Comedy, Satire and the Economics of Introspection

In times where more and more Western countries have been backsliding into behaviours that at one time had been considered a bad move, the role of Satire as a tool for system criticism is perhaps worth re-examining. Comedy as criticism, against individuals or against systems has often been part of the democratic aesthetic, and not without good reason. It does manage to package its message into a digestible form, which will ostensibly stick better in the minds of the audience, since they might be more willing to engage with it. This does imply that their top priority in engaging with the material is getting a good laugh out of it, and while this might be an okay way to get introduced in a topic, perhaps this isn't as effective as it's made out to be.

The Front Line of Free Speech

While proponents of democracy like to claim that comedy and satire tend to form the vanguard of free speech in any given system. Think of the common quote "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize" commonly misattributed to Voltaire. The irony of this quote will reveal itself when one remember its origin. It's probably uncontroversial that freedom of speech is one of the myriad bases that make democracy possible in the first place. Comedy, as an art form, is very dependent on freedom of speech, of course. Most art forms are, but comedy's nature as spoken word with few form to hide behind without getting a gimmick, and it's been cracked down on in the name of free speech. Lenny Bruce, famously broke down as a consequence of the courts and the cops who kept harassing him about his act. What's perhaps interesting to note here, is that Bruce's act was not in fact meant to criticise the state, and most of the evidence presented was meant to incriminate by on grounds of obscenity. The way the matter came to an end was of course a tragedy, something that prosecutors and judges have made public concessions on. However, it's somewhat hard to argue that Bruce's comedy was in any way a threat to the American institutions that facilitated his eventual death by suicide. Perhaps this has inflicted a collective trauma upon comedians of all sorts, hence why they like to mount their position on the very front of free speech discourse. This though, is perhaps stolen valour.

Most art forms have a long history of censorship, which the censors have been largely losing ground on. In many ways, this is the best time to be an artist in terms of censorship. However, as always there is a real question of what that means for comedy.

Just because comedy doesn't get cracked down on, doesn't mean that it's stopped criticising the systems it exists within, or that said system functions so democratically that their function has become redundant. Stand-Up comedy, a form of comedy that teeters into cultural critique and political satire with sobering regularity, has experienced an uptick in most countries, even those that some might understand as illiberal. Censorship for artists and comedians however has rarely looked as grim as it's made out to be. The most infamous examples might be the the categorization of art into "pure" and "degenerate" by the Nazis, or the Stalinist waves of censorship. Both were undeniably forms of censorship, though the former did come with the tendency to mark the artist for death, seeing as they were secretly one of the many identities that "needed purging", while the latter - while oppressive - rarely even put artists in prison for producing art.

Both forms of censorship still exist in most systems, though perhaps in less extreme ways.

There is a particular sort of comedian who likes to go on and on about free speech. Often they make claims that they're prohibited from saying things, that they might not have been a generation prior, and chalking this up to oversensitivity or political correctness. It's somewhat telling that this has become one of the archetypical comedians, and that their political stance will likely be known to anyone even just watching this bit out of context. There are more of these than one can count, even among those who have found great success in their field, those that one might believe to hold significant sway within their scene and audience.

In the night of the 4. of December 1969, the Cook County Police shot over 100 rounds at an apartment with the goal of killing Fred Allen Hampton, whom they had previously slipped a barbituate. They did not issue a warning, nor did they attempt to enter the building before killing or injuring almost everyone inside. It's likely that the Black Panthers didn't fire a single shot deliberately. Hampton, later executed during the raid, was 21 at the time and had never been involved in any violent incidents.

This is how a state dispatches with those it considers a threat. Hampton is only one example of police assassinations, famous perhaps for the undeniable involvement of state institutions. Most of these people had done much more speaking and teaching in churches and classrooms they had done shooting and still they suffered eerily similar fates.

The state has yet to execute a comedian in their sleep, nor have they in fact done so for right wing agitators. This is a fate seemingly reserved for those advocating for the poor and ethnically oppressed, for radical feminists and queer activists, anti-war advocates and radical climate activists. This is the front line of free speech.

Satire Production Lines

Satire seems to often be the only palatable method for systemic criticism, but it doesn't always set itself apart from other forms of comedy in anything other than aesthetics. In some cases, satire takes on a hybrid role between news/investigative reporting and comedy, and it certainly makes an educated impression, but its primary function as entertainment rather than education exposes a crucial weakness of the tool: Few people stick to entertainment that they don't enjoy, or don't agree with politically, and those who do also don't usually keep watching with the expectation to learn. The educational value of entertainment is often statistically diminished by the fact that most of the important information is already known to those receptive to it. Occasionally, satire involves calls to action as a form of material agitation, but considering where the large national audiences are, more often than not, this message needs to be approved by an editorial team, or even a majority stock holder, who will presumably decide to block calls that they consider harmful to business or financial apparatus. Infamously, the Washington Post's usual endorsement pick for the 2024 presidential election was blocked by company owner Jeffrey Bezos.

