Why satire is bad

After all, in a working life that's consisted, in large part, of tossing lexical firecrackers in the bemused faces of more placid verbarians, I've ended up with some of my best friends being satirists. If I wished to dodge the bullet myself, surely it could only be because of some midlife crisis of faith in life's great and compelling absurdity - and so I taxed myself: Could it be that I was falling victim to the usual delusion of the ageing joker, a pathological desire to be taken seriously?

Or was I coming to doubt the value of satire itself? I've always believed - or at least believed I believed - in the moral purpose of satire.

Indeed, I remember an essay title from school: "The aim of satire should always be the moral reform of society - discuss," and just how eager I was to discuss it. My personal yardstick for whether or not something qualifies to be satire at all is thus an adaptation of a classic definition of what constitutes good journalism - such an enterprise, it was written, should "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable".

Whenever I'm presented with a cartoon, a piece of writing or a comic shtick purporting to be satiric I always interrogate it along these lines: Who does it afflict, and who does it comfort? If in either case the work is mis-targeted - so afflicting the already afflicted, or comforting those already well-upholstered - it fails the test, and will need to be re-classified, usually as merely offensive, or egregiously offensive.

It can be objected that such a narrow classification of satire leaves little wiggle room for modes of discourse that, by transgressing the boundaries of what's acceptable draw our attention to the very contingent and culturally-specific character of much of what we deem to be ethical. Certainly - to paraphrase the great English satirist Laurence Sterne - they order these matters differently in France.

The conditions that produce violent revolution are also necessarily productive of a violent satire - one that may well aim at the moral reform of both the individual and society as a whole, but which, rather than firing Lilliputian barbs, lets fall the cleansing blade the Jacobins dubbed "our national razor".

Since the revolution of , the French state has been seized by the paroxysm of regime change on several subsequent occasions. Arguably, each sweeping away of constitutional authority was necessarily accompanied by a satiric outburst that aimed at a re-evaluation of all values, not just some - no institution could be regarded as beyond censure, no individual above the most extreme criticism; with the foundational myth of the First Republic inextricably bound up with violent revolution, each subsequent bouleversement required, of necessity, its own satiric bombshell.

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Another had a message indicating that the content was from a satirical site. Users were less likely to believe stories labeled as satire, were less likely to share them, and saw the source as less credible.

They also valued the warning. Facebook tested this feature itself a few years ago, and Google News has started to label some satirical content. This suggests that clearly labeling satirical content as satire can help social media users navigate a complex and sometimes confusing news environment.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Cite this article Hide citations. Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 19 Aug. Nieman Journalism Lab. Last modified August 19, Accessed November 12, The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.

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