The Dead Art Of Satire (Part 2)
Samiul Bashar Samin
Today, The Onion is a media powerhouse and the most popular source of satirical humor on the web. The Onion has enjoyed a good run. And even today it occasionally scores a bull’s-eye with its barbs. But much of its content now seems tired, even banal. The lead headline on the site right now is “Frustrated Man Doesn’t Know What Else He Can Do to Get Cat Purring.”
You can only push the “fake news” concept so far before it turns into a stale formula. And the field is getting more crowded. Fake news is everywhere on the web, as numerous sites as others emulate the success of The Onion. We now have Evening Harold, CityWorldNews, The Beaverton, National Report, and many other satirical websites vying for clicks and links.
Here are some recent headlines from web “satire” sites:
Women Arrested For Biting off Pit Bull’s Testicles
This Man Proves Any Shirt is Reversible
Are Spiders the New Super Food?
Woman Names Her Daughter After Superstore
President Obama Advocates Eating Dogs in July 4th Address
The ClickHole site, launched by the people behind The Onion, focuses entirely on satirizing the most birdbrained web content. It creates clickbait by parodying clickbait. What a change from the days when a brave satirist would take on totalitarian rulers and establishment dogmas.
You won’t see much resemblance between these corny write-ups and the powerful satires of the past. Aristophanes created satire so influential that Plato accused him of contributing to the trial and death of Socrates. Daniel Defoe was pilloried and imprisoned for his satire. Jonathan Swift scored devastating points against British imperialism with satire. Lenny Bruce was willing to spend years embroiled in legal problems rather than tone down his satire.
And today? We have gone from the glories of Juvenal to the merely juvenile. In our metrics-driven world, satire websites succeed by maximizing clicks. And the best way of doing this is by deceiving web surfers. Make the reader believe, if only for a few seconds, that the story is real news, not fake news.
Such is the state of satire in the present day—and, strange to say, it deserves itself to be satirized. But for that to happen, the satirists would need to turn a critical eye on their own efforts. Maybe they ought to consider doing just that.