Had a profound thought this weekend while enjoying a CD by the Capitol Steps, a hilarious musical political satire group (Motto: “We put the MOCK in democracy.”)
Listening to one of the group’s CDs, a friend and I concluded: satire ranks among the highest forms of free speech.
A culture that allows a measure of irreverence toward its sacred cows is a culture that’s exhibiting a certain level of maturity. (Even when the humor itself is utterly sophomoric.) The ability to laugh at our leaders and parody our idols keeps their egos in check in a way that a looming coup never would.
Satire has a way of puncturing pomposity, deflating the puffed up and overblown, and exposing the hypocritical, the glib, the fatuous, the scarily ambitious and the not-so-smart. Candidates may not watch their Comedy Channel impersonators – but we do, and we see the foibles that might pass as perfectly acceptable were we standing in a crowd of admirers in a rally.
The self-importance and delusions of grandeur that prop up dictators (or televangelists, for that matter) never hold up very well under the merciless lens of satire.
I’d even go so far as to suggest that Saturday Night Live, the Colbert Report and the Daily Show have become a kind of Fifth Estate for American voters. We learn more from these than just whether it’s boxers or briefs. Occasionally, one of these shows will nail a politician’s foibles so perfectly that I can’t help but think it affects the way we view him or her – and thus how we vote.
OK, so maybe I’m just trying to put a self-congratulatory and righteous spin on what’s really a matter of wasting time listening to stuff that makes me laugh.
But think of it this way: you’ll never see a show like Saturday Night Live in North Korea, and you won’t find a skit like this on television in Iran, not even poking fun at our president, in the unlikely event that he were to visit the country. (Warning: some PG-13 material.)
All of which leads me to this YouTube video that landed in my email box yesterday (it's the April 13 entry, if this link doesn't take you directly). It’s a parody of Carrie Underwood’s Before He Cheats, that’s making the rounds among clergy. I think it’s hysterical.
The video was created by a Seventh Day Adventist Church in Florida. I don’t know much about the denomination, but this just raised my opinion by a couple of notches.
The video is making fun of something fairly innocuous: the way that preachers tend to use stories involving their wives as sermon illustrations. In the video, the wives strike back.
This seems to me like a sign of a healthy community – secure enough to make fun of its own foibles and clichés.
And smart enough to make fun of themselves, maybe, before somebody else does.
And while we’re looking at parody videos, take a look at this GodTube video, Jesus Back, which the Guardian says “was produced by a handful of strikingly good-looking Methodists from Texas.”
Maybe you're just justifying watching things that make you laugh, but what you CHOOSE to watch for laughter is important. You could just be watching America's Funniest Home Videos, but instead you go for something smarter...
They say that for the fundamentally (fundamentalist?) insecure, humor is the first thing to go. That these churches can poke fun at themselves is very healthy indeed. It's the ones who CAN'T take a joke—-or make one--that you gotta watch out for.
Posted by: Ken Lowery | May 15, 2008 at 02:08 PM