Recently, an online horror show host has drawn some attention that has divided the horror community. It started, as these things so often do, with a woman expressing an opinion on the internet. Specifically, she said the horror host was racist and homophobic and shared a segment from an article to illustrate said homophobia.

The horror host plays a character that discusses horror movies. From what I’ve read, the concept of the character is to contrast the stereotype of the dumb redneck good ol’ boy with incisive horror movie critique versed in philosophy and film history. Beer jokes accompanying citations of Aristotle. Because he is a character, some have defended his jokes about various marginalized communities as being satire and not representative of the man playing the character. “He’s making fun of those types of people.”

I can’t speak to how true that is. I had literally never heard of him until the online reboot of his show, which I haven’t watched. I somehow never encountered the original show, nor any of his books, nor his road show. I’m not sure if it’s because he was a staple of a generation older than mine, if it’s because I grew up in the middle of goddamned nowhere, or if the show just didn’t air in my region, but regardless, I am completely unfamiliar with the man, his character, and his show except for what I’ve seen online in random snatches and retweets.

I don’t want to talk about the horror host or his show, though. I want to talk about satire. Satire is an incredibly difficult form of comedy. Stray too far into playing things absurd and you become more of a parody of the thing. Stray too far into playing things straight, and you’re simply emulating the thing you claim to be satirizing. Parody is a mockery, satire uses mimicry to highlight and criticize. Let’s look at an example and do something that’s always great to do with comedy: explain the joke!!

In order for satire to work, you have to make clear what is the actual joke. If you have a character saying hurtful things without any grounding context, it is a character saying hurtful things regardless of your intentions. So let’s talk about Pierce Hawthorne in Community. Pierce is a racist, sexist old man. He’s a petty egotist and a spoiled rich boy with an out-sized opinion of his own worth who throws a tantrum every time he feels he’s not being given the respect he’s due, while also refusing to respect anyone else. He lives in the past and makes almost no effort to change.

How on earth is a character like that funny? Well…he isn’t…on his own. Having a character like that by himself, there would be no indication that the joke is anything but the racist thing he says. Therefore, the rest of the cast balances him out by providing characters of different backgrounds that can react to what he’s saying. Pierce works as a satire of a particular generation of older men because while Pierce may think he’s incredibly important, it’s clear from the power dynamics of the rest of the group that he’s not — he’s the fool.

Here’s a specific example of this dynamic at play:

In the episode 1, season 2 of Community, Troy and Pierce have moved in together. As they arrive at school on the first day back from summer, Pierce mentions that they’re like “Batman and Shaft.” Troy, typing on his phone, says that Batman already had a friend named Robin. Pierce then counters that Batman can have any friend he wants, “Shaft, Dolemite, Leroy Brown. Don’t let society limit your people.” As they leave, Annie enters reading her phone and reveals that Troy has been tweeting the things Pierce says under the name “OldWhiteManSays.”

So what’s the joke in this situation?

Pierce is clearly being racist. While he may like Troy, it’s clear that his thinking is, at best, extremely antiquated. He simply can’t fathom there being a black Robin, so he begins listing off black characters that he does know — blaxploitation characters and a reference to a Jim Croce song that is…less than flattering, we’ll say. What stops the joke from being “Pierce said a racism, isn’t racism funny?” is the way that Troy reverses the situation. Troy controls the power dynamic by tweeting the things that Pierce says to the rest of the world, exposing him to widespread mockery. By the condescendingly paternal way that Pierce talks to Troy, he clearly thinks of himself as a mentor figure, but in reality he is, as usual, the butt of the joke. We’ve all met this guy, and this reiterates that while men like Pierce think they’re relevant, they’re actually nothing more than sad jokes.

But if you’re a one-man show, it’s much more difficult to have that kind of grounding. Pierce is able to say blatantly racist, sexist, and homophobic things because other characters can push back against his terrible views. But let’s look at one of the most successful examples of satire in the modern day: Stephen Colbert’s run on The Colbert Report.

The best tool in Colbert’s toolbox was pointed exaggeration. His show was a spoof on the infotainment editorial shows that aired in that time period — The O’Reilly Factor, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Crossfire, and eventually Glenn Beck. These news programs aren’t technically news programs, but they emulate the style of a news program. Bill O’Reilly was the most popular example at the time, so that is where Stephen took a lot of his early cues, so much they he referred to O’Reilly on the show frequently as “Papa Bear.”

On his own show, O’Reilly presented himself as loud, aggressive, and informed. He brought on guests that he disagreed with so he could needle them into confrontation, then shout them down, demand they shut up, and threaten to cut their mic. He used this to project a commanding presence and create the image of a fearless truth teller and man of the people.

Colbert took that formula and used pointed exaggeration to highlight this formula and expose it as the posturing that it was. As presented on The Report, Colbert was a blow hard. Self-aggrandizing, egotistical, not just resistant to facts but outright rejecting them, instead preferring “truthiness,” which is a term he coined to mean “when something isn’t true, but feels true.”

