Let’s see the reactions to this, with the slipper on the other foot:
*** Update ***
Reading the comments here, it appears the nation at large is filled to the brim with humor critics. My question- how the fuck did Carlos Mencia get a job with all you people and your perfect interpretations of what is and what is not funny? What? You mean people may have differing ideas of what is and what is not funny? You mean some people may not get jokes! OH NOES!
Also, I will point out that there is NOTHING more unfunny than researching humor. I have done it. I will never do it again.
cminus
Nope, still neither offensive nor funny.
dan robinson
I love’s me some Horsey.
liberal
Difference is that some of the stuff pictured there is true—like the “bomb Iran” part. (Constitution part is true, too, though whether it’s fair is another matter, given Obama’s vote on FISA.)
mantis
If only there was some caption so we could understand! So dumb we all are (well, not me, but all those other people who don’t have my sophistication, but will surely be influenced by this).
But, that one simple addition was not made, and now this cover will be plastered on car bumpers and forwarded via email to everyone in the country, and they will all vote based on it. Teh umanity!
John S.
Well, it does have context which makes a big difference.
The real question is if it’s satire when the content is essentially true.
4tehlulz
ZOMG CONTEXT
matt
Doesn’t really work, there are like 100 people who would even get the medication reference. Something more comparable with the Obama cover would be depicting McCain as a manchurian candidate Re: Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain.
John S.
And not so much as a hat tip to one of your long-time commenters who pointed this out hours ago?
For shame, John!
matt
There’s that as well.
nightjar
Since Conservatives despise Mccain probably more than we do, I doubt you’d get much outrage from them.
Svensker
Oh, the Meds refer to Cindy?! I was seeing Hillary and not getting the meds reference….heh.
This one I think is amusing because it’s exaggerated truth. Altho NRO would NEVER run it.
Incertus
Right or wrong, ageism isn’t as sensitive an issue as racism is. Same thing happened with that New Republic cover about Hillary–that one sparked a little outrage in the corners you’d expect, but what it really showed is that sexism was more acceptable than racism was.
Dennis - SGMM
Belaboring the obvious isn’t satire either.
Scott H
A piece where one must include captioning for the cognitively impaired isn’t as thumping, no.
scarshapedstar
McCain is old, he did sing the Bomb-Iran song, his wife was a pillhead, and he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Constitution, just like Cheney. And unlike the infallible New Yorker, the Natty Review didn’t actually run that cover, although if they did it would actually feature these comic caricatures that usually mark things as satire.
Aside from that, though, yes, you’re right and we should just shut up and praise the New Yorker for their wit and wisdom.
Dan
Holy shit. I am probably more offended by that. I am sure that is the intention, but still … . That is heavy-handed and good satire should never be heavy-handed.
The Moar You Know
How evenhanded of you. Can’t take a shot at the opposition without kneecapping your own guy. Wouldn’t be fair!
Grumpy Code Monkey
The difference between the two is that the National Review cover is taking McCain and Hills to task for their own idiocy (McCain singing about bombing Iran, Hills’ virtual pimping of McCain over Obama in the primary), whereas the New Yorker cover is satirizing the idiotic things other people have said about Barack and Michelle.
I think the New Yorker cover was upsetting to many people because it’s become obvious to everyone this side of a retarded wombat that the MSM has a vested interest in helping the GOP stay in power. If you’re not aware of the New Yorker’s politics, this can be seen as part of the larger ratfucking operation against Obama. God knows the illiterati at No Quarter or Red State will see this as a validation of their idiocy.
ThymeZone
Satire is supposed to illuminate the truth.
What is the truth portrayed in the TNY cartoon?
Who is the intended butt of the joke supposedly implied by the TNY cartoon? Where is that target depicted? What about the cover points to that intended target?
When a joke embarasses and insults the subject of the joke, and the subject is obviously not amused, who gets to determine whether the joke is funny? The person who told the joke, or the subject of the joke? Who is the apparent target of the “joke” on the TNY cover? For the 99% of Americans who don’t know the difference betwee the New Yorker Magazine and a New Yorker Sandwich, what tips them to the joke and frees them to laugh about it? Would they be laughing about it if they were sitting with the Obama family at the time? Or might they check to see how the Obamas are reacting?
“Senator, what is your reaction to a cartoon that depicts your wife as a gun-toting terrorist?”
“HAHAHAHA! That’s funny! Good satire! It’s all good!”
