When it comes to satire, the great case study is Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels remains a classic English novel that playfully skewers all elements of Georgian England, and his short essay “A Modest Proposal” is standard reading in high school English class. Despite the generic title, you’ll remember it for presenting the idea that the economic woes of 1700s Ireland could be solved if poor Irish families sold their newborn babies to the English nobility as gourmet food. This, of course, from a time when we didn’t need to write “/s” at the end of our social posts to let people know when we are being sarcastic.
While Travels and “Proposal” remain his best-known works, Swift’s writings had a much more significant impact on Great Britain than these works alone. He was Irish by birth and spent much of his life in pro-Ireland advocacy. He was an Anglican priest on Sundays, and his insights about religion are rich and sarcastic. (He once wrote to the anti-church “freethinkers” of his time that they needed Anglicanism to rebel against so that their vices would still feel transgressive. Without a voice of condemnation, he surmises, their vices wouldn’t be nearly as thrilling and fun.) Beyond this, he was also a key thinker in the Tory party, active in their publishing work and sitting at the table for key strategy meetings.
His most impactful piece of writing is probably one of his lesser known. The Conduct of the Allies, written in 1711, critiqued his political opposition for their ongoing engagement in the War of Spanish Succession. The short 90-page book outlined, with much of Swift’s famous mix of logic, satire, and irony, why the country needed to end their involvement in the war. It was a smash hit, turning the tide of public opinion among the people and in Parliament right before an important vote on the matter. Two years later, Great Britain signed the Peace of Utrecht, ending hostilities, and Swift received a good deal of the credit (and an appointment as Dean at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin) for making that happen.
It’s worth noting how Swift was a master of satire and a public celebrity, and as a result, he made a tangible political difference. Why is it that modern satire hasn’t accomplished the same thing?
Like many millennials in their mid-twenties, I spent a season of my life getting the news from Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show on Comedy Central. The writing was clever, the guests were erudite, and Stewart himself embodies comedic exasperation like none other. Stephen Colbert’s follow-up act, The Colbert Report, offered its own form of news comedy as a satire of Fox News talking heads. Neither show was a news-first enterprise. And if we’re really honest, it’s debatable as to whether those shows were even comedy-first shows. The real currency of these programs was righteous indignation. Both shows featured a parade of the worst happenings in Washington, D.C., to an audience already jaded about the modern political system. While I won’t speak for others, it felt good to have my frustrations validated on a nightly basis by people who were smart, funny, and held in high regard.
If you want that potent cocktail of political punditry, satire, and righteous indignation, you can get it just about anywhere these days. Bill Maher and Marc Maron and Trevor Noah can give you that fix on their own shows and podcasts. John Oliver will give it to you with a British accent and at twice the concentration. This genre of satire news is most popular with the political left. The political right is, of course, happy to use righteous indignation for its own political ends, but outside of The Babylon Bee, they aren’t as likely to sell it in the packaging of satire.
The height of this left-leaning satire movement came sixteen years ago when Stewart and Colbert had their “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” on the Washington lawn. That was 2010, and it drew over 200,000 people. Though the billing was meant to spoof rallies organized by the left and right, the initiative betrayed an underlying assumption. The organizers didn’t just want to make people laugh: they wanted to change the political system. That potent cocktail that made political satire so popular had a higher hope. They wanted to achieve what Swift had achieved: a return to common sense, the ending of wars, and a shift of national attention to the marginalized. It’s hard to say that they came anywhere close to that goal.
Jon Stewart’s greatest political achievement across his years of hosting TV satire news was his advocacy for federally subsidized medical care for 9/11 first responders. That work shouldn’t be diminished. Thousands of New York first responders had their health collapse because of the dust and debris they inhaled in the fresh rubble of the World Trade Center, and Stewart genuinely made a difference for them. His platform on his TV show was, no doubt, an asset to this cause, but it wasn’t that his satire changed hearts and minds across America. His accomplishment was made with earnest pleas, testimonies before Congress, and repeated investment over the course of a decade to make sure the program survived budget cuts. It is an achievement, and one that Stewart should be proud of.
Can we say that Stewart’s peers did any better than this? And yet it’s also only one small policy victory among many more that never manifested. Swift’s satire ended a war. Why hasn’t modern satire achieved anything like that?
We could consider whether the change in time and media have made satire less pronounced. Some have said that Tina Fey’s famed satire of then Vice President candidate Sarah Palin was so good that it tipped the scales against her campaign ticket in 2008. Given that Saturday Night Live has a 50-year history of political satire, however, one moment of impact is more akin to the random success of a viral video than a carefully aimed bullseye. The destruction of any sort of monoculture has given satire less exposure. Proportionally, a popular booklet in the Georgian era of Great Britain is going to hold more sway than a million eyeballs watching a screen. It’s possible that modern satire has less impact because it reaches fewer people.
Still, I would argue that it’s not just the media, it’s also the message.
