Abstract
This special issue of International Communication Gazette critically engages with the global spread of parody and satire on the web in order to understand the various ways in which it is intervening within political and social discourse within national public spheres. The essays collected in this special issue analyze the culturally variant ways in which the critical charge of comedic tropes such as parody and satire is amplified when converged with networked media technologies. Our essays analyze the dynamics of this process from six locations worldwide to underscore the truly global nature of this phenomenon. While different in each location, the iterations each create an alternative space for social and political critique, outside the institutions of traditional media due to the proliferation of networked devices.
As our essays demonstrate, the global spread of online parody and satire as forms of political and social critique is distinguished as much by its content as it is by the novelty of its medium whose participatory structure invites a much wider audience to partake in the appropriation and production of these texts. Increasingly in locations studied by our contributors networked media technologies are making inroads into terrains dominated by older media often due to restraints such as censorship and limitations of the medium. As they cede ground to new media spaces, what often emerges is a hybrid space of mutual reciprocity and interlinkages that blurs the boundaries between different media technologies (e.g., print, television, internet).
In each instance the comedic tropes of parody and satire are infused by the particularities of culture, history, and local events that give each digital sphere analyzed in this issue a flavor of its own. Each of our essays shows the unique ways in which online satire is able to intervene within preexisting conversations and controversies by using particular local idioms and specific historical allusions that are best understood within the network of cultural and historical contexts in which they operate. As with any other global phenomenon, the spread of digital parody and satire is dialectically constructed through the interaction of global processes with local elements. While the broad strategies and signifiers of protest and resistance are common across geographic sites, a propulsive force that is local and immediate animates them.
In focusing on the subversive power of parody and satire, we concede that the very networked technology that enable its resistive potential also allow the state to counteract its challenge far more effectively. Hence far from a celebration, the essays in our collection present the proliferation of subversive speech on the global web as a delicate and often risky game where parody accounts, mirror websites, fake usernames, and proxy servers allow participants to slip under the watchful radar of state agencies that continue to finesse their skills at controlling and stifling online speech.
Our special issue learns from and extends insights of several studies that have been the springboard for our collection. Parody and satire have historically been deployed as forms of political critique within the Western tradition and scholarship on the Western uptake of the genre thrives within departments of English literature. Besides the Western tradition, our essays also bring together scholarship on the historical traditions of political parody and satire from China, India, Europe, Africa, and Iran to inform their analysis. Prior studies about the global spread of parody and satire such as News Parody and Political Satire Across the Globe by Geoffrey Baym and Jeffrey Jones (2012) have been key precursors to our own thinking that brought this special issue together. In bringing together our own collection, we hope that other scholars will continue this conversation at other venues.
Given that the Western tradition of satire and parody has been studied far more extensively than others (due to the dominance of the Anglophone Western academia), allusions to its formal elements recur frequently in the analysis of our contributors. Invariably, their goal is to show both the commonalities between satiric traditions worldwide but also to illuminate ways in which local genres of parody and satire interact with the Western one due to forces of globalization. Given that our collection is driven by the goal of showing how these interactions work but also of infusing the existing scholarship on parody and satire within media and communication studies with a more informed understanding of contemporary theorizations on the genre, we offer below some broad working principles of satire as it has been practiced in the west. Although satire is notoriously difficult to define, guidelines certainly aid thoughtful analysis. These will be relative components and features of satire that apply generally but differently under varied circumstances.
The first thing to recognize is that satire is a polemic, a passionate argument against something and in favor of something else. Normally, the negative behaviors being condemned dominate the composition and are richly painted. Often in satire, the positive behaviors being recommended are less overt or even left implied. No matter the proportion of laus et vituperatio, praise and blame, within a satire, however, at issue always is an exploration of important cultural matters of the day.
Second, an awareness of form provides insight into satire’s function. Being an argument, satire operates more or less as a thesis-exempla essay, setting forth a main point followed by supporting argumentation and a loose series of examples. Jon Stewart often follows this straightforward formula on The Daily Show. However, being also art, satire can present imaginative vignettes, semidramatic storylines, or even entire plotlines as a way to argue for a certain point of view through scenes, characters, and voices. Many segments of The Colbert Report operate in this way.
