Ray Thomas and Frank Guerrero hit satirical paydirt in May of 1999 when GOP frontrunner George W. Bush openly declared that "there ought to be limits to freedom." For a satirist there are few greater achievements than to be able to skewer the target using that target’s own words. Bush was responding to a satirical website initially published and written by Thomas and Guerrero using a web domain owned by Zack Exley. This website, www.gwbush.com, is a satirical parody of Bush’s Campaign Exploratory Committee website located at www.georgewbush.com. According to Guerrero, Bush’s comment suggesting the limitation of freedom came as a response to a KEYE TV reporter’s question regarding the www.gwbush.com website during an Austin press conference. This comment not only gave their website great publicity but also provided great material for future versions of the satire. Thomas and Guerrero were "vastly delighted."
What provoked the anger from Bush was not the fact that his campaign was the subject of humorous commentary. Any major party frontrunner can expect to have his campaign scrutinized by humorists. Bush expects to have to put up with the likes of Leno, Letterman, and various political cartoonists; it comes with the territory. What Bush feels he should not have to endure is satire that offers no disclaimer—no satire label. He feels he should not have to endure the chaos and confusion that accompany parody.
A major factor in the effectiveness of early versions of www.gwbush.com, was the fact that it so closely resembled the actual Bush site. Graphics and text were remarkably similar. The main difference in the original version of the rogue site was a strong anti-corporation message mixed in with the usual campaign rhetoric. On the opening screen, appearing under a picture of Bush posing with some Hispanic supporters is the cutline, "When the supposed providers of information are all owned by one company, is it any wonder political discourse is infantile?"
According to Ray Thomas, he and Guerrero were satirizing the "corporate effect in politics." Thomas describes this corporate effect in politics saying that "Perhaps the biggest, broadest effect is a nearly complete ‘dumbing down’ of behavior and thought and dialogue, even on the ‘radical left.’ Politicians are always responsible to something, of course—their constituents, their party, their ideology. This immediately reduces the range of what they can reasonably say. But when politicians are responsible to corporations--for election costs, for positive coverage, etc.--the range of what they can say shrinks to almost nothing. Any discussion of the actual effects of corporate-style "progress" on human beings, for example--the nasty effects of "efficiency," etc.--becomes taboo. On the other hand, anything to do with increasing profits is a welcome subject. The range becomes rather miniscule."
In this version of the website the approach was subtle. There was very little that would immediately set it apart from an actual Bush website, especially the actual web address. This rogue website prompted a cease and desist letter from the Bush campaign addressed to Zack Exley, the owner of the domain. Unbeknownst to Thomas and Guerrero, the sole writers of all www.gwbush.com material at that time, Exley attempted unsuccessfully to sell that domain name for $350,000 in response to that letter. This move was completely at odds with the goals of the website creators, Thomas and Guerrero. According to Thomas, "The confidence in appealing to greed, here, says more about the effect of corporate desires on our society than about Exley in particular, because he really did see his behavior as valid and decent, and probably wouldn't have under other conditions."
The website was subsequently revised with more of Exley’s input. The approach was much less subtle, but there was still no disclaimer identifying the site as satire. It maintained a parody approach. One significant addition to this second version of the site was the addition of material aimed at satirizing Bush’s comments about past drug use. According to the website:
G.W. Bush's politics derive from his own life experience. Although he made serious mistakes as a youth, the Bible says, "Do unto others..." And G.W. Bush has indeed been forgiven again and again by others.
First there was his rambunctious youth, in which he doesn't deny there was use of cocaine and other drugs. Then, as an unsuccessful Texas businessman, he was bailed out with millions of dollars from friends of his Vice-President father. As President, G.W. Bush wants to create an America in which everyone gets as much forgiveness, and as many chances to grow up, as he had.
This is fairly common comic material regarding Bush. His comic caricature often paints him as the pampered rich boy who got all the breaks. G.B. Trudeau tackles the same joke this way:
What Bush is responding so vehemently to is not the joke. He is not going after Trudeau, Leno, Letterman, or any other thousands of comics who lampoon his tough-on-crime stance despite the breaks he has gotten. It is the presentation that Bush is responding to and particularly its potential to create confusion. It is precisely this confusion that gives parody a peculiar sort of power that other forms of satire do not have. According to Thomas, " to present the audience with something that does not scream out its message in one simple line is viewed as dangerous, foolhardy, and just plain erroneous--even by those who claim the highest regard for that audience. And so political satire becomes clearer and clearer, simpler and simpler, and less and less interesting."
