satire is a collective sedative
Satire is a creative superpower that has the ability to liberate us from the status quo, but our overreliance on it has turned it into a collective sedative.
satire is a collective sedative
There are obvious downsides to this line of thinking. It’s anti-intellectual, for one. But also, the incessant caricaturing and dumbing down of major life events numbs us to their significance. If a meme pokes fun at someone’s bad behaviour, it gives the bad behaviour a pass. Through our rapid meme-fication and IJBOLing, we obfuscate the evil of... See more
Have We Lost Our Minds?
Sometimes, things are serious. Not everything needs to be turned into a joke. As Anhedönia said, we can still make jokes and laugh, but we’ve lost the ability to know when to stop – and it’s time we learned how.
Halima Jibril • Ethel Cain says we are in an irony epidemic – is she right?
exactly—irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say.
D. T. Max • Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
The critic Roy Christopher has called irony “the most abused trope of our time, a ‘get out of judgment free’ card, an escape route, an exit strategy.”
Ian Bogost • Play Anything
then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today's avant-garde tries to write about? One clue's to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after thirty long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It's not a mode that wears especially well. As Hyde puts it,
... See morethefreelibrary.com • E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.
“Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it's not satire, it's bullying.” – Terry Pratchett
“Sometimes those ironic and satirical memes are too heavy-handed, and they go into things that, at a certain point, it’s not really a joke anymore,” Mr. Luna said. He said he appreciated wholesome content instead. Watching cat videos is one of his favorite pastimes. “I really enjoy seeing that type of content as opposed to people making fun of
... See more