Ambiguous Satire: "The Onion", Mark Twain and Poe's Law

Recently, the inability of some people to recognize satire has made headlines again.  As reported on The World, FARS, a government-backed news source in Iran, copied an article from The Onion entitled "Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama" and ran it as if it were fact.  That FARS would be attracted to such a headline is not really surprising--anything to glorify the current regime, right?--but all the same, I have got to wonder: how is it that people keep believing what they read in The Onion?

Alas, this just keeps on happening.  No matter how long The Onion has been around, people keep missing the satire.  If anything, the rise of the Internet has made this more common; check out Literally Unbelievable if you need evidence and an afternoon of face-palms.  But it's not just the incredibly credulous on Facebook and foreign media groups who fall victim.  Kevin Fallon of The Daily Beast notes that the recently duped include Rep. John Fleming (R-LA), Stephen A. Smith of ESPN, and even The New York Times.  Not even the paper of record has a fully functioning satire-detector.

What to make of this trend?  After all, aren't we supposed to be living in a world whose culture is dominated by irony and "irony"?  If that's the case, it's sure strange how our abilities to recognize satire so often falters.  It could very well be that the world has gotten so absurd that absolutely nothing would surprise us.  But I'd like to make a modest proposal (sorry, I had to).  Perhaps the issue isn't that we are unable to recognize satire.  Maybe the problem is satire especially in text, itself tends to be ambiguous, to leave its objective and targets unclear.

Poe's Law

First things first: why do so many people mistake things obviously written as satire seriously?

Prose text is a wonderful and rich medium, but it's not the best medium to communicate on a non-literal level.  There's a reason I advise people never to be sarcastic on the Internet: without the intonations of speech and the gestures of body language, all the audience has is what is literally said.  There's no real way to determine the intent of the writer just from analyzing what he wrote, so what choice does the reader have but to take what is written at face value?  There's got to be a major tip-off in the text to do otherwise, which leads right into Poe's Law.

Poe's Law is named after an Internet user by the name of Nathan Poe; although the idea stipulated in the law had previously been floating around the Web, Poe's phrasing of the concept is the one that caught on, which is why he's the namesake.  Poe's original formulation was posted to a message board called Christian Forums, and ran thusly:

Without a winking smiley or blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.

Over time, Poe's Law has been expanded to included topics outside of creationism or even religion, and can probably be reformulated like so:

It is impossible to parody anything in such a way that no one will take you at face value.

Whether it's an article about Obama's "long missing son" or a massive leap of creationist logic, there is simply no way to craft a parody so extreme that the satiric intent is plainly visible without explicitly stating it.  After all, both The Onion and creationist parodists, while certainly humorous, play their roles straight.  If you were just given the text of the article or post, how on Earth could you determine whether what you were reading was legitimately stupid or designed to look legitimately stupid to make a larger point?

(Hell, go on and read some of the posts from Literally Unbelievable.  Some of the responses on Facebook are so over-the-top and clueless that I'm tempted to call Poe on them.)

Fuzzy Targets

Furthermore, even if it is clear, absolutely clear that a work is satire, there is still another hurdle to overcome in satire recognition: what is being satirized can be ambiguous.  You know how some conservatives feel that The Colbert Report is a parody of how liberals view right-wing pundits?  Well, especially in text, that could be a valid interpretation.  After all, what is a parodic creationist post poking fun at?  Creationism? creationists? atheists/scientists/the general public's view of creationism/creationism?  Who can be sure?

For the rest of this article, I would like to focus on one particular work of satire as a case study.  Given the author, the tone, and that proving a work to be a satire given Poe's Law would be nigh impossible, I shall grant the satiric intent as self-evident.  Even so, it will become clear that what the satiric target is can only be guessed at. 

Recently, I came across a especially ambiguous satire as an assignment for a class in nonfiction.  In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain details a excursion he paid to partake in, which took him to continental Europe and the Holy Land.  The text drips with Twain's trademark derision and humor, and no one is exempt from it.  His fellow American travelers, the great landmarks of Europe, the clergy and religion: everyone is an acceptable target.  So much so, it raises the question, "What is Twain even satirizing?"

Based on the title and Twain's later works such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one would be tempted to immedaitely respond that he is poking fun at American tourists.  In fact, one could argue that The Innocents Abroad predicts the rise of the "ugly American" archetype that would later emerge.  For instance, Twain spends a great deal of time describing fellow voyager Dan, who insists on speaking to everyone they meet in English, as in this exchange in Italy:

      Dan's voice rose on the air: "Oh, bring some soap, why don't you?"
      The reply was Italian.  Dan resumed: "Soap, you know - soap.  That is what I want - soap.  S-o-a-p, soap; s-o-p-e, soap; s-o-u-p, soap.  Hurry up!  I don't know how you Irish spell it, but I want it.  Spell it to suit yourself, but fetch it.  I'm freezing." (119)

Yet while Twain certainly takes a lot of jabs at the passengers, he also seems to skewer the foreigners as well.  In particular, he portrays many of the French, Italian, etc. commoners as scam artists, preying on tourists looking for tour guides; Twain and others even take to calling all of their guides "Ferguson" after one such guide.  Considering how wide Twain spray is and how light his tone is through most of the book, one could possibly say that he just wants to poke fun at humanity in general.

