Why So Serious?

Because it's getting harder and harder to find anything to satirize.

Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash

Satire, as defined by Oxford Languages, is “…the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.”

In the current environment, one is hard-pressed to make things up that aren’t already true today or will be true tomorrow.

If you point out how stupid someone is, no matter how far-fetched your invention, it won’t come close to describing a person who gets exponentially more stupid with each passing day.

A satirist just can’t keep up.

John Waters, an American filmmaker, actor, writer, and artist, once expressed a desire to see the headlines in the morning paper turned into a television movie by the evening.

That’s what we’re faced with.

The dizzying heights to which our population and leaders have raised incompetence, insanity, vitriol, and stupidity leave very little room for satire.

It’s time for satirists to rebrand as clairvoyants, prophets, or visionaries.

Even people who wrote about serious subjects, as recently as five years ago, couldn’t imagine the depths to which we would sink, and the accelerating pace of the destruction we’re now witnessing.

It has gotten to the point where, no sooner are the words out of our mouths, the horrors we are speaking of, and the people we are commenting on make our statements a thing of the past.

There is no longer a need for constant reports on how bad things are, you need only think of the worst possible outcome, no matter how unpleasant, and it will be our reality in a few days or a few hours at the current rate.

We could reduce most of the reporting to a simple phrase, this person did something horrible today and will do something more horrible tomorrow. You can fill in any name you like.

We are dealing with, colloquially speaking, a bag of dicks.

The answer to all the questions that are posed about human rights abuses, environmental destruction, poverty, homelessness, hunger, civil unrest, disabled people, out of control pandemics, and every other issue of concern is, there’s nothing you can do.

Can climate change be fixed?
No.

Will we revolt against the Trump administration?
No.

Will we start caring about one another?
No.

Will there be a great awakening?
No.

If we’re not awake now, what could make us think that’s going to change?

The pathetic and futile efforts that are being made can be summed up by this year’s earth day celebration, whose theme this year is, “OUR POWER, OUR PLANET, calling for everyone to unite around renewable energy so we can triple clean electricity by 2030.”

Another example of an agenda that can’t be satirized.

Those poor saps actually believe there’s going to be a 2030.

You could take the entirety of the Earth Day website, put it in The Onion, and no one would be the wiser. It would be solely dependent on the platform where it is presented.

It’s kind of like psychopaths, if you put them in society they’re villains, if you put them in a war they’re heroes

Hopefully this will not be the death knell for satire because I think we need it.

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