The Failure Of Satire

We've seen a bunch of paeans in the wake of Paris to the wonder of satire  in western culture, to how we have always responded so bravely to evil by mocking it. Our hero is Charlie Chaplin for doing the globe dance in The Great Dictator. But every hero we are bringing forward today: Voltaire, or Chaplin, or Twain - they are all useless in the face of yesterday's carnage. They all mocked the power structure in their own societies. Monty Python could mock Christianity because they understood it. They had all been to schools where the religion was drummed into them.

But in Holy Flying Circus, the post-modern docudrama on the reaction to Life of Brian, the following scene makes a very important point:

However much the Daily Mail may moan, there is a reason we don't satirise Islam. We don't know anything about it.


Since Voltaire is being brought up so much, what would he have done today? He would have been as powerless as the rest of us. His enemy was Christianity and monarchy, and Chaplin's enemy was fascism, and Private Eye's enemy is government. All things we understand, come from our own cultural context, and have power over us.

The reason Charlie Hebdo wasn't funny enough was simply because it broke the cardinal rule of comedy: don't punch down. Muslims are poor and dispossessed in France, and in insulting their prophet they come across racist, ignorant bullies. The problem is that Islam is also powerful and for that reason deserves mockery. But we are not the ones to do it, because it will never be clear enough just where our fury comes from whether bigotry or righteousness, and that doubt is enough to fatally wound well-delivered satire.

The horror we must now face is that our greatest strength as a civilisation, our boisterous open free-for-all of irreverence, is completely useless against the greatest threat to liberalism in the world today (though I would say there is a tight contest between wealth inequality and Salafism for that title). And there is very little in the recent history of global Islam to suggest that such a culture of righteous mockery will emerge from within it, although there is perhaps more further back in history to give us some hope on that front.

We like to say that the gunmen attacked the cartoonists because they were a threat. If so, they were wrong. Western satire is no threat to Islam of any stripe. Satire only works when directed at its own culture, or it fails in its primary task of being funny. The jihadis needn't have bothered.