Exley has now severed ties with Guerrero and Thomas. Thomas says that at some point Exley became uncomfortable with the more subtle approach and "kicked them off the project." The current version of the site sports this very direct banner:
Notice the not-too-subtle cocaine smear under the nose. This version of the site does not even really attempt to fool anyone into thinking it is an actual Bush site.
This move from unlabeled parody towards labeled topical humor is a very common trend in American satire. The parody form is quickly disappearing from the national humor landscape due to litigation and corporate timidity and the reason for its disappearance is precisely what gives it its power, the confusion factor.
Former Daily Show correspondent Brian Unger suggests that the move away from edgy parody has at its core more than just fear of litigation. According to Unger:
Real satire defies current methods of TV promotion and marketing. Translation: it's "edgy." By nature, satire comes in a form which is inherently misleading. It is subtle -- "not what it appears to be" -- despite its traditional construction: set-up, joke, punchline. Therefore, concepts are perceived as difficult to promote in 15 seconds. I don't agree. If you can find a way tell the audience it's a joke, they will respond.
Even more, satire is difficult to sell to advertisers who want to place ads in unambiguous, easily defined product (show) that targets a specific buying or viewing demographic -- usually 18-34 year-olds. To a network, if you can't promote it, the wisdom is no one will watch it. It's such a tough sell; it requires a TV executive with a bit of courage to let good satire find an audience, to build buzz, to generate word-of-mouth. And often, this
takes more time than networks are willing to give.
Unger was an interesting choice for The Daily Show. He came to the show as a comedy outsider; he, along with host Craig Kilborn, was from the world of mainstream broadcasting. When Lizz Winstead created The Daily Show for Comedy Central, the choice of Craig Kilborn and Brian Unger was a deliberate one. Both of these television personalities came to the show from the world of conventional broadcasting rather than that of comedy. Kilborn was an anchor for ESPN, and Unger had worked with Connie Chung at CBS in the world of "conventional news". Clearly what Winstead and Executive Producer Madeline Smithberg were going for at the outset was a cast with experience in conventional news sources to closer resemble those sources and lampoon them more effectively. They could therefore rail against not only the ills of society but also the way information about that society is presented to us.
Since then many changes have been made at The Daily Show. Like other forms of current satire, the show has made a move away from parody towards topical standup. In the second season a studio audience was added making it seem even less like an actual news show. It began to resemble the target less and less and look more and more like a comedy show. Unger, Kilborn, and Winstead have all left the show. Madeline Smithberg replaced Kilborn not with another personality from conventional broadcasting, but rather with stand-up comedian Jon Stewart.
Unger and Winstead have since been working on a pilot for a new show that is designed to parody television newsmagazines like 20/20, Dateline and Sixty Minutes. They pitched it to Fox as a midseason replacement, but Fox did not pick it up. Apparently they were not able to find that courageous TV executive they were looking for.
Fellow Daily Show alumnus A.Whitney Brown also worked on the pilot and is no stranger to television news parody. Brown has been through an attempt at news parody at Fox before. Brown also worked for Fox’s short-lived Wilton North Report. Mediocrity and timidity marred this attempt at TV satire. One writer for the show said that the Executive Producer for the show deliberately hired mediocre disk jockeys as anchormen because he had just been fired by Letterman, and didn’t want to have a host for a show he was producing become that powerful again. It is precisely this fear of risk taking that is resistant to TV satire that has the potential to confuse.
But Brown is perhaps still best known for his work on the legendary TV satire institution, Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live in its early years relied on sharp-edged parody as its main satirical tool.
When Saturday Night Live was new in 1975, commercial parodies were few and far between, and because of that lack of satiric material in the television medium, those parodies were able to hit hard and attack the foibles of corporate as well as local advertising very effectively. During that time, SNL regularly used non-castmembers as characters in these sketches to go for a higher degree of realism. This was true parody.
As SNL became a comedy institution, commercial parody became increasingly predictable. There is even a designated spot for it in the show—right after the monologue. It is audibly different from other commercial breaks in that the applause track often continues into the initial seconds of the commercial. In fact it is not uncommon for the studio audience mike to be left on during the entire commercial parody. Few SNL commercial parodies are produced anymore with characters other than highly recognizable castmembers. The result is that this once towering giant of hard-hitting satire has softened its approach or at least cleared up any confusion.
By the time Brown joined the featured cast, SNL was already becoming institutional in its approach, particularly the Weekend Update segment. During early seasons this segment took the form of parody in that it satirized not only the topical news stories, but also newsgathering and reporting itself. Ackroyd and Curtin’s Point Counterpoint segment, Belushi’s weatherman and ranting editorial, Garrett Morris’s deaf interpreter, Bill Murray’s celebrity interviews, and Radner’s disgruntled viewer editorial were all brilliant parodies of news conventions in that they resembled the actual news. Brown’s "Big Picture" segments were among the last attempts at parody during the Weekend Update segment.
