This is the text of a talk that I gave at York St John's University at a fantastic conference about Satire. There was a keynote talk about Jonathan Swift and other talks about Black Mirror the television programme, World War I Hospital Magazines and Georgiana and Charles Fox from the eighteenth century. There was a lot of interesting perspectives from different timelines and I hope the organisers follow up with further conferences.
Satire: from Oscar Wilde to Donald Trump
Satire is a genre of literature, and sometimes graphic and performing arts, in which vices, follies, abuse, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be humorous it can provide constructive social criticism, using wit to draw attention to both particular and wider issues in society. Jonathan Swift described it as ‘a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own’. There can be an element of speaking truth to power or seeing ourselves as we truly are and not as we want to be seen. Satire can show the rituals that grow up over time and may longer serve its original purpose. This applies to the aristocracy of the 19th century and their love of status, the 20th century and their love of wealth and the 21st century with the love of self. For the satirists, as Sir Robert Chiltern said in ‘An Ideal Husband’, ‘Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons’.
Oscar Wilde provided satire on a number of aspects. The first was personal, the way in which he conducted himself. He left Oxford in 1878 with a double first in classics and the Newdigate prize for poetry, no job and no career and a self-proclaimed ‘Professor of Aesthetics’. He dressed like a dandy and created the public persona that he would develop over time. This worked. With self-publicity and becoming ‘famous for being famous,’ he was hired by the D'Oyly Carte Company to do a number of lectures in America. These lectures were a success and increased Wilde’s fame and wealth.
Wilde made himself part of the joke and used his appearance and manners to provoke the audience. For example, sometimes groups of people turned up dressed like him to embarrass him in his American lectures. He responded with one-liners that turned the tables on them. He was no pushover. The content of his lectures attracted praise from the audience and journalists who were expecting him to fail. His aesthetic pose did not stop him from winning a boxing match against a bully and expelling some students from his rooms at Oxford.
The second aspect of his satire was his reported speech. He developed a sound bite approach that appealed to journalists. He perfected this during his tour of America. His actions and his words were not always aligned. He liked to pass himself off a lazy dandy but his academic achievement, his stamina (more than 70 lectures across America), a novel, plays, children stories and much more show someone with a work ethic who wanted to get on but make it look effortless.
The third aspect was in his written work where he learned how to attract attention and provoke a reaction. The audience saw him in his material. He created a buzz of uncertainty with his novel, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ that scandalised England, his one-act play, Salome, was banned in England and then his society plays continued to develop themes of hypocrisy, blackmail and a flexible set of moral values. These plays were lightened by wordplay and characters that provided dark humour and light comedy at the same time such as Jack Worthing in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ or Lord Darlington in ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan.
He was an insider-outsider in that he knew how the rules of the system worked; he would like to be a part of it but on his own terms. Whereas his father had been a famous doctor who looked after the eyes of the establishment, Wilde was more interested in the sensitivities of the establishment.
His plays provided entertainment and social comment in equal measure and from 1892 through to 1895 he was at the height of powers developing his themes of comedy, hypocrisy and morality in a succession of plays.
Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) is a melodrama with lots of wit and people with suspect morality. Lines from the play are memorable even if people need to be reminded that they are Wilde and have not invented them for themselves.
“I can resist anything except temptation.”
“Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”
An Ideal Husband (1893) is undoubtedly a comedy. Oscar Wilde finds every opportunity in this play to poke fun at aristocratic views on education, politics, and marriage through his humorous epigrams that some may deem as insulting. Such as:
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
“In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.”
In the 21st century he would have to add social media to the list of instruments of torture.
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is a drama but simultaneously a comedy. It presents a group of characters who must all overcome some sort of triviality to obtain a happy ending (giving the play that drama factor). The themes of’ ‘Earnest’ include living a double life, the working class, wealth and social status. The lifestyles and attitudes of the aristocracy are mocked mercilessly.
His thoughts were provocative and funny. Lines such as:
“If the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?''