John, sometimes I am embarassed to be associated with you and your blog, and this is one of those times. And scanning the tubes for material that props up your clumsy and adolescent view of this situation isn’t making you look any better. The cover is not funny, and what you are doing is not funny.
Barack Obama is making a critical policy speech on the Iraq war right now. And you are busy looking for snark to buck up your TNY cover position.
Good for you, and thanks.
Go ahead now and flame my ass as you have always done when I have really come after you. Give it your best shot.
Grumpy Code Monkey
You know what, everyone just needs to ignore everything I say until I get caught up on sleep, which should be sometime in September.
Sirkowski
I lol’d.
mantis
Parsley, sage, rosemary and whine….zone.
John Cole
Oh, for fuck sake, man up or I will fly to Arizona and steal the rest of your prune juice and change the masthead here to the New Yorker cover.
Chris Johnson
Yeah, wait a minute. How is this the same thing in reverse when the Obama one is all bullshit and this one is all true? Way to further confuse things, guys.
johnosahon
this is funny, BUT it is not the same thing. Obama’s version were more damaging. if Obama’s cartoon were of him as a baby (too young) and michelle were shaking him (angry), i would not have been offended i could have laughed.
Obama’s version used what america is afraid of the most race and religion. ‘
NOT the same thing.
johnosahon
this is funny, BUT it is not the same thing. Obama’s version were more damaging. if Obama’s cartoon were of him as a baby (too young) and michelle were shaking him (angry), i would not have been offended i could have laughed.
Obama’s version used what america is afraid of the most race and religion. ‘
NOT the same thing.
johnosahon
this is funny, BUT it is not the same thing. Obama’s version were more damaging. if Obama’s cartoon were of him as a baby (too young, lack of experience) and michelle were shaking him (angry), i would not have been offended i could have laughed.
Obama’s version used what america is afraid of the most race and religion. ‘
NOT the same thing.
Robert Johnston
No; you can’t differentiate your candidate from the opposition on an issue on which they agree. All attacking McCain’s lack of respect for the Constitution does is make Obama supporters look like ragingly insane hypocrites, because Obama unabashedly voted to gut the Constitution and the rule of law. Making Obama’s supporters look like loony hypocrites loses votes for Obama.
It is better to admit your candidate’s faults, however bad they are, than to come off as an unprincipled hypocritical liar. If people believe you to be an unprincipled hypocritical liar, they won’t believe any of your attacks on the opposition, fair or not.
The Moar You Know
One of America’s enduring mysteries. That retarded, racist piece of shit is about as funny as AIDS, dead children, and 9/11 put together.
mantis
Oh dear, Powerline’s gotten in on the alternate covers craze (with an alley-oop from Georgetown Republicans, or something). FAIL
The Moar You Know
Which is why the Republicans have lost every election since 1968.
Keith
Or for that matter, how did Dane Cook get *multiple* movies?
mapaghimagsik
I’m not sure whether its an issue of whether the cover is funny — at least not to me. Unless I’m missing something, the National Review cover *isn’t a real cover*. The National Review already got spanked by the wingnuts once, and aren’t willing do go through it again.
So the imaginary cover somehow vindicating the real cover is a bit of a sham.
Though I agree on one point. Some people won’t feel vindicated until there’s a window sticker of Dick Cheney pissing on the constitution.
scarshapedstar
Via the Rude One:
This is kinda what we’re getting at. 404 Funny Not Found. Satire without funny is like a car without an engine.
I don’t see what’s confusing about this.
cyntax
Uh, John? From where I’m sitting the lack of nuance in Mencia’s comedy (and its baffling popularity) proves that the criticism of the NYer cover is legit: the cover is only satire to people already in the know.
Go reread A Modest Proposal, that’s good satire. The NYer column is the inside baseball of satire. And critiquing something doesn’t necessarily equate with freaking out over it (though I’m sure you’re right and quite a lot of the blogosphere is in a full on coniption and BTW, thanks for keeping up on that BS cause I sure don’t have the patience to).
Face
It’s not funny b/c there’s just no way that many pills could fit in that bottle. Totally unrealistic; ergo, terrible and ageist.
/too many f’in liberals
cyntax
Just as long as I don’t have to hear about his multiple tour-gasms…
[shudder]
Liz
I pretty much just found elements of it tacky. Yeah, it’s satire. It’s just not good satire. Good satire is funny and insightful. This is just… I’m reminded of Howard Stern. Goes for the shock and winds up with a bit of lame humor that prompts more of a weak “Heh.” than a laugh.
dnA
Carlos Mencia is not funny. Dude steals jokes like kids steal candy from bodegas.
