Tone: Humor, Satire,
& Literary Humor

111}PEN IN CHEEK: SATIRE

A New Yorker cover got much more attention than the magazine bargained for. It shows then-candidate Barack Obama as the new President of the United States: He stands in the Oval Office, decked out in full Muslim regalia, knocking knuckles with his wife Michelle, who sports army fatigues and an AK-47. In the background, a portrait of Osama bin Laden hangs over the fireplace in which an American flag burns.

Democratic and Republican campaign spokesmen alike described the cover as “offensive,” “tasteless,” and “disgusting.” But New Yorker senior editor David Remnick had a different word for it. He called it “satire.”

“What I think it does,” said Remnick, “is hold up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imaginings about Barack Obama’s—both Obamas’— pasts, and their politics.”

Maybe that’s what Remnick thought he and his cover artist Barry Blitt were doing. Others didn’t see it that way. For them, the cover played straight into the hands of those whose ideas and opinions it was meant to satirize. And it was in poor taste.

When writers knowingly and purposefully set out to ridicule, pillory, burlesque, or otherwise hold up characters to censure or derision they are, at best, hopefully, writing satire, a literary genre wherein through usually acerbic wit an author attempts to attack or at least call attention to some societal ill or injustice.

The form dates back to ancient times, to The Satire of the Trades, a text composed at the start of second millennium B.C.E. that attempts to assure weary scribes that their lot in life is far superior to that of “ordinary” men. Of the early satirists the Greek dramatists Aristophanes, whose play The Clouds slandered Socrates and may have led to his execution, is by far the best known. More recently satire has been used by novelists Sinclair Lewis and Joseph Heller to scorn, respectively, the vacuity of the American middle class and the insanity of war.

In Meditation # 4, I discuss the danger of prejudging our characters and thus limiting their dimensionality, while preventing both our selves and our readers from arriving at deeper levels of understanding and empathy. With satire a prejudgment of some kind is mandatory if only to ascertain that a character or subject deserves satiric treatment.

But there are different levels of satire, and of judgment. There is the kind of judgment that labels, defines, or categorizes—that puts characters in a box and refuses to let them escape. And then there is a kind of judgment that is ongoing and subject to revision, that allows for empathy, understanding, or even forgiveness, that doesn’t pigeonhole or condemn outright, from the start (though the resulting story or novel may amount to a condemnation). Such is the type of “open-ended judgment” rendered by satirists like Flannery O’Connor, who—though she certainly has her views, and though her characters reflect certain values in society that she disapproves or deplores, are still living, breathing, dimensional characters (the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”). Great satirists judge, but they don’t condemn.

We run two other major risks with satire, and the two go hand in hand: bad taste, and being misunderstood.

With a cartoon, we at least know that humor is intended, even if (like Queen Victoria) “we are not amused.” With written satire, the potential for misunderstanding increases by an order of magnitude. Jonathan Swift got a famously hostile reception for his essay, A Modest Proposal, which proposed cannibalism as the means to prevent the children of the poor from becoming a burden to society. Not only was Swift accused of bad taste, he came within a hair of losing his royal patronage.

Contemporary satire can backfire as badly, as the editor of one campus newspaper learned when he published an article titled, “Rape Only Hurts When You Fight Back”:

Most people today would claim that rape is a terrible crime almost akin to murder, but I strongly disagree. Far from a vile act, rape is a magical experience that benefits society as a whole. I realize many of you will disagree with this thesis, but lend me your ears and I’m sure I’ll sway you towards a darkened alley.

The writer—no doubt envisioning readers rolling with laughter— goes on to tout the “advantages” of rape, proclaiming that, if not for rape, “how would [ugly women] ever know the joys of intercourse with a man who isn’t drunk?” Whether or not they got the joke, no one, least of all the president of the university, was amused.

Satire is dangerous. It is meant to be so. From Ovid’s Art of Love to the novels of Chuck Palahniuk, library shelves sag under the weight of satirical masterpieces, with few if any subjects immune from the satirist’s pen. This short list of topics, and the authors who satirized them, spans centuries: Nigel of Canterbury (Speculum Stultorum): monks and universities; Walter Map (De Nugis Curialibus⁵¹): court life in medieval England; Erasmus (In Praise of Folly): corrupt clergymen; Voltaire (Candide): optimism; George Orwell (Animal Farm): Stalinist Russia; Flannery O’Connor (Wise Blood): religious hypocrisy; Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita): statutory rape; Joseph Heller (Catch-22): war; Terry Southern (Candy): sex; Don Delillo (White Noise): consumerism.

The key to successful satire is to establish the satirical tone early and maintain it consistently, as Heller does with the famous first lines of Catch-22:

It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

Tonally, these first two lines give us permission to laugh at anything and everything that follows, including men getting disemboweled by shrapnel or being bombed on orders from their fellow officers. Heller’s opening continues:

Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.

If you’ve ever had jaundice, you know it’s no laughing matter.⁵² It can be a harbinger of hepatitis or cirrhosis or other liver diseases, including cancer. Yet Heller makes it clear, through his deadpan delivery and switchback sentences, that his intent is humor, that we’re not to take Yossarian’s illness too seriously. In fact, Yossarian is faking it.

But even where the pain and suffering in Heller’s novel are meant to be real (as when Snowden, the radio-gunner of Yossarian’s B-24, spills his literal guts), we see the author grinning in the wings (at least, I do). Yet Heller’s grinning doesn’t stop me from taking his theme, the insanity of war, seriously. When he tells us that wars are bonkers, he means it. Catch-22 is satirical, but its message is, if not in earnest, sincere.

