SNARK: Satire for Dummies?

Snark is the lowest form of humor next to Larry The Cable Guy at an open mike/ limbo contest. (Git-r-down?) Have I just dis/proved my point? Hard to say, as Snark is more subjective than pornography, though perhaps more worthy of censorship. It’s a steep, comedic decline from Stephen Colbert to Perez Hilton; a precipitous plunge from high-minded satire to low-brow name-calling.

Fortunately, The New Yorker’s esteemed film critic and social commentator David (Great Books) Denby  cleverly distinguishes Snark from more successful laughing matters, in his new book, tellingly sub-titled: It’s Mean, It’s Personal and It’s Ruining Our Conversation.

My conversation with Mr. Denby stayed on track as I was able to focus on the subject rather than stray for a throwaway joke and risk offense… although he did decline to respond to my final, multiple-choice question. So, I’ll just have to count on you, dear readers, to provide an (in)appropriate (and amusing?) answer. 

WARREN: Seems like the lines you draw between wit and snark and hate speech are fairly subjective. Is there any objective way of evaluating the differences?

DAVID: The lines are not as subjective as all that. What’s called hate speech is demeaning insult aimed at vulnerable ethnic groups–minorites like Latinos, for instance. I left hate speech alone because there are serious legal issues at stake–some heavyweight law professors (for instance Jeremy Waldron of NYU) think we should possibly have tough laws prohibiting hate speech, something closer to what European countries have. That’s a legal issue that’s beyond my scope. I’m talking about good and ill humor, style, and I guess you would have to say ethics. Critical standards have to come into play. Now the positive. Wit is anything that does something creative and funny with language–inverts a cliché, creates a startling fresh metaphor, sets up an expectation and reverses it. It can be nasty, of course. Winston Churchill had a mean tongue as well as an eloquent tongue. He disliked a Labor Member of Parliament named Bessie Braddock and said “I wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole.” Cries of “shame” came from the back benches. So Churchill said something like, “All right. I would touch her–with a ten-foot pole.” Nasty? Mean? Personal? Yes, all of the above. But look what he did! He took a cliche and turned it inside out. That’s wit. When the somnolent Calvin Coolidge died, someone told Dorothy Parker. And she said “How can you tell?” That’s wit. But snark is just lazy–it’s mean, rug-pulling, undermining personal insult that pulls an available reference off the media junk pile. It doesn’t engage anything seriously; it deals only with surfaces–say Maureen Dowd repeatedly scoring off Gore’s stiff manner in 2000 without asking what his ideas meant and what they might do for the country. She’s only interested in style, personality, and she’ll jump at a politician in any way that he’s vulnerable. That she gets things wrong half the time doesn’t stop her from doing it over and over.

WARREN: Show us the difference. Call out Perez Hilton, wittily, without resorting to the snark (many celebrities might feel he so richly deserves).

DAVID: Perez Hilton is a creepy descendent of the old battle-axes like Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper who ruled Hollywood as gossip columnists sixty and seventy years ago. He’s interested in power–namely, the ability to control derision directed at celebrities. It’s as if he were still ruling the hallway-locker jokes at high school, only it’s  twenty years later.  He seems indifferent to whether anyone has any talent or not; he’s interested in how a celeb is vulnerable and what he can scrawl on a picture of their faces.  I know millions of people look at his site.  I do too, sometimes–as a movie critic I need to keep up with Hollywood. But it’s rotten candy. Your mind begins to develop cavities after spending ten minutes with his site.  

WARREN: After 9/11, many pundits proclaimed Irony would soon perish. Has it survived? If so, what is its quality of life?

DAVID: Oh, irony will always survive because it’s a basic form of humor–you say one thing and you mean the opposite–and we need it to express our disbelief about the way things are going. It takes different tones, though, according to the times. Colbert putting on his rubber face mask and pretending to be a Bill O’Reilly reactionary blowhard, expounding conservative positions in such a way as to expose what Colbert takes to be their absurdity–that’s irony at a high level. I don’t know when we’ve ever had anything so sophisticated on national TV. But with thousands of people losing jobs every day, snarky sarcasm feels really cheap to me. It feels infantile, inadequate. I think a new kind of sardonic irony–call it gallows humor–will flourish in its place, because everyone is losing money or feeling the loss of job security, and gallows humor will be a way of reaching out to others. But it won’t be snarky–the point will be that we’re all in the same boat.

WARREN: If Snark is “investigative reporting’s bastard, weak-limbed child,” whither the parent? Has investigative reporting died, replaced by its lesser offspring?

