I have 'queer satire panic': How can we exaggerate in an exaggerated world?
Writer and comedian Trevor Campbell wonders whether the horrifying state of things is messing with his jokes
Emerging Queer Voices is a monthly LGBTQ arts and culture column that features different up-and-coming LGBTQ writers. You can read more about the series and find all published editions here.
It's a perverse time to be alive — and as a queer person, I know perversion.
My community of sexual deviants has acquired a reputation as champions of unorthodox pleasure, but even our most joyfully accommodating have stumbled from their dungeons, pulling off gimp masks and ball gags to mutter in awe at a new age of dictatorial fealty:
"Now that's submission."
Things have gotten weird. Technocrat ideologues have stormed the Capitol, and this time they didn't even have the decency to wear funny hats. The ancient machinery of systemic oppression is accelerating, fuelled by the paradoxically infinite nature of our collective scarcity complex. And not only have church and state brazenly slipped into bed, but they've finally confessed their most craven of fantasies: an Ouroboros-style orgy with a parade of soulless and unblinking billionaires in muscle polos and shearling coats.
At the risk of yucking someone else's yum: yuck.
As a queer writer and satirist who has always found his greatest joy in the upside-down, I'm having a hard time. My source material has jumped the shark. How, I wonder as I look out at a world on fire, do you spoof a spoof?
Listen, I can appreciate some of the offbeat world-building — like an aging dictator who turns his public seat of government into a car dealership — but it's overwritten. Once-obvious works of satire must now be revised to include disclaimers assuring us that their absurd fictions are not, in fact, fact.
It's frightening, it's depressing and, worst of all, it's messing with my jokes.
Plato and his contemporaries theorized that the pleasure of humour comes from its lens of superiority: a comedic premise reveals how we are either better than our neighbours or earlier, inferior versions of ourselves. Freud thought joyful hysterics were the release of our many taboo-driven tensions. An acting teacher I had in college told us that laughter is recognition (we laughed in response). We recognize the relational distance of fantasy and reality, and we're thrilled by how different — or similar — they might be.
Comedy is the rhythm of tension and release. A good joke is dependent on its twist, an unexpected discovery that recontextualizes a previously established premise.
That's why when you break down a joke — or precede a punchline by warning your audience of its imminent arrival — you iron out the twist and suck out the joy. (If you don't believe me, read the abstract to this academic article on joke construction and tell me if you spit-take your Shirley Temple.)
Your favourite comedians make you laugh by unexpectedly shifting your perspective, which requires a shared understanding of how you see the world. This often involves a mild transgression — what a study in Psychological Science calls a "benign violation." We like a bit of pearl-clutching provocation, but not too much. Slipping on a banana peel is funny unless it puts you in the hospital with a compound fracture. Blasphemy's a hoot until it beckons the smite of some ancient god.
All to say, satire thrives in a delicate ecosystem: too tense and we can't relieve the tension; too extreme and our silliness is mistaken for the news.
How can we exaggerate in an exaggerated world? If I tell you I'm so hungry I could eat a Ford Fiesta — and you actually know someone who ate a car — you won't laugh. You'll padlock your garage.
The unfunny result is a phenomenon I call "satire panic": the fear that our audiences will misinterpret our wit as reality, reifying the very myths we've set out to dispel.
For queer folks in precarious times, that confusion has consequences.
Look at Canadian queer icon Scott Thompson and his cutting alter ego Buddy Cole. Developed in collaboration with Mouth Congress bandmate and fellow provocateur Paul Bellini, Buddy slunk into family rooms in the 1980s and '90s as part of Canadian comedy institution The Kids in the Hall. Rather than shy away from the maligned affectations associated with gay men (limp wrists, thick lisps and a predilection for a patterned jacket), Buddy leaned in. Hard.
"What I think comedy does," Thompson told CBC in 2021, "is hold the light up to the darkness … to the silliness and things that we try to pretend aren't there. But comedy won't look away."
Thompson's satire brazenly tilted the hierarchy of sexual social politics. Traditional gender ideology maintained the "overtly" queer couldn't help themselves; sissy boys, butch women, and all the other unfortunate misfits who tried and failed to pass as straight were inevitably outed by their inclinations.
Buddy poked the bear and brought another message across the country (and around the world): queer folks weren't afraid of transgression. They craved it. It gave them pleasure.
A lot of people missed the joke.
Many a witless prig took this as vindication. "See?" they frothed at the dinner table between unseasoned bites of wet potato. "They're sex-crazed cartoons! This is what we've been saying all along!"
Thompson inspired a dual outrage. "You have your typical homophobic people that just didn't like that kind of a f-g and then you'd have the gay people who didn't like that being reflected. They'd rather put out a more socially acceptable picture and Buddy Cole would turn over the rock and show some of the darkness of gay life.
"Activists never liked Buddy Cole. Never. Still to this day Buddy Cole makes people uncomfortable. And I'm absolutely fine with that."
Would it have changed anything if he'd shared my satire panic and started his sketches with the dry assertion that queer folks weren't sewer-dwelling sex fiends?
Maybe. Or maybe it would have changed less. Queerphobes were used to evading more obvious arguments: myth-busting research on nature vs. nurture and breathless appeals that no god, even in his most Old-Testament incarnation, would damn millions of souls for the way they loved.
So Thompson eschewed satire panic and let some of his audience flub the punchline.
