Jessica Bryan: Classroom Satirist?

This post is a work in progress. Please read it as such. When I've settled on what I think, I'll remove this opening paragraph. Please feel free to comment.

I am trying to work out my insights and ideas about Jessica Bryan's situation. Here is one way I've thought about it.

A story has made the rounds about NIC English instructor, Jessica Bryan, who made polemical comments about Republicans and had a student demand her tuition be refunded (it was) and has been the recepient of strongly worded and threatening emails from those who take issue with her classroom comments.

Here's what Jessica Bryan is reported to have said: "Republicans should be executed. I believe in the death penalty. I love it. I think we should use it every day. First we line up everyone who can't think and right behind them, anyone who's ever voted Republican."

It's satire, in my opinion. It's not personal philosophy or opinion or words from a pulpit.

The outageous first sentence is hyperbole; the tradition of satire is built on exaggeration. She follows her hyperbole with an assertion "I believe in the death penalty" which could be taken at face value until she says, "I love the death penalty."

No one loves the death penalty, even those who support it. Only in satire does a person say they love it. Her expression of love is ironic, satirical, sarcastic, whatever you want to call it and the next two sentences further reinforce the exaggeration.

What's the purpose of satire? Well from Lysistrata to A Modest Proposal to Dr. Strangelove to Rush Limbaugh (does he really support machine gunning environmentalists? I don't think so...) to Michael Moore to Anne Coulter, the purpose of satire is to exaggerate a position, often the position of one's opponent, to provide social criticism, to shake us out of our typical ways of seeing things, and to make us think.

I watched the video tape of Anne Coulter when she used the word "faggot" recently.

I thought she was satirizing how Isiah Washington of Grey's Anatomy had gone to counseling for using the word "faggot" in a conflict with another actor.

Back to Jessica Bryan. Can the death penalty be satirized? Is what might seem to be too much social or political enthusiasm for capital punishment something an instructor can satirize in the classroom? And if she said this with a smile, isn't that an indication that she is being ironic or satirical? And if her comments were published out of context, isn't it possible that her ironic tone and satirical purpose, the rhetoric of her comments, was lost when reported in the newspaper and on blogs?

Likewise, Ann Coulter. When Ann Coulter says that she knows using the word "faggot" will land her in rehab (a paraphrase), isn't she satirizing a world of rehab or counseling or sensitivity training that has possibly gone out of control? I value therapy and I value knowing how words injure and I also see, and relish, how the culture of therapy and the policing of language is ripe for satire.

Ann Coulter is a smart alec. She pushed her satire pretty far, then, when she said she couldn't use the word "faggot" and so couldn't talk about John Edwards. Maybe there is a better way to satirize political policies that are not, in the world of Ann Coulter, manly.

As a Democrat and a fairly liberal one at that, I enjoy Ann Coulter's satire. With friends, I can be kind of an Ann Coulter myself and it gets tricky because it becomes double satire: I'll satirize something Coulter would satirize while, at the same time, satirzing Ann Coulter!!

If nothing else, Jessica Bryan has experienced, in a frightening way, something we English teachers often say when we teach satire: satire is flammable, unpredictable, prone to being read at face value, combustible.

Many times satire falls on tin ears. When it does, often the fit hits the shan.

I guess I'd have to say that I'm glad Mauer and Limbaugh and Coulter and Franken and Colbert and all the other satirists hang in there and keep our fooishness and follies before us, even as these satirists are attacked from every side as if everything they say should be taken at face value.

I have not been satirical in this post. Nor have I been ironic. Nor have I been sarcastic.

I want to defend the right of satire to be understood as the powerful rhetorical strategy it is and I wish we could all enjoy it more.

I know. When things are polarized, the first thing to go is a sense of humor.

Was it Freud who postulated that jokes and laughter usually mask unconscious hostility?

Damn him. It ruins all the fun. It greatly limits the field of what we can joke about.