“Satire is not Comedy; Laugher is just the delivery mechanism of the medicine“
Over the past few years, a swath of shows built on satire and parody have been cut back or cut altogether. CBS scrapped its 12:37 a.m. experiment “After Midnight” this summer. Earlier, Showtime ended “Ziwe,” TBS axed “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” and the cult-favorite “Desus & Mero” split up at Showtime. Then came the earthquake when CBS and Stephen Colbert announced that they will be parting ways, ending the top-rated “Late Show” and raising existential questions about whether the most traditional home for nightly satire still has a future on broadcast. Even when late night isn’t canceled, it feels embattled. Just recently, Jimmy Kimmel’s triumphant return from a brief suspension drew his biggest audience in a decade. To many, this is a testament that the seemingly declining Late Night shows can still draw national attention when controversy makes its core purpose unavoidable.
However, some critiques have continued to question where satire is losing its place in mainstream culture. Part of the answer lies in economics. Younger audiences no longer wait until 11:30 p.m. to watch a monologue. They catch short clips on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram. Ratings keep dropping, ad revenue is shrinking, and even legacy late-night shows have lost millions of viewers since their peak in the late 2010s. On paper, satire looks like bad business. But economics alone don’t explain its decline. The deeper issue is cultural. In recent years, there’s been a widening gap between the growing need for satire and a shrinking tolerance for it. Divisions around race, gender, immigration, and other hot-button issues have only heightened this tension, leaving fewer people willing, or even able, to pause and grasp the meaning behind satire. Audiences today are more literal, more cautious, and less patient with irony. Yet irony, sarcasm, and discomfort are exactly what satire depends on. It asks us to laugh at the very realities we’d rather avoid.
It is easy to forget that satire was never meant to be “just jokes.” Its purpose is not laughter for its own sake but pressure and using wit to puncture power and pretension. The laughter is the sugar coating and often just the delivery mechanism for the medicine. When we laugh at something, we acknowledge its reality while, for a moment, denying its power over our emotions. It gets people to pay attention to issues they might otherwise ignore, holding a mirror to our flaws and forcing us to think critically. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this in 1988 in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, when it protected a brutal parody. The Court warned that punishing speech simply for being offensive would put political satire itself at risk. That decision did not excuse cruelty, but it defended satire as an essential tool of democracy.
Satire’s power, however, makes it easy to misunderstand. As Dr. Thomas Bivins of the University of Oregon notes, satire provokes because it mixes anger with humor. That blend can unsettle audiences and blur meaning. Some dismiss satire as tasteless. Others complain, “It’s just not funny.” The most dangerous mistake is assuming that satirists secretly believe the very ideas they are mocking. One example came in 2008, when The New Yorker published a cover by Barry Blitt that showed Barack Obama in a turban and Michelle Obama with an Afro, fist-bumping beneath a portrait of Osama bin Laden. The cartoon provoked outrage and was widely condemned as offensive and NOT FUNNY. The editor, David Remnick, explained that it was a satire of the right-wing’s perception of the couple. The joke, for many, was lost in translation, and the image spread globally without its ironic context.
Today, the consequences of this misunderstanding are more acute. The recent decline of editorial cartooning is a case study. Cartoonist Michael de Adder, for example, claims that his contract with several Canadian newspapers was terminated after he drew a cartoon based on the harrowing AP photo of a migrant father and his daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande. Around the same time, The New York Times International Edition banned all political cartoons after the newspaper published one showing a blind Donald Trump being led by the Israeli Prime Minister, portrayed as a dachshund. As Patrick Chappatte, one of the cartoonists let go in the ban, lamented, “Political cartoons were born with democracy. And they are challenged when freedom is.”
Traditionally, satire has “punched up,” targeting those in power rather than the powerless. In the 19th century, Thomas Nast used Harper’s Weekly to relentlessly attack corrupt New York politician Boss Tweed. Tweed famously said, “My constituents can’t read, but they can see pictures!” Nast’s cartoons were so effective that they helped send Tweed to prison. Today, though, what counts as “punching up” is harder to define. Ralph Steadman, known for his collaborations with writer Hunter S. Thompson, built his career skewering presidents from Reagan to Trump. His work is messy, shocking, and offensive to some, but always aimed at power. “To offend the right person is its own reward,” he once said. The danger comes when satire “punches down”, mocking minorities, victims, or the powerless. When that happens, it curdles into cruelty. Joe Sacco, critiquing Charlie Hebdo, asked the essential question: “Whose bone is being cut? What exactly is the target? And why?” The target, in other words, matters.
This raises a deeper conflict between free speech and responsibility. The First Amendment protects satire, but legal protection does not answer the ethical question of who should be targeted and why. In the United States, this is complicated by a cultural attachment to facts. Journalism here has long prized objectivity and literal truth. Against that backdrop, irony can seem dishonest, and sarcasm can feel like bad faith. But satire reminds us that facts without context can also deceive. Stephen Colbert captured this when he coined the term “truthiness”, to explain the idea that people prefer what feels true over what is true. His 2006 roast of George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was called “not funny” by many in the room. But the real reason it stung was because Colbert treated power as a target to confront, and not as a partner to flatter.
That is the true purpose of satire, and controversy is not a flaw but the inevitable cost of doing so. Therefore, the question is not whether someone is offended, but whether the satire is holding the powerful accountable or simply mocking the powerless. As late-night shows fade and political cartoons disappear, we risk losing one of the most important mirrors we have. Without satire, the public square becomes safer, perhaps, but also blander and less honest. Cartoonist Mr. Fish put it best: “If you don’t look, you can’t see.” And as the lights dim on the late-night stage, we may be closing our eyes to one of the most important ways we have ever had of seeing ourselves clearly. The punchline was never the point. The critique was. And when satire disappears, democracy itself is the poorer for it.