Satirists don’t really mean what they say — or do they?
IN a recent National Business Review column Sir Bob Jones suggested introducing Maori Gratitude Day to replace Waitangi Day.
‘‘I have in mind a public holiday where Maori bring us breakfast in bed or weed our gardens, wash and polish our cars and so on, out of gratitude for existing,’’ wrote the wellknown pugilist, property magnate and knight of the realm. Not surprisingly, a petition was soon doing the rounds seeking to revoke his knighthood. Sir Bob says he was using satire, while his opponents describe the column as hate speech. It can’t be both, so you will have to make up your own mind about what Sir Bob was actually producing.
This column, existing as it does on a diet of light satire, wonders if Sir Bob has done satire itself a disservice by using the word to describe something that brings some readers to the boil and crying out, ‘‘This is racist ranting’’. I prefer satire to prompt a gentle grin or an indulgent chuckle rather than a sneer or a lawsuit and now and again, so I’m told, this column does give some readers a lighter start to their day.
Satire and its stablemate, parody, usually require the reader to adopt, at least to some level, what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called ‘‘a willing suspension of disbelief ’’ which requires readers to put to one side logic and realism for the sake of enjoying whatever improbability is being presented in the poetry or prose that’s before them.
Satire can only work if there is at least some level of suspension of disbelief and humour is the other essential ingredient. Paul Chadwick, readers’ editor for the Guardian, has the daily responsibility of ensuring that his newspaper’s contributors, especially cartoonists and ‘‘humorous’’ writers, don’t land the paper in a morass of court cases. Last month he wrote: ‘‘One of the most precious aspects of freedom of speech is the space we reserve for humour, especially satire. It is like a fenced playground within which the activity is understood by almost all participants to be for release, for delight, being teased or just being silly. The privileged spaces for humour are damaged when hate speech masquerades there, so it is rightly ejected.’’ I suspect Chadwick would have rejected the Sir Bob Jones’ column.
Auckland historian Prof Paul Moon commented that some people had taken the Jones column at face value, which he believed was wrong.
‘‘I absolutely interpreted it as a form of satire. You make a point about something or highlight aspects of it by coming up with something so ridiculous that people revisit everything.’’
However, I find it difficult to defend Jones by using the satire ploy. His column seems to have too little of Chadwick’s, ‘‘release, delight, teasing or silliness’’. Moon’s point about people taking the column at face value illustrates satire’s most recurring problem. He suggests that ‘‘people who take it seriously might need to take some medication, perhaps’’, a comment which indicates Moon has his own satirical streak — an uncommon trait among historians.
The medication could well be two willing suspension of disbelief pills to be taken before reading satirical columns. Such a dosage may well have prevented the phone calls from at least one ODT reader to the University of Otago political studies department seeking clarification, when this column announced last year that academics led by Prof Sigma Leafrust had recommended the cancellation of the general election because of lack of interest. The newspaper was accused of dabbling in false news, despite the column’s name.
Politics and politicians are, of course, sitting ducks for satire; not that politicians are more ridiculous than the rest of us, but because they are a universally recognisable target. The pretensions and pomposity can be pricked and some of their silliness satirised, but all in good fun and, sometimes, in the best of possible taste.
Satire can be savage, rather like Jonathon Swift’s A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick. Swift suggested that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies. These days regarded as a model of straightfaced satire, the Proposal at least got people thinking about a problem, which is what satire does best.
Jones’ ‘‘Maori Gratitude Day’’ may do some good by encouraging debate about racial equality but, to my mind, less than successful use of satire will still not placate what Chadwick sees as his most challenging readers.
‘‘A different kind of complainant about satire is aware it is humour but definitely does not find it funny and may be offended. They declined to suspend disbelief.’’
But don’t believe all you read, especially if it’s not too serious.