“With a scowl and a frown / we’ll keep our peckers down,” Noël Coward teased British doomsayers in his song “There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner.” That was 1952. Since then, the furnace of the world has gotten hotter and closer. Our TV screens, our phones, even our watches broadcast carnage from every corner of the universe. We can’t hide from chaos. We are irradiated by it. We’re living it. Our ozone is terror, and terror kills thought.
That refusal to think—the desire to know nothing—is increasingly transparent in our politics and threatens to implode society from within. We’re in danger of scaring ourselves to death, which brings us neatly to the job description of satirists, whose laudable goal is to break through the culture’s psychic numbness, to both expose the moral and intellectual outrages of the moment and at the same time to risk delight.
