this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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El Chisme
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Satire does not work. It just reinforces the thing it's satirising because it is literally the content that its fans want to see.
It sells, because people on one side are entertained by the satire and the people on the other side get the exact content they want reinforcing their beliefs anyway.
I am anti-satire.
Interestingly the hogs in the UK hate this. Daily Mail comments section can be summed up with "This sets women back decades, it's like we're in the 60s/70s again".
the way I see it, the problem with satire is that good satire straddles a very very thin line: if you're too subtle, the satirical aspect is lost on the target audience that you're making fun of, but if you're not subtle enough, it's no longer identifiable as a plausible representation of the thing in question, and then it becomes pointless
but see almost anything but outright clownish representation ends up as too subtle unless something else about the work makes it so inapproachable that the only people who bother to consume it are able to pick up on it.
what I find lame about this "satire", as someone who has jokes, is that it is obviously banking heavy on the controversy and titillation of the audience that enjoys overt misogynistic expression anyway. it's lazily doing the thing while claiming it is against the thing. that's not clever. might as well blast the N-word to get everyone's immediate attention and then expect them to recognize the subtext of one's far-less-obvious body of work in anti-racism and begin applauding.
good satire makes the thing it satirized unpalatable to the people it lampoons with shame. it scorns them such that they would not want it shared or seen.
that's a very good point, but then I think it begs the question: shameful to whom?
I say that because I think Starship Troopers (the discourse, I know) for example is great satire, but a fascist wouldn't be ashamed of liking it unironically among other fascists who also don't get that they're being made fun of
in the case of this album cover, is it successful satire if horny guys who sexualize women look at it and share it with other horny guys who do the same thing? she's an attractive woman in a very sexual scenario, so it would absolutely be very palatable to this audience
I'm not really arguing any points, just thinking out loud here because I think that's legit an interesting debate and I don't really have a solid take on it
I think it's hard to find satire in commercial products, because it needs to be sold to make back it's investment... so it veers into parody and entertainment, because those are more pleasant to experience.
I respect verhoeven's politics, and I have no doubt he set out to make a movie that would revolt anyone with a critical eye. even as a dumbass teenager I felt upset by Starship Troopers' for reasons I couldn't articulate. and, at the time, I felt like I must be weird, because while it revolted me but made my chuddy friends very excited and happy. so, unfortunately for art, but fortunately for the studios, the cinema-attending masses are incurious and uncritical in the US. that's the needle verhoeven threaded, erring on the side of careerism. no shade, we all gotta eat.
I think good satire, as I define it, is something fringe and often dismissed as preachy or too "dark" for the general public... because the public perhaps has limited interest in transgressive art/expression except in times of crisis.
maybe something that complicates our experience is that so much of the creative expressions we are invited to engage in the US are explicitly commercial, rather than actual public art.
so when we comb the landscape of our culture, looking for something authentic and truly revealing of our social problems, we are only ever searching through the garbage can of ideology. we think of entertainment products by default, instead of preachy street graffiti or other cracks in the facade where subversive thoughts make their home.
I have never seen good satire.
Shrek?
See, I haven't seen that since I was a kid and have no clue what it is supposed to be satirizing.
It was a prank bro
True, but then do you really have an audience, in the first place? Does satire even need to have an audience? Does a satirical product need to be a product in and of itself?
Let's imagine a piece of satire, I dunno, let's say, a fake poster for an Azov battalion documentary that's full of nazi symbols. Make it really outlandish so that nobody could take it seriously. Is that good satire?
But what if you actually make a satirical mockumentary about Azov that's outrageously nazi, to an absurd degree. Well then, you might just end up being liked by the nazis who are also fans of Azov, so did you really do satire, or did you just do a nazi film?
Like I said in the other comment, I'm just spitballing here, trying to figure this out as I go along, because I'm interested in the debate lol
I mean, depends on the portrayal. outrageously Nazi to an absurd degree may be satire but absurdity by itself is not in itself necessary satirical. When I said clownish I wasn't necessarily meaning merely outlandish either but more so the satirical work almost needs to portray the subject of its ridicule in a way a clown portrays themself. Not necessarily just outlandish but with universally understood cultural references that indicate intentional stupidity.
If someone does stupid stuff dressed normally, we may assume mistakes, incompetence etc. If they do the same dress as a clown, there tends to be an assumption of intent due to the clown dress being a thematic explanation. From my understanding, the boys moved to this type of storytelling in season 4 and it made a bunch of people realize it was making fun of them.
There is also the route of outright statements after every bit where you explain you are portraying something you ridicule.
In essence, I think if your concern is a group you're portraying needs to be ridiculed in a way where they don't embrace it via your work you need something along the lines of Garth Marenghi's philosophy.
And in order to do that, they ended up making the show absolute hot garbage for everyone. Now the people being satirized will not watch it, and the people laughing at the people being satirized don't want to watch it anymore.
I think the point is that satire is incredibly hard to pull off while telling a compelling story, and the more compelling it is, the more likely it's just going to be a cultural artifact through which a group of people can laugh at another group. Maybe the point of satire is catharsis, rather than changing minds.
Oh, I fully believe the point of satire is catharsis. I was more playing with the idea presented here:
If that is a requirement for good satire, you're likely not seeing it outside of clownish representations as just about anything short will likely have support from the group in question. i.e. Starship Troopers as you mentioned or the earlier seasons of The Boys.
I do think you can do a form of clownish representation that is compelling as well narratively, but you likely have to start from that point as well as have an extremely strong pen.
Satire requires textual clarity. Like it can't just be "bad thing that's silly in some way, extra silly edition" it has to be self-defeating and ideally include its own refutation in explicit terms. It's like how "I'm doing bad thing, but and here's the twist, I disagree with bad thing, huh? huh? pretty clever right?" is generally a bad format outside of in-group contexts where stilted presentation and an established reputation ensure that it comes across as mockery instead of just doing the bad thing but in a funny voice.
And even then satire isn't a converting argument, it's not something you win people over with, it's entertainment for people who agree with it. Its use as propaganda is more in reinforcing a position rather than spreading it, it's a "point and laugh at the bad thing" at its shallowest or an exploration of why bad thing is bad at its deepest.