Desire for the Good: How Debate About Satire’s Public Sphere Efficacy Confuses Aesthetics with Politics

ABSTRACT The high-value stakes of scholarly debate on the efficacy of satire are suggested in the fact that it is characterized by two extremist positions: the view that satire can substantially affect public affairs and the view that it can do nothing. This article argues that certain claims for the efficacy of comic artifacts can be easily dismissed because the phrasing of them indicates that their authors understand satire to function as political speech when in fact it functions as comic political speech. Because satire is comic political speech, it is best approached as a playfully aesthetic object rather than as political communication: its poetics need to be acknowledged before its politics can be understood. This article lays groundwork for the idea that satire’s efficacy is variable through a review of the literature that also clarifies the implications of the terminology often deployed in scholarly assessments about the efficacy of cultural work accomplished by comic utterance and performance, in particular satire, spotlighting the problem of declaring that comic laughter is inherently progressive.