Times are less bleak when we realize we’re not alone
When I was about eight or nine years old, I discovered MAD magazine. I was already a big reader of comic books, like many prepubescent boys, and a fan of science fiction. But MAD was different. If it had a motto, it was “no sacred cows.” Everything was subject to parody, especially uptight straight people and their cultural assumptions. Cold Warriors, Hollywood, the rich, sports, politicians, fashion, commercialism, advertising — they all were lacerated by MAD’s wacky cartoonists. Even the nonconformist hippies got teased for conforming to their own new rules of comportment. Were some of MAD’s illustrations sexist or racist? I’m sure if you look at it now, there’s plenty there that would ruffle today’s more inclusive sensibilities. But for a kid just starting to be aware of the larger world and its hypocrisies, MAD was a gateway drug. It taught me to question authority. It made me laugh.
And as we kids passed copies of the magazine back and forth, giggling at its jokes, MAD showed us that there was another version of America than the one we were being force-taught at school: an America that riven by unresolved contradictions and still unfinished, along with lots of Americans who were aware of those problems and trying to fix them. As R. Crumb, one of its breakout illustrators, later said, “If you were growing up lonely and isolated in a small town, MAD was a revelation. Nothing I read anywhere else suggested there was any absurdity in the culture. MAD was like a shock, breaking you out.” According to Maria Reidelbach, the author of Completely Mad, a history of the magazine, radical activist Tom Hayden was a teenage fan of the magazine and was inspired by it to start his own high school satire newspaper, The Daily Smirker.
Great satire does three things: it makes you laugh, it makes you think, and it helps you realize that you are not alone when you see other people also laughing and thinking in response to it. In times of political turmoil, satire can also be a force for two kinds of good. First, to laugh is to relax, at least for a moment. As the author Elena Ferrante wrote a few years ago, “No power has ever yielded an inch thanks to a laugh. Ridicule, yes, annoys the powerful, but it doesn’t bury them. Yet for the moment we’re laughing, we feel their grip on our life relax a little. Laughter is a short, very short, sigh of relief.” And second, when we laugh together, we signal each other that we think the same way. Do you see that the emperor has no clothes? Why yes, I do.
Back in 2019, video of a guy in a green shirt laughing at the antics of two anti-immigrant protestors at a Tuscon city council hearing took off on Twitter. In less that 24 hours, it got 5 million views; it’s now been watched almost 19 million times.
Scene inside a Tucson City Council Meeting. Officials voted to put a "Sanctuary City" measure on the November ballot pic.twitter.com/mEh4PNj0Wo
— Nick VinZant (@NickVinZant) August 7, 2019
The man, who later identified himself as Alex Kack, was there in support of a sanctuary initiative being considered by the city. His laughter was a salve. He told a local TV news reporter that, “People really took time out of their day to go interrupt a City Council meeting to just yell crazy, ignorant, racist, hate-filled stuff in the most absurd manner they could possibly do it. Why wouldn’t you laugh at this?”
All of these thoughts were in my mind this weekend when I encountered this brilliant satire of the January 6th insurrectionists put together by The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. I immediately shared it with some of my more politically-minded friends. But I’ve been surprised by the response. Half of them loved it. But half told me it made them uncomfortable or sad. Seeing the Orange Cheeto and his deluded followers on their most infamous day is still triggering for a lot of people. It is a reminder that they are still at large, unvanquished and intent on transforming America into their fantasy of a white Christian nationalist refuge.
I hear that. If people don’t feel comfortable laughing at the Boogaloo Bois and their ilk, I get it. These men prancing around in their Kevlar suits and waving their AR-15s want to intimidate the rest of us, and the images of them showing up at state Capitols and school board meetings asserting their freedom to bully the rest of us are upsetting. And they aren’t a laughing matter: two Boogaloo boys killed a cop in Oakland in June 2020 and more recently two adherents were charged in Washington state with conspiring to build explosive devices to target police.
But to anyone who is intimidated by these bullies, I would just say: the best way to deal with a bully is by gathering your friends first and then challenging him together. Few things bothered Donald Trump more than the feeling that people were laughing at him, which he often projected onto other countries laughing “at us.” What is important and valuable about the Colbert show’s “Abhor-Rent” video isn’t the jokes alone. It’s the sound of the audience laughing, nay cheering, its best lines. We should take heart from that sound. We need more of it.