SATIRE AND SARCASM

A self-help book I once read warned against satire. It said satire implied a lack of control and was bad for self-image. That may be, but I have found satire to be useful and, at times, beneficial. I do not remember exactly, but I think the serenity prayer goes something like this:

God grant me:
The patience to accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I should not accept
And the wisdom to know the difference

The short form is “fuck it.” And that is satire. Many times satire is a way of coping with the things we cannot change or accept. An exercise of futility? Not necessarily. Laughter has a leveling effect. It decreases the importance of the things we cannot control and allows us to focus on what we can control. By laughing at an ineffectual attempt to do something we are often able to see where we made our mistakes. We are then ready to try again. We are then ready to look for a way to get around the seemingly insurmountable obstacles we cannot remove.

The other beneficial thing about satire is that it makes people laugh, and people like to laugh. There are times when conventional complaints have not worked, and I have achieved the desired results through satire. The thing to remember when writing a satirical letter of complaint is that satire is not the same as sarcasm. Sarcasm is a bitter laugh, a biting or cutting remark. Satire, on the other hand, holds up follies or vices to ridicule. Although the line between satire and sarcasm can be very thin, the difference is significant. Satire is more general and does not need to be directed at an individual, whereas sarcasm is more personal and is usually seen as an attack.

When I owned a bookstore I frequently placed special orders for books my customers requested. One of my customers wanted a book entitled Hydroponics: Gardening Without Soil. The publisher from whom I ordered the book was in the U.S., but the publisher who printed the book was in South Africa. Apparently, the U.S. publisher did not have enough copies of the book on hand and had to back order it from the publisher in South Africa. The problem was that I was not informed of this. After forty days went by, I sent a letter to the U.S. publisher inquiring about the status of my order. Twenty days later I still had not heard from the publisher. Furthermore, my customer was putting considerable pressure on me by insisting that I find out when he could expect the book. It seemed to me that this called for an unconventional approach. So I sent the U.S. publisher the following letter:

“Since you did not reply to my inquiry of November fifteenth I was forced tell my customer that some wayward errand boy, who was trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records by balancing Hydroponics: Gardening Without Soil on his nose, inadvertently dropped the book down an abandoned diamond mine shaft, and that a giant python then seized the book and squeezed it down to the size of a three by five card.

I went on to explain that the English and the Afrikaners are now arguing about whether the book is in Dutch, and that the Bantus could give less of a damn than you seem to.

My customer, however, refused to accept this excuse, and he is waiting with baited but soil-less breath for some word, or, better yet, his book.”

Within several days of sending this letter I received a telephone call from a very pleasant lady who worked for the publisher. She told me the letter made her day and thanked me for sending it.

“I managed to find a copy of the book in the office,” she told me. “I have just placed it in the mail along with a reply to your letter.”

She was good to her word. The book promptly arrived at my bookstore along with her letter and a three by five card on which she had very neatly printed:

“HYDROPONICS:
GARDENING
WITHOUT
SOIL
(The 3 x 5 version – condensed)”

Her letter read as follows:

“My goodness: We certainly don’t want to implant in your mind a seedy image of our company. We also don’t want you to believe that HYDROPONICS is all washed up.

So, fortunately, after much – uh – soil – searching, we were able to dig up a copy of HYDROPONICS from our office. It is en ‘root’ to you right now.

Please accept our deep-rooted apologies.”

This exchange of letters happened so long ago that I did not try to obtain the lady’s permission to include her name or the name of the publisher she worked for. Perhaps I should have made an effort to locate her. She certainly deserves a lot of credit. Although I softened the satire a bit by fictionalizing it, my letter was a complaint that demanded a response. She did not take offense. Instead, she laughed. She then replied in kind and greatly expedited the delivery of the book. My customer and I really enjoyed her clever response.

While a sarcastic comment will frequently inspire a clever reply, it rarely inspires such a favorable response. As I stated earlier, sarcasm is a personal attack, and this can result in exchanges that become increasingly ruder and cruder.

Don was a person with a very sarcastic sense of humor, and his favorite target was John. Several years had passed since John and Don had seen each other. When they met again it was obvious that Don had put on a considerable amount of weight. John thought about the many sarcastic barbs Don had hurled at him, and he decided to use Don’s weight gain as an opportunity to get even.

“Jesus Christ, Don. When was the last time you were able to see your dick?” John asked.

Unfazed by the question, Don calmly replied: “Oh, about a year.”

“Well, don’t you think it’s time to diet?”

“Why, what color is it now?”

John did the same thing that many of you are probably doing; he laughed.

I know the exchange I just recounted is crude, but I included it because it illustrates something about human nature. Don deflected John’s attack with self-depreciating humor, and this made John set aside the sting of the sarcasm he had endured over the years. I suppose there is a self-help book out there somewhere stating that self-depreciating humor is very bad for your self-image. I would not know. I stopped reading advice columns and self-help books a long time ago. They usually state the obvious and frequently exaggerate the dangers of traits that can be useful. If you are looking for advice about when to use satire, self-depreciating humor and/or sarcasm, all I can say is that I do not have the answer. The best I have to offer is a cliché. (Oh, goody! I get to use a cliché.) “There is a time and a place for everything,” but it is often difficult to determine when and where that is. Our interactions with other individuals are far too complicated and interesting to provide us with easy answers.

First published in macsbackporch.blogspot.com on Jun. 11, 2009