Jacquie's Email Notice
Barbara's Minutes
Before Fran Greenberg rang us to order with her president’s bell, Literature Club members on Zoom on November 18 chatted eagerly of their relief at Biden’s election, recommended books, among them John Berger’s To the Wedding and Alex Ross’s Wagnerism, and shared personal news. We welcomed as guest Sharon DeLevie, who later helped us out of a technical glitch. At our business meeting Jacquie Weitzman’s insightful minutes were accepted as read, and the treasury reported at $181.52. We asked Connie Stewart to choose a book from her list of science books for kids to give to the Hastings Library in memory of Susan Korsten, and we deferred to a later meeting choosing a book in memory of May Kanfer. We also need to decide on an amount to contribute to the Hastings Library.
In her sweeping presentation on political satire, Lori Walsh ranged from influential cartoons by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Nash to Stephen Colbert’s eerily prescient 2012 book America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t and Christopher Buckley’s 1995 novel The White House Mess, and then moved on to classics of the genre like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5.
Lori defined political satire as a critique of social conditions that makes us laugh. Its main ingredients are ridicule, sarcasm, and exaggeration. The Onion has reported that this is why it’s been hard to satirize Trump – how do you exaggerate what is already far beyond norms? A lot of what has happened over the past four years has been very unfunny, yet humor has thrived. Shows like “Saturday Night Live,” Steven Colbert, “The Daily Show,” “Full Frontal,” among many others, as well as comedians like Randy Rainbow and Sarah Cooper have helped us to laugh about things while we simultaneously cry, protest, and shout with rage.
Lori commented that back in 1961, Catch-22 tried to warn us about the dangers of unchallenged authority and the tendency of government bureaucracy to obscure the reality right in front of us. In the 90s and early 2000s, comedy shows like “The Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” warned us about the increasingly partisan Fox News and the more and more extreme views of the conservative movement. And here we are in 2020, after four years of a president who makes Stephen Colbert’s conservative caricature look––reasonable and who is asking us not to see the reality right in front of our eyes. It hurts, but we might as well laugh. After all, humor is one of our best weapons in the fight for self-preservation.
Respectfully submitted, Barbara Morrow, Recording secretary
