this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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El Chisme
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Satire does not work. It just reinforces the thing it's satirising because it is literally the content that its fans want to see.
It sells, because people on one side are entertained by the satire and the people on the other side get the exact content they want reinforcing their beliefs anyway.
I am anti-satire.
Interestingly the hogs in the UK hate this. Daily Mail comments section can be summed up with "This sets women back decades, it's like we're in the 60s/70s again".
Also, I don't see how this is satire.
Sabrina is pretty openly horny and makes horny music, often about how she likes being in subby roles with men. I think she may just like giving head while getting her hair tugged and wrote some music about it.
The biggest problem with satire is that people don't know what satire is. "Satire" sucks now because it isn't satirical. Words no longer have meanings, everything is just vibes.
Making an allusion to a concept without any statement at all on that concept? fuck it, that's satire.
You mean something figuratively? fuck it, say literally.
Even prescriptivism is useless, because reading comprehension and media literacy are non-existent.
100% I don’t think this is satire it’s just hot
Lyrics seem tame but I suppose this is mainstream music? I know some uhh... Less tame stuff.
It's what bad modern day satire has turned into which is just "look at me I'm doing the thing"
Okay but that still suggests some satirical intent. I don't think she's gone that far even, I think she just likes the thing and is doing it.
I think satire is only subversive when shared within a subversive subculture. Once satire escapes into the mainstream it stops being subversive and just becomes the thing it is satirizing.
It's just the process of detournament and recouperation, and satire flows both ways.
This is my least favorite recurring Hexbear take tbh. Not all things dubbed "satire" are the same and didacticism is not the only way.
Do you have examples of useful satire?
I am willing to debate this and reconsider my view but I never see anyone materially demonstrate its usefulness.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department
Blazing Saddles single handedly killed an entire (racist as fuck) film genre
can't believe we're forgetting shrek
Some... BODY!!!
Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed
She was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb In the shape of an "L" on her forehead
Well, the years start comin' and they don't stop comin'
Fed to the rules and I hit the ground runnin'
did "hey let's eat irish babies" do anything over there or is swift's only legacy being used as a school lesson? they skipped the part where they should've told us if it made a difference.
The name "Vanessa" comes from a poem of his, but I don't think that's too relevant to his satire.
i also forgot about a bunch of stuff from gulliver's travels, but byte-order conventions are probably not relevant either
Honestly have no idea, not one I'm an expert on. Perhaps? I wonder if the efficacy of this style of critique changes depending on society and media literacy rate. Probably? This would also be different historically I assume.
yeah there are several sibling chains about riding the line of subtlety and i think that's mostly a literacy issue.
I just watched a crash analysis video of Air France flight 447 and right before it slams into the ocean the first officer says "This can't be true!"
That's how this post makes me feel
I don't think I even like the initial premise that it's art's job to be "materially useful"
That's fair. But art still falls into politically useful, politically useless, and politically harmful categories. I'm going to prefer the useful and I'm going to tell people to make more of the useful and less of the useless, while actively trying to prevent the harmful.
With that said. I'm not going to say something useless but entirely unrelated to politics should stop. Just that people making political art could do so in a different and more useful way.
Pixar's Sodas.
Dogcatcher Inataro?
Aamon Animations' stuff.
Is this satire? Or full on lampooning? Depicting the other side as giant fucking alien biblical monsters doesn't seem satirical but a rather direct and clear attack.
the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
Harsh cold take imo
the way I see it, the problem with satire is that good satire straddles a very very thin line: if you're too subtle, the satirical aspect is lost on the target audience that you're making fun of, but if you're not subtle enough, it's no longer identifiable as a plausible representation of the thing in question, and then it becomes pointless
but see almost anything but outright clownish representation ends up as too subtle unless something else about the work makes it so inapproachable that the only people who bother to consume it are able to pick up on it.
what I find lame about this "satire", as someone who has jokes, is that it is obviously banking heavy on the controversy and titillation of the audience that enjoys overt misogynistic expression anyway. it's lazily doing the thing while claiming it is against the thing. that's not clever. might as well blast the N-word to get everyone's immediate attention and then expect them to recognize the subtext of one's far-less-obvious body of work in anti-racism and begin applauding.
good satire makes the thing it satirized unpalatable to the people it lampoons with shame. it scorns them such that they would not want it shared or seen.
that's a very good point, but then I think it begs the question: shameful to whom?
I say that because I think Starship Troopers (the discourse, I know) for example is great satire, but a fascist wouldn't be ashamed of liking it unironically among other fascists who also don't get that they're being made fun of
in the case of this album cover, is it successful satire if horny guys who sexualize women look at it and share it with other horny guys who do the same thing? she's an attractive woman in a very sexual scenario, so it would absolutely be very palatable to this audience
I'm not really arguing any points, just thinking out loud here because I think that's legit an interesting debate and I don't really have a solid take on it
I think it's hard to find satire in commercial products, because it needs to be sold to make back it's investment... so it veers into parody and entertainment, because those are more pleasant to experience.
