Writing Satire During A Revolution

Hallo lovely Patreonites. It looks like there’s a revolution in America, and from over here in Australia it’s hard to feel like there’s any way to comment or not-comment that is right, useful, helpful, productive.

So what I say now will inevitably be wrong, incomplete, and specific to my interest in rhetoric and comedy.

You might want to follow any number of people more informed than I am. Here’s a start: Baratunde Thurston who is brilliant on the bugle and can be found here. Lisa Sharon Harper, who you can listen to on Tea With Alice or find here. For Australian perspective, Nayuka Gorrie, here. Miranda Tapsell and Nakkiah Lui’s Podcast “pretty for an aboriginal” here. Corey Tutt’s project Deadly Science here. Feel free to add more in the comments.

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All that said, here are some of my thoughts.

Thought 1: Coronavirus

Coronavirus has been astonishingly good at exposing the fault lines in societies. The places we have left people behind, from care homes in western countries, to the migrant dormitories in Singapore, to the disproportionate death rate among African Americans - not, apparently because of a genetic component, but because of an endemic racialised inequity in health status.

And then on that backdrop you have these ongoing and repeated stories where police kill people in America; people being filmed dying being shared on social media. And more than that, the apparent pursuit of justice by the authorities in the face of these abuses seeming to be prompted only by the virality of the footage, so that even when justice is seen to be done, it raises the question of whether if it had not been seen, it might not have been done.

Thought 2: Violence

And now, with an urgency that has rendered the dangers of the pandemic secondary to their need to demand change, the rage in America about its inequalities has spilled into demonstrations in the streets, into riots and violence and looting - worsened and instigated (by a number of very reputable accounts, and larger numbers of less verifiable accounts, which even when bias is accounted for, do accumulate) by the authorities whose job it is to deescalate violence.

Police attacks on reputable journalists lend credence to the widespread claims that (some proportion of) law enforcement are using the excuse of public disorder to behave with opportunistic brutality and reckless authoritarianism, even when you factor in the chaos of adrenaline and the mortal terror of violence that can put a heavy foot on the accelerator of mistaken action or reaction.

Thought 3: America and Australia (and the U.K.)

My feelings about the public reaction to all this horror is slightly muddied by my ambivalence about the American cultural imperialism that we get in this country (and all over the world). I ask myself why I see Australian celebrities feeling more pressured to talk about American injustices than Australian ones when our own education systems and justice systems have such skewed outcomes on racial lines?*

And then

Thought 4: Jokes.

I have to write satire in the midst of this. Or I choose to. It’s my job, anyway, so I will. The Bugle is real-world satire, The Last Post gives me more leeway to talk about things abstractly or via metaphor, but even so.

(Tea With Alice is where I talk directly about serious and difficult things, so I feel like there’s a balance there. Standup (and Patreon) is where I talk about myself.)

I often use the veil of comedy or satire (are they distinct? I think of them as different modes of address) to talk about serious things, and sometimes, when it’s very serious, it’s a very slight veil.

But that veil is useful - it lets you unlock things more directly and brutally... or does it?

When I’m playing out these ideas, sometimes I think what’s the point of doing comedy at all. But then I defend the right of comedy to exist, because I love it, and I’m an idealist about the power of speech and art and rhetoric to change how people see the world.

Here’s a thing I said recently in response to a question about how we can keep making entertainment during such extreme circumstances, or whether people should stop creating as an expression of respect/solidarity/the impossibility of properly addressing from our position of privilege what’s happening in America.

I don’t know if that’s a legitimate rationalisation for me to keep doing my job, and I’m not washing my hands of an obligation to deal with difficult things in day to day life as well as in satire and comedy. I’m maybe asserting the right of comedy and satire to exist even when there are horrors. Whether they are a way to deal with the horrors or to help people take a break.

Xx

A

* Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults make up around 2% of the national population but constitute 27% of the national prison population. Those kinds of numbers speak to some combination of unjust policing and a segment of citizens who don’t feel they have a stake in this society.