[LINK] "I Wear A Red Dog"

[rfmcdonald]

John Moyer writes about satire, generally and in the context of the Charlie Hebdo atrocity. Satire's not nice, and that's the point.

Satire is a hunting wolf that seeks prey. Satire demands a sling and a shot and finds only pleasure in the bloody thunk when it hits the target. Yet in all that there is a point, a meaning behind the lurid absurdities of Mad magazine and the slashing, daring art nouveau of Simplicissimus. When I was a child (and oh, how youth was wasted on me!), nothing drew a greater laugh than the firing of the chicken cannon at the end of The Royal Canadian Air Farce. The idea of the segment was ludicrous; Don Ferguson, dressed up in snappy Canadian Forces greens as Colonel Stacey, fired an air cannon filled with crap of all sorts at pictures of politicians, celebrities, and anyone else deserving a rubber chicken to the face. This was Canada in the 90s; there was no shortage of targets. But only now, much older than I was, do I understand the courage it took to choose, not a target, but a person, and to mock them for a reason. Unstated but always present was the idea of the wagging finger of the CBC-watching proletariat as we waged our vengeance upon those untouchable politicians who wronged us. It was not us that was being blasted with baked beans, it’s you, Jean Chrétien, and you, Lucien Bouchard, and so on, as the laughter sounded. Equally absurd, though, would have been the idea that you could not do that, and that the very image of the politicians or the clergy were somehow untouchable. The chicken cannon showed me true democracy, where any face can be pie-d.


Laughter means so much in the world and to the world because laughter is the greatest power of the powerless. We are all just parts of a giant machine beyond our comprehension, just bricks in one giant wall, but the comedian is the one that comes and spray paints a penis on us, or tosses a wrench in the gears. “Hey,” they yell gleefully, a toothy smile on their gaunt faces, “what are you doing? Isn’t that ridiculous?” Every day, we’re ground down by machines bigger than us, and every day we’re reminded just how small we really are. But we are never too small to laugh, and there is nothing too big that cannot be made small by our mockery. Even when the jabbing finger of humour is thrust straight in our own faces we can laugh at ourselves, for we are ridiculous, aren’t we? For if we are, then so too the machine we’re a part of (this is where the madness comes in). And what’s it even making, anyways?

But the satirist must always be hungry; they must have eyes bigger than their stomach and only a razor-sharp tongue to whittle the world down to manageable chunks. And very little likes being mocked. I know well the stories, of the hundreds (thousands!) of artists who, with a simple image or word now incomprehensible to us, lead to the fury of the belittled (for that is what satire does; the presumptions of grandeur are torn down until even the Emperor knows he too is just another brick in the wall) and the punishment of the satirist (presumably for telling the truth). Lese majeste, Majestätsbeleidigung, blasphemy; it’s all the same reaction to that which thinks itself great being told “No, actually, you aren’t”.