Earlier this year, Australian writer and satirist Rebecca Shaw published a viral essay in the Guardian with an unusual lamentation: it was inevitable that our adversaries would burn down the world, she wrote, but why did they have to be such losers?
Shaw could have used the opportunity of an international op-ed to call out our current brigade of spineless despots for their greed, amorality or watery politics. She could have soberly cautioned how, as a female-identifying lesbian, she'd be disproportionately affected by this era's near-universal disaster politics and the resulting social and legislative shift.
Instead, she claims the heaviest burden of the apocalypse is that its horsemen are uncool. Or, in her original Australian: "so cringe."
Like Thompson, Shaw accepts that a chunk of her audience might miss the bit.
Dear reader, so many did! Sucked of its satire, Shaw's is a petty argument that seethes with self-righteous contempt. One critique levies that Shaw and her ilk "apparently relish the opportunity to punch down by performatively punching up." It seems many folks prefer their activism purely didactic; better for us to speak truth to power, they say, in its plainest, driest and least ambiguous form.
While I love to see "relish" elevated from pickled noun to decadent verb, I wonder — are they right? Read Hans Christian Andersen's nudity-rich kid-lit The Emperor's New Clothes and you might think that a pointed exposé can topple an empire. Not anymore, Mary! If today's child burst from the throng to call out his naked oppressor, the brute would look down the lens of the nearest camera, wiggle their bits and call it a family-first tribute to the glory days before original sin.
They are rubber, you are glue; behold, the schoolyard bully in its final form, proud boys of all gender identities bolstered by an MBA, box seats and an impossible-to-park SUV.
Fascists attack the mechanisms of democracy to trigger diminishing returns on the naked truth. And in the dizzying fog of autocrat groupthink, satire is harder to see.
But laughter is recognition — it reminds us of what we know to be true, even when we don't see that truth reflected in the world around us.
The most reliable way to disarm a bully is by laughing at them, preferably in a way that their joyless worldview makes it impossible for them to understand. Maybe Plato was right — you certainly can't argue with that beard — and humour feeds our superiority complex, after all.
So Shaw, Thompson and the millennia's worth of satirists they descend from skip the hard shells of their oppressors for their soft bellies. Great satire goes deep and its wounds are hard to heal: they itch. They fester. They've got staying power.
Marginalized groups are experts in satire because their survival has depended upon their ability to read and remix the status quo. This fluency in mainstream constructs helps us understand our supposed aberrations and hide them to stay safe. Ask my teenage self why he binge-watched the video for Ricky Martin's Livin' La Vida Loca and he'll tell you it was an appreciation of Latin culture — not Ricky's hips.
The byproduct of this exhausting education is the ability to encode and decode meaning in messages sent through dangerous spaces. In this way, we evade our censors, reach our intended targets and achieve maximum effect.
These messages can be literal, like the hanky codes born in post–Gold Rush San Francisco (when in doubt, choose orange: anything goes). But this encoding also works in abstraction, as with vernacular dialects like Polari, a pidgin lingua franca for gay men that allowed them to distinguish potential partners from undercover policemen in their quest to build community and, uh — get some.
As the world revealed my queerness (i.e., othered me as a result of my atypical tastes), I put this training in service of the persuasive power of satire. For three years and five seasons, I hosted You Made Me Queer!, an "accusatory" radio show that subverted the moral panic surrounding the "queer agenda" by inviting my fabulous celebrity guests to "blame" who and/or what "made" them queer.
Even in our decade's so-called progressive climate, satire panic was often present. Before indulging in the satirical conceit of the show, my guests would slip a disclaimer through the fourth wall: "I just want to say: this is a joke. Nothing 'made' me queer. Please don't be confused!" And then they'd hypnotically recall the seductive powers of the Bechdel-binging golf butch who showed them how to get a tight grip on a five iron.
My newest show, Queerial, doubles down on this idea by positioning me as a neo-noir detective in a race against time to discover the root of queer contagion. By remixing interviews with everyone from child delinquents to bioarchaeologists and shoehorning the patterns and irregularities from their depositions into an absurdist mystery, Queerial shows how the granular obsessions of social policing make the world more — not less — queer.
And that's satire, baby: an artistic genre which leverages the distance between truth and fiction to expose the stories we tell others and ourselves. It laces a message with an unusual — or even paradoxical — point of view that indirectly disrupts a dominant ideology. It's powerful, precocious and delightfully twisted, like a secret handshake or the nail file you sneak into your jailbird boyfriend's visitation day strudel.
Different from pastiche (which pays homage) and parody (which imitates solely for comedic effect), satire doesn't just mirror the world, it changes it. And it does it in a way that, when done well, feels fun.
But does it still work if our weird world has rendered it invisible?
All told, I think it does. In fact, it might be more powerful than ever.
Maybe my satire panic has missed the point. The great writer and civil rights activist Audre Lorde wrote that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Humour is the mother tongue of the underdog, and satire will always belong to the disenfranchised.
In his oft-quoted speech "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?", abolitionist Frederick Douglass suggests satire is made for dangerous times:
"At a time like this," Douglass rails, "scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed."
And in the same pantheon, Buddy Cole: "People make fun of me because I lisp. Really! Such a fuss over a few extra S's!"
Maybe because they know that one of those S-words, no matter how oblique or encoded, can start a revolution.
And if you don't get it, that's your problem.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
