Understanding Satire

By Kleinheider Posted on July 22, 2008 at 4:27 pm

Daniel Larison thinks the Vanity Fair spoof of the famed Obama New Yorker cover is not a proper imitation:

There is essentially nothing in this image that is not an exaggeration, or just a representation, of things that are true about John McCain: he is old, his wife once had a problem with prescription drugs, he is closely aligned with George Bush and he does support policies that violate the Constitution.  As a caricature, it works quite well.  As a parody of an image that is supposed to be mocking absurd claims about the Obamas, it completely fails, because the point of the New Yorker image is supposed to be that everything in it is ludicrous and false and obviously so and, more to the point, it is supposed to be exaggerating the absurd claims to their most extreme form.  (The problem with the original image, as I’ve said before, is that it did not exaggerate the claims, but simply repeated them.)  The more of these parodies people produce, the more literally audiences may take the New Yorker image.

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