Humor and Satire
Earlier this month a satire piece I wrote lampooning a professor of mine attracted some attention when the popular New York gossip blog Gawker reported it as a straight news story. Needless to say the whole episode amused me- and happily also Professor Thurman- to bits.
Since then I've noticed that two additional blogs have weighed in. The University of Pittsburgh newspaper published a paragraph describing the incident and wrote "satire or not, the publication was clearly trying to boost hits for its website. In other news: Sidney Crosby, Michelle Obama, astronauts, naked women, naked men, Chuck Norris. "
Very funny. Of course we write with the intention of boosting hits for our website. I'm sure the Pitt students feel the same about their own site, as does everyone else who publishes their thoughts online. For every Emily Dickinson who prefers to write in total obscurity there are a million scribes who recognize the value in reaching a wide audience.
That being said, neither I nor the editors at The Morningside Post expected my post to generate much attention at all. I thought that the 250-odd students who knew Professor Thurman might get a couple laughs out of it and was as shocked as anyone when Gawker and The Huffington Post picked it up. After all, if I was truly looking for attention I'd come up with something much more scandalous than a story about a professor with a strict late policy.
In another comment, the Student Press Law Center warns that authors such as myself are at risk of being sued for libel if we fail to explicitly identify pieces as satire. Perhaps I'm being naive, but one of the reasons satire works is that it resembles actual news- if I had made the fictitious elements of the story more outlandish people would not have found it as funny or interesting. Prior to publishing the piece my editors assured me that the satire was obvious, hence my shock when Gawker didn't get it.
For one thing, how many people who mug students in broad daylight have the tact to remove their homework from the bag? Secondly, no professor to my knowledge would include a snarky comment about the crime if one of his students had just been mugged. These two facts I thought would be sufficient in setting off everyone's bullshit detector.
Then again, these days media sources who compete for content don't always take the time to read the stories they link to carefully. For Gawker, the publicity they received made their loss of face- such as it was- totally worth it.
