The Quantum Paradox of Truthiness: Satire, Activism, and the Postmodern Condition

“The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks.”

— Albert Einstein¹

When Studies in American Humor conceived of a special issue on recent satire, we framed the topic by asking contributors to test the usefulness of the postmodern condition as a rubric. How might the concept demarcate a poetics of contemporary American comic art forms that use ridicule to enable critique and promote the possibility of social change?

Whatever distinctions might be or are being made about what to call the contemporary cultural and artistic era, beyond simply the contemporary—remodernism, performatism, hypermodernism, automodernism, renewalism, altermodernism, digimodernism, or metamodernism—the idea of a postmodern condition, most memorably offered by Jean-François Lyotard in La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport Sur Le Savoir (1979), can still function as an analytical gambit not just for considering the contemporary scene for the art of satire, but perhaps also for evaluating satirical works produced in the United States since so-called black humor flourished in the 1960s.² The entanglement of basic terms complicates how to name the moment supposedly separating the postmodern from a new contemporary era of social relations and aesthetic concerns. The distinction between modern and postmodern registers as ambiguously as anything claiming to supplant the postmodern, given the persistence of modernism in many of its would-be supplanters.³

Nevertheless, a central concept from Lyotard that has created an intelligible contour to the postmodern condition involves turning away from the grand narratives found, for example, in an Enlightenment telos of social progress, humanist intellectual history, Christian eschatology, and Marxist historiography: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives,” says Lyotard.⁴ In particular, the metanarrative of ineluctable scientific progress has been undercut by insights developed with quantum physics, cybernetics, dissipative structures, information theory, fractal theory, chaos theory, and string theory; all have produced complicating, disaggregating knowledge about the physical world, with profound impacts on human societies. Moreover, technological changes in communication and mass media have reshaped the ways in which societies receive and understand such science as advancements. Lyotard’s influential report might have been heralded by a line from a famous modernist poem— “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”⁵

Skepticism toward metanarratives as well as the impact of technology and science on all domains of human society, then, provide the first necessary ingredients for understanding the production and consumption of contemporary satire in the United States, production and consumption that have reached unprecedented levels. Rachel Caufield and Rob King have argued that we are currently in a new golden age of satire, an assertion that might strike one as obvious, given the unrivaled ascendency of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, and John Oliver as pop culture satirists.⁶ The popularity of work by Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Amy Schumer, for example, like the 2016 addition of Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal (TBS) to the weekly line-up of broadcast shows, indicates the strength of gender-inflected satire. Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show (Comedy Central, 2015–2016) brought an African American sensibility to the broadcast scene memorably expressed earlier by Chappelle’s Show (Comedy Central, 2003–2006) and more recently by Key & Peele (Comedy Central, 2012–2015). Trevor Noah’s current version of The Daily Show (Comedy Central, 2015–present) features an international as well as person of color’s satiric point of view, enabled by Noah’s South African background. These examples suggest an unprecedented diversity to accompany satire’s unprecedented visibility. A survey of satire in a stand-up format would easily elaborate this televisual hint of its ubiquity.⁷

The ubiquity of satire in contemporary culture has occurred, in part, via the newest mass medium, the Internet, with its progeny YouTube a video world unto itself. Podcasts and streaming take their place as new formats in older media, existing alongside social media platforms that have a potential for comic presentation. Two new forms testify to our collective short attention span: Vines (sketch comedy in six-and-half seconds?) and Twitter (haiku satire?). These communication platforms blur...