Against Satire

The man who spends his life telling jokes is more often than not a fool in search of friends.

The man who spends his life telling jokes is more often than not a fool in search of friends. Confronted with something which falls beyond the sphere of his comprehension, the fool tends to laugh at it. And by laughing, he extends the invitation to other fools to laugh at the object of his ridicule.

This is the object of satire, a fundamentally comic experience whose principal objective is to invoke laughter. The search for laughter itself is the search for a microsociety, given that true satirical laughter requires the complicit laughter of others who recognise its ingenuity.

This is the satirist’s objective: to create, or to reveal, a society of like-minded fools by reducing to parody what neither he nor they understand, replacing the mutual frustration of not understanding with a cathartic laughter.

Satire is a comic experience punctuated by ingenuity, wit and/or acerbity, words which English has tended to conflate, or at least associate, with intelligence. But the association is tenuous, and wit is better understood as intelligence’s stand-in. Wit is thin and digestable. It gives the reader an immediate satisfaction of being in on something. It gives him something that he can take away and repeat at a party, passing it off as his own. Nota bene: The majority of wit is second-hand.

How many truly great authors may be defined as satirists? The reader says “Shakespeare”. After a short, ruminative pause he says “Pope.” After a longer pause, and with greater satisfaction, he says “Gogol”. But the reader is wrong, and I would dare him to suggest that any of these men are celebrated principally as satirists rather than as great writers. Shakespeare’s œuvre is not held up as a great satirical œuvre, but a triumph of dramatical writing. That he indulged occasionally in something as base as satire does not define him as a satirist. We all make mistakes, and good fathers can be equally bad debtors.

Let us hold our true great satirist up to the light — Swift, a man whose acerbic criticism of English government and society was only written after every ambition which he held of entering into it was frustrated. Having failed to attain a Church position in England, Swift fled to Ireland in virtual self-exile to live “like a rat in a hole”. Writing now in favour of his fellow countryman and against the England which had jilted him, he saw himself converted into an Irish patriot. A fool celebrated amongst fools, and on the road to madness. Here is your satirist.

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