The world has gone to sh*t, there’s no way around it. Donald Trump is busy trying to bully a 16-year-old climate change activist with Asperger’s on Twitter. The U.K. is run by a man who hides inside refrigerators (literally) to evade tough questions from reporters. One Amazon is on fire, the other one is laughing all the way to the bank, covered in layers of cardboard and bubble wrap, not letting its employees take pee breaks. This is barely even the tip.
Closer home, the lovely people in power are locked in a bitter feud with past leaders who died a minimum of 35 years ago. During breaks, they put in place aggressive policies widely criticised for being unconstitutional, leading to democratic dissent, which is subsequently crushed, followed by predictable dog whistles attacking “anti-national elements” or, more recently, people’s attire. As I’m writing this, students at public universities across the country are bravely protesting the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in the face of aggression and force by the police and little to no support by the political elite. In such bleak times, humour can, for many, be a means of both relief and resistance.
The time is ripe, one feels, for creating bitter satire. And to spread it far and wide through the Internet (till it gets shut down). Except that there’s a slight hitch.
Internet satire is at a bit of a crossroads. The genre itself demands a kind of physical immediacy in the viewer or reader’s reaction. There’s a constant race to go broader in tone and comedy, to bring in elements of surrealism, to create punchlines and then reverse-engineer the set-ups for the quickest impact. The shorter the punchline, the harder the punch lands.
An issue facing the unique demographic of Internet satirists is the so-called post-truth nature of public discourse today. In true Orwellian fashion, nothing and everything is true at the same time; a thing is both true and untrue together. ‘Fake news’ means news that’s untrue, but it has also come to mean news that you claim is untrue but isn’t.
Before this current wave of absurdity intensified over the last two or three years, American satirical website The Onion did an admirable job highlighting the path of descent that modern society was on. At its best, The Onion’s work would present satirical news stories that were both believable enough to be real and unbelievable enough to be out of this world, spawning a series of pastiches and rip-offs (in India too).
Particularly outlandish
Except that news stories today, the true ones, are just as silly and unbelievable as those on The Onion. “Not The Onion” has become a common refrain, a shorthand comment on a particularly outlandish story. And it’s getting steadily more farcical. Does chow mein cause rape? Does Sanskrit cure diabetes? Did Trump personally tackle IS leader al-Baghdadi and overpower him?
Does satire really land then? It’s a creative challenge, one that is proving hard to navigate. And then there’s Poe’s Law, an old Internet law which states that satire or parody can get lost in translation without knowing the author’s intent; that a winking emoji is a must. That it can, without a clear indicator like said emoji, be misconstrued as being the very thing it’s attempting to attack, sometimes wilfully so. What is said in irony or sarcasm can just as easily be misinterpreted as sincerity, which is why a lot of publications now add tedious disclaimers or tags that say “satire” or “fake news” to clear any doubts.
All of this, however, pales in comparison to the weaponising of satire, as is happening today, to put forth toxic and dangerous ideas. Misinformation on the Internet — deliberate or accidental — is a very real problem, with people seeking out news (regardless of validity) to confirm their own biases, to fortify their own belief system. Bad faith actors make it worse; publications and creators who insidiously advocate regressive, hateful views under the garb of “satire” — a convenient smokescreen, a façade to promote their propaganda. Twitter accounts claiming to be parodies often stoke communal fires, subsequently hiding under principles of free speech, satire, and humour.
For little fault of the earnest satirist, then, there is now an even greater responsibility on her to tackle these dilemmas. To make sure her words are not deliberately misused, especially given how the Internet theoretically allows us to reach an infinite audience. Added to that the fabled Indian inability to take a joke as well as the very understandable argument that humour can potentially dilute, trivialise, or normalise grave issues, and there’s a certain fragility to the art form. Satire is meant to be subversive, but when that purpose isn’t achieved — when it’s arguably doing more harm than good — it all rings a bit hollow.
The author and freelance culture writer from New Delhi wishes he’d studied engineering instead.
