Satire has been rendered meaningless by reality

The concept of satire no longer applies given the current state of our world

By Rebecca Peterson, Interim Humour Editor

Over the weekend the New York Times reported, officially, that the concept of satire has lost all relevance due to current events.

“Every time we write a piece of satire these days, something happens that makes it look like news,” columnist Tom B. Badil said in a phone interview on Monday, sounding very tired. “And every time we write a news article, it winds up looking like satire. I actually had to write an article explaining how months after his tragic shooting, the internet is now honouring a dead gorilla with the hashtag ‘dicks out for Harambe.’ I had to write that with my own two hands. I have a Masters from Yale. What am I even doing with my life, Linda?”

(No one named Linda was on the phone with him at the time.)

With ex-reality TV star and rancid-carrot-with-the-vocabulary-of-an-eight-year-old Donald Trump in a serious campaign for the White House, police officers bragging about hunting and shooting black people in the streets, violent white male sex offenders being released from jail early because of the potentially negative impact life behind bars might have on them, and many other obscure and horrible realities we now face, everyone has started to agree that the world has taken a turn for the horrifically bizarre.

“It doesn’t even matter that I’m a strawman figure written to demonstrate the lack of critical thinking employed by Trump supporters in the States,” said young voter John White, star of another article in this section. “There are probably real-life people who have said exactly what I’m saying. They’re probably even named John. It’s a pretty common name.”

Well-known artist K.C. Green recently updated a comic he originally drew three years ago, where a dog sits in a burning room, while expressing calm acceptance of the fatal situation he finds himself in. This comic in many ways satirized the complacency of others in horrible situations. However, the artist himself felt that the satire of the piece was beginning to get lost due to real life complacency in the face of current events, and rewrote the comic to show the dog panicking about the disaster unfolding around him. Though this little anecdote appears in a satire article in the Humour section of this newspaper, it is a real thing that has actually happened. A humour artist had to change his well-known comic satirizing human complacency because it had become too literal.

“It’s just not funny anymore,” said staff writer Rebecca Peterson, to no one in particular, as she stared at the articles spread out across her laptop and the fifteen tabs of bad news open in her Google Chrome browser. “I mean, it is, I guess, but… God, at what cost?”