Watch Which Way You Punch
Unless you don't give a damn about mutual respect.
We all understand bully humor.
We saw it in school hallways. We’ve seen it in the movies. We saw it when some kid made a joke, and the crowd laughed. Not because it was funny, but because it was safer to laugh than to be next.
Bullies weaponize humor, but they don’t tell jokes. They recruit audiences. They get people to laugh with them, at someone else.
Bully humor isn’t actually funny. It’s social currency.
So what about humor like…
Stephen Colbert roasting a senator?
Seth Meyers doing his Trump impression?
Tina Fey standing at a fake kitchen window and saying she can see Russia?
Turns out, that’s different because satire isn’t the same thing as bullying.
Bullies punch down.
Satirists punch up.
From my deep and detailed understanding of American history (I am, after all, a technical writer for VPN software), this country was most definitely founded by people who enjoyed punching up at the white dudes in powdered wigs and tights.
I’ll tell you all about it.
A brief and totally calm history of American mockery
In high school, I was in a seminary class with Sister Smith. I had a seat in the back. I had my black, triple combination open. (For those uninitiated with LDS scriptures, this meant I had a Bible with the Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine & Covenants all combined into one heavy block of pages with their gold leaf on the edges.) I flipped to the blank page in the back and wrote a list of favorite quotes.
They weren’t scriptural verses.
They were Benjamin Franklin quotes.
“Love your neighbor as yourself, yet don’t pull down your hedges.”
“Fish and visitors stink after three days.”
“He that lies down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.”
“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
Nothing says devotional enrichment like colonial snark.
Franklin didn’t invent satire. He absorbed it from writers like Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith who preceded him, and refined the art of holding up a mirror so exaggerated that people were forced to see themselves.
Take Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”
His suggestion? That impoverished Irish families should sell their kids as food to the wealthy to solve poverty.
You know. A totally modest suggestion.
He wasn’t mocking starving families. He wasn’t punching down at desperate parents. He was punching up at a ruling class so indifferent to suffering that only grotesque exaggeration could break through.
(What would that be like? Hmm.)
No Irish mother was clutching little Patrick, saying, “Well, I suppose we could try that marketplace.” That’s not how satire works.
Swift weaponized absurdity against power.
How about Gulliver’s Travels? I immediately picture the tiny ropes tying Gulliver down. And perhaps it’s easy to forget the part where these wee little Lilliputians are obsessing over petty political disputes… arguing over which end of an egg to crack.
I mean, y’all.
Tiny people. Tiny visions. Tiny priorities.
It’s almost… relatable.
Oliver Goldsmith did the same thing, swinging at the hypocrisy of the upper classes with letters written by a naive Chinese philosopher in The Citizen of the World, and skewering the middle-class status anxiety in The Vicar of Wakefield with another naive protagonist, Dr. Primrose — bloated with moral certainty and intellectual pride — who could easily host a podcast today.
Then there’s Mark Twain, America’s patron saint of “I am also part of this mess.”
Twain didn’t just mock society. He mocked himself first.
“By and by I was smitten with the silver fever… I would have ben more or less than human if I had not gone mad like the rest… I succumbed and grew as frenzied as the craziest."
The satirist implicates himself.
Twain even joked about polygamy in the Utah Territory.
“…how some old frog of an elder, or a bishop, marries a girl—likes her, marries her sister—likes her, marries another sister—likes her, takes another—likes her, marries her mother—likes her, marries her father, grandfather, great grandfather, and then comes back hungry and asks for more.”
Clearly, a truthful, factual, and accurate description. And Twain added:
“No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”
As an LDS Utahn, I feel obligated to both laugh and check historical footnotes.
Satire works because it exposes power, hypocrisy, greed, and ego.
It doesn’t work when it humiliates the powerless.
The First Amendment is first for a reason
Satire is practically constitutional.
As Dave Chappelle said while accepting the Mark Twain Prize at the Kennedy Center (remember that place?) in 2019:
“The First Amendment is first for a reason. The Second Amendment is just in case the first one doesn’t work out.”
That joke works because it punches at power, cultural absurdity, and American contradictions.
Freedom of speech gives us humorists, late-night comics, and the ability to laugh when everything feels structurally unstable. (I’ll add a plug here for a book that really hits on this: Laughing to Keep From Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century.)
I have a sticky note on my computer monitor:
humor as the scalpel, not the anesthetia
Anesthesia numbs.
A scalpel cuts precisely.
When people confuse satire with bullying
Some people can’t handle being satirized. I guess it feels like persecution? Like something unfair? Even a cruelty. But satire isn’t bullying. It’s a critique with rhythm.
Surprisingly, Sean Spicer understood that. Melissa McCarthy hilariously portrayed him on Saturday Night Live, and he later responded:
“I had a really tough, you know, time out of the gate at the White House — is probably generous on my behalf. And so, look, it was fair. It was funny. It was a little well deserved."
That’s the difference. If you’re in power, satire is an occupational hazard. If you’re powerless, ridicule is cruelty.
Both linger.
I can still remember the full name of a kid the group teased in first grade. Decades later, it’s filed in my memory archive under Shame I Witnessed and Didn’t Stop.
And I remember Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impressions far better than what Sarah Palin actually said. Satire sticks.
Side note: The SNL jokes didn’t decide my ballot. Competence did. I didn’t vote for Palin. Instead of voting for the Republican ticket that year (gasp!), Utah received one very earnest Romney-Huntsman vote. (I’m so Utahn.) I assume democracy felt it.
The Ethical Technologist weighs in
Satire is a tool.
Like AI.
Like code.
Like speech.
It can be used to clarify or to wound.
It works when it’s precise… when it crafts absurd hyperbole in a mock-serious tone, dripping with sarcasm. When it molds the relatable into the ridiculous. When it exposes the emperor’s missing wardrobe with confidence and impeccable sentence rhythm.
It fails when it punches down.
And here’s where I get personal.
I’m not some fearless gladiator of wit. I’m a slightly bewildered, aging, out-of-shape protagonist in my own stories… lost in the modern world, armed only with sarcasm and digestive discomfort.
Growing up in a family where competitiveness was currency, mutual respect wasn’t exactly applauded. Winning was. Dominating was. Humor sometimes blurred into hierarchy.
So yes, punching down hits a nerve.
Satire that exposes power? Dude, I am so in.
Humor that humiliates the vulnerable? HARD PASS.
The direction matters.
Always watch which way you punch.
And if you’re unsure?
Aim up.
