Satire, humour, tongue in cheek... some thoughts

Is that a bunch of lemons I see through a tangled text? Or are you having a laugh?

The thing most of the books and plays that I seek out and have enjoyed over the years have in common, is that they almost all fall under the category of satire, the absurd, or humour, more generally. Not all, but there is a strong element of satire in most of the books I have read, and the entertainment I have enjoyed. Why? It's fun. It feels good to have a laugh. I think it provides alternative ways of seeing the familiar.

Hard to pull off though, and I don't know, but maybe when I look back, things aren't as funny as they used to be. The assumptions upon which the humour depended have changed - a shared understanding of the conventional, and the absurd. Or my assumptions have changed. Humour, as an element of the writing (as opposed to its central premise) is something that seems to get lost these days, unless the reader's attention is specifically directed towards it.

And I'm not sure that yesterday's humour has travelled all that well through time, culture, or geography - even very obvious comedy. Humour is largely dependent on the society from which it springs, and its foibles. Nowadays the society from which it springs tends to be less local, more global. To be successful at getting a laugh, the modern comedian needs to become an observant citizen of the world, and to get a handle on mainstream assumptions in order to challenge them.  But as societies become less homogeneous, yet more interconnected, the mainstream (if such a thing continues to exist) becomes increasingly difficult to identify. For the comedian who wants to reach global audiences s/he needs to understand the nuances not only of language but also of socio-political- religious acculturation right down to the level of the multifaceted family in a cosmopolitan society - ok? Now I've probably lost you, as well as myself. Seems that being a comedian is a serious business.

Then again, are we all becoming a little too serious? These days when we read books that contain both comedy and tragedy, I wonder whether drama trumps humour. It seems to me that there is often a privileging of seriousness, even when it seems obvious that amongst all the bleakness and the underlying serious intent, a writing style is satirical. The link between humour, and what is otherwise too much for human beings to bear, is well-established. It is the reason that people in the medical professions, in the police forces, in the defence forces, in politics - and in books that deal with these subjects - have to lighten the mood with some laughter, no matter how black the humour. It might be the only thing that keeps them on this side of sanity.

Another difficulty for some writers, such as (but not exclusively) women, is that satirical humour has not historically been assumed to be their domain. Typically satire has been harshly applied at the expense of those in power, but I think it is often applied by those with an expectation of usurping and replacing the status quo (and thereby becoming the status quo). If a traditionally powerless group applies that particularly biting form of satirical humour, there seems to be some difficulty with the laugh. Is this because this type of humour has usually been applied to particular types of political concerns? War. Power struggles in the public domain. Large 'P' politics. Or is it because satire in those different hands implicitly sidelines the assumed up-and-coming?

Of course things have changed over the years for female comedians and others who had previously been the butt of jokes, rather than their conveyors. Female comedians are staking a claim in the situational comedy and in stand-up. A random (far from comprehensive) review - maybe it started with Lucille Ball. More recently, Roseanne Barr.  Miranda. Kath and Kim. Dawn French. The Ab Fab duo Saunders and Lumley. The 53 women comedians featured in the Huffington Post a couple of years back.  Even so, much of female humour tends to be self deprecating, inward, rather than outward looking. Roseanne Barr might be an exception here.

Satirical female writers seem thinner on the ground, or is it just that they are not typically recognised as such? Margaret Atwood is surely a satirist. If you're not sure, you just have to listen to her speak. Kathy Lette. Susan Maushart certainly. Playwright Caryl Churchill is, in the main, or at least straddling that and the absurdest school. I'm sure there are many more, but not so they stand out. Maybe they are not all that readily picked up for publication.

Or the humour might be hidden in books masquerading as something else. It is subversive, after all. The problem with that is that we see what we expect to see. Humour sometimes gets missed because if we don't expect it to be there, and our focus is on something else.  This can be disastrous to the intention of the text, because it can look like the sentiments expressed are either mean-spirited, or just plain weird. The difficulty is that while some vehicles of humour, such as cartoons - especially Family Guy, American Dad, The Simpsons and South Park, have a big arrow pointing to them (music, sound effects, the traditional funny role of cartoons itself) to prime us not to take them seriously, often literature is assumed to be intimate, private, hard work, and therefore, serious, unless it has a sticker on it saying 'hilarious'.

Compliments DW

If something seems a little bit over the top, I always entertain the possibility that it might have been intended. Whether it comes off or not is another thing. Humour, after all, tends to be enjoyed in social situations (even text - bits of funny articles or books are often read out and shared with friends) and social situations are diverse, and always changing. A few drinks and some laughing gas can change everything. Cold, stone sober, how much is too little? Too much? Exaggeration, excess, self-deprecation, understatement, playing opposite to the conventional wisdom are just some of the tools employed.

Getting a laugh is the province of ordinary people too.  How easy it is for the regular-person-would-be-comedian to be misunderstood. As in social media, it seems we must increasingly employ :) lol ;-) !!! to ensure that our good intentions are made clear. Their absence when irony or satire is applied always risks misinterpretation and a break down of the social relationships we work so hard to maintain.

Bottom line - as so beautifully portrayed in one of Caryl Churchill's television plays The Judge's Wife we don't always get the joke that was intended. In this teleplay, the judge deliberately becomes more and more extreme and reactionary in the hope that people will see how absurd that position is, but he simply attracts more and more people to the cause he is attempting to ridicule. They think he is what he is lampooning. And maybe, in a twist of Orwellian double-think, he was, and his wife is posthumously reinterpreting his life! It's worth reading the text if you can't track down the performance itself.