Literary types have long differentiated between two styles of satire, each named after its Roman founder. There’s Horatian satire, which is meant to be soft and sympathetic. It defuses and uses humor to address our shared follies. Then there’s Juvenalian satire, which is biting and sarcastic. It doesn’t assume that its targets are foolish, but it assumes they’re evil, and the result of this satire is not only laughter but outrage.
Swift was deft enough to leverage both of these schools in his writing. “A Modest Proposal” is harsh and Juvenalian, and Gulliver’s Travels is Horatian, though elements of both styles exist in both works. In The Conduct of the Allies, Swift declares the universal but dangerous desire for global prestige as folly (Horatian) while viciously skewering the political figures who exacerbated the problem (Juvenalian). Swift’s success wasn’t just a product of eighteenth-century London’s media ecosystem: he is an incredible writer who knows what he’s doing.
Both forms of satire are in the Bible, too. The easygoing Horatian satire is what Jesus uses to talk about our hypocritical spirit of judgment. “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye?” It’s a compelling mental image. Nobody is explicitly singled out; the shame is diffused throughout our universal life experience. Instead of being rejected, we’re all asked to recognize our own inner hypocrisy and engage in a bit of humble self-reflection. There’s not a lot of bite in this teaching, and it’s easy to ignore, but spend even a little time with it, and you’ll start to squirm in self-reflection.
The prophet Elijah has, perhaps, the most devastating example of Juvenalian satire in the Bible, mocking the prophets of Ba’al as they called for their God to show up and prove his existence. Despite the pagan prophets’ ecstatic shouting, self-flagellation, and earnest prayers, it wasn’t working. Their god wasn’t appearing no matter how hard they called for him, and Elijah took an almost perverse pleasure in rubbing it in. “Shout louder,” says Elijah. “Maybe Ba’al is asleep. Maybe he’s distracted in deep thought or away on a vacation. Maybe he’s on the toilet!” The paragraph ends with this conclusion: “There was no voice. No one answered; no one paid attention.” It’s as biting a satire of pagan religion as you’ll read anywhere.
But what’s remarkable about Elijah’s Juvenalian attack is that, like so many other attempts at satire, it didn’t accomplish its goal. Even though Israel’s God shows up and proves himself, and the prophets of Ba’al are put to death, Israel’s awful king responds to Elijah’s challenge by doubling down on Ba’al worship. There is no political change — in fact, there’s only change in the opposite direction. The king drives Elijah into hiding, and the prophet of God is so distraught at his perceived failure that he collapses to the ground in despair. Overwhelmed, depressed, and exhausted, he tells God he doesn’t want to be a prophet anymore and asks for permission to die. By this metric, of course, Jonathan Swift is the better satirist than this Old Testament man of God.
If I had to put a finger on the great limit of satire, it might be this: satire traffics in shame, and shame is one of the least effective ways to inspire a change.
Why do people change? What inspires people to a new way of thinking and behaving? It’s not rational thinking, and it’s not common sense. The great biblical insight, and the anthropology of the church ancient and modern, is that human beings are driven by their affections. “What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.” Human beings are attracted to love like a moth to a flame, and very rarely do we find satire overflowing from a place of love. Does modern satire cultivate any sort of intrinsically good affection in the heart of its hearer? Sympathetic souls are encouraged to derision and contempt. The targets of satire are driven to defensiveness and retaliation. It’s the law, condemnation and judgment wrapped in a veneer of smiles. Modern satire inspires fight and flight with very little hope of anyone on the receiving end taking it seriously, which is likely why it has proven so ineffective in its hopes for transformation. There has to be something more effective at social, political, or religious change than shame. “I hope my enemies see my joke and wither as worms unto a state of repentance in awe of my snappy wit and moral indignity” is not an effective strategy for social progress. (Neither, FYI, is sharing online video clips from the people who think this way.)
That’s not to say that satire is wholly useless. There’s a reason why the best headlines from The Onion start with phrases like “area man” and “local woman,” and why they get space in our regular Another Week Ends column. What follows is usually a word of humor that is universal in scope, true to human experience, and gentle in its ribbing. “Man Thinking About Just Packing Up And Making Exact Same Mistakes Someplace Far Away” hits on the universal temptation for what AA calls “the geographic cure.” “New Nike Running App Tells You What You’re Really Running From” (see below) has insights about human psychology that apply well beyond the realm of Fitbit athletes. There are elements of love and commiseration in that satire, where the writer and the target share in their mutual folly. Just because it isn’t being done doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but inspiring someone to helpful self-reflection is a different expectation than hoping that biting humor will change the world.
It was this realization that modern satirists weren’t making change but cementing division that soured me on the lot of it. That’s when I stopped tuning in to the famed talking heads of Comedy Central. As much as I appreciate a good jab at my ideological enemies, I don’t see how the ills of our age can be solved with the strategies of Horace or Juvenal. If you’re excellent at the genre, you might end a war. Perhaps, if you are fully committed to loving your enemies, you can get away with some knowing laughs. But as long as the human heart is driven toward love, there will be limits to what satire can accomplish.
