Laughter in the dark
I am one of those people who believes that Bugs Bunny and George Orwell are both inspiring anti-fascist icons. I believe in the power of smart satire to chip away at the false fronts constructed by tyrants. Watch Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 anti-Nazi parody “The Great Dictator,” or Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be,” a 1942 screwball set in Nazi-occupied Poland.
But comedy is no use right now as the world watches the events in Ukraine, because the proper response to brutality is horror and outrage. They push us to action.
One of the most famous articles ever published by the satiric website The Onion was a post-9/ 11 piece — released roughly three weeks after the attacks — that bore the headline “A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid (BS) Again.” An excerpt: “Shaken by the tragic events of Sept. 11, people across the nation have abandoned such inconsequential concerns as the Gary Condit scandal and Britney Spears’ skimpy outfit at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards.”
It was a brilliant parody of popular culture’s appetite for worthless celebrity gossip and tabloid scandal, and an oddly sympathetic portrait of a nation that too often just wants to narcotize itself with pop culture. (When it was released, I was the entertainment editor of this fine publication.) This was long before the rise of Facebook and Twitter.
This deathless piece of satire came back to me on Friday as I deleted the column that was originally going to appear in this space, concerning the golfer Phil Mickelson’s shameful remarks about how, despite the human rights record of Saudi Arabia, he was more than willing to consider signing aboard a Saudi-funded golf league meant to challenge the supremacy of the PGA.
“We know they killed (Washington Post journalist Jamal) Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights,” Mickelson told his biographer Alan Shipnuck in an interview conducted late last year. “They execute people over there for being gay.” But he implied the PGA’s “manipulative, coercive, strong-arm tactics” made the sort of deal he was considering worth it. Or something.
According to the best intelligence, Khashoggi was set upon in October 2018 after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, injected with a sedative, suffocated to death and then dismembered in order to hide all traces of the murder — a crime carried out by minions of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Mickelson said the players who might break away from the PGA “had no recourse.”
On Thursday, I came to the conclusion that Mickelson’s comments were pretty much beyond the reach of satire. And
besides, the news had been hijacked by another oligarch with blood all over his hands.
The Russian invasion is a crime that will likely remain outside the reach of comedy for — weeks? months? however many hours are left until the next live episode of “Saturday Night Live”? We will get there eventually, because there is nothing that happens on this planet that can’t be viewed from a comic perspective, as long as the teller has chosen the proper vantage point.
But again, it takes time. The closest we’re going to get this week is the very blackest kind of comedy, such as the audio of a Thursday exchange between Russian forces and the Ukrainian garrison on Snake Island, a tiny chunk of rock in the Black Sea near the embattled nation’s southeastern reach.
“Snake Island, I am a Russian warship,” says a voice in the translation offered by The Guardian on Friday. “I suggest you lay down your arms and surrender. Otherwise, you will be hit. Do you copy?”
“Well, this is it,” says a male voice in what is assumed to be a side conversation between members of the Snake Island defense. “Should I tell him to go f__ himself ?”
“Just in case,” a woman’s voice says softly.
The male voice crackles over the line, louder: “Russian warship, go f__ yourself.”
It pains me to say this in the current context, but that line made me laugh. And it felt good to do that, and one imagines it fleetingly felt good to the Ukrainian people as well.
In an Ernst Lubitsch comedy, the heroes with the snappy patter would have snuck away without suffering more than a scratch. But 13 Ukrainian guards died in the ensuing air and sea bombardment. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy — who for the purposes of this column needs to be identified as a former standup comic — said they would all be honored as Heroes of Ukraine.
Because this bombardment happened on the first day of the
Russian invasion, one has to wonder if the currently anonymous guard realized that it was quite likely he and his comrades would be pounded to death for failing to surrender. Or perhaps he knew that full well, and momentarily considered ad-libbing a rousing (or at least more family-friendly) patriotic speech on how a brutal dictator would never bring the proud Ukrainian nation to its knees, no matter the technological might brought to bear.
But then decided that that kind of thing sounded kind of generic, or just wasn’t his style.
We imagine our hero in his last moments, scared but smiling.