John B
There’s a big difference between the Obama cover and the McCain ‘cover’: the McCain one is based on facts: He is old, he did sing that song, and she abused pills. The Obama one? None if it is true. So just a little difference there.
Pasota
Yeah. And the Obamas did bump fists. It is like rain on your wedding day.
Robert Johnston
The Republicans are very smart about how they lie, but, more importantly, they are a party completely devoid of policy concern, dedicated solely to ideology and corruption, so lying about policy simply doesn’t hurt their message the way it hurts Democrats’ messages.
When Republicans say “Vote for me: I’ll cut your taxes, balance the budget with magic ponies, and, oh, by the way, John Kerry is a coward and a war criminal” there is no inconsistency of message, no hypocrisy of the sorts that matters politically. There’s just lying. There are no violations of the Republican principles of enforced wingnut ideology and victory at all costs.
When Democrats say “look at McCain shred the Constitution while I vote to give George Bush dictatorial power to turn all your rights into weak privileges that exist only so long as he has a whim,” there’s a slightly bigger message problem. Democrats ostensibly care about policy, and they ostensibly care about the Constitution. These are the things they run on, and when Democrats seem not to care about either, there’s no reason for anyone who doesn’t think that Republicans are devils to vote Democratic.
Republicans have principles. They just aren’t very good principles, and they don’t include honesty. They don’t run promising principled or good government, and they don’t express any concern for policy. They run promising tax cuts and reactionary social thinking, and a strong-armed government that will impose law and order at home and abroad by any means necessary. Republicans aren’t unprincipled hypocrites; they’re just evil liars, and evil liars win a lot more votes than unprincipled hypocrites.
Brachiator
I am having a field day with all of these uninformed and contradictory idea of what satire is supposed to be:
Sweet Horace and Juvenal on a papyrus reel! I blame “Mad Magaizne” and “Saturday Night Live” (which has been neither funny nor satirical for centuries) for debasing the understanding of satire, which at times has been abusive without being funny, or being so funny that the author was thrown into prison, especially when the object of the satire was a person of power or influence.
I know its too much to ask people to read Quintilian or John Dryden, but for fuck’s sake, one of the reasons that God created Wikipedia (Satire) was to help people know that they were talking about.
“Satire is what closes on Saturday night.”
— George S. Kaufman
gil mann
Cinder Calhoun gets the final say.
cyntax
But since that song is titled “Ironic” and none of the examples in it are actually ironic then, in a meta-sense, the song is ironic. I submit the Alanis Morrisette is vastly under-rated as a deconsrtuctionist song writer.
Jeebus, Derrida scarred the hell out of me.
carsick
Come on John.
Let’s take this piece by piece,
Cheney on the wall makes sense: “…on the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I’ve been totally in agreement and support of President Bush.” [Meet the Press, 6/19/05]
McCain in a wheel chair: he will be the oldest first time president in our country’s history if elected.
Cindy with pills: documented in court
Bomb bomb Iran: documented on video
Now, the New Yorker cover,
Nuthin’. Nada based in fact except that it reinforces the misinformed views and smear campaigns of nearly 20% of the population.
I’m not outraged by the cover but the common thread of the press “innocently” reinforcing right wing talking points and innuendo seems to happen a bit too much for happenstance.
Krista
I only heard about this whole flap last night, as I’d been busy since Thursday.
I’m certainly no expert on satire. However, I think something failed when the end result is that the people who the cartoon is mocking actually will like the cartoon and will use it as further justification for their own prejudices.
Were I not posessed of a sickening fear that Obama will lose the election, precisely because there are so many people who genuinely DO think he’s a Muslim, then I could probably appreciate the cover more.
However, right now, I just cannot help but feel that this particular attempt at satire did much more harm than good.
liberal
The Moar You Know says,
Somehow, I think the $1000 I gave Obama a few months ago will have helped him out a lot more than a blog comment here will hurt him.
I’ll wager his campaign will survive this infraction.
Besides, the more we comment about FISA, the more we drive JC into a rage, probably resulting in him donating his entire net worth to the Obama campaign.
;-)
Krista
I think this is why I’m not comfortable with the New Yorker cartoon. From wiki:
I think the problem is that those beliefs have already been taken to their furthest logical conclusion, and then beyond logic into sheer crazyland, by those who actually hold those beliefs in the first place.