I respect verhoeven's politics, and I have no doubt he set out to make a movie that would revolt anyone with a critical eye. even as a dumbass teenager I felt upset by Starship Troopers' for reasons I couldn't articulate. and, at the time, I felt like I must be weird, because while it revolted me but made my chuddy friends very excited and happy. so, unfortunately for art, but fortunately for the studios, the cinema-attending masses are incurious and uncritical in the US. that's the needle verhoeven threaded, erring on the side of careerism. no shade, we all gotta eat.
I think good satire, as I define it, is something fringe and often dismissed as preachy or too "dark" for the general public... because the public perhaps has limited interest in transgressive art/expression except in times of crisis.
maybe something that complicates our experience is that so much of the creative expressions we are invited to engage in the US are explicitly commercial, rather than actual public art.
so when we comb the landscape of our culture, looking for something authentic and truly revealing of our social problems, we are only ever searching through the garbage can of ideology. we think of entertainment products by default, instead of preachy street graffiti or other cracks in the facade where subversive thoughts make their home.
I have never seen good satire.
Shrek?
See, I haven't seen that since I was a kid and have no clue what it is supposed to be satirizing.
True, but then do you really have an audience, in the first place? Does satire even need to have an audience? Does a satirical product need to be a product in and of itself?
Let's imagine a piece of satire, I dunno, let's say, a fake poster for an Azov battalion documentary that's full of nazi symbols. Make it really outlandish so that nobody could take it seriously. Is that good satire?
But what if you actually make a satirical mockumentary about Azov that's outrageously nazi, to an absurd degree. Well then, you might just end up being liked by the nazis who are also fans of Azov, so did you really do satire, or did you just do a nazi film?
Like I said in the other comment, I'm just spitballing here, trying to figure this out as I go along, because I'm interested in the debate lol
I mean, depends on the portrayal. outrageously Nazi to an absurd degree may be satire but absurdity by itself is not in itself necessary satirical. When I said clownish I wasn't necessarily meaning merely outlandish either but more so the satirical work almost needs to portray the subject of its ridicule in a way a clown portrays themself. Not necessarily just outlandish but with universally understood cultural references that indicate intentional stupidity.
If someone does stupid stuff dressed normally, we may assume mistakes, incompetence etc. If they do the same dress as a clown, there tends to be an assumption of intent due to the clown dress being a thematic explanation. From my understanding, the boys moved to this type of storytelling in season 4 and it made a bunch of people realize it was making fun of them.
There is also the route of outright statements after every bit where you explain you are portraying something you ridicule.
In essence, I think if your concern is a group you're portraying needs to be ridiculed in a way where they don't embrace it via your work you need something along the lines of Garth Marenghi's philosophy.
Satire requires textual clarity. Like it can't just be "bad thing that's silly in some way, extra silly edition" it has to be self-defeating and ideally include its own refutation in explicit terms. It's like how "I'm doing bad thing, but and here's the twist, I disagree with bad thing, huh? huh? pretty clever right?" is generally a bad format outside of in-group contexts where stilted presentation and an established reputation ensure that it comes across as mockery instead of just doing the bad thing but in a funny voice.
And even then satire isn't a converting argument, it's not something you win people over with, it's entertainment for people who agree with it. Its use as propaganda is more in reinforcing a position rather than spreading it, it's a "point and laugh at the bad thing" at its shallowest or an exploration of why bad thing is bad at its deepest.
This is true, but what’s the solution? Make shittier art because we need to make sure the absolute dumbest motherfuckers in the world get the message?
Why are you assuming that non-satirical art is inferior? Wouldnt you prefer art tackle issues directly instead of abstracting them into meaninglessness?
Because tackling issues directly and in a way that dumb dumbs can absorb by definition must be bereft of subtlety, nuance or contradiction. All of which are a part of the human experience that good art is able to express. Not all art absolutely must have indirect qualities to be good or even to have depth, but art as a whole would be way less rewarding without them.
Directness necessitates subtlety and nuance. You are making big claims about "good art" and what it entails, but I don't see how something must be satire or indirect to accomplish this. I don't even think satire is inherently bad, but I think it's pretty clear what purpose it serves in the modern world since it's massive proliferation in the 20th century.
Also, people don't misunderstand art because they are "dumb."
This is accurate. People misunderstand art because it requires cultural literacy, and most people are partially to completely culturally illiterate, because we live in a time of the massive fracturing of mass market culture.
This includes myself. Perhaps it is satirical, perhaps it is sincere, perhaps it is good art, perhaps it is bad art. I wouldn't know, I am not the targeted demographic.
Hell, having been a Charlie xcx fan for years since her collaborations with the PC Music label (RIP) I thought 'brat' on release as mostly just a very well produced semi-self aware pop party album, a decent in-between of her best (imo) and most experimental pop album 'How I'm Feeling Now' (which was also one of her worst selling) and her more return to form of 'Crash' but then she went and attempted to turn it into a feminist political vehicle, and now she is attempting to keep pressing on the whole 'brat' concept and even going so far as to rebrand many of her previous albums in that light, which is hella weird and a bad move imo, because none of her earlier albums exhibit those characteristics. If I can't even be truly media literate in the messaging of an artist I have been following for years, I have absolutely no chance with someone like Sabrina Carpenter.