“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”
This suggests that he understood the concept of modern celebrity before it had been invented.
The trajectory of his career was still ascending when ‘‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray’ was received with outrage but Oscar Wilde defended it, Salome was banned in England because it was based on a religious figure but was put on in France and then translated into English. His later work still challenged the behaviours of the well-off but he had found a way of making them laugh at themselves without taking offence.
What could have happened if Wilde’s playwriting career did not end abruptly and he had lived to see and survive the First World War what would be his new targets for a changed society?
Post-War War II England was very different and Peter Cook is an example of how satire had evolved with new targets for corruption and decadence. He too focused on targets of class, the aristocracy and hypocrisy but there was also the rise of the marketing executive and the reliance on opinion polls. His style was similar to Wilde as he posed with an entitled, aristocratic style but behind that there was a sense of humour that looked to highlight the ridiculous attitudes where the old values were replaced with ‘modern’ values. He opened a club called ‘The Establishment’ that allowed him to put on sketches and acts that avoided the censorship laws. His style was subversive and sly. His targets are us and himself. An example of a sketch from ‘Beyond the Fringe’ below shows how accurate he could be and his point about poverty is still relevant.
1st person Isn’t there a lot of poverty in America?
2nd person Yes, there is, but luckily it’s all been concentrated in the slum areas. It’s beautifully done. You’d hardly notice it.
In one session the targets would include The French and US Presidents, the Conservative Leader, Queen Elisabeth, advertising executives, God, The Communist Party, Labour Leaders, the Ban-The-Bomb pacifists and sex maniacs. The purpose was to laugh at the absurd in all forms of creed, authority and institution, irrespective of politics. Labour received as much abuse as the Tories. The appeal of satire meant that the establishment wanted in on the act.
Newspapers had started to include a satirical page and the BBC had its own satire programmes. Dennis Potter described the BBC version of satire ‘as harmless as a punch from a broken-down flyweight at the end of a gruelling fight’. In 1962 the BBC created ‘That Was The Week That Was’ (TW3) which was topical, live and was more representative of the comedy of the time.TW3 lasted about a year but by the end it had become less aggressive and politicians were queuing up to be seen in the audience to show what a good sport they were. TW3 had begun to confirm the audience’s prejudices and became as cosy as the old style comedians they had replaced. TW3 had more in common with hymn singing by the end than satire as the audience became familiar with the content of the programme and the programme was less challenging.
One of Cook’s later successes in 1979 when he created a sketch that gave an alternative perspective on the Jeremy Thorpe case. This was the establishment looking after one of their own and he was funny and truthful. He spoke as the judge summing up the case in an obviously biased way.
“You will probably have noticed that three of the defendants have very wisely chosen to exercise their inalienable right not to go into the witness box to answer a lot of impertinent questions. I will merely say that you are not to infer from this anything other than that they consider the evidence against them so flimsy that it was scarcely worth their while to rise from their seats and waste their breath denying these ludicrous charges...”
Cook was known for epigrams that were as good as Wilde, for example, Cook once said, “I've learned from my mistakes and I'm sure I can repeat them exactly.” He once stated, “I met a man at a party. He said “I'm writing a novel,” I said "Oh really? Neither am I.” Wilde and Cook both had a perception that went beyond the superficial although they would have both denied it.
A more recent satirist was Bill Hicks. He was an American comedian, social critic, satirist and musician. His observations were direct attacks on mainstream society, religion, politics, and consumerism, and he challenged the audience to look past the war on drugs, Christianity, the takeover of politics by business and the spectacle of rock stars promoting soft drinks. He and Cook both had a disdain for marketing and the superficiality of the post-War dream. Wilde had embraced marketing when it was in its infancy as an enabler and not a corrupter.
Below is an example of Bill Hicks discussing how he and his manager would talk at work.
'Hicks, how come you're not working?'
I'd go, 'There's nothing to do.'
'Well, you pretend like you're working.'