Colbert is good satire because he takes something that is worthy of scorn, and brings it to the point where it is ridiculous. I don’t think that the cartoon was effective because frighteningly enough, it was no more ridiculous than the beliefs that are already out there.
It’s very hard to effectively satirize the insane, and there is a lot of insane out there right now.
cyntax
Actually the majority of the critiques are circling around the very definition that you cite on Wikipedia:
Simply parroting the rightwing talking points, as the cover does, isn’t sufficient to create the sarcasm, the exaggeration, the militancy, necessary to highlight the error in thinking that Obama is a secret muslim terrorist. If you recall during the Rev Wright flap reporters could still find people who disapproved of what Obama’s preacher said and still thought he was a secret muslim.
Essentially this comes down to a disagreement about who the intended audience is; if it’s just Gen x-ers liiving in Park Slope, then fine the irony works, but since they already think that and the very definition you point to (and many of us had in mind) mentions “with the intent to bring about improvement” that really implies that good satire isn’t preaching to the choir.
Now you’re right that many of the reasons people cited weren’t exactly spot on, but what’s interesting to me is that most of the critiques were circling around the sense that this “fell flat” as satire, and looking at the definition above, that’s exactly right.
Clyde
Here’s an even better one.
http://blogs.laweekly.com/fish/
Blue Raven
Jesus on a flagpole.
The fuckwittery here has crested.
Who the fuck are you people to claim to know what is or isn’t funny to the entire world? I saw the Obama cover and laughed. Sure, you didn’t like it. I won’t deny that. But you sit here and claim you know everything there is to know about humor and how terrible the Obama cover was because you’re the experts.
Screw that shit. We’re all a bunch of malingerers and malcontents burning valuable company time by typing away at blog comments and hoping it at least sounds like we’re hard at work. None of you are experts at this. Neither am I. I know what I find funny. My sense of humor is broad enough to accommodate everything from The Three Stooges all the way through to how I discovered the pitch-black humor of Orwell at the end of my third reading of 1984 and giggled so I would not mourn the fate of the main character. From that position, I figure some of you can’t see humor without it being at the peak of a cream pie heading for someone else’s face. Kindly quit acting like that makes you wise.
Warren Terra
Y’know, if those half-bright people at the New Yorker had run a cover featuring the extreme caricatures of both candidates, or run an issue with two different covers, that’d be one thing. But they didn’t, and that’s kinda the point.
Also, as has been pointed out ad nauseum:
1) The Obama cover is perhaps more concentrated but is not more extreme than you hear from major personalities on talk radio and on nearly-respectable Fox News. It’s only satire because of the New Yorker masthead. If it was running under the National Review masthead, it would be seriously advertising a sincere, if misguided, screed about how all those tropes in the cartoon were very slight exaggerations of the truth.
2) The Horsey cartoon highlights what Yglesias likes to call actually existing truths. Only a liar or a fool could claim Obama is a Muslim, hates America, idolizes Osama, or is married to an Angela Davis clone. Not so the McCain traits bewing amplified and skewered in Horsey’s cartoon.
cyntax
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you to find wankery on a polical blog.
: )
Brachiator
Actually, I cited the full Wikipedia article, but did not point to any particular definition of satire, because that would be pointless. Not that many people have actually read any of the authors cited. I’m not sure how many people have even seen the recent (and not too bad) version of Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” with Ted Danson, which by the way was originally a satire but has now become downgraded into a little read children’s story. I don’t see anyone here, for example, getting close to John Dryden’s definition of satire:
The bottom line is that I would be much more impressed if the yokels in this thread could actually write a joke instead of getting bogged down into what they think satire is or is not.
I kinda bet that the intended audience would be people who read The New Yorker. That’s why the cartoon is on the cover of the magazine, as opposed to being put on “Mixed Martial Arts Weekly.”
Phoenix Woman
(((hug)))
D. Mason
Irony is completely lost in this thread.
HyperIon
TZ wrote (on this thread):
ok, i will (although you did not direct the remark to me) because i posted this on a previous thread, which may be dead now.
TZ wrote (on “The Final Word” thread):
TZ, this is about the stupidest thing you have ever written.
all those bush jokes we’ve been making here (which i’m pretty sure chimpy would find insulting)….not funny? and coming from you, who has been known to make cruelly humorous statements about commenters here? WTF?
i’ll tell you about funny/not funny. funny is when you laugh. not funny is when you don’t laugh. there is no universal standard of funny/not funny. thus, YMMV. duh!
the new yorker has been captioning its covers on the inside for years. the caption for this cover was in the same place it has been for all the other covers. “the politics of fear” caption is unambiguous.
