Understanding satire

Assuming that if someone disagrees with you it is because of a flaw in their understanding is the sort of thing that really holds back humanity, so I'll stress once more that "You just don't understand satire" is really condescending. However, that alone would not have inspired this post.

Instead it comes from the comments that always seem to follow, where not understanding satire is paired with needing a sense of humor and never having heard of "A Modest Proposal". The problem with this reasoning is that "A Modest Proposal" is not a laugh riot.

It's actually pretty horrible, and I don't mean horrible in a "He wants people to eat babies! That awful, awful man!" way. It is horrible in exactly the way that satire is supposed to be, which is what makes it work.

Through English exploitation, agricultural regulation, and other factors, the Irish economic situation was dire. Some people did very well, but there were many people who could find no employment other than begging, and they were ragged and starving, including children. Swift references that, and very logically explains how the poor being able to sell their children for food solves all of this. Details like food preparation, time periods, and projected numbers are all covered and sound completely reasonable.

Of course any normal person recoils at eating babies, but as he points out that these children are not provided for, and that their lives are misery, it raises the question that if eating them is wrong, why is letting them starve right? Because that is what happens under the current situation, and it is set up that way so some may profit; is this superior to cannibalism?

There are features of satire that are adjacent to humor. "A Modest Proposal" is clever. The line about the landlords having the most right to the children as they have already devoured the parents? That's pretty on the nose. There is parody of the common tracts of the day. It can be offensive. There is the twist where the author gives you something you were not expecting. All of those things sound like it could be funny, but it really isn't comic.

Maybe this means that people actually don't understand satire. I read a few student comments that they were surprised upon reading the essay, because they were expecting satire, and then they realized what Swift was doing. I am going to interpret this as meaning that they were expecting satire to be funny and then realized that it was more effective the way it was. Or maybe they came around to the practicality of eating Irish babies, but I hope it wasn't that.

Satire works by taking what is familiar and everyday, but combining it with something repulsive that we cannot accept, but not so far removed from what happens in the status quo, thus making us question our acceptance of the status quo. So Animal Farm has funny parts and it is so clever, but if you are not disturbed by Boxer's death, it is less effective. Brazil can have laughs, but is it a comedy?

Obviously it can be easy for satire to go wrong, and I think it is useful to look at a failed satire as well, so I refer to Bret Harte's poem "Plain Language from Truthful James", otherwise known as "The Heathen Chinee."

Harte was sympathetic to the Chinese immigrants in California, who faced a great deal of prejudice and abuse. In the poem, two white men and one Chinese man play euchre, and while the Chinese man said he was not familiar with the game, and while at least one of the white men was egregiously cheating, the Chinese man is winning, which is because he is cheating too. The other cheater complains about being ruined by "Chinese cheap labor" and then physically attacks him.

The poem became very popular. Opponents of Chinese immigrants quoted it all the time. The first time I saw it was in Best Loved Poems of the American People, and there was no disclaimer that it was satire; so I just thought it was really racist.

Harte was embarrassed by this, and he did try and write a make-up piece, "Wan Lee" but Wan Lee had some honesty issues too, so Harte's sympathy may have been hampered by his own prejudices.

The poem is not a great poem, in terms of meter and clarity, but it did have elements of parody and some of the things you would expect to see in satire. I think its problem was that nothing was horrible enough. Hypocrisy, complaining about cheap Chinese labor, beating the laborers, having riots where Chinese people were killed and their property destroyed, that was all ordinary and acceptable. If only Bill Nye had cheated, but he blamed it on Ah Sin, would they have cared then? Instead of helping, Harte added fuel to the fire.

It may have simply been a situation where satire was not going to be effective. Satire is not for everything. Humor is not for everything.

And most importantly, humor and satire are not synonyms. Repeat that as many times as it takes.