Simultaneously, if the function of satire is to criticise structures, then there is a phenomenon that puts its role as a positive force in societal development starkly into question:

Bill Maher and his ilk - those perhaps titled the "Netflix Comedians" - have been around for a while. They're rarely ever on the top of their game, when they start making "comedy for the regular people", perhaps the most audible dog-whistle for right populist talking points, but they tend to very reliably garner an audience. They stick with big networks, too, perhaps not with the same ones that consider themselves progressive, but most countries have their fair share of conservative networks. In a free market, there's also little stopping them from creating a network of their own, in the style of the Daily Wire. Indeed, such networks have their own comedians, repeating slight variations of the one trans-joke that the laziest among them came up in the early 2010s. It turns out, that humour is just something that people like, regardless of their political allegiances, even though said allegiances might render specific things funny to one group, and not to another. I personally find any mention of the "invisible hand" very humorous, though what truly comes to mind isn't Adam Smith, but rather the infamous Ghostbusters scene involving Ray Stantz. Same difference, really. That however makes satire vulnerable to cooption, perhaps the final boss for structural criticism, and this in turn makes satire a viable product to sell to market of consumers.

The way entertainment is handled as a currency between large platforms means the emphasis is placed primarily on the volume of consumption, rather than artistry or substance. This observation might be found at the base of people bemoaning the indiscriminate mixing of art and content. Besides the factuality of that statement - I won't touch it, as I'm not sufficiently familiar - the way platforms have historically cemented a userbase is by placing the cool stuff, the art, in the center, and hoping that there's enough of it to keep the attention of everybody that stumbles across it. And when whoever is running productions for the platform can't keep up, it will happily present things that will hold the attention in the meantime. The fact that satire is handled like entertainment first, and a political tool second, then there is no reason not to treat it like all the other content, as it's deseminated using the same platforms as gaming clips or 30 second dances. They can, from a data science perspective, be sorted to specific interest groups like any other category of content.

One of the more well known instances of cooption of a political movement was the hippie counter-culture of the 1960s. They used to be anti-war, about free love and drug decriminalization, though nowadays many Tech CEOs of the wealthiest companies in the world come from their ranks. It wasn't so much a conscious process, as it was that their form of protest was vulnerable to cooption, and it took place within a system able to easily subsume the ideology into its own presentation. In the case of the hippies, this was a freedom of expression, removal of taboos around sexuality and experimentation with novel experiences. These can easily be folded into the superstructure of capitalism, which sells itself on the idea of personal freedoms (as long as it's tied to material supremacy), it sells sex freely and willingly, just as it does other forms of novel experiences. The fact that several illegal substances were once regular ingredients in either pharmaceutics, or popular "healthy" articles, even after it became clear that they were harmful is a clear indicator of that. Capitalism has also always played fast and loose with drugs, seeing as its generally fine with alcohol and tobacco, while similarly harmful substances tend to get regulated.

Satire, too, comes with a form of ideology, though it's a somewhat less consistent one. No matter the satirist's political beliefs, they will advocate for free speech, and reforms to an existing system. The latter point doesn't necessarily need to be called "reform" - right wing comedians probably wouldn't know what to do with the word - but their criticism entails a degree of severity that would only introduce minor changes, while keeping the rest of the structure intact. Otherwise, the person in question likely wouldn't do satire, but rather a different kind of comedy, as well as a different kind of criticism. Either way, both are easily subsumed into capitalism, though that is mostly because reforms are easily subsumed into every system. In that way, satire is perhaps one of the most lenient forms of criticism.

Introspection as a Product

Any good comic's job entails making people think about mechanisms that happen around them every day. It is just part of writing jokes. Much of comedy runs on a "relatability", something contingent on shared experiences, and humour rarely hits its mark without underlining some kind of logical tension. This is, incidentally, why I find the invisible hand funny, where a libertarian might not. To me, this is a logical fallacy, and conjures images of Dan Akroyd's pants unzipping on their own, while to a libertarian it might be a fitting metaphor to describe a process that they genuinely believe in. This also has the added bonus of giving satire - a discipline often touted as "the thinking man's comedy" - the air of serious introspection. Let's face it, figuring out things feels good. Perhaps the entire process might not feel amazing to everybody, there is a certain degree of masochism involved, after all, but feeling like someone figured something out, especially about a process happening all around them, or that one is critical of, comes with a form of intellectual high. This is the main product of satire. The feeling of successful introspection, and with it comes the implicit permission not to think too much about the topic going further, or at least using what they might have learned so far as a jumping off point. Neither of which is meant to be a condemnation of the behaviour in itself, though it does often pay off walking back some of the knowledge, if the solutions proposed, or similar ones, have had a track record of not working in ones favour, even if allowed to proliferate unhampered.

What satire then does, is rarely shaping discourse. The way it's designed just makes it highly unlikely to do so. It's better built to create the feeling of introspection to satiate the drive to change, and in some cases, even deliver solutions that would likely do little to fix the problem. This is not an argument to remove satire as a form of entertainment, or even a form of reformist criticism altogether. It does render an audience more receptive to suggestions of reform, and perhaps even to specific ones, which is its real value. It manages to direct attention well from those that already align with their principal politics, even if it's in form of a non-specific-tendency orientation. It just shouldn't be expected to do anything more than that with any regularity, and certainly not in situations, where it makes a significant difference.