Within the first few lines of a story or novel the author makes a pact with the reader, letting him know what to expect and establishing the level of sincerity and earnestness. Stray from those levels and you break the bargain.

112}JOHN UPDIKE OR HOLDEN
CAULFIELD: A DICHOTOMY OF DICTION

Diction comes down to the words we use. We can evoke a world merely through restricting the vocabulary used by our narrators (and by other characters).

As with most things in fiction writing, consistency is king. The narrator who, on Introduction, says, “And we’re off like a dirty sheet!” cannot say, on 13}THE DOPE ON JUNKIES: CHARACTERS IN SENSATIONAL CIRCUMSTANCES, “Vehicles had difficulty with the ascent.” Our narrators can’t be John Updike and Holden Caulfield at the same time.

Nor is a New Millennium Supermom likely to dress like Mrs.

Dalloway. One student’s story, with a postmodern flavor, is studded with grace notes (and occasionally whole chords) that echo To the Lighthouse and other writings by Virginia Woolf. But what does Woolf’s world have to do with this protagonist—an obsessively competitive contemporary urban mom?

The result is a disconnect between subject and tone. It’s as if, having found herself in possession of Mrs. Dalloway’s voice, the writer applied it to a character it doesn’t belong to—like a little girl trying on her mother’s dress.

Story and characters cannot be parted; neither can plot and theme, nor metaphor and plot, nor style and substance—nor can any one or two or three elements or components of a work of fiction be parted from the others.

In works of art, unity is eveything. When you make a stylistic choice, especially one likely to draw attention to itself, it should relate to something in the material.

Better still, the demands of the material should limit our choices, and make, or help make, them for us.

113}BRAMWELL GROVELS:
LITERARY HUMOR

Writing can get overconvoluted through an author’s attempt at literary humor. This is humor that relies on how a thing is said— usually, in a pompous, pretentious, euphemistic, or otherwise verbose way—rather than on what is being described.

“Being of a decidedly delicate nature, Mrs. Phelps was obliged to dispatch herself with utmost promptitude to the nearest place of easement.”

Translation: “Mrs. Phelps ran to the bathroom to throw up.”

A longer example:

It would seem that the cosmic tumblers have aligned, and Kyle, our two-year-old, is at this precise moment congealing into a perfect storm of incoherence, mobility, and fastidiousness. This temporal mania is hardly mitigated by his reluctance to avail himself of even the briefest and most token of naps; and soon thereafter (that is, after the nongranted reprieve), with the arrival of his playgroup cronies, said mania is thrust into maximum overdrive.

If these examples have a distinctly Victorian flavor, that’s because literary humor is essentially Victorian, born out of an exaggerated (and, by current standards, perverse) sense of decorum. When I read, “She would sit properly and decline to enter into the conversation,” I imagine that the sofa or chair on which the lady sits is overpadded and stiff, set in a stuff y parlor jammed with lace doilies and bric-a-brac—even though the story takes place in 1997. The stilted language packs more pomp than meaning.

Victorian circumlocution has its place: namely, in Victorian prose. Here is part of a letter written by Charlotte Brontë’s younger brother Bramwell, an aspiring poet:

Sir,

It is with much reluctance that I venture to request, for the perusal of the following lines, a portion of the time of one upon whom I can have no claim, and should not dare to intrude; but … I could not resist my longing to ask a man from whose judgment there would be little hope of appeal. [After half a dozen lines of florid flattery and a paragraph of apology, Bramwell proceeds:] … I seek to know, and venture, though with shame, to ask from one whose word I must respect: whether, by periodical or other writing, I could please myself with writing, and make it subservient to living.

When Bramwell wrote his groveling letter, such self-abasement was not only tolerated, it was de rigueur. A blunter instrument would likely have gained no reply. In Queen Victoria’s England, among the educated classes, propriety was everything. Because those values no longer apply, humor based on them feels inauthentic and forced.

To be funny, you need to be as true and specific to the characters and their circumstances as possible.

Let language carry humor, rather than create it.

114}FUNNY ON PAPER:
PUNCTUATION = TIMING

With humor, on the written page as in life, timing is everything. The following examples come from another student’s story.

“He told me he was married, but only on paper. I asked, ‘What kind of paper?’” [Two sentences and already the author has gotten a laugh out of me.]

“I was always asking the wrong questions.” [Endearingly harsh self-judgment.]

“I was new at this.” [The world loves its ingénues.]

“He said he was separated; I pictured oil and water in a puddle.” [The analogy works perfectly, the image conveyed in a lightning flash.]

“I pictured an egg gently tapped along the edge of the mixing bowl with blue flowers, my mother pouring the yolk between each split-half shell, the slippery whites oozing over the edge.” [Specific, authentic.]

“I didn’t ask, ‘Separated from what?’ I was learning.” [Here, the speedy response of the first sentence has built momentum toward the slow wink of “I was learning.”]

No matter what you hear to the contrary, and The Chicago Manual of Style notwithstanding, punctuation is an art, not a science. Exactly what a comma is for no one can say for sure without qualification.

Punctuation is a breath, a pause, a stutter, a foot on the brake, a downshifting of the transmission. Like any art it must be mastered. We should learn the supposed rules that we may break them as the Italians drive their Alfa Romeos: with confidence.