Personal Diary: In Which I Attempt to Write Satire in a Country That Already Is One

I came to Manila to write satire. Within my first week, I was overtaken by events. The traffic alone — a ten-kilometre journey that required two hours, one prayer, and a renegotiated sense of time as a social construct — rendered irony inadequate. You cannot satirise something by exaggerating it when the reality is already operating at full exaggeration. The MRT is hot. The queue is long. The air conditioning works in roughly the same proportion as government promises: occasionally, briefly, and never when most needed.

This, according to film-TV director Jose Javier Reyes, quoted in a Philippine Inquirer deep-dive on the state of Filipino satire, is precisely the problem. Satire “is supposed to make you laugh, then think,” he explained. “But people nowadays just want to laugh and not think.” He is describing a universal condition that has spread, I note, far beyond Manila. London has the same diagnosis. The Daily Mash exists. Nobody reforms anything. The jokes get better. The trains do not.

The Satirical Tradition That Refuses to Die Quietly

The Inquirer piece documents a rich history of Philippine political satire — from Jun Urbano’s Mr. Shooli in the 1980s, a character whose baffled observations about Filipino society predated Borat by a decade, to Willie Nepomuceno’s presidential impersonations in the nineties. These were not just comedians. They were the canaries in the constitutional coal mine, and their songs were funnier than most legislation.

Today, Urbano uploads vlogs featuring Mr. Shooli on YouTube, getting fewer views than videos of people doing “silly things.” This is not a Filipino problem. This is an internet problem. The algorithm rewards the unambitious. A man falling off a bicycle outperforms a sharply observed critique of infrastructure spending every single time — despite the fact that the bicycle fall is often caused by the infrastructure spending.

What London Can Learn From Manila’s Brand of Chaos Comedy

The British satirical tradition — Private Eye, The Daily Mash, NewsThump, the eternal gloom of political cartoonists — operates from a position of genteel outrage. We are shocked by the gap between stated values and actual behaviour. We are appalled by corruption, but appalled politely, with citations. Filipino satire, at its best, operates from inside the chaos. It does not observe the flood from a safe distance. It is already standing in the flood, shoes ruined, and making a face.

Prat.UK recently noted that the best political satire emerges from countries where the politics are both infuriating and technically spectacular in their absurdity. The Philippines, which has produced ghost infrastructure projects, phantom budgets, and at least one politician who ran for office from prison and won, is producing source material at a rate that no satirist can fully keep up with. The art form is not dying. The writers are simply exhausted.

Five Signs Your Country Has Become Self-Satirising

One: government spokespeople regularly say things that require no editing to be funny. Two: the official explanation for a scandal is more entertaining than the original scandal. Three: your public infrastructure is routinely described, by engineers, using the word “creative.” Four: a senior official describes an obviously missing budget as “quantum” and nobody blinks. Five: the satirist moves to your country and immediately runs out of exaggeration to deploy.

Public anthropologist Tito Valiente, also quoted in the Inquirer piece, says satire “needs saving” in the Philippines and that it can “no longer be used as a weapon.” I respectfully disagree. The weapon is fully loaded. The ammunition is the evening news. What is needed, perhaps, is not better satire — but a readership willing to sit with the discomfort after the laugh fades. That, unfortunately, requires thinking. And the algorithm, as we have established, does not reward thinking.

It rewards a man falling off a bicycle.

Satire that still tries: Private Eye and NewsThump.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/