Sigh. As a high school English teacher, this thread has me feeling pretty hopeless. I am used to children not understanding the nuance and power of satire, but when (what I assume to be educated and worldly) adults are so astonishingly ignorant to the aim and emotional motivation of satire, I start to understand how Trump got elected.
I made a joke very early in this thread about Jonathan Swift, an 18th century satirist who wrote an satirical essay called "A Modest Proposal" that posited that we should once and for all deal with the problem of so many poor Irish babies by feeding them to the wealthy of England. The point of the essay, like all satire, was to make people laugh at the implausibility, the silliness, the absurdity........and then make them realize that there is some truth to the suggestion, and that the wealthy of England might as well just eat the poor babies of Ireland with how those babies are being treated in real life. The point of the essay was to motivate people to do something about the poor babies in Ireland.
On to BOM. My oh my. Female genital mutilation. Baby rape. Famine. AIDS. Lack of clean water. Dysentery. Lack of technology. Warlords. Violence. Colonialism. Neo-Colonialism. Religious hypocrisy. How can any of this be fun? Well any of us who have sat through a performance know that every audience roars with laughter at these topics.
I am so disappointed that some of my fellow theater goers honestly and legitimately sat through BOM, saw Neutrogena (I'm sorry what's her name?) send a text via typewriter and think "They're making fun of Africans." That is the response I get when I show my freshmen a headline from the Onion (sidenote: Please, none of you ever read the Onion....I think we'd have a civil war on our hands if some of you tried to make sense of it) and they do not understand the point of the article and/or what's being satirized. So to be clear and simple to all of you who either failed Freshman English or maybe you were texting on a typewriter while your teacher taught, but the typewriter-as-text joke is NOT at the Ugandan people's expense. That joke is quite complicated actually. On one hand, Parker/Stone are saying that you are the one who is a dummy if you think Africans don't know what texting is. On the other hand, there are parts of Uganda where people are living without clean water, enough food......and access to tech. Now would they go so far as to be aware of texting but conflate it with a typerwriter? Of course not, but that is the rich rhetoric behind satire---this particular example uses hyperbole.
The real emotion behind satire is anger. The audience is supposed to laugh and then be angry. Angry that they laughed at such a serious topics as a man dying of AIDS raping a baby to cure himself to a warlord circumcising a woman against her will. Are there millions of men in Africa raping babies to cure AIDS? No, but has it happened before? You bet it has. Have warlords performed forced circumcisions? Yes they have. And we hear about it on 60 Minutes or in the NY Times and what do we do? We switch the channel to the Kardashians or turn to Page Six. (NY Post, ok fine) But Parker and Stone throw these issues in our faces and then sicken us by making us LAUGH at them. And now what? We should be inspired to look up how can we help Uganda. Or how we can help women's rights in our local community. The absolute worst thing we could do is say that the show is offensive or it forces actors of color to humiliate themselves. Just as bad as parents who try to ban Huck Finn for the exact same reasons.
The most disturbing poster is the one who said that Parker and Stone never get the audience to have sympathy for the Ugandans. I am still struggling to pick my jaw up from the floor and I read that response a day ago. The show does NOTHING but elicit sympathy for the Ugandans. They had to deal with the worthless parade of missionaries who came before the Mormons and did nothing for them. Now they have to deal with these idiot WHITE Mormons who are so dumb that they don't even fully understand what they're trying to teach--and they are so ignorant, they don't know about the historical racism inherent in their religion. They have to deal with all of the issues I mentioned above. Doesn't the song Salt Lake City ( I know that's not how you spell it, stans relax) break your heart? That this poor woman, this poor human being, thinks that paradise is a place with a Red Cross on every corner, and flies that don't bite your eyeballs? Where human life has worth? How many Africans are dying of preventable diseases, from a lack of sanitation and clean water? Can we really say that we care about what poor and marginalized Africans are going through? And here is a show that points out these problems and some of you have the nerve to say they shouldn't be?