YellowJournalism
I just can’t get over the fact that John might think Carlos Mencia is funny.
harlana pepper
Looks like something out of Mad Magazine.
John Cole
God no. But that was my point. You all claim to be experts on what is funny, but none of you would think Carlos Mencia is funny. I know people who don’t think Mitch Hedberg or Steven Wright were funny, when I think they are hysterical. People think different things are funny. I thought poking fun at the wingnut representations of Obama was funny.
I should probably add, there is a weird crowd of us who do think the cover is funny. The Poorman, Bradrocket at Sadly No, Roy Edroso, and I all think it is funny. Coincidentally, we spend most of our time mocking right-wingers.
D-Chance.
NBD.
But I DO find it Hillary-ous that the Liberal response to “they made fun of
our Jesus!our Obama!” is to say, “we’ll do it to their guy, too… nyeh-nyeh!”.How mature. How leadership-worthy. God, our nation is so fucked.
mantis
I should probably add, there is a weird crowd of us who do think the cover is funny. The Poorman, Bradrocket at Sadly No, Roy Edroso, and I all think it is funny. Coincidentally, we spend most of our time mocking right-wingers.
You guys are a weird crowd? You remind me of my friends (which is why I read you all daily — since I killed all my friends). Does that make me weird too? Does that mean Jebus doesn’t love me?
cyntax
Fair enough, but as you’re fond of invoking Juvenal perhaps we should give this one the scratch test: would anyone bother carving it on the side of Yankee or Shea Stadium? I doubt it.
iluvsummr
My favorite Obama joke is still the Onion’s “black guy asks nation for change.” Didn’t hear much outrage about that. Stephen Colbert also hits a home-run with the “secret muslim” bit. Haven’t heard any outrage there. Neither the New Yorker cover nor this one does anything for me. When you have to go on NPR to explain satire because the wingnuts you are making fun of are not represented in the cartoon, it missed the mark. However, as I’ve said before, the New Yorker certainly figured out the best way to sell its July 21 issue. And we now know how thin-skinned and fearful we’ve become, sadly.
w vincentz
A few things are incorrect in the National Review cover.
1) Cindy’s boobs ain’t that big.
2) Johnnie’s hands are arranged to hide his pitiful “erection”.
3) The bottle holding the pills isn’t labeled “viagra”.
4) Cheney is a whole lot uglier in real life than his image on the wall.
Obviously, this cover is flattery towards the McInsanes, while the NYer one is a spoof on the idiots that believe the falsehoods concerning the Obamas.
Just Some Fuckhead
All of them have the potential to be funny, as do all satirical magazine covers. Where the New Yorker cover fails is that it isn’t funny and it doesn’t actually skewer it’s intended target. Instead, it suggests a lot of other things about our collective attitude on race, religion and respect which we are conveniently choosing to ignore because this is steaming pile of turd was shat from the enlightened bowels of hipster libruls, s’all good ya know.
At it’s very best it is offensive for the sake of being offensive, something that only equals funny to the person being offensive. (Trust me on this, I’m a pro.) At it’s worse, it doesn’t actually hold up a mirror to those who would traffic in these sorts of slurs, rather it hijacks and gives them a new vehicle to drive.
Perhaps the next New Yorker cover can parody Joe Lieberman drinking the blood of gentile babies, hoarding piles of gold, worshipping Satan while trying to help little old Israel take over the world. On the inside cover we can caption it.. hmm, I dunno, how about “The Politics of Fear”. That will really stick it to those pesky anti-semites and enemies of Israel. Ho, it is to laugh.
scarshapedstar
All I’m hearing, again and again, is “consider the source”.
Here’s a thought experiment for you. Take the original New Yorker cover in its entirety. Now, replace “The New Yorker” with “National Review”.
It would seem like a supremely dick move, right? And would draw pretty much universal condemnation? Does anybody seriously want to claim that we’d all be defending National Review’s brilliant “satirical” portrayal of Obama as an Al-Qaeda militant? Fuck no. It would go over about as well as Mother Jones running a cover of Bush snorting coke off of a dead Abu Ghraib prisoner. It would stand as one of the worst hack jobs and self-inflicted wounds in journalism history.
