A Great American Satirist
by Roland Barphe, editor of Excressences and
head of media studies at the Polyvalente de Saint-Tite
A recent article on this site (mercifully no longer posted) disparaged the work of a great American artist. Making the common assumption that appearances are reality, this site's television "critic" attempted to belittle the work of this great American artist with cheap sophomoric humour.
The artist is David Letterman. In a country famous for its distaste for satire (as discussed on the letters page), Mr. Letterman is famous for performing satire!
The trick, of course, is that most of the people he satirizes are unaware that he is satirizing them. These people are…his audience!
Mr. Letterman's audience prides itself on its hipness. Mr. Letterman responds with jokes about smelly foreign cab drivers. He responds by contemptuously putting as little effort as possible into producing his show. The jokes are feeble, cues are regularly missed, his staff often appears to have no idea what is going on, and Mr. Letterman regularly manages to muff the reading, from a card, of the Top Ten list. Mr. Letterman also regularly manages to muff his punch lines, so that even if his jokes were not feeble they wouldn't work anyway.
But…he wins Emmys year after year! His nightly festival of the bigoted, the slipshod, and the unprofessional receives professional awards for excellence! Mr. Letterman has gone beyond the box. He has taken his comedy beyond the show and turned all of show business into a comedy of his own invention!
Mr. Letterman's most recent artistic coup was his threat to change networks. He has turned himself into such an icon that he managed to persuade not only the public but also, apparently, senior executives at CBS that ABC would be interested in replacing Ted Koppel's higher-rated show with his lower-rated one!
An important question, of course, is that of who is getting the joke. This group seems to consist mainly of Mr. Letterman and his staff. This of course makes his art all the greater. We all believe that the highest art is that appreciated by the fewest, and Mr. Letterman has applied this principle to satire. And in doing so he has supported and maintained a great American satirical tradition.
This tradition goes back through Andy Warhol to Wallace Stevens and perhaps farther. Wallace Stevens wrote poems devoid of content as a satire of poetry, and ended up being considered one of the great American poets. Mr. Warhol mass produced unoriginal and, in his later career, flat out hideous objects as a satire on the art industry. He produced films in which nothing happened (in Empire, for example, he filmed the Empire State Building with a fixed camera for 24 hours). He referred questions about his art's meaning to his agent. And no one in the art world got the joke! They continue to pay huge prices for his oeuvre!
Yes, perhaps the tradition of American satire does go farther back. Perhaps it goes back to H. L. Mencken and before him to P. T. Barnum. The messages of American satire are that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, and that there's a sucker born every minute.
We see here the essentially reactionary and elitist form which contemporary American satire takes. As Wentworth Sutton pointed out in a recent article, American humour is about belittling the little guy. There used to be a second satirical tradition in America, the tradition exemplified by the Three Stooges, who, as Dr. Sutton pointed out in his article, satirized authority. That tradition, despite the valiant efforts of Geroge Carlin and Robert Klein, is now much weaker.
What else could explain the spectacle of the last American presidential elections except the scarcity of satirists committed to satirizing authority in general? An uninformed and inarticulate scion of a family of great wealth and influence ran against the undependable and bombastic scion of another family of great wealth and influence, and no one pointed out that both aspirant emperors were buck naked. What can explain this except the absence of satirists interested in attacking authority in general rather than someone in authority they don't like?
For the most part American satirists prefer to satirize the suckers who voted for these two men, knowing that the suckers' newly improved self-esteem will keep them from getting the joke. And keep them paying the shot. And loving it.
April, 2002A Great American Satirist © Coolth, 2002
