If it’s not provocation, it’s useless! — A love letter to satire.
Maybe I should warn you that this won’t be an objective essay on satire and caricatures. This blogpost won’t be full of well-balanced pro and con arguments supporting both sides of the discourse. I’m sorry, I know we’ve all learned it differently at school. But I am way too much of a fan of satire to stay objective. So this post will rather be my exuberant explanation of why I think satire is incredibly important to our society and why it should be allowed to say everything, yes, everything.
Apparently, this is a quite upsetting time to be alive, with wars all over the place, populists regaining power in one country after the other and the (more or less) given risk of terror attacks. To sum it up, there is a lot of horrible and alarming things going on. Although many of these things stage in countries far away, they still have an impact on our lives, one way or the other. With thousands and thousands of refugees fleeing warzones and our economies being connected due to globalisation, it’s also on us to inform ourselves on what is happening and then act responsibly. Now, a major problem that I and many others have faced is that all this information at some point weighs so heavily on our shoulders that we’re just fed up with all this negativity and choose to rather not care. And this is where satire kicks in.
The mission of caricaturists is to point out contradictions, identify weak spots in society and politics and hit nerves, again and again — with wit, sarcasm and humour as their weapons. Satire is constructed of several elements. First of all, there is the obvious joke that catches our attention and is simply fun. We just love being entertained and having a good giggle. Then, however, we need to look beyond the joke and figure out the problem. Wherever there is a joke in satire, there also is a problem. Now, the potential of satire is to break down complex contents concisely and pointedly and to use these shortcuts to shed light on truths. This way it becomes much easier and more pleasant to wrap our head around controversial topics and to care about them.
Of course, being provocative and dishing out insults in every direction leads to controversy and, naturally, to people disagreeing with the caricature or satirical text. However, an open society should be capable of a differentiated debate. In the worst case though, people feel so offended by satire, that they physically attack its source, as seen during the terror attacks on Charlie Hebdo in 2006 after having published Mohammed caricatures.
The point is that we don’t have to agree with everything said in satire, we don’t have to like it. But we need to understand that satire is crucial to our society because it addresses problems that others are too afraid to address. Caricatures have to be provocative, if not, they are useless! I think that satire is the expression of an enlightened, liberal society and although we might not always like what is being portrayed, we need to accept and defend our right to free speech.
