We begin with Fabrizio Ciccone’s paper, “‘Maybe the Artist Is Being Literal’: The Political Present and the Betrayal of Satire.” Ciccone poses the catastrophic present as an artistic crisis for the modern satirist. For those who rang comedy’s death knell in 2016, he argues, Theodor Adorno’s announcement of the death of satire in Minima Moralia (1951) came about six decades too early. Ciccone considers the persistence of satire even amid its demise, taking Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) as exemplary of cinema’s reckoning with satire’s unavailability for the present moment. He claims that Riley’s solution to the problem of modern satire is to betray satire through genre masquerade. The film’s reactivation of the satiric tradition—drawing primarily on that patron saint of anger, Jonathan Swift—is less a séance than a wake. Riley’s “savage indignation” disguises his recognition of the validity of Adorno’s panic. Sorry to Bother You, however, moves beyond Adorno’s diagnosis of the present moment, leaving behind political despair by finding in satire’s defeat the ground for a new kind of comedy—a comedy of defeat.
Next, we move from the defeat of satire to the comedy of death. David Gillota’s paper, “Dead Funny: Satire and Horror,” explores the ways in which American horror texts frequently engage in satire during periods of social unrest and cultural upheaval. Gillota considers satirical horror texts from three periods: The Vietnam War era, the Post 9/11 era, and the Trump era, all of which marked a proliferation in horror films that blend humor and horror devices in order to formulate their social critique. The trend suggests that traditional modes of comic protest are inadequate in accounting for the insanity of current events. This is especially true in the 21st Century, which has seen not only horror artists turning toward satire but also several well-known humorists (Jordan Peele, Kevin Smith, Chris Rock, Ilana Glazer, John Krasinski, Danny McBride, and others) embracing horror. Gillota opens by framing important overlaps in humor and horror theory and then offers close readings of George Romero’s zombie films and their remakes (which span the Vietnam and Post 9/11 eras) and of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Us (2019). Since so many of these texts posit end-of-the-world and apocalyptic scenarios, the paper will not so much be about the “end of satire” as it will be about “satire and the end.”
Last but not least, Karintha Lowe traces the anticolonial geopolitics of satirical humor in her paper, “Satirizing the Colony in Han Suyin’s A Many-Splendoured Thing.” While Ciccone and Gillota both focus on the fragmentation of genre satire amid political catastrophe, Lowe emphasizes satire’s unruly movements across multiple media forms and into the global commercial sphere. She analyzes Han Suyin’s autobiographical novel, A Many-Splendoured Thing (1952), in which Suyin recounts her Korean War-era love affair in Hong Kong with Mark Elliot, a British foreign correspondent. Although the novel reads like a conventional romantic melodrama, Han often joked that her text in fact satirized the Madame Butterfly plot—as she told a friend, “In my book the Westerner died, and the Chinese woman survived.” The novel proved immediately successful and was widely adapted for Western audiences. Within the novel, satire enabled Han to unsettle the power differentials of her interracial relationship and critique the colonial structures that authorized a generic representation of her romance. In contrast to Ciccone, who views Riley’s satire as a form of disguise for its weaponized critique of racial capitalism, Lowe suggests that Suyin’s anticolonial feminist satire was hiding in plain sight, further obscured by its Cold War adaptations for American film and television.
All three papers play with the form of the question, “Is Satire Dead?”, by revealing the artistic mutations and collective political potentials of satires that laugh at their own wake.