example than the obvious; a figure like Trump is parody-resistant because he is already the most extreme version of himself.
In a recent article, Erik Hoel wrote about the ways that satire has evolved in last 20 years. One quote in particular — in relation to Trump — deftly summarizes the current state of political satire.
Trump, for instance, at first seems so deeply susceptible to satire, and yet actually he cannot be satirized, because no one is more Trump than Trump and nothing can ever be more Trump than Trump. He maxes out the Trump-o-meter, and you can’t go past it any more than you can go faster than the speed of light, and a bunch of stuff is like that now.
No wonder the Alec Baldwin-as-Trump SNL skits fell flat so quickly2.
Satire seems like the wrong response to politicians like Trump. When a public figure makes no attempt to disguise the fact that they are hyperbolic – as Trump does – traditional political satire is rendered impotent. Trump hasn’t always taken this approach (he once tried to sue Jimmy Kimmel for parodying him), but leaning into his comedic potential has had a lot of positive effects for Trump. It’s no surprise that parody can have the consequence of neutering a threat or disguising the danger in a political figure. There’s a risk for the Left in underestimating humor as a Right-wing political bargaining chip. In recent years, I’ve seen more and more young people describing Trump as "funny” or even “iconic” because of the way he utilizes humor and satire in his self-representation. I can’t help but feel that this tactic has complex implications for an informed assessment or acknowledgment of his policies and their practical consequences. Similarly to the lifestyle influencers that self-satirize to make their lives seem less extreme by comparison, by being “in on the joke” of himself, Trump seems self-aware, cognizant of his own absurdity, and willing to laugh at himself. He gets it! Or does he? Maybe, he’s just playing the game.
There’s no doubt that we’re living in hyperbolic times. An attempted assassination becomes old news in less than a week. A woman refuses to let her children go to the grocery store in October lest they fall victim to Satanic influence. In a 2017 interview, Andy Borowitz was quoted as saying, “we live in an age that defies satire.” He observes that Trump’s public persona — particularly his Twitter presence — is in the business of the ridiculous. With a tool like social media, there’s something new and insane every single day. Constant access to the extreme. The best satire can do is point and laugh at, or mimic, that which is already absurd. My response to this is similar to when I believed Lis Daily’s page was satire; I’m disappointed. I’m left wanting more from a medium that’s intended to reveal the unseen, and pull the rug out from under deception. What better deception to reveal than the subversion of the medium itself?
A recent article by writer Zaid Jilani contends with the recent slew of mediocre satire in the media, from The Boys to the 2021 flop Don’t Look Up. He writes:
I found myself wondering whether Kripke and his writing team were making fun of the entire audience for having to pretend there was any wit here at all.
Instead of building out complex allegories that posed moral dilemmas that might cause us to pause and reflect on real life, they instead chose to simply copy and paste political references in a sort of high-budget game of Mad Libs.
He observes that these works omit space for the audience to infer and reflect on their own. In good satire, there must be a gap between what is said and what is implied. Viewers must be allowed to reach their own conclusions. This is how I feel about satire on Reels. This kind of satire reaches for the low-hanging fruit (Tradwives, lifestyle maxxers, conspiracy theorists), but lacks a thesis beyond the point-and-laugh. Now, subjects bypass this ridicule and satirize themselves. In doing so, they invite engagement from both like-minded viewers and would-be-haters disarmed by the display of self-awareness. Like Trump, they’ve discovered that when you become a hyperbole of yourself, no one can touch you.
Writers have been predicting the end of satire for years, but it never seems to happen. Instead, satire evolves. It’s adopted. Increasingly, it’s indistinguishable from the kind of content it mimics. I think the most significant effect of satire and subject blurring together is a mounting sense of unreality. What’s real, if there’s no wink and nod to wake you up? There’s a sense of boundarylessness between the joke and the punchline. The endpoint has appeared on the horizon, and it seems to be the dawn of a more absurd world. Is any of it real? I suppose we’ll just have to guess.☞
References & Further Reading:
Trump’s Ironic Effect on Political Satire, Film Quarterly
Actually, maybe parody would be a more appropriate word; satire sans thesis.
Ironically, there’s a 2012 episode of 30 Rock (starring Alec Baldwin) in which the cast grapples with satirizing a political figure who is parody-resistant. Instead of writing skits, they get his cast member doppelganger to recite his speeches verbatim, to uproarious laughter. The premise illustrates a point SNL failed to grasp in their Alec Baldwin-as-Trump skits: extremity is immune to itself.
Incredible essay, Lennie! You've perfectly explained the failings of so-called satire these days. That's exactly how I've been feeling about the Barbie movie, where satire is created by the very people we're supposed to be satirizing, and it just becomes a hollow depiction of capitalism's already extreme characteristics. I think a lot of people felt the same way about Black Mirror too. It seems like media is not as interested as it once was in offering thought-provoking satires. Thanks for writing this, it's so important!!💗