On Satire: And Why You Won't Read This Post

But 184,000 read one of my X satire posts

The playwright George S. Kaufman famously stated “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.”

“Closes on Saturday Night” means that the show opens in a theater on Friday and closes a day later, as opposed to a multi-week or month run that would actually earn some money. It also means, of course, the theatergoers attend for entertainment reasons not to be mentally challenged after a busy day or week with all the challenges life can throw at you, fair enough.

As one commentator noted “The 'Satire' part means that most audiences generally want something less intellectual than satire. Popular theater at the time Kaufman was writing included musicals and farces. Get too thinky and people tune out.”

This preference for lighter fare extends beyond theater to modern platforms like X and pertains just as well to blogs. My X site had just over 3000 followers and is substantially satirical in content, i.e. A=B, whereas simply appalling obvious clickbait sites can run into the millions of followers for the same reasons found in theatergoers audiences.

Well not quite the same, X sites with a mass following contain viewers of their content who follow for confirmation of the personal biases and the more vehement or even outlandish the sites affirmation of their biases and predilections the more followers are attracted and the larger financial return for the site’s owners.

That this is fairly obvious to most people is bye the by, the object varies from seeing your name in ”print” to “owning” the opposition, to owning the person who made, what you see as an idiotic comment. In the end I doubt anyone takes it too seriously. Satirists generally get none of these sort of comments except occasionally from non-followers who have stumbled on their writing and take them seriously.

I struggle to think of satirists who have found a large following, Will Rogers “I don’t belong to an organized party, I am a Democrat” was probably the most successful but he was also a popular “everyman” sort of actor. Dave Barry the hugely successful humorist who wrote for the Miami Herald and was nationally syndicated was another beyond those two the well runs dry.

The above is not a cry of despair, rather just it is what it is, and I have found any attempt to build a larger audience fails unless I ditch the satire element altogether. This only happens a month or two prior to a presidential election when my follower numbers multiply significantly as I have gained somewhat of a reputation as an election predictor guru-which current followers know is a reputation/guru status well deserved.)

However, it gives me great pleasure to advise that, once in a blue moon, satire can catch lighting in a bottle, or whatever descriptive phrase works best. The above simple but lighthearted image and statement has at this writing received over 184,000 views and is the single biggest response to my satirical efforts since I commenced such in 2008. It took one X poster, Benny Johnson with a following of 3.7 million, to repost it (along with a few other luminaries like Nancy Grace) for it to become a meme, well meme numbers for a satirical post.

Once in 17 years may seem thin gruel, but to a long suffering satirist it is Manna!