Satiristas

by Paul Provenza

  I was a latecomer to it, but around ’ninety-seven, I discovered the Internet. I realized you could do things like cut and paste Associated Press stories but change one word and make it absurd. It took me back to my college years on the Harvard Lampoon, where the most fun of everything we did were these dead-on parodies of the Harvard Crimson, the “legitimate” campus newspaper. On a day they weren’t publishing, we’d publish a really absurd look-alike edition—with real mature stuff, like “Motherfucker Crimson Publishes Dirtiest Headline Ever.”

  For comedians or satirists there’s something irresistible about making up news. In an early newspaper job, Mark Twain used to slug in fake headlines. It’s a great target; it’s a repository of people who take themselves very seriously—not only people in the news but newspapers themselves.

  So I started cutting and pasting articles and sending them to friends, until someone said, “Instead of sending out articles, just have your own Web site.” So I started The Borowitz Report. It was just a step-saving, lazy-man move on my part; I didn’t predict that anyone besides my thirty or forty friends would be interested in it—but I now have about half a million daily subscribers.

  It’s free, because I believe if you can’t charge for Mapquest, the most useful thing in the world, you really can’t charge for a satirical news site, but satire’s big business now. There’ve been waves in the past where satire exploded, like the early seventies Nixon years—times not dissimilar from the times we’re in now, actually, with even some of the same characters: Donald Rumsfeld is one colossus that strides both eras; Dick Cheney’s another. The Nixon era gave birth to National Lampoon, which came out of Harvard Lampoon, and from that came Saturday Night Live, and satire became big business.

  Around the late nineties, Jon Stewart took over the The Daily Show, and his presence and the topical, political focus he brought to it took it through the roof. That spawned Lewis Black, who’d been around but really broke through there, and to Stephen Colbert and The Colbert Report.

  The Onion cooked along in Madison, Wisconsin, with nothing happening for years besides making some people in Madison laugh, but they went online and suddenly were getting fan mail from around the world. That spawned their books, The Onion Radio News—and now The Onion’s become a “brand.”

  So the Bush years have been as kind to satire as the Nixon years were. It gave us what the Pentagon calls a “target-rich environment.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: So much news satire often ends up actually having been prescient.

  ANDY BOROWITZ: I say it’s not that we’re doing fake news, we’re just early. Sometimes it’s shocking when that happens. But one reason the craziest fake headlines actually come to pass is because for any satire to work you have to write true to character—much like writing a sitcom: for nine years of Seinfeld,

  Kramer always sounded like Kramer, Jerry sounded like Jerry, et cetera. The same’s true writing satire with “characters” in the news—if you’re true to character, odds are that some things you write will come true.

  People say, “That’s really funny, but there’s an element of truth to this.”

  Well, no shit. Maybe that’s why you thought it was funny.

  The truth can be hilarious. The funniest fake news story may be a press conference where somebody just says exactly what’s on their mind instead of couching anything.

  PAUL PROVENZA: The Borowitz Report, The Onion, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report are also about the way we get our news as much as about news itself.

  ANDY BOROWITZ: Along with the president, Congress, and all the traditional targets of authority, media have risen to the level of an appropriate target this time around. Slipshod, opinionated reporting, bias—especially on cable news—have become worthy of ridicule, sometimes more so than the news they report.

  But we also have to be careful. Saturday Night Live did some very funny things during the 2008 election, but they also injected themselves into it in a partisan and not terribly funny way by basically just saying, “We like Hillary Clinton.” You have to hand in your satire membership card when you do that.

  People get accustomed to me taking whacks at Republicans, then, when I go after something stupid Democrats do, Democratic readers come out of the woodwork saying I’ve been a “traitor to the cause.” I don’t know why they ever assumed I signed onto “the cause” my only agenda is to express my view of things. I’m not an expert, so that’s all I’ve got. I’ll make fun of either side that’s being ridiculous enough that I see comedy in it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you think we make any difference?

  ANDY BOROWITZ: It’s that cliché of turning around a supertanker: it’s such a huge undertaking, it takes forever. This is a big country with some awfully powerful people in charge of it. I’d like to think we bloggers can undermine the system, but it’s going to take a lot more blogs to do it.

  But having said that, you never know where revolutions are going to start from, you know? It was dockworkers in Poland who ultimately led to the total collapse of the Soviet Union. Maybe a really good joke on The Colbert Report will start some kind of a cascade, and we’ll be able to trace it all back to one great punch line. But when I, or Jon Stewart and his writers, or anyone else sits down to do what we do, if we have any agenda or sense of self-importance, we’re fucked. Because the only time anything really good happens is when you’re not thinking about it too much. It’s the people who always swing for the fences that usually wind up hitting foul balls. So, we’ll just try, and see what will be.

  It’s gratifying to get e-mails like, “I’m Right-wing and vote Republican every election, but I still think you’re funny.” You can actually communicate to people on the other side of the aisle, if they’re laughing, but they’ll tune out to preaching. It wasn’t surprising when Obama said he never heard any of those things Reverend Wright said in church; he was probably asleep half the time. If you can make people laugh, you’ve gotten them in a visceral way. Even if they don’t realize why, you’ve hit the bull’s-eye.

