To the Urbane Society, University of Illinois
I have been asked to make some remarks tonight on the nature and workings of satire, probably because it is thought I must know the subject from the inside out, having been shadowing Mr. Lippman for some time now. And he does engage in this particular form of international intrigue.
Needless to say, I don’t do satire myself. To paraphrase Will Rogers, I don’t make jokes, I just read the newspapers and re-sort the facts. And that’s an easy job since the newspapers generally pre-re-sort them for us. But since satire is topical commentary with a twist, I do maintain an interest in it. I have interests in the topics and try to assure that those areas remain as twisted as possible.
The purpose of satire is to expose vice. (I come from a humanitarian tradition, and since you can die from exposure I couldn’t participate in that.) If you don’t expose vice but merely add to it, that is known as advice. And those who do this are called advisers. Now that I can get behind.
Parody is something else I couldn’t do. It involves making a mockery of something respected, so you can see I don’t do any parodying of the CIA since that would be impossible by definition. And soon, by law.
Satire makes use of irony, which is defined as the use of words to express something other than, and especially the opposite of, the literal meaning; hence, the Presidential I, Ronnie.
Satire also employs incongruity. Obviously most CIA agents wouldn’t come out and talk to the public; that is incongruous and therefore funny. (You may laugh now.) But I know you won’t report what goes on here. I can tell you won’t tell. I can tell you you won’t tell. Because I know you’re an Urbane group. (Another tool of satire is to use a few bad puns so you’ll seem like a regular guy. All right, a lot of bad puns.)
It also would seem to be incongruous for a CIA operative to sing, and after my presentations, many seem to think it odd that I chose to sing.
Another example of incongruity would be the juxtaposition of important things with trivia. For example, I have explained many times that the Honduran peace constabulary crossed into Nicaraguan territory only for the limited objective of retrieving a frisbee. This amuses you, perhaps, because it juxtaposes the trivial, namely Nicaragua, with the truly important: international sports.
And so we can see that there is no more need for satire in society today than there is for social change. That will be all on this topic, won’t it? I thought so.