O’Reilly famously called his show “the No Spin Zone.” This was because he claimed to provide only the facts of news stories without any “spin” or bias. To that end, Colbert often referred to his show as “the No Fact Zone.” This was a direct call out of O’Reilly’s tendency to blatantly disregard or misrepresent facts that didn’t help his argument. O’Reilly was known for taking things that were technically or partially true and building a deceptive argument around that kernel of truth.

If Colbert always played his character straight, how did the audience get the joke without someone else to either undercut him or call him out? Let’s look at an example of how both men covered the same events in the US — the shooting of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

• When covering shooting and the resulting violence, O’Reilly chose to feature at the top of the story a video that supposedly showed Mike Brown robbing a store some time before being stopped by the police later for walking in the road.
• Immediately after that, he also showed security cam footage of a single store being robbed and used that to say that the people in Ferguson were rioting.
• When he brought up Darren Wilson, the man who shot Mike Brown, he stated that Wilson had been a good cop with no trouble up until that point.
• He went on to criticize MSNBC for featuring a guest that claimed Mike Brown was shot in the back — a statement which turned out to be disproved by a later autopsy.
• However, immediately after that, he mentions an uncorroborated report that Darren Wilson had an orbital fracture. He justified bringing that up as “just demonstrating there will be more to come.”
• He did not differentiate how his uncorroborated news was different from the uncorroborated news of other networks.

O’Reilly then went on to say:

“To the race hustlers, Officer Wilson is already guilty; they have convicted him. Their slogan is no justice, no peace. I guess that’s lynch mob justice because those people will never accept anything other than a conviction of murder in this case.”

The Mike Brown shooting was a dark moment in US history. You could teach an entire media literacy course on the ways the story was handled in the media. But it’s also clear that O’Reilly had already made up his mind, in spite of his claims to the contrary. He chose his video clips very specifically to paint the image of a violent person that got shot, implying that the shooting was justified whether he was armed or not. He used footage of a single group of people robbing a store to paint the community as overrun with criminals and looters. He does not show any footage of police tear gassing protesters, turning sonic cannons on them, firing on them with rubber bullets, corralling them through the streets, or marching on them with militarized vehicles.

So here’s where satire becomes tricky. If satire were simply emulating the hurtful rhetoric of his subject, then that should be Colbert’s angle, right? But Colbert didn’t do that — because if he did that, he would simply be restating the hurtful things without any additional context. The joke would inevitably be on black folks and marginalized communities. Below are two clips of Colbert, one from a show around the same time as the O’Reilly show linked above, the other from a show a few months later, that illustrates how he did cover the story.

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/4komvc/the-colbert-report-outrage-in-ferguson

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/wud7e1/the-colbert-report-ferguson-fallout-and-the-st–louis-rams

Part of the purpose of Colbert’s character was to highlight the media’s obsession with creating two-sides to a narrative, even if there isn’t one. To accomplish this, he started out with an earnest description of the shooting as a tragedy, then pled with his audience to withhold judgement of Darren Wilson until all of the facts were in, stating:

“Some are rushing to judge this man as a violent racist cop who gunned down an unarmed black teenager…but others argue that he’s a heroic police officer doing his job…by gunning down an unarmed black teenager…”

He took O’Reilly’s defense of Darren Wilson and stated the facts, but in a pointed manner, reminding the audience that Mike Brown was, after all, a teenager and unarmed. It’s that pointed language that’s the key to a lot of his satire.

In an episode a few months later, he covered the story of a few players on the St. Louis Rams who came onto the field with their hands up in a reference to the chant “hands up, don’t shoot.” This was extremely controversial at the time, leaving many in the media outraged, calling the gesture political and divisive.

Colbert, as the character, of course agreed with them that the gesture was divisive and political. But he demonstrates the absurdity of this argument by bringing up further “examples” of how the gesture spread — referees during touchdowns, the goalposts themselves, the audience doing the wave. While Colbert is arguing in character that this is the danger of allowing players to display political messaging, he’s actually undermining that very message and demonstrating how innocuous and commonplace the gesture is.

So we’ve talked about how Colbert used exaggeration and pointed reassertion of facts in order to highlight the actual point of the joke while staying in character. He was definitely a great satirist…but he also missed the mark on occasion, such as in this clip below.

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/b6cwb3/the-colbert-report-sport-report—professional-soccer-toddler–golf-innovations—washington-redskins-charm-offensive

When the Washington Redskins drew complaints from the Native American community for having a racial slur as their team name, the owner, Daniel Snyder, started a charity (the Washington Redskins Original American Foundation) to provide aid to Native American tribes. Great…but the charity name contained the same racial slur that drew criticism in the first place. It was an obvious cynical attempt to appear to be doing “something good” for Native Americans, but without actually having to change anything that had been criticized.

Colbert used the opportunity to discuss one of his own past racial controversies — a racist Asian impression he did called “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong.” To “make amends” to activist groups that called him out for his racist caricature in the past, he created a charity: The Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Racial Sensitivity or Whatever.

The joke’s intention is clear. Colbert chose a cartoonishly offensive stereotype — something that white folks would easily recognize as offensive — and then proceeded to do the very same thing that Daniel Snyder did — created a nondescript charity as a PR move to look like he cared about making amends for racist actions, but keeping the offending slur in the charity name. He was trying to highlight that the folks behind the Washington foundation were either seriously lacking in self awareness or didn’t actually care about making amends for any hurt they caused.

