Parody Parity
Parody Parity
Note to Bureaucrats - Kafka's "The Trial" is Supposed to be a Terrifying Cautionary Tale, Not a Career Blueprint
Successful satire and parody depend upon a certain grounding in reality. There has to be some – even if quite distant – relation to the subject or current conditions for the joke or skit or tract to work.
But what happens when it becomes impossible to create satire and/or humor because it turns out that every “wacky” idea turns out to be already true?
It is this state of “parody parity” that we now find ourselves in – trying to think of something to make fun of has become impossible because every absurdity is already real.
Imagine for a moment an “idea pitching” session in a writing room (for the purposes of this article the political leanings of the writers are not actually relevant).
One person says the following – “Okay, here’s an idea for a skit – imagine a government employee gets paid to put on a bunny suit and shadow the President at a children’s event just in case he says something stupid?”
The idea would die because of the sheer impossibility of such an occurrence – the concept is simply not credible enough to be the basis for satire.
Or imagine this pitch – “The President is so out of it he tries to shake hands with invisible people?” Again, nowheresville, especially because some situations are so catastrophically dangerous that they do not merit satire but an intervention.
Former comedian Chevy Chase made fun of former President Gerald Ford on the “Saturday Night Live” for being a klutz. While it wasn’t true, it had comedic purchase due to Ford’s public literal missteps. The distance between slipping down a few airplane steps and wrestling the Oval Office Christmas tree is a bit far but it is a relatable, valid premise.
The current crop of examples is seemingly endless but when a billionaire buys Twitter with the purpose to reduce political censorship is called evil but when another billionaire – a billionaire with massive government contracts and connections - buys one of the nation’s most important publications it is hailed as truly magical moment for American democracy, the satire field gets very very thin.
The options become even more limited when those people whose very livelihoods depend upon the free exchange of idea – the press – roundly criticize the concept of the free exchange of ideas. It’s like a cattle rancher demanding, with a straight face, that the population of the world be forced to convert to veganism - it is so incomprehensible as to be immune from humor and one must simply stand back and watch in awe as the answer to the question of “what is 2 + 2?” becomes “lepidopterist.”
It is almost as if humans – a carbon-based life form – spent a great deal of time condemning the existence of carbon – it doesn’t quite track.
It can also never be forgotten that this public drift to a permanent theater of the absurd – during which the citizen audience is expected/demanded of to keep a straight face – is not a random occurrence. From the tens of thousands of people get paid with tax dollars to keep the charade going – from unpardonable DEI efforts -
- to the massive increase in education-sector administrators especially when compared to the marginal, if any, increase in the number of students and teachers, it is unquestionable that their exists an entire layer of society that believes Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” was not a terrifying tale of dishumanity but a blueprint for a successful career.
Which brings us back to the Biden bunny.
This was not a random event, an idea of one lone staffer who took it upon herself to “go the extra mile” to ensure the president doesn’t accidentally declare war on Delaware. Meetings took place to make this happen.
Consider, for a moment, the mindset of a White House press office that would lead them to decide to make sure a covering flack - dressed in a bunny suit - would be needed for the annual children’s egg roll to make sure Joe wouldn't say anything, um, stupid?
Having worked in public relations (and, independently worn bunny suits - don't ask), imagining what exactly happened in a meeting that decided the best solution would be a "bunny suit press deflector" is simply mind boggling.
To emphasize the point - someone had to say "let's put one of us in a bunny suit to follow him around the garden just in case" and everyone in the room agreed.
Just imagine sitting through that meeting with a straight face - I don't think actual humans can.
And therein lay the problem – when everything is true nothing can be satirized and we, therefore, have reached parody parity.
Author’s note -Ok, I can hear you asking yourself about the bunny suit so here goes. When I was a reporter in Louisiana a noted local figure – wouldn’t say a nabob or a solon or a tycoon, just the type of person everyone knows and has their calls to the mayor answered on the first ring – hosted a Halloween party. Halloween parties for grown-ups are a bit much already, but themed Halloween parties would seem to be beyond the pale – except in this case the theme was “come dressed as a local or state law, regulation, or ordinance.” To be blunt – brilliant. A contest was held and a winner was declared – a couple came as a violation of the city’s lawn mowing/property maintenance ordinance, complete with homemade overgrown grass skirts and hats and jackets and shoes – and yes they were Birkenstock’s covered in weeds. As to the bunny suit, I happened to mention a costume idea to a friend and he said – “sure I have a bunny suit – feel free to borrow it.” Oddly not nonplussed, I added a restaurant apron, a few dozen plastic flies, some fake blood (just on the apron, of course), grabbed my antique sugar cane knife (which I found wandering around near a levee-side murder scene – held it up, yelled to the officer “need this?” was answered with a “no – he was shot,” leading me to ask if I could take it and was told “sure – why not?”) and Voila! I was a violation of the state’s health and safety regulations covering small animal slaughterhouses. I didn’t even come in the top five.