Of Satire and Gordian Knots

Comic dictionaries and encyclopedias are an underappreciated medium of satiric epistemology in a twenty-first century replete with televisual satire. This article looks at how the humor in texts like Jon Stewart's America (the Book) (2004) and Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!) (2007) establishes catalogues of cultural knowledge as collections of the Gordian knots that ensnare US public culture. It argues that the written form of the dictionary or encyclopedia discloses a nexus of connections about matters of social, political, and cultural concern, which reveal grand narratives as so many bundles of squibs. The squibs enable readers to unravel the Gordian knots in hidebound modes of knowledge. Such unravelings result in a comic logic of unknowing prevailing against ways of knowing in and through narrative travesties.