Here’s the trouble though…if you watch that clip, you hear the audience start laughing at the old clip Colbert showed. Then, people were laughing at the term “ching-chong ding-dong” before Colbert even got to the punchline about the charity. So what is the joke here? As I said, while the intention is to satirize lazy, cynical attempts to squash racial criticisms while avoiding doing any actual work…what a lot of people were actually laughing at was “Colbert did a racism, lol. Racism is funny.”

Colbert later addressed the issue by, in character, doubling down on the fact that it wasn’t racist, at one point explaining that the racist caricature was a character he played. “He is a character. He is not me. This is the real Stephen Colbert. I mean everything I say on this show.” Obviously that’s not true. We know Colbert played a character. But again, that’s where satire gets tricky. See if you can spot the problem with how he addressed the issue:

• Colbert explained that the Colbert Report twitter account, which was not his personal Twitter account and which he did not run, published a tweet reiterating the announcement of the Asian joke foundation.
• However, they didn’t include a link to the episode, therefore depriving the tweet of the context of the whole bit.
• He then added that the activists that started the hashtag (#CancelColbert) said even with the video as context, the joke was still racist.
• In that same segment, he announced he was closing his charity and donating all of the proceeds to Daniel Snyder’s charity, adding an aside that nobody on Twitter seemed as mad about Daniel Snyder’s racist charity name.
• Then he fired “the whole charity staff” — a single Asian-American man whom he called Jow-Mez even after being corrected that his name was “James.”
• With that bit over, he then pointed out several other inflammatory things he’d said in character and said he hoped Twitter didn’t find those clips because they seemed pretty bad out of context.

So…did you spot the issue? Go watch the videos linked above if you want to see the full bit in context.

The issue is this: how much of what Stephen said in that segment was real, and how much was the character? Was it part of the character’s act that he didn’t understand that the tweet wasn’t the issue but the racist name he used as a punchline — even in the context of the video? Was it part of his character’s act to defensively complain that he got in more trouble than Daniel Snyder? Was it his character defensively pointing out other inflammatory things he’d said on his show, or was it Stephen reminding everyone that he speaks in character? Does the fact that he was in character matter if the joke was ultimately at the expense of Asian Americans and hurt Asian Americans?

And that’s the trouble with satire when it’s not pointed at a clear target. If you slip up, or if you refuse to divorce yourself from your character when you do slip up, you end up muddying the effectiveness of the act. On the one hand, for folks who actually do like being racist, this provides them an easy defense. But if you want to be an anti-racist, or at least be seen as such, that muddiness leads to a lack of clarity about your personal character and where that differentiates from the personality that you put on for the cameras.

This has already been far longer than I intended, but if you’ll bear with me for just a bit longer, I said that I didn’t want to talk about the horror host…but let’s take a quick look at that article that kicked off this current controversy. I’m not linking to it because I’m sure you can find it.

So, much like the bit with Colbert’s Asian charity, see if you can spot the issue here:

“I have a friend who defines herself as trans—actually I should say hirself, not herself, but I’m not exactly sure why—a friend who defines hirself as trans but also lesbian, therefore a biological male who presents as female and dates females and has relationships with females. So a lesbian with a penis, which, if you think about it, is a penis that becomes, in this situation, basically a built-in sex toy—but then again, let’s not go to places known only to the two LGBTQ lovebirds. (Actually I don’t think I’m supposed to say biological male, either, I’m supposed to say Assigned Male at Birth.) I don’t think ze is a demiboi—ze being the designation for a nonbinary personal pronoun, boi being the opposite of what my friend is, a person presenting hirself as masculine but not male, and demiboy being partly boi and partly another gender although the other gender doesn’t have to be girl, woman, or female. Did you follow that? Probably not, but I don’t think I can re-explain it in any better way.”

So, if the horror host is actually a progressive and is playing a conservative bigot to satirize the types of redneck folks that are actually homophobic…what is the target of the joke here? Where is the indication that this is said as a character and said in jest? Where is the pointed exaggeration, such as Colbert stating that the hands-up gesture of the football players had spread to the crowd like a virus and caused them to do the wave? This reads, to me, like the joke is “they’re needlessly over-complicating sexuality and gender — aren’t these folks silly to bother with all of this?”

If taken as genuine, it’s a mean-spirited mockery of a marginalized community. The tone and wording implies that the writer is overwhelmed by this brave new world, but that is betrayed by how informed it is. It uses actual terms — as far as I can tell — correctly and explains them accurately. That requires research and demonstrates actual understanding. However, that understanding is weaponized, introducing new terms to the reader one after the other in rapid succession with the seeming intent to overwhelm the reader. You wouldn’t ask an engineer to explain their field in-depth and with a full glossary in 1200 words. Hell, you couldn’t even write about the Marvel Cinematic Universe like this.

Satire is a tough thing to nail. It’s a tightrope walk, and the thing about tightropes…is sometimes you fall. Whether you have a net that catches you or not, I suppose, depends on how well you treated the rest of the circus.