This view, however, would suggest that Twain lacks an agenda.  That's not impossible, but then how does one account for the drastic tonal shift that Twain's voice undergoes while in Florence?  Normally, Twain seems content to make jokes and cast everyone in unflattering lights.  Then, out of nowhere, his words become deathly serious.  Rather than making jokes about the wealth of the church and the poverty of the masses, Twain's prose takes the form of an impassioned plea:

Look at the grand Duomo of Florence - a vast pile that has been sapping the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly finished yet.  Like all other men, I fell down and worshipped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said, "O, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavour, utterly dead within ye?  Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?" (164)

Compared to earlier passages about soap and tour-guides and general annoyance, this passage is downright acidic.  It's as if an episode of The Colbert Report suddenly smash cut to John Stewart at his most outraged.  It ceases to be a satire and transitions into straight polemic.  And most confusing, this change is only temporary.  Once Florence far behind the Quaker City, Twain jumps right back into a lighter, broader comedy.  So is Twain actually satirizing Europe, or the ruling classes, but doing so in the persona of a rural hick?  The Innocents Abroad is far from a straight-forward work.

In Search of a Solution

So how are we to make sense of ambiguous satiric targets?  One proposal comes from David McNeil, who, in an essay on A Confederacy of Dunces, suggests a type of satire which accomodates conflicting or shifting targets.  He refers to it as "reverse satire", which McNeil defines as "the kind of satire in which the satirist-persona or the satirist-character makes his attack and is ironically ridiculed himself" (33).  The term itself does not appear to have caught on, but McNeil contends that this particular satiric form is prevelant throughout American literature.

At first it would appear that the reverse satire may be the key to deciphering Twain's intentions in The Innocents Abroad.  I certainly got that hope reading McNeil's essay, since he draws myriad references to another Twain novel, and my personal favorite of his, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.  In that novel, the satire first appears to be aimed squarely at the chilavric, medieval age, but as the narrative develops and the tone darkens it becomes clear the real target is the industrial age and "Yankee ingenuity", represented by the protagonist Hank Morgan.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court works as a reverse satire because Hank Morgan "makes his attack" on the Arthurian world but later "is ironically ridiculed himself" thanks to the unfolding narrative; industrial progress is really just another form of magic that leaves nobody enlightened.  The joke, in other words, is on the perspective character.  In the case of The Innocents Abroad, however, I don't believe that the text fits the definition.  The issue is the "ironically ridiculed himself" part of the equation.

For this idea to really hold, there ought to be a clear indication that the ultimate target is the perpective character.  So, in The Innocents Abroad, that would mean that by the end we should get the sense that the Twain figure, the chronically unimpressed and dismissive narrator, is the real target.  By the end, however, Twain's character has not changed all that much.  He pretty much has the same tone and outlook that he had at the start; he's just seen the world now.  So the reverse satire approach seems to be a dead end.

What, then, do we call a work such as The Innocents Abroad?  Given the scattershot approach Twain takes, that hard to say.  Perhaps we should just forget the intent of the satire and read whatever meaning we want into it.  That's not a particularly satisfying approach, but given how the author is currently unavailable on account of being dead, it's probably the only approach.  What else can the modern reader do but interpret the satiric intent as the reader sees fit?

In fact, given how we interact with print media, far away from the author and unable to hear his voice, this may explain why satire often goes over our heads.  Because a direct statement of intent is unavailable to the audience, and text yields the fewest clues about intent, initial exposures to satire can be easy to mistake, especially when the satire itself is ambiguous.  This still doesn't excuse people who take Onion articles at face value, but at least now--I think--I can understand what exactly is going on when that happens.  Perhaps.

Works cited:
"Iranian News Agency Apologizes for Reprinting Onion Satire as Fact." The World.
     Host Marco Werman. NPR. WESA, Pittsburgh, 1 Oct. 2012. Radio.

McNeil, David. "A Confederacy of Dunces as Reverse Satire: The American
     Subgenre." The Mississippi Quarterly 38.1 (1984): 33-47. Literature Resource
     Center. Web. 2 Oct. 2012.

Poe, Nathan. "Big contradictions in the evolution theory." Christian Forums. Christian
     Forums, 11 Aug. 2005. Web. 2 Oct. 2012.

Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad. 1869. Introduction Stuart Hutchinson. Ware,
     Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2010. Print.