[If ever a year both needed and yet resisted a heavy dose of satire, it would be 2024. So for this year’s April Fool’s series I’ll share a humorous handful of SatireStudying posts—please add your thoughts on these and any other satirical texts you’d highlight for a knee-slapping yet pointed crowd-sourced weekend post!]
[NOTE:
This post originally aired in 2017; I’m sure there’s lots of great TV satire
since we could add to this list, and please do so for the weekend post!]
On four comic
shows from which we can learn a great deal about our society and culture.
1)
Key & Peele
(2012-2015): During its five seasons and fifty-three episodes, Keegan-Michael
Key and Jordan Peele’s Comedy Central sketch comedy series was more than just
consistently hilarious; it offered some of the most biting and insightful
reflections on race in
America that I’ve ever seen (in any genre or medium). (By all reports, Peele’s
new horror film Get Out manages
the same impressive balance of entertainment and social commentary within that
genre.) If I were to suggest any one cultural work to represent race in America
in the age of Trayvon and Obama, it would have
to be Key & Peele; a viewer
could dive into almost any episode and come away with a better understanding of
the lightest and darkest of both this crucial issue and our national community.
2)
Inside Amy Schumer
(2013- ). I would say many of the same things about Amy Schumer’s Comedy
Central sketch comedy show, which has aired four seasons and has a fifth coming
at some point in the future; only her show focuses its social satirical lens
most consistently on issues of gender and sex. Schumer is particularly adept at
utilizing parody in the best ways about which I wrote in yesterday’s post: see
this Friday Night Lights sketch on football and rape culture; or this clip from her
transcendent, episode-long parody of Twelve
Angry Men. But her entirely original sketches are just as biting, as
illustrated by this one
on female celebrities experiencing their “last fuckable day.” Between the two
of them, Key & Peele and Inside Amy Schumer could comprise the
entire syllabus for a course on 21st century America and you
wouldn’t run out of things to talk about.
3)
Last Week Tonight
(2014- ): The Daily Show veteran John
Oliver’s weekly news satire show on HBO is an entirely different animal, not
only from sketch comedy shows like those but even from The Daily Show and its ilk. What Oliver does best—and, perhaps,
what only Oliver does—is produce in-depth segments, usually running in the
ballpark of twenty minutes, that examine a complex issue at great length,
featuring a mixture of humor, investigative reporting, and impassioned
arguments and activism. If you haven’t seen any, I don’t think you can go
wrong, but I would recommend in particular this one on the death
penalty, this
one on prisons, this
one on refugees, and this one on
online harassment of women. Like many folks, I used to say that The Daily Show offered more accurate
news than most of the news media; that might well still be true, but I don’t
think any current show offers better reporting on vital American issues than Last Week Tonight.
4)
Full
Frontal (2016- ): Another Daily
Show vet, Samantha Bee’s weekly news satire show is the newest of this
batch (it debuted just over a year ago), but has already impressed me (and
everybody else I’ve ever talked to about it) with its blend of reporting and
humor (a la Oliver’s show) mixed with Bee’s unique, fiery, and never less than
compelling voice and perspective. Once again, I don’t think you can go wrong
with any clip, but this
one—Bee’s response to Donald Trump’s Access
Hollywood tape scandal from last October—is a particular favorite and
exemplifies all those qualities that have made this show much-watch television
so quickly. As I wrote in this
post on the media and the 2016 election (written in the halcyon days before
that election actually transpired), to my mind the majority of the best
coverage of that campaign came from the Olivers and Bees of the media world.
That’s partly a disturbing reflection of the state of other parts of the news
media, to be sure; but it’s also partly an illustration of just how vital these
kinds of social satirical voices have become in our society and culture.
Last
satire tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do
you think? Other satirical works you’d share?
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