Inception

Dear Dookie,

I’ve just started reading your column and I’m a little confused. Do you mean what you’re saying? I don’t really get satire, so I’m having trouble understanding the point of your articles. Help!

—Stumped by Satire

Dear Stumpy,

I’m sorry if I’ve misled you. Nothing about what I write adheres to the rules of satire. I’ve meant 100 percent of everything that I’ve said. Satire is for cowards who aren’t willing to be forthright about what they mean and instead want to communicate through riddles and tricky mind games. I read to be entertained, not to THINK. Anything beyond first grade-level intellectual functioning and I’m not even going to try to understand.

So honestly, I don’t know if I’m the best person to answer your question. I don’t really get what satire is. I see comments on my articles and don’t really understand if the commenter was reading the same article that I wrote. They think my message is twisted. I think they have a bad sense of humor, no sense of irony and a low threshold for personal offense. However, I have learned something from the reactions to my advice column, and that is that satire, much like the rest of humor, is something that deals strictly in absolutes. How can something be considered true if it isn’t universally agreed upon by all humanity? Something is funny, or it isn’t. Something is good satire, or it’s dookie.

But even we humorless philistines can get some enjoyment out of this barren, dystopian world of satire. The best way I’ve found to understand satire is to take it piecemeal. Eight-hundred words of a college student’s writing is a lot to take in at one time, so I prefer to skip around and find the important parts. Taking a context-free quote here or there and constructing your own interpretation of the author’s message is how satire is meant to be read. It’s such an efficient method that I’ve adopted it for reading most anything. It enables me to command intellectual conversations about a variety of literary topics—such as the implication in “To Kill a Mockingbird” that racism and murder are okay sometimes, or (SPOILER ALERT!) how anticlimactic it was that the entire “Harry Potter” series was just the dream of a dead, gay dude. After you’ve assembled your sound-bite opinion, go forth and tell it to the world! If there’s something we’ve learned from online comment boards, openly accepted letters to the editor and Sarah Palin, it’s that you need absolutely no qualifications or even real intellectual capabilities to purport yourself as an expert on something. Everyone’s opinion is equally important. Thanks, Obama.

The second step to satire is rejecting underlying messages and exposing them for what they are: dangerous. Although we know it’s SUPPOSED to be a shocking, sometimes humorous and relatable way to provoke discussion on difficult, divisive issues, the truth is that satirists usually believe the things they write and use this front of “satire” to trick you into reading them. Satirists know that the average person reading their material will see their wit and verbosity and blindly accept whatever they write without a second thought. I mean, thank God Jonathan Swift illustrated new meal options, much to the relief of the nervous, fat-jiggling aristocrats. They knew their babies would have been the most tender. When he wrote about his diet of welfare queens and street children in “A Modest Proposal,” the people of Ireland began fattening their lowlier neighbors in order to preemptively bake them into poor-people pepperoni to put on their deep-poverty pizzas. And thus, social equality was achieved.