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SATIRE

                                  July 14, 1993

Okay, I'm going to babble a bit about the lowness
of satire.  Maybe I can get across what I mean by
this.

Probably I should distinguish between political
satire and literary satire, since sometimes I
think the former stuff works well, but the later
really is the lowest of the low.

To me, stories, even though they're stories work
best when they're about something real, even
when they're primarily about a real fantasy or a
real set of values.  Briefly, the reason I rate
satire as a low artform is because of the added
distance between the story and anything real.

I might also point out that satire, or less
pretentiously, "making fun of something" is
ridiculously easy to do.  Very few things exist
that can't be made to seem ridiculous when
portrayed in an unkind light.

The hard thing to do, the "highest" thing to do is
not to make fun of something, but to find
something worth being serious about.

Which isn't to say that I don't believe in humor
or comedy... to me, the funniest jokes are the
serious ones.

And from this point of view, satire of fiction is
the lowest of the low.  It's another step removed
from anything real: a story about a story...

Getting back to Cerebus, some of
the things I liked best in it            Political satire: I can't
were the political satire ("Lower        comment on Swift, since
Interest Rates or Death!")...            I've never read _Gulliver's
                                         Travels_.
But the satire of other comic
books was almost always                      Let's talk about Shaw's
completely pointless.  So Cerebus            _Pygmalion_ instead.  On one
is vaugely like Conan, except a              level, _Pygmalion_ is a
bit sleazier, so what?  Or take              brilliant satire of the British
the Dark Knight satire: when I               upper class, it rubs their noses
read that stuff, by a quirk of               in the triviality of everything
fate I hadn't yet read the Dark              that they hold most important.
Knight itself.  I thought lines              But this alone is _not_ what
like "Have to finish this                    makes it a great play... even if
quickly."  were really funny.                you're completely ignorant of
When I realized they were lifted             the cultural context it comes
whole hog from Frank Miller I was            from, if you miss the satiric
disappointed.  Something I'd                 element entirely, there's
thought was somewhat creative was            something about the plot and
just a matter of cut and paste.              characters that is really
Take a quote from anyone, put it             engaging.  And the "message" of
in the mouth of a buffoon, and               the play could be condensed into
it'll sound like buffoonery.                 an essay a few paragraphs long
                                             and work just about as well.
So why would I want to read                  It's one of the elements that
Dave Sim making fun of The                   makes it a great play, but not
Sandman?  I could do that                    the only element.  While
myself if I felt like it.                    political satire has it's
You probably could too.                      virtues, even it seems like a
                                             very thin thing to me.
This is something that I've
never entirely understood
about fans of comic books
(or heroic fantasy or
science fiction or whatever)...

The fans are obviously people who
are *really* into it, they live
and breath the stuff, it's the
closest thing to a religion that
they ever have.  But for some
reason they're reluctant to take
it seriously, or to admit that
they do.  They really like silly
take-offs that poke idiotic
fingers at the things they care
about the most.  They like to
crack jokes about how silly some
comic book is while they're really
thinking "isn't the next issue out
soon?"

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