19 - Satire

Summary

Introduction

In 2011, Canadian actor Elliot Page tweeted, “Why are vegans made fun of while the inhumane factory farming process regards animals and the natural world merely as commodities to be exploited for profit?” In its alignment of ridicule and exploitation, Page’s question seems purely rhetorical. However, this essay begins, perhaps facetiously, by offering a series of answers to this question. The remainder of the essay then considers how vegans from the Global North have responded, sometimes preemptively, to their status as the butt of cultural jokes by satirizing both non-vegan culture and themselves. I begin with popular paraliterary texts, including comics, cookbooks, and stand-up comedy. I then turn to Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead (2009, translated into English in 2018), which both engages in satire, humor, and irony and offers philosophical reflections on those modes, including their pitfalls and possibilities, from a distinctly feminist perspective.

Throughout, I work with the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) definition of satire as a literary or artistic work “which uses humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize prevailing immorality or foolishness, esp. as a form of social or political commentary.” I should note, though, that any discussion of satire, humor, irony, or other rhetorical-political forms is subjective. For example, at times I will describe some things as “funny” or “unfunny,” when they are so perhaps only to me. And, of course, those aforementioned forms are always contingent. The question posed by my queer theory professor Kathryn Schwarz in a seminar back in 2004 continues to reverberate: “Is it satire if no one gets it?”

Vegan Killjoys and Cranks

As perhaps exemplified by Page’s Tweet, vegans often appear as awkward, humorless killjoys, ruining dinner parties the world over with their “sincerity and despair” (Quinn 919). Vegan activist Carol J. Adams explains that “vegetarians of decades past were seen as isolated individuals holding odd (nondominant) cultural positions … There’s a reason one of the early 1960s popular natural health food restaurants in London called themselves ‘Cranks’” (90) – meaning, a kind of fussy or grumpy eccentric.

Statistically speaking, vegans are odd; a recent Gallup poll found that only three per cent of Americans identify as such (Reinhart).