The warning signs of unsuccessful satire

News & Commentary from the liberterrain...

Satire is a tricky critter to tame.

Without going into any hyperventilating hyper erudite intellectualizing, there are basically two ways for satire to fail.

Satire or serious? Clint Webb for Senate (YouTube
   video screenshot)

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Old Examiner examples of Satire

• A political safari
  

• Stop the wine presses! Politically correct wine reviews
  

• Part 2: Politically correct wine reviews

• The syndrome made me do it
  

1. Hits the mark but isn't funny.

Mad magazine has taught a whole generation (or two or three or four) that if satire isn't funny it fails.

And a long and glorious gaggle of sharp-penned India-inking political cartoonists has taught Western Civilization that you can't appreciate satire, or get the joke, if you don't understand the underlying undercarriage of the characteristics that carries it.

2. Funny but misses the mark.

Libertarians know all about this from non-libertarians who think they're lampooning libertarians with witless wit like, "Definition of a Libertarian: a Republican who wants to smoke pot," or this old chestnut: "Should a Libertarian government own their own battleships or rent them?"

The first misses its mark because no true libertarian would consider him- or herself a Republican, period. And the second is merely an oxymoron to anarchist libertarians who don't equate "libertarian" with "government." It's funny stuff only to unknowing mainstream left-right political partisans who just don't get libertarianism.

So to be successful satire must be both funny and on the mark.

Which brings us to the YouTube video, The Whitest Kids U'Know - Clint Webb for Senate.

Conservatives will get it but hate it because it's too painfully true (the whole point of good satire).

Liberals will get it instantly and laugh their butts off, until it dawns on an insightful few of them that this is just a reflection of an equally devastating caricature of themselves on the flipside of the two-headed two-faced political coin.

Only libertarians will laugh their butts off unconditionally.
 

The Whitest Kids U'Know - Clint Webb for Senate (YouTube video)

 
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