And yet, if you put “The New Yorker” back at the top again, well, it came from good folks who have to be on our side because they’re liberalish, and anyone who doesn’t get the joke has New Yorker Derangement Syndrome and is basically the mirror image of Charles Johnson. All because somebody else drew it. Yeah, that makes a crapton of sense.
"Fair and Balanced" Dave
Ummm, because as bad as Mencia is, he’s still funnier than Carrot Top.
WRT to the New Yorker cover flap, Bob Somerby’s take is spot on, IMO.
El Cid
Good point on showing who does & doesn’t appreciate satire and whatnot — after all, it’s not like any liberals or Democrats or mainstream organizations complained when MoveOn.org posted a “General Don’t Betray-Us” ad in the New York Times.
Right?
scarshapedstar
Look, pal, just because Congress denounced MoveOn in the public record doesn’t mean they didn’t get the point of the satire… er, I mean, it’s completely different because well-meaning people could have been offended… that is to say… I’m sure it’s different somehow.
bago
This thread is so irony it’s starting to rust.
nightjar
I don’t know where people get that satire is supposed to be funny or unfunny. The question is whether it works or not, and to work it has to reveal something that appears to be one thing, but is really something else altogether. I guess it can be funny, but that’s not the purpose.
For some people, the unexplained illustration worked. For others it didn’t.
John Cole
You son-of-a-bitch. You tricked me into starting to read yet another rant by Somerby on the injustice done to Al Gore in 2000.
t4toby
Horsey makes me proud to live in Seattle.
Abhinav
Yeah, yeah satire is abstract and however, someone mentioned one small change to the New Yorker cover which would have made it much more closer to the apparent idea… Put the picture on a TV with a Fox news Logo, with the byline “This is HUUUGE”.
Just Some Fuckhead
Haha. Bob only does one trick so he gets it right every time.
Laertes
scarshapedstar: “And yet, if you put “The New Yorker” back at the top again, well, it came from good folks who have to be on our side because they’re liberalish, and anyone who doesn’t get the joke has New Yorker Derangement Syndrome and is basically the mirror image of Charles Johnson. All because somebody else drew it. Yeah, that makes a crapton of sense.”
Where did people get the idea that the source was irrelevant? You’re damn right there’d be a different reaction if National Review had run the cover. Because if National Review had the same goddamn cover, it’d still be a different cover. Context matters, and the speaker is part of the context.
Take Chris Rock’s act and have Michael Richards deliver it, word for word, and imagine that Richards is a good enough comic to precisely match Rock’s inflection and timing. Think he’d get the same reaction?
Context matters. Speaker is context.
scarshapedstar
Yeah, but the thing is, Chris Rock’s act isn’t exactly satire, aside from the part about “Shit, I wish they’d let me join the Ku Klux Klan!” It’s not meant to translate well.
You have a point, though. However, the fact that this cover goes from Jonathan Swift to Mallard Fillmore simply by changing the author should suggest that it’s simply not very well done. Any number of things – put it in a thought bubble coming from a cheeto-flecked warblogger, stick a Fox News logo in the bottom right hand corner, fuckin’ anything – would have made it work. As it stands, it is at best a painfully subtle inside joke destined for epic fail.
HyperIon
you mean, like inside the cover where it said “The Politics of Fear”?
Fruitbat
I don’t agree. Ever listen to someone try to describe an article they read in The Onion, or repeat something from last night’s Daily Show? Even if it’s verbatim, it’s rarely as funny/effective as encountering the original yourself. But that doesn’t say anything about the quality or success of the original.
I gotta disagree with you again. I don’t think any of those things would have increased my appreciation of the satire or the quality of the humor. But that’s completely attributable to the whole “personal take on humor” thing, and it doesn’t bother me too much. What’s funny for you is very probably quite different than what’s funny for me, and that’s perfectly okay.
I realize I’m jumping in on someone else’s argument here, but I couldn’t help myself.
HRA
Satire as I percieved it when told to write a satirical poem was to choose a subject and humorize the truth of the subject to the point of being vulgar.
I admit I am not quite taken with satire. I find it to be cruel as it is depicted in both covers.
Sometimes true events are comic. I have enjoyed the comedy of those many times. What I wonder now is it our inability to release ourselves from the seriousness of our present situation that hinders us from appreciating any political humor?
scarshapedstar
Tom The Dancing Bug agrees with me, but as a professional satirical cartoonist, he’s probably just as lacking in the humor department.