Reality Is Already the Joke: Why Satire No Longer Needs Exaggeration

There was a time when satire had to exaggerate reality to make a point. Today, reality does all the heavy lifting.

When an American Airlines regional jet collides with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River, you’d think the national conversation would focus on understaffed air traffic control towers, mass deregulation, or the gutting of the FAA. Instead, the official response from political figures is that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) is somehow to blame.

It’s a moment tailor-made for satire, yet impossible to parody. In a functioning society, this would be the premise of a Saturday Night Live sketch: "Two aircraft collide in midair, and politicians immediately blame wokeness instead of, say, the people actually responsible for air safety." But here we are, living inside the joke.

Satire has always thrived on exaggeration, irony, and inversion—turning the powerful into fools by highlighting their contradictions. But what happens when power itself stops pretending to be competent? When elected officials sound more like The Onion than The Economist?

Take, for instance, the ongoing effort to blame systemic failures on ideological scapegoats rather than the people actually running the system. When a train derails due to corporate cost-cutting and deregulation, the response isn’t, “Maybe railroad companies shouldn’t have eliminated their safety inspectors.” Instead, it’s, “This is what happens when we let drag queens read to children.” It’s an argument so disjointed, so deeply unserious, that satire becomes redundant.

If satire’s job is to poke holes in the absurd logic of the powerful, then the powerful have made it easy. They’ve abandoned logic altogether. The goalposts for satire have shifted—not because satirists have changed, but because reality has outpaced them.

This is why satire is no longer just entertainment—it’s collateral damage in the war to control the narrative. Apple didn’t cancel The Problem with Jon Stewart because it was unwatchable; they canceled it because it was unflinchingly real. Stewart’s planned episodes on artificial intelligence and corporate greed weren’t just controversial—they were inconvenient. In today’s landscape, satire isn’t being suppressed for being too outrageous. It’s being suppressed for being too accurate.

In the early 2000s, Jon Stewart was America’s most trusted newsman—a comedian whose political takedowns were so effective that actual journalists looked to him for guidance. But in 2024, the environment had changed. Apple, a trillion-dollar corporation deeply enmeshed in AI development and global supply chains, wasn’t about to bankroll a show that might question the very foundation of its profit model.

This wasn’t a case of a show getting bad ratings. It was a case of corporations realizing that even mild criticism is a liability. Satire isn’t failing—it's being preemptively muzzled before it can do real damage.

There’s another factor at play here: the rise of disinformation.

We live in a time when political operatives can flood social media with AI-generated deepfakes, misleading headlines, and outright fabrications. When actual news is indistinguishable from propaganda, satire doesn’t just have to be funny—it has to be precise. Shows like Last Week Tonight don’t just make jokes; they spend entire episodes debunking lies, filling the gap left by a media ecosystem increasingly incentivized to chase clicks over truth.

But what happens when satire gets caught in the crossfire? When people start mistaking satire for reality?

It’s already happening. Every few months, someone shares a headline from The Onion as if it’s real. A recent poll found that a significant percentage of Americans believe satirical headlines to be genuine news. This isn’t a failure of satire—it’s a symptom of a reality so unhinged that even parody feels plausible.

In the past, satirists could rely on hyperbole to make a point. If a politician had a bad policy, satire would amplify its flaws to absurd extremes. But what happens when those extremes are already happening?

In the 2006 film Idiocracy, the U.S. president is a former wrestler who speaks in catchphrases. In 2016, America actually elected a reality TV star who sold steaks and tweeted in all caps.

Black Mirror once depicted a world where people were forced to cycle on exercise bikes to earn currency. Today, companies like Amazon literally track every worker movement and issue automated penalties if they don’t move fast enough.

A satirical news article from 2014 joked that corporations would one day charge for "breathing tax credits." In 2023, major insurance companies actually started considering "climate surcharge fees" for people living in high-risk areas.

There is no need for exaggeration when the joke writes itself.

The solution isn’t to abandon satire—it’s to refine it. If reality is already absurd, the role of satire must shift from distortion to documentation.

That means:
✅ More fact-checking – Satirists are now doing the work mainstream journalists won’t.
✅ More direct mockery – When power stops pretending to be serious, satire must mock it in plain terms.
✅ More real-world consequences – Satire must push beyond jokes and into actual political engagement.

The job of satire is no longer to create an alternate, exaggerated reality. The job of satire is to simply present reality and let it collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.

When politicians insist that pilot shortages and gutted regulations had nothing to do with a midair collision—but that “wokeness” is somehow to blame—satirists don’t need to invent a more absurd scenario. They just need to point at it and say, “Look.”

And that, apparently, is too much for some to handle. Because if there’s one thing the powerful hate more than being mocked, it’s being understood. That’s why Apple canceled The Problem with Jon Stewart. That’s why political leaders would rather blame “wokeness” for a midair collision than admit they gutted the FAA. That’s why every time a billionaire or a politician gets caught red-handed, they don’t take responsibility—they cry victim.

If you’ve ever wondered how the rich and powerful fail upward while convincing the rest of us that it’s our fault, that’s exactly why I wrote Immunity: How the Elite Stay Untouchable Through Weakness. Because the biggest joke isn’t satire—it’s how power has mastered the art of weakness. Corporate fraud is just "innovation." Regulatory capture is just "job creation." And every political disaster is always somebody else’s fault.

If you're tired of watching the people at the top trip over their own shoelaces and somehow land on a pile of cash, check out Immunity. Because the best way to deal with this circus isn’t just to laugh at it—it’s to tear down the tent.

📖 Read it here: Immunity: How the Elite Stay Untouchable Through Weakness