'Well, why don't you pretend I'm working? Yeah, you get paid more than me, you fantasise. Pretend I'm mopping. Knock yourself out. I'll pretend they're buying stuff; we can close up. I'm the boss now, you're fired. How's that? I'm on a f***ng roll. We're all millionaires and you're dick. I'm pretending s**t, I'm wacky, I can't be stopped.'
All three satirists provoked controversy. ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ was regarded as decadent, Bill Hicks’ appearance on ‘The Letterman Show’ was edited out because the material offended the sponsors and Cook (with Moore) was banned for performing sketches like ‘The Gospel Truth’ where Cook played a Shepherd and Moore a journalist and made some snide comments about Jesus and his carpentry skills.
Television has a lot of satirical comedy. It has always been easy to hate the politicians, even before Wilde’s time. Television programmes such as ‘The New Statesman’ and ‘The Thick of It’ continued the direction of travel of ‘Yes, Minister’. ‘The Office’ put our daily behaviour under a microscope and ‘W1A’ demonstrated the dysfunctional behaviour of the BBC. We now see cosy satire programmes where the viewers and the presenters both laugh at a common target but do not turn the guns on themselves. Modern living and social media mean that satire become absorbed into mainstream quickly and the targets can be inoculated against serious hypocrisy by acknowledging the barb. Politics is more media savvy than they were and do not confront satire head on but see how they can use it to support their point of view. Look at how quickly the word ‘omnishambles’ was adopted by politicians to take the higher ground in a debate and also suggest they were hip and cool to the electorate. Some targets revel in the image that the satirists portray of them, and they will often contact a cartoonist or a television producer to get copies of the original material for their portfolio. Satire has a new challenge set by the use of social media and technology that it needs to address by evolving with it.
Some criticisms of modern satire are levelled by people involved on both sides of the fence including Gerald Kaufman, Harry Enfield and David Nobbs. BBC satire was described by Gerald Kaufman, once an MP and once a contributor to TW3 and Private Eye.
‘It’s timid and conventional, though it pretends to be forward-looking and thrusting’
Harry Enfield described Margaret Thatcher,
‘... they perceived of her, as an extremely strong, arrogant, aggressive woman. This was exactly the image she wanted to project. So there was no gap between the reality and the caricature’
David Nobbs who wrote the Reginald Perrin stories and for TW3 discussed New Labour by saying,
“Labour’s whole philosophy is to get re-elected — there’s absolutely nothing else. And that’s a cynicism beyond anything that a satirist can offer”
Echoes of Wilde’s satire can be seen in the best comedies. The television programme ‘Frasier’ is a modern version of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ and ‘Yes, Minister’ is a modern version of ‘An Ideal Husband’ with the clever language of ‘Earnest’. We are committed to recycling the style of these plays as they are still a template for dysfunctional behaviour with a civilised veneer and they have some universal truths inside them,
One of the best modern satires is provided by Dave Lamb, the voice-over specialist of ‘Come Dine with Me’. This programme puts a microscope over the morals and behaviours of people across class and geography. It compares and contrasts on a weekly basis with an unending supply of participants who think they can beat the game. As Oscar Wilde said:
“To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people.”
‘Come Dine with Me’ would’ve been Oscar’s cup of tea. However, if he was alive today what would be his targets? In his time he attacked the bohemians as well as the aristocracy. Today, the millennials and hipsters would be squirming in their seats; the EU; the diversity industry; rock star tax avoiders, the sanctity of the National Health Service (NHS) and the activities of big charity.
Satire is timeless but it takes a particular talent to provoke and amuse. We always need people, like Wilde, to hold us up to the mirror again and remind us how ridiculous we have become or may become. We must look to people who provide insights that courage, luck, hard work, loyalty, tenacity and patriotism can be both virtues and vices, depending on the person who has them and our point of view. With his tweets and the quick-fire response from the establishment, the ‘Donald Trump Show’ will continue to provide the necessary satire for the next few years as satire continues to evolve.