  I’ve said common-sense things about the war on terror that even Republicans find funny. Like how a “war on terror” is highly ambitious—we’ve declared war on a human emotion. If this works out, will we go after shyness? Maybe a “War on Malaise”?

  PAUL PROVENZA: Is it enough to have someone laugh? Shouldn’t we want to change their mind?

  ANDY BOROWITZ: You’re never going to reach some people. Dick Cheney was never going to pick up The Onion and think, “My God, I’m a horrible human being.” But when our government comes up with a really bad idea—which it’s been so great at, I think they have a Department of Bad Ideas—sometimes the cumulative effect of ridicule makes it hard to continue with certain things.

  Katrina was an example where we certainly couldn’t do anything about it, but we could point out horrible mistakes being made. Like how the people we needed to help us were all in Iraq—we have a National Guard, but they were busy. The Onion did a great piece where the National Guard gave residents of New Orleans emergency information over the phone from Baghdad. That needed pointing out.

  That’s all satirists can really do to help. We should be the annoying people who always point out how other people are screwing up. We’re not part of the solution; that’s not part of our job description. We don’t pretend that we can fix things, but we can point out and explain how other people are fucking up. We do that better than anybody.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Characterizing the Katrina shambles as mismanagement or incompetence may be part of the bigger problem: what if the shameful response in New Orleans and Mississippi is exactly how some powerful people wanted it to play out? Racial concentrations are permanently altered; gerrymandering and redistricting taking place as a result. As the brilliant comedian Matt Kirshen put it, “They should rename it like a laundry detergent: ‘New Improved Orleans Ultra…Now whiter than ever!’”

  A hugely profitable corporate agenda’s fallen perfectly into place, with massive land grabs
and private entities profiting from it in lieu of government addressing it in any meaningful way. What if, opportunistically, it went exactly according to a bigger-picture plan?

  Now this is not some nut conspiracy theory, of which I am always skeptical. The commissions and agencies officially charged with rebuilding are all comprised of real estate moguls, hoteliers, multinational developers, construction companies…It’s a variant of the military-industrial complex: the “tragedy-condominium-resort complex.”

  ANDY BOROWITZ: Yeah, the “Army Corps of Realtors” came to the rescue.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Well, by satirizing the response to Katrina as some failure or mismanagement, aren’t we just reinforcing the narrative the media prefer us to have, rather than seeking other possible narratives? Aren’t we just giving further traction to that obvious narrative? If so, then we’re part of the distraction from meaningful analysis and criticism.

  ANDY BOROWITZ: In other words, we’re unwittingly serving “the man” by making fun of the narrative they want us to make fun of, so we’re just hapless tools in some bigger picture?

  PAUL PROVENZA: I wonder.

  ANDY BOROWITZ: Hmm…Well…I just want to kill myself now. Thanks.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Welcome to my existential nightmare.

  ANDY BOROWITZ: You know what? I don’t totally buy that.

  Both can be true. People say Bush couldn’t be both an evil genius and an idiot—but I think you can have an evil agenda and still be incompetent. There’ve been some obvious nefarious agendas, but there’s also no denying that it’s been a pretty incompetent group of people running the show. Even if you had the most sinister objectives for Iraq, which I’m sure a lot of people did—blood for oil, enriching Halliburton, whatever—you still wouldn’t have constructed the war they did. If you want to steal their oil, you don’t want to get into the situation where insurgents are blowing up pipelines every two days.

  PAUL PROVENZA: But huge corporations are paid handsomely to protect and rebuild those pipelines. The more “insurgency” the more private security and reconstruction firms hired, the longer Blackwater’s contracts, the more KBR feeds and services them, the more no-bid, cost-plus, no-oversight contracts are handed out.

  ANDY BOROWITZ: That’s certainly true, too. Even chaos does work for them up to a point…Boy, you have an answer for everything, don’t you?

  PAUL PROVENZA: Sadly, no. Just questions and some jokes.

  ANDY BOROWITZ: The problem is that you reach a point, especially with Iraq, where it gets so dark that even my audience, which has a taste for that sort of thing, doesn’t want to hear it anymore. There’s a tipping point where the sad truth overwhelms how funny it can be.

  There’ve been moments in my life where I’ve felt democracy has broken down and I feel we are powerless. The Supreme Court decision during the 2000 election was truly dispiriting. Another moment, weirdly enough, was the O. J. Simpson verdict: a jury was told, “Ignore the facts, nullify everything, vote this way.” That was another case where something we—or some of us—believed in, the justice system, seemed to break down. I’m a little bit less sanguine about it now.

  PAUL PROVENZA: You’re also white and privileged.

  ANDY BOROWITZ: So the system generally works for people like me, true. But Iraq is another instance; everyone knew Bush wanted to invade Iraq and it seemed no one could do anything to stop it. Most of us knew it was a terrible idea and it felt like a runaway train. I suppose a lot of Americans put up with Iraq, thinking, “Oh, well. Let’s just hope this works out.” But the last straw, and another sign that perhaps we are powerless, was Katrina.

