Followup to: Politics and Awful Art

There's this thing called "derisive laughter" or "mean-spirited laughter", which follows from seeing the Hated Enemy get a kick in the pants. It doesn't have to be an unexpected kick in the pants, or a kick followed up with a custard pie. It suffices that the Hated Enemy gets hurt. It's like humor, only without the humor.

If you know what your audience hates, it doesn't take much effort to get a laugh like that—which marks this as a subspecies of awful political art.

There are deliciously biting satires, yes; not all political art is bad art. But satire is a much more demanding art than just punching the Enemy in the nose. In fact, never mind satire—just an atom of ordinary genuine humor takes effort.

Imagine this political cartoon: A building labeled "science", and a standard Godzilla-ish monster labeled "Bush" stomping on the "science" building. Now there are people who will laugh at this—hur hur, scored a point off Bush, hur hur—but this political cartoon didn't take much effort to imagine. In fact, it was the very first example that popped into my mind when I thought "political cartoon about Bush and science". This degree of obviousness is a bad sign.

If I want to make a funny political cartoon, I have to put in some effort. Go beyond the cached thought. Use my creativity. Depict Bush as a tentacle monster and Science as a Japanese schoolgirl.

There are many art forms that suffer from obviousness. But humor more than most, because humor relies on surprise—the ridiculous, the unexpected, the absurd.

(Satire achieves surprise by saying, out loud, the thoughts you didn't dare think. Fake satires repeat thoughts you were already thinking.)

You might say that a predictable punchline is too high-entropy to be funny, by that same logic which says you should be enormously less surprised to find your thermostat reading 30 degrees than 29 degrees.

The general test against awful political art is to ask whether the art would seem worthwhile if it were not political. If someone writes a song about space travel, and the song is good enough that I would enjoy listening to it even if it were about butterflies, then and only then does it qualify to pick up bonus points for praising a Worthy Cause.

So one test for derisive...

DJB

DJB

DJB

DJB