The Satiric Exaggeration Of Satire

[Paul Mackin]

On Jul 6, 2006, at 7:00 AM, Joe Allonby wrote:

> I like :
>
> "Well, OK.But if you don't get the President of the United States  
> on that phone you'll be personally responsible to the Coca Cola  
> Corporation of America!"

Or, Gentlemen, no fighting in the war room.


>
> On 7/3/06, MalignD at aol.com <MalignD at aol.com> wrote:
> << That's why I say that to understand reality, you have to take  
> satire and
> then wildly exaggerate it. >>
>
> People say things like this from time to time, e.g., fiction is  
> obsolete
> because it can't compete with reality.  But it's glib and it's a  
> distortion.  Art
> isn't something whose quality can be measured by the reliatve  
> degree of
> madness in the reality it seeks to portray  ("You can't make this  
> stuff up.").  Even
> satire:  it doesn't work or not work relative to the degree it  
> attempts to
> outstrip reality.  Some of the worst satire is the most strenuous  
> at trying to
> do just that.  There's little worse than zany satire.
>
> What's funny in the lines you quoted from Dr. Strangelove (at least  
> to me)
> are the the words, likely written by Terry Southern.  This --
>
> "The whole idea is to kill the bastards...At the end of the war, if  
> there
> are two Americans and one Russian, we win."
>
> --is just not as funny or as sharp as this --
>
> "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But  
> I do say
> no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on  
> the breaks."
>
> I'm not sure I can explain why.  (Actually, I think I can, but it  
> would be
> boring.)
>

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