However, in the institutionalized version of SNL Weekend Update, Norm MacDonald regularly introduced the segment by referring to it as "the fake news." Correspondents showed up with a guitar and sang songs. Colin Quinn started the segment for most of last year in front of the desk standing up then later saying, "Let’s go do the news." None of this even resembles news shows anymore. It is satire that has abandoned its target. It is no longer the voice of countercultural dissent. What started as a solid parody that satirized the conventions of newsgathering and reporting has moved in the direction of topical standup. In fact, when asked about the difference between SNL and Mad TV, SNL Executive Producer Lorne Michaels said to the Los Angeles Times, "They're primarily parody. I'm sure they do what they do really well. I don't think we're that interested in parody. We're more of a live variety show."
Many satirists claim that subtlety may be the problem. It is as if network executives will shy away from anything that cannot be pigeonholed and therefore classified as a clear targeted market. According to Daily Show creator Lizz Winstead, television executives often complain that material is too subtle. She also suggests that satire may be an endangered form of social expression, at least on television. She says, "I think that satire is a thing that is dying on the vine. The networks don’t really understand satire and sometimes view it as "what you’re saying is racist…what you’re saying is evil" and it’s like "no—By pointing out stereotypes in such an overblown way, you are debunking the stereotype and you are making fun of the people who come up with the stereotypes."
Brian Unger also suggests that subtlety is out of vogue among the television elite saying:
On network, satire can't be too mean or too smart so that it excludes large numbers of viewers. Subtlety is not necessarily a virtue. And jokes require a bit of telegraphing -- in other words -- you can hear the joke coming down the track.
Unger suggests, like Thomas and Guerrero, that corporate influence is the major determining factor in what gets aired on television. Unger asserts that even in the world of cable’s more targeted programming, intelligent satire is a tough sell:
Networks are broadcasters -- vying for mass audience -- not niche programmers like cable. So, at the network level, the stage is set for some fierce creative battles over content and the perceived intelligence of the viewers. The same battles exist in cable but to a lesser extent -- where there is less corporate interference, smaller audiences, more narrow demographics. In either case, whoever gets the most 18-34 year-old viewers, wins. And whoever gets the most 18-18 1/2 year-old viewers really wins.
So where does satire thrive in America? Well one of the long-time bastions of intelligent satire without disclaimer is Paul Krassner’s periodical The Realist. Since 1958 it has published actual stories side by side with apocryphal ones with only the reader’s perception to tell the difference. Like most satirists who adopt this style, Krassner says that there is beauty in the confusion. According to Krassner, what is fascinating about blurring the lines between what is real and what is not is the way humans "build their lives around illusions which become their reality." He suggests that if bizaare truth can be exaggerated in such a way that it can be accepted as reality, then that acceptance reveals the "basis of your perception." He suggests that what is happening in this kind of satire is the creation of a sort of "metaphorical truth."
Krassner’s most notorious piece was undoubtedly the "Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book" piece. Published in The Realist in 1967 only four years after the assassination, it claimed to be the transcript of sections of William Manchester’s The Death of a President that had been stricken during a final edit by the Kennedy family. Among them was the outrageous claim that on the plane from Dallas to Washington D.C., that Jackie Kennedy had witnessed then Vice President Lyndon Johnson copulating with the president’s throat wound possibly to try to change it from an entrance wound to an exit wound. It was a very effective piece of satire because according to Krassner, "it was consistent with the personalities of JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson." Krassner suggests that while the described scene of necrophilia wasnot an actual truth "it was a metaphorical truth in the context of the Vietnam War abroad and the quest for political power domestically."
Sadly even The Realist is leaving us. Krassner will publish only a few more issues before laying this American institution to rest. Though The Realist is in its final days, and the networks cancelled "This Week," and all trace of subtlety is gone from www.gwbush.com, there is still subtle, yet hard hitting satire out there. But who knows for how long?
Possible graybox information-
The following is a list of websites where parody and satire are still viable media:
www.adbusters.org--superior commercial parodies www.gatt.org--great subtle parody of the WTO site www.yesrudy.com--parody of a Giuliani campaign site www.grayday.com--parody of an anti-online copyright infringement site www.michaelmoore.com--Homepage of anticorporate activist Michael Moore
Another—
Legendary satirist Paul Krassner is the author of two new books. Pot Stories for the Soul is a collection of stories culled from 250 of Krassner’s friends. Impolite Interviews is a collection of interviews that originally appeared in The Realist. The interviewed include He also has a new CD titled Sex, Drugs, and the Antichrist—Paul Krassner at MIT.