A third key element of satire is the narrative persona. What manner of narrator the satirist puts before us has everything to do with the polemical aim of the piece. Western satiric tradition hands down to us two broad kinds. One is the Horatian vir bonus, the good and honest man. This well-mannered fellow points out the foibles of humanity using a mild and pleasant form of humor. The other type is the Juvenalian vir iratus, the irate and indignant man. This bitter fellow rails against the enormities of humanity using rough language and dark humor. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart regularly performs both of these narrative characters. Other readily identifiable modes of satiric narration exist as well. The parodic narrator pretends to be someone or something that she is not. A good example is Jon Stewart wryly impersonating a real newscaster. Similar to, but not necessarily the same thing as, the parodic narrator is the self-damning narrator. Such a narrator will lead us down the primrose path of a specious point of view that turns out, in the end, to be disastrously stupid. Stephen Colbert’s elaborate satiric persona functions mainly by this formula. In short, all manner of invention is possible when it comes to the narrative disguise a satirist inhabits.
A fourth vital characteristic of satire is its intensive transactive reader response dynamic. If text + reader = meaning, then satirists are especially attuned to precipitating an exact kind of partnership with their contemporary readership. As much critical attention needs to be paid to the satiric narratee as to the satiric narrator. Just how is that current-day reader being manipulated into becoming the ideal reader of a piece? One common device is exaggeration. Often satire signals its purpose by being over the top. Equally, though, subtlety and sophistication come into play. Ham-fisted satiric attack tends to be directed at ham-headed listeners. Dexterous satire finds its mark more effectively for its cleverness. Thus, the paradox of what might be called civil savagery is one hallmark of an accomplished satirist. The attack is vicious, but the artistry is skilled.
Along with these general attributes of Western satire, three prominent features of the form as practiced in the modern state warrant attention. The first is the invasion of genre. Satire often succeeds by masquerade, by initially pretending to be something else. There seems hardly a genre satire cannot somehow twist and occupy, and advancements in media technology certainly assist such pointed charade. A second conspicuous feature of modern satire is the manipulation of a satiric persona. Identity façade is a frequent and potent delivery system for attack. Currently, no one exploits this satiric maneuver better than Stephen Colbert. A third important feature of current-day satire is its ability to voice opposition to the dominant orthodoxies of the day. Modern hegemony is subject to alteration and renegotiation. Recently, much satire has come to serve the function of challenging ‘truth’ formulated by power. Specifically, modern satire is adept at detaching truth claims from the current systems of social, economic, and cultural hegemony that create their illusion. Contemporary satire, then, through its invasion of genre and manipulation of persona, has the capacity to debunk bunk.
In various ways the essays in our collection show these attributes and features of satire and parody at work within locations such as China, India, different countries in Africa, and Iran. In their collaborative essay, ‘The Networked Practice of Online Political Satire in China: Between Ritual and Resistance,’ Guobin Yang and Min Jiang reconsider the study of online political satire in China. Going beyond the mere study of content, they analyze the ritual elements of this social and political commentary, showing it to be a networked practice where technology, culture, and history combine.
Sangeet Kumar explores the emerging satiric discourse on the Indian Internet in his essay, ‘Contagious Memes, Viral Videos and Subversive Parody: The Grammar of Contention on the Indian Web.’ He shows how this discourse carves a space for itself outside the traditional media sites by operating through the logic of ‘difference with repetition’ at the level of the text as well as the medium. This interaction between content and medium is continued in the analysis of Lyombe Eko whose essay, ‘Transferring Cartoons from Real Space to Cyberspace: The Art of Satirical Space-shifting in Sub-Saharan Africa,’ studies a select group of newspaper cartoonists and other political commentators who seek to escape official censorship by transferring their satire from print to web formats. He finds that this media transfer also functions to ‘deterritorialize’ the rich and powerful targets of this satire out of their protected, official zones to locate them instead within absurd, imaginary cartoon ‘realities’ for purposes of criticism.
In the essay ‘The Satirical Publics in Iran,’ Babak Rahimi examines the changing mode of political satire in Iran by analyzing the dynamics of satiric practices in both print and what is identified as ‘Internet publics.’ He shows how a proliferation of online political satire works to subvert the official discourse of the Iranian state. Mohamed El Marzouki explores user-generated satirical YouTube videos about Morocco in his essay ‘Satire as Counter-discourse: Dissent, Cultural Citizenship and Youth Culture in Morocco.’ He reveals how, in the wake of the Arab Spring, these emerging forms of citizen-made, participatory cultural productions are giving rise to new articulations of dissenting political culture and identity in Moroccan public sphere.
Departing from an analysis of new media per se, Kirk Combe situates the influential satiric practice of Stephen Colbert within the larger theory and history of the genre. His essay ‘Stephen Colbert: Great Satirist, or Greatest Satirist Ever?’ argues that satire enacts a postmodern agenda of freeplay and undecidability, and that modernist readings of the genre, and of Colbert in particular, are inadequate.