  Domestically, there are things we always took for granted our government is capable of doing. You get the feeling that even Nixon—a crook, a lunatic, and who knows what else—would’ve at least gotten enough sandbags to New Orleans. There’s a sense now of total incompetence on the part of the government, and that it’s not really serving us, the people.

  This is not a Republican/Democrat thing at all, but it does seem like large corporations are in the driver’s seat, dictating a lot of what our government does. And they control the media.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Remember the good old days when it was just the Jews controlling the media?

  ANDY BOROWITZ: Yeah, can we go back to that?

  TODD HANSON

  FROM HUMBLE ORIGINS as a weekly free student paper in Madison, Wisconsin, The Onion has ridden the rise of the Internet to become one of the nation’s preeminent satirical voices. For evidence, look no further than its lauded 9/11 issue, which was perhaps the first and still most incisive use of humor to understand the massive psychological blow of those attacks. Todd Hanson has been a writer for the paper since its earliest days, penning many of its most memorable stories. Here, he discusses how The Onion’s humor helped us cope after 9/11, and how humor helps him survive and make it—barely—from day to day.

  TODD HANSON: I’m no businessman, and I’m certainly no expert in these matters, but I can tell you this for a fact: the only reason that The Onion is successful is because it is a voice that is outside of all those normal restrictions that apply to other comedy outlets. That is the reason it’s different, and if it ever stopped being different, that would be a terrible mistake, because that is called killing the golden goose. The point is, if you want more eggs, you don’t want to serve that goose for dinner. Then again, what do I care? I’m not making any money off it anyway.

  But as far as satire in general, I’m not an expert. I don’t even know the precise literary definition of the word, but here’s what it means to me: it’s not just that you ridicule things that are deserving of ridicule. It’s broader than that.

  I respond to the late work of Mark Twain, because he would be satirical and dark in his comedy. Early on, he would ridicule a specific institution or a specific action of the U.S military or a specific thing about religion, but eventually, in his later years, he was ridiculing the entirety of the human condition. The same thing happened with Jonathan Swift’s four books of Gulliver’s Travels. He started out with a narrower scope of what he was satirizing, specific local things about current and recent political history in England, then he expanded more to talk about intellectuals in general, but by the time he got to the part at the end about the Houyhnhnms, which literary people always talk about as “Oh, he went too far! At that point, it was just misanthropy. It’s the least effective part of his book.” Well, that’s my favorite part of the book, because in that part he’s just ridiculing everything about humanity. The way I look at it, that’s sort of the thesis behind satire in general, which is this: the human condition is inherently flawed, to the point that it is deserving of ridicule. No matter what you’re talking about, if it involves the human condition, there’s something in there that deserves to be ridiculed.

  Some people would call that fatalistic, nihilistic, horribly negative, and maybe it is. I don’t know, but there’s got to be some sort of idealism behind that, saying, “Well, things should be better than they are, or you wouldn’t be criticizing it.” I’m a sad, miserable person. Like, it’s kind of a miracle that I’m not crying right now. If there weren’t some way of finding an outlet for these terribly bleak thoughts about the nature of this earth and our place in it, I don’t know what I would do. For me, it’s a survival mechanism.

  There is a letter from Jonathan Swift’s Letters to Alexander Pope from 1725, and he says, “The chief end I propose to myself of all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it.” In other words, rather than to entertain people with comedy, I’d rather point out things that make me angry, and in so doing, make them angry. That’s kind of the idea of satire: to vex the world.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Simply to vex it, not to improve it?

  TODD HANSON: I don’t think The Onion’s going to change the world. I don’t think it’s going to have any positive social effect on anybody.

  PAUL PROVENZA: None?

  TODD HANSON: I don’t know, maybe it does. I remember
one of the coolest things that ever happened to me was I got to meet one of my comedy heroes. It was Jim Abrams, one of the three guys who had written and directed Airplane! I met him at the Aspen Comedy Festival. He waved, came over, sat next to me for a little bit, and said, “I wanted to thank you guys.”

  He’d had a terrible battle with cancer—was, in fact, dying of cancer—but he had come through it. But he said while he was in the hospital dying of cancer, someone brought in The Onion, and it had the story about “Area Man Dies Following Long Cowardly Battle with Cancer.” Every story like that is always “His Long Brave Battle with Cancer,” so we had switched it to his “cowardly” battle with cancer, and it was all about how he showed no dignity whatsoever during the process of dying and he begged God to take his relatives and loved ones instead of him, like, “Why couldn’t my wife have gotten it instead of me?”

  Abrams said that that story made him laugh for the first time in weeks, that he loved it and that it gave him the courage to go on. He was saying all these things that are just blowing my mind. So that was very powerful. And, thing is, that is exactly the kind of story we would run and we’d get lots and lots of e-mails from people, saying, “This is inappropriate. This is not something to make light of. You cannot make light of this.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: Like the 9/11 issue?

  TODD HANSON: Yeah, every single thing in there was all about 9/11; we never expected it to be that way, it just came out as we were trying to think about what we were going to do.