Satire

I've been revisiting SCTV. I watched it quite a bit through high school and a little while thereafter. Its got me thinking about satire and what makes it good and what makes it not so good. One of the reasons I've been thinking about it is because I was equally acquainted with Monty Python, both the show and the films, but I never found them funny, never got them, in spite of trying. I had friends who were total Monty Python geeks and I wanted to get it, but didn't. But I found SCTV very funny, and sometimes found it so funny the show seemed a miracle.

I'm pretty sure this is what makes good satire: the one wielding the scalpel can wield it, by necessity, only from the source of some initial openness that is uncomfortable because it is a place of anticipated humiliation, and the anticipation is already humiliating. It can't be conjured. Evelyn Waugh was such a great satirist because he had this ability, which within the satirist feels like a disability. You see it especially in the acting of John Candy. I watched an interview of him on Letterman in which he seems to be painfully aware that he's starting to come across as a bore, and suddenly, almost in spite of himself, he turns it into a source of laughter for the audience. It's like he didn't even need to try. He was just funny. Joe Flaherty and Martin Short were also great in this regard. Those three guys were just so damn funny.

Monty Python always seemed too easy, too towering, too one-sided, too overbearing. SCTV though had a certain light regard that was a two-way scalpel. That special zone they were able to create, light as a feather, was like an endless progenitor of cutting satire that was deadly funny yet didn't injure. And that's the greatest laughter. The more it cuts, the more the healing laugh, and vice versa.

Today there is absolutely no good satire whatsoever - at least not mainstream. Certainly there are good comedians out there. Kevin O'Brien is one actor/satirist who I find very funny. But mainstream like the way SCTV was mainstream, there is nothing. All of it is just a competition to see who can out-vulgarize the other.

I wonder what that says.

Time-stamped

When people use the word beauty too easily, something presumptive and something very unlike beauty begins to show its face, and I begin to think of things like this passage from Brideshead Revisited:



 

Quote

"It is no good my saying: “I wish I were like Joan of Arc or St. John of the Cross.” I can only be St. Evelyn Waugh—after God knows what experiences in purgatory." --Evelyn Waugh

Hmmm, let's see here...

It is no good my saying: "I wish I were like Evelyn Waugh Flannery O'Connor Walker Percy Thomas Merton G.K. Chesterton Hilaire Belloc J.R.R. Tolkien cantankerously responding in Latin during a vernacular Mass like I was born in 1892 or imagining myself in the glory days of Cluny Joan of Arc or St. John of the Cross." I can only be Sign Name Here - after God knows what experiences and my decision to accept His graces here in this life, which is built up of present moments.

From The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh

Saturday 31 January 1931

Seminary. Dutch Father Superior, fine beard. Good woodwork by brother. Two-storeyed concrete building on site of first mission. Eight years' training to be priests. Three ordained. Laboratory with anatomical models, telegraph apparatus, etc.

Tabora school. Huge two-storeyed concrete building. Arcaded outbuildings for native teachers, old buildings, farm, etc. Bad soil. One class typing. Boys wore uniforms of khaki caps, vests and shorts. Band drilled by KAR sergeant-major.

Saturday morning school court. Honour boards with one boy a year's name. Dais. Carved shield-back chairs. We sat on dais with prefects, school on floor. Prefect of week shouts out 'Shari' (case). Three urchins called out accused of smoking. No defence. Laid on floor, held down, and given two strokes each with cane by sergeant who salutes after beating. Loud cries in most cases. A larger boy accused of refusing to plough field. Said he didn't hear order. Witnesses called. Prefects discuss case and sentence him four strokes. An announcement made that epidemic of mumps in town over. Then we go out.

Went to Indian cinema with commercial traveller. Old Charlie in transition stage Keystone - Goldrush. Polishes his nails before meals. Food stolen. Eats grass with salt and pepper and delicacy, rinses fingers. In the end handsome lover turns up and Charlie goes off. Followed Indian film; fairy story; very ornamental. Beautiful girl greeted with shouts (no women in building) and is led from her bed to precipice and thrown over. 'That is her dream.'* Supposedly beautiful youth gazes at her. 'He wants to take her into the bushes.' Later elephant with drunken attendant. 'That is an elephant.' Elephant escapes, wicked robber attempts entrap heroine. Her father dies saying he has never kept promise to irrigate desert, etc.

*Comment(s) by Waugh's Indian companion