Dear Ellen,May 4 is World Laughter Day, an invention of Madan Kataria, an Indian doctor and yoga practioner who has founded an international network of laughter clubs. These clubs promote the idea that laughter is good medicine -- that people laughing together can lead to international peace. At the club meetings, people sit around in a circle repeating HA-HA-HA and HO-HO-HO until everyone is doubled over with laughter. Laughter, it seems, is more infectious than the SARS virus.
Now I'm all for laughing, but, let's face it, when most of us laugh we are laughing AT something or AT someone (even if it's ourselves). Or as F.H. Buckley says in "The Morality of Laughter," with laughter there is always a butt: Laughter takes sides. "Through laughter, the butt is made to feel inferior, and those who laugh reveal their sense of superiority over him,'' writes Buckley. In other words, laughter decidedly has a point of view. When that butt is a weak target, the laughter is cruel (as the proverbial skinny, nerdy outcast in elementary school quickly discovers), but when it is a powerful target, the laughter can be revolutionary.
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In literature that process is called satire: a work that holds up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn. Satire is written to right a wrong, and it should flourish in times when folly reigns. So why is there so little of it around these days? Sure, there's the Onion and South Park ("Blame Canada" is one of the most bitingly satirical songs I've ever heard), but where are the Will Rogerses poking fun at the powerful, the Mark Twains ridiculing the hypocritical and the Jonathan Swifts shaming the self-absorbed rich?
The song writer Tom "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" Lehrer said that irony died when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Peace Prize. Has this country gotten so dead serious that all we can do is repeat HA-HA-HA and HO-HO-HO and hope for the best?
Hi Margo,Irony is dead? Hardly. The reason it's so scant on the bookshelf is because parody is so difficult to sustain at book-length. The rapier wits are better suited to TV, a la David Letterman, "Saturday Night Live," "The Simpsons," "South Park." And their proliferation speaks to how the audience for an ironic take on the world has grown: As a card-carrying subscriber to
MAD Magazine in my early life, I'm primed for Monty Python, the best British import since the Beatles. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, logic taken to its illogical extreme is no vice.
As for the printed page, I wonder if it's too subtle and complex a vehicle to compete. Sure, writers like Christopher Buckley prove that there's no shortage of ways to illuminate the flaws in social institutions and ourselves. But it's tricky business. Just ask Salman Rushdie, who mocked an entire religion and nearly got himself killed in the process. Rushdie took enough grief from writing "The Satanic Verses" to obscure the literary shortcomings of a story that had a greasy, fat, pork-eating Muslim at its center. My primary objection concerned matters of taste. Just as irony is the toughest thing to teach, satire is the toughest thing to write.
The form of satire that seems most ubiquitous among contemporary American writers is a version that pokes rather than pummels -- the kinder and gentler version of satire, which doesn't give the same "pow" and picks more limited targets. Jane Smiley's "Moo" (bull's eye: academics) and Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" (the family) fit this description, as does one of my recent favorites, "The Lecturer's Tale," by James Hynes, a dark comedy that -- like "Moo" -- captures the politics and pettiness of professors' lives. In other words, I can't think of any satiric novel these days that's tearing the cover off the ball. Do you have any candidates? And, if not, what does this say about the state of the novel in general?
Hey Ellen,I think you hit it right on the head: American writers timidly throw stones at the smaller gods of academia, political graft, and patriarchal tyranny (and in the case of Carl Hiaasen's wacky tales, land-raping developers and religious fanatics), but they leave the behemoth Zeus unscathed. A common lament about American literature is that it lacks the political and social scope of other traditions. No wonder. Our writers routinely ignore the obvious elephant in the room: that America, from the land grab of Texas and California, from Mexico to the imperial policies of "Manifest Destiny," has long been an imperial power. We just hate thinking of ourselves in those terms (prefering the words liberator or missionary), and so our novels seldom reflect the broader context within which we operate. "The greating thing about the American empire is that so many Americans disbelieve in its existence," Niall Ferguson, author of "Empire," said this week at the Council on Foreign Relations.
But that means that the Great Satirical American Novel won't be written -- or read -- any time soon. Satire depends on an agreement of how things need to change. Readers need to be in on the joke -- it's the others that don't get it. The trouble is, we don't agree in America on what should change. As the 2000 elections showed, we are deeply divided. Satire flourished in Eastern Europe under the yoke of governments that were pretty easy to satirize -- think of Milan Kundera's poison pen -- but satire falls flat in a country that can create a Department of Homeland Security and not crack a smile.