DAVID: That remark about the “bastard child” came in the section of the book about “Spy” magazine in the eighties, which, to be fair, did do some serious investigative work on Wall Street that I should have mentioned. But mainly “Spy” did what I call “mapping”–saying where power lived (at the Bohemian Grove, say, north of San Francisco, where Republican eminences gathered in the eighties to play) rather than investigating the actual deals that powerful people made that controlled the rest of us. That latter kind of work–real investigative reporting into hidden power, hidden corruption–is difficult to do, it takes time, it requires editorial support, and sometimes a reporter will work for two months and come up empty. Yet it’s arguably the most important thing that journalists do. A lot of journalists are worried that if publications have a Web presence only and weaker resources, investigative reporting will wither. Snark, needless to say, doesn’t investigate anything; it just plays off the surface.

WARREN: Tom Wolfe takes a licking and keeps on kicking. Would you be kinder in your assessment of his career trajectory had he fallen to the left, rather than the far right?

DAVID: I think Wolfe’s writing, with the exception of Bonfire of the Vanities, which has its racist overtones (look at it again), has been pretty bad in recent years, and that the piece I took apart–the 1970 article that went into the book called Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, marked the turning point from his earlier exuberant generosity to his sour later writings.  Look, there’s definitely left-wing snark–Clinton’s old hatchet man Paul Begala falls into it pretty regularly–but there’s less of it on the left, since liberals, by their very nature, tend to respect many different kinds of people and groups that conservatives feel free to ridicule.

WARREN: You criticize Wonkette for poor humor and worse timing… and I concur. But it is possible to make the best of comedy even in the worst of times, yes? Would it have been possible, say, to rib Ted Kennedy on the day of his brain surgery without drawing your scorn?

DAVID: Ted Kennedy, as even Republicans admit, has been an extremely hard-working and effective senator and a good colleague, but, sure, he’s a boozer, and he used to back women up against the wall at a party. Normally, I would say he’s fair game, but let the guy stagger off the surgery table before you go after him.

Another thing: The anonymity that the Internet offers to the bilious, ranting, anti-semitic, racist, mysognist or just malicious charmers out there is often not directed at celebrities but at ordinary folks. One thing that concerns me for the future in the increasing digitization of social space. You have two drinks and put your arm around the wrong woman or man–and which of us hasn’t done that in the last two weeks?–and someone with a smart phone or digital camera takes your picture.  Most of the time, of course, it’s completely friendly. But if someone doesn’t like you and wants to make trouble, that picture could wind up on the Web with a snarky comment.

Civil libertarians in the past have been worried about Big Brother–the government listening in to our calls or reading our e-mails–but in the  future Little Brother may be more of a worry.  My anti-utopian nightmare: Everyone is monitoring everyone. A guy sleeps with a girl and, hiding behind anonymity,  posts intimate stuff about her (she gets named) on a campus site (the worst offender, Juicy Campus, just shut down, by the way), and that stuff hangs around forever. You can’t escape the accusation, and the style of this “shaming” is always snark. No one goes on the Internet to soberly, somberly complain about his neighbor’s behavior. And what’s the result of it. Often, nothing at the time. If you’re 20, you laugh it off. But the guy who gets teased on the Web because he got drunk and did some drugs at a frat party, or the woman who’s sexually active in college goes for a job interview seven or eight years later, and that information is going to Google up. It could be the end of the job. I’m not being paranoid. Some of the law-school heavyweights, including people in the Obama administration, think that the absence of any protection of our privacy on the Web is a serious issue. But I don’t want laws or censorship restricting the Internet, and I’m sure that you don’t, either. The conversation has to turn to ethics, for want of a better word. Or manners. That’s why I wrote the book–to push the conversation of what kind of public culture we want to have. 

WARREN: You accuse celebrities of getting hooked on fame, but isn’t this a case of blaming the victim? Aren’t the aimless snarkers the ones with the debilitating addictions?

DAVID: Yes, absolutely agree, and I say that in my section on celebrity. We’re all hooked into the celebrity cycle, and it’s a sick game. We built them up and tear them down, and snark rules the cycle, particularly on the downside which turns into a collective deathwatch as we stomp Amy Winehouse (say), who’s talented, to death. 

WARREN: Snark (d)evolves to meme. Is this a genetic imperative or the cumulative impact of journalism’s declining integrity and our society’s vanishing sense of shame?

DAVID: All those things, I guess. The development of memes is intrinsic to the Internet.  Journalism is in a panic because it doesn’t know the future. Old-media types are afraid their publications will subside into a Web presence only and have a lesser authority. Snark may be a way of trying to hold on to a declining audience of younger readers. New media types are eager to make their mark and earn a living. They turn to snark, hoping to create a meme that makes them famous. The love of celebrity, even notoriety, dissolves shame, or, more accurately, the love of privacy. Kids who blog their love affairs are in effect joining the snark culture. No one is going to comment about your lost boyfriend in any way that isn’t derisive.   

WARREN: Alexander Pope is to Colley Cibber as…

a)    Keith Olbermann is to Bill O’Reilly

b)   Hilary Duff is to Faye Dunaway

c)    Waldorf is to Statler

d)    Fill in your contemporary equivalent here